Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography (Early Modern History: Society and Culture)

Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography Katharine Hodgkin Early Modern History: Society and Culture General Edito...

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Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography Katharine Hodgkin

Early Modern History: Society and Culture General Editors: Rab Houston, Professor of Early Modern History, University of St Andrews, Scotland and Edward Muir, Professor of History, Northwestern University, Illinois This series encompasses all aspects of early modern international history from 1400 to c.1800. The editors seek fresh and adventurous monographs, especially those with a comparative and theoretical approach, from both new and established scholars. Titles include: Robert C. Davis CHRISTIAN SLAVES, MUSLIM MASTERS White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 Rudolf Dekker CHILDHOOD, MEMORY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN HOLLAND From the Golden Age to Romanticism Steve Hindle THE STATE AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND, 1550–1640 Katharine Hodgkin MADNESS IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AUTOBIOGRAPHY Craig M. Koslofsky THE REFORMATION OF THE DEAD Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 John Jeffries Martin MYTHS OF RENAISSANCE INDIVIDUALISM A. Lynn Martin ALCOHOL, SEX AND GENDER IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE Samantha A. Meigs THE REFORMATIONS IN IRELAND Tradition and Confessionalism, 1400–1690 Craig Muldrew THE ECONOMY OF OBLIGATION The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England Niall Ó Ciosáin PRINT AND POPULAR CULTURE IN IRELAND, 1750–1850 H. Eric R. Olsen THE CALABRIAN CHARLATAN, 1598–1603 Messianic Nationalism in Early Modern Europe Thomas Max Safley MATHEUS MILLER’S MEMOIR A Merchant’s Life in the Seventeenth Century Clodagh Tait DEATH, BURIAL AND COMMEMORATION IN IRELAND, 1550–1650

Johan Verberckmoes LAUGHTER, JESTBOOKS AND SOCIETY IN THE SPANISH NETHERLANDS Claire Walker GENDER AND POLITICS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE English Convents in France and the Low Countries Johannes. C. Wolfart RELIGION, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICAL CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY Lindau, 1520–1628

Early Modern History: Society and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71194–7 (Hardback) 0–333–80320–5 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography Katharine Hodgkin

© Katharine Hodgkin 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9781403917652 hardback ISBN-10: 1403917655 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hodgkin, Katharine, 1961 Madness in seventeenth century autobiography/Katharine Hodgkin. p. cm. “ (Early modern history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 9781403917652 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1403917655 (cloth) 1. Autobiography. 2. Biography“17th century. 3. Mental illness. I. Title. CT25.H635 2007 2006050307 920.009 032“dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

1 Introduction: Studying the History of Madness

1

2 Crises of the Self: Madness and Autobiographical Writing

19

3 Without Sense and Understanding: Concepts of Madness in Early Modern Thought

40

4 Melancholy: A Land of Darkness

60

5 Mad Unto the World: Spiritual and Mental Disturbances

86

6 The Thread Out of the Labyrinth: The Experience of Cure

102

7 Inside and Outside: The Body and its Boundaries

118

8 Beyond the Human Body: Life, Death and the Devil

135

9 Family Histories: The Self and Others

159

10 Love and Desire: Disordered Passions

177

11 Conclusion: Writing out of the Labyrinth

192

Notes

198

Bibliography

242

Index

258

v

Acknowledgements

In one form or another, the material in this book has been with me for a very long time, and many people have given help, support and advice; my thanks to them all, over many years. More immediate acknowledgements are also due. Many thanks to Rab Houston, one of the two series editors, who encouraged me to put in a proposal for the book in the first place, and has been consistently positive and enthusiastic – as well as appropriately critical – in response to various half-formed ideas and panic-stricken drafts; and to Ed Muir, the other, for sound advice when it was needed. For wonderfully detailed and illuminating comments on particular chapters, many thanks to Laura Gowing and Jeni Williams; their responses reconciled me to the alarming notion of constructive criticism. For information on Hannah Allen and on Dionys Fitzherbert, my thanks to Sue Wiseman and Mary Morrissey respectively for generously sharing knowledge and ideas; and my gratitude to Kate Chedgzoy for allowing me to refer to her forthcoming book. Barbara Taylor has been a constant source of support and advice over both content and process, and the writing of this book would have been much harder without her sustaining encouragement and enthusiasm; many thanks also to her and to Anna Davin for reading the entire book in the last stages and reassuring me that it was indeed time to let go. I should also like to record thanks to many friends, colleagues and students in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Against all the odds, and despite all the challenges, it has been for me a creative and lively environment, giving support without pressure, and impressively sanguine in the face of my repeatedly deferred deadlines. Thanks finally to Abbas Vali, for always expecting the best of me; and to Vian Vali, for being so patient and lovely.

vi

1 Introduction: Studying the History of Madness

To be sure, I have not yet decided whether every deviation of the senses or the faculties ought to be called by the name of madness. Erasmus, Praise of Folly 1

In search of sanity To take madness as a topic is inevitably to be faced with the question of definition. The writers who are the subject of this book were regarded as mentally disordered at least some of the time by at least some of those close to them, and they went on to write about the experience; this may provisionally justify referring to their texts as autobiographies of madness. But it does not answer the more general problem. What does it mean to name someone mad, now or in the seventeenth century? What deviations of sense and faculty, as Erasmus puts it, may lay claim to (or be claimed by) that word? To open the question, I begin with the autobiography of a man who was not mad. Towards the end of the seventeenth century Goodwin Wharton, the younger son of an aristocratic family, began to write his memoirs.2 He describes the fortunes and misfortunes of his life so far: quarrels with unreasonable people, providential escapes from danger, money-making schemes that come to nothing (owing to misplaced trust), young women who fall in love with him (although for one reason or another the affairs fall through). He is interested in experimental chemistry, hermetic philosophy, providence and prophecy; he is also constantly short of cash, and he hopes to make money out of his experiments. Late seventeenth-century London was full of young men with similar backgrounds, interests and worries. As Wharton’s narrative progresses, however, it gets odder. His attempts to raise money lead him into contact with people who claim to be able to communicate with spirits and find treasure; most momentously, with one 1

2

Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography

Mrs Parish, who becomes his partner in explorations in the spirit world, and eventually in everything. They begin in a small way, with charms intended to ensure success at gambling (they don’t work) and efforts to find treasure which can only be found at full moon at a particular location (things constantly go wrong). Then Mrs Parish gets in touch with the fairies, properly known as Lowlanders, and a torrent of communication opens up. For months and years, messages are relayed by Mrs Parish to Wharton and back again, revolving chiefly around his wish to meet them for himself. They want to meet him too, she assures him, especially the queen; repeatedly meetings are planned, and repeatedly they are thwarted. The queen is not well; the king is jealous; they have unexpected visitors from Cornwall and cannot leave; the queen has her period; the princess is ill; the queen came in the night but found Wharton asleep – the excuses pile up, to ever more ludicrous effect, but Wharton never despairs. His hopes, indeed, are constantly increasing; eventually the king dies and the queen marries him and makes him emperor of the Lowlanders, though still without his ever seeing her. Meanwhile, he and Mrs Parish are involved in adventures in other domains too. Another supernatural drama concerns Wharton’s status in heaven, also involving continuing elevation and glory, and culminating in a ceremony in which the good angel Ahab, speaking through Mrs Parish, consecrates Wharton as a priest and prophet of God, and Jesus lays his hand on him. Domestically, Wharton and Mrs Parish become lovers, and she immediately begins to conceive children. She continues to do so notwithstanding her age (over fifty) for a number of years, although the children mysteriously disappear; when he computes the total number of her pregnancies and deliveries since they have been together it comes out somewhere in the thirties (and she tells him she has already had twenty children by her several previous marriages). Their lives are a ceaseless manifestation of magic, mystery and divine favour, recorded in minute detail, with a code of marginal symbols to identify the themes that preoccupy them: fairies, journeys, chemistry, treasure, good and bad angels, God, the movement of objects, She and He. This extraordinary narrative – which lasts in memoir and subsequently in journal form for some eighteen years, and occupies two huge folio volumes each hundreds of pages long – is my starting point because, precisely, it is not an autobiography of madness. Goodwin Wharton was possibly a bit of an irritation to his father and other members of his family, especially because of his tendency to run out of money, but he was clearly to all intents and purposes sane. All this while his public life was proceeding in a fairly normal way. He was elected MP; he was a justice of the peace; he came into his inheritance, moved to the country and pursued his spiritual adventures there. At no point does anyone appear to suggest that he was literally away with the fairies, or that he was in any way not fit to function in the world of the everyday. The cosmic dimension of his life, his extraordinary status

Introduction: Studying the History of Madness

3

as emperor of the Lowlanders and consecrated prophet of God, is located in the private sphere. Hidden away with Mrs Parish in their lodgings in Long Acre, he is intensely, consumingly involved in their spiritual adventures. The supposedly real world fades away to insignificance, and everything of importance happens somewhere invisible, as he sleeps, dreams, conducts experiments, hunts down special substances, and gazes hopelessly into thin air while Mrs Parish speaks with the spirits who will show themselves to her but not to him. From the point of view of the outside world, however, his interest in spirits could pass as no more than a particularly powerful private hobby. He might believe himself emperor of the fairies and secret prophet of God as much as he chose; unless he went out proclaiming himself King of England, and attempting to prophesy on the streets, nobody was likely to be particularly bothered by it.3 Wharton lived in a pre-enlightenment world, even though many of his intellectual aspirations might be identified with those of enlightenment philosophy. It is a world saturated with spiritual beings, with whom it might be possible to enter into communication, given the right circumstances and the right medium. None of his beliefs, in the context of his own time, is anything particularly unorthodox. Most people did not carry them to such extremes, but spirit-raising tied in to hermetic philosophies and vague notions of chemistry had been popular among educated young men for a century or more, and there was no shortage of people willing to be drawn in briefly to Wharton’s world: ‘his absorption in alchemy, in demons, in spiritual agency, when set within the religious, scientific and personal belief systems of the Renaissance and the Reformation, appear utterly normal’, comments Porter.4 If some of Wharton’s preoccupations are peculiar to him, other assumptions are shared by almost all his contemporaries. Spiritual and material dimensions were not readily separable. The course of an individual life might be directed by strange fates and mysterious providences; magical signs were there to be read and attended to; a woman past the age of childbearing could if God chose continue to conceive indefinitely; scientific experiment might make it possible to raise the dead; thoughts, words and dreams might have material effect – opinions such as these were relatively mainstream, and certainly tenable in the speculative intellectual circles of the late seventeenth century. For most people such perceptions would be articulated within the context of a more conventional religious community than Wharton’s; but the reality and also the immediacy and accessibility of the non-material world were very generally taken for granted. Moreover, this other world has epistemological priority: truth communicated in nonmaterial ways, especially for the more devout, might in fact be taken as more reliable, as a higher truth, than the mere evidence of the senses.5 This central fact immediately complicates an investigation of madness. The frames of meaning and possibility which shape seventeenth-century world views are founded on particular constructions of reason and unreason,

4


truth and untruth, which are not always readily recognisable. Much of the repertoire of symptoms that to modern psychiatry might signify mental disorder had alternative available meanings. Visions and voices, prolonged fasting, uncontrolled speech, the conviction that one is specially chosen by and in communication with God – all of these, which might now be taken as apparent indicators of mental disturbance, can be located in a religious and cultural context which makes them perfectly reasonable. There are no grounds for supposing that a writer is mad merely because he or she focuses on the world of inward spiritual transformations and records encounters with spiritual agents. It is worth bearing in mind too that this is not only a historical difference; there are plenty of belief communities today (both formal and informal) which would make very similar assumptions about the nature of spirit and matter, or truth and knowledge. As historians, ethnographers and anthropologists have increasingly emphasised, unless we are to diagnose entire cultures as psychotic, we have to rethink the question of what counts as mad, locating it in social and cultural definitions rather than assuming a transhistorical identity of the insane.6 But it seems also to be the case that there is some concept of madness in every human culture, and that every human culture identifies some people or some forms of behaviour as mad; which perhaps suggests that mental disturbance is itself natural to the human mind. As Roy Porter comments, ‘It is not, after all, mad people who are the invention of psychiatrists, but only the ways of classifying them . all cultures have recognized that there are individuals who are indisputably disturbed, pained, incapacitated, a danger to themselves and others.’7 Madness always exists in culture, and is culturally articulated and defined. But this is not to say that madness exists only as a purely social or conceptual construct, the necessary concomitant to sanity, as it were. Those who describe the experience of mental disorder register a vivid sense of dislocation and disturbance, of being caught in an inexplicable and distressing net of contradictory and inaccessible meanings, and finding themselves at odds with a dangerous and bewildering world, both inwardly and outwardly. To discount the force of such experiences in the name of cultural relativity seems a failure of understanding. Madness, after all, is experienced as subjective as well as social. It is an emotional and physical experience, located in mind and body, as well as in culture; it turns both inward and outward, knotting together an alienation of the self in all dimensions. To investigate cultural constructions of insanity, then, or to explore the particular circumstances under which a given person may be defined as mad, should not be taken to imply that there is no such thing, and that everybody is sane.8 At the centre of this book are three seventeenth-century autobiographical narratives, by two women – Dionys Fitzherbert and Hannah Allen – and one man – George Trosse. These narratives belong to the wider context of seventeenth-century spiritual autobiography, and they are structured by the


5

generic expectations and assumptions of spiritual writing, in which intense emotion was to be expected, and periods of despair and misery are commonplace. But the writers of these particular accounts were perceived by their friends and families as having a disorder that was disproportionate, that went beyond the normal problem of affliction of conscience and into the realm of the unreasonable, and as a consequence they were placed under medical as well as spiritual care. All three authors went through a period of mental disturbance, involving variously depression, suicide attempts, delusions and delirium; all three were identified by families, doctors and carers as in need of medical treatment for their disturbed minds. Two of them retrospectively agreed with this, seeing their affliction as either melancholy or madness. One contested it, and her account is in part the outcome of her desire to refute the suggestion that she had been mad. But for all three the experience of spiritual affliction incorporated not only extreme and delusory behaviour and beliefs, but also medication and confinement. These accounts thus occupy shifting positions on the question of how mental disturbance is to be explained and understood, in which religious and medical explanations coexist. The spiritual framework of sin and punishment, repentance and redemption, is not incompatible with the medical idea of madness, but it inflects it in particular ways. For the purposes of this book, I have been willing to identify them as autobiographies of madness for one primary reason: all three describe the experience of being viewed and treated as mad. To characterise them as mad autobiographies, however, is not entirely straightforward. I do so in this instance because it opens up certain questions about the history of madness and the self, but one might with equal validity locate them as instances of the outpouring of early modern spiritual writing, seeing them in relation to anti-Catholic polemic and Anglican or nonconformist culture at various points throughout the century. They are written and circulated for their spiritual content, and their original context is that of seventeenth-century devotional literature. By provisionally extracting them from this context, we can use them to explore the histories and meanings of madness; and by retaining an awareness of that wider devotional culture, we can think further about the question of how madness is defined and understood at this particular moment. But other religious writings remain constant points of reference, making it possible to speculate about similarities and differences, points of convergence and separation, as well as about the articulation of the self in seventeenth-century writing more generally. For if one aspect of madness is about social definitions, another is about the self, and about damage and disturbance; and alongside the social and cultural reasons for the identification of these particular people as mad, I want also to read their narratives for the marks of that disturbance. However their conditions might be defined, it is clear that the stories they tell involve psychic and emotional storms. They describe and convey intense emotion, periods

6


of delusion and bewilderment, failures of memory and self-knowledge. To overlook all these elements in favour of a concentration on the purely social aspects of their diagnosis would hardly do justice to what the texts themselves have to say. It would also cut us off from the questions these texts may open up about the early modern self and its psychic as well as cultural dynamics. In so far as madness is a disorder of the self, different ideas of the self will generate different ways of being mad, and different ideas about what madness is and how it works. It may be imagined as something coming from outside that attacks, or as an internal disturbance that breaks out; as an ineradicable inherited flaw in the fabric of the self, or as the accidental consequence of misfortunes or misjudgements that have damaged what ought to have been healthy.9 Culturally specific understandings of the boundary between self and other, of the relation of mind and body or human and divine, of cause and effect, all shape the way in which mental disturbance may be conceived. In this study I have attempted to keep these various aspects in balance, locating the narratives on the one hand in relation to seventeenth-century ideas about madness, and on the other in their own inner worlds of narrated experience. Before returning to consider these particular texts in more detail, however, in the remainder of this introductory chapter, I discuss some of the debates and issues that arise in writing about the history of madness.

Crossing boundaries: the mad and the sane The case of Goodwin Wharton, who looks mad and yet was in his own terms and times quite sane, opens up the question of what it means to be mad, in public or in private, in one’s own time or in the eyes of posterity. This is a question that has been attracting more attention over the last couple of decades. Historians have become increasingly interested in the problematic boundary between madness and sanity, and also its relation to other converging territories of unreason. What determines the ways in which not only historians but also contemporaries reach a decision about a given person’s state of mind? Why is one person a prophet, another a witch, another politically seditious, another possessed, another hysterical, another merely devout? What social and cultural contexts can help us to make sense of the proximity at certain moments and the distance at others of such categories as these?10 There are different sorts of boundary in question here. Alongside the troubled distinction between madness and sanity, there is the question of behaviours that are like madness but may be differently explained. And if the boundaries set between madness and sanity are never clear or absolute, it is also apparent that the categories of things close to madness are liable to change. Arguments over what might constitute an adequate and generally agreed definition of mental disorder, not to mention how those suffering


7

from such disorders should be treated, are in our own times notoriously fraught and difficult. The possible ways of being mentally disturbed seem to be on a course of endless expansion (to judge by the classifications in the US Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness); if every trouble in mind comes to have a diagnostic category attached to it, then the notion of mental illness becomes almost universalised.11 At the same time the fear of the mad, identified especially as those liable to acts of extreme and unpredictable violence, has positioned madness as something absolutely outside culture, to be managed only by exclusion. In current popular discourses on mental disorder, the proximate term is often criminality, with a particular emphasis on violent crime, and debates focus on the question of responsibility, blame and punishment (is a serial murderer evil or insane?). In the early modern period, madness and its proximate terms are differently constructed. Because madness, on some level, is to do with what happens internally, the diagnosis of insanity requires onlookers to come to a judgement about a person’s internal state from their outward speech and conduct. And these are open to multiple interpretation, especially in a context which allows for the reality of spiritual forces, demonic possession and witchcraft. Does someone shout and curse God because they are mad, sinful or possessed by a devil who is making them act against their own wishes? The case of the Scottish Covenanter Archibald Wariston and his son in the mid- to late seventeenth century, explored by Louise Yeoman, offers an intriguing illustration of the instability and the cultural specificity of these areas.12 The father’s extensive diaries record a range of beliefs and practices, as well as moods and emotions, that might now appear marks of serious eccentricity if not depressive illness, but which located in the spiritual context of Calvinism are entirely normal. The son, by contrast, increasingly suspicious and violent in his temper as he grew through his teens, drew on the imagery and practices of devilworship and witchcraft to represent a dangerous and disturbing inner world. Only being regarded as mad, perhaps, could have defended him against prosecution for witchcraft, not to mention rejection by his deeply religious father; and yet he continued to live at home and organise his own life even while he was generally seen as insane; he was neither imprisoned under the criminal law nor confined as medically incompetent. Any notion of a clear distinction between the mad and the sane is troubled by the multiplying ambiguities of this case. As this case also suggests, a particularly troubling boundary was that between madness and religious fervour. This was perhaps ironically underpinned by the widespread assumption that true spiritual faith should be emotionally powerful and expressive, which opens up the possibility of excessive emotion and excessive expression. If the extreme forms of behaviour and expression characteristic of some of the mid-century sects made sense in their own terms, their adherents were nonetheless seen by many contemporaries as eccentric to the point of being deranged; if affliction

8


of conscience for sin was a familiar type of spiritual suffering, it was also commonly recognised as very difficult to distinguish from the physiological disorder of melancholy. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, theological writers were anxiously aware of the ease with which a penitent and anxious frame of mind could topple over into despair, rather than leading the sufferer to spiritual renewal; or zeal and eagerness in the godly cause could become delirious and excessive. The question of what is normal in religion then as now presented difficulties. The difficulty of establishing this boundary is perhaps especially visible where religion impinges on the political – and of course given the intertwining of politics and religion in the early modern world such cases are frequent. People who rant in the streets and call for the end of the world may be variously seen as divinely inspired, lunatic or politically dangerous – or indeed at different points and by different people as all of these, as Alexandra Walsham’s essay on the Elizabethan case of ‘Frantick Hacket’, who prophesied the end of the world and incited the people to rise up, illustrates.13 For civil authorities to refer to such a character as mad might be a useful strategy, in so far as it allowed them to discount wild ideas about the overthrowing of rulers as delirious raving, but it by no means prevented them from proceeding to execution, as in Hacket’s case; one could be at once mad and politically malevolent. And as religious and political sedition combined throughout the seventeenth century in revolutionary movements, the counter-discourse identifying ‘enthusiasm’ with madness gathered energy; by the end of the century, according to Michael Macdonald, the elite reconstruction of religious fervour as a form of madness had effectively neutralised the political radicalism of the religious sects.14 On the other hand, it seems clear that certain preachers were simply regarded as mad, and that this could – notwithstanding such cases as that of Hacket – sometimes protect them against the legal process. A bundle of late sixteenth-century letters to Lord Burghley labelled ‘Letters of several madmen’ is indexed with summary descriptions of each letter’s author and content: ‘John Payne, a Puritan Minister, to Ld B; very zealous against Popery and Prelacy; he discovers frauds of foreign artisans’, or, ‘Robt Dickons, a distracted Glover, requests of the Queen that he may preach repentance’. One William Renolds appears twice, once ‘full of strange enthusiastical exhortations to repentance’, and subsequently as author of ‘a most impudent, abusive and nearly treasonable letter to the Queen such as only absolute madness can excuse’. It is a tricky boundary; but the annotator of these letters evidently felt it was in the end possible to distinguish between the crazy and the malign.15 Such case studies as these help us to be alert to the complex and multiple factors which shape particular interpretations at particular moments. People hesitated about the definition of madness in the seventeenth century too, of course; or at least, they found the task of definition no less complex than


9

we might. But it is important to remember that the question of whether a given state is madness can never be answered with a simple yes or no. The question is not so much whether the people involved could usefully be defined as either ‘mad’ or ‘sane’, but rather to recognise such definitions as a matter of process and context, rather than as fixed and definitive. For one of the assumptions of this book is that between madness and sanity there is not an unbridgeable gulf; neither is a secure and fixed category, decisively different from the other. The condition of being mad is shifting and variable. It may be consuming or merely distracting; people may move in and out of it, change their relationship to it, be seen as sane by some and mad by others; it covers anything from minor eccentricities to florid and extravagant delusion. The boundary between madness and sanity is fragile, permeable and unfixed. It follows that in studying the history of madness we are not only trying to understand how madness at different historical periods is constructed, explained, interpreted and treated; we may also hope to illuminate subjectivity more broadly. The preoccupations of madness generally derive from and are similar to those of sanity. One way of describing the specificity of madness is as a condition in which the inhibitions that normally prevent the expression of certain ideas and emotions are overthrown: the mad person says what we would all like to say. As a definition, this is unsatisfactory. But something like this perhaps underlies the long tradition which sees madness as in certain ways a state of truth, a condition in which all the normal barriers which prevent people from speaking their minds are no longer there. Again this emphasises the proximity of mad and sane subjectivity: the content may be less different than its articulation would suggest. In reading autobiographies of madness, then, we can see not only what it was like to be regarded as mad in the seventeenth century; we can also see certain things about what it was like to be sane. All the writers under discussion in this book write from a position of sanity; the madness they describe lies in their past, to be accommodated or refused. But the preoccupations of madness, and the light they may shed on sanity, remind us not to set too firm a distance between the mad and the sane selves.

Madness and the early modern These dilemmas of definition and interpretation have become familiar in the historiography of madness over the last few decades. Michel Foucault’s inspirational and also hugely contentious Madness and Civilization (as it was called in English) was the harbinger of a surge of interest in the idea that madness itself had a history, that it is not only differently treated but differently defined and constituted in other periods and other cultures.16 For Foucault, the seventeenth century is the critical period in which madness was reconstituted in the form we have inherited. Where madness in the Middle

10 Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography

Ages, he suggests, was allowed a certain licence, and privileged for its access to the delirious truths of unreason (even if actual mad people might still be feared or ill-treated), as Europe progressed into enlightenment the meanings of madness changed. It came to be seen as something less than human, void of truth or significance; and the mad themselves correspondingly were dehumanised and incarcerated, no longer left to wander but shut away as part of a grand tidying and purifying impulse which required order and rationality above all things in social organisation. Most historical work subsequently has questioned and indeed vigorously criticised the Foucauldian model, with its broad assumptions and lack of historical detail.17 It is clear that on the one hand the pre-enlightenment mad were not regarded as ‘goofy sages’ (in Michael Macdonald’s phrase), left to wander freely and happily about throwing out cryptic words of wisdom; and that on the other the move to confinement was erratic, not centrally driven, and not explicitly associated with the demonisation of other marginal groups in the period, as Foucault’s account would suggest.18 And yet despite the empirical problems of his work, it inaugurated new ways of thinking about madness. The idea that the definition and treatment of madness could be analysed according to other models than the progressivist assumption of a move from barbarism to enlightenment, the attention to the institutions through which it is treated, and to the underlying logic through which ideas of madness are constituted and articulated, are all to some extent part of the critical heritage of Foucault, even among historians hostile to his theories. Detailed studies of previously ignored archival sources, although they generally refute Foucault’s hypothesis of a great confinement or a time in which madness spoke with the tongues of angels, are nonetheless in some sense answering problems posed by that book.19 And one does not have to be a Foucauldian to recognise that the act of defining madness is inevitably an act of power, in some way or another. If one way of reading the history of madness is as a grand historical struggle between the repressive institutions of psychiatry and the victims on whom repressive definitions are imposed, many historians are likely to hesitate before aligning themselves with those who have the privilege of naming madness. Foucault’s shadow, then, looms large over all subsequent work in the field; but this book has only a tangential relation to the debates it has sparked off. My concern is not with confinement, with the grand processes of exclusion and repression which Foucault sees as defining the history of madness between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries; my attention is on much smaller scale and more individualised accounts, on what it might have meant to be defined as mad in the seventeenth century, and how autobiography might tell that story. The influence of Foucault, though, has marked this study in more general ways. From Foucault, broadly speaking, I take a concern for both linguistic and institutional constructions of madness, an awareness of the ways in which ideas of reason and unreason are mutually


11

constitutive and historically variable, and the recognition that madness is to some extent at least a discourse of power. Perhaps more specifically, too, anyone working on first-person narratives of madness must be constantly aware that they are working on what Foucault famously calls an archaeology of silence: what is being described is fundamentally inaccessible. The silencing of the mad is a constant in the history of madness. To bring into the open the speech of those who have suffered from madness (in one sense or another) does not really break that silence, for these are people who speak only because they have emerged from it. But it does perhaps represent a crack. Foucault’s great period was that of enlightenment, the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. But it is not, of course, only in relation to this particular narrative of transformation that the seventeenth century occupies a key position. From many different perspectives, this is a transitional moment. The economic shift in mode of production, from feudalism to capitalism, is perhaps the most familiar of these transitions. Additionally, historians of nation, state and empire identify this as the age of the dawning of all three; historians of gender see it as critical in establishing the division between public and private, work and home, along lines that would divide the sexes for the next three centuries and beyond. Historical accounts of the self, whether following the arguments of Weber and Tawney about the Reformation and the growth of Protestant individualism, or the earlier Burckhardtian celebration of Renaissance individualism, identify the seventeenth century as the moment in which a new idea of the self is becoming embedded and consolidated. Whichever version is given predominance, such grand narratives do have an important bearing on the history of madness. Reason, religion, rank, gender and the self: these terms are at the heart of madness, implicated in what makes people go mad, how they experience it, how they are regarded and treated. The seventeenth century may thus be critical to the history of madness not only in relation to questions of institutional power, but also more intimately in terms of changes in what it means to be a person. Recent work on the history of madness, however, has tended to focus on the eighteenth century rather than the seventeenth. The late Roy Porter wrote extensively on aspects of madness in English culture; Allan Ingram explores the linguistic territory of eighteenth-century insanity, and R. A. Houston’s wide-ranging study of eighteenth-century Scotland works with court records to elucidate the problems of definition; Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull have written on the history of madhouses.20 But apart from Michael Macdonald’s fascinating 1981 analysis of the casebooks of Richard Napier, Mystical Bedlam, the seventeenth century has had curiously little attention from historians.21 The prominence of madness in the drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has given rise to some discussion in literary criticism, and an interest especially in literary constructions


of melancholy and madness. Carol Thomas Neely’s recent study, Distracted Subjects, offers an impressive blend of literary and historical approaches, examining Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic representations of madness alongside case studies, medical writings, and archival sources.22 But in the history of madness in general, this is a surprisingly overlooked period. This focus on the later period is due in part, perhaps, to the fact that historical sources become much richer in the following century. Increasing numbers of hospitals and asylums for the mentally disturbed, both public and private, leave increasingly plentiful records. Doctors keep fuller records and publish accounts of their experiments and theories. Papers relating to court cases have better chances of survival, and these may bear on the history of insanity in various ways; cases to determine lunacy in eighteenthcentury Scotland, for example, are at the centre of Houston’s study. The spread of literacy, and with it of habits of autobiographical writing and diarykeeping, increases the number of first-person accounts of insanity. The range and quantity of material, both published and unpublished, is simply much greater than in earlier periods.23 And indeed, even where earlier sources exist, there is a tendency for them to be assimilated into accounts of the later period. Of the cases I will be discussing in this book, those of Hannah Allen and George Trosse are often borrowed by the eighteenth century; they were both written towards the end of the century, but describe experiences from the 1650s and 1660s. To relocate them in the seventeenth century is to become more aware of how the experience of madness they describe differs from that of eighteenth-century writers. Another explanation for the historiographical prominence of the eighteenth century is that in terms of debates about institutionalisation and medicalisation, it is clearly the central period in British history. In the seventeenth century, houses for the care of the mad are generally unknown and unregulated, and assumed to be few, with Bedlam the famous exception; medical debates are for most of the century framed by humoural theory, and tied in to an ancient model of the ways in which body and mind are connected which was being written out of standard medical theory by the end of the seventeenth century (though it took its time to disappear completely). Another crucial change relates to religion, which in the seventeenth century is central to debates about madness, its causes and its cure. Not all madness all the time was identified as divine punishment, or the result of excessive zeal or demonic possession; but these and other fundamentally non-materialist versions of madness were always available as explanations, part of the general understanding of what drives people insane. Not all cures would involve prayer, bible reading and an encouragement to repentance, but outside the context of the public madhouse, it seems likely that a good many of them did. The great change made by the eighteenth century in the treatment of madness, it has been argued, was secularisation.24 Divine agency was relegated to a back seat in understanding


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the aetiology of madness. This can be overstated – as historians of the eighteenth century have pointed out, while there is a shift in understandings of madness, religion does not simply disappear. ‘As cause, symptom and cure, religion remained an important part of understandings of mental derangement’, comments Houston.25 Nonetheless, it does seem that far more than in the eighteenth century, seventeenth-century discourses on madness unselfconsciously and unproblematically merged the spiritual and the medical; organic, divine and demonic factors could all play a part simultaneously. This has also complicated the ways in which historians have approached the idea of madness in the seventeenth century. If it was once acceptable to classify the beliefs and behaviour of groups which seem to us to be characterised by irrationality as the outcome of individual neurosis – religious radicals, for example, or witches and those who accuse them – the tide has turned so far in the other direction that to suggest mental disturbance in historical figures has become crude and impolite, and among the hundreds of books and articles published over the last twenty years or so on seventeenthcentury religious and political culture, very few discuss it in relation to insanity.26 Both historians and literary critics in recent decades have tended to emphasise the rationality of the religious culture of the early modern period. Thus Natalie Zemon Davis argues that women drawn to reformation Protestantism were often attracted precisely by its reasonable qualities, its emphasis on study, reflection and argument over ritual, emotionality and the authority of the priest; Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons explains early modern demonology as part of a formidably rigorous and internally coherent theological system which was to its adherents entirely reasonable.27 Studies of the religious movements of the time have similarly tended to regard them as if not entirely sensible, at least not mad, reclaiming groups such as the Fifth Monarchists or the Quakers for a history of utopian possibilities rather than deluded enthusiasms.28 An increasing volume of work in both literary and historical studies has explored the wilder shores of spirituality in this period: visions, prophetic outpourings, dreams and divine judgements have been analysed without prejudice, as matters that could be taken for normal within the culture. This is on the whole a good thing; there is little understanding to be gained in identifying an entire population as pathological. At the same time, it has perhaps limited the ways in which the history of madness (as opposed to the history of religion) can be written about in this period. The fear of being identified with historical condescension and anachronism makes it difficult to discuss the interrelations of madness and religious belief, and yet it is impossible to discuss madness in the seventeenth century without addressing that relationship. For of course extreme religious sensibilities were not simply taken for normal, at least not always and not by everyone. In the view of contemporaries as well as later historians, the distance between religious enthusiasm and madness was short and easily traversed.


My point is not that we should return these areas to the domain of the irrational, but rather that we should be careful about reproducing that division. In religion as in madness, what is at stake is complex; levels of psychic investment and imaginative energy are high. We should not try so hard to rescue people from the imputation of insanity that we end up implicitly assuming the rationality of all human behaviour; not all the forces driving us, after all, are entirely conscious or entirely reasonable. We still need to find ways of hearing the voices of unreason in history as well as in the present. Here, perhaps, alongside Foucault’s reminder that to identify someone as mad is an act of power rather than a neutral description of truth, we might invoke Freud to remind us that to identify someone as sane is not necessarily straightforward either. Freud, and psychoanalysis more generally, presents historians with perhaps even more difficulty than Foucault. History, generally speaking, is interested in difference. Psychoanalytic theory, despite provisos and qualifications, does posit a level of invariability about the human subject, in the form of psychic elements and processes that are not subject to change. It is not fundamentally interested in changing family structures, sexual norms or social organisation more generally; it assumes sufficient continuity in human subjectivity that the language of psychoanalysis can be used to understand what happens in any culture or historical period. To this extent it always sets historians the challenge of its own ahistoricism. And yet psychoanalytic theory continues to engage historians, and perhaps particularly historians of the early modern period; Lyndal Roper’s work on witchcraft is a powerful instance.29 What it seems to offer is a language in which to describe and attempt to understand the often inexplicable or disproportionate emotion driving particular historical phenomena, such as witch persecution: can the hatred and violence that erupt in a witch trial be explained without some notion of the unconscious as a real force? Similarly, if it seems inadequate to explain madness simply as a matter of labelling, then in reading accounts of madness it may be that to mobilise concepts such as fantasy, guilt, identification, or to think about the dynamic emotions of family life, will offer some illumination. At its most basic, as Peter Gay points out, this is hardly contentious; the idea that emotion as well as rational self-interest guides people’s behaviour is generally allowed by the most conservative historical work.30 But of course part of the point of psychoanalysis is to be contentious, rather than self-evident, and the notion that it is only common sense is hardly tenable. In debating the relevance of psychoanalysis to early modern history, the difficulty is located particularly in the notion of subjectivity itself. As noted above, this is a period in which debates about the nature of the self are especially pressing, and subjectivity is supposedly in a state of transition, even though the ways of understanding that transition are varied.


15

The outline of the argument is a familiar one; the landmarks are ‘Renaissance individualism’, Protestantism and the protestant ethic, the development of new literary forms like autobiography and diary, the shift from an extended notion of selfhood with attachments to large groupings (the dead, the unborn, the kinship group, the household) to a more restricted version with powerful local attachments and identifications (the immediate family, the heirs). Whichever line is followed, this is an account which insists that this is a period of transition and change, that new forms of the self and self-consciousness are genuinely emerging. And this does beg the question posed by Stephen Greenblatt in an influential essay: can we interpret early modern culture in relation to a version of the self that is only just coming into being?31 Is the inwardness and ahistoricism of psychoanalytic theory compatible with an awareness of the ways in which identity is socially (historically) constructed and maintained, or of the different formations of early modern childhood and family life?32 These are not questions that can be answered here; and this is not a Freudian study any more than it is a Foucauldian one. But I would argue that the case for the deployment of psychoanalytic approaches is the same as for any other set of analytical tools: they may help us to see things we might not otherwise see. In exploring subjectivity and its disruptions, the metaphorical and symbolic resonances of psychoanalysis, as well as its conceptual and descriptive apparatus, are a valuable resource. This need not be at the expense of historical awareness. If psychoanalysis sees ‘culture and the drives as inimical’, in Sally Alexander’s phrase, this is not to say that culture is irrelevant; human subjectivity is the product of that incommensurable relationship, and of the tensions and repressions generated in the inescapable process of learning to accommodate the two.33 It is thus the formation of subjectivity in a given cultural and historical moment, through historically specific forms of social organisation (kin, family, class, religion) that needs to be understood. As Alexander points out, psychoanalysis assumes not that human nature is universal, but that ‘some forms and capacities of mental functioning – the unconscious, phantasy, memory, for instance – seem to be so’.34 And precisely such concepts as these can illuminate mental disorder, so long as we bear in mind that psychoanalytic history has as its task the exploration of the articulation of psychic processes with and in culture, rather than the repetition of unchanging truths.

Reading and writing madness The three narratives at the centre of this book have a common location in the culture of spiritual and devotional writing. All three writers are devout; all three are literate; all three are from financially comfortable families. Beyond these three characteristics, however (which are in effect the minimum conditions for the writing and survival of their work), they are quite diverse. The


earliest of them was written at the beginning of the seventeenth century, by a gentlewoman from an elite family; Dionys Fitzherbert’s father was a fairly substantial landowner based in Oxfordshire. The other two were both written in the later part of the century, by Hannah Allen, who came from a respectable Presbyterian mercantile family based in Derbyshire and London, and George Trosse, also from a mercantile background, who came from the west country, and ended his life as a nonconformist minister in Exeter.35 Dionys Fitzherbert, the earliest of the group, was also the only one to leave a manuscript rather than a printed work; her autograph manuscript, in the Bodleian Library, includes papers dated between 1607 and 1641, but the narrative of her life belongs to the earliest part of this period, and was finished by around 1610. In addition to this, however, she left two fair copies of the manuscript, made by a professional copyist and amended in various ways; and she herself deposited both these fair copies in libraries in order to ensure their preservation. Manuscript circulation was at this period still a common alternative to print, and the manuscripts were clearly intended to be widely read; it seems likely that further copies circulated among her friends. Fitzherbert’s family evidently gave her the entrée into a number of aristocratic households; she spent her twenties (until her breakdown) as waiting gentlewoman to various great ladies, and it was during this period that she experienced her affliction, collapsing into a delirious condition and remaining disturbed and confused for several months. As noted earlier, her narrative is anxious to demonstrate that what happened to her was not in fact madness, but a spiritual affliction, a punishment for sin. Her zeal in preserving and disseminating this account would have been of little use if others had not been prepared to agree with her understanding of what had happened; and she was apparently successful in establishing a network of friends and supporters with similar religious interests to her own, with whom she exchanged letters and reflections on her experience. But her descriptions of the breakdown, and her anxiety to explain and convince those who saw her distracted that despite appearances she was not mad, testify both to the importance and to the difficulty of distinguishing between madness and religious affliction. Hannah Allen’s agency in the writing and publication of her narrative is much less visible, and her social situation is very different. A Presbyterian, her descent into melancholy came about in the 1660s, when she was about the same age as Fitzherbert had been, but a widow with a child, and from what was evidently a comfortable mercantile background. The intervening decades of revolution and religious radicalism had made manifestations of overpowering spiritual affliction more familiar, and her own religious community was one which was devout and given to publication, though not inclined to enthusiasm. Her narrative was not published until 1683 (though it may have been written earlier; it comes to an end with her remarriage at the end of her illness), by which time the genre of spiritual autobiography


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was much more developed than it had been at the beginning of the century. Fitzherbert’s manuscript, indeed, is one of the very earliest English autobiographies; Allen’s account conforms more closely to an existing format, although the story she has to tell does not always sit comfortably in that format. Melancholy, to which she showed an early predisposition, grew more severe during her marriage to a husband who was often away, and came to a head after his death. Inextricably intertwined with this story of an organic illness, however, is the religious despair through which it was articulated. Her conviction that she was damned, worthless and monstrous is a familiar part of the conversion story as told by other spiritual autobiographers, but here it is understood as part of an illness, from which eventually she recovered, not through the sudden illumination of grace, but through a combination of bodily and spiritual tending. Like Allen, George Trosse belongs to the later seventeenth century and to the more sedate wing of the dissenting community. By the time of his death he was a respectable minister to the nonconformists of Exeter, and his Life was published posthumously, ‘according to his order’, in 1713. He had, however, written it twenty years earlier, dating the text 1693; and the period of madness which is a large part of the book’s subject dates further back still, to the mid-1650s. In contrast to the other two, however, prominent though it is, madness is not the only theme of his life; he is more concerned to give a chronologically complete account. He describes at some length his idle and reprobate ways before his collapse into raving, including travels to France and Portugal, and hanging about in taverns; he also narrates the story of his life afterwards, how he went to university and became a minister, and his sufferings during the persecution of the nonconformists under Charles II and James II. Structurally, indeed, the period of madness could be removed from the narrative to leave a conventional account of sinful youth and reformed zeal; many such texts were published during the last decades of the seventeenth century, and it is perhaps significant that Trosse preferred to leave his own for posthumous publication. It is also a much more polished production than either Allen’s or Fitzherbert’s. As a minister, Trosse was an educated man, with training in logic and rhetoric, and thirty years’ experience of preaching; he writes in a polemical and preacherly style, repeatedly pausing the narrative to summarise at length, in carefully constructed rhetorical oppositions, the moral lessons to be derived from what he has just narrated. Nonetheless, the breakdown at the centre of the narrative seems to have been more dramatic and extreme than was the case for either of the other two: he describes hallucinations, delirium, violence and wild behaviour, being shackled. He was also treated more drastically, being taken to be confined in a specialist house near Glastonbury, where he returned three times before eventually emerging cured. Madness, in this narrative, is God’s shocking punishment for his shocking sinfulness, the only way of bringing him to his senses.


All these narratives have much in common with other spiritual autobiographies of the period, and it is in relation to such writing that they can most obviously be understood, and that they understand and locate themselves. But they also have a relation to a different history, and it is that other story that I shall be concerned with in this book. My aim is to explore seventeenth-century madness both extensively, in its social and cultural meanings, and intensively, as it is experienced and described in first-person narrative. Mental disorder is located in many places: in language and in the body, in familial and in social relations, in culture and in the self; and all of these are inextricably interrelated. This is no less the case, of course, for sanity; and the boundary between the two will be repeatedly traversed in the course of this book. These narratives are both extraordinary in the experiences they describe, and characteristic of much seventeenth-century spirituality, with its emphasis on emotional extremes and the dissolution of the self. They offer disturbed and hallucinatory versions of early modern preoccupations and relationships, and yet they are always recognisably of their own time and place, sharing in the cultural grammar of the seventeenth century, and thus illuminating ‘sane’ as well as ‘mad’ subjectivities. And ultimately, they can perhaps reach forward in time to raise new questions about how mental disorder is conceived and treated today.

2 Crises of the Self: Madness and Autobiographical Writing

The Quaker writer and preacher Dorothea Gotherson in the course of her self-narrative, written in the mid-1650s, gives the following warning (one among many) to her readers: ‘all you that are travelling out of Sodom with your faces towards Sion’, she tells them, ‘look not back; remember Lots wife, who became a pillar of salt ’1 Look not back: a curiously paradoxical instruction for one engaged in recounting the history of her life, and a useful reminder of the ambiguities of the past in early modern spiritual narrative. The experience of conversion, or convincement, or whatever other overturning of the soul, is a second birth: all that is corrupt in your previous life falls away from you, people as well as pastimes, and of course thoughts and desires. To hold on to the past might thus appear as looking back towards Sodom, failing to realise the radical transformation of self implicit in the conversion process. Particularly for those associated with the radical sects of the Civil War and Commonwealth, spiritual rebirth was part of a rebirth of the whole world; everything, potentially, was new, to be changed. ‘O! what a great alteration there is now in them!’ declared John Rogers, referring to the newly converted, ‘all old things are passed away, and all things become new! a new nature! a new heart! new affections! new objects! new smilings, and flowings of light, and love!’2 The millennial tone of much religious thought of the period seemed to point firmly to the future, to Sion, and away from the antichristian past. Saints made themselves new in readiness for the coming day when all should be made new. But this perspective, antithetical as it is to any dwelling on the past, coexists with an extraordinary upsurge in autobiographical writing. The midseventeenth century is the period when autobiography as genre could be said really to get under way; when rather than being a matter of a few isolated manuscripts at long intervals, almost invariably and inevitably written by the leisured and educated, self-narrative becomes the province of countless small presses publishing works by obscure and marginal people.3 Men and women 19


of many different social backgrounds, in some form or another, publish the story of their lives, a story which by definition implies an engagement with the past. Lot’s wife notwithstanding, the experience of conversion – the journey from Sodom to Sion – was recorded again and again throughout the seventeenth century.4 The three narratives considered in this book are part of this new genre and emerge out of the same intense concern with the self and its relation to the divine. The founding paradox of autobiography, notoriously – and in a sense the condition for its existence as narrative – is the gap between the I who writes, in the present, and the I who is written, in the past.5 In spiritual autobiography, as in any narrative pivoting on a transformative moment, the paradox is especially sharp: the self described ‘before’ is by definition different to the self now – someone else, worldly, unhappy, mistaken. The story that is being told in spiritual narrative is that of the transformation of the inner self: its primary statement is ‘I am not what I was’. The aim of the narrative, then, is to show how this earlier person turned into the new one. And in the conversion narrative, memory is critically important, to guarantee the continuity of the self against this disruption. If one’s being and one’s world have been turned upside down, memory sutures the gap between old and new selves; the autobiography is the written guarantee of that suture.6 Autobiographical writing, by definition, is a discourse of memory; and it is one which claims to represent the truth of a life. It assumes the existence of a remembering subject whose narrative is founded on personal recollections: however complex the relation between the writing subject and the written text, however many qualifications need to be made in reflecting on and exploring the transformation of life into text, the existence of that remembering subject is fundamental to the genre. It seems thus in certain ways paradoxical that autobiographical accounts of madness are practically numerous enough to make a genre on their own account; for madness is often characterised as a crisis of both memory and self. To be mad is to be dislocated from one’s past, unable to recognise or remember one’s closest friends and family; living with ‘no past, no future, only an imprisoned Now’, as Janet Frame describes it.7 To write an autobiography after having recovered from madness is to encounter a different challenge to memory, that of being really and radically changed: what can be recollected of a time when the self was in a sense absent from itself? And yet despite the seeming impossibility of the project, autobiographies of madness are not merely a phenomenon of the last century or so. Dionys Fitzherbert, Hannah Allen and George Trosse are writing in the early days of the genre, and even earlier works, notably the fourteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, are often discussed in the framework of mental disturbance.8 Many other seventeenth-century narratives, as we shall see, engage with periods of doubt, despair and alienation. The emergence of such concerns

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so early in the history of autobiography is worth dwelling on, for what it suggests not only about the history of autobiography but also about the history of autobiographical subjectivity: notably, that inner turbulence, of one sort or another, is often the impetus behind the writing of autobiography. The genre that appears above all to assert and to communicate the self has from its beginnings been put at the service of a state of mind which is about the collapse of self and the incommunicability of experience. Nor is it only in relation to memory that autobiography and madness are awkward companions; the bare possibility of representation, of articulating the condition of madness, is often called into question. If any constant element may be seen in the history and ethnography of madness it is the notion that the mad are separated from the shared linguistic and social codes that give meaning to communication; their relation to the world is disrupted, and the version of the world they live in cannot be apprehended by those outside it. To understand, hear, or see differently, things that are ‘not there’, is mad; thus Andrew Boord in the mid-sixteenth century defines melancholy madness as ‘a sicknes full of fantasies, thynkyng to here or se that thing that is nat harde nor sene, and a man havynge this madnes shall thynke in him self that thynge that can never be ’.9 Madness, in this model, cannot communicate with the sane world. Foucault famously argued that madness had been silenced, that it could never truly speak itself, but only be spoken of from outside – in particular, and disastrously, by psychiatry; language itself excludes the possibility of mad speech. An extended philosophical and literary argument sparked off by Derrida’s response to this claim complicated the purity of Foucault’s initial picture, with its strict opposition of mad and sane, reason and unreason; and empirical explorations of the writings of the mad have also put into question the assertion that madness cannot be represented within the order of language.10 Autobiography itself represents one of the ways in which the mad may communicate what mental disturbance is like. Nonetheless, in cases where the writer is looking back retrospectively on madness rather than writing from inside it, the question of how to represent the workings of the mind as it was remains a problem. Even where memory supplies a sequential narrative (and it may not always do so), the logic of that sequence may have become inaccessible (why did I think this, say that, behave in such a way?) or scandalously unrepeatable (especially within the context of devotional writing). Fiction may bridge the gap with metaphor and imagination, and fictionalised autobiography can be a way around the difficulties of memory and representation.11 But for seventeenth-century spiritual autobiographers, other ways of articulating and representing these complex pasts had to be found. In this chapter, then, I follow up these various threads in order to explore both the possibility and the impossibility of representing madness in these


narratives. I begin with a general discussion of the development of autobiographical writing and an overview of debates around early modern subjectivity, focusing particularly on the idea of the self as it is articulated in seventeenth-century life-writings, and as it is shaped by religion. I go on to consider autobiographies of madness in relation to this larger group, in terms of their form and content, and ask how they negotiate the crisis of memory, and the unrepresentability of madness. What does it mean to write about a time of mental disorder; how can memory grasp it, and how can it be represented in the framework of the spiritual autobiography, as it traverses the ground of turmoil to reach a perspective of tranquillity? In particular, I focus on how the writing attempts at once to articulate the disturbance and dislocation of mental disorder, and to combat and control it. The problems of memory and authority always implicit in autobiographical writing are multiplied when the writer is describing a time of what at least retrospectively appears as absence from the self.

The Christian life: spirituality and selfhood The new forms of writing about the self that emerge during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have traditionally been regarded as articulations of new ways of thinking about the self. Medieval writers did of course explore and analyse aspects of selfhood in various ways, and indeed occasionally wrote narratives of their lives, but the emergent genres of diary and autobiography are nonetheless genuinely innovative, both structurally and in terms of their rapid dissemination through a population increasingly literate and involved with the written word, especially in the bible. The question of how these new ways of writing about the self developed has become increasingly prominent in both historical and literary research, and the last twenty years in particular have seen an explosion of interest in the early history of autobiographical writing, a project fuelled by a more general interest in the forms of representation of subjectivity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among both literary critics and historians.12 Despite different emphases and materials, these discussions have in common the persuasion that there are new forms of subjectivity emerging in this period, and that new forms of self-writing are both the register and the rehearsal of this larger shift.13 The self is becoming modern; and it becomes modern by, among other things, learning to understand itself narratively and autobiographically, analytically and self-reflexively. In Michael Mascuch’s formulation, ‘the origins of the individualist self lie in the advent of modern autobiographical practice’; the two are inextricably related, at once cause and effect, and the ability to represent one’s life as a plotted narrative is critical in defining the modern individual self.14 But although the idea of a sequential narrative is an important part of the emergence of autobiographical writing, from a purely formal point of view,

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self-writing in the early modern period is seldom governed by narrative or chronological structure. Rising into popularity above all among the devout, as part of the torrent of publications accompanying the revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, it is characterised by fluidity and variety, and by constant merging of forms and styles, and it crops up in unexpected ways and places. Writers of the 1650s frequently include passages of autobiography as part of a polemic or visionary text. They may switch between diary, meditation, prayer and recollection. Moral fables, reflections, biblical exegesis, attacks on idolatry, utopian or prophetic dreams or visions, all can be included in the larger category of self-writing. And if in some cases it is the fluidity of generic boundaries that makes such writing unfamiliar, in other ways it is on the contrary a strict adherence to the conventions of the new form. Increasingly as the seventeenth century progresses, personal narratives come to be more rigidly structured, often following a clear model, and written according to an approved set of specifications (the various churches tended to keep quite a firm hold on the published writings of their adherents). Self-writing in its early phases is simultaneously looser and more rigidly constrained than we might expect.15 These writings thus represent a genre which is still in the process of becoming, and in many ways do not conform to later notions of autobiography; there is indeed debate over the extent to which it is appropriate to use the term ‘autobiography’ at all. Anthologies such as the recent Personal Disclosures include letters, diaries, published and manuscript narratives, under the general rubric of ‘self-writing’; in Europe the term ‘ego-writing’ is widely used.16 Michael Mascuch has recently argued that the terminology by which we designate even the different forms is itself misleading; diaries, for example, mix personal accounts with useful maxims or quotations, notes on reading or sermons, and a range of material that may have little in common with the modern idea of a diary; and autobiography proper, he asserts, does not emerge until late in the eighteenth century.17 This seems unduly restrictive, but it is useful nevertheless to be reminded that just as early modern genres do not correspond exactly to later forms, so we should also be attentive to the distinctiveness of early modern subjectivities. For the version of selfhood much of this writing presents is often strange to us in its preoccupations. Writing the self, in spiritual autobiography, emerges paradoxically out of a discourse which strives in certain ways towards the annihilation of the self; spiritual autobiographers wrestle with the selfcentredness, the suspicious proximity to arrogance, of their project. Every good Protestant knows what will be found in the self: sin. To look into the self is to look into a pit of ugliness, and if what is found is not pride, selfishness, vanity, greed and hypocrisy, then it means the searcher is not looking hard enough. ‘He that cleares himselfe from all sinne, is the most sinner, and he that sayes, he hath not sinned in hypocrisie, is the rankest hypocrite’, the preacher Thomas Adams proclaimed.18 John Bunyan’s description of what


he found himself to be inwardly is particularly vivid and energetic, but also typical in its unconditional self-loathing: my original and inward pollution, that, that was my plague and my affliction I was more loathsome in mine own eyes than a toad, and I thought I was so in God’s eyes too: sin and corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart, as water would bubble out of a fountain I fell therefore at the sight of mine own vileness, deeply into despair 19 John Donne’s plea, ‘Burne off my rusts and my deformity’, stands as an image of what this focus on the self was designed to achieve: first to identify the impurities of that self, and then to have both impurities and self devoured in a transforming fire that (as the poet Francis Quarles desired) would ‘leave nothing of my self in me’.20 To the extent that self-knowledge is valued, it is valued only as the route to its own transcendence and to knowledge of God. As Phyllis Mack describes it: In hundreds of public tracts, private letters, accounts of dreams, and autobiographical journals, Quakers and others recorded their attempts to apply the acid of self-criticism, fasting and incessant prayer to their own bodies and personalities; to dissolve the habits, passions, gestures, and little secret sins that made them who they were to become blank.21 The aim of these early autobiographers was thus to dismantle the self rather than to express it. ‘Let nothing be attributed to the Monster Self’, proclaims Alice Hayes. ‘Let me be unto thee, O God, what I am’, pleads Elizabeth Stirredge, ‘and not unto men’ – though as so often in these writings that central ‘I am’, precariously balancing the divine and the human spheres, asserts what it intends to eradicate.22 Even when what they are writing is easily recognisable as the first-person account of a life, the very different priorities and concerns of the writers give that life in many ways a very unfamiliar structure. Time swells or contracts; long periods are skipped over with barely a mention, short encounters or reflections or dreams fill pages and pages, important life events (as we might see them) are overlooked. These are narratives shaped by chronological sequence, to some extent, but with no interest in being either balanced or comprehensive in covering the life story. Since to know the self fully is to know it inwardly, spiritual writers have little time for events in the external world, and little interest in presenting a full chronological narrative of their lives. The Baptist Jane Turner commends ‘self-examination, self-watching, self-judging, self-humbling and prayer’ as a means to know one’s own heart; but she dismisses knowledge of the world as at best ‘convenient for Saints to know upon a natural or civil account too low for them to spend much

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of their precious time about’, and declares that ‘things meerly historical and traditional will come to nothing’, by contrast with divine truth.23 An autobiography written according to these principles will clearly have little time to waste on details of everyday life. Parents barely mention their children (living or dead); marriages are casually referred to long after the event; children give a sentence to their parents and never refer to them again. John Bunyan’s autobiography Grace Abounding, written after two marriages and four children, gives domestic relationships no more than a few lines, and indeed declares that if anyone he had converted fell away from the church, ‘I can truly say their loss has been more to me, than if one of my own children, begotten of my body, had been going to its grave’.24 This does not necessarily mean that such relationships were distant (an issue discussed in detail in Chapter 9), but that the priorities of spiritual narratives are precisely on the life of the spirit: being reborn and living in religion is more significant than the circumstances of the writer’s first birth. The near complete omission of childhood, now seen as the crucible of adult personality, holding the seeds of all one’s later life, is one of the most striking reminders that we are working with a very different model of subjectivity. Commonly, spiritual autobiographers dismiss their childhoods in a sentence or two. ‘It pleased the Lord that I was civilly brought up from a child, and kept from such gross evils as persons meerly civil do not allow, but otherwaies very vain’, is Jane Turner’s summary of her upbringing.25 Exemplary moments may be cited to show how childhood prefigured the vices or virtues of later years, but it has in itself no explanatory value; it is not because one’s parents were neglectful that one grew up anxious, or because they were of the protestant petty bourgeoisie that one grew up thrifty and meticulous. Childhood – like marriage, like parenthood – happens to everyone in more or less the same way, seems to be the assumption; individuality and the true self are defined by one’s spiritual experiences. Seventeenth-century life-writing may thus be seen as particularly concerned with subjectivity, in the sense that it focuses on the events of the inner rather than the outer life, and depends on some notion of selfexploration and self-knowledge even if the stories it tells about inner lives often seem stylised and conventional. But the ‘individuality’ generally seen as the defining feature of autobiography is complicated; the self that is to be uncovered has from one point of view nothing significantly individual about it. The drama of the inner life, of sin and regeneration, is fundamentally undergone in the same way by all Christian souls, and to this extent the individual life story is located in common experiences, rather than being particular to the individual. The story told by spiritual autobiography is founded in conformity to a pattern, even in its earliest days, when the pattern was that of an exemplary life rather than somebody else’s book. It is subordinated to a higher common aim, primarily that of celebrating God, usually in the context of a specific church or faith, and elements that fail


to address that aim are likely to be excluded. It demands a rigorous attentiveness on the part of the writer to his or her inward life, and at the same time insists that the meaning of all inward lives is ultimately to be found in a single context and a single providential structure. It is for these reasons that it is a pattern both wholly appropriate as a vehicle for stories of mental breakdown, and at the same time awkwardly resistant to those stories.

