MADDALONI, a town of Campania, Italy, in the province of Caserta, about 3½ m. S.E. of Caserta, with stations on the railways from Caserta to Benevento and from Caserta to Avellino, 200 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1901), 19,778 (town); 21,270 (commune). It is prettily situated at the base of one of the Tifata hills, the towers of its medieval castle and the church of San Michele crowning the heights above. The fine old palace of the Caraffa family, once dukes of Maddaloni, the old college now named after Giordano Bruno, and the institute for the sons of soldiers are the chief points of interest. About 2½ m. east of Valle di Maddaloni, the Ponte della Valle, an aqueduct built by the orders of Charles III. of Naples and his son to convey the water of the Tiburno to Caserta (19 m.), is carried across the valley between Monte Longano and Monte Gargano by a threefold series of noble arches rising to a height of 210 ft. The work was designed by Lodovico Vanvitelli, and constructed between 1753 and 1759.
MADDEN, SIR FREDERIC (1801-1873), English palaeographer, the son of an officer of Irish extraction, was born at Portsmouth on the 16th of February 1801. From his earliest years he displayed a strong bent to linguistic and antiquarian studies. In 1826 he was engaged by the British Museum to assist in the preparation of the classified catalogue of printed books then contemplated, and in 1828 he became assistant keeper of manuscripts. In 1833 he was knighted, and in 1837 succeeded Josiah Forshall as keeper of manuscripts. He was not entirely successful in this office, partly owing to want of harmony with his colleagues; he retired in 1866. He edited for the Roxburghe Club Havelok the Dane (1828), discovered by himself among the Laudian MSS. in the Bodleian, William and the Werwolf (1832) and the old English versions of the Gesta Romanorum (1838). In 1839 he edited the ancient metrical romances of Syr Gawayne for the Bannatyne Club, and in 1847 Layamon’s Brut, with a prose translation, for the Society of Antiquaries. In 1850 the magnificent edition, in parallel columns, of what are known as the “Wycliffite” versions of the Bible, from the original MSS., upon which he and his coadjutor, Forshall, had been engaged for twenty years, was published by the university of Oxford. In 1866-1869 he edited the Historia Minor of Matthew Paris for the Rolls Series. In 1833 he wrote the text of Henry Shaw’s Illuminated Ornaments of the Middle Ages; and in 1850 edited the English translation of Silvestre’s Paléographie universelle. He died on the 8th of March 1873, bequeathing his journals and other private papers to the Bodleian Library, where they were to remain unopened until 1920.
Madden was perhaps the first palaeographer of his day. He was an acute as well as a laborious antiquary, but his ignorance of German prevented his ranking high as a philologist, although he paid much attention to the early dialectical forms of French and English. His minor contributions to antiquarian research were exceedingly numerous: the best known, perhaps, was his dissertation on the orthography of Shakespeare’s name, which, mainly on the strength of the Florio autograph, he contended should be “Shakspere.”
MADDER, or Dyers’ Madder, the root of Rubia tinctorum and perhaps also of R. peregrina, both European, R. cordifolia, a native of the hilly districts of India and of north-east Asia and Java, supplying the Indian madder or manjit. Rubia is a genus of about thirty-five species of the tribe Galieae of the order Rubiaceae, and much resembles the familiar Galiums, e.g. lady’s bedstraw (G. verum) and the cleavers (G. aparine) of English hedges, having similarly whorled leaves, but the parts of the flowers are in fives and not fours, while the fruit is somewhat fleshy. The only British species is R. peregrina, which is found in Wales, the south and west of England, and in east and south Ireland. The use of madder appears to have been known from the earliest times, as cloth dyed with it has been found on the Egyptian mummies. It was the ἐρευθέδανον used for dyeing the cloaks of the Libyan women in the days of Herodotus (Herod. iv. 189). It is the ἐρυθρόδανον of Dioscorides, who speaks of its cultivation in Caria (iii. 160), and of Hippocrates (De morb. mul. i.), and the Rubia of Pliny (xix. 17). R. tinctorum, a native of western Europe, &c., has been extensively cultivated in south Europe, France, where it is called garance, and Holland, and to a small extent in the United States. Large quantities have been imported into England from Smyrna, Trieste, Leghorn, &c. The cultivation, however, decreased after alizarin, the red colouring principle of madder, was made artificially. Madder was employed medicinally by the ancients and in the middle ages. Gerard, in 1597, speaks of it as having been cultivated in many gardens in his day, and describes its supposed many virtues (Herball, p. 960); but any pharmacological or therapeutic action which madder may possess is unrecognizable. Its most remarkable physiological effect is that of colouring red the bones of animals fed upon it, as also the claws and beaks of birds. This appears to be due to the chemical affinity of phosphate of lime for the colouring matter (Pereira, Mat. med., vol. ii. pt. 2, p. 52). This property has been of much use in enabling physiologists to ascertain the manner in which bones develop, and the functions of the various types of cells found in growing bone. R. chilensis has been used for dyeing red from time immemorial. The chay-root, which furnishes a red dye in Coromandel and other parts of India, is the root-bark of Oldenlandia umbellata, a low-growing plant of the same family as madder.
MADEC, RENÉ-MARIE (1736-1784)—called Medoc in Anglo-Indian writings—French adventurer in India, was born at Quimper in Brittany on the 7th of February 1736, of poor parents. He went out to India and served under Dupleix and Lally, but being taken prisoner by the British he enlisted in the Bengal army. Deserting with some of his companions shortly before the battle of Buxar (1764), he became military instructor to various native princes, organizing successively the forces of Shuja-ud-Dowlah, nawab of Oudh, and of the Jats and Rohillas. He took service under the emperor Shah Alam in 1772, and when that prince was defeated at Delhi by the Mahrattas, Madec rejoined his own countrymen in Pondicherry, where he took an active part in the defence of the town (1778). After the capitulation of Pondicherry he returned to France with a considerable fortune, and died there in 1784. At one time he formed a scheme for a French alliance with the Mogul emperor against the British, but the project came to nothing.
See Émile Barbé, Le Nabab René Madec (1894).