A. «Stultifera Navis»
  1. The role of lepers would come to be occupied, later, by the poor, dangerous, 'unstable' and with the same rites to be expected in a salvation of the sectioned-off: A new meaning for old form in societies which sought to re-integrate the mind's soul by means of social exclusivity.
   a. With the medieval disappearance of leprosy's, a space of inhuman harm waited like a sickness, seeking pain to solicit and appeal to wrong.
   b. The leper houses were numerous at the time of Crusades and their cathedrals; by the close of the 1600's, the disease had all but vanished from sight.
   c. French royalty was already in the process of reorganizing the land-holdings of treatment centers with the purposed result of caring for wounded soldiers and the poor.
   d. As an economic issue, the problem of leper hospitals was nationalized, then privatized and assigned to other medical institutions at the end of 17th Century with only a few remaining.
   e. In the UK, there was a general regression of the disease and the houses emptied considerably earlier, generally in the 14-15th Centuries.
   f. The asylums were placed in charge of townships also in Germany, coming to house in the 1500's a number of terminal illnesses and the insane.
   g. Leprosy's evil was not cured: The sources of contagion, Eastern and the Crusades, were broken off from and the infected were segregated; the image of the leper and cultural value of its disease—their necessary exclusion—which could not be contained except by confinement's cure...
   h. Remained though unseen as the wrath and grace of God.—Despite exclusion, the leper is considered a separate part of the community in a judgement upon moral faults, salvation fulfilled inevitably as it's death: Divinity-communion.
   i. The disease was gone, but its subject remained as the structures of treatment by excluding them.

  2. With the regression of leprosy, for a time—until medical treatments became common—venereal disease occupied an apparently similar place, with an even more offensive moral element; which was overcome, but only to be excluded alongside Madness as two derivatives of leprosy into the early modern period.
   a. But we progress not:
   b. Leprosy took place within a system of other diseases, including venereal, which occupied an intermittent position in the history of the leprosaria; these "new lepers" were the cause of more than a conflict, full source of terror.
   c. Confined with leprosy, the sufferers of STD's were looked down upon and rejected by even the lepers themselves—but by the 15th and 16th Century, there were too few for their objections to matter.
   d. By the 1700's, however, venereal diseases were treatable and, despite widespread revulsion against their patients, came to be classed as simply another illness: The moral objections against this were overcome practically with only minor consequences for the purely medical interpretation.
   e. The strange thing is confining venereal disease led to separation from its medical context and re-integration alongside insanity, a fault to exclude; leprosy's true legacy, in a more intricate relation than medical science took years to adopt as its own: That is, Madness.
   f. But it must've had to lie dormant for some 200 years for a new anxiety to become the common fear provoking arousal of apparently self-evident responses over divisive exclusion before insanity could be mastered and created, on its behalf, the old rituals it was bound up inextricably with as a constituent experience of life in the Renaissance.
   g. It's an immanence, some essential forms, that need be recalled highly cursorily in a way.

  3. Though derived practically from a side-effect of exclusion, or transport ships for madmen, likely by virtue of its fearsome cargo of passengers, comes to acquire numerous associations in the period between the Renaissances and end of the middle ages.
   a. To begin with the most basic, symbolic:
   b. A new form's appearance in the intellectual history of the post-Medieval world fills a primacy of position, a literary construct based-on, called The Ship of Fools.
   c. More widely influenced by mythical themes, perhaps the Argonauts cycle, the idea of mythical journeys over sea becomes a compositional motif of imaginary heros, allegories of social or ethical examples in the pursuit of their voyage depicted as one of fortune or the truth of their destiny.
   d. But the Ship of Fools was more than mere fantasy; boatloads of them would wandering about rather freely after expulsion often be taken in by boatmen, and are supposed to have been seen with a fair frequency.
   e. It was a common practice of obscure significance in which foreign, perhaps vagabond, madmen were expelled from towns (though some were treated in hospitals—where places were, at times, set aside for their own) and often fell in together, in Germany especially, to congregate in ships travelling to centers of pilgrimage for relief.
   f. However, certain places would house them at the city's expense without treatment, preferring instead to throw large numbers into prison; so treatment and confinement appear to have been confused or equivocated.
   g. Their banishment was beyond mere pragmatism or concerns of security, enacting certain traces of rituals in their semi-exclusion being granted certain tokens of community; which nonetheless retain similarities with rituals of exile and punishment.
   h. Departure of the mad for navigating where they were in the care of sailors was a form of inverse confinement, excess baggage purging the city of their threat or taint: This gives them its subversive allure; in paradoxical terms, they were excluded to outside the city or together on boats—a symbol of their 'in-between' status in the order of things.
   i. Stuck on a ship amidst the sea's unbounded openness, the madman inhabits this liminal space between two equally uninhabitable worlds from which derives the imagined connection in western civilization—or this relation was established in the ritual of enforced embarcation: Either way water and insanity are tied-up in the mind of the European.
   j. German and French, English works of literature and science attest to the metaphor of the mind, or soul, as if a small ship amongst turbulent seas of waning desire; enough to inspire despair or evil, melancholy—Madnesse—interpreted as the presence of a dark, vast and chaotic element in opposition to sound mind's resplendent fixity.
   k. It is an ambivalence of physicality assumed to stand in some essential relation to instability of the mind, but appearing quite suddenly at the threshold of Renaissance thought.