Narratives of madness: the crisis of the self Autobiographical narrative is perhaps at its most compelling, both for readers and writers, when it is attempting to negotiate the threatened collapse or disintegration of the self. It comes into being in the often anguished communities of the godly, not only to describe disintegration but also to record successful outcomes. Numerous writers on spiritual autobiography have emphasised the importance of self-narrative as part of the process of fashioning a new self out of a time of crisis.26 Elspeth Graham notes the continuing dominance of the theme of the fragile self into the present day: Our current preoccupation with autobiography, the prime genre of selfhood, very often seems to be, in fact, a preoccupation with threats to selfhood, with issues of collapse and absence of self, with the very fragility or the impossibility of a concept and sense of the self. And she goes on to suggest that ‘suffering is psychically and formally linked to the very possibility of articulation of the self in autobiography’.27 From this point of view, the presence of psychic catastrophe in the earliest autobiographies should come as no surprise; and the exploration of the forms in which such catastrophe comes to be written may help to understand some of what is not written in other spiritual autobiography. As we have seen, the new autobiographical forms of the seventeenth century were in certain ways highly conventional, following a predetermined spiritual trajectory and published with a view to the public image of both writer and church. Religion shapes the narratives, focuses the writers’ intentions and defines their intended audience. But to approach these new forms of writing from their extreme edge, so to speak – from the perspective of the narratives of outright breakdown – also highlights the fact that however conventional the form, it is often the self in crisis that seems to be at issue. The small number of accounts that explicitly deal with the experience of being treated as mad are shadowed by the many spiritual autobiographies which describe experiences of doubt and distress that often come close to mental disorder. Seventeenth-century autobiographers worry about their sinfulness, God’s punishments and mercies, their eventual redemption; they read their lives for signs and clues; they suffer doubt, misery and despair; many of them describe behaviour that appears from the outside erratic,

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obsessive or hallucinatory. The most frequently repeated motif is that of personal suffering transcended and offered to others as consolation, and even the most conventional spiritual autobiographers wish to insist on the truth and originality of their experiences and their writings. The spiritual autobiography, however it may be tied to particular theological and sectarian imperatives, has its origins in the often anguished and complex reinvention of the self that goes with seventeenth-century spirituality; it is the product of doubt and anxiety rather than cheerful serenity.28 And this indeed binds it to the autobiography of madness. If autobiographical writing is a form in which to work over ideas of the self, then where that self seems in some way threatened or problematic there is perhaps an especially strong motive to create a narrative in which it can be recuperated and reasserted. Spiritual autobiography of this period thus reminds us simultaneously that sanity is not an untroubled or unproblematic condition, and that madness is not set apart in its preoccupations from the world around it; mad autobiography shares much of its vocabulary and content with countless narratives of spiritual distress. Seventeenth-century narratives of madness, located in this general context of spiritual self-writing, tell stories in which the breakdown of the self and its subsequent recovery is understood through the breakdown and recovery of the relation to God. The selves in question, however, break down in ways that are perceived by those around them to express something more than the experience of religious affliction rehearsed in so many spiritual autobiographies; and the project of the narrative is to fit into a conventional model a story which has some dramatically or at least problematically unconventional elements. No spiritual autobiography, perhaps, is a perfect fit with the ideal type; and as we shall see in subsequent chapters, the boundaries between religious affliction and the physical illness of melancholy, and between zeal for the Lord and outright madness, were not always easy to establish. But in these three narratives, to some extent, it seems that notwithstanding their adherence to the conventions of God’s trial of the soul, their divergences from those conventions are not always easy to contain. The stories these writers have to tell are directed towards recovery from affliction, through divine grace. All three wrote their accounts after recovering from their various afflictions; that is to say, none could be regarded as writing in any unmediated way as the ‘voice’ of madness (though we should also bear in mind that recovery in these narratives may not be altogether straightforward). They are concerned to understand their experiences by way of a structure of salvation, and at the same time demonstrate their soundness of mind. The stories they tell are designed to assert their regained lucidity and coherence, not to recapture a lost delirium; as Allan Ingram comments of the authors collected in his anthology of mad autobiographies (mainly eighteenth-century, but including Hannah Allen), they are attempting ‘a written self-renewal demonstrating their capacities for moral


perspective and linguistic choice’.29 This modifies what they have to say in significant ways: they have emerged from the silence and have arguments to make about what happened at the time and subsequently. It does not mean that their narratives are unmarked by what has gone before, but it complicates still further the relation between what is written and what the experience was at the time; between memory and representation. The explanatory structure that identifies human suffering as punishment for sin ensures that their experiences are located firmly in a spiritual framework: medical explanations are of little significance to any of them, despite the medical treatments to which all three were subjected. However, even if the assumed structure is clear, it is not always a good fit; and there are also aspects of the content that are hard to assimilate into this framework. Spiritual meanings are not always easy to find in the delusions they describe, and half-remembered or unrepeatable blasphemies are still capable of threatening the precariously regained spiritual security of the writer; accounts of medical discipline can appear as submerged counter-narratives in which the spiritual nature of their experiences is put into question. Thus the narratives have to work quite hard to establish the meanings they claim. This work is most visible in Dionys Fitzherbert’s narrative. As a manuscript, and as one that exists in both authorial and copy form, it displays repeatedly the traces of the corrections and erasures that are required for it to work as the narrative of purely spiritual suffering that it claims to be; and furthermore, as her aim is to argue that she was not in fact mad, those aspects of her behaviour that seem too close to madness are often omitted in the public text. Thus a description in the original of her removal from one place to another with her hands bound disappears in the fair copy, perhaps as too suggestive of wild and disorderly – mad – behaviour. Other passages that might seem to imply eccentric and unusual preoccupations are also removed: her account of her conversion, in which she came to find God through inspiration rather than through instruction, was amended to emphasise that it was subsequently tested and approved by a clergyman; and a description of her delusions about her own name is omitted. Structurally, Fitzherbert’s narrative aims to offer an account of the Christian soul called to God, backsliding, undergoing punishment for pride, and eventually finding redemption and a renewal of faith; a structure already culturally available through exemplary lives and devotional writings in general, although the spiritual autobiography itself had yet to emerge. If the aim of Fitzherbert’s narrative is to distance her crisis from insanity and establish it as a purely spiritual experience, Trosse by contrast takes the view that God’s power and mercy are more splendidly displayed the more extreme and catastrophic his experiences. Unlike Fitzherbert, he has no wish to demonstrate that even in his worst moments occasional glimpses of light would promise eventual redemption. Where she deletes the reference to the binding of her hands, he offers a lengthy description of how his legs were cut

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and bruised in his attempts to writhe out of the iron chains that restrained him; where she represents herself as a devout and serious young woman who delighted in books and reading, he emphasises his perverse rejection of all forms of religion and learning in his youth. The latest of the three to be written, his narrative is much more securely contained by the conversion structure; he approaches the raw material of his life as a preacher, with the appropriate contrasts and morals consistently drawn. But the narrative structure is skewed and unbalanced by the imaginative power of the time of his madness, which dominates the book. Hannah Allen’s narrative, although generally described as a conversion narrative, perhaps fits that category least well of the three. Her initial calling to God takes place in a few lines in the first couple of pages, and is implicitly associated with her melancholy tendencies as a young girl; there is no sign of any particular sinfulness on her part, beyond excessive attachment to her husband; and her recovery from affliction similarly seems to take place almost randomly, with the help and support of a clerical cousin and his wife, but little sign of the inward transformative work that might be expected. As Elaine Hobby comments, the spiritual interpretation of her story to which the reader is directed by the introductory remarks ‘is remarkable in view of the fact that the problem the narrative centres on is the failure of this religious framework to explain or relieve Hannah Allen’s state of mind’; nonetheless, once she had recovered it could be fitted ‘into the accepted pattern of false confidence, doubt, and new, true knowledge of salvation’.30 If the conversion structure presents one sort of challenge, another problem is that of how to deal with delusions. Spiritual autobiographers typically read their past lives of error for signs of their eventual redemption, looking for spiritual stirrings in the period before their conversions. Suffering, in particular, is meant to bring the writer to God: the various crises of life may provide the impetus for a reinvention of the self. Despair and anguish may be states in which God seems unreachable, but they are also commonly states in which the sufferer is struggling towards God. There is a sense in which all these states retrospectively could be seen as delusory, or at least as mistaken. Spiritual autobiographers who describe their past conviction of damnation no longer see themselves as damned; that condition is part of the soul’s quest, rather than a true perception. To recognise one’s real sinfulness is needful, but sin does not mean damnation. The proper outcome is the realisation of grace. The conviction of one’s own sinfulness is an inward state, not necessarily depending on any outward act: as Stachniewski puts it, ‘Sins were not primarily wicked deeds: Sin was rather an engulfing sense of being rejected and hated.’31 Thus when the mid-century prophet Anna Trapnel describes her realisation that far from being a decent sort of person, as she had supposed, she is to be ‘ranked amongst the vildest miscreants in


the world, and to behold my self as bad as the greatest adulterer or blasphemer in the world’, this is a true realisation; but it does not mean she thinks she has actually committed adultery.32 This distinction is harder to maintain in the autobiographies of madness, where the conviction of sin in general may be literalised into the belief that one has committed certain definite crimes or errors. Fitzherbert believed herself to be a thief, and to have stolen all her clothes; Trosse was convinced that he had promised marriage to a young woman he had sinned with ‘altho’ I had formerly utter’d no such Thing to her, nor ever intended it’, he adds carefully.33 Hannah Allen, convinced she had been a hypocrite in her earlier faith, argued with her relatives over the question of sins in mind and deed: I would say I was without Natural Affection; that I Loved neither God nor Man; and that I was given up to work all manner of wickedness with greediness; We see no such thing by you, would some say; I would answer, Aye, but it is in my heart; Why doth it not break out in Act? say they, It will do ere long; said I.34 The privileging of inner over outer in theological terms, and the insistence that it is what is done in the spirit rather than in the flesh that counts, makes it very difficult for anyone to claim a state of innocence. In a condition of mental disturbance, however, the terms of self-reproach used metaphorically by other writers become concrete. Thus in order to demonstrate recovery, it is also necessary to disavow the wilder parts of one’s earlier self-accusations. As numerous scholars have noted, the metaphorical value attached to the words of the wise fool in Renaissance Europe had no impact on how the words of the actual mad were regarded: to be raving, distracted or delirious meant precisely that speech had become meaningless.35 The recollection of delusions about the self in these narratives also involved the problem of blasphemous words and thoughts, which similarly needed to be discounted or denied. Mad speech, read in these contexts, in no way participates in the notion that madness may give access to higher or different truths: the issue is to discredit it, not to read it for marks of illumination. Thus Trosse describes his delusions at great length and with constant reminders of his distance from them. ‘I again fell into the foolish and wicked Conceit, that it was in my Power to make God miserable, and to torment Him, forever; and it was in my malignant Will to do it’; ‘I suppos’d my self to have been mov’d by the Spirit of God to a certain Thing; which I refus’d to submit unto, and withal renounc’d Him’.36 Strengthened as he is by his years as a minister, and his acceptance that he was in a state of madness at the time, to recount blasphemous and terrifying thoughts no longer has the power to alarm him, though he repeatedly marvels at God’s goodness in not striking him dead on the spot. Hannah Allen, although in

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certain ways less securely distanced from her earlier self, is also able to attribute her wild claims to her disturbed condition, and to repeat them without apparent anxiety. ‘I would say that I was Magor-Missabib, a Terrour to my self and all my Friends that I was a Hell upon Earth, and a Devil incarnate’; ‘I am the Monster of Creation: in this word I much delighted’.37 Indeed, as the last phrase suggests, there is a certain grandiose satisfaction in describing the extreme horror of one’s own dreadfulness. Allen’s claim (in her melancholy) to have committed worse sins than the sin against the Holy Ghost is matched by Trosse’s reflection after recovery that ‘none did ever come so near to The Sin against the Holy-Ghost, and not commit it, as I have done I know not how a Creature can sin more desperately than I did’.38 Trosse’s insistence that his suffering was the result of his sin makes the question of responsibility particularly complex for him; he both does and does not hold himself responsible for the terrible things he said and did. If he did not commit the sin against the Holy Ghost, he suggests, it was perhaps due to ‘the Want of a Sedateness of Spirit, Composed Deliberation, and Clearness of Light, which are necessary Concomitants of it’.39 Before his madness, he writes, he sinned ‘as a Brute and a blind Atheist’; during it he sinned ‘as a Devil and a raging Furie’.40 Madness does not in fact exculpate the sufferer; it merely provides some small protection from the full consequences of his blasphemies, which nonetheless both punish and articulate his sinfulness. For Fitzherbert the problem of responsibility is complicated in a different way. Because she does not regard what happened to her as madness, she cannot disclaim her blasphemous speeches by attributing them to mental disorder; on the other hand, at least some of the time they were ‘not fit to repeat’, and can hardly be owned as the outcome of any kind of rational thought process. When she records that in her delusions she said of the bible ‘those books were made to deceive such fools as I was’, or, in reference to Christ on the cross, ‘Take me, said I, and nail me up so as that book saith he was, and see when I shall die’, or that she was tempted to become a Catholic, all of these must be distanced from any notion of intention. She was, she suggests, ‘distracted’; ‘I appeal to all them that have known me if I were like to have given such a reason if I had been in my right senses.’41 But at the same time distraction and being out of one’s right senses must be located in the context of a spiritual trial rather than a physical or mental state, a difficult balancing act to maintain. Dr Chetwynd, the cleric who writes a preface to her narrative, offers the comforting analogy of illness: her speeches were ‘no more to be counted yours than a man in a fever’.42 Fitzherbert herself, however, does not use this comparison, although it was a commonplace at the time. She is now ‘in her perfect sense and memory’; then she was not; but there is no vocabulary that will firmly and acceptably identify the state she was then in, and her anxiety about her past blasphemies is accordingly greater.


Memory, autobiography, madness Memory, in Fitzherbert’s phrase, is explicitly opposed to a state of unreason: to be sane is to be in perfect sense and memory, able to apprehend rightly both the outside world and one’s personal past. The writers of spiritual autobiography, characteristically inward-looking, are in a sense peculiarly reliant on memory, since what they are describing is above all states of mind and soul. But it is surprisingly rare for autobiographers to express doubts about their own memories; memory, indeed, is by many taken for granted. One reason for this may be that in so far as these narratives are concerned with the question of their own truth, it is focused on the question of whether or not it is the truth of God guiding them. What they want to persuade the readers of is the genuineness of their particular conversion or particular church, and it may be assumed that this is why the question of memory becomes subordinate. Additionally the writer commits the enterprise to God, and where doubts seem to arise about the fallibility of human memory, it is suggested that divine approval of the project will ensure the accuracy of the finished account. Thus Jane Turner, worrying that ‘it would be very hard, if not impossible, for me to remember that which has been so long since’, as well as ‘fearing lest through forgetfulness as I knew I should leave out something which was, so I might possibly write something which was not’, is reassured by God’s promise that she would write ‘as in his presence’, and this would guarantee her truth.43 Another important factor might be described as the importance of rehearsed memory. Godliness required a high level of self-reflection which was actively memory-based; the godly looked back over their acts and thoughts constantly, in order to judge themselves and to improve.44 This was a practice encouraged by many religious groups, emerging as a public performance of the narrative of one’s conversion in some of the gathered churches; these spoken narratives were gathered together and published by several churches.45 For a public figure like the prophet Anna Trapnel, this oral testimony might be repeated again and again, further supporting memory: ‘I could not have related so much from the shallow memory I have naturally’, she remarks, ‘but through often relating these things, they become as a written book, spread open before me, and after which I write’ – the book of the mind translating itself into physical form.46 But from the point of view of memory work, the private practice of selfinterrogation, and regular meditation on one’s own acts and experiences, is probably more significant. What has been meditated over repeatedly, it may be presumed, can be formed into a coherent narrative with reasonable confidence. Autobiographical writing thus records what has been many times rehearsed in the mind, and also helps to ensure that it will stay in the memory.

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The active training of memory also plays some part in this, probably for men in particular. To demand that your children repeat back and show understanding of sermons was a key part of puritan educational practice. George Trosse, describing the sinfulness of his own youth, comments, I never cared to understand, or to retain, what I heard in Publick; never, as I can remember, being called to an account by my Parents, after the Sermon and Service was over; and so profited nothing by all that I heard.47 This is also of course an implicit reproach against his parents for neglecting this part of his education. Catherine Holland, by contrast, daughter of a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, was held to strict religious discipline to ensure (unsuccessfully) that she did not follow her mother’s faith; her father ‘for my good, holding a strict hand over me, severely corrected me, if I learnt not my catechism’, and ‘if I remembered not the sermons, I was made to write them down’.48 The Quaker Joan Vokins memorised sermons voluntarily: ‘when I was very young in years’, she records, ‘I greatly delighted to go to professors’ meetings, and could bring home the text, and repeat much of their sermons, but yet that brought no benefit to my poor hungry soul.’49 And the Fifth Monarchist preacher John Rogers describes his own memory training in listening to sermons as a young man: having memorised the sermons under their headings, as required by his father from early childhood, he embedded them in his memory as follows: this course I took customarily every night to repeat sermons to my self alone, or rather to say them by heart (as duly as I went to bed) the Lords-day night that sermon which I heard in the forenoon; the Munday night (so called) that which I heard on the last Lords day in the afternoon, the Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, alwaies left to say sermons I heard a month, 2 months, 12 months, and so (as I encreased in years) 2, or 3, or 4, or 5, or 10 years before by this means I could remember many Sermons, and such as were long agone preached, perfectly 50 Even without such strict planning, exercising the memory is a central part of godly practice; and the act of writing is thus in a sense a continuation of this practice of active remembering. Thus Jane Turner’s decision to write down her experiences is explained as the result of a simultaneous awareness of the comforts of memory (communion with God was ‘so sweet and joyous’, and the remembrance was ‘to my own comfort and profit’) and its fallibility (‘I am prone to forget the particulars’). ‘Upon the consideration of which’, she concludes, ‘I thought it might be a good way to write them down.’51


In autobiographies of madness, whose writers are looking back to a time when they were not fully in possession of themselves, the problem of memory appears in certain ways sharper. The nature of the path on which God has guided them may be in dispute; the opinions of others as to what happened to them may be more varied; and above all, their own ability to recollect and reflect on the events of the time in question may be more open to doubt. Where what is being described is a state of being not in full possession of oneself, it might be expected that remembered knowledge would be a problem. So it is perhaps surprising that this seems not to be the case; the working of memory in these narratives is a more ambivalent and complex process than the simple contrast between memory and forgetfulness might suggest. Often, indeed, the memories recorded seem more vivid and precise than they are in other spiritual narratives, and chronological sequence is more tightly adhered to. George Trosse recounts the progress of his illness and its attendant delusions almost as if what he is describing is an ordinary sequence of events; there never seems to be any question for him about the reliability of his knowledge of what happened while he was distracted. His narrative is full of descriptions like this: I strongly fancy’d that God watched Opportunities to destroy me; but I also presumed that God must get in by the Door, or he would not be able to come at me; and I foolishly conceited, that if I did but tie the Door with a particular sort of a Knot, he would be effectually shut out; which I attempted to do, that I might be secured from his wrath.52 In these passages the delusions both are and are not owned by him. The fact of his recovery, on which the narrative is premised, allows him to recount them without identifying himself any longer with the madness they signify; the verbs mark them as creatures of the mind, not of reality (‘fancy’, ‘conceit’). At the same time it is because he has been the subject who is so deluded that he remembers these events; and it is his memory of what he thought (God cannot untie this knot) that allows him to explain what he did (make strange knots). That memory itself, though, is the bedrock; he knows what he thought in his madness as clearly as if he had been sane. And while memory is involved in his exposition of what it means to be recovered from madness, it is not in the position one might expect. Rather than an opposite to forgetting, memory is part of knowledge and the ability to learn, as his summary of what he has been through makes clear: By my Sins and Sensualities, I had brought myself into horrible Distractions and perfect Madness, I was for a Time deprived of the regular use of Reason, and by the Disturbance of my Imagination I became wild and outragious.

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But now, my Brain is composed, my Mind calm, my Thoughts orderly, I have a Fancy to invent, and a Memory to retain what I clearly understand; I can well remember others Sermons and my own 53 The point about sermons marks the distance he has travelled from his irreligious youth; and it is a distance measured by his ability to put memory at the service of godliness. It is his confirmed godly life as minister following his recovery that enables him to assert the meaning of his life with a certainty that excludes the possibility of faults in memory. Like Trosse, Hannah Allen recounts her life and thoughts during a time of delusion with no suggestion that anything has been lost to memory, and with a clarity and detail which is at times surprising in view of what is being described: once when the Surgeon had let me blood, I went up into a Chamber and bolted the Door to me, and took off the Plaister and tyed my Arm, and set the Vein a bleeding again; which Mrs. Walker fearing, ran up stairs and got into the Chamber to me, I seeing her come in, ran into the Leads, and there my Arm bled upon the Wall; Now (said I) you may see there is the blood of a Cursed Reprobate.54 The rational presentation of the material is at odds with its content. The tone is level and ordered, and there is no sign of disruptions of memory or certainty. Like Trosse, she is perfectly clear about what she did, and now that she has recovered sees no reason for the confusion of the past to lead her to doubt her recollections of it. Fitzherbert is the only one to refer directly to her difficulty in remembering some of what happened in the darkest period of her illness. For her, as for other later spiritual autobiographers, memory is guaranteed in the first instance by divine approval of the project, and secondly by the testimony of witnesses. ‘I protest before the majesty of God’, she declares, ‘that I will (so near as he shall give me memory and assistance) deliver it in the same manner as it was done, as I appeal impartially to them that saw and heard it’.55 Memory is in God’s gift, and as it is for Trosse, memory for Fitzherbert is connected with intelligence and the ability to reason; the phrase ‘in their perfect sense and memory’ is used as the opposite of ‘distracted’.56 At the same time, though, the problems of memory run through her narrative, in various ways. Fitzherbert wrote her account almost immediately after her recovery, whereas both Trosse and Allen seem to have recorded their experiences several decades after the event, and her proliferating narrative proclaims both implicitly and explicitly the incompleteness of memory in additional prefaces and afterthoughts. Her first preface explains that it is designed to add ‘things omitted in my former writing and now better come to memory’,57


and it is striking that several of those things still appear under the sign of a disturbance of memory. Her description of the most acute phase of her confusion repeatedly refers to trouble in remembering events: But farther I cannot yet remember what was done until they had me out of my bed and suffered me to walk about the chamber and galleries by; and then I was as one utterly deprived of all sense and understanding whether I did resist them or were in any way unruly thereupon, and that was the cause they bound my hands, I do not well remember. But I was every day after far worse than other; which was I think the cause that they removed me to Doctor C., where I was as I remember for the most part speechless many days after if not altogether.58 The violent disorder which resulted in the binding of her hands is for Fitzherbert a source of continuing anxiety, and can be acknowledged only under a cloud of uncertainty: if it happened, she cannot remember how or why. It seems that for her the secure distance which both Trosse and Allen seem to have established between their ‘mad’ and ‘sane’ selves is not fully achieved, and the orderly narrative of her time of delusions is less confidently maintained; perhaps because unlike them she refuses to see her history as one of madness, separation between past and present selves is more complex. Fitzherbert is also a highly self-conscious practitioner of the rehearsal of memory, both as therapeutic practice and as source of knowledge. This is her account of her recovery: I did rise very early, about three or four o’clock in the morning, and commonly ate twice a day, but very little, only to stay my stomach [so] it might be no hindrance to me. As soon as I was up I went to prayer, as I ever used to before this came to pass Then I read three or four chapters in the Bible, such as I thought I might take most consolation in; and then walk a while and meditate on that I had read or all this which I have written; the which I could not do without many tears and sometimes trembling of my body, Satan persuading me I did not sorrow enough. But I found by experience that too much thinking of it dulled me and made me unapt to a true relenting sorrow and prayer.59 Memory is a tool, along with meditation, to be inserted into the structure of a godly life, and used with care and discipline. Sorrow is necessary, but not to excess; reflection is necessary, but not to obsession. Once the act of memory has become ordered, structured and purposeful, part of the daily pattern that proclaims Fitzherbert’s repossession of herself, then it can be turned to good use, no longer threatening the self with false knowledge. And the act of writing it all down is a further repetition and disciplining of a knowledge which threatens to become excessive and disorderly.

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If it is the case – and of course this is a very small number on which to make a generalisation – that narratives of madness tend to be more concrete in their representations of time and memory than other spiritual autobiographies, it is perhaps this need to demonstrate precisely that the past is past that makes them so. The verbal and spiritual extravagance of much seventeenth-century autobiography is allowable in the context of a readership that shares the writer’s ecstatic rejection of boundaries and structures. For writers such as the Fifth Monarchist John Rogers, or the Quaker Barbara Blaugdone, what Clement Hawes calls the rhetoric of enthusiasm will be acknowledged by its audience as the sign not of madness, but of transcendence.60 For writers whose ability to grasp the world has been in question, however, it is perhaps more urgent not merely to assume but to demonstrate the security of one’s memory and the structure of one’s life. Hence the apparent paradox that narratives of mental disturbance seem in fact more disciplined and more precise in their representations of the past than narratives of spiritual transformation in general: they lay claim to understanding and ownership of an experience which was both transformative and hard to come to terms with.61 Seventeenth-century protestantism was strongly inclined to stress the authority of experience: those who had endured suffering, especially spiritual suffering, were held particularly qualified to speak about it. To have lived through the mind’s collapse and emerged to tell the tale is to acquire expertise, not on the basis that having been mad gives access to hidden truths, but rather on the analogy of having come close to death or suffered great losses. As spiritual autobiographers, these writers locate their authority to write in their experiential knowledge of religious doubt and terror; the extremity of their condition, so long as it could be assimilated into the frame of religious despair, only strengthens their claim to special knowledge. Thus the experience of madness could be recuperated into transmissible knowledge, both in writing and in action. Trosse was transformed from a reckless and self-indulgent young man to a scholar and a nonconformist minister, whose pastoral practice might be enriched by the trials he had undergone himself. With a similar underlying logic of purification and expertise gained through suffering, Dionys Fitzherbert describes how on the basis of her own experiences she was able to help and cure others suffering from strange delusions, as well as writing a work addressed explicitly to ‘the poor in spirit’ and those who had undergone similar sufferings to hers.62 Of Allen’s life after her recovery nothing is known, but the writing and publishing of her story indicates that she came to be seen as someone with matter of interest to impart.63 Providential recovery confirms the experience as a spiritual one, and thus available as new spiritual knowledge; the rhetoric of abasement and the recognition of the futility of worldly knowledge (a strong Christian tradition) allows a new understanding of what might otherwise appear to be the collapse of meaning, so that a new person can emerge. ‘[T]he


“I” of the autobiography’, notes George MacLennan, writing about Bunyan, ‘distinguishes between the autobiographical narrator and a protagonist who struggles, through crisis, to become that narrator ’, whose new identity ‘has been painfully regenerated out of the breakdown of a former self’.64 This familiar contrast, which defines the conversion narrative, is seen at its sharpest in accounts of mental breakdown; and the narrative accordingly has to work particularly hard to secure it. As Allan Ingram comments, for the writers of spiritual autobiography, madness is ‘firmly enclosed by the perspective of their redemption through God. Suffering is dealt with, both physical and mental, but its presence is unproblematic in so far as its telling is able to make it mean in a context of temptation, transgression and salvation.’65 The containing conceptual and linguistic frame is the proof of the sanity of the writer; but the distance it establishes between the mad and the sane selves, he suggests, also potentially undermines the writer’s ability to communicate the experience, binding them to the codes and structures of the spiritual narrative. What these narratives display, in their own context, is a spiritual expertise acquired at great cost, and demonstrated through a reacquired mastery of language and memory; and this necessarily excludes any possibility that madness might have its own insights. But of course, as he also notes, this reasserted sanity is not always secure: memory itself, in the writing of scenes of remembered suffering, can disrupt the separation of mad and sane selves.66 The distance between past and present, sane and mad, is repeatedly troubled by the instability of the subject of autobiography.

Significant others In this chapter, I have been concerned with the broad characteristics of spiritual autobiography, and with the ways in which autobiographical accounts of madness at once form part of that tradition and yet at times depart from it. One feature of spiritual autobiography discussed earlier was its inward orientation. Religious autobiographers pay little attention to external and human relationships; their focus is on the divine, and the relationship of consuming interest is that with God. This, indeed, is perhaps the aspect of spiritual autobiography which may now seem most distant from us (a distance which is not merely that between believer and unbeliever; modern writers of religious autobiography include their human relationships as crucial to the story they have to tell). Subjectivity for us is centrally concerned with human relationship; modern autobiography accordingly foregrounds childhood, family, love and marriage; autobiography that excludes these elements is hard to recognise as being about the self. Like the majority of spiritual autobiographies, narratives of mental disorder focus on what is going on in the inner rather than the outer world, and on a particular crucial period. However, the significant drama

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they deal with is not precisely the development of a relation to God, but rather a narrative of the breakdown of relationship in general – with God, but also with human beings, especially with family. The particular focus of these narratives on a time of intense distress and disturbance gives them a distinctive quality of intimacy and local detail that is not often present in other spiritual autobiographies. The narratives are concerned with damage to the self, and recovery from that damage. Both the damage and the recovery are associated with human and specifically family relationships; and in attempting to recuperate the fractured self and its damaged relationships, the writers necessarily foreground that self and its relationships. Unlike the majority of spiritual autobiographers, these narrators are located, socially and geographically. They write about where they live and with whom, where they go and what happened there; they write about their confusion and distress, and what they said about it at the time. From this point of view, the accounts discussed in this book offer some of the most immediate and intimate insights into early modern subjectivity. If conversion narratives are sometimes characterised as too conventional and abstract to be regarded as real self-narrative, these accounts demonstrate how even within that supposedly inflexible frame, unconventional and particular experiences can be accommodated. These relationships will be explored in detail in a later chapter. From the point of view of the development of the autobiographical subject, however, it is a point worth pausing on. If domestic and emotional relationships seem to be in some sense at the heart of these stories, even if in complex and uncertain ways, the effect of this is in fact to make their stories more familiar to the modern reader. Emotional intensity is not confined to God, but spills out to places we can more easily recognise it, with a freedom not generally found in the standard spiritual narratives. I suggested earlier that in part because of this different focus, these narratives potentially offer insights into aspects of early modern subjectivity that are hard to come by in the more conventional forms of spiritual autobiography. It is worth adding here that they also suggest a greater continuity with later forms of autobiographical writing. In this sense, one might argue that not merely the Puritan urge to self-knowledge, but also the concomitant collapse of the possibility of selfknowledge in the extremes of religious despair, lies at the origin of modern autobiographical subjectivity. ‘Mad’ autobiography, paradoxically, may be more familiar in its forms and preoccupations than ‘sane’.

3 Without Sense and Understanding: Concepts of Madness in Early Modern Thought

Mental disorder in the seventeenth century was explained, interpreted and treated in a number of different contexts. Medicine provides one language for describing and explaining mental disorder, but it does not have the field of madness to itself. Throughout the seventeenth century madness was primarily managed and understood by lay-people; and alongside formal medical orderings of human knowledge was a vernacular and popular understanding, with another vocabulary, sometimes borrowing from science and sometimes ignoring it. The language available to describe the many ways in which people might appear mentally disturbed was wide-ranging and vivid: mopish, distracted, raving, furious, frantic, fearful, all summon up different images of disordered speech, thought or conduct.1 Madness might be popularly attributed to excessive passion, exposure to the moon, reckless drunkenness; cures might involve purges, drugs, music, charms or confinement. It might describe a momentary extravagance of mood or behaviour, or a continuing dislocation from social norms and expectations. The idea of madness as an affliction with supernatural causes – God’s punishment, the devil’s malice, a witch’s curse – was also part of popular understandings of the affliction, and added prayer (and for Catholic Europe pilgrimage) to the range of cures.2 Especially significant in relation to autobiographical writings was the spiritual idiom which located madness in relation to sin, and understood all internal dramas thaumaturgically, as part of the cosmic drama of the battle between God and Satan. Most of the early modern mad would never see a doctor. Care took place primarily within the household or the local community, and the problem of how to support and look after both the mad and those who might otherwise have been their responsibility meant that much of the discussion about whether someone was mad or not was framed by economic and social as much as medical considerations.3 Madness from this point of view was 40

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defined as much by the inability to carry out one’s duties as spouse or parent, or to earn a living, as by medical categories or actual eccentricities of behaviour. Additionally, then as now, the classifications of mental disorder have social meanings. Melancholy, famously, was seen as being a disease of gentlemen; greensickness was the affliction of young girls. In a hierarchical culture, rank and gender have a bearing on definitions and diagnoses. Moreover the hierarchies of rank and gender reflect and are articulated in the hierarchies of reason and passion, mastery and ungovernability: women and the poor bear a different relation to mental disorder, as they bear a different relation to its categories and causes – reason, scholarship, sexuality, self-control.4 Thus when early modern people write about madness, their own or that of others, they draw on a range of ideas and expressions, with different roots and connotations, which in combination give a picture of the ways mental disorder was conceived and understood. Conceptions of madness are fluid; what emerges is a kind of negotiation between culturally available models of madness, and subjective interpretations and variations of these models. My concern here, however, is not only with ways of thinking about mental disorder, but with how they are deployed in autobiographical narrative. In a world of shifting and complex meanings, how do the writers of mad autobiography understand and describe what is happening to them? Do they describe themselves as melancholy or mad, distracted or confused, and what is at stake in their choices? Their preferred terminologies relate to how they think of their own condition, and how they understand and interpret what they have been through; melancholy, distraction, confusion, all invoke different models and different understandings of mental disorder. To understand these differences we need to look at the contemporary terms and concepts available, and how they map on to the symptoms these different writers recount. Early modern culture was deeply interested in what we would now call psychology. Medical, philosophical, scientific and literary writers increasingly engaged in speculation about the mind and its construction; the meaning of dreams, the relation between reason and imagination, between will, understanding and judgement, are constantly debated. This is also, of course, the age of the early enlightenment, and philosophers such as Locke and Descartes are centrally concerned with the nature of reason; madness, indeed, although often in occluded ways, is at the heart of debates over what it means to be human. Such debates could hardly be regarded as mainstream at this period, but the concern of early enlightenment philosophers with the nature of human consciousness was part of a much wider cultural engagement with the subject. Religion is central in these discussions, and I return to the relation between religion and mental disorder in subsequent chapters. Here, however, I focus more on the medical and psychological aspects of these narratives, locating them in the wider framework of early modern ideas about the mind.


Humours and inward wits: early modern explanations The fundamental idiom for explaining and describing mental disorder in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was based on the ancient theory of the four humours, blood, melancholy, choler and phlegm. In the humoural body, the ebbs and flows of hot and cold, moist and dry humours were constantly reshaping the health of mind and body, and imbalance generated ill health. The task of physic (and indeed of healthy living in general) was to monitor and regulate those ebbs and flows, taking into account a person’s predominant humour or complexion, their habits of life (food, drink, exercise, study, sleep, sex), their age, the time of year, and so forth, and to correct excess and deficit in order to arrive as near as possible to an ideal balance. Thus where cold and moist humours predominated, medication and diet aimed to reinforce the warm and dry: hot and spicy foods, for example, or particular herbs classified as hot. Where the inner system seemed turbulent and generated an excess or a corrupted form of a particular humour, the balance would be restored by attempting to take it out: purges, vomits and bleeding were central to medical practice in treating both mind and body.5 To understand disorders of the mind, then, it was necessary to identify the body’s excesses and deficits, and to rectify the erratic movements of corrupted humours. Thus Andrew Boord’s comprehensive mid-sixteenth century Breviary of Health, which describes a number of forms of insanity, locates them for the most part firmly within this system, and its explanations and recommendations are founded on the assumption of humoural imbalance. Melancholia comes of ‘an evyl melancoly humour’; caros, a type of lethargy which leads to ‘the privation of mannes witte’, is the result of a cold humour perturbing the brain, and should be cured by purges and keeping the feet warm. For mania, ‘a madnes or woodnes lyke a wylde beest’, a range of interventions are suggested. The patient is to be treated by attending to the environment (he should be kept in a room without pictures, surrounded by sweet smells, and sustained by mirth and merry communication); relationships (he must be kept in fear, ‘and if nede requyre he must be punyshed & beten’); food (‘geve him.iii.tymes a day warme meate’); and medication (‘cassia fistula & epithime used is very good’).6 The balance of the humours was influenced by the air, by the senses and by mood, as well as by diet; the reason for attending to all these different aspects was thus strictly speaking physical, even if they appear to be aimed at psychological rather than bodily conditions. Such models remain influential throughout the seventeenth century, and even after doctors had moved away from reliance on the strict Galenic system, the vocabulary and the treatments associated with the humoural body continued to be favoured by patients and practitioners alike.7 But the system is never as monolithic as this summary might seem to imply. Even a traditionally humoural writer like Boord did not hold absolutely to a single


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line; lunacy, he suggested, may be caused by ‘a great scare or a great study’ (which would disrupt the humours, although he does not spell this out), but equally it ‘may come by nature & kynde and than it is uncurable’.8 And there were other models of mind and body available to account for mental disorder. ‘Of the parts of the Body’, as Robert Burton observes in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), ‘there be many divisions’; and he goes on to make use of them all.9 Alongside the humoural body, early modern scholars inherited the theory of the ‘inward wits’ – phantasia, cogitatio and memoria – a tripartite division of the brain into imagination, understanding (or common sense) and memory, each located in a separate ventricle.10 They also drew on the Christian idea of the rational soul, with its further subdivisions of understanding (again) and will (‘the rational power apprehending’ and ‘the rational power moving’, in Burton’s words).11 Thus the vocabulary and the conceptual apparatus through which mental illness might be understood derived from a range of sources, eclectically deployed. As the sixteenth century moved into the seventeenth, a number of writers wrestled with the various ways of describing the mind available to them. For Carol Thomas Neely, indeed, the half-century between about 1580 and 1630 is a time of critical transformation in understandings of madness, in which ‘early moderns drew on the traditional humoral discourses to rethink the parameters of the human by reimagining madness’; she emphasises ‘heterogeneity, regendering, and widespread change in the discourses of distraction’, and this discursive heterogeneity can be traced in medical and religious as well as in literary and dramatic writing.12 Thomas Wright, author of an early seventeenth-century text on the mind, takes the existence of humours for granted in his discussion of the causes and effects of passions (‘Passions ingender Humors, and Humors breed Passions’), but simultaneously locates passion midway between sense and intellect, and often uses it in opposition to reason, as an unruly and dangerous force.13 Although passions may at times encourage virtue, they more frequently incite vice; therefore reason must retain its governing position.14 The preacher Thomas Adams, at around the same time, gives a description of the structure of the brain, and explains how types of madness differ according to which part of the brain is disturbed. ‘To understand the force of madnesse’, he explains, ‘we must conceive in the brayne three ventricles; as houses assigned by Physitians for three dwellers, Imagination, Reason, and Memorie. According to these three internal senses or faculties, there be three kinds of Phrensies or Madnesses.’15 But having established this structure for the physiology of the mind, he immediately goes on to describe the three parallel faculties of the soul – understanding, reason and will – in order to develop an analogical category of spiritual madness. Of course, bypassing physiological models altogether, divine and demonic intervention were always possible causes of mental disturbance. Providence was an active force in early modern society, and to identify instances of God’s personal hand in the lives of even the insignificant was a popular


pastime. Thomas Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgments (1597) offered numerous examples of sinners struck with madness as a punishment for offending God.16 And while madness in practice was not necessarily seen as a direct act of God, it retains a relation to the spiritual. For most writers, organic and spiritual causes had to be understood alongside one another. Edward Reynoldes in 1640, also working with the model of the inward wits and describing ‘errors in and wrought by the fancy’, suggests among the possible causes ‘the varietie of tempers in the Body, with the predominancie of those humours which give complexion thereunto’; ‘the imposture of the Senses’; and ‘the ministry of evill Angels, who can easily cast into the Fancie strange and false species’.17 And Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy gives hundreds of pages of causes, beginning with God and moving down through every aspect of immaterial and material creation. If the possible causes of mental disorder were many and varied, so were its potential symptoms, and the ways in which it is imagined and described. For Foucault, the critical shift taking place across this period is in the mutually constitutive relation of reason and unreason: madness, he argues, came to be seen as reason’s opposite, trapped in a hierarchical structure of antithesis that deprived it of any meaning beyond that of (literal) nonsense.18 And clearly, in the early modern texts that discuss madness, the concept of reason is a key relational term, along with passion. Madness might, for example, be imagined as something uncontrolled and violent, a brutish passion capable of overthrowing reason. A ‘man being deprived of the use of reason, doth most unreasonable actions, as to kill himselfe, or his dearest friends; led onely by a brute passion, without reason, or understanding’, as John Sym observes in his treatise against suicide.19 In similar vein, madness could be pictured as an attack, an invasion of and damage to reason. The ‘Tygre-minded sonne’ who left his old father destitute, according to Beard, was punished when the Lord ‘sent a furie into the sence and understanding of this monstrous sonne so he might be void of reason and discretion for ever after’.20 This image draws on and extends back into the metaphorical use of the language of madness to describe any temporary excess of passion or suspension of the power of reason. When passion is allowed to carry all before it ‘in spight of all the Dictates of Reason, it furiously over-ruleth the Will, to determine and allow of any thing, which it pleaseth to put in practise So Lust and Anger are sometimes, in the Scripture, called Madnesse; because it transporteth the Soule beyond all bounds of Wisdome or Counsell’, according to Reynoldes.21 ‘Drunkennesse bereaveth men of reason, and for the present time maketh mad’, comments Wright.22 As well as an ungovernable force attacking reason, madness was also commonly figured as a lack or deficiency of reason; rationality appears as a property that can be taken away. ‘Satan assaulted her presently, and robbed her of her wits’, is Beard’s description of the fate of a woman whose husband had recklessly consigned her to the devil.23 John Sym distinguishes between


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wilfully sinful suicides, and those temporarily incapacitated by madness, in terms which similarly see the governing condition of madness as a lack or absence: when a man, destitute of understanding, or of the use of reason, kills himselfe, as a child without discretion, a naturall foole, a mad man in his mad fits the same is not properly self-murder: because, understanding in them is deficient, or passively depraved, and not actively and wilfully done by themselves neither is such an act in such persons to be deemed willing, or an act of the will, so long as reason is wanting, without which it is not possible for a mans will rationally to move.24 Madness, then, whether regarded as physiological, spiritual or an effect of nature, was commonly represented as a disordered relation to reason (or wit, or understanding): the processes of thought had been overturned, or a particular capacity was in deficit.25 But that disorder is neither necessarily oppositional, nor permanent, and to talk about madness in terms of unreason is not really sufficient to represent all the different ways in which early modern people conceive of the mind going wrong. Reason and unreason could indeed be imagined as closely related. A number of writers comment on the resemblances between the thought processes of the mad and those of the sane, not only polemically to blast the madness of the sinful and self-seeking world, but more precisely to describe what might be called the reasons for unreasoned behaviour. Adams, having identified the brain’s three ventricles (imagination, reason and memory), goes on to distinguish between the different types of madness associated with each. There are mad people who ‘can rightly judge of the things they see, as touching imagination & phantasie: but for cogitation and reason, they swarve from naturall judgement’; those who can reason but ‘erre in Phantasie and Imagination’; and those who are disturbed in both imagination and reason, who ‘necessarily therewithall doe lose their memories in mad-men nothing is conceiv’d aright, therefore nothing deriv’d, nothing retayn’d’.26 Thus for some their perceptions are sound – they do not suffer from hallucination or delusion – but they are unable to think logically and sensibly about what they see and know; while others imagine what is not true, but can reason rightly on the basis of those deluded imaginings. Timothy Bright, one of the earliest English writers on melancholy, takes a comparable view (in a metaphor that reflects the growth of bureaucracy in Tudor England): the mad man, of what kinde soever he be of, as truly concludeth of that which fantasie ministreth of conceit, as the wisest: onely therein lieth the abuse and defect, that the organicall parts which are ordained embassadours, & notaries unto the mind in these cases, falsifie the report,


and deliver corrupt records. This is to be helped, as it shall be declared more at large hereafter, by counsell only sincerely ministred, which is free from the corruptions of those officers, and delivereth truth unto the mind, wherby it putteth in practise contrary to these importunate and furious sollicitors.27 And John Sym suggests that suicidal urges in the mentally disturbed are frequently the result of ‘abused judgment’, arising from ‘mistaken principles or by over-clouding of a mans minde, by mad error, raging passions, furious preposterous zeale; and by the foggie mists of misprisions and horrors, overspreading mans understanding and conscience which is a kind of learning that makes mad’. Even where the cause is spiritual, the primary difficulty is an inability to dispute effectively with oneself; in a state of ‘inextricable perplexity of distresse of conscience’, he argues, ‘ a man hath not the use of those parts of understanding and grace, which he hath in him; but is like a ship in a storme driven to destruction’.28 The inevitable result of this failure of the reasoning process is error: whether driven by delusion, imagination or passion, the man who cannot rightly govern his reasoning processes will come to wrong conclusions. ‘That the Fancie is fruitfull in producing Error, is as manifest, as it is difficult to shew the manner how it doth it’ comments Reynoldes.29 Wright similarly sees imagination as alarmingly liable to mislead; ‘a false imagination corrupteth the understanding’, he states, ‘making it beleeve that thinges are better than they are in very deed’.30 And worse, passion is able to deceive reason itself into believing its truths are being followed, even if only temporarily: I never knewe any man troubled with a vehement passion of hatred, ire, or love, who would not bring many reasons to confirme his purpose, although after he had performed his pleasure, and the tempestuous passion was past, hee condemned himselfe, and thought his fact vitious, and his reasons frivolous.31 The reasoning process, then, may be perverted by passion or imagination, or by madness; but although the premises and the conclusions may be wrong, the process itself can be seen as in some way persuasive. As Reynoldes remarks of obsessive fixity on a single idea, such things may lead the learned into ‘such strange practises on themselves, and others, as could not proceed but from a smothered and intangled Reason’; but it is reason nonetheless that operates here.32 The intertwining vocabulary of reason, understanding, error and imagination in these writings suggests a degree of continuity between the thinkers of the early seventeenth century and those of its close. John Locke’s famous


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reformulation of the nature of madness in his 1690 Essay on Human Understanding is often taken to signify a major transformation; but these thinkers seem in certain ways to be precursors. For Locke the defining feature of madness is that the reasoning process starts off in the wrong place: For they [madmen] do not appear to me to have lost the Faculty of Reasoning: but having joined together some Ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for Truths; and they err, as Men do, that argue right from wrong Principles. For by the violence of their Imaginations, having taken their Fancies for Realities, they make right deductions from them. Thus you shall find a distracted Man fancying himself a King, with a right inference, require suitable Attendance, Respect, and Obedience: Others who have thought themselves made of Glass, have used the caution necessary to preserve such brittle Bodies. In short, herein seems to lie the difference between Idiots and mad Men, That mad Men put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong Propositions, but argue and reason right from them: But Idiots make very few or no Propositions, and reason scarce at all.33 For Locke as for the earlier thinkers, too, there is a destabilising continuity between the errors of the sane and the errors of the mad, especially if they become obsessed with a single idea: Hence it comes to pass, that a Man, who is very sober, and of a right Understanding in all other things, may in one particular be as frantick, as any in Bedlam; if either by any sudden very strong impression, or long fixing his Fancy upon one sort of Thoughts, incoherent Ideas have been cemented together so powerfully, as to remain united. But there are degrees of madness, as of Folly; the disorderly jumbling Ideas together, is in some more, and some less.34 It seems, then, that there was a good deal of continuity in the ways that madness was described throughout what might be called the long seventeenth century, even though underlying theories might be in a state of transition. Humoural physiology lost its place as the dominant model for understanding the workings of mind and body in conjunction, and the notion of humours as distinct substances in the body did not really survive the arrival of the new medicine; the descriptive language of melancholy, sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric survived, but it gradually drifted away from its theoretical underpinnings. The various constructions of the rational soul and the ventricles of the brain also receded. But the ways in which madness was identified and recognised by onlookers, and the key images of error and confusion, of reason lost or damaged and malfunctioning, recur throughout the century.


