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King Charles VI of France was famously afflicted by the glass delusion. He wore clothing that was reinforced with iron rods and did not allow his advisors to come near him due to his fear that his body would accidentally "shatter." He may have been the first known case of glass delusion. [1]
- Charles Vi of France: The King Who Believed He Was Glass
- Charles Also Had The Peculiar ‘Glass Delusion’.
- Where Did The Glass Delusion Come from?
- The Glass Menagerie: Selected Cases
- Is There A Modern Explanation?
- The Bi-Polar King
- Did The Glass Delusion Die out?
On a hot August day in 1392 the young French king, Charles VI (1368-1422), was marching through a forest near Le Mans, northwest France, with a company of knights and retainers, on a mission to Brittany. Champing at the bit to reach the enemy, the 23-year-old monarch’s manic energy reached such a heightened state that when a page boy dropped a lanc...
Sufferers of glass delusion tended to believe their head, arms or buttocks were composed of glass. Scholar Gill Speak, in his famous 1990 paper, ‘An odd kind of melancholy: reflections on the glass delusion in Europe (1440-1680)’, described Charles VI as ‘possibly the first case of a man believing his whole body to be made of glass’. The future Pop...
In classical and early medieval texts there are records of people who were described as or believed themselves to be made of earthenware, and these were typically linked to Biblical references to pottery and men of clay. (‘As the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers.’). In the second century AD, Rufus of Ephesus wrote of a man who th...
In The Optick Glasse of Humors of 1607 Thomas Walkington (d. 1621) describes a real case of a Venetian man who believed his shoulders and backside to be made of glass, and therefore had a fear of sitting down. This ‘fool’, as Walkington calls him, never left the house out of a fear that a glazier would make him into a window. A 17th-century Paris d...
One historian of psychiatry has in recent years suggested that materials-based delusions throughout history have been unconsciously influenced by new technology and substances. Glass has been around for thousands of years, but transparent glass was something quite new at the height of the glass delusion. In the 15th century, Venetian glassmaker Ang...
In the case of Charles VI, a 2018 study by a team of French psychiatrists argued that Charles VI may have had bipolar disorder. Their reasoning is based on the king having recurrences of manic-depressive episodes of varying severity, interspersed with asymptomatic periods, which is a characteristic of this kind of disorder. The French king suffered...
The prevalence of glass delusion dropped off considerably after the late 17th century. There were reportedly a handful of genuine cases in the late 19th century, in Paris and in Edinburgh. Records of isolated cases of the delusion were found dating back to the 1930s in the Netherlands, and in recent years a Dutch psychiatrist has stated that he has...
Dec 4, 2017 · One of the first recorded patients to suffer from this delusion was probably its most famous victim. King Charles VI (1368–1422) had ascended the throne of France at the age of 11. Handsome ...
Jul 29, 2024 · In fact, the only named historical figures that all historians who have written about the glass delusion seem to agree definitely suffered from the condition were Charles VI and Nicole du Plessis ...
- Caroline Wazer
Jan 12, 2024 · King Charles VI of France (1368-1422) remains the best-known sufferer of the psychiatric disorder of glass delusion. The condition peaked in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and the afflicted person believed that all or part of their body was glass and fragile enough to shatter on impact. Charles VI was the first known case of a person ...
Mar 29, 2018 · King Charles VI, ruler of France from 1380 to 1422, held a strange conviction: he believed he was made of glass. To protect his fragile body, he dressed in special reinforced clothing. Terrified that he would shatter at their touch, he forbade his courtiers to come near him. Even before this transformation, the King’s life was marked by madness.
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Dec 28, 2020 · Although perhaps the most famous person to suffer from the glass delusion, Charles was by no means the only one – in the 15th to 16th centuries it was not uncommon for such delusions to be reported. Case numbers dropped after this period, and cases of the glass delusion are now rare. Why do people have the glass delusion?