  4. The anxiety concerning madness in later periods derived from an earlier link between the fear of mortality or illness and, more generally, in response to confusion or anxiety in the face of madness had come to comprise the absence of abyss or non-rational events; e.g. laughter, lies, death, love—the vastness of seas, nothing...
   a. This is what was so unsettling to arise at the close of the Middle Ages, that madness and its subject were personified ambivalently as threat or ridicule, a kaleidescopic absense of worldly reason—and denigrating expression of humanity.
   b. Moral allegories abound to a vast critique of folly in which no apparent fault is given for a vice, but an unspoken desire to appease engulfing each; the characterization of madness becomes the central arbitor of Truth: Folly leads to error, and forms of the insane should bring one back into a reciprocity of comedic, deceptive or romantic elements at level, the playing field for all,—if not one of celebratory (at times, holy) sollemnity.
   c. For elitist literature, Madness or unreasonability is essential to reason in truth as the regulating principle for allegorical depictions of human beings.
   d. Art and writing bear witness to the haunting theme of Death in relation to boats where madmen held their sway and develop from mere morbidity to the full theme of madness.
   e. Death alone, over the course of the 15th Century, gives way to the mockery of insanity; it moves from an existential point of inevitability to one of nihilistic absurdity verging always on the almost ironic: Fear transmuted into a grimly moral hilarity shown as the omnipresent state of threatened nothingness, already here and disarmed at once by the insane's haunting laughter.
   f. The interchange of themes is not a marked discontinuity, it's a wrenching of the same unsettling anxiety internal to existence rather than portrayed as an external limit of its continuance (before, being mad meant unawareness of the ephemeral nature of life and refusal to accept this as motivation to live faithfully and moral for death impends; consequently, it became a situation of living already among as if the dead and extirpating the non-irrational refusal to see this in all its many forms: The unification of Madness and Death as the fulfillment of living their presence).
   g. Rather than an ever-approaching revelation of apocalypse as proof of the insanity which is not concerned about this, it is born of its own infiltration in order to demonstrate the final upheaval which always draws nearer as madness, its self-same conclusion:
   h. So the bond between being mad and nothing in the 1400's forms an underlying part of the post-Renaissance experience of 'Crazy' in an era of enlightening.

  5. The terror of emptiness found its expression in the seemingly non-sensical equivocation of death and madness whose forms take new values as their former meaning loses sense to such extent that their void becomes a basis of endless speculation and interest for the subject of madness as initiated to an undeciphered experience knowing the nature of our universe.
   a. In artistic and literary forms, this experience of non-sense is found as influence and source's result.
   b. There is of course no literal continuity of thematic elements, but a metaphorical substitution united by the figures of language and art imagistically; the barely imperceptible schism was to rupture in later centuries as a division that is madness in the West.
   c. The old symbols of the middle ages unravel as the allegory values take in new meaning of their mute and impotent austerity into cultural forms living on that fascinate, freed from their former order, to a world where they're perceived as images of insanity.
   d. This absence of any apparent, or present, relevance permits the symbol to become weighted down with such superabundance of possible meaning, endlessness of undefinable significances, that their original value is to lose sense: The object compelled to offer arbitrary meanings in the arcane, overburdening manner of dreams is an original value lost and became senseless images too much of excess, so that its Symbolism—not-hinge but madness.
   e. Images shift from a world of heirarchical order to one where multiplicities of meaning obscure the visible face of original value becoming an object again, but one of fascination instead of edification.
   f. Thus images of unreason, or madness, in its chthonian attraction, for the symbolic man of the 15th century, remained always a temptation to the unreason of dreams and fantasies more powerful than physical desire for all its symbolic imagery of insanity.
   g. It appeared as if the remarkable discovery of an esoteric knowledge previously unknown, taking the form of fantastical creatures symbolizing the inner truth of humanity—an allegorical image of mankind's darker nature, folly and forms of madness.
   h. Conversely, it fascinates as a form of knowledge but it is one which comprises a hidden system of secret feints which the madman unconsciously possesses and which the sensible experience in a differentiated series incomprehensible to them as forbidden (but tempting to have transgressed of degree for study or rank, given appropriate intention of personalitylessness from self—a nihilism of symbol's communed with).
   i. Then madness gave access to a unified form of experience which likely foretold the coming end of the world; it is an unconscious paradise, yet one without a return to innocence: Approaching, the reign of madness is an Apocalypse, its end of knowledge.
   j. The post-Medieval west, therefore, was a paradoxical interest in the unknowable quality of mental illness which both revealed the necessary truth of the world, and expressed to man itself the overshadowing fearfulness of diverse images as enigmatic symbols.