Confusion, reason, perception: disorders of thought and sense Theories and debates about the causes and the nature of madness were of course conducted at a rarefied level, aimed at scholars, philosophers and physicians rather than at a lay audience. But similar issues preoccupy the writers of autobiographical accounts of mental illness, for whom the need to understand and describe what had happened to them was particularly pressing. What, in the view of these writers, should happen in the properly regulated mind as it apprehends, processes, draws conclusions and determines courses of action? What causes may disrupt the mind, and how are the various ways those processes can go wrong articulated? The ideas and metaphors they summon up in order to describe from the inside their mental state share with those of the theorists an emphasis on reason and understanding; but they are often more graphically descriptive, and – not surprisingly – more oriented towards the emotional aspects of disorder. In describing mental disorder from the inside, the idea of confusion is central. Confusion evokes a disordered and contradictory heaping up of ideas, a condition in which thoughts do not operate properly, failing in coherence and sequence; it is an internal cloud through which it is hard to see clearly. Thus Hannah Allen refers to ‘such a woful confusion and combating in my Soul, that I know not what to do’; Fitzherbert comments, ‘there would be no end to write the miserable confusion of my thoughts, now this and then that’; and Trosse declares, ‘I discover’d the Confusion and Distraction of my Mind where ever I went. I had most strange Conceits concerning the Tower in Glastonbury, and of the Torr ’35 Confusion, here, represents the opposite of sense and reason, a condition in which the capacity for clear thought has been disrupted. But it is also a condition in which the ability to make distinctions and know one’s own opinion is under threat. The problem is one of inner contradiction: combat in the soul, thoughts that go to and fro, make it impossible to determine on a course of action. To decide what to do one needs to know what one thinks. In a state of confusion, the impossibility of recognising and laying claim to one’s own definite thought makes it impossible also to act consistently. Confusion is imagined as almost physical: something present in the mind which should not be there. A similar state of mind can also be figured as privation, identifying qualities that would normally be present, but which have gone missing. Trosse ‘was for a Time depriv’d of the regular Use of Reason’.36 Fitzherbert uses the language of sense and understanding frequently, describing herself ‘as one utterly deprived of all sense and understanding’, or mentioning times when ‘my understanding was so weak’ or ‘my senses and reason now bereft me’.37 This is again a language of lack and deprivation, as if the reasoning faculty were a piece of the brain that could be removed. And like confusion, it is also identified as distressing: ‘woeful’,


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‘miserable’, ‘lamentable’, are terms that recur. In contrast to the theoretical writers on madness, those who have experienced mental disorder identify suffering as central to its description: to lose track of one’s own thoughts, to lose the part of the self that is able to think coherently, is also to experience emotional damage. Moreover, it may be the ability of those who pride themselves on their thinking skills that is most appropriately punished by madness. The intellectual faculties are ambiguous and potentially dangerous gifts, and the melancholy of scholars was a familiar theme in writings on the subject. Too much learning, ‘overmuch study’, as Burton explained at great length, was so common a cause of melancholy that it is ‘almost in some measure an inseparable companion’:38 how many poore schollers have lost their wits, or become dizards, neglecting all worldly affaires, and their owne health, wealth, esse and bene esse, to gaine knowledge? for which, after all their paines in the worlds esteeme they are accompted ridiculous and silly fooles, Idiots, Asses, and (as oft they are) rejected, contemned, derided, doting, and mad.39 For all three of these writers, personal identity is closely entwined with an attachment to the literary, broadly speaking, and to a set of ideas around learning, sobriety, self-control and books – as the fact that they all convert their experiences into written form affirms, indeed. Fitzherbert implies that the form her trial took was a specific punishment for her over-attachment to the reasoning faculty in herself, commenting to one correspondent that God had punished her by ‘depriving me of all wit and understanding, which I was so loth should come in question’, and to another that she ‘who was thought by some to be of more than a common judgment and understanding’ had become ‘more sottish to see and hear than the most natural idiot that is’.40 Women’s relation to learning, in a culture which saw it as essentially a masculine activity, was particularly likely to be troubled.41 Hannah Allen in her despair knocks the hornbook from her child’s hand to prevent it learning to read; ‘I would wish I had never seen Book, or learned Letter’, she comments.42 Trosse takes this idea in the opposite direction: his early talents for scholarship were overridden by his desire to earn money as a merchant, and it is only after he has been purged by madness that he eventually returns to this original track, going to university at the mature age of twenty-five. Nonetheless, he registers the commonplace connection between mental achievement and mental disorder in his reflections on God’s grace in allowing this transformation: ‘that He should so compose my Head, and give such a soundness to my Mind, after my outrageous Madness and fearful Distractions, and to capacitate me for serious and sedulous study ’.43 The connection between intellectual aspiration and the mind’s collapse, it seems,


works differently here for men and women; but it is there in both. In both, too, what is at stake is in some sense the self. Mental disorder in these usages is placed on the line between reason and unreason, reason and its absence; it is the ability to think that has failed. But disordered reason, the predominant image in these ways of thinking about madness, is not the only way of representing the internal disruptions of the mind. Another common way of understanding madness in the early modern period is as an affliction relating to the imagination or the fancy, which has to do not so much with the internal workings of the mind (like reason), as with perception, and how what is seen or heard is understood. What is seen may be hallucination, turning out not to have been there at all. Alternatively, attributed meanings may have distorted an actual perception: things seen or heard are supposed to be one thing and later turn out to be another, or to mean something different. All of these are in some way or another concerned with disruptions of the senses: for the mad, sight and hearing no longer offer access to reality. This is particularly true of melancholy, which is primarily defined as a disorder of the fancy, but it is also used more generally. Thus when Fitzherbert describes herself as having been ‘altogether uncapable of the most sensible things that be’, she refers not to the intellect but to the senses specifically: it is her apprehension of the perceived world that is in disarray.44 What she sees, at her lowest point, does not correspond to what is. She no longer recognises other people; she treats those around her with what seems to be inappropriate respect, ‘kissing their hands and eating the coals out of the fire’, and believes nothing she is told (‘no, not that I was child to my own parents’, she comments, in a classic symptom of early modern madness).45 It is striking that she is herself concerned to distinguish between the different types of mental disturbance that characterise different points of her disorder. At this point, she explains, she showed herself ‘in all behaviours altogether uncapable of any thing’.46 Earlier, on the other hand, she had had a better recognition of the outside world: although I was exceedingly distracted, yet for the most part I took things in their own nature, always showing some sign of understanding and reason in me.47 One may be distracted, she suggests, and yet see things in their own nature, as they are – not mistake a piece of coal for something edible, for example – and this implies the continuing presence of at least some kind of perceptual understanding. To have lost track of the world and one’s place in it to the point where one no longer realises that something is wrong, and cannot tell day from night nor friend from foe, represents to her a complete loss of self and of sense. The reiterated language of sense and incapability locates the misunderstanding in the process of perception, and in what the mind does with its materials; and this is a package in which sensation (both bodily and


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perceptual) are key, in contrast with reason. When she is convinced that bits of her body were coming off, for instance, she refers the impression to her ‘feeling, sense and imagination’; it is a conviction that has laid hold of her physically and imaginatively, rather than an assault on reason.48 Allen’s confusion is more internal than that of the other two; her symptoms are located for the most part in what she does and says, and what she believes about herself, rather than in what she perceives in the outside world, although she does draw on the language of fancy to identify wrong beliefs. At the root of her delusions, it appears, is not so much disruption of the senses as the attribution of strange meanings to real events; what she sees and hears is what other people see and hear, but she understands it differently. Thus the sounds of a night at the inn are translated into a language of portent and terror: One night, I said there was a great clap of Thunder like the shot of a Piece of Ordnance, came down directly over my Bed; and that the same night, a while after, I heard like the voice of two Young Men singing in the Yard, over against my Chamber; which I said were Devils in the likeness of men, singing for joy that they had overcome me; and in the morning that Scripture in the 10th . of Heb. and the last words of the 26th . Verse, was suggested to me from Heaven (as I thought) There remains no more Sacrifice for Sin; And this delusion remained with me as an Oracle all along; that by this miracle of the Thunder, and the Voice and the Scripture, God revealed to me that I was Damned 49 The meaning of the two external events – the clap of thunder and the young men singing – is determined by Allen’s own preoccupations, and confirmed by the inner event, the ‘voice’ that suggests a scripture to her. This is the kind of ‘inner event’ that is constantly happening to the godly; scriptures come into their minds with terrific, overwhelming force, to explain, enjoin or alarm. Few spiritual autobiographies do not give examples of the active supernatural power of the words of the bible. Equally, there is nothing especially unusual about portents in the skies, or indeed devils walking and speaking in the real world. It is the fact that retrospectively Allen sees her interpretation of all of these as wrong that makes them errors of perception, not the fact that she heard voices and thunder inside and outside, or attributed supernatural meanings to what she heard. Indeed on the only occasion where there is an inexplicable noise, its reality is confirmed by the fact that both Allen and her mother hear it. Allen is convinced that she is on the point of death and damnation all the time: and I yet wearying my Mother with such fancies and stories; One Evening my Mother said to me, Well, if you will believe you shall be saved if you dye not this night, I will believe all that you say to be true if you do dye


this night; to this she [sic] agreed, and in the night about one a Clock (as we thought) the Maid being newly gone out of the Chamber to Bed we both heard like the hand of a Gyant, knock four times together on the Chamber door, which made a great noise (the Door being Wainscot;) then said I, You see, Mother, though I dyed not to night, the Devil came to let you know that I am damn’d; my Mother answer’d, but you see he had no power to come into the Chamber.50 This is a strange and inconclusive little anecdote. On the one hand, Allen describes her convictions of damnation as ‘fancies and stories’, creatures of the imagination, and her mother (representing the voice of sanity) attempts to persuade her into a logical bargain: if Allen is proved to be wrong in believing herself to be on the point of death, then she must concede that she is also wrong in believing herself to be eternally damned. But before this negotiation can reach an acceptable conclusion (Allen does not die, and either is or is not therefore persuaded) a supernatural element intervenes. Whose are the mysterious knocks on the door, and what do they demonstrate? Is Allen’s reading of them right, or her mother’s? After all, although Allen in writing her account no longer believes herself damned, she undoubtedly believes that the devil was an active participant in what happened to her, and might well have visited with the aim of carrying her off. And her mother’s response is hardly oppositional: she offers an alternative reading of the event within the same spiritual framework, though whether this was an attempt to reassure with a pretended assent or a simple difference of interpretation is impossible to determine. As the story is told, any moral or even any explanation slides away: there is only the real irruption of the inexplicable into a narrative which is attempting to recuperate mental disorder into a straightforward opposition between truth and delusion. Trosse, during the time of his madness, lived in a much more actively hallucinatory world than either of the other two, and uses much more extensively the language of imagination; he mentions being ‘disturb’d with silly ridiculous Fancies, and Thousands of unreasonable and non-sensical Delusions’, and refers to ‘the Disturbance of my Imagination’.51 He sees his ‘Companion in Wantonness’ gesturing lewdly to him, and being carried away by the devil; he hears voices ‘which I attributed to Fairies, who, I thought, were in the Wall, and there convers’d and were merry together’; he ‘fancy’d many Devils flying in the Air just over me, and by my side as so many Fiery Flying-Dragons’.52 Bound to his bed, his imagination roams even further: Sometimes I should fancy, I saw the Kingdoms of the Earth, and the Greatness of the Turkish Sultan, and other Monarchs: Sometimes, that I saw Heaven it self, but exceedingly degraded by my carnal and disturbed Fancy.53


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‘Fancy’ is a key word in all of this. The strange sights that he saw during his illness can be explained only as a disease of the imagination, working on the external eye as well as the eye of the mind; ‘my very external Senses were deceiv’d’, he comments.54 Had he not been in a state of confusion, not only would he have realised that the visions were not real, but he would not have had them, or at least not in the same way; a degraded heaven is the product of a degraded mind, in more ways than one. Trosse’s fancy, far from being created in the mind and spirit, is ‘carnal’, fleshly and worldly. But although he is guilty, he is not alone in his responsibility for delusion; the mind is worked on not only by sin, but also by Satan. When he looks scornfully or uncomprehendingly on the bible, there is a devilish agenda at work: ‘So strangely did my Fancy, influenc’d by the Devil, ridicule and abuse Scripture’.55 The question of how the devil enters the mind is one we shall return to. But it is worth noting that for Trosse the hallucinatory side of his affliction was not only especially vivid, but also particularly problematic for a dissenter at the end of a century in which visionary experiences had played an important part in religious and political debate. He returns repeatedly to the alarming verisimilitude and concreteness of his delusions. Of ‘a great many terrifying and disquieting Visions and Voices’, he notes, tho’ (I believe) they had no Reality in themselves, yet they seem’d to be such to me, and had the same Effect upon me, as if they had been really what they appear’d to be.56 And the moral he draws from it is to regard visions with extreme suspicion. Quakers, he suggests, ‘were deluded by such Voices and Impulses from the Impure Spirit, which they mistook for the Holy Spirit of God’; ‘Papists’ similarly derive their belief in purgatory from devilish workings on disturbed brains.57 The combination is a significant one: the devil needs an already disturbed mind to work most effectively; he will be less able to influence a well-educated and sober man. Quakers were ‘grossly ignorant, and so fitted to entertain such Delusions of the Devil’; and the deluded Catholics were those suffering from ‘a crack’d Brain’.58 In this emphasis, Trosse, writing at the very end of the seventeenth century, is in line with his times. One significant shift in the conceptualisation of madness across the seventeenth century, according to Michael Macdonald, was the relocation of delusion. In earlier theories, delusion had been a key element in melancholy. Melancholy led to disordered perceptions, and people saw what was not there; madness, by contrast, was characterised primarily through wildness and incoherence. Following the Restoration, however, Macdonald suggests, ‘Philosophers, physicians and fashionable scribblers focused their attention on the ideas of madmen, and they stressed that delusions and hallucinations were the very essence


of utter madness’; melancholy, meanwhile, was evacuated of its wilder meanings, as we shall see in the next chapter.59 This insight can be located in a number of larger shifts. The culture of late seventeenth-century England was increasingly fact-based, concerned to distinguish between the empirically verifiable and the fantastical and false; declining belief among the elite in the reality of supernatural phenomena increasingly circumscribed the possible meanings that might be given to strange visions or voices, locating them ever more firmly as symptoms of madness.60 It thus becomes difficult to reconcile the idea of reason with the possibility of extraordinary perceptions: to be reasonable, effectively, is to see and hear as others do. This is a contrast that should not be overstated; those subject to vision and hallucination in earlier periods were undoubtedly vulnerable to accusations of madness. Nonetheless, the implied shift from a view of madness which emphasised its behavioural difference – what could be seen by the onlooker – to a view which emphasised its perceptual difference – what the sufferer saw – is significant. ‘All agreed’, comments Roy Porter, describing seventeenth-century attitudes to madness, ‘that it was of the essence of lunacy to be visible, and known by its appearance Madness advertised itself in a proliferation of symptoms, in gait, in physiognomy, in weird demeanour and habits.’61 By the end of the seventeenth century, what was in question was vision rather than visibility; the strange and new possibility was that someone might appear sane in their behaviour, while being mad in secret.

Mad in the mouth: disordered speech The vocabulary of early modern madness frequently focuses on disordered speech as indexical of a more deep-rooted disorder: what comes out of the mouth demonstrates the disturbed character of the inside. The mad say unaccountable and bizarre things; they speak inappropriately, furiously, or not at all. They are unable to participate in conversation, obsessively concerned with a single topic, weeping, or failing to respond to conversational prompts. Ranting, raving, babbling and muttering are commonly noted symptoms of madness; words such as distracted and light-headed, according to Macdonald, also indicate linguistic disruption, and he describes the ‘distinctive action’ of the distracted as ‘idle talk – raving, seemingly incomprehensible speech’.62 The language of madness, as Allan Ingram notes, defines the condition, and yet simultaneously is taken to be void of significant content: ‘Language misuse is a feature of madness, it is one means whereby madness may be recognised as madness, but it cannot apparently be attended to as a means of treating the mad.’63 Their language puts them decisively outside the community of speech. In the late seventeenth century, the pamphleteer Richard Stafford, justifying himself against accusations of madness, described his own use of language as a central part of his defence:


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I have all along delivered my self in plain, common, obvious, familiar and intelligible Expressions. I have spoken the Words of Truth and Soberness; though it is hard to express the mad and foolish Actions of mankind to the very Life and Reality, and not to be reputed so ones self.64 If madness is defined by its erratic linguistic habits, sanity must be associated with governed and rational speech. It is thus not surprising that those reclaiming language and meaning in the act of writing about its absence demonstrate concern about their speech in the past. Fitzherbert in her disorder speaks randomly, following her own inward preoccupations; she ‘did speak and answer to any thing they asked me according to the cogitations that then possessed my mind’, she notes.65 She is later perturbed by her inability to remember whether she has spoken her wilder thoughts aloud or not (‘whether I said or only was the discourse of the mind I do not know’66 ), and still more perturbed at the idea that her blasphemous remarks might be taken as her serious opinions, particularly when those blasphemous remarks seem to be in support of Catholicism. It is in relation to this concern about what she has said that she describes herself as ‘distracted’; for her too it is a form of disorder closely related to speech. Thus she insists that ‘the words spoken in so distracted a state were the [suggestions] and testimony of a lying spirit’, and that her speech was the result of her state of mind, not a reflection of her true beliefs: that [which] was spoken was manifestly untrue, and proceeded from the deceit the heart was possessed with I appeal to all them that have known me if I were likely to give such a reason if I had been in my right senses now let them think whether stands more with reason to believe one so distracted, or in their perfect sense and memory both before and after 67 ‘Distracted’, in Napier’s use, indicates one of the more extreme forms of insanity, used along with ‘mad’ and ‘lunatic’ to describe those ‘who were patently insane’.68 For Fitzherbert, however, it seems more tangentially connected with madness. It describes a condition of absence from the self – it is because she was distracted that she did not know what she was saying; but also, perhaps, it implies a temporary turning aside rather than a permanent alienation.69 It is also noticeable how she distances the word from herself: ‘the words spoken’, and ‘one so distracted’, not ‘I was distracted’. In a distracted state she might say what she did not really mean, but it would not fundamentally determine her condition. Trosse also describes himself as having been distracted, but for him the word seems to evoke delusion more generally, rather than disorders of speech in particular. ‘By my Sins and Sensualities’, he comments, in his closing summary, ‘I had brought my self into horrible Distractions and perfect


Madness, I was for a Time depriv’d of the regular Use of Reason, and by the Disturbance of my Imagination I became wild and outragious.’70 For him as for Napier, distraction is defined by its proximity to madness; the two words are paired several times (‘my outragious Madness and fearful Distractions ’).71 It is also connected with disturbances of the imagination, and believing in things that are not there. When he wishes to evoke wild language, by contrast, he calls himself raging or outrageous; and ranting is associated with physical wildness and generally ungovernable behaviour. For both Trosse and Fitzherbert, however, the central disorder introduced into speech by madness is a loss of the ability to interrupt the passage of inner thoughts to the outside. Disordered speech has to do with the relation between what happens inside and outside the self – a logorrhoeic inability to police the boundary of the mouth. Early modern culture was deeply interested in the relation between private thought and public speech, an interest which is played out in many different ways. A widespread cultural preoccupation with various aspects of that relation – dissimulation, hypocrisy, drunkenness, the closed mouth of the ideal woman or the man of mastery – reiterates the need for discretion.72 ‘Janglers and praters’, comments Thomas Wright severely, ‘deserve to be registered in the catalogue of fooles, because many fancies come into mens minds, & he that wil poure foorth all he conceiveth, delivereth dregges with drinke’.73 To be unable to keep one’s thoughts secret to oneself was a social and personal catastrophe. Harried in his conscience at the recollection of ‘base and indecent behaviour’, Trosse is unable to keep quiet; he breaches the codes governing relations between sexes and generations with his detailed recapitulations of his filthy acts and words in the presence of his mother. ‘I openly acknowledg’d my Impurities, and all my lewd and lascivious Actions, I had been guilty of, and the filthy Language I had often us’d’, he writes, and with a doubt that underlines the scandalous character of his speech, he continues, ‘This could not but grieve, and fill with shame, those who were present (of whom, I think, my Mother was one). Thus I became a Publisher of my own secret Wickedness ’.74 Fitzherbert’s main narrative opens with a declaration that it is because she has lost her privacy that she is obliged to go public with her own account. Her sisters suggest that her sin was greatly magnified in being unconcealed: ‘your sin is great’ they tell her, ‘for you hid it not, but published it to every one’.75 The humiliation of having collapsed into raving delirium in the public space of a great aristocratic household at New Year reverberates through Fitzherbert’s letters as well as her narrative. It is thus not surprising that the other side of this reckless and ungovernable speech is a condition of closure, a refusal of any speech or communication at all. After the delirium of the early part of her illness, Fitzherbert is reduced to silence; carried to the house of a doctor, she ‘was for the most part speechless many days after, if not altogether’.76 Under the devil’s influence, Trosse is persuaded that he should neither look nor speak, and accordingly


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seals his lips and closes his eyes. This continues even while he is being forcibly removed and tied on to a horse for the journey to the madhouse: ‘I neither open’d mine Eyes nor my Mouth, either to see what was done about me or to make any Lamentations: for still I look’d upon this as my necessary Duty’.77 Language and speech are both hazardous and frightful, and at one point he attempts to escape from them altogether, being tempted to bite off his tongue: and (which I desire to mention with Trembling) spit it in the face of God. Which Thing I also attempted, thrusting my Tongue between my Teeth I bit it very hard But the Lord would not suffer me to force up my Under-Jaw with so much Strength as to bite it quite off. God would preserve that Tongue, tho’ it had been so sinfully abus’d, and set on fire of Hell, that it might be exercis’d in the most glorious Employment, even to Preach His Word 78 The neat analogical inversion is characteristic of Trosse’s preaching style: the tongue dedicated to hell would be restored to celebrate God. The journey he traces is full of such moral reversions, from raving and blasphemy to civil and holy ministry, and speech is one of the central arenas of his transformation. If for Trosse and Fitzherbert disturbance of language is associated with an alternation between overspilling and uncontrollable speech on the one hand, and muteness on the other, for Allen the emphasis is more on obsessive and inappropriate speech: she can talk about nothing but her own damned condition. From the outset it is above all through language that her affliction is communicated to those around her; as her ‘language and condition grew sadder’, she can speak of nothing else: ‘little to be heard from me, but lamenting my woful state, in very sad and dreadful Expressions’, she comments.79 Less extreme in her symptoms in certain ways than the other two, it is only through extreme language that she can convey a sense of her desperate condition. Her own retrospective sense of this language is indeed as dreadful, and indeed transgressive; she speaks with an insistence and desperation, and an abruptness that is implicitly not suitable for a young woman. When friends attempt to comfort her with language, she rejects them: I would not speak, but only give them some short scornful answer and no more I was usually very nimble in my Answers, and peevishly pettinacious to please my own cross humour.80 Nimble answers imply pertness and lack of respect, like her willingness to please her own humour; she has abandoned the forms of politeness along with conversational norms. At times this is simply a matter of being so taken up with her own state that she is oblivious to others and their needs; when


her aunt complains of tiredness after a long coach journey, Allen responds unsympathetically, ‘Ah but what must I do, that must have no rest to all eternity’.81 More generally, her persuasion that nothing can save her allows her to contradict and ignore those who care for her, to abandon any notion of trying to please others, and to insist on her unequalled depravity in terms of grand satisfaction: There is no word comes so near the comprehension of the dreadfulness of my Condition; as that, I am the Monster of the Creation: in this word I much delighted.82 Language itself is barely sufficient to express her atrocious state; she is ‘MagorMissabib, a Terrour to my self and all my friends’; she cannot pray because she is unfit ‘to take the holy and reverend Name of God within her polluted lips’.83 Although experienced and perceived as dreadful in content, Allen’s relation to speech is generally comparatively ordered. It is only occasionally that her condition opens the way to a lack of restraint at the more physical level of noise, ‘weeping even to roaring’.84 Rather than the random and uncontrollable outpouring described by Trosse and Fitzherbert, Allen has simply lost interest in observing the conventions of politeness and sociability. She does not forget what she has said, or have any doubts about what she said aloud; she allows herself to speak, as it were, her mind. It would be simplistic to read this entirely in relation to the severe constraints that governed the speech and conduct of young women from respectable families in the midseventeenth century; but it would be hard not to identify some part at least of her pleasure in declaring herself the monster of creation with the throwing off of those constraints. And her recovery, not surprisingly, is identified as a return to the community of speech and prayer. As she grew better, ‘I began much to leave my dreadful expressions concerning my condition, and was present with them at duty’, and eventually at public prayer.85 The collective voice of Christian worship in household or in church becomes one in which she can once again join. Nor is Allen alone in this progression. The contrast between the speech of madness and the speech of not just sanity but specifically religion structures the process of recovery in all three narratives. For Trosse, God’s preservation of his tongue in order to preach the word is literally providential, and prayer is both the means and the sign of his recovery. Fitzherbert, as she emerges from her affliction, astonishes the household by suddenly starting to sing psalms as she goes about the house. The symbolic weight of language in early modern culture is located above all in its religious function, both listening and speaking: the preaching of God’s word, the reading of the bible, private and collective prayer, psalm-singing, all underline the power of the spoken word in defining a shared religious culture as well as the individual religious


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experience. The language of distraction is marked not only by an inability to observe the rules of this oral culture, but also by an inclination to attack it head-on: for all three writers, an inability to prevent themselves from speaking blasphemously becomes one of the central signs of madness as well as a source of subsequent anxiety. This pattern is also seen in many other spiritual autobiographies: blasphemy is an immensely powerful temptation, and to give way to it risks making it true (as John Bunyan finds when the devil eventually bullies him into assenting to the words ‘Sell Christ’, even though it is in his heart rather than spoken).86 Madness, however it is described and experienced, is fundamentally to do with exclusion from community. Whether confusion, distraction or raving is the dominant image, what is being described is the loss of shared perceptions: the knowledges that bind communities together have come apart. For the person who sees demons or enemies in the familiar figures of parents and siblings, who can no longer regulate their moments of speech and silence – or the content of their speech – according to the norms of their community, madness is an experience of extreme isolation. It is also, in this period, commonly experienced as isolation from God; among those who wrote about their experiences in the context of religious communities, the sense of separateness and rejection focuses above all on the divine. Thus it is not surprising that for Allen as for the others recovery means the coming together of all these lost capacities. In the next chapter, this spiritual dimension comes more to the fore, through the concept of melancholy.

4 Melancholy: A Land of Darkness

‘Cousin’, Hannah Allen’s aunt used to tell her, attempting to bring her out of her ‘dismal dark condition’, ‘would you but believe you were melancholy it might be a great means to being you out of this Condition’. Allen would have none of this: Melancholy, would I say, I have Cause to be Melancholy, that am as assuredly Damn’d as that there is a God ’1 Her aunt wishes to persuade her that she is suffering from an illness, a physical disorder that can be medically treated, rather than actually damned to eternity. Allen counters this with a different sense of melancholy, one which would eventually emerge as the primary meaning: she has good reason to be miserable, since eternal damnation is all she has to look forward to. This exchange both encapsulates the shifting and ambiguous character of the language used to define and describe mental disorder in early modern England, and also underlines the point that it was in the process of change. As outlined in the previous chapter, between Dionys Fitzherbert’s narrative, written in the 1600s, and George Trosse’s, in the 1690s, the world of medical knowledge had undergone a revolution of its own. The Galenic categories that had dominated understandings of both mental and physical disorders for centuries were being displaced by the new chemical medicine of the Paracelsians, and by the scientific experimentalism of the empiricists. This is not a sharp or absolute change, of course. The four humours – choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic and sanguine – remain significant in thinking about disorders of both mind and body into the eighteenth century. At the level of treatment, the various techniques by which Galenism sought to achieve a balanced state of humours in the body, such as fasting, purging and bleeding, along with attention to diet and bodily temperature, are central to medical practice throughout the early modern period and beyond. Both patients and practitioners continued to use a mixture of traditional and 60

Melancholy: A Land of Darkness

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new methods and explanations for ill health. Nonetheless, as the seventeenth century progressed, debates on mental disorder increasingly reached out towards new ways of conceptualising mind and body.2 The concept of melancholy remained active throughout the century and beyond, but its meanings and connotations shifted, perhaps especially in relation to its spiritual dimension; melancholy in the writings of Richard Baxter is a very different thing to melancholy in the work of Timothy Bright. Melancholy is one of the central organising concepts in thinking about mental disorder in this period, widely discussed and written about both at the time and subsequently.3 The concept of melancholy as it developed during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries brings together several quite disparate traditions, commonly identified as Galenic (medical) and Aristotelian (philosophical and literary); it is also closely tied to the problem of religious doubt, and it inherits to some extent the mantle of the medieval concept of accidia, spiritual sloth. With these diverse origins, it is not surprising that by the end of the sixteenth century it seems hard to draw into a single model of mental disorder. Class, gender and religious affiliation all shape a sufferer’s view of the diagnosis of melancholy. For some it might be an aspirational affliction, a genteel sort of problem suggesting the finer constitutions of the upper ranks of society; for others it might be a shame and an insult, the sign of someone only fit for Bedlam; for women it was shadowed by the suggestion of excessive and unseemly sexual desire; and the recurrent anguishes of religious doubt also bring it to bear on spiritual terrors, and on strange behaviour among religious enthusiasts.4 This chapter, then, explores melancholy from several angles. It begins with a brief account of the medical and philosophical traditions which shape its initial meanings. This is followed by a discussion of melancholy in religious discourse, especially in relation to the problem of affliction for sin. Next we turn to consider how the concept is deployed in spiritual life-writing, autobiographical and biographical, and to explore the changing spiritual resonances of the concept as the seventeenth century progresses, both in religious writing in general and in spiritual life stories. Cases such as that of Francis Spira provide a model throughout the seventeenth century of religious despair, and spiritual autobiographers locate their own experiences in various ways in relation to the concept: for Dionys Fitzherbert it is a troubling and contested term, for Hannah Allen ultimately unproblematic, and for George Trosse of only marginal interest. Finally, since recent scholarship has addressed the question of the gendering of melancholy in particular, the chapter concludes with a discussion of gender, melancholy and madness: to what extent do contemporary theories about the causes of madness, as well as ideas of appropriate behaviours in men and women, inflect the ways in which mental disorder is experienced and represented by men and by women, and how far may this account for different responses to the diagnosis of mental disorder?


‘A sicknes full of fantasies’ Of all the terms used to discuss mental disorder in this period, melancholy is perhaps the most explicitly medicalised, referring directly to the Galenic model of human physiology, and underpinned by an extensive body of theoretical and medical scholarship. As a concept it grew in popularity across Europe in the sixteenth century; as Midelfort notes, discussing sixteenthcentury Germany, ‘the rise of melancholy was one of the fundamental transformations of discourse as well as of practice in the Renaissance’, providing ‘a powerful new set of metaphors’ to describe mental disorder.5 In medical terms, melancholy was the result of unbalanced humours, to be treated with physic and purges to restore balance. Melancholy was envisaged as an actual substance, a black bile in the body which interrupted and disturbed both mental and physical well-being, and its effects were also graphically represented: fumes inside the body rise up and interfere with the vision, overheating the brain and generating strange delusions. ‘The melancholie passion’, according to one of the earliest English commentaries on the disorder, Timothy Bright’s Treatise of Melancholie of 1586, ‘is a doting of reason through vaine feare procured by fault of the melancholie humour’.6 And Robert Burton’s grand compilation of more or less everything anyone had ever written on the subject, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), described at immense length all the causes, cures and symptoms of the affliction, citing Galen to summarise the effects: the minde it selfe, by those darke obscure, grosse fumes, ascending from black humours, is in continuall darknesse, feare & sorrow, divers terrible monstrous fictions in a thousand shapes & apparitions occurre, with violent passions, by which the braine and phantasie are troubled and eclipsed.7 Melancholy men are fearful because of ‘an inward cause, a perpetuall fume and darknesse, causing feare, griefe, suspition, which they carry with them’.8 Reason is disrupted; but it is disrupted specifically by an assault on the imagination or phantasy, leading to one of melancholy’s primary symptoms, delusion. The melancholy were subject not only to gloom and downheartedness, but also to hallucinations about their own bodies and the world around them, imagined persecutions and extravagant fears. Melancholy is particularly a disorder of perception, in which things are not seen as they truly are. A depressed sense of one’s own unworthiness (whether spiritual or secular), a persuasion that people are mocking and plotting against one, and a conviction that one’s body is made of glass can all be symptoms of melancholy, in that they represent misapprehensions about the nature of reality; the imagination has come to play too powerful a part in the human mind.9 The Aristotelian tradition, which tends to associate melancholy with the characteristics of genius, shares with the Galenic medical understanding of


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the disorder an emphasis on the imagination, but values it rather differently: for poets this disordered relation to the real may be an advantage, enabling the creative faculty to extend beyond the normal bounds of human imagination. To the extent that it becomes a fashionable affliction in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, then, it is through its associations with scholarship, genius and imaginative sensibility; melancholy acquires a more elegant and intellectual gloss, and increasingly forms part of the educated but nonspecialist vernacular. As Michael Macdonald comments, those identified as melancholy among Napier’s patients tended to be of higher social rank, and in a number of cases it seems that the diagnosis was self-suggested. ‘Persons of rank and learning’, he notes, ‘frequently judged themselves to be melancholy rather than merely sad, troubled or fearful’.10 The notion that melancholy was in some sense associated with genius gave it a more interesting and aspirational character, better suited to describe the afflictions of the gentry than such vulgar words as dumpish.11 However, the fashionability of the diagnosis should not be overstated. To the extent that melancholy is a medical disorder, the imagination may be brought back to earth with a bump, to be prescribed purges and physic. As Lawrence Babb describes it: According to one [conception], melancholy is a degrading mental abnormality associated with fear and sorrow. It may be a morose, brooding morbidity of mind, it may be a sottish lethargy, or it may be insanity accompanied by sorrowful and fearful delusions, often ridiculous According to the second conception, melancholy is a tradition which endows one with intellectual acumen and profundity, with artistic ability, sometimes with divine inspiration 12 Thus if it could on the one hand be regarded as an interesting malady, suggesting a thoughtful and sensitive person, or indeed a genius, it could also be placed on the spectrum of forms of madness and mental disorder more generally, with less gratifying associations. While it may have seemed less insulting to elite self-esteem than mopishness, there is little indication outside the world of the literary that early modern people saw melancholy as anything other than a distressing disorder, whatever its causes. And the physical character of the illness came particularly to the fore in debates about its relation to an affliction with very similar symptoms but apparently different causes: the suffering of the Christian soul as it realised its own sinfulness.

Black clouds of terror: religion and melancholy In the mid-sixteenth century, Francis Spira, a wealthy Italian who had converted to Protestantism, converted back again as a result of worldly fears and anxieties. He immediately fell into spiritual and mental crisis, suffering


‘fearefull dreames and visions’, and declaring, according to a narrative that described his case: that he saw the divels come flocking into his Chamber, and about his bed, terrifying him with strange noyses; that these were not fancies, but that hee saw them as really as the standers by; and that besides these outward terrours, hee felt continually, a racking torture of his minde, and a continuall butcherie of his conscience 13 The extremity of his symptoms, which were followed by death, provoked great interest and also a wide range of possible explanations. Some of his friends ‘laid all the blame upon his Melancholike constitution; that overshadowing his judgment, wrought in him a kinde of madnesse’.14 Others were more inclined to see it as God’s punishment for apostasy, and thought, as Spira himself did, that he was indeed damned (among them Calvin, who wrote a preface to the case). His story was first published in English in the late sixteenth century, and became a recurrent point of reference for many writers throughout the next hundred years.15 Thomas Beard, in The Theatre of God’s Judgements, takes the case as an instance of the penalty for backsliding, and describes how Spira on his deathbed ‘warned all that stood by, to take heed by his example how to listen too much to worldly wisdome he refused all manner of sustenance thus he died indeed pined to death in despaire and horrible torment of conscience’.16 And Hannah Allen’s narrative is one of many to refer to his account: ‘When I read of miserable Spira’s wishing himself above God’, she comments in the preface, ‘I do not in the least strange at such intemperate expressions, considering that God, and their Enemy doth blow the coals ’.17 The question of how to know the true cause of such disturbances reverberates through the seventeenth century. A diagnosis of melancholy could be used to dismiss the painful soul-searching of the devout as mere physical illness, to be treated with medication rather than taken seriously. Discussions of melancholy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries thus take place in devotional as well as in medical and scholarly literature. Both insisted that there must be a difference between affliction of conscience and affliction of the body, and attempted to define precisely how that difference might be recognised. Robert Yarrow, describing the symptoms of affliction for sin in his Soveraigne Comforts for a troubled Conscience (1634), complains, ‘The causes of these griefes, some inconsiderately have referred unto melancholy: wheras indeed it is nothing else but sin’.18 William Perkins, in his Treatise of Conscience (1608), poses the question, ‘whether there be any difference betweene the trouble of Conscience, and Melancholy? for many hold, they are all one’, and answers with great decision, ‘They are not all one, but differ much. Affliction of Conscience is one thing, trouble by Melancholy is an other’; but his brief and sketchy explanation of the difference does not go


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much beyond the bare assertion.19 Timothy Bright devotes several chapters of his Treatise on Melancholie to the specific characteristics of affliction of conscience for sin and how it should be distinguished from melancholy, reproaching ‘the error of some, and the prophanenes of othersome, who either accompt the cause naturall, melancholy, or madnes’, but although longer, his account of the difference is not much clearer than Perkins’s.20 He concludes, if they be diligently compared in cause, in effect, in quality, in whatsoever respect these unreverent and prophane persons list to match them, they shall appeare of diverse nature, never to be coupled in one fellowship 21 But the distinction is chiefly to be found in the cause, rather than in the effects. By contrast with the vain fears of melancholy, according to Perkins, ‘the Conscience afflicted, hath a true and certen caus, whereby it is troubled’.22 Bright and Burton make similar arguments. ‘Melancholy feares without a cause’, Burton comments, but religious despair ‘upon great occasion’.23 Temperament, too, connects spiritual and organic melancholy. For spiritual autobiographers, a melancholy disposition in one’s pre-religious days may indicate a serious turn of mind, and one in search of true faith. But it is a predisposition to melancholy, all too often, which allows reflection on one’s own sinfulness (laudable in itself) to get a dangerous grip on the body, and derange the humours. Satan’s ‘ordinary engine’ for afflicting men with despair, Burton suggests, ‘is the melancholy humour it selfe’: Blacke choler is a shooing horne, a bait to allure them [evil spirits], in so much that many writers make melancholy an ordinary cause, and a symptome of despaire, for that such men are most apt, by reason of their ill disposed temper, to distrust, feare, griefe, mistake and amplifie whatsoever they preposterously conceave, or falsely apprehend.24 For Yarrow too there is a common ground, although one to be treated with caution. On the one hand religious affliction cannot be attributed to melancholy, since ‘experience teacheth, that this is a passion happening oftentimes to those, which by the disposition of their bodies, are for the most part free from melancholy’; on the other, ‘many times, I also grant, that melancholy passions are joyned and doe concurre with it’.25 The substance of melancholy itself, black bile, is thus what makes certain types vulnerable, because of the particular bias it gives towards seeing things in a gloomy light; but it is also the result of despair, the symptom, for once in spiritual despair one is understandably gloomy.


Burton’s own views on the subject are shifting, and he is more willing than other writers on the subject to allow for some blurring of the boundaries; Michael Macdonald suggests that Burton was the first to come up with the phrase ‘religious melancholy’ to denote a spiritual variant of what was nonetheless an organic disease, and that he saw despair as ‘a symptom of mental illness’.26 But even those writers who struggle to keep the two apart find they tend to converge. Bright’s own text is addressed to a friend suffering from an affliction which, Bright tells him, should be regarded ‘as mixed of the melancholick humour and that terror of God’ even though in the rest of the book he argues they are separate.27 The symptoms, indeed, are naturally similar. The ‘troubled minde’, in Yarrow’s words, is ‘a receptacle for all griefes The multitude of sinnes doe amaze it, and the intolerable weight of judgment, and of the anger of God, doe continually afright it. Within, nothing but a most infinite masse & confused Chaos of despairing thoughts, and without, every object is so terrible and full of feares ’.28 And the resulting symptoms of misery occupy every part of the person: hee oftentimes bedeweth his face with teares and weeping: The body also oftentimes waxeth leane and wan, fretteth away and wasteth, as pained with some grievous and consuming sicknesse 29 The problem thus becomes how to identify one of two separate causes in an apparently indistinguishable set of symptoms. As Carol Thomas Neely comments, ‘Bright fails in his strenuous efforts to differentiate the spiritual from the physiological and to map distinct causes and cures for the two kinds of despair’. For her, indeed, this failure registers a broader secularising tendency in early modern understandings of melancholy. ‘One effect of the treatise’, she argues, ‘is to create a material self as full, as dark, and as tragic as the sinful soul constructed through the imagery of Christian theology’.30 This is a suggestive and important point, but it perhaps underestimates the extent to which the concept of religious melancholy was itself being elaborated and expanded at precisely the same moment, with comparable implications for the construction of a “deep” inner self. As we shall see, if anything the bond between melancholy and religion strengthened, although the nature of the relationship changed, in the course of the century after Bright.

Dionys Fitzherbert and the afflicted conscience ‘Bright and Burton’, comments Macdonald, ‘taught educated men and women to speak the language of classical medicine’.31 Fitzherbert, the earliest of our authors, wrote her account too early to have read Burton, or indeed Perkins or Yarrow; although she lived until the 1640s, the bulk of her manuscript was written around 1607. But it is clear that she had acquainted herself


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with the medical characteristics of melancholy, most likely through the writings of Bright; and in arguing for a clear distinction between affliction of conscience and melancholy, she is in a sense taking up the project he and a number of others attempted to clarify.32 The title given to the fair copy of her manuscript, indeed, could be seen to echo directly that debate, and to assert at the outset the identity her text will argue: An Anatomie for the Poore in Spirrit, Or, the Case of an Afflicted Conscience layed open by Example.33 What her narrative attempts, accordingly, is a reading of her malady which moves it away from the body and into the realm of the spirit; which refutes attempts to explain her suffering in terms of ‘melancholy or I know not what turning of the brain’ and locates it as a genuine case of ‘Afflicted Conscience’.34 To support her reading, Fitzherbert approaches the diagnosis of madness from two mutually reinforcing directions. In the first place, she engages directly with her own symptoms, discussing and analysing them in order to give a different interpretation to that proposed by doctors at the time. In the second place she offers her life story as evidence: by giving an account of herself which is clearly and coherently structured around the familiar framework of the Christian life discussed above, she encourages the reader to understand her story not as alien and bizarre, but as something strange but recuperable within a providential discourse. Both these approaches run into difficulties, of course. Like her contemporaries in their attempts to elucidate the distinction between affliction of conscience and melancholy, she is confronted with both conceptual and terminological problems; and her life story as she tells it is marked by the traces of elements that are not wholly compatible with the meaning she wishes to give it. But in its difficulties and contradictions it gives a fascinating picture of the struggle to establish the boundary between mad and sane. It is never clearly specified precisely what form of mental disorder she is being treated for (and whether or not those about her were using the language of mental disorder with precision is hard to tell from her account). Besides melancholy, she refers (resentfully) to ‘the miserable imputation of madness and all wretchedness’; she describes herself as ‘distracted’, or ‘bereft’ of ‘sense and reason’.35 But Fitzherbert’s argument is less an attempt to minimise her symptoms (although some of the more extreme manifestations of disorder are left out of the fair copy of the text) than a reinterpretation of them: they are, she insists, part of a divine punishment. She had grown cold and careless in her practice of religion, and because she was backsliding, Satan was permitted to torment her. What is distressing to her is the tendency in others not to recognise this spiritual origin, to attribute it to more ordinary causes, and therefore not to recognise the suffering of those so afflicted. Like Bright, in effect, she asserts that there can be no cause for misery more well-founded than such a conviction, however the conviction itself may be in error. As Bright puts it, ‘this is a sorrow and feare upon cause, & that


the greatest cause that worketh misery unto man’, whereas melancholy is ‘a meere fancy & hath no ground of true and just object’.36 If melancholy is characterised as groundless fear or sorrow, the first step in establishing that her case was not melancholy is to explain that this sorrow is not groundless. A central aim of Fitzherbert’s argument is to establish an identity as part of a community of sufferers, not merely God’s elect (although the question of election is vitally important for her), but that portion of the elect chosen to undergo particular trials. Thus her discussion opens out beyond her own particular case to a broader engagement with the question of how to identify and treat those similarly afflicted. ‘Let me instruct them’, she declares of those who tend to confuse her affliction with melancholy, ‘ to be more wary in these respects, and know there is a great difference in their cases’.37 The difference resides in both cause and effect, symptom and cure; and she begins with the physical aspects. The bodies of those suffering from melancholy, she explains, are oppressed by ‘thick and dull humours’ which accumulate to oppress the heart and spirit – a disorder, therefore, whose primary cause is located in the body, in the accumulation of humours, however its symptoms may subsequently affect mind and spirit. Those in her case, on the contrary, are first smitten in the heart and distracted in the spirit, ‘then no marvel if all the rest go out of frame’ – body follows mind, not the other way about.38 Here again she seems to be closely echoing Bright, with his similar technique of argument by opposing pairs; according to Bright: In this [afflicted conscience] the body standeth oft times in firme state of health, perfect in complexion, and perfect in shape In the other [melancholy], the complexion is depraved, obstructions hinder the free course of spirits & humours, the blood is over grosse, thick, & impure Here it first proceedeth from the mindes apprehension: there from the humour, which deluding the organicall actions, abuseth the mind, and draweth it into erronious judgement 39 In both these accounts, to explain the body’s disorder as a consequence of the soul’s affliction rather than the other way about invokes the moral superiority of spiritual over physical affliction implicit in such discussions (even to the apparently technical language: depraved complexions, gross, thick and dull blood and humours, suggest moral as much as physical corruption). A similar order of priorities informs Fitzherbert’s discussion of possible treatments. Cures for melancholy at this period are countless. Along with medicine, adjustments of diet, purges and bleedings are recommended to rebalance the humours or assist evacuations; music may console a sufferer, or encouraging conversation; marriage may ensure that a woman is properly regulated again; physical exercise within reason is good. The treatment is


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designed to act both on the physical and mental levels, on the basis that both are broken, and one cannot be mended without the other. One way of distinguishing affliction of conscience from melancholy, then, is to see whether medicine can be effective. If the disorder is indeed spiritual, most writers suggest, then medicine will do no good. According to Bright, ‘no medicine, no purgation, no cordiall, no tryacle or balme are able to assure the afflicted soule and trembling heart’; for Perkins, ‘distresse of conscience cannot be cured by any thing in the world but one, and that is the blood of Christ’.40 If, on the other hand, a disorder responds to medical treatment, the implication is that it is in fact medical and not spiritual in its origins. Fitzherbert attempts to modify this account, and to leave some space for medical treatment, not least because in her own view she derived some benefit from medicine. Accordingly, she asserts that physic may be useful, but only because the already present spiritual condition has disrupted the body’s equilibrium: ‘although melancholy or any other distemperature of the body be not the first Cause thereof’, she explains, ‘ upon these violent and strong passions of the mind the whole body is much disordered’.41 But it is not, in the end, medical treatment that was the agent of her recovery; it merely mitigated the extremes of her suffering, so as to allow space for recovery to take place. She wishes to make it absolutely clear that she herself suffered from affliction of conscience, and not from anything else; that her affliction was a spiritual not an organic one, both in its onset and in its eventual disappearance. As Mary Morrissey points out, her descriptions of both the arrival and the disappearance of her disorder conform closely to the requisite devotional pattern; as, indeed, does her entire narrative.42 From a profane childhood through a rebirth of faith in her teens, a special and terrible trial of that faith, and her eventual reconfirmation as one of God’s chosen, the structure of her life story insists that this is a Christian life, this is how the godly story is shaped. The catastrophe and disgrace of her public breakdown can be understood and interpreted in a way that locates it within a known spiritual structure, rather than leaving it shapeless, meaningless and humiliating. The difficulty for Fitzherbert is that while she may dispute the origin of her disorder, what she appeared to be, to those around her, was clearly melancholy or mad; and what appears is taken to be the truth. In addition to disputing causes and treatments, then, she is required to perform a delicate negotiation between the acknowledgement that she looked as if she were out of her mind, and the insistence that actually she was something else. Conceding that her symptoms are of a kind which ‘may in some sort seem ridiculous’, and move the observer to laughter, her problem is to persuade the reader that the absurd is not comical, and that her distracted behaviour was not representative of her inner truth.43 She was ‘as one utterly deprived of all sense & understanding’, she writes; but the reader must grasp the difference between what something looks like and what it truly is.44


With regard to the external signs of disorder, she claims, the two can be distinguished by careful watching and listening: in all other distemperatures, their anger, rages and accusations are bent more against others than them selves, in this it is wholly or for the most part directed against them selves Their often complaints, deep sighs, hearty wishes to be as they have been, with their exceeding tenderness of conscience in every respect, and their humbling them selves lower than can be imagined, and immeasurable the like passages, doth more than distinguish their case from all others in the judgment of any well seeing eyes.45 Self-abasement, then, is the crucially distinctive marker of religious affliction. Those suffering mental disorder turn their anger outwards, and are without humility; those afflicted by God turn all their accusations against themselves. The moral weighting here is obvious: God’s elect, even when distracted, are inclined to exhibit the characteristic features of virtue, especially humility. And it is this religious significance, apparent to the well-seeing eye even if too many eyes failed to see correctly, that underpins her entire argument. Mental disorder does not have meaning on its own; there is no hidden truth to be derived from the experience, unless it is located within the framework of the sufferings of the godly. Those who identify her as mad judge merely by appearances; but since the battleground between God and the Devil is in her heart and soul, it is not her actions that are at issue, but her thoughts and emotions. That this battle shows itself to the world in a form remarkably similar to that which the world calls madness is not without reason (whether God’s, to humble pride, or the devil’s, to cause despair); but the similarity remains essentially contingent. To assert the centrality of God and sin to her mental collapse is thus to reclaim an experience which without that framework would be meaningless to her.

Lamentable soule-travel: mid-century misery Nearly a century after Spira’s sufferings, the case of Mrs Drake, described in a book first published in 1647, offers another illustration of the entanglement of spiritual and medical causes in dealing with these cases.46 Mrs Drake was the wife of a Surrey gentleman, who spent ten years in a state of mental and spiritual turmoil, and eventually died. Her case was regarded by one of the ministers involved with it as sufficiently remarkable to merit a written account, describing her experiences and the many attempts made to persuade her out of her despairing frame of mind, and speculating as to the causes in a woman who – like Fitzherbert and indeed Hannah Allen – did not appear on the face of it to have committed any sins grievous enough to account for the extremity of the disorder.


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Mrs Drake’s affliction follows a familiar course. It began when she woke up in the middle of the night, ‘in a fearefull trembling and sweat, shaking exceedingly and crying out, That now shee was a forlorne creature with shricks and loud Cryes, the bed shaking, yea, the whole chamber seeming to rock and reel ’.47 It proceeded through refusal to eat, threats of suicide, ‘strange desperate speeches, unruly carriage’, generally antagonistic and furious behaviour, and a refusal to pray; at various points it also involved a conviction of damnation, the belief that she had committed the sin against the holy ghost, and an assertion that her case was hopeless: the Decree of her rejection and damnation being past and irrevocable all her comfort and portion being in this life, shee was resolved to spend the remainder of her time in all jollity and merriment, denying her selfe no worldly comforts; and therefore wished him to let her alone, for it was impossible for him to doe her any good, nor shee would not either be ruled or advised by him; with a great deale of the like scurvie rotten stuff, and that she was quite destitute of all naturall affection unto Husband, Father, Mother, Children, and every body else, having in brief no love to either God or man 48 For John Hart, the author this affliction places her in the hands of the devil: ‘we have seen Satan malicious, violent, subtile, various in his temptations, changing shapes, by all meanes striving to have overthrown this good soule, abuse her judgement, affections, fancy and best reason to fight against her selfe ’.49 , he comments. The treatment he describes is accordingly almost exclusively spiritual: she is visited by numerous ministers, whose chief task is to persuade her out of her mistaken opinions in order to reawaken her to sanity. The book describes at great length all the different arguments used, and how gradually she was beaten back from one position to another (despite the fact that Satan lent her a sophistical strength in arguing which at times defeated the less experienced ministers). In this case, it would appear, in contrast to Fitzherbert’s, the medical approach had been subordinated to the spiritual. Her cure would take place not through medication, but through reasoned debate, and by successfully persuading her of her errors. Yet running alongside this theological reading of her condition is a physiological one, which attributes her sufferings to bodily disorder. Melancholy in this text operates alongside satanic temptation and corruption, and divine trials. Mrs Drake’s natural constitution, according to John Hart, was ‘joviall’, but ‘accidentally melancholy’, and he goes on to detail the accidents that led her to melancholy: an arranged marriage to a man ‘whom at first shee could not affect, so as she was married against her will’; a difficult childbirth, following which ‘being much wronged by her Midwiffe, shee was ever after troubled with fumes and scurvie vapors mounting up unto her head, which bred in her a continuall head-ach ’.50 But having


established these physical causes, the account of both her illness and her cure is located in an almost entirely spiritual frame. And while on the one side he emphasises the spiritual interventions which gradually help her to reinterpret her state, on the other he notes the bodily alterations which are part of this process: For all this, yet did the Devill hold her close unto his maine end of desperation, to have made her selfe away being forbid Oranges (as naught for her) shee made shift to have forty brought unto her, so to have sped her selfe; but it so pleased God, that these proved excellent medicines unto her, purging away abundance of black ugly filthy matter, which made her to look much better.51 To John Hart, it in no way detracts from the reality of Mrs Drake’s spiritual affliction that it may have causes as mundane as a botched delivery, or that an accidental purge may improve her condition; the entire struggle is in the hands of God, who may choose to work through the humours as well as through the spirit. And Satan, of course, may make the same choice, ‘taking advantage of her melancholy temper’, as the minister comments. The work done by the minister is on the soul, but it cannot be disentangled from other aspects of the affliction; ‘the indisposition and melancholy temper of her body was such as hindered much the work’, he comments, ‘shee therewith being averse to Physick’.52 The medical aspect of her affliction may be of secondary interest to the minister writing about her experiences, but it is also far more prominent than it had been in accounts of Spira’s case. The narrative simply sidesteps the issues of priority and causality that had so preoccupied Fitzherbert, to balance between medical and theological explanations. This perhaps reflects a wider shift. As the century progressed, and extravagant expressions of religious fervour became more familiar, the anxiety about how to distinguish between melancholy and affliction of conscience seems in certain ways to have diminished. By the 1650s, an unsympathetic commentator such as Henry More might draw from this the caustic comment that, ‘it is very well known that this Complexion [melancholy] is the most religious complexion that is, and will be as naturally tampering with divine matters as Apes and Monkies will be imitating the actions and manners of men’.53 But even amongst the communities of believers, dozens of writers from the mid-seventeenth century on describe their misery and despair, and use the language of melancholy, without seeming especially concerned about whether it might provoke an unflattering diagnosis. Indeed, to show too much contentment was probably a mark of damnation. The primary sign of the work of grace in the soul, for many, remained intense misery. Self-abandonment and despair for most godly people in this period were an essential part of the soul’s progress, rather than a regrettable lapse of


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common sense or a failure of reason; and recognising one’s own unworthiness was a shatteringly painful experience, even if often incomprehensible to onlookers. As the Fifth Monarchist preacher John Rogers explains, his purpose in publishing a series of conversion accounts is in part to make the irreligious majority realise what was going on in the work of conversion, and to judge with tenderness the bemused and the miserable: to teach us to suspend our censures, and to forbear prejudicate opinions, or harsh judgment of such as suspire under lamentable soule-travel, and heart-pangs! and agony! and afflictions! though they cry out, Oh, they are damned! undone! forsaken of God! &c. yet condemne them not, for even then, they may be the dear children of God, and passe a false sentence on themselves for some time!54 Agony and afflictions, indeed, are described by many spiritual autobiographers. Among the oral testimonies collected from Rogers’s own Dublin congregation, the tendency is marked: Elizabeth Chambers, for example, ‘lay lamenting, and afflicted day and night’; she ‘sighed and prayed, and sighed and prayed, and went to bed with my heart full, and head full, and eyes full, and all afflicted’; and on waking, ‘my heart aked, ready to break, I rose up, and wept sore ’. And Humphry Mills ‘was distracted in my mind, wounded in conscience, and wept often and bitterly, and prayed earnestly’.55 But they are not alone. Mary Penington’s manuscript autobiography describes a long period of seeking before she eventually found the Quakers, in which she tried unsuccessfully to console herself with vain pastimes: ‘in the midst of this’, she explains, ‘my heart was constantly sad, and pained beyond expression; and after a pretty long indulgence in such follies, I retired for several days, and was in great trouble and anguish’. She refers repeatedly to her ‘restless, distressed state’.56 Another Quaker, Joan Vokins, is similarly unable to take pleasure in worldly happiness: she ‘could not take comfort in husband or children, house, or land, or any visibles, for want of the marriage union with the Lamb of God’.57 John Crook even as a schoolboy ‘often mourned and went heavily, not taking that delight in Play and Pastime which other Children took’; he would ‘get into some by-Corner, and pray and weep bitterly, from the sense of my own Sins’.58 And Elizabeth Stirredge distressed her mother with her desire to go and weep in corners in her spare time: my Mother feared I was going into a Consumption, and greatly fear’d my Death; and would say unto me, Canst thou take delight in nothing? I would have thee walk forth into the Fields with the young People, for Recreation, and delight thy self in something. And to please her, I have sometimes gone forth with sober young People, but I found no Comfort in that.59


Instead, Stirredge prayed for salvation through isolation: ‘I matter not what become of this outward Body’, she pleaded with God, ‘if I could find out a Cave of the Earth, that I might get into, where I might mourn out my Days in sorrow, and see Man no more’.60 Hannah Allen, publishing in the 1680s an account of her experiences twenty years earlier, belongs to this second generation of afflicted consciences; and her relation to the question of melancholy is notably different to Fitzherbert’s. Still writing within the Galenic tradition, she treats afflictions of mind and body as part of a single phenomenon, and the preface to her narrative opens with an assertion of their inseparability: The Soul of Man hath a singular Affection for its own Body, rejoycing in its Prosperity, and sympathizing with it in all its Maladies, Miseries and Necessities. Hence if the Body be out of frame and tune, the Soul cannot be well at ease The blood and humours are the Souls Organs, by which it doth exert its actions.61 This traditional image of interdependence governs her explanations of her affliction throughout, and the word ‘melancholy’ for her still precisely assumes that interdependence, allowing her retrospectively to understand her sufferings as simultaneously spiritual and physical. Where Fitzherbert seems to imply that the spiritual dimension of her affliction would be undermined if it were attributed to a physical cause, Allen is unselfconscious in her use of the language of melancholy. During her marriage she was ‘much inclined to Melancholy’; after her husband’s death she ‘began to fall into deep Melancholy, and’, she continues, ‘no sooner did this black humour begin to darken my soul, but the Devil set on with his former temptations ’.62 For her, as for Fitzherbert and for Mrs Drake, melancholy is an entrance, a point of weakness through which the devil gains access. But this also allows her to locate her blasphemies and evil thoughts as something outside herself, not truly her own, as her closing remarks make clear: As my Melancholy came by degrees, so it wore off by degrees, and as my dark Melancholy bodily distempers abated, so did my spiritual Maladies also, and God convinced me by degrees; that all this was from Satan, his delusions and temptations, working in those dark and black humours, and not from my self 63 Her self is separate from her melancholy. Melancholy is a dark substance that spreads in the body and allows dark thoughts to spread in the mind, the mental analogy of the physical stuff. It also allows the devil – conventionally figured as black, occupant of the dark pits of hell – to work on the soul and produce delusions. Allen is thus able to distance the melancholic person as not her real self – indeed as different in character, ‘very rugged and


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cross, contrary to my natural temper’, she comments.64 Thus her rejection of the diagnosis of melancholy while she was ill becomes in itself a mark of illness: to have recovered is to recognise retrospectively the reality of mental disorder. Melancholy for Hannah Allen, eventually, is a concept that works.