  6. Due to new capacities for representation of 'mental illness' in the 15-16th Centuries, Madness takes two paths—either of which became into being fractured: Newer media of entertainment, education and expression depicted the experience as granting fundamental truth either to the nature of being in the world universal, or a center of moral reflection divorced from its presumptions of threat to decipher—in time, come already in to its self-referential state of distanced recognition.
   a. This tendency is contrasted by the moral and literary, philosophical treatments of Madness in that era.
   b. Previously amongst allegorical personifications of vices, madness or Folly held not the sovereign position they came to occupy in direct control of all faults, and indirect relation to secular virtues.
   c. The relation to foreknowledge of the world's end likely being negligable, though both controlled dark powers of the world, in this latter case they could be harnessed for productive good; outside the confines of strict sentiment.
   d. It is a literary trope, Folly, which controls the light-hearted aspects of Renaissance living as attraction—less of interest—to have a surface which did not line-up with its dark, inverse world.
   e. Madness becomes an indispensable counterpoint to all the professions of knowledge: Not in terms of discernible secrets undisclosed, but as punitive admonition against the vanity of placing too much faith in knowledge to the point of arrogant belief in its absolute validity (but 'all-onely', as if universally cosmical).
   f. More widely linked not to underlying forms, but more tied to people's frailties, dreams and imaginings; a cosmic unveiling of chance's events, will insinuate its way in through as a relation maintained with oneself—abstracted characterization or textual device of human error which fails an imagined attachment to self-reflection not on the universe-as-reality:
   g.  But to loop back in stealth and pandering to the dream of its own as if un-flawed capacity for perceptively assumed correspondences, not about truth and the world (in increasingly secular, but often semi-mystical, contexts taking the form of objective imperative ethically—rather than moral questioning), but that of one who masters through studied experience how to go about perceiving as such.
   h. 15th Century writing is a moral satire, in contrast to painting, perhaps to disarm its fearful aspects?, and used as a subtle corrective for communal distraction through laughter in acquiring associations of perceptual power and cultural visibility.—an organizing force of humankind, familiar as a fault is its failing

  7.  In terms of a worldly or cosmic fascination, the acquisition of critical instruction becomes, trial and error, the irony of this same form in the final, cataclysmic image unveiling ethical themes of cosmic imaginings; these are facets of its tragic and critical experience between disease and wrong born of madness: A reified result of context in culture masking a potentially more rigorous method, perhaps even more well-defined as threatening, a being only not defined either by reciprocal induction or from nothing to all is back again.
   a. As such, its outline puts into opposing relation a generally abstract universal: But at the outset, these as experience remained imperceptibly separate forms of exchange—one an other.
   b. The literary motif of the world's end, however, is not essentially foreign to madness-as-critique.
   c. And in painting is found that medical science could only progress by substituting an unmasking of error (persisted in to the point of insanity) that all can see but for one, its self: A corrective to knowledge, unsettle ironic, as the apparent expression of a symbol.
   d. Less the synthesis of visible movements, the tragic and critical (including comedic) elements start here to detach into a space or gap—medically, No-thing—itself which distances irrevocably the esoteric alchemy of practical wisdom; edifying example of human folly.
   e. This formal madness, persisted in its error, is the force unleashing sights of dream vision and cryptic revelation unto the unknown world's fate in oscillation of the final catastrophe between disorder and the consistency which provokes its own by fulfillment: Of this image, the ruined appearance that comes to be lost as the visible relation's immediate perception, or one of undisclosing secrecy, is 15th Century 'mental illness'.
   f. However in Humanism, it exists in a discursive world which subtly improves by alteration in the heart of man its rules and releases upon behavior to govern vices re-directed to existing and morals ethically; one submits to Folly's picky rule, an object of laughter itself: Taming it would be more astute in wisdom than knowledge, if self-directed of true knowing relative to whose recognition allows it last word: But never that of universal truth (that form of knowledge's justification which only take its place from a consensus criticism of humanity).
   g. Confronting the satirical and tragic or comedic, stated in its own terms of a progressively 16th Century disappearance, where it passes into the systematic order of the world,—both enfolded within the sole domain of this critical sense's acquired terminologies (this is why it corresponds, of a sort, to modern notions indirectly, but in a way still relevant to our sense of 'truth'—an incomplete division, abusive gift of the absolute, togetherness of imbalance for all who lack it or conceal)—is "tragedy" in its ideological or clinical incarnations interpreted as the soul critique of refusal to listen never ceasing its kept watch.
   h. Gradual development of its own physical, moral or spirituality's breaks which come to the legendary struggle of desire and instinct of death in the 19th to 20th Century, where the most pertinent questions, quite readily apprehendable, announce continually that our world has lost the domestic tragedy of mental illness—is a singular phenomenon—whose rending discontinuities and rifts where it is discharged infinitely as life and death of burning evil do and not exist.
   i. The 'latest' "discoveries", then, grant us value to the continuous development of insanity from the 1500's to today in terminologies nihilistic (as claiming absolute validity), but the aesthetic orthodoxy of logical thought on mental illness ought be re-evaluated from the ground up back down as but one idea of (it-)self: The final condition of requisite crisis we have been aiding since the 1900's.