The later seventeenth century: melancholy and the nonconformists For the godly earlier in the century, like Dionys Fitzherbert, to be accused of being melancholy threatened to devalue their beliefs, reducing spiritual turmoil to the dismal symptom of a poor diet, and associating it with mental disorder, delusion and hallucination. Mrs Drake’s case, like that of Hannah Allen, suggests a shift in this perspective. Perhaps one reason for this was the changing religious climate. By the mid-century, the public expression of religion had grown steadily more extreme. In the association of religion and mental disorder, the visionaries and prophets, the fasting girls and the women going naked for a sign, the men who re-enacted the Passion or who talked to trees and published their dreams, had raised the stakes considerably. Compared to this, melancholy – even in severe form – might well seem a pleasingly quiet affliction, and far more suitable for a woman than some of the alternatives on display. This new configuration of religion and madness will be the subject of the next chapter. Additionally, however, the meaning of melancholy was shifting. If writers throughout the century continued to meditate on the extremes of distress into which the godly might fall, they seem less and less to have seen the word melancholy as problematic in this connection. It still, indeed, needed to be distinguished from simple affliction for sin, to the extent that it was natural for a Christian to feel and repent the weight of sin on the conscience. As Timothy Rogers puts it, in his 1691 Discourse concerning Trouble of Mind and the Disease of Melancholly, ‘There is a very great difference between such as are only under trouble of Conscience, and such whose Bodies are greatly diseased at the same time: A sense of Sin, and great sorrow for it, may in some persons not change at all their former state of health.’65 But it seems to have become increasingly acceptable among the godly themselves to identify extreme forms of this as the consequence of organic disorder, rather than trying to keep the two rigorously apart. Descriptions of the illness, its symptoms and its treatments in the works published in the second half of the century clearly echo earlier descriptions and debates, and suggest how familiar and how embedded in the culture of nonconformity melancholy had become; but views have shifted since the writings of Yarrow and Perkins. It would, comments Timothy Rogers, ‘be a thought very Atheistical, to imagine, that all inward horror of Conscience comes from bodily distress’; but nonetheless, he goes on, ‘I verily believe, that of all the Christians that are under dreadful fears of Wrath, and in long Terror, there is not one in twenty but whose inward trouble comes


either from a Melancholly Temper, or from a multiplication of sharp and severe outward Afflictions; and from these the Devil takes an opportunity to throw his fiery Darts ’.66 The categorical distinction earlier divines attempted to maintain, it seems, is becoming steadily less important. Like Rogers, the prominent nonconformist divine Richard Baxter initially wishes to maintain the distinction. ‘I do not call those Melancholy, who are rationally sorrowful for Sin, and sensible of their Misery, and Solicitous about their Recovery and Salvation as long as they have sound Reason, and the Imagination, Fantasie or Thinking Faculty, is not Crazed or Diseased’ he explains.67 But of course those who are in fact melancholy generally believe themselves to be in this category: Yet in all this Distemper, few of them will believe that they are Melancholy, but abhor to hear Men tell them so, and say it is but the rational Sense of their Unhappiness, and of the forsakings and heavy wrath of God. And therefore they are hardly perswaded to take any Physick, or use any means, for the Cure of their Bodies, saying they are well, and being confident, that it is only their Souls, that are distressed.68 And this reluctance to believe in the real cause of the malady is in fact one of its symptoms; so that it is hard to see how one might distinguish rational from irrational sorrow in such cases. Both Baxter and Rogers are clear that melancholy is a physical disorder, though the new medical theories make it harder to explain. ‘Such a black distinct Humour called Melancholy, which hath of old been accused, is rarely if ever found in any’, comments Baxter, departing from the humoural model; but he immediately returns to its vocabulary: ‘But the Blood it self may be called Melancholy Blood, when it hath contracted that Distemper and Pravity by Feculency, Sluggishness or Adustion, which disposeth it to the Melancholy Effects.’ He also invokes ‘the Spirits, whose Distemper unfits them for their Office in Serving the Imagination, Understanding, Memory and Affections’, and, covering all possibilities, suggests that ‘The matter which is the Root and Foundation, is usually a Depravation of the Mass of Blood, which is the Vehicle of the Spirits, and that is usually accompanied with some Diseases of the Stomach, Spleen, Liver or other Parts ’.69 More significant than the question of physical cause, however, certainly for Rogers, is the comparative use of physical illness to validate the reality of the illness of the mind. Rogers repeatedly summons up the real existence of the disease as a way of persuading people to sympathise with the sufferers; ‘’tis as vain a thing to strive against it, as to strive against a Fever, or a Plurisie, the Gout, or the Stone’, he insists; the melancholy ‘are as persons whose bones are broken, and that are in great pain and anguish, and consequently under an incapacity for action’.70 In a well-known passage, he argues for the objective reality of psychic affliction – the ‘Land of darkness’, as he describes melancholy, ‘on which no Sun at all seems to shine’:71


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You must be so kind to your Friends under this Disease, as to believe what they say. Or however, that their apprehensions are such as they tell you they are; do not you think that they are at ease when they tell you they are in pain. It is a foolish course which some take with their melancholly Friends, to answer all their Complaints and Moans with this, That it’s nothing but Fancy; nothing but Imagination and Whimsey. It is a Real Disease, a Real Misery that they are tormented with: and if it be a Fancy, yet a diseased Fancy is as great a Disease as any other; it fills them with anguish and tribulation In all other Evils people take for granted what others say, and accordingly sympathise with them; but in this they are apt to contradict and oppose such as are distressed suppose when you have the Toothach, or Headach, and people, when you complain, should tell you tis nothing but Fancy, would you not think their carriages to be full of cruelty? and would it not vex you that you cannot be believed?72 Baxter uses similar analogies. Observing that the melancholy should be kept from meditation, he explains, ‘If a Man hath a broken Leg, he must not go on it, till its knit It is your thinking Faculty, or your Imagination which is the broken pained Part; and therefore you must not use it, about the things that trouble you.’73 And slightly later, the nonconformist doctor Richard Blackmore declares, ‘let the Cause of such Symptoms be never so chimerical and fantastick, the consequent sufferings are without doubt real and unfeigned. Terrible Ideas, formed only in the Imagination, will affect the Brain and the Body with painful Sensations.’74 It is worth noting the contrast between this analogy between mental and physical affliction, and Fitzherbert’s analogy at the beginning of the century between the suffering of those who believe they have lost God’s favour and the suffering of those who have lost the favour of their prince: men can see those that are fallen from the favour of their Prince or some dear and especial friend, in passion yea and almost distracted with the loss, and yet pity and lament them. But those which think and feel themselves fallen from the grace of God the Prince of Princes, their only friend is it possible (I say) that any can pass by these without show of compassion ?75 Like Fitzherbert, Baxter and Rogers are appealing for sympathy for a real suffering, but the metaphor of distress due to social and emotional displacement has been replaced by that of pain due to physical sickness, and the claim to sympathy is made on the basis that the person is suffering in the same way as one with a broken leg: the significant point of comparison is a bodily disorder, not a psychic one. ‘Look upon those that are under this woful Disease of Melancholly with great pity and compassion’, pleads Rogers.76 Fitzherbert’s plea for compassion is very differently angled.77


For writers like Baxter and Rogers, the emphasis on the organic reality of the disease pushes out its cosmic dimension, to the point where even the agency of the devil may take a back seat. ‘Do not attribute the effects of meer Disease, to the Devil’, urges Rogers, cautiously adding, ‘though I deny not that the Devil has an hand in the causing of several Diseases’.78 Baxter’s description of the tendency of the melancholy to hear voices comes close to the way sceptics tended to regard all religious enthusiasm: They are usually so taken up with busie and earnest Thoughts that they feel it just as if something were speaking with them, and all their own violent Thoughts were the Pleadings and Impulse of some other, and therefore they are wont to impute all their Fantasies, either to some extraordinary Actings of the Devil, or to some extraordinary Motions of the Spirit of God 79 And a similar spirit informs other comments: ‘some of them grow to think, that they are possessed of Devils; and if it doth but enter into their Fantasie how possessed Persons use to Act; the very Strength of Imagination will make them do so too’, he observes; again, Some Melancholy Persons that are near Distraction, verily think that they hear Voices, and see Lights and Apparitions, that the Curtains are opened on them, that something meets them, and saith this or that to them, when all is but the Error, of a crazed Brain, and Sick Imagination 80 He does interpolate a brief discourse on how to identify true possession, as opposed to the imagined kind. Nonetheless his discourse on melancholy, like Rogers’s, seems increasingly to veer towards scepticism about all supernatural phenomena. Like madness in general, melancholy attacks the ability to reason, and it is thus not surprising that sufferers imagine they see things no longer there. ‘They have lost the Power of Governing their Thoughts by Reason’, he observes.81 Like madness in general, melancholy is conceived of as a disease that attacks the mind’s central capacities of reason and imagination; the melancholy may deploy the language of religious belief and debate, but in the view of these nonconformist preachers, this is scarcely more than the vehicle through which the disease is articulated. Baxter’s account of melancholy was based on decades of counselling the unhappy; in the 1660s, when Hannah Allen’s carers attempted to arrange for him to visit her, his reputation was already high.82 (‘God will not let Mr Baxter come to see such a Wretch as I am’ was her response to the proposal at the time.)83 But although she did not see him, the understanding of melancholy that emerges from her account and that was evidently part of the general knowledge of her social and religious circle has much in common with his description. To identify her suffering as the ‘black humour’


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of melancholy, to attribute the strange visions and voices that visited her not to the devil but to her state of delusion, and to see herself restored to health by physic and consoling advice, fits neatly with Baxter’s view of melancholy as a common affliction which was no more the responsibility of the sufferer than a toothache would be, and located as certainly in the body. ‘They can think of nothing but what they do think of, no more than a Man in the Tooth-Ach, can forbear to think of his Pain.’84 If religion and melancholy retain a link, it seems, the way to deal with it is to treat melancholy with resolute secularism, and to dethrone it from its special status. By the time of Richard Blackmore’s Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours in 1725, both the medical and the spiritual terrains have shifted significantly. ‘Hypocondriacal Affections’, Blackmore declares, ‘consist in the irregular and disturbed Motions of the Spirits, and the irritable disposition of the Nerves; and this was the opinion of Dr Willis and Dr Sydenham, and now, I imagine, generally obtains’.85 Melancholy is a branch of these disorders, rather than the effect of black bile, caused by weakness in the blood and the animal spirits. Religious melancholy is not (as atheists blasphemously suggest) caused by religion, but is merely contingent: ‘it is but natural that a disturbed Imagination should chiefly entertain such Images, as were before well known, and have been long familiar to the Mind’; and its treatment is no longer a matter for ministers: such religious Melancholy is as much a bodily Disease, as any of another Class and different Nature; and they must more depend upon the Art of the Physician, and the Force of Medicine, than the Skill and Reasonings of the Casuist, for their recovery 86 The long decline of humoural theory left some of its terms in place (and melancholy has proved particularly resilient), but by the time of Blackmore the conceptual structure that underpinned it has vanished, and the interdependence of mind and body that it signalled can be put aside in favour of a purely medical model for the treatment of mental disorder. For George Trosse, another nonconformist writing at the end of the century, it appears that melancholy has lost its force as a key term in thinking about mental disorder. He uses the word only once, after his recovery: going to take up his studies and his new life, he comments that he was ‘withal still somewhat melancholy’.87 Rather than a state of delusion, the word here describes a residual condition, something not yet cleared up; and the sense of low spirits which comes to be the predominant meaning is in play. He is no longer raving, hallucinating or distracted; what is left is only a disposition to unhappiness, which studying will soon clear away. It is also attached to concrete reasons, particularly his doubts over whether he should be taking up his studies again; grounds include age, ‘since I was a Person of so many Years’, he comments, ‘(about 25 or 26)’ and lack of ‘Grammar-learning’;


he worries that these factors along with his persisting melancholy make him ‘indispos’d for an Academical Instruction’, and that he will ‘return as very a Dunce as when I first went up’.88 These self-doubts and anxieties, however, do not signify mental illness, so much as an entirely appropriate humility, given his situation. He has wasted years on sin and dissipation; he is indeed of a very advanced age to go to university at that period; he has lost the habit of study; he fears he will be unfit for any employment, never mind the ministry, which is his ambition. All of these are reasonable worries, not the extravagant abjections and delusions of melancholy in its earlier guise. The term in Trosse’s usage is being recuperated from the domain of mental illness, and brought into that of general doubts about his own capacities. It has not altogether left madness behind – after all, it is a residue of something – but it is no longer dominated by it. The absence of the language of melancholy in Trosse’s account, however, is not simply a function of the transition from humoural to experimental medicine; at least at the time of his confinement to the madhouse, the concept remained potent. The nature of his symptoms was likely to have been more significant in shaping his descriptions of his condition. Although melancholy could in principle include within its capacious symptomatology hallucinations, delusions and wild behaviour, these aspects of the disorder were in decline, and the emphasis was increasingly on the fear, misery and despair described by the nonconformist clergymen. And even in earlier days, Trosse’s fighting, shouting and struggling would not generally have been regarded as typically melancholic. Trosse refers to himself as ‘violent and unruly’; as ‘storming and roaring in my Chains of Darkness’; as ‘outragious and furious’; such behaviour would have been more likely to be described as frantic, frenzied or lunatic by earlier writers on madness (or indeed as mania, another Galenic category – ‘a madnes or woodnes lyke a wylde beest’, as Andrew Boord described it).89 Where melancholy is pre-eminently a disorder of the imagination – involving a misapprehension of the world – frenzy is a disorder of the passions, involving above all an extremity of anger. But just as melancholy is not the explanation Trosse calls on for his hallucinations, so mania and frenzy are not the names he gives to his roaring and fury. For him the religious framework is explanation enough; there is no need to go into other explanations. For Fitzherbert at the beginning of the seventeenth century, then, melancholy is a medical condition identifying a state of severe mental disorder, incompatible with the spiritual meanings she sees in her condition; for Allen it is a disorder that gives an explanation for her sufferings, without emptying them of spiritual significance; for Trosse it is a residual depression that continues to afflict him after the symptoms of madness have left him. But although this chapter has suggested that there is a shift in the ways devotional writers address the relation between religion and melancholy in the course of the seventeenth century, we should be cautious in reading too


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much into these differences. Across the entire century, writers on religious melancholy repeat the same warnings and the same comforts, identify the same pitfalls for the faithful and direct sufferers to the same texts. There is a sense in which the question of religious melancholy divides off from the wider context of humoural medicine, retaining its explanatory power long after melancholy has receded from popularity as a diagnostic category more generally. But it is also the case, as studies of the eighteenth century have shown, that the language of melancholy continues in use after the Galenic system that gave it meaning has apparently fallen by the way. By the end of the eighteenth century, indeed, there is still enough resonance in melancholy for it to be revived with Romanticism, which reclaims the notion of the melancholic genius as a central idea. Working as it does at the boundary of mind and body, summoning up a rich and diverse range of images for the mind’s suffering, it is perhaps not surprising that it outlived its humoural context to remain potent for subsequent generations.

Minds and bodies: melancholy women One final aspect of melancholy remains to be considered here, and that is its relation to gender. The association of femininity and madness has a long and complex history, traced and referenced over recent years by a number of scholars.90 In the early modern period this association draws on both familiar and unfamiliar elements. The Renaissance inherits and develops a lengthy tradition of analogical thinking which places masculinity, self-government and reason together, in opposition to femininity, disorder and passion; and this overlaps with popular and Christian misogynist discourses insisting on the inferiority of women’s characters in directions which lead readily towards madness. The weakness of women, in these traditions, made them easily swayed; they lacked self-control, were governed by their appetites and desires, by passion and emotion rather than by reason and mastery over the body. ‘The lower ruled the higher within the woman’, as Natalie Zemon Davis famously put it; even in their physical being they exemplify the inversion of proper hierarchies.91 To the extent that madness is associated with gusts of extreme passion, then, and the inability to control emotion, it is easy to make a link between the normal condition of women and a state of mental disorder. If the love-mad woman is an iconic figure from the sixteenth century on, it is in the context of these assumptions about women and emotion.92 And disorders specific to women – hysteria, greensickness – further enact the power their disorderly physiologies have over their minds.93 Nonetheless, while these deep-seated assumptions underpin an association of women with unbalanced and ungovernable conduct, early modern madness is anything but a peculiarly female province. Hamlet, after all, is as much of an iconic figure as Ophelia; great men in tragedy go mad through the greatness of their passions, and it does not necessarily feminise them.


The inmates of Bedlam regularly wheeled out to entertain Jacobean theatregoers are men more often than women; the wandering Tom o’Bedlam figure of popular ballads is one of the archetypes of madness in the period.94 Among both men and women, excessive emotions – grief, fury, excitement, fear – could all throw the balance of the humours into disorder. Passion, in a general way, was dangerous: as a condition of brief madness in itself, it might easily be seen as responsible for a more prolonged overthrow of the mind’s stability. More generally, as we shall see in Chapter 11, the disturbances caused by love and desire were central to early modern aetiologies; love melancholy was almost as near to Burton’s heart as the melancholy of scholars. Both men and women, then, are at risk from the disruptive effects of desire; but the cultural meanings of such risks are differently weighted. One aspect of this difference is founded in the early modern belief that regular sexual intercourse was crucial to a woman’s health, both mental and bodily. The humoural system insisted on the need to correct the intrinsic imbalances of the female body, which left to itself was liable to fume and overheat; male semen would keep levels of heat and moisture where they should be. At the emotional level, as well, it was commonly believed that women’s sexual appetites were much greater than men’s. ‘Of womens unnaturall, unsatiable lust’, Burton famously asks, ‘what country, what Village doth not complaine?’95 Accordingly it is not surprising that early modern explanations of women’s illnesses in general often focus on sexual privation. Moreover, a woman in a state of distraction was already breaching the codes of specifically feminine as well as more generally civil behaviour. Men tearing off their clothes or making inappropriately lascivious suggestions were disgracing themselves, but in a sense by going too far along a continuum of existing masculine conduct; a woman behaving in the same way was in shocking contradiction to all the qualities associated with femininity. Women might be regarded as incapable of self-government, but high levels of bodily and linguistic decorum were nonetheless demanded of them; like a woman drunk, a woman mad was transgressively open to the world. Thus madness in early modern women is sexualised in two directions: the dominant explanation of its cause assumes some kind of sexual imbalance, and the mad woman as spectacle is associated with both sexual aggression and sexual vulnerability. Even in the quieter terrain of melancholy, women were likely to find their affliction differently interpreted to that of men. Several critics in recent years have argued that the aspirational version of melancholy, denoting the sensitive and creative soul, was only problematically available to women. Women’s melancholy is apt to be read not as a mark of intellect but as the opposite; it is seen as bodily and sexual, ‘as a debilitating disease and certainly not as an enabling ethos’, likely to align them at best with gloom and ludicrous delusions.96 Women are less often diagnosed as melancholic, according to Juliana Schiesari, and it is differently valued in them; women


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‘appear more afflicted by its negative or pathological effects than creatively inspired by the potential for “eminence” it seems to encode in men’.97 More recently, Carol Thomas Neely has drawn attention to the development of a specifically female form of melancholy in this period. Women’s melancholy, she argues, is in effect ‘a new subcategory’, an ‘innovative amalgamation of the formerly distinct conditions of the suffocation of the mother, genital congestion, and melancholy’, which ‘newly locates the the cause of women’s perturbations of mind in disordered female wombs and genitals’.98 Thus melancholy as a category is increasingly gendered: women in their disorders are instances of the disorders of their ungovernable bodies and unruly passions, rather than of any notion that genius might be close to madness. For Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, melancholy is above all a masculine identity, to be traced in the endlessly ramifying disorders of lovers, scholars, clerics, soldiers and statesmen. Only one chapter takes up explicitly the question of women and melancholy, and this chapter does not appear in the original edition in 1624; it is added in 1628, and is based on several recent books addressing the question of women’s melancholy as a physiological disorder.99 Burton’s account refers not to all women, but specifically to the single: it discusses ‘Maids’, Nuns’ and Widows’ Melancholy’.100 This, he explains, is a ‘peculiar Species’. It ‘much differs from that which commonly befals men and other women, as having one onely cause proper to women alone’; and women alone, indeed, are precisely the issue.101 The lack of male company is the cause of melancholy in these women, and the reasons are physiological rather than emotional. Lacking either childbearing or regular sex, they are afflicted by ‘vitious vapours which come from menstruous blood’, and ‘corrupt seed’, which trouble brain, heart and mind: ‘the whole maladie proceeds from that inflammation, putredity, black smoakie vapours, &c. from thence comes care, sorrow & anxiety ’.102 Widows, he explains, are especially subject to it, ‘by reason of a sudden alteration of their accustomed course of life, &c.’; and the coy et cetera is elucidated by the recommended cure: ‘the best and surest remedy of all, is to see them well placed, and married to good husbands in due time’.103 Thus on the one hand, women in their right position, married (and preferably with children), and on the other, women putrefying internally, and at risk of going mad: a neat encapsulation of the notion that melancholy in women can only signify sexual disorder. This association, however, is not automatic or inevitable. While melancholy in general, and women’s melancholy in particular, undergoes considerable change and indeed reinvention in the course of the century, it remains a flexible concept, which may be deployed in different ways. Helen Hackett, working on the writer Lady Mary Wroth, suggests that the exclusion of women from the ‘philosophical’ tradition of melancholia was not absolute, and that it was possible for certain women to access its more aspirational


aspects.104 And while at a theoretical level melancholy in women, like other forms of madness, was open to a sexual reading, it is evident that not every case of mental disorder would be explained in this light. Women’s melancholy, like men’s, might also be explained by emotional distresses, especially bereavement and marital or love problems.105 Religion, too, provides a strong counter-narrative, offering perhaps the readiest alternative means of understanding women’s melancholy. The various expositions of the difference between melancholy and affliction of conscience seldom make any distinction between men’s and women’s experiences, and even where they do, these are not as a rule specifically sexual in nature. Mrs Drake’s biographer comments on the ill effects of childbirth on her constitution, and later on the need for extreme tact when dealing with pregnant women; but sex itself is excluded from the discussion. Religious melancholy, nonetheless, is also in certain respects gendered. For Burton in the 1620s, melancholy was experienced by both sexes, ‘but men more often; yet women misaffected, are farre more violent, and grievously troubled’; as we have seen, he regarded sexual deprivation as the primary cause, and marriage as the cure, and the violence of melancholy’s effects on women recalls the ungovernability of their bodies.106 His discussion of religious melancholy, however, although it does not explicitly draw a link with gender (or indeed with sex), repeatedly cites women as examples of the weak-minded and suggestible types who are led astray and deluded by corrupt preachers – an idea that can be traced back into the Middle Ages, and that persists well beyond the seventeenth century.107 Additionally, in the course of the century, religious melancholy was simultaneously feminised and desexualised, becoming a disorder of women’s weak minds rather than their lustful bodies. Baxter, dealing specifically with religious melancholy, in contrast to Burton describes it as ‘more the Disease of Women, than of Men’.108 His focus on the duties of husbands towards wives suffering from melancholy simultaneously sidesteps the notion that they might be suffering from sexual deprivation (they are married, after all) and effectively infantilises the afflicted wife: You took her in Marriage for better and for worse; for Sickness and Health. If you have chosen one who, as a Child must have every thing that she cryeth for, and must be spoken fair, and as it were rock’d in a Cradle, or else it will be worse, you must condescend to do it Your Passions and Sourness towards a Person that cannot Cure her own unpleasing Carriage, is a more inexcusable Fault and Folly than hers, who hath not the Power of Reason as you have.109 And his recommendations that the melancholy wife should be treated kindly, offered amusements and distractions, and given what she wants are suggestive of quasi-paternal benevolence, rather than the need to rebalance


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her physiological disorders with regular sex. The wife’s lack of reason, of course, is strictly the condition of her illness rather than of her sex, but the dynamic proposed here is a close fit with the ideal relation of husband and wife as it is described in devotional tracts throughout the seventeenth century, in which the husband is a wise, firm but affectionate guide to his less competent and intelligent wife. It is striking, too, that while melancholy is a diagnosis under discussion in both Fitzherbert’s and Allen’s accounts, in neither case is there any explicit linking of that diagnosis to either gender or sexuality. Such a link comes closer in the case of Hannah Allen, whose melancholy is associated with her widowhood, and whose recovery comes with her remarriage, as we shall see in more detail in Chapter 10; but the possibility is never made explicit, and the narrative gives precedence to the spiritual and emotional dimensions of her affliction. Fitzherbert’s narrative remains still more distanced from any notion of possible sexual motives. As a single woman, her illness too could have been explained with reference to her status as a woman alone. But her discussion of her own case – whether as sufferer, as recounter of the experiences of others, as informed commentator, or subsequently as expert adviser to other sufferers – constitutes her disorder as gender-neutral; she writes as a suffering soul to other souls. Whether she was resisting the sexual associations of melancholy in an unmarried woman, or simply expressing a general religiously motivated resistance to any identification with the flesh as opposed to the spirit, her narrative consistently offers a reading of her malady which moves it into the realm of spirit and away from that of body.110 Mental disorder in women, I suggested earlier, has in recent scholarship often been seen as intrinsically and inevitably sexualised. These cases suggest, however, that the situation is more complicated than that direct association would imply. There is undoubtedly a sexual component to early modern understandings of women’s mental disorder, but it does not seem to apply automatically or in every case; to be diagnosed as mad or melancholy is damaging to the reputation, but not necessarily specifically to sexual reputation. In writing as women who have apparently suffered from mental disorder, Allen and Fitzherbert are potentially on dangerous ground. But their narratives suggest that religion trumps medicine, in these instances at least. So long as the spiritual frame is strong enough to contain what has happened to them, they can bypass the assumption that their suffering is the consequence of sexual disorder. Where medical language appears in the course of their narratives, it is strictly asexual: black humours and melancholy, body and soul in or out of tune, disturbed passions, may in theory have different meanings for men and for women, but the differences are excluded by these two accounts. The question of where that leaves the body and desire is one that will be returned to in the final chapter of this book.

5 Mad Unto the World: Spiritual and Mental Disturbances

Although Robert Burton is credited with the invention of the concept of religious melancholy, his Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621, offers an interestingly different account of the relation between religion and melancholy to that which the phrase seems to suggest.1 Instead of sorrowful and despairing states of mind, his discussion emphasises delusory, misguided and heretical beliefs; he is concerned not with emotion but with error. The understanding of melancholy as disturbed perception of the truth allows him to suggest, in effect, that anyone not religious according to approved forms – whether worshipping false gods or worshipping God falsely – is in fact suffering from melancholy: ‘all superstitious Idolaters’, he declares, ‘Ethnickes, Mahometans, Jewes, Heretickes, Enthusiasts, Divinators, Prophets, Sectaries, and Scismatickes’ are ‘all miserably out, perplexed, doting, and beside themselves for religion’s sake’.2 He is particularly disdainful about religious melancholy as a result of what he regards as excessive zeal. Those afflicted, he suggests, have often spent too long inquiring into divine mysteries such as election and free will, ‘with a deale of foolish presumption, curiosity, needlesse speculation’, or have come under the influence of ‘thundering Ministers’ who terrify them with hell-fire.3 As for the members of ‘these peculiar sects’: their Religion takes away not spirits only, but wit and judgement, and deprives them of their understanding: for some of them are so far gone with their private Enthusiasmes, and revelations, that they are quite madde, out of their wits 4 To be ‘quite mad’ or out of one’s wits, it appears, is to go even beyond the capacious category of the melancholy. Wandering off the beaten path in religious terms, for Burton, can make you not merely melancholy, but 86

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outright mad. To remain sane one must remain under the authoritative guidance of the Church, rather than crediting stray visions with divine purpose or believing the word of unsanctioned prophets. And most easily seduced by heresy, of course, are ‘silly, rude, ignorant people weake women, or some poor rude illiterate persons, that are apt to be wrought on’.5 Women, the poor and the ignorant are united in their credulity, their inability to make balanced judgements, and their susceptibility to religious extravagance verging on madness. Had Burton lived to see the flowering of religious sects in the 1640s and 1650s, he might well have thought himself a prophet too. For the new religious movements, abandoning the Anglican church to follow new preachers and establish new congregations, drew in precisely the people whose involvement Burton deplored: women and men of backgrounds which if not necessarily poor were certainly not elite, and educational backgrounds which seldom included university, though many were literate. And for these new sectarians, the accusation of madness became a familiar one. Burton was not alone in his distrust of private revelation and extravagant religious behaviour: one person’s visionary is always liable to be someone else’s lunatic, not inspired so much as in need of treatment. If melancholy, then, is an important part of the web that links religion and mental disorder in seventeenth-century England, the two are intimately connected in other dimensions as well, both in diagnosis and in treatment. This chapter considers another of those connections, exploring the idea of madness in relation to the growth in sectarian religion. From an orthodox point of view, strange and unconventional conduct in the religious sphere is increasingly identified as a marker not just of religious dissidence but of madness itself, by way of the language of enthusiasm. The sectarians themselves, meanwhile, often reclaim the idea of madness on their own terms to identify either the wilful blindness of the worldly or the capacity for abandonment to the will of God. Sectarian spiritual narratives also take for granted many phenomena which in other contexts might appear as signs of mental disorder rather than spiritual communication: visions, voices and dreams as well as erratic behaviour raise the question of the cultural contexts of insanity, and how such accounts are to be understood. If significant divergences from the normal were generally accepted in religious communities, how can we understand the identification of some but not all of these divergences as signs of madness?

Fools for Christ: mid-century enthusiasm Early modern England is famously an age of popular religious fervour. From the Puritans of Elizabethan and Jacobean England to the gathered churches of the mid-century, the radical sects of the revolutionary decades, and the nonconformist congregations after the restoration of the monarchy,


thousands of people were caught up in the spiritual adventure of salvation, searching their consciences and their society to identify the path of spiritual truth. At the same time, however, hostility to the more extravagant and ungoverned manifestations of faith ripples across the seventeenth century. Families and friends of the newly devout reacted with bewilderment or annoyance to the disruption of everyday life and relationships; civil authorities saw the prophets and congregations of radical religion as potentially serious threats. Those who declared ‘the Evidence of God in my own Conscience’ their highest guide were perceived as dangerously likely to disregard hierarchies and proprieties of all kinds.6 And separatists and sectarians were not only at risk of imprisonment for sedition or treason, under a succession of government measures intended to ensure uniformity of worship and obedience to the reigning secular powers; they were also liable to be seen as insane or frantic.7 From the late sixteenth century on, stray prophets, some from plebeian backgrounds, emerged from time to time, coming to the unfavourable attention of the authorities as seditious or deluded, or both: Alexandra Walsham cites the example of Jane Hawkins, a preaching pedlar who was both attacked as an impostor (‘a wittye and a craftie Baggage’) and dismissed by the local bishop for spouting forth ‘the dotages and Reveries of a franticke weoman’.8 And the blurring of the boundaries between madness and civil and religious dissent became more pressing as the religious and political conflicts of the seventeenth century developed. One of the most celebrated examples of political prophecy was that of Lady Eleanor Davies, whose prophetic career began in the 1620s and lasted nearly thirty years.9 She found herself at various points fined, imprisoned and committed to Bedlam for her prophetic publications, and the various penalties reflect a degree of confusion on the part of the judges about how to distinguish between treason and insanity (as well as how to handle an aristocratic woman who had stepped so radically out of her sphere). Attacks on Archbishop Laud saw her fined and imprisoned at the King’s pleasure, for pretending to have revelations and for illegally printing books; such activities were more or less recognisable within the frame of public politics, although a report written at the time commented that her ‘devellish practizes in her pretended prophecies’, hinting at treason, might have seen a more severe penalty, ‘if the judges had not thought her possessed with a frantique spirit, to be conjured out of her by restrayning her libertie’.10 A subsequent outrage, in which with a small group of women she poured tar on the altar at Lichfield Cathedral and sat on the bishop’s throne, led to committal to Bedlam. The Privy Council order declared her actions to be ‘of soe fowle and strange a nature that we cannot conceive them to passe from any person but one wholey distracted of understanding’.11 In her own account, however, written some years afterwards, she identifies these actions as political, part of a protest against church decoration. Writing about herself

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(as she usually does) in the third person, and in an extraordinarily tortured and inverted syntax, she describes the altar hangings at Lichfield as ‘Unsufferable to behold’, and her action (‘she cast a Confection made but of Tar, mixt with wheat Starch’) as aimed to awaken the consciences of court and city; as a result, she was ‘as it were bound quick in Bedlems loathsome Prison, infected with those foul spirits day and night Blaspheming: where was shut up by the space of two years ’12 The uncertain boundary between madness and crime, and the intertwining of the religious and the political, made her activities hard to place, and her aristocratic status further complicated the issue. Acting for the most part on her own, and keeping her protests within the Church of England, Lady Eleanor is an anomalous figure in more ways than one. Her solitary prophetic career made her peculiarly visible, but also perhaps less serious as a threat; and to tuck her away and declare her mad was clearly a tempting way of dealing with her determination to declare herself. Even in the revolutionary decade, she remained detached from the new religious communities, pursuing her own prophetic and publishing agenda. But increasingly, spiritual turmoil was identified with the congregations of the gathered churches, and those seeking the truth from one group to another. In early modern England, madness is a haunting and contested presence for the sectarians in particular, and the madhouse of Bedlam figures alongside the prison of Bridewell as an appropriate place of confinement for those too energetic in their devotions. Allegiance to one or another of the gathered churches of the 1640s and after might have drastic consequences for the converts who found themselves suddenly at odds with their surroundings. Unsympathetic onlookers hooted in the streets at those seized with the impulse to prophesy, or required by their new faith to change their style of dress or behaviour; family members might attempt persuasion, bullying or confinement, or cut off the new believer entirely; imprisonment and distraint of goods were common experiences, particularly after the restoration of the monarchy. To be regarded as insane could be seen as merely one hazard among many others for the enthusiastic believer. And yet whatever was shouted in the streets, it is important to remember that most sectarians most of the time were not actually treated as mad; confinement in an asylum was as far as we can tell only very rarely the response to religious zeal, and Lady Eleanor’s experience was anything but typical.13 In a world in which extreme religious behaviour was a familiar sight to many people, the question is, what distinguishes those who are defined as insane? What did you have to do, or where did you have to be, to be seen as mad, when throughout the 1640s and 1650s in particular, a wide range of seriously eccentric conduct was taken as normal? Did those generally regarded as mentally disordered behave demonstrably more strangely than others, or was it only a matter of context? Consider the experience of the


Fifth Monarchist minister John Rogers, during a period of inner turmoil over his faith: I was also tempted to think there was no God, but all things come by nature I did not onely despair, but began to be distracted, and out of my wits (as we use to say), I thought trees sometimes good Angels, sometimes bad, and look’d upon bushes as the den of Devils; I should sit up whole nights studying, singing, whistling, hooping, or drawing figures, or one thing or another, or else be walking in the fields, woods or some other places, talking to my self, speaking to trees as to men, or as to Angels, or God; and thinking the least whistling of the winde, or chirping of a bird, or lowing of a beast, to be some answer sent to me 14 It is not surprising, as he comments himself, that ‘few that saw me in those headlong distempers, did think me at the best, fit for any place but Bedlam’.15 Indeed his repeated suicidal urges led his friends to take drastic action; ‘at last I was taken’, he recounts, ‘and bound hand and foot, and held (or tyed) fast in a bed till the raging fits were over’.16 What is more interesting, perhaps, is that despite the extremity of his behaviour he was not sent to Bedlam; that, indeed, this period of what he calls distraction is merely an episode in the narrative of his life, no more significant than the period of extreme poverty when he was reduced to eating quills and leather, rather less than various dreams. John Rogers probably came closer than many sectarians to being seen by his contemporaries as mad; but it is clear that many of the characteristics associated with radical religion might from an outside perspective seem hard to reconcile with sanity. Quakers were named for the uncontrollable shaking that came over them as the spirit spoke in them, and aimed to be in constant communion with the world of the spirit; Fifth Monarchists, associated with prophetic and ecstatic religion, expected the imminent establishment of Christ’s kingdom, and saw themselves as having a duty to help it along. Sectarians of many varieties interrupted church services to declare the errors of the minister, and went into the streets to call the people to repentance.17 Young women stopped eating and fell into rapturous prophecy; Sarah Wight, according to her biographer, ate nothing for seventyfive days, declaring herself ‘so full of the Creator, that I can now take in nothing of the Creature’.18 In communities like these, to be in a state of delirium, vision or despair need signify nothing beyond the processes of spiritual growth; to be extreme, in a sense, was to be privileged. Extreme emotion, viewed with suspicion by outsiders and frequently associated with mental instability, was for many enthusiasts and sectarians absolutely necessary when dealing with matters of the spirit, as a guarantee of both the seriousness and the truth of the religious experience. To be cool and collected was not something most of them would have aspired to. ‘You are very hot for

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mercy’, the Devil tells Bunyan as they struggled over his soul in the 1650s, ‘but I will cool you’.19 The believer strove to stay in the state of heat and passion that indicated the working of grace. Better to be swept away, out of control and desperate than to be cold, calm and unaffected by faith. Moreover a long tradition in Christianity required the believer to acknowledge himself or herself as in some sense out of control, helpless in the hands of supernatural forces; redemption would be brought about only through abasement and the recognition of the self as weak and sinful. Passivity, in this sense, is something to strive after. This displacement of the self-mastering humanist subject in favour of an outside (divine) authority was at its most marked in the radical theologies of the time, both Protestant and Catholic; and the ability to let go of all sense of self-worth and self-government was repeatedly called for in the religious writings of groups such as Quakers and Fifth Monarchists.20 Often, too, this involved a rejection of the idea of the self as knowledgeable or competent. For John Crook, in becoming a Quaker, ‘the Difficulty to part with my Wisdom or Knowledge I found to be the greatest of the Tribulations that I passed through’, but ‘I at last gave my self up to be a Fool for Christ, and as one besides my self for the Lord’.21 This is a process that explicitly threatens the mind’s balance. ‘I thought I should have been Distracted’, he declares, ‘because of God’s Terrors that were upon my Soul.’22 The familiar Christian topos of being mad or a fool to the world in order to be wise for God is given added impetus in the seventeenth century by the wide dissemination of such ideas.23 Instead of relying on the self as a source of knowledge, for many sectarians direct communications from the spiritual world were the most highly valued truths. Such communications came by various routes. Signs and portents, dreams and visions, mysterious voices, insistent scriptures, are all recorded and interrogated for meaning. At moments of doubt or fear, believers of all kinds commonly had recourse to the bible, opening it to find in the text God’s answer to their predicaments; Providence would guide them to the right verse. God also frequently intervened to address his people directly with reassurance or instruction (often with commands to go and do difficult or unpleasant things). The Devil too is a constant and active presence in many spiritual narratives. Bunyan is tormented in various ways; the Devil urges him to commit the sin against the holy ghost, or to sell Christ, or simply to give up on religion: ‘sometimes I have thought I should see the Devil’, he records, ‘nay, thought I have felt him behind me pull my cloaths: he would be also continually at me in the time of prayer, to have done, break off, make haste, you have prayed enough’.24 The godly lived in a world of constant interaction with supernatural forces. Visions and dreams were particularly highly valued; as Nigel Smith comments, ‘radical Puritans and sectarians regarded dreams and visions as manifestations of supernatural inspiration, valid prophecies which told a truth and which bolstered the authority of a particular sect or individual’.25


According to the mystic Thomas Tryon at the end of the century, ‘the knowledge of Visions and Dreams is reckon’d among the principle Gifts and Graces immediately bestowed by the Lord on them that fear him’.26 Visions were recorded by many sectarians, often as matters of course. Elizabeth Avery, member of a Fifth Monarchist congregation in Dublin in the 1650s, moves smoothly from the more conventionally melancholy motifs of sorrow, not eating and a sense of isolation from the world, through to an encounter with what is presumably some kind of angelic messenger: I was troubled to hear any Preach, and being once got to go to the publick place, I was so tormented that I could not bear it; for I could not joyn with them, nor hear, nor pray, nor had no rest, no comfort, nor ease, nor could I eat or drink, but went (as I was wont) to bewail in a Garden, where I was moaning, when there came one unto me, and presently told me, That I was under the opening of the fifth seal, and very near the sixth 27 There is no change of register here: to be visited by one who tells her that she is under the opening of the fifth seal seems no stranger than her pain at hearing preachers, and she shows no apparent wish to present this as evidence of any prophetic credentials. For the believer, such visitations are to be expected. For the visionaries and prophets of the radical religious movement, interaction with the forces of the spiritual world was dramatic and continuous. Anna Trapnel, a celebrated prophet of the 1650s whose visions and experiences were recorded in a number of pamphlets, is woken not only by the devil offering her knives to kill herself, but by God: ‘something as it were pulled me by the shoulder, with this voice, it is better for thee to wake, I will shew thee thy Saviour in the Mount’, she is told.28 Her writings describe visions, raptures and conversations: so much Glory was presented before me, such Visions of the Eternal God, that tongue is not able to express; the Raptures were so great, that I was not sensible of a body the Son of Righteousness arose with healing in his wings, and uttering his Voice, telling me that he was my beloved that would not leave me 29 Such encounters are described in a rhetoric of ecstasy, emphasising both the inexpressibility and the sensual pleasure of communion with the divine, and yet simultaneously its ordinariness. ‘God I may say spoke to me as a man speaks to his friend’, remarks Trapnel memorably, ‘but in a far more transcendent manner’.30 Accusations of madness against the sectarian community, indeed, are frequently tied to their use of language – as Clement Hawes calls it, the rhetoric of enthusiasm, which favours extravagance of expression, incoherence,

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repetition, allusiveness and associative leaps.31 Such writing also places great emphasis on alternative forms of knowledge – dreams, visions and the like – and attempts to communicate to the reader experiences defined by their inexpressibility. Writing of this kind, in the view of many contemporaries, is the very image of madness. If one of the defining characteristics of early modern madness is raving and disconnected speech, the writing of particularly the more extreme fringes of the religious and political movements of the mid-century seems to enact that distraction of language. And yet all kinds of features of spiritual travail described by spiritual autobiographers, which now might be interpreted under the umbrella of mental disorder – named variously as depression, eating disorders, suicidal tendencies, paranoia, schizophrenia – do not primarily suggest madness in their own context. On the contrary, in the culture in which they are recorded, they are positively normal. Not to be seized by intense self-loathing at your own sinfulness; not to acknowledge the need to register in body and mind the urge towards godliness; not to recognise that God and the Devil are both intervening in everyday life and may choose a range of ways to signal their interventions: to a religious community in the seventeenth century, all these would signify real (spiritual) madness. Sorrow, despair and delusion are the common currency of these communities, with the proviso that it is emergence from these conditions which defines the awoken Christian. And while sectarians may polemically accuse one another of insanity, or indeed acknowledge that the path they follow carries risks, nonetheless for them madness is identified not by specific eccentricities of behaviour, but rather by a refusal to accept the truth. Thus if enthusiasts were apt to be regarded as mad by the members of more sedate religious groups, they defined madness as the inability to realise one’s true condition, and the anger and hostility of the worldly when faced with saints who were likely to remind them of it. Barbara Blaugdone, for example, uses the word to describe those of her old acquaintance who were unable to cope with her in her converted Quaker identity: even those now were afraid of me, and would not come near me, but the dread of God was upon me, and it made some of them to Tremble; and some said, I was a Witch: and when I would go to their Houses to reprove them, they were so mad that they would run away, and then their Servants would come and hale me out; and when I would go to sit down, they would drag me along the Stones, and hale me out and shut the Doors 32 Madness, in such usages, is the condition of sin: being alienated from God and failing to realise it. This is indeed a familiar piece of Christian rhetoric; Thomas Adams uses it at the beginning of the century as the governing metaphor of his sermon Mystical Bedlam, declaring that ‘every wilfull sinne is


madnesse. Doubtlesse, when we come to this precise distribution, and narrow scrutiny you will blesse your selves, that there are so few Bedlam-houses, and yet so many out of their wits’.33 And George Fox made something of a specialism out of treating the mad, bringing them to their senses by revealing to them the inner light, as if madness were literally the condition of the unenlightened soul. Thus he describes an encounter with a ‘distracted woman with her hair all loose about her ears’: I desired them to unbind her and let her alone, for they could not touch the spirit in her, by which she was tormented. So they did unbind her; and I was moved to speak to her in the name of the Lord to bid her be quiet and still, and she was so. The Lord’s power settled her mind, and she mended and afterwards received the truth 34 But madness might afflict the faithful as well as the unregenerate, and Fox’s notable success in dealing with the mentally disordered might be required amongst Friends as well as outside. As Richard Vann observes, ‘it is important to recall something which was never far from Fox’s mind: that such dark trials of the spirit might drive men mad. Fox’s skill at “discerning of spirits” and many of his rebukes to “airy notionists” were employed to draw a line – not always easy to maintain – between justifiable enthusiasm in the Truth and mental illness’.35 Cases such as that of James Nayler and his followers, as well as their generally fluid and ecstatic modes of expression and experience, made Quakers especially vulnerable to accusations of insanity.36 Outside the community of the religious, too, the responses of friends and family to the effects of religious awakening were often perturbed, and the accusation of madness went in the opposite direction. ‘I thinck my daughter will be distracted’, commented Agnes Beaumont’s father, in her narrative of her experiences in a Baptist congregation, ‘She scarse Eats, drincks or sleeps; and I have lived these three score years and scarse ever thought of my Soul’.37 And Abiezer Coppe’s cheerful characterisation of what happens when the believer first enters Christ’s church suggests the familiarity of the pattern: ‘when you are accounted fooles and mad men, and are besides your selves (in good earnest) and your father and mother are troubled at you, grieve for you, and at length forsake you, then the Lord will take you up ’.38 Indeed, the person going through the experience might be inclined to agree with the onlookers. Jane Turner, judged by some to be ‘neer a distraction’, adds, ‘truly my condition was so sad that I was afraid of a distraction my self’.39 Those who were visible on the public stage as visionaries and prophets were especially vulnerable to general scorn, in which the language of madness often played a part. Anna Trapnel was variously accused of being ‘mad, and under the administration of evil angels, and a witch’, she records (as well as a whore and a vagabond, at one point or another); ‘They will say the spirit of madness and distraction is upon her’, she declared, ‘but thou knowest Lord

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that it is thy Spirit’.40 Elizabeth Avery evidently expected the same response to her prophetic publications: And though I may be counted mad to the world, I shall speak the words of sobernesse; and if I am mad, as the Apostle saith, it is to God; and if I am in my right mind, it is to the benefit of others.41 Notwithstanding this expectation, however, there were plenty of other ways to explain and indeed pour scorn on the public prophets of the mid-century. Avery’s brother responded indignantly to her pamphlet, but rather than counting her mad, he regards her as misguided, proud and deluded by Satan, in a way altogether unsuitable to her sex. ‘Who would have thought or dreamed, that such expressions should ever have come out of the mouth of Sister Avery? What will you make yourself to be?’ he asks, telling her, ‘your printing of a Book, beyond the custom of your Sex, doth rankly smell; but the exaltation of your self in the way of your Opinions, is above all’.42 Trapnel finds herself in prison for preaching sedition against the powers that be, rather than in a madhouse; and those inclined to dismiss her seem more likely to suggest that she is malignant than that she is mad. The same pattern is seen in the responses of the authorities to the Quaker disruption of church services, for example. If enthusiasm is converging with madness, it still has plenty of political force left; jeerers may suggest that Trapnel is crazed, but it seems to be in much the same way that they might suggest she is suffering from convulsions, part of a general devaluing of spiritual insight as originating in physical disorder rather than divine intent.

Anti-enthusiasm: religious politics Depending on one’s point of view, then, religious sectarians and enthusiasts might be regarded as the truly and sincerely godly; as pernicious, hypocritical subversives out to undermine church and state for their own profit; or, increasingly, as mentally disordered, rather than malevolent. By the late seventeenth century, the balance was shifting decisively towards mental disorder as the explanation for religious enthusiasm; to be an enthusiast, with the intensely emotional, expressive and demanding religiosity that it defines, was in the view of many to be perpetually on the edge of madness. Texts such as Meric Casaubon’s Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm (1655) and Henry More’s attack on radical religious groups, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1656), are early instances of this repositioning of intense spirituality.43 More’s catalogue of religious sects represents the spread of religious ardour as an epidemic, and the beliefs of the various groups as so many symptoms; and at the level of the individual, excessive religious zeal is regarded as simply another physiological disorder. As Macdonald summarises his position, ‘sectarians who claimed divine revelations or prophetic powers were


suffering from diseased imaginations the victim’s brain became polluted by the poisonous fumes of the melancholy humour’.44 For More as for Burton thirty years earlier, all the visionary raptures experienced by the saints were attributable to organic disorder. It is, More observes: a strong temptation with a Melancholist when he feels a storm of devotion or zeal come upon him like a mighty wind, his heart being full of affection, his head pregnant with clear and terrible representations, and his mouth flowing and streaming with fit and powerful expressions to think that it is the very Spirit of God that then moves supernaturally in him 45 but in fact it is ‘nothing else but that flatulency which is in the melancholy complexion’, which ‘fills the mind with variety of imaginations’.46 The remedy he suggests is therefore ‘Temperance, Humility and Reason’, to moderate the body’s excesses and teach the sufferer to be suspicious of his own aspirations to a special access to God.47 True religion is virtuous, corresponds with the scriptures and is solidly rational at bottom; anything that does not meet these criteria is madness masquerading as inspiration. By the end of the seventeenth century, as state persecution of nonconformists gave way to toleration, this view was becoming the norm. ‘Enthusiasts’, John Sena comments, writing of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ‘were seen as splenetic sufferers, and their erratic behavior and religious delusions were explained as the inevitable consequence of melancholic vapors’.48 Over-emphatic piety, with its extravagant emotion and visionary elements, was increasingly assimilated to insanity – which did not of course exclude a repressive response to the potential for political disturbance associated with religious radicalism up to and beyond the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Both madness and religion retain a political dimension in this period. Michael Macdonald argues that the attack on enthusiasm was fundamentally ‘a campaign waged by Anglicans to discredit popular religious radicalism by claiming that it was a form of mental disease’, and that this was a direct response to the religious and political turmoil of the seventeenth century; elite antagonism to radical religion was articulated in its repositioning as madness just as much as in the imprisonment of seditious preachers.49 Casaubon’s Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, deplores the weak-minded people animated by ‘spiritual pride’, who lay claim to special knowledge; mystical theology is all very well in the educated, but ‘to commend it to ordinary people, and to women, especially, is to perswade them to madness’.50 Similarly Casaubon’s alarm at the prospect that ‘one Mad man is enough to infect a whole Province’ is motivated by the fear of popular excitement and its consequences; mid-century England had seen the potential of people like the Elizabethan ‘blasphemous Hacket’, who was ‘so ardent in his understanding, that he would ravish all that heard him; whereof some also he infected with the venome of his opinions’.51

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Burton’s distaste for the religious experiments of the poor, rude and ignorant, and his inclination to classify them as melancholic, had eighty years later become mainstream.

Definitions of disturbance Both godly and ungodly, then, proclaim the proximity of much religious experience to madness; both godly and ungodly also have alternative ways of interpreting apparently mad behaviour (the struggles of the soul, the temptations of the devil, on the one side; the disturbance of the humours, the malignant pride of those who should be too lowly to hold opinions, on the other). This still leaves open the issue of how in any particular case a given person is assigned to one category or another, and by whom. If Fitzherbert, Allen and Trosse, in the context of seventeenth-century spirituality, are perceived as anomalous or extreme, it is not self-evident why this should be so, and it is tempting to speculate whether the experiences of any of the three autobiographers could have been recuperated into a narrative that excluded the category of madness had they belonged to a different sect or a different moment: was Fitzherbert’s problem perhaps simply that she was born in the wrong decade, that forty or fifty years later she might have found a context in which her despairs and delusions had meaning to those around her?52 As a young woman from a gentry background, living in aristocratic households, and with a family which in her account was not particularly devout, madness might well have seemed a more plausible explanation than divine inspiration. Half a century later, however, when adherence to the gathered churches was at its height, Trosse and Allen were also regarded and treated by those around them as actually mentally ill. Both of them refused food, saw and heard strange things, were convinced of their own damned condition and in despair about it, spoke with uncharacteristic anger and aggression, attempted suicide – but they shared these characteristics with a multitude of others who remained at liberty. And it would be difficult to argue that their symptoms were so radically and qualitatively different to those of others that insanity was the inevitable conclusion. Allen, indeed, by comparison with a number of the writers discussed in the previous sections, is positively modest and low-key in the degree of her disturbance. Trosse’s outbreaks as he describes them were clearly more violent and extreme, but whether he was any madder than John Rogers running about the fields at night talking to trees is at least an open question. How, then, should we understand the difference in the responses of those around them to their behaviour, and indeed in their own retrospective understanding of it? Religious affiliation undoubtedly had an influence on the way that disturbances were perceived; there is a great deal of variation between the different religious groups of the time in terms of accepted beliefs and behaviours. If


the radical Protestant fringe allowed considerable latitude for eccentricity, for those associated with more moderate religious groupings, the negotiation of the relation between extreme states of mind, spiritual growth and mental disorder was perhaps more difficult. Hannah Allen’s family background was a religious one, but not of the radical kind; her family connections inclined towards Presbyterianism, which was far more restrained and cautious in relation to spiritual excess, and the ministers she mentions are prominent nonconformists such as Baxter and Calamy, rather than visionary leaders like George Fox or John Rogers.53 As Louise Yeoman comments, among Presbyterians ‘extreme extra-rational experience within was normally to be matched with impeccable social behaviour without’, something Allen was clearly falling short of.54 Contained by a well-informed and supportive family structure, Allen’s affliction was clearly understandable to those around her as simultaneously organic and spiritual, to be treated with sympathy but recognised fundamentally as an illness. Moreover the period of her disorder, the 1660s, is the latest of the three: the Commonwealth has gone, the prophets have for the most part vanished from the streets of London, and the ministers of her church are subject to persecution and keeping their heads down. Religious fervour is out of fashion, although it remains central to the lives of many. Allen’s melancholy remains strictly domestic and private. George Trosse in his youth was still further removed from religious radicalism. At the time of his breakdown he was (in so far as he was anything) on the conservative end of Anglicanism; he describes himself as having been ‘a zealous Bigot for the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy’, and ‘extreamly fond of Ceremonies’, as well as devoted to the Cavalier interest.55 Exeter during the 1650s, along with the rest of the country, clearly saw hostilities between the pious and the profane. Trosse refused to hear various ministers in the parish ‘because they would not wear Surplices, nor Baptize with the Sign of the Cross’; he indulged in ‘hellish and sarcastical Reflections’ about the power of prayer, and regarded the strict and holy with ‘Hatred, Scorn and Derision’.56 This evidently reflected the family position as well. When after the Restoration he decided he was unable to accept the doctrine and ceremonies of the Church of England, and instead became a nonconformist, he acknowledges that the decision would ‘disgust my Mother and all my Near Relations, who were perfectly prejudic’d against Presbytery and Nonconformity, and throughly devoted to the Episcopal Way and Interest’.57 With such a background, and with no prior interest in religion, when he began to rave about his sinfulness the assumption of madness was perhaps the inevitable next step. Contextually, then, it would be plausible to suggest that madness for all three of these writers is at least in part the outcome of their particular social, familial and religious environments: what appears in them as something requiring treatment might in a different time or another spiritual community have been perceived as spiritually motivated. From this point of view one

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might conclude that madness is purely social: whether or not a given person is defined as mad depends on the meanings of madness in a given social milieu. But the notion of madness as socially constructed, though it may be part of the answer, does not really do justice to the problem. This returns us to the problems of definition discussed in the introductory chapter. It was not only their contemporaries who were inclined to regard the sectarians as insane; historians subsequently have also mobilised the concept in discussing aspects of seventeenth-century spirituality, and the attempt to diagnose ‘real’ mental disorders, or to expand the category of mental disorder to encompass those who seemed sane at the time, is surprisingly common. Thus Christopher Hill joins forces with Michael Shepherd to offer an interpretation of the life and writings of the Welsh prophet Arise Evans, concluding that on the one hand he may have experienced a ‘revelatory psychosis’ in his early life, and on the other that in the context of extraordinary times much of his later behaviour was relatively normal.58 Edward Hare analyses George Trosse’s autobiography and suggests that he may have been suffering from alcoholic psychosis and affective disorder (rather than schizophrenia as others have suggested).59 And going further back in time, Margery Kempe has been variously described as suffering from hysteria, postpartum psychosis and ‘alternating mania and melancholia consistent with fourteenth and fifteenth century medical theory’.60 George MacLennan includes Bunyan’s Grace Abounding in his account of madness and subjective writing, discussing it alongside Trosse’s narrative on the grounds that, ‘In each case the crisis turns on pathological disturbance’; even Allan Ingram includes two late eighteenth-century prophets, Joanna Southcott and Richard Brothers, as instances of the language of madness.61 Nor is it by accident that all these instances relate to religious writers. As this chapter and the last have underlined, the relationship between religion and mental disorder in early modern England is close and troubling; it is also clearly still unresolved. Still more significant here, perhaps, is the difficulty historians have in dealing with the religious imagination.62 Seventeenth-century spirituality is an alien world in many ways, characterised by extreme emotion, passionate conviction and equally passionate despair, minute attention to every detail of thought and behaviour, moments of rapture, and a sense of being caught up in something greater than the self; it accepts the reality of devils and spirits, visions and voices, and sees providential meanings wherever it turns. This is a world that can be accepted as normal by those who live in it (notwithstanding the struggles around the idea of enthusiasm and religious melancholy), though it does not provide the same meanings for everyone. It may offer the mentally disturbed a system of meaning within which to understand and perhaps resolve their troubles; it may indeed attract people with ‘turbulent personalities’, as Michael Macdonald suggests; it may also, of course, be in some cases the cause of those troubles, reducing the godly to a state of desperation.63

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For historians, then, the difficulty is in grasping both the strangeness and the normality of this. Like any other belief system, the religious culture of the time means different things to different people; it can be comforting or destructive, a consuming preoccupation or an occasional concern. But it cannot be taken as a general signifier of mental disturbance. Whatever the disturbances and despairs of Bunyan’s inner world, for example, and indeed however those disturbances were articulated as strange behaviour externally, they did not signify madness to his contemporaries. The spiritual idiom in which he thought was entirely adequate to understand and explain his suffering and his consequent behaviour; it even provided a resolution of sorts, whether or not that resolution is seen to represent a full ‘cure’. Religion provides not merely a language in which to articulate mental disorder, but a language in which to experience it. To be suffering from spiritual despair is in its own terms a sufficient explanation; for many, there is no need to go further. Religion, however, is in constant interaction with more medical understandings of madness, and this relationship needs to be negotiated with care. All three autobiographers understand their sufferings in a spiritual framework, attributing both fall and recovery to divine punishment and grace. For Fitzherbert this framework is an alternative to medical accounts of her affliction; everything that has happened to her, she argues, can be understood within that providential structure, and the introduction of organic explanations is seen as an attempt to detract from the spiritual signficance of her experience. For Allen, conversely, while sin was undoubtedly implicated in her original fall into melancholy, it was her bodily as much as her spiritual disposition that made her vulnerable, and her recovery too is credited to physic as well as prayer. Trosse, meanwhile, like Fitzherbert explains his fall as the direct act of God to punish him for his many sins, but like Allen finds this quite compatible with an understanding of it as a real form of mental disorder – real madness, in his case. What is at issue here is thus not a choice between spiritual and secular understandings of mental disorder, but a perception of disorder as the effect of an interaction between these two causal models, with room for negotiation about which should be seen as primary. This is why the structure of spiritual autobiography makes sense for the telling of these stories: there is indeed a great deal of common ground with the sufferings of other autobiographers. Differences of period, religious affiliation, and duration may push similar experiences in one direction rather than another; but the outcome is not given. The point, then, is not to reach a retrospective view on whether any particular person was ‘really’ mad or sane. On the one hand, madness has a social dimension: the categories through which mental disturbance is understood and identified shape the ways in which people experience their own conditions, as well as the ways they are seen by others. But the broad category of the social is located in endless tiny instances, each open to interpretation.