  8. All madness has its reason which judges and controls it, just as every reason has its capacity for inversion where it finds its dark humorous, threatening image; these come to conjunction in intellectual, artistic and practical reflection—not in a final unveiling of Truth, but its revelation through negation towards knowledge in their explicit linkage,—so they become segregated as dual form of a single, all-encompassed event: Subjectivity's insanity, in its absence, as a secret reserve of its truth-seeker capacities relegated to the requirements of cultural necessity and interpretation contextually.
   a. Laws of personal vantage in the reflexive critique of the subject, how it is appropriated by them into the early modern period as they dissipated to shadow: The 'Renaissance' as a break, but was it with them?
   b. A "classicism" became the evolution of Folly, or Madness.
   c. First, it happens as manifestation linked reciprocally to reason; that is they are mutually incomprehensible (perhaps not yet exclusive), but based on each other.
   d. This reciprocal synthesis posed conflicts for ideas of human and divine in the 16th Century Renaissance—i.e. God and man become foreign to themselves.
   e. Humanity is a fragmentary shadow cut off from the resplendence of divine truth accessible only indirectly through inverse images of contradiction's dialectic of truth; but the basic divide was internal to appearance if essentially self-consistent with meaning that the dichotomy would reside in the real world of things, always pointed; the contradictions of symbolic enigma, that is universally, hinder our path to truth recognizing: In the face of God, sole insanity.
   f. The shadowed existence of human-kind, its necessarily finite intellects, must be essentially fallible if caught in the split between physical objects and their abstraction absolutely a cruel contradiction—all emptiness as is—which forms a relentless denial between "truly" and 'real': An obverse reflection of things-in-themselves as if the privileged basis for valuated polarizations reduced to non-sense by the facts of the matters, i.e. God, or the human condition is madness.
   g. Such that trying to break free of this folly is madness itself.
   h. Before this dizzying gulf, Christian Humanism was able to tame the appearance of insane individuals,—a mastering of its forces to threaten with arcane knowledge of impending destruction (or incite towards reflection through subtle criticism of irony)—into a category of experience related at heart to non-madness: "Denying, they affirm each other."
   i. Secondarily of equal importance, they comprise each other, the instance of its visibility, as a reciprocal contradiction of its either in terms of self-recognition.
   j. As a form of reason's ability having meaning only as a part of their relation—People are all, to some degree, crazy.,—the refusal to admit this, in its historical context, is indicative of this very event: This means one must except the subtle gradations of meaning which link insanity to being mad and merely sound—the locality of wisdom over a search for the hidden disclosure of secrets.
   k. This unreason serves as madness to the knowing truth of reason.
   l. Madness is welcomed in the grand scale of order assigned places by Reason, a result of pre-scientific Renaissance skepticism—in Humanistic recognition of itself—making insanity another means to power, either hostile or trandscendance: But as a more fundamental form than even representations of its converse, opening within even Madness two types of a semi-divisible split in which the one is purely nothing and destructive, its other being capable of providing valuable insights counter-intuitively necessary, and fully submissive, to the acquisition of Wisdom.
   m. So the 'true madness' is "victorious reasonability" as a metaphorical relation (literally: One whose definition is derived from proximity of events historically—including chance or language) which makes "mental health" interior to the pathology of relative force and a subjective need of its reassuring.