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The diagnosis of madness appears as in certain ways a negotiation, a set of probabilities along a continuum: certain behaviours, at particular periods, in specific social milieux, and in particular people, are more likely to be identified as mad. On the other hand, however, madness is not only social; mental disorder cannot be reduced to the labelling of deviants, and a diagnosis of madness in order to be persuasive must have some raw materials to build on. Mental disturbances are inward as well as outward, and disturbance is registered in many ways. In reading narratives of mental disorder, then, rather than reaching conclusions about specific mental states, we are highlighting areas of tension and pressure, which in particular historical contexts may be variously perceived, articulated or experienced as madness; and religion is one vocabulary among many that comes into play here, rather than a privileged cause or effect.

6 The Thread Out of the Labyrinth: The Experience of Cure

Early modern doctors, like early modern asylums, have in general a bad reputation. In the work of Foucault and the anti-psychiatry movement they are positioned as agents and institutions of repression, dedicated to acts of silencing and exclusion; even without such a political and theoretical agenda, asylums are generally seen by historians as places in which the mad are to be managed and accommodated, rather than helped or cured.1 Treatment of the mad in general, whether in or out of asylums, was often brutally unsympathetic, concerned primarily with control and discipline. Abuses of the asylum system and of the procedures for declaring people insane became increasingly notorious in eighteenth-century England, and the impression given by court and medical records as well as by autobiographical narratives is of regimes that were often effectively unpoliced.2 An asylum keeper who chose to experiment with brutal and painful treatments, or to shut patients away in conditions of hunger, discomfort and dirt, might do so with impunity.3 These images of violence in the asylum condition our assumptions about the treatment of madness before the modern era. But in the descriptions given by Trosse, Allen and Fitzherbert of their treatment and their responses to it, the picture seems more complicated. Some aspects of their treatment, indeed, would have been familiar in the eighteenth-century asylum; vomits, purges, bleeding and physical restraint were a standard part of all seventeenth-century medical treatments. In other ways, however, what emerges from their descriptions seems more benign than what came later, and certainly (by contrast with later accounts) none of them expresses anything but gratitude to their various doctors and carers. All three were treated to some extent and at least some of the time as reasoning beings, entitled to a say in their own treatment; they were given support and care not only by family networks and doctors but also by spiritual advisors, who were clearly seen as appropriate people to intervene in such cases. Few eighteenth-century records suggest anything like the level of communication 102

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there seems to have been between the seventeenth-century autobiographers and those in charge of them. Up to a point, then, these accounts might seem to confirm Michael Macdonald’s often-quoted description of the eighteenth century as ‘a disaster for the insane’, by contrast with the more eclectic and less rigorously medical treatment of the seventeenth-century mad.4 The difference, however, is not necessarily the consequence of a shift in the treatment of the mad in general. The treatment of the disorders described in these texts is determined at least in part by the fact that all three were undergoing their trials at a point when religious understandings of the causes and cure of mental disorder retained a dominant position, and not only they but many of those who cared for them interpreted their experiences in that light.5 However delirious, religious madness provides a potential legitimation of its own meaning. If Trosse had been raving about fairies rather than angels and devils, it seems unlikely that the lady of the house would have tried to reassure him or brought ministers to him. To talk in the language of religion at least allows a way in for argument: whether the sufferer is in fact damned or not, has indeed committed the sin against the holy ghost, and so forth, are topics on which any godly person might have an opinion. The same is true of Fitzherbert, in her various conversations about whether she is damned or elect, and the pattern is clearer still in the case of Hannah Allen, whose disturbance was less dramatic, and more explicitly situated in the structure of affliction of conscience. The uncertain boundary between religion and mental disorder shaped the responses of their carers and provided a space in which the meaning and consequences of disorder might be negotiated. If at times these writers look to a modern reader as if religion drove them mad, it also seems to provide them with the space for recovery. The religious context of their madness not only changed the way they were regarded by the doctors in charge of them, but also meant that ministers as well as doctors were charged with their care. If the doctor dominates the imaginary world of later mental patients, in the seventeenth century the minister is potentially no less significant as a figure of power. And alongside doctors and ministers there are others prominent in their accounts. As the entire context of care is more domestic and familial in general, nonprofessionals are actively involved; not only close kin (whose imaginative importance will be discussed in a later chapter), but friends, advisers, housekeepers. This opens a window into the emotional dynamics of the treatment of mental disorder. What medical or spiritual treatment is given, and how is it received? What are the less formal ways of providing care, and what is the impact of religion beyond the domain of the minister on the experience of madness? What it means to be cured of madness, of course, remains a contentious question to this day; and we have no way of knowing for sure whether any of the three suffered a recurrence of their condition at a later date.6 What their narratives describe, however, is a process of recovery, in

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which some forms of intervention are clearly perceived as more effective or important than others, even while the ultimate cure belongs to God. Three elements of this interaction between religion and medicine, then, are explored in the remainder of this chapter. First, we look at the people involved in bringing about a cure, and the roles they play in the lives of the three writers. Secondly, the centrality of godly conversation to the process is described; for the central effective activity of those involved in caring for the mad in these narratives is speech, and the attempt – however apparently futile – to persuade the sufferers that they are in error. The final element centres on the idea of sanity as a matter of practice: sufferers are retrained in godly habits even if they lack conviction in the performance, as if by working on the outer forms the inner self could in fact be transformed.

Agents of cure: doctors, ministers and others The treatment of madness in early modern England, like the treatment of other forms of illness, took place in a variety of contexts – domestic, familial, medical and spiritual – and through many different types of practitioner. Physicians are by no means the only people involved in caring for the mad. Depending on a range of factors (financial position, family relationships, the form of the affliction, for example) families might also seek advice from lay practitioners, cunning folk or ministers, find ways of managing the situation in the local community, attempt to place the sufferer in a hospital or workhouse, or look after the sufferer within the family. Even where physicians were called in, it was as general medical practitioners rather than necessarily as specialists; there was no distinct category of mad-doctor in the earlier seventeenth century, although there were doctors with a reputation for particular skill in dealing with disorders of the mind (just as there were ministers held expert in counselling the afflicted). If the picture across the seventeenth century suggests both an increasing professionalisation of medicine and an increasing medicalisation of madness, nonetheless there is plenty of room for manoeuvre on the part of patients and their families in terms of the kind of treatment they sought. This relative fluidity is reflected in the accounts given by all three writers of the treatments they received. They lived in a mixed economy of specialists and amateurs, involving their own kin as well as doctors, ministers, and their families and servants. Hannah Allen, whose entire period of affliction was spent with members of her family, was brought to London so as to have access to ‘the best means both for Soul and Body’, that is, to the best ministers and the best doctors; and she was generally moved around with a view to finding both the place where she could be best cared for and the relatives best able to cope with her.7 At one time or another, she stayed with her aunt, her mother, her brother, her relatives Mr and Mrs Walker, and her kinsman John Shorthose and his wife. Not all of these are close kin;


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rather they are people who can provide a safe and careful environment for her while she is in a disturbed condition (as she remarks, she was ‘but an uncomfortable guest’).8 Fitzherbert too spends time in a doctor’s house, in the household of family friends in Oxford, and in her mother’s house in Wales, while Trosse is moved between what seems to have been a private madhouse in Glastonbury and his mother’s house, according to his state of mind. For each, then, in describing their affliction and accounting for their recovery, there are a number of possible significant figures: not only doctors and ministers, but also housekeepers, friends and acquaintances, and kin. The physician might be expected to be prominent among these. Seventeenth-century physicians were authoritative figures, highly educated and socially prominent.9 These characteristics combined with their literal authority over their patients made them potentially figures of considerable importance in the imaginative life of the ill. In fact, however, neither Allen nor Trosse indicates any particular interest in doctors. Allen barely mentions medical treatment at all; there are a couple of references to a chemist and an apothecary, but although doctors are consulted for medication, there is no suggestion that they had any serious diagnostic or therapeutic work to do. In Trosse’s narrative too one might say the physician was strikingly absent. He is the only one of the three to have been under the care of a specialist mad-doctor, ‘a Person dwelling in Glastonbury, who was esteem’d very skilful and successful in such Cases’; this doctor ‘engag’d to undertake the Cure, upon Condition that they would safely convey me to his House, where I might always be under his View and Inspection, and duely follow his Prescriptions’.10 But although he mentions physic in a general way as a support to his recovery, the doctor, who supposedly has him continuously in view, is scarcely mentioned again. Dionys Fitzherbert’s account is the most revealing of complex attitudes to doctors, not so much in what she says explicitly as in the content of her delusions, in which the doctor takes on a role of power and authority. She acknowledges the effectiveness of the medication her first doctor, Dr Lister, gives her; but it is Dr Carter, in whose house she lived for six weeks in the early stages of her illness, who plays the most significant part in her narrative.11 For some time she refers to Dr Carter as her master, and is convinced that he had power over the sky and the night and day. He and his family, in her eyes, take on qualities of godlike omnipotence: she ‘never thought it was night but as doctor C made it’; she was ‘troubled with fearful dreams that doctor C would burn me and the like, and when I waked lie sobbing & sighing’.12 Indeed his wife to some extent shares his immortal authority. Trying to understand the natures of those around her, Fitzherbert reflects: sure the meaning to be God was to be as they were and to live in that great pleasure I thought they did, and to be the devil was to be in that state I should be in; and sometimes I would think that they were devils,

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for sure none that had any goodness in them could endure to see one tormented in that manner they would do me 13 At this moment, the power that the doctor exercises over her expands to become a power invested in his family and extending over the entire cosmos. The doctor determines her times of eating and sleeping; he compels her to take medicine or orders other treatments; he appoints people to watch over her; as he effectively controls her entire world, so he is envisaged as controlling the rest of it. Her duty as patient is to submit to this control. ‘I told doctor C that I would gladly go unto my father’s’, she records. ‘He promised me that if I would be ruled by him so that I might recover my strength and be somewhat better, he would use all the means he could to further me.’14 Being ruled by the doctor is the condition of liberty; Fitzherbert’s temporary submission to medical authority, however, is in the end the means by which she evades it. Her acceptance of the usefulness of medication is strictly qualified. If in the early part of her affliction the disorder of her body was so extreme that medicine was needed to keep her alive, actual recovery takes place away from the doctor, after she has returned to her mother’s house and is in control of her daily life. The letter of thanks that she writes to the doctor’s wife after her recovery mentions the book of spiritual counsel Mrs Carter gave her, but not the medicine provided by her husband. Hannah Allen’s recovery, by contrast, is in the hands of the ministers, and it is men of religion who are the main focus of emotion in her account. Ministers loom large in spiritual autobiography in general, indeed; the minister’s position potentially combines intimacy, authority, knowledge, and power over emotional and physical states in an unsettlingly eroticised mixture.15 In Hannah Allen’s account they are both alarming and attractive, and actively involved in her care. An unnamed minister and his wife in London treat her kindly, having her to stay; though she is ‘very loath to engage in any Duty excusing herself from her unfitness to take the holy and reverend Name of God within her polluted lips’, such expressions of unworthiness persuade them that there are signs of grace in her.16 When the kinsman she is staying with attempts to get the eminent nonconformist divine Mr Baxter to visit her, she comments that ‘God will not let Mr Baxter come to such a Wretch as I am, but’, she continues, I had then a secret desire to see him, rather than anyone else. And to my best remembrance my Cousin Walker told me that he asked me if I would believe better of my self, if Mr Baxter told me my condition was safe; and that I answered, Yes.17 Ministers also bring into sharp relief her damned condition, and they evoke notably ambiguous responses in her. Seeing a godly minister passing along


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the street, she reflects, ‘Oh with what horrour shall I see that face at the great day!’18 When another friend attempted to introduce her to ‘any of Gods People’, she would tell him, ‘you’l dearly repent this; and how must I Curse you in Hell for all that you did in kindness to me’.19 Like her refusal to go to prayers, and her uncharacteristically rough temper, her resentment of ministers makes it possible to articulate thoughts satisfyingly frightful and different to anything she would normally be permitted to say. It is hard not to see in this marks of an intense ambivalence towards her faith, as well as an intense interest in the authority figures of that faith; an interest which reaches its height in the person of Mr John Shorthose, her cousin and a minister, through whom, as she describes it, her cure is eventually effected. Early in her illness she goes to stay with him, and questions him continually about her condition: nor had I any ease longer than I was thus discoursing with him, for though he often silenced my Objections yet no sooner was he gone from me, but my troubles returned afresh, insomuch that his Wife would often send for him home when he was but gone into the Fields.20 His reappearance at a much later stage provokes a storm of emotion: Ah, says I, that I dreaded, I cannot endure to see him, nor hear his voice; I have told him so many dreadful Lyes (meaning what I had formerly told him of my experiences, and, as I thought, infallible evidences of the Love of God towards me; and now believed my self the vilest Creature upon the Earth) I cannot see his face; and wept tenderly.21 It is, however, under the care of Mr Shorthose and his wife that she eventually recovers. Acting as her physician as well as minister, he combines in a single powerful person medical and religious authority.22 And while her ambivalence towards him enacts the temptation to resistance to both of those authorities, at the same time, as Elspeth Graham comments, ‘In the person of Mr Shorthose the medical, the familial, spiritual authority and masculine trustworthiness are brought together’, and his care brings her to the point where she can be successfully handed over to a second husband.23 If Fitzherbert and Allen locate figures of masculine professional authority as imaginatively central, Trosse, by contrast, identifies a lay woman, Mrs Gollop, as the key person in his recovery. Reflecting afterwards on his turn from madness to religion, he declares: if any one was more eminently instrumental in my Conversion than another, I have still thought Mrs Gollop was the Person. I am perswaded, under God, she has been the prime Instrument both of the Health of my Body, and the Salvation of my Soul.24

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For both Trosse and Fitzherbert, indeed, the care and counsel of women – mothers, housekeepers, doctors’ wives – is acknowledged as a central element in their recovery, and the domestic context of their care places a considerable responsibility on the woman of the house. It is not clear whether Mrs Gollop, whom he describes variously as ‘the gentlewoman of the house’, ‘the Mistress of the House’, and ‘my Land-lady’, was the doctor’s wife or a housekeeper, though the latter seems more likely; she is at any rate literate, and in charge of the servants.25 But by contrast with the intermittent violence of his medical treatment, which presumably took place under medical direction, this acknowledgement emphasises the importance of other kinds of care. ‘I would often fight and strive with Him who had the Care of me’, he records, ‘ a Neighbour of great Strength was call’d in, that I might be bound again, & tied Hand and Feet to the Bedstead; so that I lay a long while in Pain and Weariness, not being able to turn my self for the least Ease or Relief, so that I groan’d and complain’d ’26 Trosse has no complaints about this treatment; he regards it as appropriate for his outrageous and violent frame of mind. But those who inflicted it on him remain anonymous and irrelevant to his recovery. By comparison with the person who talked to him and listened to him (and presumably also saw to his meals and clothes and so forth), his medical treatment is merely instrumental, capable of restoring physical health but not of transforming his mind. And it is the transformation of mind that all three narratives must enact – a transformation that takes place above all in conversation.

Conversations with madness Since the context of care was essentially domestic and household, even when that household was also an explicitly therapeutic environment, sufferers were integrated as far as possible into the routines of the household, which included human relationship and conversation. And to a great extent it was religion that framed and made possible these conversations. Even if a given case was regarded as madness rather than affliction of conscience, the common assumption that madness was often God’s punishment, as well as the saturation of the language of the mad by the imagery of religion, opened up a common field of debate. To discuss whether or not one was damned, or the nature of God’s promises and mercy, was after all a very familiar mode of discourse to many people in the seventeenth century. Devils and angels were (potentially if not in every case) real and substantial entities; heaven and hell immediate and real concerns. Accordingly it was possible simultaneously to assume that a person had really gone mad because of a fear of damnation or as a punishment from God, and also that it was possible to engage with them in conversation; if they could be persuaded out of their errors, it might be possible to restore them to sanity.


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Thus throughout these narratives, spiritual conversation is a central part of the treatment. Spiritual conversation did not necessarily require education. Indeed a powerful theme in seventeenth-century devotion was the superiority of untutored but real faith over sophisticated and possibly hypocritical practice; too much learning might carry the student in the direction of pride or doubt. Such conversations as Fitzherbert identifies as helpful are with lay people – a gentleman who told her the story of a comparable case to her own, her sisters arguing with her about the sin against the holy ghost, and her mother (although their importance is not intrinsic, but in the thoughts and sentiments they provoke in her). Both Allen and Fitzherbert record repeated exchanges with their friends and carers in which they explained that they were cursed, and their carers attempted to convince them they were not. Thus Hannah Allen: I would sometimes say to my Cousin Walker, will you not pity me, that must as sure as there is a God, for ever burn in Hell; I must confess I am not to be pitied, for did you know me, you would abhor me, and say Hell was too good for me; yet however pity me as I am your Fellow-Creature; and once thought my self not only a Woman but a Christian Yes he would say, if I thought it was true I would pity you, but I do not believe it.27 And Fitzherbert assured her brother that there was ‘none under the whole heavens so bad or wicked’ as she, while her sisters tried to convince her that there was no sin God could not forgive.28 Nor is such conversation held to be effective only with those who have relatively mild disorders and a clear spiritual bent. Trosse at the point when he falls into madness has been irreligious for years, and his symptoms are less concerned with his own sinfulness and guilt than with his fury against God and his wish to injure him in some way; nonetheless in crediting Mrs Gollop as the key person in his recovery, he stresses above all the importance of her religious discussions with him. She was, he says, a very religious Woman very well acquainted with the Scriptures, insomuch, that I sometimes received a Letter from her with a Hundred and odd Proofs in the Margin, fitted in good Measure to comfort poor tempted and dejected Souls. She had great Compassion upon me; would many times sit and discourse with me; would give me good Directions, and offer me considerable Encouragements 29 Mrs Gollop’s reading of Trosse’s condition is one that suggests to her a religious response would be successful, despite his hallucinations and violence, and despite his irreligious past. The prominence of God and the devil in

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Trosse’s hallucinatory world gives her the material to work on, the point of intervention for religious discourse. The conversational approach only works up to a point, of course. For one thing, conversation needs to be carefully monitored to make sure that it is not in any way alarming or discouraging: Fitzherbert is thrown into acute despair by the opinion of a minister that she could not be one of God’s elect (she also suggests other ways in which conversation may be frightening, suggesting that people speaking or reading aloud to sufferers should have mild and gentle voices, since ‘even a natural loud and strong voice terrifies them’).30 Moreover, the assumption that persuasion can operate effectively depends on the ability of the sufferer to hear and understand what is being said. When Trosse is raving and deluded, he is not available to the voice of spiritual consolation even to reject it; all Mrs Gollop’s attempts at consolation, he comments, were ‘lost upon me, who understood little or nothing of what was said to me’.31 Conversations may thus be effective only retrospectively (‘what she had offer’d me seem’d, at that Time, to be as Water spilt upon the Rocks’): until God gives grace, the desperate soul cannot hear what is being said to it.32 Similarly in the earlier part of Fitzherbert’s affliction her delusions are considerably wilder, and it is harder to engage with them at the level of religious debate. Nonetheless, she is surrounded by people who point out to her that she is mistaken, rather than leaving her to rave. When she looks up at the sky and tells her waiting woman that ‘my master, meaning doctor C, I am sure knows how to go up thither’, the waiting woman corrects her: ‘Whither, said she, into heaven? no, God dwells there, and my master is but a man and cannot come thither until God there call him’.33 When she tells the maid who undresses her that she does not believe in God, the maid says, ‘Who then made you, and fashioned the members of your body?’34 She tells everyone around her that they are going to burn her, and they keep assuring her that they are not; when she says so to the doctor, he answers, ‘No, you may speak treason or any thing and have no punishment’.35 Unfortunately this leads her to suppose that she has indeed spoken treason, and reinforces her conviction that she will be burned. But it also suggests the way that those around her both discounted what she said – if she was mad and spoke treason she would not be held responsible, just as her insistence that she was the worst creature that had ever lived was not to be taken seriously – and at the same time were willing to enter into conversation with her about it. Along with conversation, the reading of good books has a role to play in reawakening the reasoning faculties, despite the common idea that the melancholy should be kept from too much reading and study (because reading overheats the brain and disturbs the balance of the humours, and also because it may encourage brooding and discouraging thoughts). Burton cites many cases of melancholy among scholars, remarking, ‘’tis the common Tenent of the world, that Learning dulls and diminisheth the spirits, and so


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per consequens produceth melancholy’.36 Timothy Rogers urges parents ‘not to put those Children, who are naturally Melancholly, to be Scholars for that will engage them perhaps to think too much, and at last they will be overwhelmed with uneasie thoughts’.37 Fitzherbert, however, argues against the notion that reading might be damaging to those afflicted like her: here are some much to be blamed who by all means seek to keep them in these cases as much as may be from reading and their accustomed meditations, happily thinking their distempered heads cannot so well bear it It is as dangerous I dare avouch it to these, to be persuaded from their exercises in this case, as for any man to lay aside his weapons in his most extreme needs 38 Her point is that such suffering is often a penalty for slacking off in devotion, as she suggests it was in her own case, and that therefore prayer and spiritual exercise is needed to restore spiritual order. But she adds that reading should be carefully guided (unguided bible reading was apt to produce a focus on the least hopeful passages). Books – and indeed letters, like Mrs Gollop’s letters to Trosse – could thus be seen as a continuation of godly conversation: when the interlocutor is absent, the book or the letter provides an immediate recourse for the sufferer to be reminded of the arguments against despair. The Scripture, according to Burton, is ‘like an Apothecaries shop, wherein are all remedies for all infirmities of minde, purgatives, cordialls, alteratives, corroboratives, lenitives, etc.’, and he suggests the use of ‘both human and divine Authors’ – although for women he observes that ‘instead of laborious studies, they have curious Needle-workes, Cut-workes, spinning, bone-lace, and many pretty devises of their owne making’.39 Fitzherbert never mentions distractions such as these; her focus, as usual, is entirely on the spiritual. But by the later part of the century the emphasis was shifting towards the need to divert and distract the sufferer, and the part reading might play in this, and secular reading matter is correspondingly more prominent. Richard Baxter recommends, ‘If they are addicted to Reading, let it not be too long, nor any Books that are unfit for them, and rather let another read to them than themselves. Dr Sibb’s Books, and some useful pleasing History or Chronicles, or news of great matters abroad in the World, may do somewhat to divert them.’40 Reading appears as a way of reintegrating the disturbed person into social and civil concerns both in its content (factual and diverting) and as process. Madness in these texts is thus both inside and outside normal conversation; reason evidently supposes that by argument and godly persuasion, unreason can be transformed. The treatment of Mrs Drake, discussed in Chapter 4, depended almost entirely on this principle that the mad should be persuaded that they were in error: if she could be convinced that she

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was wrong in her self-diagnosis of damnation, those treating her reasoned, then she would get better. The cure is thus described as an endless series of debates, in which the devil inspires Mrs Drake to more sophisticated and cunning argument than she would ever be capable of alone, but the ministers nonetheless succeed in beating her back from one position to another. Mrs Drake’s position is paradoxically reasonable, yet stubborn. She listens to the ministers and agrees with them: ‘All this discourse shee heard willingly without replication until he had finished what he would say, when shee being very rationall and convinced of the truth of what hee had delivered, acknowledged her error, and Satans delusion ’; ‘These, and the like things thus deliverd, did much amaze her spirit to have beene thus farre deluded and mistaken in her own Case, and wherein shee was so settled, resolute and confident’; and yet she retains her ‘resolute shew of stoutnesse and stiffenesse of spirit’, even though the minister ‘had got so much ground of Satan, as to beat her from her former strong holds’.41 Fitzherbert too replicates this supposition in her recommendations that those suffering from her condition should be persuaded of their errors by appealing to their senses. Thus, she explains, encountering ‘one who affirmed she had no head nor any hands’, Fitzherbert ‘by sensible experience made her feel and confess she had both’, and subsequently was able to convince her that she might be mistaken in other respects: When they fall into conceits of this nature the only way is to give them all possible satisfaction by their senses, for thereby you shall be better able to let them know how much they may be deceived in their opinion, that they are out of the favour of God 42 The ability to distinguish between truth and error, and to recognise errors in one’s own position, is here located in the ability to apprehend the realities of the material world as a prelude to spiritual truths. But the process remains one of logical deduction: the aim is to manoeuvre the deluded person into an acknowledgement that if (a) is true, then (b) must follow. It is an approach similar to that described by Foucault as ‘continu[ing] the delirious discourse’, forcing patients to follow a logical sequence that will eventually confront them with the impossibility of their own assertions, and recalling the debates discussed earlier over the extent to which the reasoning process might survive in the mad even when their perceptions were at fault; as if madness were to fragment into different elements of misapprehension, which might be separately addressed and resolved.43 Implicit in such approaches, of course, was the problematic assumption that those suffering from mental disorder could on some level be regarded as actually free to choose their condition: the appeal to deductive reasoning will work only when the listener is prepared to hear it. Fitzherbert is obliged to distinguish in herself between times in which she was able to hear and


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respond to persuasion, and times when she was not. When her sisters tried to convince her that she was wrong in supposing she would be put to death when her father came home, she comments, they did so ‘with reasons sensible enough at [to] any capable of reason that there was no such matter, but I said and spake as I thought, it is as certain as God is in heaven ’44 Faith in God, which she has now recovered, nonetheless has not yet breached the defences of her incapacity to reason. And the ‘argument’ that Mrs Drake is least ready to concede, according to her biographer, is that her indisposition of body unfortunately prevents her from being able to believe fully what she has been persuaded of, and until God gives her grace to recover and believe, she cannot do so – ‘a sore temptation’, comments the minister, ‘which even until her last shee could hardly shake off’.45 Later writers seem more pessimistic about the effectiveness of reasonable persuasion, although they still recommend it. According to Rogers, ‘rational and spiritual methods will not suffice for the cure of this because this disease works on the spirits and phantasie’; his recommendations combine medication, patience and trust in God.46 The tension between madness as something susceptible to spiritual reason and madness as an organic and bodily affliction, requiring a cure on another level than that of argument, runs through all of these accounts.

Orderly habits It is of course entirely orthodox within seventeenth-century Protestantism to insist that without God’s grace the troubled soul cannot find its way to faith. Since cure can only take place by the grace of God, and would be ineffective without the inner spiritual transformation that accompanies it, all three accounts need to demonstrate that inner transformation as the first prerequisite of recovery. Thus Trosse’s recovery of sanity fails him twice, because although his mind and body have been reduced back to sobriety, his spirit has not yet been truly awoken, and so there is nothing to stop him sliding back again into the same state. As he explains it, I remain’d vain and carnal, did not endeavour to search my Heart, to enquire into my State God-ward, to discover whether I had any evidences of Grace, or any marks of the New-Creature but contented my self with some external Reformation, and a Pharisaical Religion 47 It is only once his conversion has become genuine rather than a mere matter of performance that he can settle into the new self. For Fitzherbert similarly the key factor in her recovery is the sudden, almost miraculous arrival in her of ‘blessed motions’ which remind her of God’s promises and her former faith, and give her cause for hope.48 These coincide in time with her mother’s attempts to calm her by making her pray, but they

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are quite separate from it. Within a few days, they have transformed her inwardly, so that she can begin to put into practice her own routine, which comes from within and so can be truly transformative. ‘I am not able to express the great comfort of Joy I felt in a short time by using this custom’, she writes, ‘by little and little coming wholly to my former state, yea, and in so short a space that in 3 or 4 days I had perfectly recovered peace of conscience and use of my former faith and hope’.49 Hannah Allen’s account of her recovery, however, although careful to acknowledge God’s agency, is curiously mute and low-key on the subject of the workings of God inside her. God is in fact absent from her description of the process of her recovery, except of course as the implicit object of the public prayers she is once more participating in. Her final paragraph considers the causes of her illness and her recovery, observing that her spiritual maladies abated as her bodily ones did; and as God persuades her that in fact her unhappiness came from Satan, ‘accordingly my love to, and delight in Religion, increased’.50 Compared to the far more detailed and searching accounts given by both Fitzherbert and Trosse of their own failings and spiritual strivings, this is surprisingly brief, as if Allen’s acquiescence in the diagnosis of melancholy as primary cause allowed her to avoid the self-analysis required of the other two. In Allen’s narrative cause and effect work underground, so to speak; she is more concerned to describe what happened than to discuss the reasons for it, which are in principle implicit in the narrative structure itself. Yet despite this insistence that only the inward work can be truly effective, alongside this runs an apparent assumption that it is by the performance of certain outward forms that inward work is made possible. The notion of sanity as in some sense a matter of habit and training, indeed, is apparent in all three of the narratives. As George MacLennan remarks, ‘Trosse presents a gruelling and prolonged re-education of the self Christian truth requires a vigilant exercise of reason: it is not given but must be worked for’.51 What is aimed at in the various treatments described is a reintegration of the sufferers into the social; they have to be drawn out of their solipsistic and miserable preoccupations and made to conform to the ways of the world again. And the process of bringing them to this point may be medical, spiritual or domestic, or indeed all of these at once. In Trosse’s case it takes place in the first instance through a violent enforcement: ‘Low-keeping and Physick’, along with being manacled to his bed when he becomes outrageous, initially discipline his body, and reintegration into the meals and conversations of the house in which he is held perform the second part of the process.52 Conversely it is his failure to continue with disciplined behaviour following his first and second releases that both demonstrates the incompleteness of his cure and provokes the recurrence of breakdown. Following his second release, he comments, ‘it might well be presum’d, I should now live the most watchful and mortified, the most


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diligent and laborious, the most religious and godly, the most fruitful and shining Life, of any in the World But all cannot make a Man a true Convert, without the efficacious Operation of the Holy Spirit’, and accordingly, he relapses back into drinking and gambling.53 Allen describes her recovery as a gradual return to the practices of religion and communication (in her social world the two are clearly inseparable); she joins in household prayers, then she is persuaded to go to church, then to go walking to pay visits to friends. To none of these is she immediately required to lend more than her physical presence, in what is explicitly only a performance of piety; but this has its own force. As she continues with it, she is able to describe herself over the winter as ‘pretty conformable and orderly within the family’ – the enacting of orderliness has enabled her to offer at least the appearance of conformity – and eventually to declare a positive response: ‘I changed much from my retiredness, and delighted to walk with Friends abroad’.54 For Fitzherbert the retraining of mind and body comes about initially through the agency of her mother, who urges her to behave as she used to, in order as it were to rediscover in herself the person who used to behave in that way. The discussion between them as Fitzherbert records it lays bare the problematic relation between being and seeming. Her mother counsels her to pray and read according to her custom, and she protests: ‘alas to what end and purpose, seeing I cannot pray from the heart nor with any true feeling; and will God accept such prayers? no no, I know it well’.55 Her attempts to read and pray meet with little success; she cannot open her mouth, she casts the bible aside. Her mother further advises her: to work and be doing of something always, and not to be continually thinking and imagining of it. Ha, said I, it is my eternal state and how should I not then be troubled ? Quiet your self as much as you can, saith she, and do as I say until you may be resolved of your doubts.56 The mother’s response to the daughter’s distress is persevering. Pray and read; failing that, then at least keep busy with small tasks, and try not to think about damnation; failing that, then try to be quiet and behave as if you were not thinking about it, even if you are. Fitzherbert herself, committed to the notion that prayer is useless unless it is heartfelt, and that there is no more proper cause for sorrow than a spiritual cause, is required simply to pretend that none of this is true, in the hope that this will bring her to a position in which it ceases to be true. And indeed it is a pattern she repeats a little later for herself, setting up a daily routine of prayer, reading and reflection on a structure of very early rising and very little eating which allows no space for her to lapse back into extravagant behaviour. Inward and outward transformation thus work alongside one another in these accounts; external change is not sufficient, and yet it is more than a matter of form; it becomes a way to remake the self internally.

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Remaking the self Up to a point, these autobiographies suggest a more benevolent regime of care for those supposed mentally disordered than might be expected. Those who fall into melancholy or delirium are given medicine and restrained physically; at the same time, however, those in charge of the mentally disordered seem often to show themselves willing to talk, encouraging sufferers not to fall into despair or persuading them out of their delusions and misapprehensions about the world. In the case at least of these three – all from families of middle rank or above, all with a spiritual context to their afflictions – mental disorder did not imply exclusion from the human; it was an affliction to be addressed medically and spiritually, with a view to curing it, rather than a condition that changed the essence of the self. Like the Greek tragic madness explored by Ruth Padel, it appears as ‘something temporary, come from outside’; it afflicts, and then it goes away again.57 But despite this provisionality, the self remains critically at issue in these narratives. A pivotal moment in Fitzherbert’s affliction, and one to which she refers several times, was the observation of a minister brought to visit her soon after her collapse; the aim was presumably to console and encourage her, but the effect was the opposite: what did most cruciate and afflict my soul was the preacher, and (as I think) he that my brother made choice of to come to me. He being demanded if one of God’s elect might not be in my case, answered that his opinion was that God would keep his from such blasphemies. A cruel sentence, most certain, which shut the door of all hope 58 Here the powerful figure of the minister returns, but this time as destructive; he threatens Fitzherbert’s sense not only of herself as elect, but of herself intrinsically. And yet it is to this threat, paradoxically, that she subsequently attributes her recovery. For his suggestion that she might have been a hypocrite ‘and so dissembled in your former profession’ is one she vehemently denies, ‘always affirming constantly that I believed unfeignedly whatsoever I had professed’.59 Hypocrisy, both in its technical Calvinist sense of one who mistakenly believes themselves elect and in its ordinary lay sense of one who says one thing and means something else, threatens to undermine the fabric of the self; what one thinks and says about oneself is false. Fitzherbert identifies this inconsistency of inner and outer as something entirely alien to her, asserting instead a series of continuities: between what she says and what she is, and between what she was in her affliction and what she was before and after. Even at her moments of greatest confusion, she declares, she knew that she had once been a true believer, ‘it being the rock from which I could not be moved’:


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in the midst of all these temptations, when I accused my self of those things I never did, my heart for all that Satan could do would never accuse me but that I did most faithfully believe what I before professed. And so most assuredly I did; which at last was indeed the true thread that brought me out of the labyrinth wherein Satan had entangled me 60 The ability to assert this consistency of inner and outer, to take up a position as subject, is critical in recovering sanity for all three of these writers. Allen by the end of her narrative is able to declare that she lives ‘very comfortably, both as to my inward and outward man’; spiritually and in the world, she is at ease.61 Trosse concludes his account with a series of contrasts between how he was in the days of his sin and how he is now, which turns among other things on a revisioning of himself as human: I depriv’d my self of all common Grace, sunk my self beneath the Beasts that perish, and levell’d my self (in effect) with the Devils But now, I hope, God hath given me Grace I love my Fellow-Creatures, and can heartily pray for them, and labour to assist them in obtaining their Chief Good 62 To recover from madness is to be restored to a sense of self. The ways in which that sense is disrupted by madness will be explored in detail in the last part of this book.

7 Inside and Outside: The Body and its Boundaries

The governance of the body and its boundaries was a matter of intense concern during the seventeenth century, and a focal point for a range of social and cultural tensions. It has also become central to the explorations and discussions of scholars working on the period.1 A long tradition of religious asceticism, sharpened by the forces of Reformation and CounterReformation, was the context for a series of arguments around celibacy and marriage, eating, drinking and fasting, pursued in religious polemic and individual choices; these debates can be enlarged into a set of structuring oppositions between Lent and Carnival, self-denial and self-indulgence, which are preoccupied with questions of what goes into the body and what comes out again.2 What Norbert Elias named the ‘civilising process’ was reshaping bodily culture around new norms of politeness, and identifying the use of fork and handkerchief rather than fingers and sleeve as the defining marks of gentility.3 The criminal body was subjected to ingenious physical penalties, restrained and confined, interrogated and put on display; at a different level, the medical body was dissected, anatomised and investigated for another set of meanings.4 Women’s bodies especially engaged the attention and the energies of various authorities, particularly religion and the law. As historians such as Natalie Zemon Davis have demonstrated, the woman’s body was seen as fundamentally unruly and undisciplined at its boundaries, leaky, volatile and tending to pollute.5 At the same time the cultural imperative of female chastity, however problematic in practice, was constantly reiterated in literature of all kinds – conduct books, sermons and religious writings, poetry, drama, satire. It also implied a high level of regulation and surveillance, as Laura Gowing’s recent account of women’s bodies in this period, focusing on the intense policing of sexuality, pregnancy and childbirth undertaken in the early modern community, demonstrates.6 The question of whether 118

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the female body could be made civilised in other respects was perhaps more problematic.7 The cultural preoccupation with the management of the fundamental activities of the human body – eating and drinking, sex, death – was thus especially pronounced at this period. But of course such activities are always managed, in any culture. From anthropology to psychoanalysis, scholars over the last century have been concerned to understand the different meanings generated by the ordering of the human body in different times and places. And the concept of boundaries has been especially significant here. The establishment (psychically or culturally) of the body as a closed, ordered system, in which intake and output are regulated, directs attention to the places where things are taken in and put out, where the boundaries of the body seem fragile or permeable. The substances associated with those boundaries, which are part and yet not part of the body itself, also become significant in all human cultures. Cultural injunctions and prohibitions attach to all of them: blood, sweat, tears, saliva, urine, excrement, vomit, milk, menstrual blood, sexual fluids, are all bound up with ways of thinking about purity and danger (as Mary Douglas famously put it): about cleanliness and pollution, health and sickness, virtue and sin.8 Conversely, if these are the substances that escape the boundaries of the body, another set of meanings attaches to those that are taken in. Appetite and disgust, greed and abstemiousness, incorporation and rejection, evoke powerful and deep-rooted emotions; ‘in the language of the oldest – the oral – instinctual impulses’, as Freud comments, ‘the judgement is: “I should like to eat this”, or “I should like to spit it out”; and put more generally: “I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out” ’.9 This desire for control over the intakes and expulsions of the body focuses attention once again on the boundaries, and the question of what openings are available for incorporation. It also has to do with the establishment of limits and edges, and the fixing of the distinction between inner and outer. These models are particularly pertinent to Renaissance ways of thinking about the body, both because of the general cultural concern with bodily governance which was my starting point and because in Renaissance physiological and dietary theory a great deal of attention is given to the processes of ingestion and evacuation, and to the ways in which the substances taken into the body are converted into the substances of the body.10 Moreover the body itself is understood as internally fluid and mobile, constantly changing in composition according to diet, climate, age and sex; illness, as we have seen, is above all an unbalancing of the carefully regulated ebbs and flows of the body, in which one humour or another becomes predominant or defective. Medication attempts to rebalance the humours by removing whatever is in excess, whence the popularity of purges, bleeding, direct application of heat or cold, and so forth.

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Mental disturbance as much as physical is implicated in these systems of balance and regulation. To correct the body’s imbalances, it was necessary to work not only through medication and diet, but also through more abstract (as we would see them) categories. Emotion is tied in with the flows of the body, and in excess or deficiency can thus produce physical illness. To cure melancholy through friendship and conversation was thus to work actively on mind as well as body, for the expression of friendship would help the hardened fluids of the body to flow again.11 At the same time, however, the tempting proximity of the language of the early modern body to the preoccupations of recent cultural theorists does pose problems, and we might ask whether in fact the very visibility of such preoccupations changes their meaning. If the boundaries of the early modern body are already perceived as fragile and permeable, then what is at stake in maintaining or destroying them may be less, or at any rate different. To explore the ways in which the body is represented in these texts, then, is to address the question of meaning at several different levels. Each writer simultaneously participates in a given set of cultural understandings of the body (religious, medical, social, sexual, physiological, and so on) and also inflects those understandings in particular ways. The question is, how do cultural attitudes to the body help us to make sense of the subjective symbolic systems in which those attitudes are articulated, and vice versa? It is not surprising that mental disorder is preoccupied with the body, its status, regulation and desires; it has this in common, indeed, with mental order. But the cultural codes which supposedly (though only ever partially and problematically) embody subjects according to their regulations are thrown into disarray by upheavals of the mind; what seems to have been firmly established is put into question. Madness, notoriously, makes mistakes about the body. It eats and drinks the wrong things, too much, not at all; it desires in the wrong way, at the wrong moment, the wrong person; it exposes itself naked, dresses oddly, doesn’t wash enough or can’t stop washing; it is confused about what it means to be alive, to be dead, it fears death and seeks it. It has trouble, to put this another way, with the constitution and maintenance of the boundaries of the self, and the boundaries between self and other. This chapter and the next pursue these themes in various ways, focusing on the representation of the body in the autobiographies under discussion. In this chapter, the focus is on the body’s own boundaries, and how they are maintained; specifically in relation to the question of what goes into and comes out of the body, and clothing and nakedness. The next chapter looks at the body in relation to other bodies: the infliction of damage, ideas about live and dead bodies, about gods and devils, and the permeability of the human body to the demonic. All three texts register intense and repeated anxiety about these fields, and in doing so articulate both individual and cultural pressures on the question of what it means to be or to have a body.


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I take this into myself; I put this out What is inside the body and what is outside ought in principle, in early modern thought, to correspond, however often it fails to do so. Beauty of form should be an index of beauty of character; darkness, ugliness, deformity, connote their spiritual equivalents within. The constant collapse of this presumption provides an endless source of literary paradox, but the presumption itself is continually reiterated. Corresponding to this in the sphere of devotional writing, spiritual debate of the early modern period is obsessively concerned with issues of hypocrisy and dissimulation, precisely representing a disjunction between inner and outer, what one truly is and what one appears to be. ‘Hypocrisy’, declares an anonymous early seventeenth-century anatomy of sin, ‘is, when a man is inwardly in himselfe wicked, & yet would outwardly seeme vertuous’; ‘the hypocrite is neat and curious in his religious out-side, but the linings of his conscience are filthy and polluted rags’, affirms the preacher Thomas Adams.12 As women were generally regarded as the more deceitful sex, too, the injunction against hypocrisy is often particularly aimed at them. The author of an early conduct book urges his female readers, ‘you are to be really, what you appear outwardly’, unlike those who have ‘learned artfully to gull the world with appearances These can enforce a smile, to perswade you of their affability; counterfeit a blush, to paint out their modesty; walke alone, to expresse their love to privacy one would imagine them terrestriall Saints at least, whereas they are nothing lesse than what they most appeare’.13 Hypocrisy and dissimulation are also a matter of speech: what comes out of the mouth (crossing from inner to outer) does not represent what is in the heart. Thus it may be seen as significant that the beginning of Dionys Fitzherbert’s illness is marked by dissimulation combined with the body’s rejection of food; her first symptoms are appropriately concerned with the passage from outer to inner and back, with consumption and rejection. Fitzherbert’s ‘fall’ begins with a pretended illness designed to extricate her from embarrassment: she did not have money to buy a New Year gift, and took to her bed so that it would not be too apparent. This in itself is mortifying, suggesting a concern with worldly matters which she is at pains to disown, and obliging her to name herself as a liar. ‘Lo now indeed I began to play the hypocrite’, she comments: she is pretending to be something she is not (a sick person) in order not to face social humiliation, and she adds that those who knew her would be surprised at such a trivial initial cause.14 The illness she pretends to is ‘the wind colic in my stomach’, which she was indeed slightly troubled with, she explains, but which she exaggerates.15 When she is brought a baked apple, however, forgetting her supposed

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disorder (apples, like other fruit, were held to be very indigestible),16 she eats it; and it strikes her down: when I had eaten it the core stuck in my throat and trembled me very much, and I (who now thought everything was a judgment of God upon me for my sin) persuaded my self it was gone up into the uvula of my mouth, and that undoubtedly it could never be gotten from there, but it would kill me 17 The apple is her downfall (as it was Eve’s); she cannot swallow it, her body refuses it, she feels herself choking. It is followed by medication and vomiting, probably initially as a result of a purge, but rapidly moving beyond that. She cries aloud, ‘in the hearing of many that I was forsaken of God’, and continues: I should be laid in the Charterhouse yard for all people to wonder at, and all the yard should flow with the matter that came out of my mouth, and did assuredly think all the bed and clothes were as wet with it as might be; and therefore did most instantly desire them that were about me to carry me into the yard, for thither I knew I must go, and there I should die with such torments that I should pluck out my own eyes 18 The grotesque fantasy of the matter coming out of her mouth, enough to flood the yard, is reminiscent of a favourite contemporary type of insanity, the man who could not be brought to urinate for fear that he would flood the entire town, as well as of jokes about leaky women’s uncontrollable urination.19 But the pleasurable and potent aspects of the fantasy have almost been drowned out. She is herself the one swamped by this matter, lying in her own vomit; the matter that comes out of her mouth is both potent (the yard will flow with it) and polluting.20 And this passage across bodily boundaries is replayed in her request to be taken outside. Excluded from the house, carried over the threshold into the liminally public space of the yard, she imagines herself on display; and there she will break herself in pieces. The image of the fragmentation of the body, starting with the mouth, is one she picks up again a page or so later. Assuredly, she believes, she will die, ‘for to my thinking, imagination and feeling also the palate of my mouth was quite broken away, and the gall within my body’.21 It is hard to work out quite what she envisages here: is it her own gall breaking loose, or that there is gall in the sense of bitter poison spreading through her body? Both ideas may well be present simultaneously; in any case it is experienced as a physical event, one of pollution and fragmentation. The triple use of thought, imagination and feeling is a reminder of the difficulty she has in


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describing such experiences, retrospectively known to be delusions but real and physical at the time. These fantasies, in their grossness and strangeness, are at the limits of what can be recuperated into her narrative of spiritual disorder; in the circulating copy, indeed, they are omitted or extensively amended. More easily accommodated is her rejection of food, and this indeed is a very common motif in spiritual writing. Christian asceticism, of course, has a long tradition of mortifying the flesh to satisfy the soul, and fasting is one of the readiest ways of achieving this.22 While for seventeenth-century Protestantism it might be undesirably associated with Catholic practices (Fitzherbert refers disdainfully to ‘all their haircloth and superstitious fasts’),23 it nonetheless seems to have remained in use as a private devotional practice, and had a surge in popularity with the mid-century sectarian movements. Famous fasters such as Sarah Wight or Anna Trapnel might survive for weeks on nothing, or on a bit of broiled fish, claiming to be feeding on the spirit; but it was also practised as a private discipline, in one form or another.24 The Quaker Barbara Blaugdone, for example, was guided by God ‘to abstain from all Flesh, Wine and Beer whatsoever’, and ‘drank only Water for the space of a whole Year’; she also engaged in total fasts in prison.25 Not eating is a continuing theme and a source of conflict between those regarded as mad and their carers; it is after all one of the few areas of bodily agency remaining to somebody who is medicated, controlled, and confined or bound. In the case of the prophetically inspired, their associates may anxiously discuss with them whether they are under a temptation for not eating, but there is no suggestion that guile or compulsion might be used.26 Fitzherbert’s carers, however, clearly felt entitled to do whatever needed to be done: if they brought me any thing to eat they had much ado to make me take it at the first, but after I fell to I it [it I] fed unreasonable, as I thought. For they would fear me with something, or entice me by some means, and hold my hands to make me eat, many times sore against my will.27 With hindsight she regards this as benevolent, in theory. Her recommendations for the treatment of those in her case includes observations on getting them to eat, referring back to what was done to her to keep her from starvation: my self and many others as I have heard of, have been in danger to be famished if such means had not been wrought when by no means they could make me take any [food], they would put it to my mouth and so let it fall to the ground, then persuade me they thought I would not for all the world offend God so as to spill his greatness in that manner Also by setting a weak and sickly person before me, and tell me that I was not

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so ill as he was to look upon, yet he could and would eat his meat. And other means they used in this kind and it is very needful, but great care must be had that no extreme terror be used 28 There is a significant gap between her description of what was done to her in the main part of the narrative, where a degree of fright and force are clearly being used, and her recapitulation of it as part of a commentary about appropriate treatments, in a context in which she is positioned as expert witness, where the emphasis is on persuasion (if necessary through deception) and not on fear. The reluctance to eat in itself, however, she barely comments on; it seems so natural a part of both mental disorder and spiritual disturbance that it requires no further explanation. There is an edge of unease about her picture of herself feeding unreasonably, with animal greed rather than human restraint, perhaps, which invokes the negative meanings of eating: to eat is to be driven by bodily imperatives, to be gluttonous. Eating is only free of this taint if it is made explicitly a means of maintaining life and no more; so at the end of her illness, describing the daily routine she adopted for recovery, Fitzherbert eats only twice a day and very little, ‘only to stay my stomach it might be no hindrance to me’.29 The growls and complaints of the neglected body are an annoying interference, and it should be given no more than a bare minimum; and the body and its needs, spiritually speaking, are always an intrusion, something to be got out of the way. This is the assumed and familiar logic of her position, so familiar there is no need to elaborate on it. For both Hannah Allen and George Trosse, too, not eating occupies a similarly ambivalent position between its associations with mental disorder on the one hand and spirituality (as opposed to carnality) on the other. During his madness, food to Trosse is repulsive: I would neither touch it, nor taste it, nor smell to it I refus’d all Food whatever which might be offered me. I would not endure the Smell of it. If it was brought nigh me, I would turn aside with the greatest Indignation and Aversion, as if it had been some abominable Thing.30 But this aversion, he explains, is the result of the devil’s influence; and the devil has in effect persuaded him to seal up the apertures of his body by putting strange thoughts and misunderstood scriptures into his mind, so that ‘I would neither open my Eyes nor my Lips’.31 Food is for Trosse a weapon in the cosmic war being fought out in his body, rather than an intrinsic signifier of holiness or sin, and his own weapon is his control of the body’s openings. ‘If I did eat’, he declares, ‘I was perswaded it was my Damnation, and that it was Rebellion against God; yet would I adventure to eat’.32 To eat or not is a declaration about the state of this war, rather than the state of


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his body; that it threatens his starvation is in a sense a side-issue, a devilish plot, rather than a central part of what he thinks he is doing. Drinking, as opposed to eating, however, is intensely meaningful; for drunkenness, along with travel and the love of fine clothes, is one of the central vices that brings him to madness. As a young man travelling, he takes up the habit of drinking to excess and repenting next morning (‘I was greatly asham’d, and displeas’d with my self; looking upon it as an unreasonable and disgraceful Sin’); and it is one very firmly associated in his mind with the flesh, and specifically ‘Sensual Inclinations’.33 He resolves to drink no more in taverns, then slips into putting his head out of the window to drink, or ‘went out into a Gutter’.34 His narrative is littered with comments about excessive drinking, and its eventual effects on his body: When my Head ak’d, and feverish Heats invaded me; when my Head, my Hands, and my Body trembl’d, and my Stomach fail’d me, upon my excessive Drinking, I could not but be sensible, that my Drunkenness was the Cause of all these troublesome Symptoms 35 Drunkenness in his account prefigures madness, in its effects on both mind and body. It is the precursor of other vices – lust, gaming – taking him out of his own control, and leaving him to be driven by his desires. His breakdown begins when he returns from a long drinking session which has reduced him to a state of animality; coming back ‘excessively drunk’, and carried to bed ‘more like an Hog than a Man’, the following morning he wakes to spirits, voices and madness.36 Such attitudes are commonplace in early modern views of drunkenness. Drunkenness is like madness already, in being assimilated to bestiality and the breakdown of the capacity for self-government. The drunken man, as Thomas Whythorne commented in his autobiography a century earlier, spills his secrets, says things he should not; ‘drunkards when they have lost the mastery of themselves by drunkenness, then do their heedless tongues babble out the abundance of their hearts, and sometimes they know not what themselves’.37 The mouth that has taken in too much drink becomes the passage out for bad speech; the drunk body falls over, is sick and incapable, even when these things do not lead to madness. Drunkenness for Trosse does not need to be a specific precursor of madness to register the same pattern of disorder. But it is nonetheless appropriate that in his eyes it is through drink that the devil literally enters him, as he is being taken to the house at Glastonbury. The opening of the mouth to drink becomes the action by which he voluntarily ingurgitates the devil and confirms his madness. Drink, unlike food, is immediate and dramatic in its effects on his body, first as indulgence, then as damage; where food is a terrain of struggle between God and Devil, drink is taken into his body, and shapes what he can become.

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Like Fitzherbert and Trosse, Hannah Allen refuses food as in some way perilous to her, associated with damnation. Just as she cannot contemplate taking the spiritual nourishment of communion, eating the Lord’s Supper, so she becomes resistant to the physical nourishment of food: I would still say that every bit I did Eat hastned my Ruin; and that I had with it a dreadful Curse; and what I Eat encreased the Fire within me, which would at last burn me up 38 There is in fact a recurrent and intriguing link in spiritual narrative between eating and drinking, and the immanence of the devil. Sarah Wight, the fasting maid, is recorded by her biographer as declaring (in terms that echo Trosse as well as Allen), ‘If I did eat, I was terrified for it. Sometimes I durst not drink in a whole week together: because I judged, it was a Cup of Devils, and I drank to Devils, if I drank.’ And Anna Trapnel, describing her fasting during a time of spiritual turmoil (as opposed to her sanctified and prophetic fasting), says, ‘I durst not eat or drink for four days together because it was said to me, If thou doest, thou worshippest the Devil.’39 Particularly for women, it seems, the connections between flesh and sin are articulated above all through food.40 The effects of starvation on Hannah Allen’s body are directly registered: she describes herself as ‘exceeding Lean; and at last nothing but Skin and Bones’.41 If for the other two eating is inscribed in a struggle between the patient and the carers, or between God and Satan, in which the body is the mere terrain, for Allen the physical reality of the effects of not eating are apparent; a neighbour who sees her in her starved condition is shocked enough to tell her aunt, ‘She cannot live, she hath death in her face’.42 Physical reality intrudes too in an earlier attempt at self-starvation, where she hides with the intention of starving to death, but after three days ‘was so hungry and cold’ that she is unable to maintain her intention, and calls for help.43 The needs of the body and its vulnerability to deprivation or illness are disruptively present in her narrative, even if in oblique forms. Starvation as a means to commit suicide is relatively uncommon; although Trosse retrospectively suggests that his refusal of food was designed by the devil to starve him, death was not a willed consequence of his refusal to eat. The literal meanings of fasting are generally kept separate from death. For Allen, however, it seems to be generally the case that her suicidal impulses work on the boundaries of the body, taking in and letting out. She fails in her efforts to procure opium, but tries smoking spiders as an alternative means of poisoning herself: I got Spiders and took one at a time in a Pipe with Tobacco once I thought I had been poysoned; in the night awaking out of my sleep, I thought I felt death upon me, (for I had taken a Spider when I went to Bed) and called to my Brother and told him so 44


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Her brother went and fetched an apothecary who gave her ‘something to expel it’, presumably by making her vomit.45 On other occasions she tried to cut herself with scissors, hoping to bleed to death, or tore off the dressing where the surgeon had let blood. The competition between Allen and her physicians is in a sense around whether the opening and closing of her body will be harmful or beneficial. They let out blood and vomit, and give her physic; she cuts herself and takes spiders, and refuses food.

Clothing and nakedness Clothing carries symbolic weight in most human cultures, encoding messages about social status, sexuality, religious or political affiliations. As Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass put it, ‘Clothing is a worn world: a world of social relations put upon the wearer’s body.’46 In early modern England these messages were perhaps especially visible and ritualised. Sumptuary laws in the early part of the period restricted certain styles and fabrics by rank.47 Running battles over women’s clothing were fought out in print: women were accused repeatedly of dressing immodestly, or like men, of being in excess or defect of femininity.48 The stereotypical images of Roundhead and Cavalier identify the opposition between political movements as one of appearance above all: curls, feathers, lace and colours against hair short or covered, austere styles of dress, plain linen collars, dark shades (‘Right but Repulsive’ versus ‘Wrong but Wromantic’, as they appear in 1066 and all that).49 Clothing was expensive; most people owned only a few items, and would pass on skirts or jackets as things of value. Giving gifts of clothing – gloves, gowns, cloaks – was also an important part of courtly culture, occupying a central place in the repertoire of favours and patronage that shaped upper-class life. And being well dressed, in whatever sense, was crucial in sustaining a reputation. The Puritan, the court lady, the farmer, the countrywoman, all needed to present an appearance compatible with their position, in terms of age, sex, social standing and cultural orientation.50 Clothing, then, in early modern culture, is not merely concerned with the surface of the body; it is potentially constitutive of the self, both as public statement and in terms of the networks of relationship and emotion encoded by clothes. Fashioning, as Jones and Stallybrass suggest, is thus a term with resonance beyond the idea of what one puts on: it has the force of making: This notion undoes the opposition of inside and outside, surface and depth. Clothes inscribe themselves upon a person who comes into being through that inscription.51 Clothes, less often removed and more carefully preserved than they are today, are more like part of the body, a second skin, than like something belonging in any simple sense to the body’s outside.52 How people dressed

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was a statement of what they were; and clearly for people whose fit in their assigned place was uneasy, there was room for dress to become a problem. This is particularly the case for the religious. Giving up luxurious (or merely pretty) dress was a crucial and defining act, especially for women. The contrast between the godly and the ungodly was a visual and visible one, and a change of heart was signalled by a change of dress; the Quakers, with their preference for grey and their refusal to remove their hats in the presence of authority, carried this awareness of the symbolic significance of dress to its highest point. Attachment to appearance was something that had to be overcome, that brought no true happiness. The Quaker Elizabeth Stirredge describes how as a young girl she ‘lent out an Ear to the Enemy of my Soul, and let my Mind go forth after fine Clothes’, but found these pleasures hollow: when I bedecked my self as fine and as choice as I could, it would hardly give me content; for when I had one new thing, when I saw another, or the third, I was as desirous as for the former and so ever unsatisfied. Oh! the lying Enemy, who promis’d me Rest and Peace, but could not give it to me 53 The rejection of the previous version of the self is frequently expressed through a rejection of that person’s attitude to clothes; thus Lady Mary Rich describes herself before her conversion as having been ‘as vain, as idle, and as inconsiderate a person as was possible, minding nothing but fine and rich clothes’.54 The Quaker Dorothea Gotherson’s fairly typical attack on finely dressed women brings together pride of rank, bodily immodesty, and attachment to perishing things as sources of damnation: all ye Ladies of England, who walk with stretched-out necks, and wanton eyes, mincing as you go, and making a clattering with your feet, curling your hair, and painting and spotting your faces, wearing gorgeous array, and the like; why consider, when you come to give an account for all things done in the body, where will you appear?55 And the phrase ‘things done in the body’ draws attention to the way in which the body in seventeenth-century religious discourse encodes a range of different meanings, both literal (what one wears, how much comfort one allows oneself, eating, sexual behaviour) and symbolic (attachment to bodily pleasures and to earthly ambitions and gratifications in general, as well as the idea of human life before death as life ‘in the body’). These examples come from the second half of the century; but the discourse of female immodesty attached to fine clothing and bodily adornment had been firmly in place long before that. Elizabethan and early Jacobean moralists such as Richard Brathwait and Philip Stubbes poured


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vigorous scorn on women’s extravagance and wantonness.56 Thomas Adams attacks the use of ‘Powders, liquours, unguents, tinctures, odors’, as symptoms of women’s mad desire to overcome mortality: There is mortality in that flesh, thou so deckest: & that skinne which is so bepainted with artificial complexion, shall lose the beauty and it self You that sayle betwixt heaven and earth in your foure-sail’d vessels, as if the ground were not good enough to be the pavement to the soales of your feet: know that the earth shall one day set her foot upon your neckes, and the slime of it shall defile your surphul’d beauties be not proude, be not madde: you must die.57 And the full title of Brathwait’s conduct book underlines at length the inseparability of the body and its adornments, and the identity of inner and outer: The English Gentlewoman, drawne out to the full body: expressing what habilliments doe best attire her, what ornaments doe best adorne her, what complements doe best accomplish her. ‘Believe it’, as Brathwait severely points out, ‘though your Person be the Booke, your Behaviour is the Index’.58 Similarly Thomas Wright, discussing the passions, insists on the transparency of the female body: ‘as harlots by the light and wanton motions of their eyes and gestures may quickely be marked, so honest matrons, by their grave and chaste lookes, may soone be discerned’.59 Female virtue is located in the body both as chastity and as all its visible encodings; the meaning of women’s bodies is legible in gesture, movement and expression as well as dress and decoration. Nor was it only women’s bodies in question here, of course. While bodily modesty was less of an issue for men than for women, the social, cultural and religious meanings of dress were equally pertinent; and men’s costumes, at least among the upper classes, were hardly less flamboyant than women’s. Male vanity, ostentation and extravagance were also targets of satire and moral protest, and the courtly man, in perfumes, jewels and silks, recurs throughout the period in literature and polemic as a figure alarmingly close to his female counterpart.60 As the religious woman was enjoined to abandon her immodest and expensive adornments in favour of dark colours and simple shapes, so the religious man was reminded that to waste time and money on worldly display was an affront to God. Hair for both men and women was also a key symbol, taken as a visible declaration of compliance with gender roles as well as godliness in general. Long hair, the archetypal sign of femininity, was to be confined to women only. Married women were supposed to keep their hair covered; men to cut it short, not wear it long and curling. (Milton’s description of Adam and Eve in Paradise, indeed, in the absence of clothes reads their hair as defining the appropriate relation between the sexes: waist-length hair signifies submission.61 ) Godliness and

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virtue in both men and women write themselves on the body, as sober dress, temperance, physical containment. Hannah Allen, growing up in a religious family, presumably knew this from the outset, and dressed according to her family’s principles; the question of what she wears and what it means never disturbs her narrative. Both Trosse and Fitzherbert, however, have to negotiate a transition out of families that are wealthy and predominantly secular in outlook; and for both of them in different ways dress is a source of disquiet and guilt. For Trosse, the connection between his extravagant dress as a young man and his general sinfulness is clear: it is yet another instance of his indulgence in worldly pleasures. His taste for luxury had been too much even for his indulgent mother – he records that when he put ‘broad Gold-Lace upon the Sleeves of my Doublet’ she ripped it off; and this love of fine clothing is to be punished in the most appropriate way, first by reducing him to a state of dishevelment, and secondly by tormenting him with the memory of his vanity.62 To have one’s clothing in disarray is of course a traditional mark of madness (one Hamlet plays on when he rushes in on Ophelia all unbuttoned); the mad lose track of the conventional codes governing the covering of the body, and go about naked.63 As Macdonald points out, the association between insanity and going ragged or unclothed evokes both a state of bestial unreason and a rejection of the hierarchical social relations coded by dress: By reducing his apparel to rags, the lunatic repudiated the hierarchical order of his society and declared himself a mental vagrant; by casting away all artificial coverings, he shed all trace of human society.64 So when Trosse describes himself ‘going up and down, perfectly neglecting my self, with my Cloths half on and half off ’, he is enacting madness in classic style.65 Dressing and undressing also lend themselves to metaphor, acquiring additional meanings in the course of his madness, though always tending in the same direction. ‘If I did put on my Cloths, and ty’d them about me, then I thought I bound my self to the Devil’, he records; ‘If I unloos’d, and put them off, then I fancy’d I unloos’d myself from God.’66 But Trosse also gives more detailed accounts of what his dishevelment means emotionally. His first descent into madness is appropriately marked by the removal of his clothes, piece by piece: in response to the voice urging him to be ‘Yet more humble’, he rolls down and then removes his stockings, takes off his hose, and then his doublet. ‘[A]s I was thus uncloathing myself,’ he explains, ‘I had a strong internal Impression, that all was well done, and a full Compliance with the Design of the Voice.’67 When he comes to replace his clothes, still in obedience to the voice, the sense of danger mounts. ‘I was directed by strange Kinds of Impulses what Garment first to put on,


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and so in Order’, he writes; and when he feels that he should not pull his stocking higher than his knee but goes ahead and pulls it up anyway, he realises that he has ‘greatly offended’, and hears a voice telling him he has committed the sin against the Holy Ghost.68 The meaning of these anxieties is not transparent, although the sense of inexplicable compulsion is vividly conveyed. What is clear is that clothing is from the outset obscurely bound into his fears, as well as being part of the system of guilt and punishment that he sees operating throughout his affliction. ‘My darling Sin’, as he explains, ‘became my perplexing Misery’: My Buttons, Gold, Silver and the Silk upon my Sleeves lay very heavy on my Conscience, as an intolerable Burthen, as weighty as a World. For I had been a foolish Gallant, and that too against the Will of my Parent.69 And he describes how he would try to pluck out his hair because he had taken pride in it, with the comment, ‘Alas! Little do foolish and extravagant Gallants, and such as pride themselves in their Hair and Apparel, think how dear it may cost them’.70 For Trosse, then, the standard tropes of madness – disordered dress and hair, inexplicable prohibitions governing the processes of dressing and undressing – are reinforced by their connection with the religious discourse which identifies sin with fine clothing. In these terms, the inexplicable nature of some of these prohibitions – why should the stocking go no higher than the knee? – can be accommodated within the framework of sin and retribution once again: if he had not been vain, he would not have suffered this punishment. Fitzherbert’s relation to this model, however, is more oblique. Having already experienced a religious conversion as a young woman, she represents herself subsequently as rather sober and seriousminded, withdrawn from frivolous pastimes. There is thus little room for the kind of self-reproach Trosse offers as an explanation of his anxieties about clothing. On the other hand there clearly is anxiety, which seems to focus around larger issues about worldliness, and is connected with questions about her legitimacy within her worldly family and her place in the aristocratic world she lives in, in which it goes without saying that everyone tries to appear to best advantage. Fitzherbert’s conviction that she has stolen her clothes is the most visible way in which this anxiety expresses itself, and it is intimately linked with doubts about her relation to her family: I imagined I had been a loose liver and a thief, and that therefore they would punish me, and had bound me so. But when they did remove me, which was in the night, they put a fair cloak and safeguard about me that my Lady L. gave me; therefore I thought I had stolen it My brother told me I was not near her, neither had I stolen those things

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from her, but she had given them me; but I thought he mocked me, beginning now to think he was not my brother 71 Loose living and fine clothes are associated, and along with them a sense of intense unworthiness: she is a sinner, a thief, not really a member of the family she claims to belong to. Another deeply anxious passage describing the behaviour of the doctor’s wife and children makes a connection between exposure and punishment, representing herself held up as an object of mockery. Even retrospectively, in this passage, she seems not altogether sure that what she saw is not what actually happened: Doctor C’s wife would stand and dress herself by me, imitating – at the least as I thought – my fashion and carriage when I was accustomed to dress my self; and that so perfectly as methought she expressed the pride I was then possessed withal Also the children would stand and stagger by me after their childish manner as if they were giddy, and one of them would say, God made this gentlewoman’s clothes which I thought their parents bade them do to show me the vices I had been subject to, and that they said God made my clothes because I had stolen them, which I believed confidently I had done 72 Fitzherbert in this passage sees herself as an object of sly mockery: the meanings of the actions she describes are never made explicit, but to her they are perfectly clear. It is because she has been proud that she can be wounded by imitation, and because she has been subject to vice that the children’s words mean more than they seem to on the surface. The problem perhaps is precisely that God did not make her clothes: her clothes signify the gentlewoman, rather than the religious woman, and do not fully belong to her. Both in the ornamentation and the conduct of her body she has been marked as a corporeal emblem of the vice of pride: not only her dress but her flesh, her movements in putting it on, display her guilt. The idea of excess visibility, of being made into a spectacle, links anxiety about adornment with anxiety about nakedness. Biblical imagery lends its weight to the symbolism of clothing and unclothing, theft and punishment. As God tells Jerusalem, in a chapter suggested by Fitzherbert as a model for her own life: I wil also give thee into their hands, and they shal destroy thine hie places they shal strippe thee also out of thy clothes, & shal take thy faire jewels, and leave thee naked and bare. (Ezekiel 16.39)73 To reveal nakedness, to be stripped, is both metaphorically to display spiritual unworthiness, and literally to bring out the body itself as spectacle.


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Fitzherbert imagines herself at the beginning of her illness as spectacle – in the passage quoted earlier, she is to ‘be laid in the Charterhouse yard for all people to wonder at’;74 and she also adds in fear of nakedness to anxiety about adornment. ‘One day’, she writes, they going about to shift my linen, a conceit entered my head that doubtless they meant to leave me naked. And whether I did resist them or were in any way unruly thereupon and that was the cause they bound my hands, I do not well remember 75 The failure of memory is significant; the whole area is one of great tension. Fear of exposure, struggle, binding, all coalesce into a picture of helplessness and abasement. To wear clothes, to have clothes removed, are both dangerous, invoking the possibilities of vanity and display. Nakedness, of course, also invokes the question of sexuality, as does much of the anxiety about clothing expressed in moral tracts of the time. Attacks on women’s dress were also implicitly or explicitly attacks on the display of women’s sexuality. For Fitzherbert, however, this question is not activated. If she occasionally refers to her conviction that she has been a loose liver, or her wish to run away from her father and become a lewd person, it is in the most abstract terms; she never directly represents herself as either subject or object of desire – a point that will be discussed further in Chapter 10. But the recourse to clothing as a metaphor through which to talk about sexuality need not be mobilised only by moralists, as Miranda Chaytor’s discussion of the significance of clothes in working women’s accounts of rape suggest.76 In the narratives discussed by Chaytor, damage to clothes seems to stand in for damage to the body; in these cases, she suggests, it is labour that gives the clothes that specific value, but the argument highlights the ways in which clothing can stand in for the self more generally. As a woman’s clothes in these cases can represent more than the mere fabric, so perhaps in Fitzherbert’s narrative the repeated anxieties around dress and vanity may stand for an unspoken and unspeakable anxiety about the sexual body. This chapter opened with the question of the inside of the body, what is taken in and put out, transgressing the body’s boundaries; it continued with the surface of the body, the significance of its dress and adornment. The sexual body, in a sense, represents the meeting point of these two, concerned both with surfaces and interiors. The ways in which sexuality is represented in these texts will be taken up in a subsequent chapter. Here, it also serves as a reminder that how people live in the body articulates social and cultural difference in its most pressing forms. The meanings of eating, drinking, dressing, desiring, are refracted through a range of variables; gender is crucial, but so are religious orientation, social level, age. Trosse’s representation of the self as drunkard, as well as his cautious descriptions of sexual incontinence, have no parallels in the autobiographical writing of

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women; the tensions registered in Fitzherbert’s account over fine clothing are the result not only of the general cultural attack on female vanity, but of her particular combination of spiritual aspiration, elite lifestyle, and age; and so forth. The body, as it emerges in these narratives, is thus shaped by specific cultural and religious discourses, and articulates a range of meanings. It can represent the opposite of the spiritual, and an attachment to anything worldly; through physical decorum and costume it makes statements about the social and spiritual identity of the subject; it offers a series of codes through which particular states of mental or physical health may be read, from the black clothing of the melancholic to the flushed cheeks of fever. But it also has another less historically particular aspect. However variously the meanings of the body may be encoded in different cultures, the raw material of the coding remains irreducibly physical: the processes of eating and evacuation, of sexual intercourse and of giving birth, of the transformation of the suckling baby whose bodily functions are uncontrolled into the culturally embodied adult, must somehow or another take place in all cultures, though different in their organisation and their significance at different times and places. And that transformation is one that leaves its traces in the familiar locuses of disturbance. To learn to be governed in the body, that is to say, is both a cultural and a psychic process, and it is perhaps not surprising that mental disorder tends to the undoing of that process. The particular tensions around food, the fantasies of vomiting, the anxiety about clothing and displaying the body, all invoke both the specifically cultural contexts of disturbance, and at the same time the more general raw materials of psychic life.

8 Beyond the Human Body: Life, Death and the Devil

If one set of boundaries is concerned with the inside and outside of the body, another significant boundary marks the difference between the body living and the body dead. But the boundary between life and death is less settled than it might appear. Historians have explored the ways in which death does not constitute so absolute a boundary in early modern Europe as we might imagine: the living relate to the dead or to the not yet living in ways that acknowledge in them a continuing force.1 The concept of purgatory surrounded Catholic Europeans with a community of the dead whose desires and distresses continued to be potent, and the continuing presence of ghosts and revenants among Protestants as well as Catholics signalled a similar sense that the dead might have unfinished business that would keep them around. To ignore the wishes of the dead might bring disaster on the living. What Naomi Tadmor describes as the ‘lineage-family’, stretching back towards ancestral lines of descent and forwards towards those who would carry the name in future, connected the dead and the as yet unborn in the minds of the living, not only among the aristocracy.2 The constant reshaping of the family unit caused by high rates of infant and maternal death gave rise to forms of expression that can now seem curiously alien, undermining notions of temporal progression or human individuality: dead mothers address their children in the popular ‘mother’s legacy’ genre, frequently written by a mother to her unborn child in case of her death in childbirth; paintings and monuments represent multiple spouses and children in a simultaneous present; babies are given the name of an older sibling now dead.3 The early modern self, in these ways and many others, may be experienced as part of a continuum rather than an isolated moment.4 By contrast with the modern experience of death, too, the event of death in early modern culture had a degree of familiarity. High mortality rates, not just among the young but in all age groups, meant that the experience of losing close kin and friends was more or less universal; encountering death 135

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and dealing with loss were integrated into everyday life. The rituals with which the dead were buried, laid to rest and remembered were constant accompaniments to the processes of living. Women particularly were associated with the intimate care of the dead body, responsible for washing and laying out, but to view the dead, to lay hands on them or to kiss them goodbye, were necessary parts of the ritual of letting go more generally (though autobiographies and fiction from later centuries suggest this was at least for children a recurrently terrifying experience).5 Thus when Dionys Fitzherbert recollects ‘those I had both seen and touched’ who were dead, she registers the normality of encounters with dead bodies in her time, and the very different assumptions about how to encounter them.6 Reminders of death, both religious and secular, are central to early modern culture; and these are also reminders about the physicality of death, about the material processes of damage, destruction and dissolution. From the tragic heroes of the Jacobean stage conversing with skulls to Donne’s speculations on how scattered body parts will be brought together at the resurrection of the dead, the insistence that death is something that happens to bodies is inescapably present.7 In spiritual terms, too, death is a central focus of Christian thought and practice. Christians were urged to live with their own deaths constantly in view, and to meditate on death; the devout are praised for their lack of attachment to life, for living as with their own deaths continually. And this need for constant awareness of death is combined with the terrifying knowledge that what happens on the other side of death is eternity, and for many eternal punishment. This may be, formally speaking, an unresolvable terror: the Calvinist insistence that human agency has no power to alter divine decisions on the question of what happens after death leaves believers to determine whether or not they are among the elect, without giving them any strategy to change it.8 Alongside this, despite the apparent contradiction, the pervasive belief in God’s immediate and active intervention in human life constantly reminds the sinful that they may be snatched away at any moment, and that they should repent while there is time, implying that it is entirely the soul’s own responsibility whether it is saved or damned.9 The moral literature of the period is full of sinners who perish suddenly in the midst of their sin, who can expect only hell and damnation.10 The doctrine of the soul’s immortality in religious discourse is presented as the answer to the fear of death; but for many it must have been merely an added source of terror, and Faustus was not alone in his desperate wish that he might have no immortal soul at all if all the good it did him was eternal suffering.11 ‘Now gladly would I have been in the condition of dog or horse’, wrote John Bunyan, ‘for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weights of hell for sin, as mine was like to do’.12 Protestantism, it has been suggested, sharpened this fear in particular ways. Against the Catholic practices and beliefs that manage the process of death

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and loss – confession, extreme unction, purgatory – it set the isolated figure of the sinner facing God’s judgement alone. Neither rites before death nor masses and prayers after it were available to sustain the dying person or the bereaved. The disappearance of purgatory especially marked a dramatic break between the community of the living and the dead, previously mediated by prayer and injunction; as Peter Marshall puts it, the Reformation involved ‘a profound reimagining of the afterlife’: the abrogation of purgatory involved not just the relocation of the dead in terms of formal theology, and a concomitant reform of liturgical and ritual practice, but a far-reaching reconfiguration of the cultural and emotional nexus that bound the living to the dead, of the idioms in which feelings, anxieties, and aspirations about the dead could be expressed.13 Death in a sense becomes less social, less communal: if John Donne famously heard in the tolling of the bell for the dead his own place in that community of mortality, the general tendency of Protestant culture was more towards the individualisation and atomisation of death.14 The importance of a good death is reiterated in countless tracts throughout the century, but in the end it is something the person dying has to do alone. On the other hand, new importance came to be attached to other aspects of death: last hours and last words, funeral sermons, memorials, were the materials out of which the rituals of memory were constructed, and there was an increasing focus on the idea of the beloved dead in heaven looking down on the bereaved.15 Neither religious belief, then, nor the familiarity and normality of death evacuate death of its terrors, nor of its emotional charge. The knowledge that the live body will cease to be, like the constitution of the body itself, is a powerfully concentrated focus for disturbance, whatever rituals and beliefs any given culture may develop to master that knowledge. And while the blurring of boundaries between the living and the dead, and the assertion of the immortality of the soul, may in some ways offer the possibility of coming to terms with death, they also carry risks. The more the differences between human and non-human, living and dead, seem insecure or questionable, perhaps, the more likely it is that the troubled in mind should focus on those boundaries and find them difficult to establish. Death is the ultimate undoing of the self; and when the self is under pressure and at risk of undoing, anxieties and delusions cluster around the subject of death. This chapter therefore aims to look at the significance of death and the dead in these narratives, as the focus for anxieties about the flesh and about sin and punishment. And as death in early modern culture is understood within the spiritual framework of salvation and damnation, God and the devil, it goes on to explore the role of the non-human, and specifically the devil, as another figure threatening the boundaries of the self, located both inside

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and outside. Refracted through and reshaped by the glass of delusion, the fears articulated in these narratives, despite their apparent bizarreness, share many of the preoccupations and anxieties of early modern thinking about mortality.

Live and dead bodies The life of the body, for both Hannah Allen and Dionys Fitzherbert, is deeply problematic. More specifically, the idea of what it means for a body to be either alive or dead seems difficult to grasp, in relation to their own bodies and those of others. The expectation of imminent death is a central feature of their condition; both anticipate their own deaths constantly, despite constant disappointment. This is Allen in what she evocatively calls her ‘dying condition’: One night as I was sitting by the fire, all of a sudden I said I should dye presently I said, Aunt, I am just dying, I cannot live an hour if there were no more in the world; in this opinion I continued a great while, every morning saying, I should dye before night, and every night, before morning 16 And Fitzherbert at the start of her illness gives away her possessions, calling on God to take her: sharply reproving the maid that watched with me for putting me in hope of life, telling her how unmeet she was to be about any in my case; and most instantly entreated her to bear witness that yet I died the true servant of Jesus Christ often enquiring of her if it were day, fully persuading myself that then I should die 17 The immediate cause of this expected death varies. At different moments during their disorders, they believe that the devil will take them away, or that they will be put to death in some strange and horrible fashion; ‘I concluded that God would not suffer me to dye a natural death’; commented Allen, ‘but that I would commit some fearful abomination, and so be put to some horrible death’.18 Allen envisages death at the hands of the authorities rather than of her family, and tried to evade it by her suicide attempts. Often in her case there is no cause; she simply knows it will happen, she will become a dead body. Reluctant to get in the coach on her way to London, she ‘would earnestly argue against it, and say, I shall surely dye by the way, and had I not better dye in bed? Mother, do you think people will like to have a dead Corps in the Coach with them?’ But in so far as there is an explanation for this death that will take her, it is her own internal heat: ‘this fire within me, will kindle and burn me before Monday’, she complains.19


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If Allen is unsettled by her own proximity to the condition of a corpse, Fitzherbert suffers from a more radical uncertainty about what it means to be either alive or dead. And where for Allen the fire that will consume her springs up inside her, Fitzherbert is convinced that she is to be burned by those around her – friends, doctors, family – as a punishment for various sins (treason and atheism are the chief ones she mentions). Despite this, for some time she does not believe that death is actually possible for her. She fears what the doctor and his family will do to her, but she also fears that it is impossible for her to die, and she will simply be tormented for ever: they would set me in the chimney and make a small fire under my feet and there [I] should burn for ever and never die, believing most assuredly none did die otherwise, but by death was meant to be burnt 20 This certainty that her own death is impossible, indeed, leads her into suggestions that appal her afterwards for their blasphemy. A reference to Christ crucified produces in her the response: ‘Take me and nail me up so as that book saith he was, and see when I shall die; thinking in very deed I could never die’.21 Her retrospective reading of such statements causes severe difficulty. On the one hand, she suggests that her refusal to believe in death indicates a recognition of the immortality of the soul, even if her confusion led her to misunderstand what it really was; on the other hand, the identification with Christ cannot be reclaimed, and produces an absolute denial. Such a comment would have been impossible ‘if I had been in my right senses’, she insists, following on with an image of literal corporeal dismemberment: ‘no surely, I hope I should indeed rather have plucked out my own eyes and tongue’.22 And if underlying this confusion about the finality or not of death is perhaps an echo of the idea of purgatory – not unlikely given her complex and ambivalent relation to Catholicism – that too cannot find its way to the surface of the narrative. But her positions throughout her period of affliction are contradictory and confused. At different moments she thinks only she will die, and nobody else will; that she is dead already; that to be dead is happy. The confusion of living and dead is particularly acute around her sense of who and what she is. Refusing to believe that she was her parents’ child, she adopts an alternative identity, thinking herself the sister of a friend, and that my name was Mary, which was the name of a sister of hers that I had often heard her say was dead and she did much resemble me. Which words I did remember, and thought I was the same, and she said she was dead because the meaning was I should be burnt 23 The death of a different friend also throws her into a state of confusion. Told of ‘a gentlewoman whom I loved exceeding well to be dead and buried’, she

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is simultaneously incredulous and grief-stricken: ‘I could not believe it, but said, No, she die? It is for such as I am; ah, happy were I if I were as she is; with that I wept very much for her, and said, She was a virtuous and a good gentlewoman; yet did I not believe that she was dead.’24 Past and present deaths, self and other, sisters and friends, have all become jumbled up: to face the prospect of death is the same as to be dead already, just as a physical resemblance merges into actual identity.25 What seems to be at issue in much of this confusion is the status of the body, and the corruptibility or not of its substance. It is her body she cannot believe will die, even while she feels herself to be in a state of torment that must signify death; she will hang for ever burning, and yet her body will not be consumed. ‘I would look upon my body and then say to mistress C, Is it possible this body should die? No, it can never die, but here you will burn me for ever,’ she records.26 Physical presence, the weight of the flesh, represent the real. But, believing those around her to be variously gods, immortals or demons, she is alienated from all flesh but her own; she no longer knows if her own flesh is what human beings are made of, or devils. Sharing her bed in the doctor’s household with a child, she investigates: then would I feel the child that lay with me to know if he were made of flesh as I was, and feeling his bones would think, It is impossible he or I should die, as I thought, or that this flesh and bones should come to nothing 27 This urgent and violent denial of the mortality of the flesh in the early part of her malady is particularly focused on the corpse. She does not believe that anything real is buried at funerals; ‘they buried nothing but a coffin’.28 It is only when by God’s providence she encounters an uncoffined corpse that she is once again able to make the distinction between the body living and the body dead, and to realise that death is universal: we were no sooner out of the lane wherein doctor C’s house stood but a corpse met us in the street, without any coffin Now I assured my self it was as she [Mrs C] had said. So this brought to memory those I had both seen and touched being dead; and when I was at Oxford, also, there came an old woman and talked with me, which within two or three days after was dead and buried 29 Nonetheless the effect of this renewal of understanding remains oddly disconcerting, for her corpses retain the characteristics of the living. The corpse meets her in the street, taking the grammatically active part; the old woman is about to be dead, but Fitzherbert sees her when she is still alive; the syntactical ambiguity of the phrase ‘being dead’ leaves unclear the moment at which death seizes the living. And the diffuse but intense anxiety about


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the status of flesh – living or dead – seems once again to be a kind of distillation of the anxieties of orthodox Protestant or Puritan thinking, in which fleshliness is always apt to be too closely connected to sin.

Punishment and torment The sense of unworthiness that governs the seventeenth-century Protestant self of course constantly finds grounds on which to expect divine punishment, and many spiritual autobiographers and diarists display intense anxiety about the torments of hell, and how fully they merit God’s anger.30 In the autobiographies of mental disorder, this general assumption of guilt is concretised into an immediate expectation of the death of the body, as a punishment for some unspecified fault. Even Trosse, for whom the imminence of his own death is a topic of relatively minor interest, registers this as a subject for concern. His madness is of course itself God’s punishment for his failure to apprehend his own sinfulness and his vulnerability to death; he mentions several instances of God’s mercy in preserving him from death before he became mad, which he failed to appreciate at the time. But he also sees himself as someone under sentence of death as he goes to the doctor’s house at Glastonbury. The first time he goes there, he believes that he is no longer on earth, but in hell; towns and the houses are all in the midst of hell, and as he goes by he hears people pitying him, saying, ‘What, must he go yet farther into Hell? O fearful! O dreadful! and the like’.31 By the time of his final visit, however, he has progressed to seeing himself as under a more mundane sentence: ‘I was leading as a Fool to the Stocks, or as a Malefactor to his dreadful Execution’, he declares, and lets his horse wander: At this Time, dismal were my Conceptions, dreadful my Expectations, and inevitable and intolerable was my fancied Execution, if I proceeded travelling to my Journey’s End. So that, in effect, every Step of my Horse was a Stab to my Heart. At length being earnestly tempted to throw my self off the Horse with a design to break my Neck, I did cast my self from it.32 A similar sequence in Hannah Allen’s narrative makes the same connection, preferring suicide to public execution: seeing ‘a company of Men with Halberds’, she immediately tells her brother that such a company will soon carry her to Newgate, and starts plotting her suicide in order to evade this fate.33 For all three, indeed, public executions, and processions taking the condemned to death, seem to have been active presences in the imagination. Fitzherbert is explicitly preoccupied with the recent ‘horrible deaths’ of the Gunpowder conspirators, adding hastily that of course they deserved

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to die, but picturing an even worse death for herself; ‘truly I never was so void of humanity to rejoice at their fearful torments’, she comments.34 The visibility and violence of state retribution against malefactors make it a live element in the anxieties of mental disturbance, not least because of its ready fit with the Christian paradigm of sin and punishment. The melancholy, notes Richard Baxter, ‘look on Husband, Wife, Friends, Children, House, Goods and all without any Comfort, as one would do that is going to be Executed for some Crime’; and the language of eternal torment is often interwoven with that of earthly punishment.35 Trosse, at a point when he believes one of his co-residents in the doctor’s house is Christ and has been pleading with him unsuccessfully for mercy, awaits not immediate hell but judicial torment on earth: I lay upon my Bed, every Instant expecting to be rack’d or cut in Pieces, and to have all manner of Cruelties to be us’d towards my Body. Every Person I saw seem’d to me to be an Executioner; and I thought every Thing either an Instrument of, or a Preparation for, my Misery and Torture.36 Fitzherbert variously believes herself to have spoken treason, spoken against the King, and spoken words of atheism; these are both crimes and sins, and will lead her to burn on earth and also to burn for ever. The elision of the notion of kingship between God and monarch makes an offence against one an offence against both. In all these fears, Fitzherbert clearly registers both her memory of the rules of the world she used to live in, and her continuing identification with them. She deserves death for the words of atheism she has spoken, she believes, because she herself always judged severely those who would not acknowledge their life’s giver: by the standards she has applied to others, therefore, she merits punishment. Only briefly does she imagine a different meaning to the world. At one of her lowest points, she imagines the entire regulatory social order to be delusory and cruel: All that I had ever heard or seen of God, the distinction of states, magistrates ordained for the defence of the oppressed, ministers for the comfort of the afflicted, would sometimes come into my mind, but then would conclude that sure there was no such thing, but these things are feigned to deceive such as I am, and to bring them to that miserable state wherein I was 37 As with her declaration (quoted above) that holy books were ‘made to deceive such fools as I was’, or that those who tell her they will not burn her are lying to her, she seems occasionally to experience madness as a moment of devastating clarity: the beliefs on which she has founded her identity are not merely wrong but actively malign, designed to entrap her in futile


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confusion and reduce her to madness.38 But to be in that state of dissociation from the rules of the world, in her narrative, is to be no longer human. The ‘miserable state’ to which she alludes, she says, was ‘to be in hell and to be a devil’; the comment about the books is followed by the suggestion that she too should be crucified, ‘thinking in very deed I could never die’.39 Once again her thoughts revert to the punishment of the body, even if on an extreme scale. Fitzherbert, Allen and Trosse are all liable to believe themselves criminals, and to expect due and formal punishment. In practice, given their social locations and the fact that they were regarded as mentally disordered, they had little to fear; paradoxically the more extreme their declarations became, the more clearly they signified madness, and the less likely they were to be taken as occasions for punishment. But while they were less at risk than their blaspheming contemporaries from the penalties imposed by the law, they might well have perceived themselves as undergoing punishment, in the restraint and confinement imposed as part of their treatment. The control of the mad bears directly on the physical body. From purges and vomits to confinement, binding and shackling, these narratives register the shock of what happens to the body when the mind seems to have gone out of control. And the narratives also seem to imply a subterranean connection between the punishment of the body and the sins of the body: it is because of previous indulgences that these sufferings must now be endured.

Destroying the self The conviction that punishment is deserved, in much seventeenth-century religious writing, is associated with a willingness to inflict that punishment on oneself, above all through suicide. This is an urge which is of course related to the sense of intense and overpowering unworthiness and selfabasement that characterises spiritual writing of this period in general. In meditations, prayer and autobiographies, the conviction repeats itself that there has never been a worse sinner in the history of the world, that no wickedness is comparable to the writer’s. To acknowledge the vileness of the self is an indispensable part of the process of conversion, but it is also a moment that carries risks. As Macdonald and Murphy comment: Young men and women in the throes of guilt over their past sins were supposed to experience profound remorse, even to the point of despair The Puritans thus, in effect, institutionalized suicidal moods, presenting them as the emotional symbol of the liminal state between the sinful life and regeneration.40 It is thus not surprising that suicidal impulses are a recurrent feature of spiritual autobiography.41 In line with general seventeenth-century

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thinking on the subject, too, they are attributed to the agency of the devil. In the turbulent process of conversion, as the soul sways to and fro between God and devil, the devil’s main role seems to be to interrupt the process by ensuring that the person dies before it can be completed: the suicide dies committing a mortal sin, and is thereby proved unregenerate. The devil holds out knives, suggests handy nearby ponds, entices with ropes. With familiar specious satanic logic, he points out how many sins the sufferer has already committed, and how much better it would be to die before things get any worse. His agency is active, immediate and external. Suicide from the devil’s point of view achieves a double purpose, in that the suicide is not only sinning against God, but also committing a criminal act, and thereby bringing shame and in some cases destitution on the family left behind. For while the suicidal mood may be institutionalised as part of the typology of conversion, and alluded to by many writers, the view of actual suicides remains unremittingly severe. Suicide in the early modern period was both a sin and a crime; indeed, it appears that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries people were particularly hostile to and horrified by suicide, and the cultural and material sanctions against it were powerful. The specific desecrations of the body of the suicide (classically, burial at a crossroads with a stake through the heart) underlined the exclusion of the suicide from the community of the dead as well as the living, and the fear that the act aroused, requiring quasi-magical ritual to contain the spirit of the unnaturally dead. The property of the suicide was requisitioned by the state, reducing dependents to penury. Only children and those found to be mad – non compos mentis – were excused these penalties; and juries for much of the period were reluctant to bring in verdicts of insanity on suicides. And although in the course of the seventeenth century suicide undergoes something of a repositioning, coming to be taken less as a sign of sin and criminality and more as indicative of mental disturbance, it nonetheless retains much of its supernatural force, especially for the religious; the devil continues to be the key figure.42 Suicide is an obliteration of the self: it is imagined as cancellation, annihilation. The overpowering sense of sin described as a prelude to suicidal urges by spiritual autobiographers is a plunge down into the pit of self-hatred and self-abasement; indeed into the pit of hell, figured imaginatively as a place of depth. ‘Downe in the depths of mine iniquity’, muses Fulke Greville, as he looks into himself, ‘That ugly centre of infernal spirits ’.43 The inner self is a vile pit, threatening to overwhelm the godly self. The seventeenth-century artisan diarist Nehemiah Wallington looks into ‘a sty of filthiness within me which did boil and bubble up’; Richard Carpenter, vicar of Poling in Sussex, declares, ‘It is granted that I am the void, and empty Cave of ignorance; the muddy fountaine of evill concupiscence; dark in my understanding, weake in my will ’.44 And according to Richard Baxter, ‘when we look down into


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our selves, we look into a Dungeon, a Prison, a Wilderness, a Place of Darkness, Horror, Filthiness, Misery and Confusion’.45 To be the worst of sinners is to descend to the lowest of places, whether in the literal sense or in the depths of the self – hell, as Milton’s Satan describes it, merges the two (and as with Milton’s Satan, it should be added, self-abasement is often tinged with grandiosity).46 So it is not perhaps surprising to see the downward impulse performed in acts of physical self-abasement; the suicidal impulse emerges in these writings as both literal and symbolic self-cancellation, and as an act of descent. At the beginning of Trosse’s first period of breakdown, an anguished dialogue with an unknown voice enacts the move from self-abasement to self-annihilation. Pacing desperately about his chamber, he hears a voice he takes to be that of God: While I was thus walking up and down I perceiv’d a Voice, (I heard it plainly) saying unto me, Who art thou? Which, knowing it could be the Voice of no Mortal, I concluded was the Voice of God, and with Tears, as I remember, reply’d, I am a very great Sinner, Lord!47 He sets himself to prayer, and hears the voice behind him saying ‘Yet more humble; Yet more humble’. So he attempts to humble himself further and further: he kneels on the ground, pulls down his stockings so as to kneel on bare knees, takes off all his clothes, and gets as low to the floor as he can: But all I could do was not low enough, nor humble enough. At last, observing that there was an Hole in the Planking of the Room, I lay my self down flat upon the Ground, and thrust in my Head there as far as I could; but because I could not fully do it, I put my Hand into the Hole, and took out Earth and Dust, and sprinkled it on my Head 48 It is only after his recovery, looking back on this experience, that he concludes that he misread the voice, and that it was in fact ‘the Voice of Satan, and that his Design was, to humble me as low as Hell’.49 In a parallel episode, Hannah Allen replicates this urge to literalise her sense of abjection by lowering herself into a pit, closing herself off from the world. She recounts how she agreed to go to a sermon with a friend, and then had second thoughts – as the devil tells her, she has ‘enough sermons to answer for already’: and sitting in great distress, contriving how I might put off my going, the Devil found me out a place on the top of the house, a hole where some boards were laid, and there I crowded in myself, and laid a long, black scarf upon me and put the boards as well as I could, to hide me from being found, and there intended to lie, till I should starve to death 50

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This symbolic death and burial (a narrow space, a black shroud) is strikingly similar to Trosse’s scattering of earth on his head. For both Trosse and Allen, the conviction that their destiny is the pit of hell, and that every journey they make takes them lower down towards that pit, comes to take actual form in the attempt to abase and annihilate the self. For both, too, the symbolic annihilation of the self is closely related to a series of temptations to suicide. Hannah Allen’s self-burial was intended to lead directly to her death, although after three days hunger and cold (‘it being a very sharp season’) compelled her to call for help, and she was rescued from the hole.51 In addition to smoking spiders in a pipe, she also tries to buy opium, and cuts herself with scissors. And that Trosse’s attempts to lower himself to the utmost were in fact demonically rather than divinely inspired is demonstrated by the follow-up: standing up before the Window, I either heard a Voice, which bid me, or had a strong Impulse, which excited me, to cut off my Hair; to which I reply’d, I have no Scissars. It was then hinted, that a Knife would do it; but I answer’d, I have none. Had I had one, I verily believe, this Voice would have gone from my Hair to my Throat, and have commanded me to cut it 52 The cluster of ideas around sin and abjection, then, result for both Trosse and Allen in what can be seen as an attempt literally to cancel the self and erase it from the earth, through suicide attempts and the descent into the pit. Fitzherbert’s temptations to suicide, by contrast, are relatively abstract, and she does not appear to have made any serious attempt at killing herself; nor does the devil seem to address her directly on the subject. These temptations, indeed, come close to the end of her narrative, after all her confusions about the living and the dead have been resolved, and at a point when her anxieties have been reduced to the question of whether she has committed the sin against the holy ghost, and a residual fear that she is to be burned. In this condition she is tempted on the one hand to Catholicism, and on the other to suicide: by some means to make away myself, as well to avoid the death that I feared as to unburden my mind of those unspeakable thoughts and sting of conscience wherewith I was continually afflicted; and then should I cast up ghastly looks upon the rafters of the house, being tempted to hang myself; sometimes steal out towards the water’s side, thinking drowning to be the better death. But my mother and sisters, perceiving by my demeanour with what cogitations I was troubled, did never leave me alone, but would be always talking how grievous a sin it was for one to murder themselves and I, who thought as much as they said, did resolve and tell them that certain I would never kill myself whatsoever became of me.53


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In this passage she contemplates herself from outside, as it were: the sane Fitzherbert is able to describe her disturbed self, identified by her furtive movements and ghastly looks, but is finally able to take a distance from that version of herself.54 It is, indeed, a transitional moment: by the end of the passage she speaks as a subject with agency to declare that she will never kill herself. Suicide is linked with Catholicism as an impulse to be disowned, tending only to destruction. She does, however, tell two stories that seem to indicate some identification with the impulse to plunge downwards. The first story comes at the very beginning of her text – in the first of the several preambles to the main narrative – and is concerned with a gentlewoman who was her ‘acquaintance and near alliance by marriage’, who had been perverted by marriage into Catholicism, and came to an unhappy end; signs of relapse towards Protestantism were followed by a visit: there came a limb of Satan, a priest or Jesuit I mean, who so wrought the matter with her that within a short time after she was found in all probability to have drowned her self in a small water very near her own house 55 This kinswoman tempted by Catholicism, driven by doubt and distress both spiritual and emotional, further tempted by suicide and eventually succumbing, presents a close parallel to Fitzherbert’s own story, with the crucial difference, of course, that Fitzherbert’s resistance was ultimately successful.56 Another variation on this story comes much later in the narrative, when a friendly Yorkshire gentleman met during her travels tells her of a more hopeful case: it was of a merchant’s wife of York, who falling into despair of her salvation, upon what occasion I do not remember he told, neither had I any list to ask him questions, because I thought it nothing comparable to mine, whose misery in my own opinion had no equal; but he said she was in such a distraction that she knew not her husband and own children, and that she would seek by all means to make her self away and at the last threw herself into a well where she was taken up without any great hope of life in her 57 This lady, tended by a devoted husband and all his people, recovered both her life and her faith in salvation, and ended up ‘joyful and well as ever, governing her house and doing all things belonging to her calling’;58 and the points of similarity between her case and Fitzherbert’s, at first rejected, later come to be a source of consolation. That the chosen form of suicide in both stories is by drowning seems significant. To drown is a death by descent; the acquaintance in a small water,

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the merchant’s wife in a well, both conjure up simultaneously the narrow space and the vertical plunge. The archetypal Biblical formulation of despair is figured as the waters closing over one’s head, an image summoned up by the celebrated Francis Spira to express his abject condition: ‘The judgements of God are a deepe abisse, (said hee) we are soon drowned if we enter into them; he that thinkes hee standeth, let him take heed lest hee fall: as for my selfe, I know that I am fallen back ’.59 Fitzherbert, however, stands on the edge of the river and steps back. Contemplating the rushing river, near her mother’s house in Wales, she muses on the horror of her condition to come in hell, ‘when I shall want one drop of water to cool my tongue’, but though she is tempted to throw herself into the river, in the end she ‘could not resolve upon it’.60 She will not replay the leap down: abjection for her is played out at the psychic more than the physical level. For all three, these urges to destroy the self are associated with the time of mental disorder. It is significant, however, that they are positioned on the whole as devilish temptations rather than as the unmediated effects of madness; even where the devil is not directly named, the language of temptation presupposes a tempter. As noted earlier, the melancholy and the mad are commonly expected to suffer from suicidal urges: ‘they desire death’, declares Philip Barrough in his Method of Phisick, discussing the melancholy, ‘and do verie often behight and determine to kill themselves’.61 But mental disorder is what gives the devil an opening, just as spiritual affliction does; the agency of the devil is not in question. The rhetoric of demonic temptation, along with a subsequent acceptance that they had been deluded in their minds at the time, allows both Allen and Trosse to identify the strange voices and impulses with the actual person of the devil, who tells Allen that she should hear no more sermons and finds her a place to hide, or who prompts Trosse with the command ‘Yet more humble’.

Devils and other beings It was not only the dead who shared the space of consciousness with the living in early modern culture. The human was located in a world of other beings, more or less real and immediate, complicating the assumption that to have a live consciousness was to be human: devils and angels, spirits and fairies, ghosts and monsters, cluster invisibly (and sometimes visibly) about the solid mortal flesh of the early modern subject. As with prophesy or vision in general, there is nothing intrinsically odd in the seventeenth century in seeing otherworldly beings; many, like Goodwin Wharton, spend their lives attempting to establish such contact.62 Fairies, ghosts and demons are encountered in court records, scientific studies and (less frequently) diaries, as well as in essays, pamphlets and political polemic, quite apart from their literary importance.63 And witches, of course, recognised as real by both law


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and religion, are familiar beings who hardly even belong in the realms of the supernatural, although their attendant devils, imps and familiars do.64 This populatedness of the world also gives to the mentally troubled a ready set of images and beings to think with, and in literary and secular representations of madness, the madman who converses with invisible and supernatural beings is a familiar figure. The popular ballad figure Tom o’ Bedlam warns against ‘the hagg & hungry Goblin’, commands ‘a hoast of Furious Fancies’, and follows ‘a knight of ghosts and shadows’ to the end of the world; his female counterpart Mad Maudlin more alarmingly declares: My Staff hath Murder’d Gyants, My Bag a long Knife carries To Cut Mince-Pyes from Childrens Thighs, with which I feast the Faries 65 But in narratives of madness, and indeed in spiritual autobiography in general, such characters are very rarely encountered. The Protestant focus on God and the Devil as the two dominating figures of the spiritual world seems to have in effect squeezed out not only saints (predictably) but also angels, fairies and even witches, not to mention a host of lesser spiritual beings, from the preoccupations of the spiritual. Trosse hears fairies whispering in the walls, but he has been a godless young gallant, and his religious turn has yet to arrive.66 Witchcraft is potentially significant in a slightly different way, as cause rather than symptom of madness. There are a few early modern cases in which witchcraft is central; the celebrated case of Mary Glover at the end of the sixteenth century, for example, in which doctors, clergymen and judges argued over whether her symptoms should be understood as witchcraft or hysteria, or the case of the younger Archibald Wariston, discussed in the introduction.67 Bewitchment as an explanation for mental disorder continues to appear throughout the seventeenth century, and indeed is a relatively popular one. ‘Disorders of the mind were the single largest category of maladies that were blamed on witches’, according to Michael Macdonald. ‘Almost any kind of mental affliction might be attributed to witchcraft, although visions and hallucinations were more frequent among “bewitched” patients than other disturbed persons.’68 But as belief in witchcraft is not itself a mark of delusion, these debates are not around whether it was mad to think oneself bewitched, but rather whether in a given case it was a plausible explanation. The uneasy sense that there was something unnatural about madness, that it signified alienation from normality, made the association with witchcraft in general a plausible one, but the two on the whole operated in different contexts and with different priorities.69 To see or communicate with non-human entities, whether fairies or devils, was thus not in itself taken as a mark of madness. Such encounters became troubling at the point when the boundary between human and non-human

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was undermined, or the notion of the self came under too much pressure. This might be the result of a real and willed event, as in witchcraft: witches sold their souls and acquired familiars and non-human powers, aligning themselves decisively (in the view of the law) with the non-human.70 It might arise from a confusion on the part of a human being: the mad believe that they are devils, or that they are surrounded by devils, or indeed angels. Or it might be the result of an invasion of the human by the non-human, most significantly in the instance of demonic possession. These various devils, according to the level of social reality assigned to them, might be most appropriately addressed by trial, exorcism or treatment for mental disorder: what needed to be determined in each case was which category a given case belonged to. Since devils were real entities, capable of intervening in human affairs, there was a necessary presumption that there might be a real devil, and indeed, that devils located in the discourse of madness might still be real. Madness itself, after all, might readily be seen as the result of a literal possession in seventeenth-century accounts. Before dealing with possession, however, we will spend some time considering the agency of the devil more generally. The devil is a live and active presence in much spiritual autobiography of the period, representing the quintessential agent of torment as well as temptation, as we have seen in relation to suicide. Subject to God’s permission, the devil makes people suffer, and puts evil thoughts and desires into their minds. He is an active and malevolent agent, engaged in tempting, plotting against, misleading, deceiving, terrifying the writer. His sphere of activity is particularly religious. He tempts Fitzherbert to say she is Antichrist, and to become a Catholic; he makes Trosse blaspheme against scripture; he puts biblical texts into Allen’s mind to terrify her. Both Allen and Fitzherbert say he ‘took advantage’ of them, using melancholy or discontented moods as an opportunity to try and prise them away from God, and nearly succeeding. He points out all their faults and sins, reminds them jeeringly of their former happiness and faith in God – or in the case of Trosse of his total want of such faith – assures them that they have been cursed hypocrites, and convinces them that they will be damned to all eternity. He is both inside and outside, representing the worst of the inner voices, and also with the power to raise delusion in the senses, so that knowledge of the world is no longer reliable. Their souls are battlegrounds, scenes of combat and struggle between God and devil, or devil and themselves, or all three together. In this, of course, they are fairly typical of their time. As Michael Macdonald comments: Visions of Satan or the urgent conviction that one was haunted by demons were not taken to be sure signs of psychosis during the seventeenth century Belief in the devil’s immanence, his protean craftiness, and his responsibility for the dark, antisocial urges that entered men’s minds was general.71


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On the whole, however, in most spiritual autobiography, the devil appears as an outside agent, rather than being incorporated into the self. To believe that you are yourself a devil, or that those around you are devils, is a clear marker of distraction. It is true that the devil’s voice is heard internally by the godly, as something that seems to come from within the self; but to resist it you must be able to maintain the conviction that it is not in fact the self that speaks, but something external; and it is the moments where that conviction begins to crumble that are identified as moments of threat to the integrity and sanity of the self. John Bunyan’s lengthy arguments with the devil are not signs of delusion precisely because he understands the difference between the devil and himself.72 John Rogers, on the other hand, quoted earlier for hallucinations in which trees and bushes appeared as devils and angels, clearly sees this as a point at which he was out of his mind, fit only for Bedlam, even though it did not in the event take him there.73 And Nehemiah Wallington in his youth went through a period of mental disturbance marked among other things by the incursion of the demonic into every aspect of his world; not only did he accuse his father’s maidservant of being a devil (expecting the devil to come as a beautiful woman to tempt him), but, as he tells his father, he expects him anywhere: ‘The Devil can come in any likeness; he can come in the likeness of my shoes’, and then I flung away my shoes. Then I said, ‘The Devil can come in the likeness of an angel of light or in the likeness of Master Roborough’. With that Master Roborough opened the parlour door. Then I run to the other end of the parlour, and Master Roborough came to me and held my arms, for I began to be unruly, and I told him he was a devil.74 For Wallington as for Rogers, this disturbance, although intense, was shortlived, and resolved within the family without recourse to outside help beyond the clergyman (the same Mr Roborough). But it is a reminder of the reality of the devil in the mental world of the time. If Wallington’s sense of the devil at this point in his life was skewed, a story he repeats several decades later, in which a drunken cavalier who jokes about toasting the devil is seized by ‘an ugly creature that frighted them all nothing of him remaining but some blood spilt about the window’, with ‘a great stink in the room and a smell of brimstone withal’, is intended to demonstrate nothing but God’s providence against the blasphemous and sceptical.75 That the devil might show up in the flesh and carry people off was entirely plausible. At times of mental disturbance, then, devils as external agents who torment can be identified with those around the sufferer; at the same time, by representing the type of absolute degradation and damnation, they offer themselves as figures of personal identification. Thus Fitzherbert thinks that both she herself and the doctor and his family are devils:

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sure the meaning to be god was to be as they were and to live in that great pleasure I thought they did, and to be the devil was to be in that state I was in; and sometimes I would think that they were devils, for sure none that had any goodness in them could endure to see one tormented in that manner they would do me; and then look upon mistress C and say, You will burn me What? said she, do you think we are devils? for it is their office to torment folks for ever.76 Mrs Carter, of course, shares Fitzherbert’s understanding of what devils are and what they do; the difference is that she is clear about who is and is not a devil, while Fitzherbert is confused. Trosse similarly veers between seeing himself as a devil and seeing himself as tormented by devils. Those who take him to Glastonbury he sees as ‘murtherous Devils’ who ‘exerted all their power to carry me away to a Place of Torment’, and this is a recurrent theme.77 ‘I fancy’d all I met to have been Devils’, he declares, seeing ‘many Devils flying in the Air just over me as so many Fiery Flying-Dragons’, and regarding rooks flying about Glastonbury Tor as devils or spirits of the damned.78 His view of himself as a devil, on the other hand, seems to be retrospective, a counterpoint to his belief at the time that he was surrounded by devils: they did not see me (as in Effect I was) a Devil, storming and roaring in my Chains of Darkness, and raging against God, Man and my Self. Now I thought my self in Hell again, and that all around me were Devils and Executioners 79 But he is also consumed from within by demonic fury and hatred. ‘I may truly say’, he comments, that if ever any Man knew, by a perfectly sinful Experience, the canker’d Hatred of the Devil against God, his murtherous Bloodiness against the Creature, and his desperate Rage against himself, I did: and may, hereupon, well pronounce my self to have been, in effect, a Devil incarnate.80 Trosse is writing as a minister, educated in theology; his judgement that he experienced what it was like to be the devil in the course of his madness is quite precisely weighted. Hatred of God is the element that for him is the shaping and driving force of his madness, ensuring that it is to be understood theologically rather than medically; and when he describes himself as having been a Devil incarnate, a devil made flesh, he means it literally. In this sense, the fact that in his madness he saw others as devils rather than recognising that he was effectively a devil himself is itself the sign of madness; and it is recovery that enables him to say he has been a devil. The assumption that seeing oneself as devil is a condition of madness and


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realising one is not equals sanity thus needs to be qualified: Trosse sees himself as having been effectively a devil while mad, but realised it only retrospectively. Hannah Allen, by contrast, turns the entire force of the devil-idea inward on herself. Unlike the other two, she never seems to see those around her as devils or tormentors; she has accumulated all possible sinfulness into herself, and become variously worse than, possessed by and identified with the devil. On the one hand, for her as for the other two, Satan is an active agent out to bring about her downfall, who makes suggestions, drops hints, provokes her to do things she would not do in her right mind. On the other, she has assimilated herself to the devil. ‘I would say that I was a Hell upon Earth, and a Devil incarnate’; ‘My Sins are so great, that if all the Sins of all the Devils and Damned in Hell, and all the Reprobates on Earth were comprehended in one man; mine are greater I am the Monster of Creation.’81 In this jumble of ideas, the devil stands as a measure of her still greater iniquity. But as with Trosse and Fitzherbert, the devil is an equally real presence to those arguing with her about whether she is one. ‘When I complained how vile I was’, she recounts, ‘my friends would tell me, it was not I, but the Devils Temptations I would Answer I am the Devil now, the Devil hath now done his work’.82

Possession: the devil within Underlying much of this, of course, is the idea of possession, which most radically and literally undermines the subject’s ownership of his or her own body. To be possessed is to be inhabited by someone else – as Ruth Padel puts it, ‘an alien force enters the body’.83 And possession was deeply interesting to the godly, both Protestant and Catholic; the language of possession was readily available to explain aberrant conduct, blasphemy, fury. Possession, like witchcraft, was a way of not only understanding but also finding solutions for inexplicable deviations: exorcisms and witch trials both aimed at restoring the lost soul to health and good order. Possession and exorcism were important elements in religious polemic, as well as being part of the general conceptual map of spiritual disorder; and historians of mental disorder have tended to see religious madness as closely associated with possession.84 Among the physician Richard Napier’s patients, for example, a number of those suffering from religious symptoms were identified as actually possessed by devils. But it was not the only possibility; the symptoms of possession were similar to those of witchcraft, and moreover, ‘Cases in which patients displayed the stereotypical symptoms of possession by the devil were very rare’.85 Diagnoses had to be made by balancing a series of possibilities, all of which might appear very like one another. ‘Flat claims that one was in league with the Devil or had been tempted by him’, comments