  9. Literary works are the best example of this period, if you go through it historically make sure not to think about it too much in terms of represenative consciousness (especially the further back you go—with some notable exceptions, classically) and don't think you know until you bother to look it up after you'd get there; it gets a little self-aggrandizing or ascetic, at times to extremity, in the imagined relation one bears as self to one's own as other—and these do get quite pandemic or even nitty-gritty in the factual applications of its exempla: If you imagine a crazy man huddled in straw clanking in the Renaissance, or a criminal being punished for too great an increase of gains—end up looking so a lot alike.
   a. Varied manifestations in literary sources from 1500-1600 function as artistic practices which dominate the logic seeking its own form of appearance place Folly in the charge of mastery—ironic games of a careful era.
   b. In representative intellectual works, the literary mediates a practical and artistic comportment of certain senses with the tragedic diachronically in its contemporaneous sense of the critiquing experience.
   c. As an aspect of its is naive identification with a text or image—even the traight-forward criticism of literature is belied of anxiety between imagined reality and inventions of fantasy in the delirious fascination of differing forms expression—aesthetic, moral.—the pure reflections of human imagination disturb...
   d. brought to one of empty assumption a priori. The subject is not taken in by literary artifice but by one's own attachment to flawed capacities of perceiving as falsely granted oneself a mistaken conviction of presence over no-thing—decisive/deluded: The most common example of Humanity at heart the relation self bears to our being, error-prone.
   e. Then, that which reveals truth through its own self-flagellation; claiming itself as truthful, the divine or cosmic vengeance of Folly itself to reveal mistaken errors as criminality.
   f. The madness of feeling experienced to the point of sustaining renewed suffering: A relational intertwining of love's death and madness, pursued itself to the nihilism of passion spreads over it void to recovery of imagining entities; the lost image it longs for found, of a sort—fulfillment as annihilation or loss of one's self as inverted in love only minds.
   g. In the most extreme representations, the terror these engender—subjective and sociological—is confronted or controlled by more tragic experience in the age prior than critical exempla could form about them.—but they remain becoming ossified forms of an aspect experienced already on the verge of disappearance, a break in continuity survived in the shadow: With reference synchronically, one may divine as their text (does) the indecipherable senses of madness at the outset of the 17th Century in literary examples.
   h. In literature, it is a limit-experience.
   i. These are the world's of an already post-renascent medieval European world where delusion had come to hold an ambivalent place by the eay 1600's in comprising as much or more central focus than denouement, an event-structure rather than impending presence: That's truth and a pacified return of rational.
   j. For being thought of as no longer tragical, its total unknotting that links work to an other world is the appearance of a crime or deceptive appearance of a death: It is stripped bare of its seriously dramatic...it's just only spankings or no hope over the real world extension of its error.
   k. In the Folly of madness shut up over itself, the speaker non-consciously begins to wind-down text fabric.
   l. 'Insanity', then, in the late middle ages through the Renaissance was a reciprocal form of subjective exchange.
   m. So artistic "representations" of the theater came to be considered as a negative form, "la folie" is experienced.

  10.—in VVhich is detay'd, the straunge serieuz of coincedaunces presenting be led up so heretofore through inveterate wellness becoming evidently overwhelms as cont'acted a contagion through disease to be an 'autre' communicable illness; — True Oddities' Tales, of a year before the London fire ominously burned like a baroque satire and insult comic's neurotic joke of schtick mobilized solely R(el)ational.
   a. Mastery of imagined forms becomes subject to unsettling power to disturb as form or modes living on quite clearly at bay shed hostile intent; no longer takes place as the foreknowledge telling one sees its own birth-night is mesmerized with 'never going to happen'—forgotten falls over the world that ploughs fields of ocean, an anarchical slavery on deck:
   b. & it it won't be an other, it's an-other side of this world in its unwieldy exchange—at the very heart of humanity's way of ordering reality, held and kept going, now we' got 'em a hospital (lots of paintings on with the boats).
   c. And, that's where they put you if no one understands what's going on and one is determined applicable under the above conjectures, this was supposed to be an illuminating point on subtle-paired critical terms of god Protector of Reality is as woven into reality's fabric by design...
   d. Always embarking massive barks, but not without a subversive antidote of reality too purely claimed for recognition—misbelieved.
   e. So we're all stunned like it's not likely to be found so often in the gorgeous lies of a novel, at the theater?
   f. By the 17th Century, it was at the very heart of what constituted man as "Human."