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Macdonald, ‘might be evidence that one was suffering from melancholy, suicidal gloom, or (rarely) another mental disorder; or they might be true’.86 As R. A. Houston summarises the position in the mid-seventeenth century: a person could either be mad and possessed or bewitched, or mad but not possessed or bewitched. Alternatively, they might be sane and under supernatural influence, or sane and feigning possession.87 And, indeed, they could be mad and yet engaged in real struggle with the devil, without being possessed; not every encounter with the devil was taken as evidence of possession. Given the centrality of the devil to all these accounts, it is perhaps surprising that possession (or indeed witchcraft) was not more prominent. There are few explicit references to the idea of actual demonic possession, and no indication that any kind of formal exorcism was considered.88 The posssibility occurs most explicitly in Hannah Allen’s account. In a manner typical of the possessed, she represents herself as being gradually forced away from her natural self into somebody different, somebody ‘rough and cross’ and given to mocking and despising spiritual things: I found within my self (as I apprehended) a scorning and jeering at Religion, and them that profest it, and a despising of’em, when I came to the heighth of my distemper, the strugling and fighting that was in me continually at first (while I combated with Satan) left me. When I complained how vile I was, my Friends would tell me, It was not I, but the Devils Temptations, I would Answer, No, it is from my self; I am the Devil now, the Devil hath now done his work, he hath done tempting of me, he hath utterly overcome me 89 As she describes it, she has been gradually taken over and filled with the demonic; the process amounts to an emptying out of the self. But she rejects her friends’ suggestion that she might be literally possessed: ‘when I was told of some that were possest with the Devil and were by Prayer dispossest’, she recounts, ‘I would reply, What tell you me of Posssession, I cared not if I were possest with a Thousand Devils, so I were not a Devil to my self ’.90 The real self who remains somehow present, she seems to be suggesting, can either be a devil or not, regardless of how many devils are inhabiting the same space. In this sense, possession is perhaps less of a threat to the self than Allen’s internalisation of the demonic. Possession is bounded and episodic: the possessed person is released when the devil departs, even if only temporarily, and a narrative of possession might seem to imply not so much a threat to the self as an assertion that the self remains intact despite the devil’s


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assaults. Possession is also not willed, and therefore absolves the possessed of responsibility. As Michel de Certeau comments, discussing the famous possessed nuns in a convent at Loudun in the early seventeenth century: What authorizes them to declare at last, under cover of the devil, ‘That’s what I am,’ is precisely what permits them to protect themselves from it, to declare, ‘That is not what I am,’ to demand of the representative of the Church, ‘Tell me that isn’t me.’91 One can be possessed and remain innocent; but as Allen in her own view is not innocent, as there is no resistance in her any longer to the devil and as she is an apostate, then in fact she cannot be possessed – or at least it is irrelevant whether she is or not. For while some manifestations of possession are dramatic and definite, the boundaries of possession are blurred, and the language used to describe it is often ambiguous. In the case of Mrs Drake, for example, Satan’s active and malevolent presence is constantly referred to. He is ‘malicious, violent, subtile, various in his temptations, changing shapes, by all meanes striving to have overthrown this good soule, abuse her judgement, affections, fancy and best reason to fight against her selfe’.92 Occasionally he seems to intervene still more directly; when she defeats a visiting minister in argument, for example, she does so ‘with many uncouth objections and Scriptures, sophistically applied by her, beyond the skill or strength of her own spirit or wit as hee judged’ (and ‘uncouth’ here hints at the demonic).93 But in the original edition of the text, she is not explicitly described as possessed, and there is no suggestion that anything beyond prayers and fasts were carried out for her (rather than formal exorcisms). It is only with the second edition that the polemical stakes are raised in the cause of making a wider point about the condition of England: while this Intruder [Satan] was Master and Governor of this Gentlewoman, her tongue uttered his Oracles, and was taught to speak nothing but what favoured the spirit that ruled in her. She was taught to deride, vilifie and reproach the grave Ministers (that came to her) with all possible scorne and contempte I look upon a great part of this Nation (at present) in the condition of this afflicted Gentlewoman, purely possessed and Captivated, by an uncleane Spirit, which makes them fome at the mouth, and to rage and rave horribly against God’s Ministers But eventually, it seems, ministers will ‘tame these poor Lunaticks, and charm their fierceness’.94 Possession is identified with lunacy as a displacement of the true self, which can be overcome; but in the actual case of Mrs Drake,

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this equivalence was retrospective and politically motivated. However active the devil in manipulating her, the word ‘possession’ was not used in the narrative of the case. A similar ambiguity is to be found in Trosse’s account of how the devil came to enter him: when they put a Glass into my Hand to drink of it, methought I saw in the Glass a Black Thing, about the bigness of a great black fly, or Beetle; and this I suppos’d to have been the Devil; but yet would drink it; and, methought, the Devil went down my Throat with the Liquour, and so took possession of me. At which desperate madness of mine, it seem’d to me that all were astonish’d 95 This is a puzzlingly unstable description. On the one hand, it might be read as a straightforward account of how Trosse came to be possessed; there is no inherent unlikelihood in the devil taking the form of a large black insect, and his wilful decision to swallow it despite his belief that it was the devil ought properly speaking to have made what he wished come true (just as the witch who chose to sell her soul to the devil was guilty). On the other hand, it is marked by qualifiers suggesting it should be read as delusion: ‘methought’, ‘I suppos’d’. These continue beyond the quoted passage to describe his belief that he was advancing into hell, and surrounded by devils; but we are not supposed to concur with his view of the doctor (‘Methought all about me were Devils, and he was Beelzebub’).96 The astonishment of those about him at his ‘desperate madness’, similarly, might be a response either to the madness of a man choosing to give himself to the devil, or to the madness of a man who believed that was what he was doing when he was only swallowing a fly.97 At any rate his subsequent treatment does not seem to have been shaped by any assumption that he was indeed possessed. Trosse experienced himself as surrounded, tempted and tormented by devils; like a devil, he is filled with hatred towards God; but he sees the devil as an influence rather than an occupier. Like Satan in Paradise Lost, whispering in the form of a toad into Eve’s ear, Trosse’s devil can get access to his innermost thoughts and work on them; Trosse attributes his visions to ‘a disturb’d Brain, influenced by a deceitful and lying Devil’.98 But the devil is not Trosse; he remains in some sense outside. Fitzherbert draws on the idea of possession only as metaphor. What possesses her is not the devil but error, in the broadest sense; possession, in her narrative, indicates a loss of self or a loss of self-government, rather than a distinct spiritual condition. Thus she refers to her heart as possessed by deceit, her mind possessed by cogitations, herself possessed with pride; all of these formulations in a sense disavow the error and relegate it to the past, to a particular frame of mind. Bad qualities invaded her and took her over; but now she has managed to shake them off.99 The devil is a


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constant presence, and must always be guarded against; there is no security against temptation. In reaching out for an image of her own monstrosity, however, it is the figure of Antichrist rather than the devil who stands for the horror of what she sees in herself. This is in certain ways an even more disruptively problematic identification than seeing oneself as the devil, since Antichrist in standard Protestant belief at this period was in fact the Pope, and to affirm oneself to be Antichrist opens up the idea of Catholicism – troubling to any good Protestant, but as noted earlier a particularly fraught area for Fitzherbert.100 Thus although the word occurs in her original manuscript, it has been obliterated every time it appears, and a phrase such as ‘an adversary to God’ substituted (apparently in Fitzherbert’s own handwriting). To be Antichrist is to be almost luxuriantly beyond sanity and redemption; like ‘treason’, her corrections suggest, it is a word too dangerous even for distraction. These dramatically monstrous identifications, of course, are not in themselves unusual. As we have seen, the rhetoric of self-abhorrence which characterises seventeenth-century Protestantism makes the assertion of unparalleled sinfulness almost standard; to think oneself reprobate, accursed, unable to love God, the worst creature living, is a recurrent motif in spiritual autobiography. And as Stachniewski points out, there is no requirement for the overpowering sense of sin to correspond to any outward behaviour: Sin was experienced internally, a mark of indelible inner corruption rather than a specific act.101 Furthermore, since the devil is generally recognised and accepted as a real and active force in people’s lives, there is nothing intrinsically impossible in being taken over by devils. Thus to believe oneself damned, tormented by devils, even a devil incarnate or an antichrist, is no necessary index of mental disorder. The question for recovery is how to balance such beliefs and make them compatible with a spiritual framework which allows for the possibility of both salvation and sanity. In this the active agency of the devil as tempter remains entirely plausible; the notion that those around you who were looking after you were also devils, however, must be abandoned. To recognise that one was sinful, even to the point of being demonic, is allowable; to continue to insist that one has committed the sin against the holy ghost, or is the worst sinner that ever lived, or is in truth a devil, is not. Sanity is not a matter of ceasing to believe in the devil or of ceasing to believe in one’s own sinfulness, but rather a matter of regaining a different perspective on those beliefs. Human subjectivity is experienced as embodied: our idea of ourselves as selves cannot be separated from our bodies (however inadequately they may at times seem to represent that selfhood). But historically, this general proposition is subject to innumerable variables. The material and conceptual boundaries of the physical body are lived differently at different moments. Materially, as the previous chapter suggested, if the body has its own unchanging processes, culture assigns a bewildering range of meanings to and

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explanations for those processes, which affect not only our understanding but our experiences of them. Conceptually, as this chapter has attempted to demonstrate, the notion of the single self bounded by the single body is complicated in the early modern period by ideas about death and the immortality of the soul, possession and the demonic (just as it is complicated today by beliefs about multiple personality or reincarnation).102 And psychically, the conceptual as well as the material aspects of the body are open to disturbance especially at times of mental disorder. The insecure or vulnerable self is susceptible to confusion about its own boundaries: the differences between life and death, human and non-human, self and others, become urgent and problematic. But once again, these are problems not only for madness, but for early modern thought in general. If the seventeenth century may be identified as a key point in the emergence of the modern self, individuated and clearly bounded, it is also a period that sees particularly intense pressure on those boundaries. Devils and witches, possession and inspiration (by good as well as evil spirits), the problematic relation of the living to the community of the dead, are all issues for early modern spirituality which seem to challenge the idea that what Protestantism is establishing is in any simple sense the individual. In the final chapters of this book, we will approach this question from outside, as it were, and explore the self in relation to human rather than non-human others.

9 Family Histories: The Self and Others

Selfhood is constituted not only in the body, as the last two chapters have explored, but also and crucially in relation to others. For spiritual autobiography the most significant of these others is God, and the relationship with God is the overriding concern of the account. Direct information about family and other non-spiritual relationships is thus characteristically sparse, as noted earlier, and in so far as human relationships are foregrounded, they are more likely to be relationships with co-religionists than with kin. In the narratives of Dionys Fitzherbert, Hannah Allen and George Trosse, by contrast, the question of human relationship as well as divine is powerfully significant. All three writers are located in specific social and familial contexts, and family members play an active part in their stories, both as those who care for them and organise their care, and as significant figures in their inner worlds. In consequence their narratives are informative not only about family and kinship connections in a general way, but also about the emotional dynamics of family life. The ambivalent and complex emotions that can be read obliquely in the terrors and delusions of mental disturbance are illuminating both for the history of madness and for our understanding of early modern families in general. For some time the predominant assumption of family historians was that the early modern family was a cold and detached place. Parents, it was argued, avoided feeling too much affection for children they might all too quickly lose; children’s intimacy with their parents was undermined by wetnursing and early departure from the family home; hierarchy and authority, rather than companionship and affection, characterised relations between family members.1 More recent research has significantly modified this picture, drawing especially on personal and domestic papers – diaries, letters and so forth – to argue that in fact family relations, however challenged by mortality rates and grounded in assumptions about obedience, were nonetheless often warm and affectionate: parents express deep grief at the loss of children, spouses demonstrate mutual tenderness and siblings are 159

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often close and loving.2 As Naomi Tadmor notes, indeed, the argument may not have been posed in the most useful terms. Many of the concepts which have traditionally structured the history of the family are anachronistic: oppositions between the nuclear and extended family, individual choice and familial strategy, affective and hierarchical family relations, are inadequate to describe the various ways in which early modern people experienced family and kinship relations.3 Additionally, the growing body of feminist historiography has explored gender relations in the early modern family, and emphasised the extent to which – affectionate or not – it was founded on the principle of women’s subordination, and organised hierarchically, after the fashion of a small kingdom (as political commentators of the time liked to observe).4 The family is both the location of powerful emotional relationships, for men and for women, and also the key site in which the early modern gender order is established. To translate these points into an understanding of human relationships in autobiographical narratives, however, is complicated. It may seem to us natural that the figures of father, mother, brother, sister, appear as emotionally weighty and charged with meaning; but even where this is apparently the case, we should not assume that those meanings are the same as those we might give them today. The emotions of the early modern family are structured by relations of hierarchy and authority to an extent which makes them in many ways radically unfamiliar. Additionally the expression of emotion towards relatives is shaped by powerful cultural codes which tend to suppress any suggestion of ambivalent, troubled or hostile feelings. Even those spiritual autobiographers describing outright conflict with parents or spouses seldom articulate explicit criticism or anger; this does not necessarily mean none was felt, but we cannot necessarily assume that it must have been. Equally, silence about the family can be read in many different ways. Hilary Hinds suggests that for women at least what is at issue in spiritual writing is not so much an absence as a relocation of the discourse of family: Whilst notions of marriage, motherhood, filial responsibility and sibling allegiance are all central to the discourses produced by sectarian women writers, they are almost invariably metaphorisations of a whole series of other relationships These familial metaphors thus foreground and familiarise a range of extra-familial activities and relationships.5 Thus in acknowledging that there may be psychic and emotional continuities in family relationships, we must also be alert to differences, and to the complex ways in which both may be articulated or silenced. If spiritual narrative in general raises a number of questions around the representation of family relationships, narratives of madness complicate those questions further with our own investment in the notion of the family as key to an understanding of emotional disturbance. Since Freud,

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the causal narrative of insanity almost inevitably implicates the family; even biologically based accounts of mental illness focus on genetics and the question of inheritance, and not only psychoanalysis but psychology in general is deeply preoccupied with the shaping of the personality in the context of family relationships. Accordingly it is tempting to read across these narratives for another story, a family romance that would explain how the narrators come to be as they are by way of an analysis of childhood experiences and parental relations. This is on one level problematic. To overwrite the explanatory models of the time by imposing causal narratives on these stories is a classic piece of historical arrogance, especially in the absence of any kind of detailed information to underpin our speculations. But nor is it satisfactory to leave early modern causal models undisturbed: sensitivity to historical difference should not imply merely agreeing with accounts that attribute unhappiness to sin, for example, or even to disordered humours. The question is, then, how to balance a reluctance to impose an alien explanatory psychic map which would understand what happens to these writers by reading their family narratives as explanations of their disturbances, with a recognition that human relationship is obviously important in these narratives, and we should not dodge its resonance in the story of delusion. These accounts can also be illuminated by opening them up to other ways of thinking, juxtaposing them with different understandings of self, family, causality. The narrative of family, love and friendship – tangential as it is to the spiritual narrative which is the main purpose of these accounts – is also at moments a record of disturbance. To explore the tensions and resonances of relationships in mad narratives is not necessarily an attempt to explain what happened in the terminology of the post-Freudian age, but rather to recognise that the imaginary landscape of madness is populated by figures of real emotional significance. And of course this is a gendered landscape; not only significant figures and sexual desire, but the experience of mental disturbance, are crucially shaped by the place assigned in early modern culture to sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, women and men. In this chapter and the next, then, I attempt to map the emotional territory of these three narratives in relation to the structures of the early modern family and the early modern gender order, and ask how we can trace in this landscape the paths of disturbance and desire.

The father’s house: Dionys Fitzherbert In one of the several prefaces to her narrative, Fitzherbert cites a chapter of the Old Testament, Ezekiel Chapter 16, of which she comments, ‘every Christian may in some measure apply it unto himself’. ‘I purposed to have made application of it to the several occurrences of my whole life’, she continues, but goes on to explain that she changed her mind, giving the

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familiar Renaissance woman’s reason of ‘many defects & inability thereunto for want of learning’.6 There is nothing immediately surprising in this statement. To apply Biblical narratives to one’s own life is a more or less universal practice amongst Protestants of the time; and while Fitzherbert is not often deterred by want of learning, it is not the only time she expresses disquiet about scholarship in general. However, the verse that she quotes is a puzzling one: Thus saith the Lord God unto Jerusalem. Thine habitation & thy kindred is of the land of Canaan. Thy father was an Amorite and thy mother an Hittite.7 And the whole chapter is in certain ways a disquieting choice. Ezekiel Chapter 16 tells the story of Jerusalem’s special covenant with God, and how the city (personified as a woman) falls from grace, turning to the pleasures and abominations of the world. God, the text warns, will throw her down, punish her, deliver her into the hands of her enemies and expose her to them; but through mercy he will then recover her, renew her covenant and set her up again in favour. As a framework in which Fitzherbert can recount her own experience, constructed as one of a special covenant, a fall into worldliness, punishment and recovery, it makes perfectly good sense. But the specific verse she cites also draws attention to the chapter’s governing metaphor, that of rejection, conflict and betrayal within the family, and to the way in which throughout the chapter Jerusalem’s relatives are represented as pagan and sinful, potentially corrupting, in contrast to Jerusalem. Fitzherbert does not quote the chapter beyond the single opening verse. But in claiming this chapter as the story of her life, she hints at an alter native narrative to the one she tells explicitly: a tale of resentment against the parents for whom she is only ever allowed to declare love and gratitude, of a neglected infant whose parents failed in their duty to her, left her needs unsatisfied, gave her no pity. The chosen one, as the rest of the chapter goes on to explain, was born to heathen (Hittite and Amorite) parents, polluted from infancy, cast without compassion into the open field. The relentless biblical repetitions insist on the sinfulness of mother, father and sisters. Jerusalem’s sisters are Sodom and Samaria, expressing the iniquity of ‘Pride, fulnes of bread, and abundance of idlenes’, along with haughtiness, fornication and harlotry in general.8 The whole chapter offers a representation of intra-familial hatred and disaffection, in which those who are supposed to love one another are continually in conflict, and the bonds of duty and affection supposedly governing domestic life break down, to the point of the breakdown of all civil and natural relations: Thou art thy mothers daughter, that hath cast of her housband & her children, and thou art the sister of thy sisters, which forsoke their husbands and their children 9

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The destruction of such relations is part of what is enacted in the course of Fitzherbert’s affliction, in which casting off and alienation come to the fore. To tell one’s life history as myth or parable is at its simplest to find a space in which to speak the forbidden, and Biblical citations can serve as a ready code for matters better left obscure; there is a comparable moment in Hannah Allen’s narrative, as we shall see.10 In this case, at the level of explicit allegory, ‘Jerusalem’s’ father, mother and sisters are standing in for the corruption not specifically of Fitzherbert’s own parents and siblings, but for the general sinfulness and decadence of the world. Nor is she unique in her attention to the allegorical force of this story. ‘Is it possible to have an Amorite to our father, and a Hittite to our mother, without participation of their corrupted natures?’ asks the preacher Thomas Adams in his sermon Mystical Bedlam, pertinently enough from Fitzherbert’s point of view.11 Nonetheless, in choosing this particular chapter Fitzherbert opts for a metaphor that precisely locates sinfulness in the family, and sees the chosen sister Jerusalem neglected and at risk of corruption from her closest kin. As she tells the story of her illness, her father, brothers, mother and sisters look after her, visit her, escort her from place to place and try to comfort her. In identifying herself as Jerusalem, however, she suggests that they are heathens and sinners. What this analogy evokes is the ambivalence of her relationship to her family, and the sense that she is not truly part of it; and what makes it resonant is the way that it directs attention to the elements of her narrative which confirm that sense of her own difference, both during her time of affliction and in the time before and after. In her account of the events leading up to her breakdown, two separate versions of her relation to her family emerge as significant. In one she is an isolated figure of virtue, at odds with her family environment, which she represents as tending to the vain and worldly. Her conversion, for instance, which took place at the age of fourteen, is described as self-generated, the result of God working in her heart and leading her to read the scriptures until she was ‘born anew of the immortal seed of the word of God, and so continued without any other help’.12 As Christian, she is parent and godparent to herself; although she carefully adds that this special calling was afterwards confirmed by a minister, it is clear that the significant confirmation was between herself and God. Moreover its effect was to isolate her: it took me from all those vain pleasures my age was subject to and wherein I had delighted, so that I was much wondered at, how I could be so much altered, keeping always within doors; and gave my self day & night to studying of the scriptures, and other exercise befitting a Christian; and many rebukes had I of some of my friends, because I applied my self (as they thought) too much to it, and fashioned my self no more unto the world 13

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That she is criticised for her excessive zeal clearly implies that those around her (and ‘friends’ commonly refers to ‘family’ at this period) are less godly than she is, involved in vain pleasures and fashioning themselves to the world; an impression confirmed by odd remarks such as her reference to herself as ‘brought up in all wantonness and ignorance’.14 It is in this context, of course, that her choice of biblical analogy takes on added meaning. In an alternative version, however, she is a wilful and disobedient daughter, too fond of getting her own way, and not listening to those who have her best interests at heart. Her spiritual separation from her family is followed by an actual physical separation, in the wake of a disagreement with her father: ‘he took displeasure against me about a gentleman he would have had me marry and I could by no means affect’, she explains.15 And although, having lived for a year with a kinswoman, she returns home, a few years later she takes off again, this time at her own volition, to live in a Catholic household, ‘which was I think a preparative to my fall’, she comments, though it is not clear whether it was the encounter with Catholicism or the departure from home that put her at risk.16 For several years she lives as a gentlewoman in the house of aristocratic ladies, increasingly tending to restlessness and ignoring good advice. Retrospectively all these decisions suggest the development of unspecified sin, the occasion for regret and repentance. She was growing, she suggests, ‘too secure and puffed up’, too worldly, forgetful of her religious duties.17 Having left her father’s house she seems unable to find a place to settle, whether Catholic or Protestant, strict or loving, religious or profane. When eventually she breaks down into delirium, it is not altogether surprising that so many of her confusions focus around questions of family relationships and her own place within them. In one of the classic marks of early modern mental disorder, she says, ‘I did not believe the most sensible things that be, no, not that I was child to my own parents’. Friends and acquaintances visited, ‘which some times I knew and other times no more than if I had never seen them’.18 Moreover her relatives are not only strangers, but potentially threatening; she does not recognise them, and thinks they want to kill her. When one of her brothers takes her from the place of her breakdown to Dr Carter’s house with her hands bound, it strikes, she says, ‘an intolerable horror into my heart’, and his attempts to persuade her that she is not a criminal on her way to death only make her more suspicious: I thought he mocked me, beginning now to think that he was not my brother, but I had been deceived in thinking so albeit I loved him dearly above all other, believing that he and another of my brothers that came to me were of the greatest enemies that I had.19 Her beloved brother, perhaps, would not have colluded in the binding of her hands, so this cannot be he; or looked at another way, if he is her brother,

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she loves him, but she does not love this man, so he must be someone else; she calls him her master instead. Sisterhood, too, in these early stages, is problematic. Fitzherbert, discarding her own sisters, believes herself sister to her friend Mistress H., whom she had ‘loved dearly and been much beholding to’, but subsequently thought ‘one of my greatest enemies, as well because I was somewhat indebted to her and that also by her procurement I came to doct C’.20 The interlocking of love and resentment, gratitude merging into an unwelcome sense of obligation, are strongly reminiscent of familial ties; and the shared phrases (loved dearly, greatest enemy) in her descriptions of the brother who she thinks is not her brother, and the friend who she thinks is her sister, also suggest a shared emotional tone. The insistence that she was not worthy to be part of her family is a recurrent feature of her narrative, displacing the possibility of anger or resentment into abjection. Certain that she was to be burnt to death, she explains that a ‘great cause’ of this was because such an abject as I was durst challenge [claim] him for my brother and other of worth for my kindred, which was the cause I would desire them to kill me always and offer my neck to their swords when they came to see me, thinking I had deserved no less of them 21 By contrast, part of the sequence of her recovery is specifically identified as the first moment when she recognises a kinsman in Oxford and is able to name him; this coincides too with the point when she manages to be sociable with the gentlemen her brothers bring to visit her. The re-establishment of human relationship in general requires an initial reacceptance of the self as part of a family unit. Fitzherbert’s anxious and ambivalent relationship with her brothers and her kin highlights among other things the unstable relation between love and authority in the early modern family. The family is both a space of private affection and intimacy, and a space of hierarchy and government – whose hierarchies are of course strictly gendered. The brother is also a paternal stand-in, expected to exercise a fatherly authority over deviant sisters, as Fitzherbert’s brothers do.22 Different familial structures are here clearly implicated in the specific forms of Fitzherbert’s delusions, and how she imagines her family is tied to how the early modern gentry family imagines itself as a place in which authority matters. To refer to one’s brother as one’s master, or to know that one’s family is a respectable and prominent one and to feel oneself unworthy of it, implies a historically particular set of ideas about family and hierarchy. And Fitzherbert is alive to issues of authority and government not only in her immediate family but more generally as well, even if her conduct seems at times to indicate resistance to aspects of it. Order is guaranteed by knowing one’s place; the loss of social

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placement implies a loss of security, and equally, the collapse of her internal order suggests a collapse of the external, to which she had previously given credence. A fear that dominates much of Fitzherbert’s illness is the conviction that she is to be burnt, obscurely linked to the idea that her father knows about it. She offers various reasons for this fear: she believes that she has committed blasphemy and treason, that she has spoken against God and against the king and will suffer the penalty (the word ‘treason’ is deleted in the fair copy of the manuscript, and replaced by the words ‘spoken against the king’). But the fear of burning resonates in complex ways beyond a straightforward notion of offences actually punishable by burning; as Elspeth Graham comments, it suggests ‘[s]lippage between life and death, the literal and the metaphoric, burning as divine punishment and burning within a domestic environment’.23 And the nexus of ideas around guilt and punishment is related in a complex way to Fitzherbert’s preoccupation with the figure of her father. Fatherhood itself, in a culture which is patriarchal not merely in the general but in the strict political sense, is an idea of great symbolic weight. The father of the family stands for the authority of king and God in his household; the king draws on the concept of paternity as a natural bond to naturalise and legitimise his own political authority, as well as on his status as God’s representative; the identification of God as father binds the believer to the duties of a son or daughter, of love and obedience. As Stachniewski suggests, emphasising also the generally authoritarian parenting culture of early modern England: The sense of divine rejection was often related to feelings about fathers, father-surrogates, or the social hierarchy banishment from the father’s presence and the threat of being disowned; guilt-feelings arising from lack of filial affection or hatred as a reaction to punishment; the desire to escape from paternal anger in all these experiences God and actual fathers seem to have been imaginatively conflated.24 The mutually reinforcing identities emphasise not merely the intellectual error involved in questioning the authority of father, king and God, but its sinful unnaturalness: not to love, not to obey, is to defy divine, human and natural law in one fell swoop, and implies the foundational sin of pride. The equation of God, king and father echoes through the biblical parables and tales drawn on by the religious, in prayer, meditation and sermon, and in their writing more generally. ‘Intellectually’, comments Paul Seaver, considering Nehemiah Wallington’s fraught and intense relationship with his father, ‘Nehemiah was able to distinguish between God and his father, but emotionally it is not entirely clear that he did so.’25 And it is not only part of the common cultural currency of the time, but specifically written

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into law; most tellingly, perhaps, in the crime of petty treason, which makes rebellion against the head of household the political equivalent of rebellion against the state, as well as in its punishment the equivalent of heresy. As grand treason acts against the authority of the king, petty treason acts against authority within the family. Wives who kill their husbands, children who kill their parents or servants who kill their masters have committed an offence analogous with that of the subject who kills the sovereign, and are put to death by burning, like those who refuse authority in religion.26 Fitzherbert’s fear of her father is entangled with her own guilty conviction that she has done wrong; she left her father’s house, sought to make her own way in the world, and finally was forced to return in weakness and misery. Her reiterated anxieties about treason and burning as well as her general sense of being outcast – from God, family and society – are given added urgency by the blurring of boundaries between God and father. What she experiences, from this point of view, are the generalised consequences of disobedience. But alongside this narrative of guilt is a submerged one of blame. If on the one hand the father is the wronged party, abandoned by his treacherous daughter, on the other he is the uncaring parent who has failed her. Indeed, it is an act of omission on his part which is immediately (though not in her view actually) responsible for her collapse. She explains the feigned illness which she puts at the origin of her disaster as an attempt to evade the embarrassment of being the only one of the gentlewomen to be without a New Year’s gift for her mistress, ‘by reason I received not money from my father as I expected, which made me somewhat discontent and melancholy, and so the apter for any temptation’.27 This is of course a serious and real problem. As a gentlewoman, she would have been paid a small annual sum by her employer, but this would need supplementing to enable her to hold her place in the elaborate network of reciprocal gifts, compliments and patronage which structured aristocratic life in the early seventeenth century.28 The balance between dependence and independence is thus precarious; she has left home, but unless her father sends her money she cannot live in a manner appropriate to her position in the household. Indeed more may be at stake than simply her ability to pay her way. ‘Continuing parental support and influence remained important to the adolescent’s advancement after the departure from home’, as Ralph Houlbrooke notes, citing the letters of Dorothy Plumpton, who in the early sixteenth century ‘begged her father Sir Robert to show by his fatherly kindness that she was indeed his child and to still the tongues of those who, in the absence of answers to her repeated messages, believed that he bore her little favour’.29 The transfer of property – money, land, gifts – whether directly or by inheritance, is tied up with anxieties about belonging, both psychic and social. Thus if Fitzherbert’s father fails to meet her financial needs, so it seems he does not always meet others. As she begins to recover, her thoughts turn

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to a return home, believing, ‘if I were at home with my own friends they would not torment me so, & therefore I told doctor C that I would gladly go unto my father’s’.30 Her re-absorption into the family unit begins with a paternal stand-in, the brother who escorts her to Oxford, where her father has been building a new house, and continues with her reception by the family friends she is to stay with; Mrs Brian tells her that her father ‘was there but a fortnight before, and willed her that I should want nothing until he came again’.31 But he has not given permission for her to be brought directly to him, and her wish to ‘go to my father’s house’ is refused on the grounds that it is empty.32 Eventually she is given permission to go in the morning and return at night (the manor is some five miles outside Oxford), and finds her father is there after all; but the meeting is inconclusive, and no answers are forthcoming. Her father tells her that he had come the day before, and was glad, he said, I could come so far, & that the next day he would come to Oxford, as he meant to have done if I had not come. So I went back again the same night, for there was no lodging but for himself and that company he had. The next day came he according to his promise 33 The careful precision with which these details are recorded seems intended to obliterate an alternative account of their meeting, full of questions, that might have run, He didn’t come immediately to his sick daughter; he preferred other company over hers, did not give her shelter; would he really have come next day, if he had not been found out? how long had he really been there? The narrative at this point has a curiously mythic, fairytale quality; the level of detail in recounting conversations and movements is greater than usual, as if to suggest that something important is happening; and yet nothing does happen, quite, or if something is happening it is hard to tell what it is. The meaning has not been restored, and the intensity is unfocused. What is being registered, perhaps, is the symbolic resonance of the father’s house, as a stand-in for the father, as well as an allusion to God and the promise of safety: ‘In my father’s house are many mansions’, as Christ tells the disciples. ‘If it were not so I would have told you’ ( John 14.2). Fitzherbert is not the only writer to call up this image. John Rogers records dreams in which his father’s house is burning down, with a mixture of anxiety and self-justification.34 And Mrs Drake in her final illness is seized by a sudden desire to go to her father’s house: having resolved and alwayes purposing, when shee found her selfe neare unto her last, to die at her Fathers House, and lie with her kindred and friends at Ammersum, Shee suddenly told her Husband, that shee found her self very ill, and therefore that shee was purposed to goe suddenly unto her Fathers House

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Accordingly she sets off, leaving her astonished husband behind. Here there are suggestions that the underlying message is to do with her enduring dissatisfaction with her marriage, as well as an allusion to heaven.35 But for all three, the father’s house seems to serve as a metaphorical place of security at times when the self seems threatened. If the father’s world appears in Fitzherbert’s narrative as desired but somehow inaccessible, the mother’s world is easier to enter but more resisted. Following her meeting with her father, Fitzherbert declares her desire to go to Wales to her mother, and is duly escorted there by her brother once again. In this last part of her narrative she has overcome most of her delusions, although she is still convinced that she is to be put to death, and weeps constantly; in the company of her mother and her sisters, she recovers entirely. Nonetheless in her account of it, her recovery has little to do with them; her mother’s advice to keep quiet and busy is not credited with effectiveness, and her sisters’ attempts to persuade her that she has not committed the sin against the holy ghost are useful only in so far as they persuade her to pick up the Bible again in order to argue with them (‘I verily think they understood not aright what that sin might be’, she comments dismissively).36 The specific motifs and anxieties of her account can thus in certain ways be historically located, by way of the place of treason in early modern discourse, and the associations between family and state, as well as the insistence on God as a paternal figure. And yet the basic mapping of anxiety around the figures of siblings and parents is not necessarily dependent on that specifically historical structuring of authority. This is perhaps clearest in relation to the figure of the father in her narrative, who as head of household seems to take on a more mythically transhistorical quality (the absent king, feared and desired). The father, for Fitzherbert, is undoubtedly the law. If her original departure from home, against the wishes of her family, may be read as an identification with the father’s world, and against the mother’s, as well as against the feminine position (she was the clever one, the serious one, the independent one, while her sisters and her mother were frivolous), then the failure of her departure sends her back into the company of women, into the mother’s world again, where she is healed. But there is still a movement of contradiction; for the first thing she does on recovering is leave. The psychic and geographic trajectories in this narrative of return, recovery and departure interlink in complex ways. Her departure from her family also marks the end of her narrative: she leaves family and madness at the same time, and there is no more to be said. The story that she writes, though, returns obsessively to circle around the different and incompatible versions of family relationships. Her father loves her, rejects her; her mother misunderstands her, loves her; her brother is her master, her kinsfolk may kill her, her sisters are Sodom and Samaria; all hate her, all love her, she rejects

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them, she wants them. Trying out all these patterns of desire, she turns around and around in her narrative, searching for the way out; for these are also, ultimately, the stories she is most anxious to escape.

The mother’s authority: George Trosse Chronologically the last both to write and to publish his narrative, Trosse’s account of his life perhaps marks more clearly than the other two the emergence of new ways of explaining and thinking about the roots of personality. All three, I have suggested, are more attentive to human relationships than spiritual autobiography in general tends to be; Trosse, however, is alone in explicitly contemplating his youth as the period in which he grew in sin not only because he was sinful but also because of his family circumstances. Such a perspective may be implicit in Fitzherbert’s descriptions of her relations with her family, but it is never allowed to surface. Trosse’s account of his boyhood, however, seems at times to suggest that his parents were directly at fault in their choices about his upbringing, and that some of his vices might therefore be attributable to them. Or, at any rate, to his mother; for if the father is the significant parent in Fitzherbert’s emotional landscape, it is Trosse’s mother who dominates his account, and following his father’s early death is the figure of authority. The opening section of his narrative tells a story of promise poorly directed, which comes close to direct reproach. He was, he announces, the son of ‘Wealthy Parents, honourable Citizens’; but this description, already implying a degree of Puritan distance from worldly notions of honour, is further undercut in the following sentences: They gave me the usual Education of those Days amongst such as were no Friends to Puritans: They were averse to the Placing me with such, either to be bred up in Religion or Learning.37 And although he was educated in ‘the Principles of Religion’, forbidden to play games on Sunday, and taken to church, the discipline was not strictly enforced, and he was never ‘call’d to an account by my Parents’ about the sermon he had just heard.38 Similarly, he showed gifts at school which were not given scope. He reports the comment of an old schoolmaster of his, who described him as ‘one of the most forward and likely Boys he ever taught’, that ‘my Mother did me and himself an Injury, to translate me from the School to the Exchange, from being a Scholar to be a Merchant’.39 Around the age of fifteen he left school to travel abroad and learn to trade. This early turning aside from his apparent vocation, he makes clear, should be attributed to his mother, even though it followed his own desires: My tender Mother comply’d with my Inclinations, as knowing the Profitableness of Trading, by having been the Daughter of a Merchant, who got

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many Thousands; tho’ my Father, who died several Years before, design’d me for a more Ingenious Education, and a Calling altogether as profitable, as appears by his Bequeathing to me all his Law-Books 40 The father’s inheritance is set aside by the ‘tender Mother’ with her desire for profit and her readiness to indulge her son’s ‘unreasonable inclinations’ against his own best interests; and Trosse’s feet are set on the path that will lead him overseas, and to the edge of destruction.41 His mother, the merchant’s daughter, evidently values his soul less than his earning potential: Hereupon, I desir’d to visit some other Country again, and my Mother was also very willing of it, for my Worldly Advantage: For she could have a Prospect of nothing else by my going into Foreign Parts. There was too much Cause to fear, that if I should go thither to gain Wealth, I should lose my Soul, or sink into Hell, by the Bargain 42 Against this critical portrayal of his mother, however, is set a different picture, in which she represents a restraining moral force. In leaving home, he declares, he would ‘desert my Mother’s Family, where I was under a careful Inspection, to prevent all gross Immoralities and Debaucheries’; on his return, it was his mother who ripped the gold lace off his doublet, being offended by it.43 In listing his transgressions against the Commandments he notes his failure to accompany his mother to hear the ‘worthy Minister’ she favoured – he went off and attended service with an ‘Episcopal minister’ in a surplice – and more generally his sins against the fifth commandment: To my good, tender, and aged Mother I was very undutiful: I would continue in those Courses, and practise those Sins, by which she was greatly griev’d and offended. Tho’ I had an awful Regard to her in my Heart, and was asham’d and troubled, after my Sins were over, that I had thereby griev’d her; yet ever and anon I would return unto my Follies 44 That Trosse should regard his mother with awe, of course, was entirely proper; mothers as well as fathers were to be respected and obeyed. On the other hand, as a man he was also supposed to be independent of her; the authority of a mother over a son is less than that of a father over a daughter. Indeed as a grown man whose father is dead he should properly be inverting that relationship, and taking on the role of head of the family. Instead, he remains her child. His dependence on his mother is conditioned initially by her evident control over the family finances, and the power he has in return is only that of disobedience and defiance. He spends too much money and lies to her about how he spent it; he comes home drunk, and when his mother shows

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displeasure, rages against her and against Cromwell. ‘I vow’, he shouts, ‘I will go and kill Oliver; and then she shall hear that her Son is brought to the Gallows, since I cannot have her Favour and live quietly at Home.’45 Even after his recovery he reproduces the same pattern of relationship, differently inflected. His mother is once again the person who can gratify his ambitions, this time approving and funding his wish to go to Oxford: ‘she, like a very good and tender Parent, willing to do any Thing for my Advantage, consented I should go and she promis’d me a handsome & comfortable Allowance.’46 Parental indulgence of youthful ambition this time appears positively, as his ambitions are now virtuous ones; but his mother is still doing just what she did before. Nor can he keep from offending her, deciding to refuse the oath of uniformity although he knows ‘that by my Dissent I should disgust my Mother and all my Near Relations’; whether in the direction of gold lace or of dissent, evidently, he always goes too far.47 Ambivalence, if not outright contradiction, remains the governing note in his references to her. She is characterised as mercenary, worldly, and prejudiced in her religious opinions on the one hand, and as tender, supportive and morally upright on the other. In his account of his madness, she appears relatively little; for the most part, she is replaced by the good mother figure of Mrs Gollop, the housekeeper, already encountered above. Unlike his own mother, it seems, Mrs Gollop is a figure of benign sympathy and also of serious piety: She had great Compassion upon me; would many times sit and discourse with me; would give me good Directions, and offer me considerable Encouragements 48 Where his real mother neglected his religious education and allowed him to stray off into idle and wicked ways, encouraging his worldly ambitions, Mrs Gollop becomes a spiritual parent to him, bringing him to his second birth; and the good mother/bad mother opposition implicit in his account of the two women underlines the importance of her role in his recovery. When he does mention his mother during his madness, she continues to appear in a mixed light, someone he both depends on and resents. At one point he refuses to get into the coach to go to Glastonbury until she offers to accompany him; as they travel, he is disturbed by ‘fearful Apprehensions and dismal Expectations’: I fancy’d that I was the Ruin of all who attended me, and especially my Mother; and was afraid every Moment that Coach, Horses and All would be born away in the Air, and carry’d to the Place of Torment 49 Hell is where he invariably sees himself as going when he travels to Glastonbury; this time, evidently, if he is to go his mother will go with

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him – whether for vengeance or for comfort. Although it is by the agency of a brother-in-law that he is sent to the mad-doctor, this refusal to go without his mother suggests her continuing authority in his mind: she can keep him safe, or alternatively he may drag her down with him.

Networks and bridles: Hannah Allen Of all three writers, Hannah Allen positions herself most specifically and explicitly within a named and located family. The long first sentence of her narrative summarises her early years in terms of kinship and place: I Hannah Allen, the late Wife of Hannibal Allen Merchant, was born of Religious Parents; my Father was Mr. John Archer of Snelston in Derby-shire, who took to Wife, the Daughter of Mr. William Hart of Uttoxeter Woodland in Stafford-shire, who brought me up in the fear of God from my Childhood; and about Twelve Years of Age, for my better Education, sent me up to London in the Year 1650, to my Father’s Sister Mrs. Ann Wilson, the Wife of Mr. Samuel Wilson, Merchant, then Living in Aldermanbury, and after some time spent there, and at School, I being not well in Health, had a desire to go down for a time to my Mother, being a Widow, (my Father dying when I was very young) where I staid almost two Years.50 This passage is at once densely informative and strangely opaque. The writer’s identity is established through paternal lineage and marriages, streets, towns and counties, in a formal declarative style, as if giving evidence to a court. By the end of this first sentence, the reader knows that her father died when she was young, and that she has been married and is widowed, and can calculate her approximate date of birth. And yet it is almost an overload of information; in its attempt to close off questions and establish facts and certainties, it seems to open new gaps. The parenthetical death of her father and the childhood relocations which seem to be explained but beg further questions are given no space in the narrative; she moves rapidly on to her early spiritual experiences. There is of course nothing untypical in more or less ignoring one’s childhood and family in spiritual autobiography; on the contrary, it is the amount of detail here that is unusual. And the particular combination of detail and opacity characterises the narrative as a whole. Allen’s account locates her at every moment in a network of kin; as her relatives attempt to manage and cure her melancholy, she passes from one household to another. Following her husband’s death, as a young widow, she might have decided to set up house alone, but instead she is rapidly reabsorbed into the family. She stays with her aunt, then her mother; she is taken to visit her cousin Mrs Shorthose and her husband, to divert her from her growing melancholy. Her mother takes her back to London, where of her ‘four loving Uncles, my Father’s

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brethren’, two are still alive, as well as a brother of her own.51 She stays with her brother, but after her mother’s departure finds it lonely and attempts suicide; the next day she is moved again: my Uncles and Brother (considering the inconveniency of that lonesome House) removed me to Mr. Peter Walker’s House, a Hosier at the Three Crowns in Newgate-Market; (whose Wife was my Kinswoman) 52 Once again the level of detail seems excessive, while the explanation for her suicidal impulses is only briefly touched on (it was to prevent her from being condemned to a horrible death, which she feared at the time). As Ramona Wray notes, too, what emerges is a striking picture of Allen’s capacity to rouse up her household and kinship network to change her situation, and to move from an empty house to one full of company.53 Following this shift, she remains settled with the Walkers for some time, before returning with her aunt to the country and completing her circuit with a visit to the Shorthoses again, where she eventually recovers. All these carefully detailed moves provide an impressive illustration of the extended family in action; as Jonathan Andrews notes, indeed, ‘Her case suggests how intimately the geography of travel for the mentally afflicted was linked to that of the extended family.’54 Mother, aunts and uncles, brothers and cousins, even at one point a grandmother, are shown intervening, consulting, and sharing the responsibility for this troubled member of the family; she is passed from one household to another, consoled and advised. And yet what is strange about it, compared to the accounts given by Fitzherbert and Trosse, is the absence of interest Allen shows in any of her family relationships: her description is strictly functional. Unlike Trosse and Fitzherbert, she does not attach adjectives to her references to those kin most closely involved with her; she never refers to ‘my tender mother’, for example, as they both do, or indeed ‘my dear aunt’ (although she does refer to her four ‘loving Uncles’).55 At most she credits particular behaviours: her mother persuaded her to travel ‘with much patience and importunity’, her cousin Walker received her ‘courteously’.56 Nor do any of her relatives seem to appear in her delusions. She knows who they are; unlike Trosse and Fitzherbert, her place as a member of her family, and her relation to each one of them, evidently remains entirely clear to her throughout her affliction. But in contrast to the other two, father and mother, brother and sister, are not resonant terms for her; the loss of her father and uncles, and the presence of her aunt as a second mother, leave no recorded trace on her emotional life. The only grief formally articulated in this narrative is for her husband. Most significantly, perhaps, the relationship that she has least to say about is that in which she is a mother herself. Somewhere in the course of the

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eight years of her marriage, a child is born. The reader knows this, however, only through subsequent glancing references. The child is first mentioned some way into Allen’s trials, at a point where she believed herself to be dying, and begged her aunt ‘to bring up my Child strictly, that if it were possible he might be saved, though he had such a Mother’ – disconcerting enough, given the accumulation of detail about other aspects of her life.57 Later she considers taking opium as a means of committing suicide without being detected ‘(which I desired that my Child might not be disgraced by my untimely end)’, she notes parenthetically.58 His final appearance is in the context of his mother’s violent refusal to read. ‘Nay I would strike the Hornbook out of my Childs hand’, she says, and hastily adds, ‘but that would trouble me as soon as I had done it’.59 But this nameless child, whose image is summoned up three times to underline his mother’s desperate focus on her own death and her refusal to return to the world of godly books, is otherwise a mystery: not only his name but his age, where he lives while she is being moved around the family, and what happens to him after her remarriage, are all passed over in silence. It is as if Allen, dependent herself throughout the narrative on so many parental substitutes, can imagine herself only as a daughter, not as a mother. The question of what a child would inherit from such a mother might well exercise Allen’s mind; for his situation as the child of a widowed mother whose father died early replicates her own, and Allen had made similar speculations about herself to her friends: ‘I said, I exceedingly wondred that such a Pious man as I heard my Father was, should have such a Child.’60 This solitary reference to her father seems to suggest disturbance in her sense of herself as a member of her family, not at the level of delusion, as with Fitzherbert, but as a moment of resistance. The godly network of Archers and Wilsons and Walkers and Shorthoses, concerned to sustain and reincorporate the straying daughter, were evidently able to absorb all her wild declarations that she was Magor-Missabib, her uncharacteristic peevishness and self-accusations, her refusal to attend church and her disruptive attempts to run away and kill herself. Allen, writing after her remarriage and consequent reincorporation into this network, can only be grateful to them for their forbearance. But her narrative, turning inwards to see only her own crises, closes them out.

Family romances Freud’s well-known paper ‘Family Romances’ hints at the ways in which the stories we tell ourselves about our families are also stories we tell about ourselves.61 We attribute to fathers, mothers and siblings qualities and histories that in one way or another affirm a version of ourselves that we wish to reinforce. Equally, from this perspective, one might say there is no account of family relationship that does not participate to some extent in the mythical. In these narratives, the ways in which family members figure

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imaginatively seem close to the mythical figures populating the landscape of the family romance. The narratives are haunted by a sense of loss, of parents who are absent through death or withdrawal, of tight but complex and often uneasy bonds between siblings, of the wish not only to belong but also to depart, to find new and other families beyond the immediate circle of kin. Fitzherbert and Trosse both seem to be successful in this. Trosse becomes a minister, caring for his congregation and imprisoned with fellow nonconformists; little is clear about Fitzherbert’s life after her recovery, but although there are signs that conflict with her family continued, there is also evidence that she succeeded in leading an independent life, establishing friendships and entering into correspondence with people who shared her religious outlook, as well as links with libraries where she could leave copies of her manuscript. Allen, by contrast, whose family is devout and whose ambivalence about it is more muted, ends her story with re-enclosure, though with a new husband. All these stories, however, in their complex and troubled representations of the bonds of relationship, offer insights into the emotional dynamics of the early modern family, as well as of the early modern self.

10 Love and Desire: Disordered Passions

‘Love’, declares Burton, introducing the longest section of his Anatomy, ‘is a species of melancholy, and a necessary part of this my Treatise’.1 Love in various forms – lust, desire of an unattainable object, jealousy, obsession – is in Burton’s discussion part of the map of mental disorder, both as cause and as symptom. Frustrated or disappointed desire drives the lover insane (‘Goe to Bedlam for examples’, he remarks in relation to lovers’ despair); but additionally, the state of mind induced by love is one which is in itself in some sense insane.2 The lover’s perception of external reality is disordered; he believes the beloved to be all beauty and perfection, however strong the evidence against this. He will ignore or override all the normal priorities and preoccupations of the sober mind, disinheriting or murdering his nearest and dearest, wasting vast sums of money, dwelling obsessively on the smallest details of appearance and behaviour. The disruption represented by love may be only temporary, but while it has possession of the mind it reduces the lover to a state of mental incapacity: lovers ‘are very slaves, drudges for the time, mad men, fooles, dizards, atrabilarii, beside themselves, and as blinde as beetles’, he comments.3 Like melancholy, too, love is at once an irresistible force bearing down on its helpless victim, and a disorder susceptible to treatment and cure. If lovers are atrabilarii, full of black bile, medication to rebalance the humours should help; good counsel and reminders of how the world looks to a normal mind will help to deflate the hyperbolic swelling of the lover’s perceptions. As with madness, organic, moral and spiritual causes and cures are tangled together; the sufferer both is and is not responsible for his own condition. Madness in many cultures is associated with disordered desires and sexually inappropriate behaviour; indeed it is perhaps to be expected that the driven and excessive character of desire should commonly be linked with madness, whether as cause or as symptom.4 Madness, comments René Major, reflecting on Foucault, ‘is entirely traversed by sexuality, as all delirium bears witness’.5 But a recognition of the cultural reach of this connection needs to be balanced with an awareness of the ways in which its articulation in the 177

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early modern period was both specific and changing. The notion of love as a form of madness has a long history in Western culture, and the glamorisation of melancholy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries reinforced the connection: from Tasso to Hamlet, melancholy was almost a demonstration of the sincerity of love. And like melancholy, lovesickness retains and in certain ways renews its energy in the Renaissance; publications on the topic – medical, literary and philosophical – bear witness to its popularity across Europe.6 As the examples of Tasso and Hamlet suggest, however, lovesickness was often a disorder of masculinity. Burton, comments Helen Small, ‘comprehended love-melancholy almost exclusively within the framework of a masculine tradition of heroic action’, and ‘its principal subject was the male tragic hero’.7 Women’s melancholy, also often driven by love, has less heroic dimensions; as we have seen, it is often associated with sexual disorders, and located in a medical rather than a classical context. Women, rather than raging heroically through forests in the grip of love, are driven into madness by unsatisfied desire. As the seventeenth century progresses, love-madness is increasingly associated with women in drama, ballads and poetry. The popular broadside Bedlam ballads never dwell on the cause of Tom o’ Bedlam’s madness, but his female counterparts Bess and Maudlin have been sent mad by disappointments in love. Ophelia, who becomes an icon of the love-mad woman, can be seen as a version of such figures in a tragic context.8 But the connection is not only a glamorous one for men either. Madness, representing the overthrow of reason’s sovereignty, allows the lower parts of human nature (and the human body) to hold sway over the higher; the passions are uncontrollable, and the body and mind alike are thrown into turmoil. As Burton describes it, in so far as desire is central to love, it is literally a reduction of the human to the animal: The major part of Lovers are carried headlong like so many brute beasts, reason counsells one way yet this furious lust, praecipitates, counterpoiseth, weighes downe on the other: though it be their utter undoing, perpetuall infamy, losse, yet they will doe it, and become at last, insensate, void of sense; degenerate into doggs, hogges, asses, brutes 9 Within the discourse of love-madness, the distinction between love and lust is unstable and constantly breaking down. Love, driven by physical desire, inevitably tends towards such a bestial overthrow of reason. Desire can appear as a crisis that threatens the self with mental disorder, destroying the capacity for reason and self-government. Sexual contact puts the integrity of the body into question, breaching the boundary that separates one body from another. And since in any context outside marriage (and even at times within it) both are understood within the framing discourse of sin, both are often associated with conflict, guilt and anxiety.

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It is thus hardly surprising that the texts under discussion here remain at a distance from the idea of love melancholy, locating themselves instead in the framework of spiritual narrative, and turning to the idea of religious melancholy or spiritual trial to give meaning to their experiences. In this silence, of course, they are typical of their genre. Spiritual writers have good reasons both for focusing on the divine (which is what really matters) and for resisting any attempt to reduce their spiritual emotion to the level of the sensual. Sexual feelings and behaviour are simply not talked about by most early modern autobiographers, of either sex. The mention even of desire, never mind sexual activity, would effectively damn women as whores, and the fragile reputations of women in the public sphere (as religious activists or as writers) would be irreparably damaged by the imputation of unchastity. Nor is this difficulty confined to the godly, indeed. As Laura Gowing’s work on seventeenth-century sexuality has shown, ‘Despite the widespread acknowledgement that mutual pleasure was necessary to marriage and reproduction, female desire was characterised in a whole range of discourses as dangerous, grotesque and unsettling’, and the language of sexual contact was predicated on the desiring man and the consenting woman.10 Andrew Boord reflects this grotesque and bestial aspect of women’s desire in his comments on the cure of women suffering from unlawful lusts: ‘I have knowen that such lustes hath bene put awaye by smelyinge to the savour of theyr owne shoes, whan they be put of’; nonetheless, the only real cure he can identify is that those lusts should be gratified.11 To speak of female desire, then, in a sense, is immediately to enter the terrain of unreason. Women writers will occasionally mention courtship, and tensions within marriage generated by the conflict between religious and domestic commitments, but the vocabulary is strictly that of virtuous love, not desire. Men’s diaries refer to sexual encounters, even if in coded forms or foreign languages; women’s diaries are silent on the subject. And although for men prohibitions on speaking about sexuality are less forceful than they are for women, the use of code is a reminder that they are not non-existent. Sexual misconduct among religious men in particular remains a serious matter, despite the sexual double standard, and surprisingly few among the male spiritual autobiographers accuse themselves of past sexual sins. Drunkenness, gambling, bad temper and a liking for ungodly sports are the usual crimes.12 In so far as desire can be traced in any of these narratives, then, it is in occluded and concealed forms, and involves some degree of violence against the text; for it is clearly not what the writer wishes to offer. But as with family relationships, these narratives do offer some ways in to the question of how to read the intertwining of desire and mental disorder. It is a connection most effectively silenced in Fitzherbert’s narrative, which gives very few clues to anyone searching for a love story, or at least a love story beyond the family. In Hannah Allen’s account, it is present but never explicitly

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acknowledged as an alternative way of understanding her melancholy; and it is most actively present for Trosse, for whom sexual misconduct is part of the general package of sin that led to his downfall, and who is haunted by it in his delusions. In all three, the spiritual framework that has allowed them to recuperate and make sense of their mental disorders does so on the condition of exclusion: there can be no positive articulation of desire in these texts, and sexuality is what above all cannot be allowed to speak the truth of their being. But to trace the hints of this excluded discourse perhaps allows us an insight into that process of constitution through exclusion.13

Protestant virginity Among the loose papers bound into Dionys Fitzherbert’s manuscript is an appeal apparently written some years after the events she describes, addressed to the Church of England, and reproaching it for its failure to value a despised group of its servants – ‘ancient virgins’. These are not simply women who have accidentally failed to get married, but women who have made a willed choice of their virginity, who have dedicated themselves to the service of Christ and his church, but find their service unappreciated, both in the church and among their own families. ‘For can there be a more despised thing’, she inquires, ‘than a virgin, an ancient virgin, who hath in a religious way given her name to Christ in fasting and prayer, day and night?’ And she asks that the church should respect those who make this choice in order that they may also be respected in their families.14 In making this plea, she is well aware, she is at odds with the ethos of early modern Protestantism, in which the unnatural chastity forced on unwilling Catholic daughters was polemically contrasted with the happy lives of Protestant women with husbands and children, fulfilling the sexual and domestic roles ordained by God.15 Accordingly she states her case with some care, and without ever using the word ‘nun’. St Paul, she notes, ‘commends them Absolutely’ who have the gift of continence and use it to God’s glory. The church’s advocates, ‘although they condemn all rash and coerced vows, little esteeming that chastity which needs stone walls to keep them honest, yet magnify this gift of continence’, and it is practised among Anglican ministers; ‘only we, alas, poor maids, are despised and forgotten, as if that gift, their glory, were not perfected in our weakness’. Marriage, she acknowledges, is holy and honourable, and she gives it honour accordingly; but ‘holy and modest virginity’ too is a gift through which God may be glorified.16 The date of this paper in relation to the main part of her autobiographical narrative is not clear, but it does imply that for Fitzherbert, virginity was a chosen condition, and that she identified her ability to resist the snare of sexual desire – her continence – as a gift from God. Sexual temptation,

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in effect, was for others, not for her, whether in or outside marriage. Her narrative suggests that she extricated herself from the business of marriage early on; her first departure from home, she writes, followed a disagreement with her father ‘about a man he would have had me marry and I could by no means affect’.17 Thereafter she lives mainly away from home, and there is no further mention of possible marriages. This position of detachment is reflected not only in the course of her life, but also in her accounts of her friendships with men, which are written in such a way as to exclude any suggestion that there might be alternative readings of these relationships, still less any impropriety. The narrative in fact suggests a surprisingly extensive network of gentlemen friends. At the beginning of her illness, she confides in Mr W, who gives her good advice which she fails to take. He visits her ‘earnestly desiring to know the cause and manner of my sickness, protesting if anything lay in his power that could do me good or pleasure he would not fail to do it, or to conceal anything I should reveal to him’. But no more is to be understood here than religious fellowship; on leaving he reiterates his promise of ‘any furtherance and kindness that lay in his power he would help me the best he could, for any were bound in Christianity so to do’.18 The rhetoric of Christian duty overrides any hint of special relationship. Similarly, the numerous gentlemen visiting and attending her in Oxford are no more than sympathisers, and she takes no interest in them, although once she has seen her father she is able ‘to frame my self to be somewhat more sociable with those gentlemen that came to me’. They all come and say farewell, and several of them ‘would needs’ accompany her on her departure, riding with her as an escort for the first day, but again there is no acknowledgement of any possibility that visiting gentlemen might be regarded as admirers, still less potential wooers.19 The impression the narrative seems keen to convey, then, is of a woman who mixes easily with men, but on strictly intellectual and spiritual terms. Letters to friends asking them to comment on and circulate her manuscript offer a similar picture, of messages to gentlemen which exclude the possibility of love. Mr Dormer should read her narrative to discourage him from falling into Catholicism, and Mr Westfield of whom they both have such a good opinion; both should comment on and correct it. Mr Gasquene and Mr Knightly are asked to forgive any offence she may have given through her jests (an uncharacteristic touch).20 In one curious letter, indeed, she writes to an unnamed ‘special friend’ in terms of considerable intimacy, addressing him as ‘most dear and loving’ and urging him to reform his way of life: it is said and censured by many, my dear, that you cannot live as you do by means pleasing to God, although too fashionable to the world. For my own part, as I never saw no ill, so I am always willing to hope the best let not Sathan hold you any longer in the deceitful lusts

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thereof Take a wife, then, with whom you may live in godly contentment, and without the scandal of the world 21 So decisively has she extracted herself from the business of courtship that she is able not only to write in such terms, but to make her letters available to a wider readership; the persona of the wise counsellor permits her an expressive licence which would otherwise be open to misunderstanding.22 Even in her delusions, as she records them, hints of sexual content are few and far between. The main direction of her self-reproach, indeed, is for the opposite kind of sin. She has been too proud of her intellectual capacities, too self-satisfied in her religious faith, too confident in her ability to rise above petty concerns. And the occasions when she approaches the suggestion of other forms of guilt are ambivalently expressed. She believes that she has been a thief and a loose liver,23 but while she amplifies the first of these to explain that she thought she had stolen all her clothes, she leaves the second unexplained: even delusions in this direction, however wrong, cannot be repeated. She is tempted ‘to become a lewd person, and to run away from my father to take some pleasure in the world’, but the mere thought makes her burst into tears; the emotional potency of the combination of father, lewdness and pleasure is inadmissible, perhaps; but lewdness is sufficiently expansive in its meanings at this period to cover a general sense of living without religion, rather than referring specifically to sexual sins.24 Denial, indeed, for her represents the stronger temptation; she dwells for several days on the idea of sending for a priest to discuss conversion to Catholicism, thinking ‘to be a papist and so to live the strictest order whereby perhaps I might be saved’; and though she eventually resolves against it, her commitment to religious virginity would make it an obvious temptation.25 There was, as Patricia Crawford observes, ‘no lawful avenue for an unmarried woman with a religious vocation’ in England at this time; the choice was between becoming a Catholic, and remaining single without social recognition.26 In the end, though, there is little space in Fitzherbert’s account for reading between the lines, or speculating about possible other relationships or other desires. If her account is marked by moments that evoke some kind of semi-erotic tension – the fear that her clothes may be removed and she be left naked, the startlingly visual description of herself stretching out her neck to the swords of her kinsfolk, the thought of lewdness and her father’s displeasure – they are implicit rather than explicit, and the strongest emotional charge is reserved for her family relationships rather than for outsiders. It is, in the end, her own version of events that remains, whatever the speculations and opinions of friends and family. Her friends may have had other thoughts about the immediate cause of her breakdown (in presenting her own explanation she says firmly that ‘amongst their many

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conjectures’ this is the truth); her father was displeased at her refusal to marry the man he chose; her family in general seems to have been exasperated by her dedication to religion, as her letter to the Church suggests (she complains at being left out of people’s wills).27 But for her the constitution of the religious self by the exclusion of the sexual, at least at the level of discourse, has been effective despite the potentially undermining impact of mental disorder. If her rejection of the diagnosis of melancholy is in any way motivated by a wish to avoid the sexualised explanation of that disorder, that motive never becomes explicit. The disordering of her mind and of her heart are both located firmly in the realm of the spiritual; the loss and longing that structure her narrative are directed internally towards her family, rather than towards love objects beyond the family. Her desires, like her body, are given little part in her account.

Desire and loss: Hannah Allen Loss and longing are also key to Hannah Allen’s account of her melancholy, but very differently organised. Allen, in contrast to Fitzherbert, writes as a married woman and a mother, and although it is the isolated and suffering self that is foregrounded in her account, the implicit causal narrative focuses on that identity as married and widowed. Her melancholy tendencies are attributed initially to ‘the oft absence of my dear and affectionate husband, with whom I lived present and absent about eight Years’.28 After his death, melancholy comes upon her still more powerfully (as his absence is now irreparable), and she is consumed by it for several years; her humours are unbalanced, and her mind and body lapse into discord. Through a combination of care, counsel and medication, eventually the balance is restored, and at the conclusion of her narrative comes her second marriage. The final paragraphs see her settled with ‘Mr Charles Hatt, a Widdower with whom I live very comfortably, both as to my inward and outward man; my husband being one that truly fears God’.29 ‘Present and absent’ – the phrase sits uneasily with ‘dear and affectionate’, a reminder that much of the time this was a husband who was there but not there. If presence and absence as structuring pair initiate her narrative, inward and outward define her recovery from it: the point when once again what is inside her is balanced by what is outside, and her bodily and spiritual disorders evaporate together.30 Presence and absence in this narrative are material; they relate to what is wanted and not there, what is there and not wanted, where she is that she does not want to be. The inward and the outward, however, work rather differently. The inward man refers to the spiritual self, that part of the self in communion with God. The outward man refers broadly to the life of the body (disconcerting when used by a woman, but not uncommon).31 The outward man may be fainting, starving or imprisoned when the inward is in ecstasy; or the

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outward man may be at ease, with plenty to eat and drink and pleasant surroundings, when the inward is tormented and raging. Allen’s use of the phrase, followed by the point that her husband fears God, suggests in the first instance that she has married prosperously (her outward man), but also married a man with whom she is in spiritual sympathy. But perhaps also, with the choice of a phrase specifically evoking the satisfaction of the body, it reminds the reader that there is more than one way of comforting the outward man (or woman). In Hannah Allen’s narrative, the question of why she fell ill and how she recovered is left hanging, an unasked and unanswered question. Elaine Hobby is one of several critics to comment on the curious flatness of the narrative: she sinks into melancholy, after a while she recovers, but the explanations given never seem quite sufficient; ‘religion had provided no explanation for the arrival of her melancholy at her first husband’s death, and produced no reason for its leaving her at her remarriage’.32 What is also noticeable, perhaps, is what the text carefully does not say. If the sequence of events hints at one reading of Allen’s malady (she fell ill through unsatisfied desire; she recovered through remarriage), in a causal model that would have fitted neatly into early modern understandings of women’s melancholy as the result of sexual abstinence, it is nonetheless an interpretation that is not made explicit. As Allen describes her family situation, she is a daughter, niece and sister, enfolded and sustained by a supportive if scattered family; her other familial identities, as widow and as mother, fade into the background by comparison with these live relationships. To foreground them, perhaps, would work against the image of the melancholy young girl that the narrative seems concerned to produce. Widows and mothers not only have some element of independence and authority over others, however limited; they also necessarily have sexual experience. In focusing instead on the relationships of her girlhood, Allen’s narrative slides over these alternative versions of herself. This is not a point that Allen’s narrative explicitly takes up. In so far as her account resists the attribution of sexual motives, it does so in a muted and indirect way: her husband’s death may be a motive for illness, but she will not position a new husband as a motive for recovery. That her case was open to such an interpretation in the view of those caring for her, however, is hinted at in an interpolated passage a few pages long in the middle of the narrative, which is written in the third person. The author of this section is not known, and the narrative itself makes no reference to the change of person. It describes her reluctance to talk to a visiting minister, and the minister’s opinion on her case; and concludes, ‘From his Observation of the ground of her Trouble, he advises all Christians to mortifie inordinate Affection to lawful things. Col. 3.5.’33 The reference here is to St Paul’s advice to the Colossians:

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Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry. What is immediately striking about this verse, as other commentators have noted, is its insistence on specifically fleshly and sexual sinfulness.34 The phrase the minister takes from it, ‘inordinate affection’, suggests a slightly different kind of sin – the sin of placing earthly love above divine, and falling into idolatrous adoration of other human beings.35 The minister could indeed equally well have chosen to quote Colossians 3.2, just a few lines above, which advises, ‘Set your affection on things above, not on things of the earth’. But as with Fitzherbert’s reference to Ezekiel, the quoted words are shadowed by those not quoted. Even though the object of love – a husband – is lawful, fornication, uncleanness and concupiscence lurk in marital love. Moreover, to love earthly objects is a distraction from love of the divine. Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, who puts his fingers in his ears to block out his wife and children crying after him as he heads off after ‘Life, Eternal Life’, is an emblematic figure here; the tension between earthly and divine love is a recurrent theme in religious literature.36 An anonymous manuscript memoir of the late seventeenth century describes the death of the writer’s husband as ‘a sad, but righteous stroake’, on the grounds that when he was alive she ‘did not live to the Glory of God. the creature did deeply share in my Affections then’; now, however, ‘I bless God, the World has, for some yeares bene to me dead and insipid’.37 The testimony of D. M. in Vavasor Powell’s collection similarly declares, ‘I had too much loved my Husband in fleshly love, making an idol of him he became an enemy to goodnesse, and so a hinderance to me in coming to Christ’; when her husband left her, she worked out that God ‘had done it, that I should not hang upon husks, but that I should love him’.38 If Allen had not loved her husband to excess, the minister implies, she would not have suffered at his absences, or come apart at his death. Like Richard Napier’s patients, she has been ignoring the good advice of clergymen and physicians to grieve in Christian moderation.39 But the location of her excessive love and her excessive grief in the field of sexual desire also invokes the association of women’s melancholy with sexual privation.40 In this narrative, then, different cultural discourses on sexuality, melancholy and religion seem to be in tension with one another. Explicitly the narrative adopts a spiritual framework, presenting a story of divinely sanctioned suffering and eventual recovery. That the suffering takes the form of melancholy is up to a point tangential: the narrative logic would have been unaffected if Allen had been recounting an imprisonment, say, or a brush with death. However, the perceived connections between mental and physiological disorder, which emphasised women’s sexuality as causative, provide an implicit explanatory model, only hinted at in the text, in

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which the primary explanation of her suffering would be the consequences of widowhood. In this model religion retains a place, but her sanctified suffering has become the punishment for excessive affection for her lost husband, and the particular symptoms of her affliction might be seen as related to the physical loss she is undergoing. The intertwining of religious and medical discourses allows both explanations to coexist; it is not irrelevant that the clearest hint of sexual disorder as the ultimate cause of her problem is made by a minister. But it is not a version that can be made explicit in the text without undermining her claims to sanctified affliction.

Lust and excess For Fitzherbert and Allen, then, sexual desire is an unspoken and unspeakable area, and any attempt to read sexuality into their narratives is complex and contentious. George Trosse is much more open about the sins of concupiscence, although with reservations nonetheless. In identifying wantonness as one of his sins, he is anxious to insist that although there was a good deal of fondling and indecency, he and his various partners in crime never proceeded to the full act. Despite the ‘impure Flames’ within him, he declares, and the ‘abominable Uncleannesses’ he practiced, ‘yet, by the good Providence of God, I was restrained from all gross, complete Acts of Fornication; tho’ I sometimes did what directly led to it’.41 God may have restrained him from such acts, he speculates, because he designed him ultimately for the ministry, ‘that I might not be render’d unserviceable by a common Reproach and Infamy’.42 Not all his ‘impure Fancies’ involved other people; in Portugal, ‘A lewd Fellow-Servant led me to practise a Sin, which too many Young Men are guilty of, and look upon as harmless; tho’ God struck Onan dead in the place for it’.43 But in general he seems to have conducted his flirtations with girls ‘in the Family’, that is to say, in whatever household he was living in.44 In London, he was involved with the elder daughter of an irreligious, drunken and argumentative family, whose chief virtue seems to have been that she was unlike the rest of them: beautiful, and of a winning Carriage, and one who pretended to more Religion than was in all the rest, and greatly bewail’d the enormous Wickedness of the Family, and the unchristian Contentions of her Parents She had a pious Education under an Uncle of hers 45 Unfortunately ‘these her Qualifications prov’d to be a Snare to us both’, leading them to indulge in ‘amorous Glances, Words and Actions’ and to behave ‘foolishly and wantonly together’ despite her engagement to another man.46

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The involvement of the godly young woman here is noteworthy if only because no godly woman ever describes herself as having behaved in such a way during her youth; it is a useful reminder that piety does not actually guarantee chastity, however it may inhibit writing about the lack of it. But the pattern of sexual involvement with women in his household was a continuing one. In Portugal ‘there was in the Family a Young Comely, but Wanton, Wench; so that there was Fire enough to kindle my Tinder’; there was also an old woman, a nurse and housekeeper, and mother of two illegitimate children, whom he describes as ‘Old in Age, yet Young in Lewdness: She would often lie Dead Drunk, and so expose herself to all imaginable Indecencies’.47 Back at home, he was involved with the person who caused him most guilt during his madness: the Person with whom I was more especially wanton and lascivious, was one of our own Family; with whom I liv’d in Lewdness of Heart, in the Lust of Eyes and Looks; and betray’d the Impurity of my Heart by the filthy Language of my Mouth, and by other Indecencies, for many Years together 48 The domestic setting of all these liaisons has to do obviously with the convenience of proximity: the widespread custom of placing young men and women in other households as servants, apprentices, waiting women and so forth created a ready community for sexual experimentation. But the ambiguity of the term ‘family’ also invokes another aspect. Trosse accuses himself in his lusts of making ‘no Difference as to Persons, whether single or married, Strangers or Relations’, and thus of being ‘a Fornicator; an Adulterer, and a Person Incestuous, in some Degree, tho’ not as to the compleat Act’.49 Madness in both classical and literary sources is frequently represented both as a consequence of sexual excess in one way or another, and in relation to the breaking of the incest taboo. The intimacies of the early modern ‘family’ seem to provide a rich source too for such images. In many households, young people lived together as if they were kin without necessarily being so; additionally the definition of kinship was wide, including marital as well as blood relations.50 Incest might thus refer to in-laws or step-relations, or to others living in the same household, as well as one’s own immediate family; as Naomi Tadmor comments, ‘There is an important resemblance between the extended language of kinship and the biblical rules of incest, set in Leviticus. the biblical interdictions had close resonance in the popular language of kinship’.51 Trosse’s sins with members of the ‘family’ in some cases clearly refer to co-residents in the household, but the reference to incest seems to suggest a closer link at least in one case. But one might also compare the powerful and ambivalent emotions directed by Fitzherbert and Allen to sibling equivalents: Fitzherbert loves and fears her brothers, Allen, also at various points under the charge of her brothers,

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recovers under the care of her cousin John Shorthose. This is not to say that incest as it might be understood today was literally being committed, but rather that there is a strong emotional charge in the figure of the sibling, and this is in certain ways reflected both in the sexual behaviour of young people in general, and in the mirrors of disturbance held up by madness. Trosse’s narrative describes among other things a negotiation of early modern codes of masculinity, and the tension between signs of manliness located in physical excess and the attempt to redefine manhood through the codes of Christian virtue. This was not a new conflict; early modern masculinity was repeatedly confronted by a conflict between manhood as mastery of the self, and manhood as explosion out from the self. More than a century before Trosse, Thomas Whythorne’s autobiography deplores drunkenness because it undermines a man’s control over his words and his actions; and Lyndal Roper’s discussions of masculinity in early modern Germany highlight the difficulty of reconciling the identity of godly household father with uproarious man among men.52 Becoming a man, in a general way, meant drinking, fighting, swearing and sex; masculinity could thus be intensely disruptive of efforts to establish order and civic virtue in Reformation cities. This culture of excess, read retrospectively as sin, clearly shaped Trosse’s activities in his early life; and typically its various elements are bound together. Drinking leads to sexual misconduct and linguistic indiscipline, as well as more general bodily transgressions (sickness and vomiting). From the perspective of the later Trosse, all this prefigures and is indeed a temporary form of insanity – so many different ways of losing self-control; sanity is then the ability to discipline all these uncontrolled drives, not so much regained as newly acquired. In this sense he was mad even before he was mad, so to speak. To become a Christian man requires him to close all these outlets, and ensure that he can be clean and contained, rather than polluting. The story of the body ends sharply with his recovery; once he has left home to study, he never refers again to eating, drinking or desire, and even his many years of marriage and fatherhood go unmentioned. Reconstituted masculinity for Trosse is becoming a father to his flock, not to his family; the new self is above all a minister. This suggests a perhaps surprising distance from the ideal of the consecrated household dear to many reformation thinkers; as if the household had for him become too much the location of pollution. Or else, having become a man for the first time within the popular codes of energy and excess, Trosse perhaps has no need to demonstrate manhood further.

Histories of sexuality If masculinity is a problem for Trosse, on some level, so is femininity for both Fitzherbert (whose narrative aims to transcend gender altogether) and

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Allen (who shifts uneasily between a position as good daughter and desiring woman). And if these problems for them are particularly insistent, similar dilemmas are played out repeatedly in other spiritual autobiographies. The wish to evacuate spiritual identity of gender is encountered in religious writing across the ages, but is perhaps especially prominent in the seventeenth century among groups such as the Quakers.53 The difficulty women in particular seem to have found in reconciling domestic and religious loyalties and desires can also be seen in the autobiographies of Alice Hayes, for example, or Agnes Beaumont.54 And the effort to transform oneself from hard-drinking, sexually tempted and swearing young man into good Christian repeats itself in many accounts. The difficulty of this process is not insignificant. To be religious is not only to be at odds with aspects at least of the dominant versions of gender identity; religion itself is entangled with the sexual. Religious meetings are attacked as occasions for undercover licentiousness; Puritanism is represented as a hypocritical denial of the unquenchable urges of the body, both at the time and subsequently; conversely, the godly attack the disorderly lusts of the secular, their indecent clothes and adulterous habits. Rhetorically at least, religion and sexuality are constantly linked. Spiritual autobiography, especially by women, could be seen to displace sexual tensions into narratives about giving up fine clothes, refusing marriage, reproaching the fleshly and worldly concerns of one’s neighbours. The language of love and friendship towards co-religionists, of both sexes, is conversely intensified; the Quaker Alice Hayes, for example, who describes extended conflicts with her husband over her conversion, writes several pages of affectionate tribute to a Friend who died young, while passing over the death of her husband in silence.55 The silence of autobiographical writing on the subject of sexuality in any direct way need not indicate indifference. But one of the difficulties for historians in such readings is the question of what is the terrain of the sexual. In speculating about submerged erotic bonds between co-religionists, or about the sexual meanings of dress, there is always a risk that we may impose an overly inclusive notion of what is included in that category. Much religious history, not to mention the history of witchcraft, has been read in the past as in some sense a displacement or perversion of sexual energies, and this is rightly open to criticism as ahistorical and patronising: we need to be able to approach people’s own accounts of their behaviour without assuming that what appears odd to us is therefore actually symptomatic of some inner disturbance (again, belief in witchcraft is a classic example). Histories of sexuality itself, by contrast, have been concerned to delineate more cautiously the question of what is the field of the sexual and how it is constituted. Here once again it is necessary to invoke Foucault, as historian of sexuality rather than of madness, to remind ourselves that sexuality is among other things a matter of discourse and definition rather than a given description of constant human behaviour.56

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For Foucault the seventeenth century, far from being a time when desire could be spoken of freely in contrast to the later clampdown on sexual expression, should be seen as a point when the discourse of sexuality was beginning to change position, so to speak; it was acquiring new forms and new relationships to the self. Accounts of sexual activity are elicited in new detail and in new contexts: medicine and the law become deeply concerned with the activities of the sexual body and the desiring mind, and how they should be regulated. Where sexual behaviour had previously been understood in a framework of sin, it was being relocated into what would eventually become a framework of pathology. At the same time it was being placed at the centre of the self: the deed, rather than being a single sinful act, would eventually come to identify the self; and the act of confession would become identified as the moment at which the truth about the self would be spoken as forbidden desires. As Jeffrey Weeks summarises Foucault’s position, ‘Modern sexuality, unlike the Christian idea of the flesh, is constitutive of our individuality: sex has become the truth of our being.’57 We should be cautious, then, about how readily we assume that sex must be there even if it is not named. If we cannot assume that silence on the subject of sexuality is concealing something, however, nor can we straightforwardly assume that it is not. Sexual and gender identities are inevitably tied in with love and desire; they are also located in the body as well as the mind. And they are also often associated with disturbance. The regulation of sexuality as a cultural and social task is not imposed on blank psyches; the Foucauldian model, helpful though it may be in understanding the complex interweavings of repression and incitement, does not sufficiently acknowledge the psychic costs. This is not by any means to say that it is sexual repression that drives people mad, but rather to recognise that sexuality, like madness, brings together psychic, emotional and bodily pressures as well as the cultural forms in which those pressures are articulated and experienced. For all three of these writers, human relationships and the body are central to their disorders, in the form of fears, delusions and wishes, however oblique and coded in their expression; it is these elements that this chapter has attempted to explore. The difficulty of drawing boundaries and definitions has been a recurrent theme in this book. How madness is known and identified is a matter of distinguishing it from what it is not; religious excitation or affliction, possession, simple lowness of spirits, miscellaneous other physical disorders. Similar difficulties of definition, of course, persist today. Another recurrent concern has been what madness shares with sanity, and the extent to which the two follow a common cultural logic. Madness does not suddenly abstract the sufferer from the social world; people go mad with the cultural materials they have to hand, reshaped and sometimes wildly distorted, but nonetheless grounded in familiar beliefs, relationships and ways of understanding

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the self and the world. Religion, in the seventeenth century, is a shared language of great power and flexibility, capable of describing, explaining and imagining the inner world, of sustaining and encouraging those who suffer, and also of feeding terrors and anxieties; the vocabulary of salvation and damnation leads in many directions. But while religion is a crucial way into the imaginative life of early modern people, madness perhaps offers a more direct line to other aspects of the psyche. In the turbulent confusion of ideas about life and death, eating and the body, family and sexuality, articulated in mental disorder, we can perhaps see in caricatured form the psychic investments of the sane as well.

11 Conclusion: Writing out of the Labyrinth

if it bee so, that the Earth is a Moone, then are we also giddy, vertiginous and lunaticke within this sublunarie Maze. Robert Burton, ‘Democritus to the Reader’, The Anatomy of Melancholy1

Erring on a plain Madness, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is something that wanders. The restlessness of the mind is replicated in the restlessness of the body; as the mad wander in their minds, so they wander in the world, inexplicably driven to seek refuge in wild uninhabited places and to run away from their fellows. Those afflicted by melancholy under the moon, according to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘are all for peregrinations, sea voyages, much affected with travels wandering in their thoughts’.2 And Thomas Adams in his 1615 sermon Mystical Bedlam, or, the World of Mad-men, explaining that to be overcome by passion was a form of madness (a commonplace of the day), characterises this state of mind as ‘a practicall frenzy, a roving, wandring, vagrant, extravagant course an incessant and impetuous fury, that never ceaseth roving and raving, till it come to the Center, Hell’.3 Wandering has no goal: it is to stray without purpose or time limit. The sane are fixed in time and space, the mad slip about; location and duration change meaning. Journeys are made without purpose, evoking at once the unease attached to those who have no place of belonging – the sturdy rogues or mad prophets, detached from social order and hierarchy, wandering about the countryside – and at the same time the freedom of one who no longer worries about past, future or location, who exists in a present of anywhere. The wanderer is displaced, unlocated in the social; almost by definition identity is put in question. The anonymous sixteenth-century Tom o’Bedlam summons up the splendid omnipotence of delusion: 192

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with an hoast of furious fancies whereof I am comaunder with a burning speare, & a horse of aire, to the wildernesse I wander but at the same time is reduced to begging for basic needs. Abandoned by his senses, the anchors of self have come adrift; his wish for others is ‘That of your five sounde sences/you never be forsaken,/Nor wander from your selves with Tom/Abroad to begg your bacon’.4 ‘Aimless wandering’, comments Ian Hacking, in his discussion of mad travellers in late nineteenth-century France, ‘driven by irresistible impulses, seems such a natural way to be insane’.5 The image of madness as wandering is found in many times and places; the wandering of the mind and the wandering of the self seem naturally to stand in for one another, though the specific meanings conjured up will vary according to the resonances of the idea of wandering in a given culture. ‘Inner and outer, mental and physical belong together’, writes Ruth Padel, discussing ancient Greece; ‘the body’s external wanderings, large scale and geographic, like Io’s, or smaller-scale rolling eyes and restlessness, are mirrored in the mad mind’.6 In relation to the early modern period in particular, debates over the relation between mobility and insanity have been highly charged. The image of mad displacement underlies the figure of the Narrenschiff, the Ship of Fools, with which Foucault notoriously inaugurates his history of madness – as he describes them, ‘highly symbolic cargoes of madmen in search of their reason’.7 To the Narrenschiff, Foucault opposes the age of the great confinement: against the wandering madman is set the image of the madman enclosed, shut up and locked away; chained, manacled and cell-bound. And while the reality of the Narrenschiff as a practice has been put seriously into question, the figurative power retained by the image derives from the notion that madness is about journeys; about errancy, vagabondage, wandering.8 The seventeenth century can be seen as a period in which madness was strung between these two opposing principles – of endless, aimless movement, and of enclosure and immobility. And one logic underlying the notion of confinement is surely that if madness is both evidenced and enacted in wandering, then to arrest the progress of madness you must arrest the progress of the mad, stop the wandering of their bodies and minds in one movement. For the treatment of the frenzy, the physician Philip Barrough recommends, ‘let the sicke be kept quiet without moving as much as possible; if he be rich let his servants hold him, if poore bind him; for inordinate moving diminisheth strength’.9 Inordinate and purposeless moving, ‘going without a path’ (as Thomas Adams describes it), is both literally and figuratively the condition of madness.10 Travelling, too – moving about on the surface of the world – is a key motif in the narratives I have been discussing in this book.11 For Dionys Fitzherbert

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the journey is the recovery from mental disorder, in which she regains a power of decision over her own movements; she goes by stages from one house to another, coming at every stage closer to autonomy. For Hannah Allen, the years of her malady are characterised by a constant journeying up and down from the house of one relative to another in search of a place of cure, and recovery is figured as in some sense the return to a normal relation to movement. For George Trosse, extended travelling is the precursor to breakdown, and his restless voyages about Europe lead eventually to the confinement of a private madhouse. All of these are also journeys undertaken in confusion, signifying lack of direction, ignorance of the right path; in this sense they are wanderings in a labyrinth, which bewilder and mislead, rather than journeys with destinations. And while only Hannah Allen could be said to demonstrate the classic symptoms of wandering madness, attempting to evade her carers and go and lose herself in a wood at Barnet, the relationship between madness and displacement in all three cases, though differently significant in each, is full of meaning. The image of the labyrinth, which Fitzherbert uses to describe her period of affliction, is a further variation on the idea of mobility. The afflicted are characterised as suffering from mazed senses, lost in a confusion of unknown paths. The figure of the maze is a popular one in this period, in all kinds of writings, and can be used to signify a variety of conditions: the search for truth, the realm of the senses, the human condition, Error in general, all could be represented as labyrinths.12 These are places in which one gets lost: signs lose their meaning, and the assumption that one can know the world by looking at it is subverted. For Fitzherbert, the sense of error is the primary one, and the image describes the toils in which Satan had entangled her. She describes herself as being in the labyrinth of sin, and of finding ‘the true thread that brought me out of the labyrinth wherein Satan had entangled me’, of ‘that maze of sin & mischiefs that afterwards I fell into’.13 And the maze defines not only the space of spiritual and intellectual error, but also the space of mental bewilderment: those in her condition suffer from a mazed sense, are amazed, literally. The maze identifies an unknown location: you may know you are in it, but not where you are or even how you got there. As she explains, ‘many times they are not able to give an account how it began with them whilst they continue in this estate, as my self was not, but only said that an astonishment and amazedness fell upon me’.14 But having entered a maze, however mysteriously, one can in principle hope to leave it again; and this, I think, is a highly significant meaning available in the image of the maze, and in her appeal to it. For while labyrinths may have terrifying beasts at the centre, they may also be supposed to have exits, however hard to find. Thus by naming her disorder as amazedness, by placing herself as one lost in a labyrinth, Fitzherbert gives her affliction a sense of movement and a dynamism absent from the static identity of madness. Rather than


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a fixed condition, that of being mad, she claims a metaphor of spiritual movement and exploration which gives her mental wanderings an aim and a destination. To be lost in a labyrinth, however disastrous, is to be mobile; if one’s mind is wandering, lost in sin and error, it may be hoped that perhaps it will eventually find its way back on course.

Finding the way out Comparing these three narratives with the mad autobiographies of later centuries (and notwithstanding all the necessary qualifications about typicality and the difficulty of generalising out of such a tiny sample), one outstanding difference is in the place of the institution. From the eighteenth century onwards, hospital treatment becomes the defining moment for mad autobiography. The compulsions, brutalities, impotent protests and enforced treatments of the asylum reverberate through autobiographical accounts of madness throughout the following centuries, from Alexander Cruden to Sylvia Plath.15 Indeed, one reason for the ambiguous status of two of the texts under discussion in this study is precisely that there is no hospitalisation. To be placed in an asylum may not be proof of insanity, but it undoubtedly confirms that the experiences described are taking place under the sign of madness, and that the story is one of an encounter with the discursive and material constructions of madness, and with the doctors who manage it. If asylums dominate the narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, with the twentieth century a further variation emerges, which focuses on therapy and analysis rather than confinement.16 Here the story becomes one of self-discovery, a journey through the mind, and the goal is recovery of the self rather than liberty from the institution. Indeed, the metaphor of wandering might be said to have found a new home here: no longer descriptive of the condition of madness, but of the process by which it can be left behind, the internal traveller tells stories of strange encounters, forgotten knowledge, terrible secrets brought to light. A journey into the self is difficult to end – interminable, even; the self, after all, is not going to be left behind. In this sense perhaps it more accurately inherits the metaphor of the labyrinth, which tries to prevent escape, which defers and resists endings and closures. To be melancholic, in early modern thought, may be constitutional – associated with people who are thin, sallow, inclined to study too much, and so forth; but melancholy as a condition is a passing disorder. Madness in general, in early modern culture, is not necessarily permanent, as Carol Thomas Neely notes: ‘Distracted people are not viewed as essentially or permanently different from those who are healthy The assumption is that they have temporarily lost a self that can be “recovered” or “restored

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to memory”.’17 In tracing their progress out of the labyrinth, the narratives we have explored in this book can maintain a notion of cure, of the pastness of the affliction: there is no reason to imagine it lurking in the interstices of the personality, awaiting its next chance to emerge. Modern notions of mental disorder work differently. The image of madness as wandering, common in representations of madness across many times and cultures, has diminished in importance over the last hundred years or so. Accounts of mental disorder, on the other hand, have themselves become labyrinthine, extending endlessly through branching passages into ever smaller chambers; and each chamber names a form of the self: manic depressive, bipolar, schizophrenic. These are chambers one does not readily emerge from. Madness that is inherited or genetic, that is the consequence of infantile disturbance or of chemical or hormonal imbalance, is deeply embedded in the self; it may be treatable, but it is not something that will pass away with a change of diet or season, or indeed a rediscovery of religious faith.

Surfaces and depths The dominant metaphors of mental disorder today are concerned with depth: madness is a hidden truth borne deep within the self. Freud’s archaeologies of subjectivity, rather than Foucault’s ships of mad folk bobbing on the surface of the world, shape our encounters with disturbances of the mind; excavation rather than pilgrimage offers the hope of cure. And one of the aims of this book, indeed, has been to assert the possibility of reading depth in accounts of mental disorder, not so as to arrive at a true diagnosis, but so as to acknowledge the experience of mental illness, over and above whatever institutional and medical definitions may govern it. If madness shakes the foundations of the self, then looking at accounts of madness also draws us in to explore those foundations, in their historical specificity and in their human generality. As the proliferating discourses of mental illness suggest, to identify mental illness as a matter of depth is not without problems. But excavation implies questions and thus dialogue; the romantic silence of unreason that places madness beyond speech has difficulty admitting the possibility that madness might wish to speak about itself. Returning to reflect on his argument with Foucault after Foucault’s death, Derrida noted both the ambiguity of Foucault’s relation to psychoanalysis and the significance of what Freud brought to the reading of unreason: For Freud too madness would be unreason (and at least in this sense there is a neo-cartesian logic at work in psychoanalysis); but this time it would be necessary to engage in conversation with it; the dialogue with unreason would be re-established, lifting the Cartesian halt.18


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The exclusion of unreason, that is to say, cannot be absolute. The idea that unreason shadows all human subjects – in dreams, in desires, above all for Derrida in the death drive – is the other side of the assumption I have made in this book, that to engage with the idea of madness tells us also about what it is to be sane. At stake in all of these images, of course – in ideas of depth and surface, of dialogue and silences – are more fundamental questions about how mental disorder is defined, lived with, recovered from or not. The metaphors we use to describe madness inevitably give a partial and distorted picture, but they also shape how we are able to imagine it, and to think about how they do this can illuminate the assumptions and the choices we make. As madness becomes an identity, something that conditions and defines the person, the metaphor of wandering loses its force; and perhaps this is because the condition itself has lost mobility. But the association of madness with confinement has historically been a troubling one, and to be confined in the identity of mental illness can constrict and limit the possibilities of change. A renewed attention to the possibilities of thinking about mental disorder as wandering might eventually help to map the mind in ways that are less fixed and unchangeable; to see madness as more mobile, eventually, and with more ways out.

Notes

1


1. D. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, tr. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (Moriae Enconium, orig. 1512; tr. 1941; Ware, Herts: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1998), p. 39. 2. Wharton’s manuscript is in the British Library: BL Add. MSS. 20006, 20007, ‘Autobiography of the Hon. Goodwin Wharton’, 2 vols, 1686–1704. The account of Wharton that follows is drawn from this manuscript. See also J. Kent Clark, Goodwin Wharton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), for a biographical account. Roy Porter gives a fuller summary of Wharton’s supernatural adventures (though still at a fraction of their original length), and a characteristically lively and illuminating discussion of the issues this narrative raises for the history of psychiatry, in ‘The Diary of a Madman, Seventeenth-Century Style: Goodwin Wharton, MP, and communer with the fairy world’, in R. M. Murray and T. H. Turner, eds, Lectures on the History of Psychiatry: the Squibb series (London: Gaskell, 1990). 3. Although he came quite close even to this; see Roy Porter, ‘Diary of a madman’, pp. 137–138, on his expectations in relation to various ladies of the royal family, and his ambitions for a more significant role in the public sphere. ‘After all’, as Porter comments, ‘his divine mission was to become an earthly power’ (p. 138). 4. Porter, ‘Diary of a Madman’, p. 139. The Fifth Monarchist preacher John Rogers describes how when he was an impoverished student, ‘the Devil did often tempt me to study Necromancy & Nigromancy, and to make use of Magick and that then I should never want’; John Rogers, ‘Another Testimony for the Truth’, in Ohel or Beth-Shemesh: A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, 1653), p. 433. 5. On science, religion and belief systems in seventeenth-century England, see (taking a few texts from a very large field) Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971); Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Brian Easlea, Witch-hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy: an introduction to debates of the scientific revolution, 1450–1750 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980); Christopher Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980); Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: astrology in early modern England (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 6. For discussion of this, see for example Basil Clarke, Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain: exploratory studies (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), Introduction; R. A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), Chapter 1; Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: elements of Greek and tragic madness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), Part V. 7. Roy Porter, ‘ “The Hunger of Imagination”: approaching Samuel Johnson’s melancholy’, in W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, eds, The Anatomy of Madness: essays in the history of Psychiatry. vol. I: People and Ideas (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985), p. 63. 198

Notes to pp. 4–10

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8. This point also provides a rationale for the potentially problematic use of the word ‘mad’. The history of madness is full of examples of the resistance and refusal of those called mad to accept this view of their condition; on the other hand, its usefulness for the historian is in its ability to signal a generic and transhistorical phenomenon, rather than attempting to attach possibly anachronistic diagnostic labels to sufferers in the past. For a thoughtful discussion of the concept of sanity, see Adam Phillips, Going Sane (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005). 9. For a fascinating example of how concepts of madness are shaped by these cultural differences, see Padel, Whom Gods Destroy. 10. See for example Michael Macdonald, ed., Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover case (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991); K. Hodgkin, ‘Reasoning with Unreason: visions, witchcraft and madness in early modern England’, in Stuart Clark, ed., Languages of Witchcraft (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001). 11. The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published in 1952 by the American Psychiatric Association, listed 60 disorders; DSM IV, the most recent, published in 1994, lists hundreds. 12. Louise Yeoman, ‘Archie’s invisible worlds discovered – spirituality, madness and Johnston of Wariston’s family’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society 27, 1997 (pp. 156–186). 13. A. Walsham, ‘ “Frantick Hacket”: prophecy, sorcery, insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan movement’, Historical Journal 41, 1998 (pp. 27–66). 14. Michael Macdonald, ‘Insanity and the realities of history in early modern England’, Psychological Medicine, vol. 11, no.1, 1981 (pp. 11–25). 15. BL Lansdowne MSS 99, Burghley papers, ‘Letters of Several Madmen’. The annotations are later than the letters themselves, but probably seventeenth century. 16. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason, tr. Michael Howard (London: Tavistock Publications, 1967). This is an abridged translation of Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961); a full version has not yet been published in English. 17. This is a large and continuing debate. For a critical view of Foucault’s work, see H. C. Erik Midelfort, ‘Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe’, in Barbara C. Malament, ed., After the Reformation: essays in honour of J. H. Hexter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980); he also discusses Foucault briefly in A History of Madness in Sixteenth-century Germany (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990) and in Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1994). For a response to Midelfort’s critique, in an informative and thoughtful collection, see C. Gordon, ‘Histoire de la folie: an unknown book by Michel Foucault’ in Arthur Still and Irving Velody, eds, Rewriting the History of Madness: studies in Foucault’s Histoire de la Folie (London: Routledge, 1992). Other essays in this collection (based on a special feature in History of the Human Sciences 3.1, 1990) respond variously to the empirical and philosophical issues raised. 18. Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenthcentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 147; Midelfort, ‘Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe’; and see Roy Porter, ‘Foucault’s Great Confinement’, in Still and Velody, eds, Rewriting the History of Madness. Jonathan Andrews revisits the question of confinement in ‘The Politics of Committal to Early Modern Bethlem’, in Roy Porter, ed., Medicine in the Enlightenment (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine, 1995).

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Notes to pp. 10–12

19. The history of madness has seen something of a boom in the last two or three decades, especially the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For the eighteenth century specifically, see n. 20. More generally, see for example Klaus Doerner, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: a social history of insanity and psychiatry, tr. Joachim Neugroschel and Jean Steinberg (Oxford: Blackwell 1981); Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe, eds, Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800–1914: a social history of madness in comparative perspective (London: Routledge, 1999); Andrew Scull, Madhouses, Mad-doctors, and Madmen: the social history of psychiatry in the Victorian era (London: Athlone Press, 1981) and The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: women, madness and English culture 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); William Llywelyn Parry Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: a study of private madhouses in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971). See also the threevolume collection edited by W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, The Anatomy of Madness: essays in the history of psychiatry, vol. 1, People and Ideas; vol. 2, Institutions and Society (London: Tavistock, 1985); vol. 3, The Asylum and its Psychiatry (London: Routledge, 1988). 20. Significant works on the eighteenth century include Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: a history of madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Athlone Press, 1987), as well as numerous articles and essays on the topic; Allan Ingram, The Madhouse of Language: writing and reading madness in the eighteenth century (London: Routledge, 1991); R. A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 21. Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam. 22. Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); see also her earlier survey essay, ‘Recent Work in Renaissance Studies: Psychology. Did Madness have a Renaissance?’, Renaissance Quarterly vol. 44 no. 4, winter 1991 (pp. 776–789). For other discussions of madness and melancholy in literature, see for example, Duncan Salkeld, Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: studies in literary treatments of melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971); Ken Jackson, Separate Theaters: Bethlem (“Bedlam”) Hospital and the Shakespearean Stage (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 23. Collections of primary source material for the eighteenth century have also been finding their way to publication. See Allan Ingram, ed., Voices of Madness: four pamphlets, 1683–1796 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1997), which reprints four autobiographical accounts of madness, including that of Hannah Allen, and Allan Ingram, ed., Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: a reader (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998). See also Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade: the management of lunacy in eighteenth-century London (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), which analyses John Monro’s 1766 case-book, and includes the complete text. 24. See in particular Macdonald, ‘Insanity and the realities of history’, and his ‘Religion, Social Change and Psychological Healing in England, 1600–1800’, in W. J. Sheils, ed., The Church and Healing (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982).


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25. Houston, Madness and Society, p. 324. Ingram, Madhouse of Language, also emphasises the continuing importance of religion in framing debates about madness. 26. For some specific studies of religious culture in relation to madness: Jonathan Sawday, ‘ “Mysteriously divided”: Civil War, madness and the divided self’, in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday, eds, Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Anne Laurence, ‘Women’s Psychological Disorders in Seventeenth-Century Britain’, in Arina Angermann et al., eds, Current Issues in Women’s History (London: Routledge, 1989); Yeoman, ‘Archie’s Invisible World Discovered’; Christopher Hill and Michael Shepherd, ‘The Case of Arise Evans: a historico-psychiatric study’, Psychological Medicine, vol. 6, no. 3, 1976 (pp. 351–358); Macdonald, ‘Insanity and the realities of history’. 27. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1975); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 28. See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: radical ideas during the English revolution (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972), which influentially reclaimed the radical groups of the English revolution for serious analysis. Interestingly, Hill did in fact include a chapter on madness amongst those groups; most subsequent historians working in this field have not taken up that problem. 29. See Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994); also her recent Witch Craze: terror and fantasy in baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 30. Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); in Chapter 1 he notes the reliance on ‘commonsense psychology at work in history’ (p. 36) while historians remain vehemently hostile to Freud. 31. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture’, in Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds, Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 32. This discussion in relation to early modern culture is more familiar in literature than in history. See, in addition to Roper and Greenblatt: Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: feminism, psychoanalysis and the symbolics of loss in Renaissance literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, eds, Historicism, Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2000). 33. Sally Alexander, ‘Feminist History and Psychoanalysis’, in Becoming a Woman and other essays in nineteenth and twentieth-century feminist history (London: Virago, 1994), p. 229. 34. Sally Alexander, ‘Women, class and sexual difference’, in Becoming a Woman, pp. 108–109. 35. Dionys Fitzherbert’s narrative exists in three copies: Bodleian Library MS. e Mus. 169 and MS Bodley 154; Lambeth Palace Library MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47. The first is her original MS, and the other two are corrected manuscripts for circulation. References are to her original MS; spelling and punctuation have been modernised. An edition is in preparation: K. Hodgkin, ed., Women, Madness and Sin in Seventeenth-Century England: the autobiographical writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2008). Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs Hannah Allen (London, 1683), has been

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Notes to pp. 19–20 reprinted in Allan Ingram, ed., Voices of Madness: four pamphlets, 1683–1796 (Stroud: Sutton, 1997); references are to the 1683 edition. George Trosse’s life was published posthumously in Exeter in 1614, and has been reprinted in full with a few MS additions: A. W. Brink, ed., The Life of the Reverend Mr George Trosse (Montreal and London: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974); references are to this edition.

2 Crises of the Self: Madness and Autobiographical Writing 1. Dorothea Gotherson, To all that are Unregenerated: a call to Repentance from dead works (London, 1661), p. 94. 2. John Rogers, Ohel or Beth-Shemesh: A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, 1653), p. 362. 3. On the history of autobiographical writing in this period, see Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969); Dean Ebner, Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century England: theology and the self (The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1971); Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). More recently, to name two among many, Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: autobiography and self-identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); H. Dragstra et al., Betraying Our Selves: forms of representation in early modern English texts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). A couple of important anthologies, both with much useful editorial commentary: Elspeth Graham et al., eds, Her Own Life: autobiographical writings by seventeenth-century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989); David Booy, Personal Disclosures: an anthology of self-writings from the seventeenth century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 4. On seventeenth-century spiritual narratives, in addition to works in the previous note, see Owen Watkins, The Puritan Experience (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the literature of religious despair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 5. For an extended discussion of the ‘I’ of the author in autobiography, see Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), Chapter 1, ‘Le pacte’ (also in Philippe Lejeune, tr. Katharine Leary, ed. Paul John Eakin, On Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).) There is now a substantial body of theoretical work on autobiographical writing. See for example, James Olney, ed., Autobiography: essays theoretical and critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: making selves (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Lejeune, On Autobiography. Women’s autobiography has also generated a substantial literature. See Shari Benstock, ed., The Private Self: theory and practice of women’s autobiographical writings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c.1988.); Liz Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: the theory and practice of feminist auto/biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, c.1992); Domna Stanton, ed., The Female Autograph: theory and practice of autobiography from the tenth to the twentieth century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: women’s autobiographical practices in the twentieth century (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993). 6. In addition to works in previous note, on conversion narratives in particular, see D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: spiritual autobiography in early modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).


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7. Janet Frame, An Angel at my Table (London: HarperCollins, 1993; orig. Auckland: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 69. Alexander Pope makes a strikingly similar observation in the Dunciad: ‘In Bedlam, now is supreme’; quoted in Allan Ingram, ‘Time and Tense in Eighteenth-Century Narratives of Madness’, Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 30, 2000 (pp. 60–70), p. 60. 8. The narrative often described as the first English autobiography, ‘The Book of Margery Kempe’, written in the fourteenth century, which describes the experiences of a woman whose spirituality was articulated especially in passionate weeping, has often been discussed as a pathological text; this may be problematic in many ways, but it underlines the point that mental disturbances of one kind or another are often the impetus behind autobiographical narrative. See Phyllis R. Freeman, Carley Rees Bogarad and Diane E. Sholomskas, ‘Margery Kempe, a new theory: the inadequacy of hysteria and postpartum psychosis as diagnostic categories’, History of Psychiatry, vol. 1, no. 2, June 1990 (pp. 169–190). Kempe’s narrative has been reprinted several times in recent years; see The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Harlow: Longman, 2000). 9. Andrew Boord, The Breviary of Helthe (London, 1547; The English Experience no. 362, Amsterdam, New York: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd, 1971), f. 91r. 10. For the debate, see Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); Jacques Derrida, ‘Cogito and the Writing of Madness’, in Writing and Difference, tr. A. Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978); and Foucault’s response, ‘My Body, This Paper, This Fire’, tr. Geoff Bennington, Oxford Literary Review 4.1, autumn 1979 (pp. 5–28). See also Shoshana Felman’s discussion, ‘Foucault/Derrida: the madness of the thinking/speaking subject’, in her Writing and Madness: literature/philosophy/psychoanalysis (Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 2003; orig. La Folie et la chose littéraire, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978). Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: elements of Greek and tragic madness (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 137–138, gives a sharp summary of the issues. Derrida returned to the question in relation to psychoanalysis after Foucault’s death: ‘ “Etre juste avec Freud”: L’Histoire de la folie et l’âge de psychanalyse’, in Elisabeth Roudinesco, ed., Penser la folie: essais sur Michel Foucault (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1992). For autobiographies of madness, see for example Dale Peterson, ed., A Mad People’s History of Madness (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982); Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: stories of the insane (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987). 11. See for example Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Heinemann, 2001; orig. 1963); Antonia White’s autobiographical trilogy Frost in May (1933), The Lost Traveller (1950) and Beyond the Glass (1954). 12. In addition to works cited in note 2, for historians working with autobiographical texts, see for example Sara Heller Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women: three studies (Brighton: Harvester, 1987); Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: three seventeenth-century lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). For the history of the self more generally, Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna and David Wellbery, eds, Reconstructing Individualism: autonomy, individuality and the self in Western thought (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1986); Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: histories from the Renaissance to the present (London: Routledge, 1997). Particularly influential has been the work of literary critics on subjectivity; see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980); Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: essays on subjection (London: Methuen, 1984); Catherine

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13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

Notes to pp. 22–27 Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: identity and difference in Renaissance drama (London: Methuen, 1985). On the question of medieval subjectivity see David Aers, ‘A whisper in the ear of early modernists, or, reflections on literary critics writing the “history of the subject” ’, in David Aers, ed., Culture and History 1350–1600 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). These debates are not of course simply the outcome of recent literary theory. Speculations about Renaissance individualism, the impact of the Reformation on the idea of the self, and the cultural, social and economic transformations with which new forms of selfhood are associated go back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905); R. H. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self, p. 19. For more detailed discussions of the forms of seventeenth-century spiritual narratives, see Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self ; Caldwell, Puritan Conversion Narrative; Michael Macdonald, ‘The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: narrative, identity and emotion in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies vol. 31, no. 1, 1992 (pp. 32–61). Numerous other articles discuss specific examples. Booy, Personal Disclosures; Rudolf Dekker, ed., Ego-documents and History: autobiographical writing in its social context since the Middle Ages (Hilversum, NL: Verloren, 2002). Pierre Nora’s collection of autobiographical essays by historians declares it a new genre, distinct from autobiography; Pierre Nora, ed., Essais d’ego-histoire (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1987). Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self ; on the diary form, see in particular Chapter 4, ‘Writing on the Heart’. Thomas Adams, The White Devil, or the Hypocrite Uncas’d (London, 1613), p. 28. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the chief of Sinners, W. R. Owens, ed. (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 24. John Donne, ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westwards’; Francis Quarles, ‘On Christ and our Selves’. Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: ecstatic prophecy in seventeenth-century England (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 7. Alice Hayes, A Legacy, or Widow’s Mite (London, 1723), p. 65; Elizabeth Stirredge, Strength in Weakness Manifest: in the Life, Various Trials, and Christian Testimony of that faithful Servant and Handmaid of the Lord (London, 1711), p. 17. See also Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: seventeenth-century radical sectarian writing and feminist criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), especially Chapter 4, ‘ “There is no self in this thing”: the disappearing author’. Jane Turner, Choice Experiences of the kind dealings of God, before, in, and after conversion (London, 1653), pp. 185, 194. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 71. Turner, Choice Experiences, p. 10. See for example Macdonald, ‘The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira’; Margo Todd, ‘Puritan Self-Fashioning: the diary of Samuel Ward’, Journal of British Studies vol. 31, no. 3, 1992 (pp. 236–264). Elspeth Graham, ‘ “Oppression Makes a Wise Man Mad”: the suffering of the self in autobiographical tradition’, in H. Dragstra et al., eds, Betraying Our Selves: forms of self-representation in early modern English texts (London and New York: Macmillan/St Martins Press, 2000), p. 198. See Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, especially Chapter 2, ‘Patriarchs, Providence and Paranoia: subjectification and autobiographical narrative’.


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29. Allan Ingram, ‘Introduction’, in Allan Ingram, ed., Voices of Madness: four pamphlets, 1683–1796 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1997), p. xxii. 30. Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English women’s writing 1649–1688 (London: Virago Press, 1988), pp. 72–73, 74. 31. Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, p. 94. 32. Anna Trapnel, A Legacy for Saints, being several Experiences of the dealings of God with Anna Trapnel (London, 1654), p. 5. 33. George Trosse, ed. A. W. Brink, The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse (Exeter, 1714; Montreal and London: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974), p. 106. 34. Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs Hannah Allen (London, 1683), p. 50. 35. See for example H. C. Erik Midelfort, ‘Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe’, in Barbara C. Malament, ed., After the Reformation: essays in honor of J. H. Hexter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980); Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 36. Trosse, Life, p. 108. 37. Allen, Narrative, p. 13. 38. Trosse, Life, p. 109. The fear that one has committed the sin against the holy ghost is a recurrent theme in spiritual autobiography; see Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination. 39. Trosse, Life, p. 109. 40. Trosse, Life, p. 84. 41. Dionys Fitzherbert, Bodleian Library, Ms. e Mus. 169, f. 23v. 42. Fitzherbert, Ms. e Mus. 169, f. xvr (letter from Dr Chetwynd). 43. Turner, Choice Experiences, pp. 3, 4. See also Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, pp. 105–107, on the pressure to be scrupulous in spiritual autobiography. 44. For examples of the rehearsal of memory among the godly, see Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self, pp. 81–84. See also Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: histories of place and memory, c. 1550–c. 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2007). Many thanks to Kate Chedgzoy for allowing me to cite unpublished work. 45. See for example the testimonies published by John Rogers, in Ohel or Beth-Shemesh: A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, 1653); Henry Walker and Vavasor Powell, Spirituall Experiences, of Sundry Believers (London, 1653). 46. Anna Trapnel, Report and plea, or, a narrative of her journey into Cornwall (London, 1654), p. 34. 47. Trosse, Life, p. 47. 48. Catherine Holland, ‘Narration’ (1664), in Booy, Personal Disclosures, p. 120. 49. Joan Vokins, Some Account given forth by Joan Vokins of the great goodness and mercy of the Lord towards her , in Joan Vokins, Works (Cockermouth, 1871), p. 22. ‘Professors’ here refers to those who professed a strong faith in God. 50. John Rogers, ‘Another testimony to the Truth or further Experience of John Rogers Preacher of the Gospel ’, in John Rogers, Ohel or Beth-Shemesh, p. 421. 51. Turner, Choice Experiences, pp. 2–3. 52. Trosse, Life, pp. 90–91. 53. Trosse, Life, p. 132. 54. Allen, Narrative, p. 44. 55. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus 169, f. 6v. 56. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus, f. 23v. 57. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 2v.

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58. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 3v. 59. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 17r. 60. Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: the rhetoric of enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: language and literature in English radical religion 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); and Margaret Ezell’s discussion of the linguistic characteristics of female Quaker mysticism, in her Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 157–158. 61. Cf. Allan Ingram’s thoughtful discussion of language in religious autobiography in the eighteenth century, which I return to below. He suggests that what such narratives demonstrate is ‘not a restoration to linguistic independence, but a capitulation to a single, all-powerful register that carries with it the capacity to make meaningful every aspect of the experience of derangement’; Allan Ingram, The Madhouse of Language: writing and reading madness in the eighteenth century (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 127–128. 62. Dionys Fitzherbert, Lambeth Palace Library MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, pp. 7r–9r, and title page. 63. See Sue Wiseman’s entry on Hannah Allen in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for some speculation about possible subsequent traces. 64. George MacLennan, Lucid Interval: subjective writing and madness in history (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), p. 56. 65. Ingram, Madhouse of Language, p. 120. 66. See also Allan Ingram’s discussion of the disrupted relations of past and present in ‘Time and Tense in Eighteenth-century Narratives of Madness’.

3 Without Sense and Understanding: Concepts of Madness in Early Modern Thought 1. For an analysis of the words used to describe the mentally disturbed by a seventeenth-century physician, see Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Chapter 4, ‘Popular stereotypes of insanity’. See also Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: a history of madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Athlone Press, 1987), pp. 22–23; Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 2–4. 2. See Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, especially Chapter 5, ‘Psychological healing’; R. A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Chapter 8, ‘The Language of Insanity 1: words about the insane’. On the European dimension, H. C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-century Germany (Stanford: California University Press, 1999), Chapter 6, ‘Pilgrims in search of their reason’. 3. See Akihito Suzuki, ‘Lunacy in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England: analysis of Quarter Session records’, Part I, History of Psychiatry, vol. II part 4, December 1991 (pp. 437–456); Part II, History of Psychiatry, vol. III part 1, March 1992 (pp. 29–44), for discussion of family responsibility in relation to insanity; Houston, Madness and Society, for similar patterns in eighteenth-century Scotland.


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4. See Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, especially Chapters 3 and 4, for an extended account of social and cultural factors in the identification of madness. Gender and madness is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. 5. Many works on the history of medicine or madness in this period give an overview of humoural theory. A useful summary may be found in Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Chapter 1. See also Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: from Hippocratic times to modern times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: psychological theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Warburg Institute Surveys, VI; London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1975); Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: bodies, plagues and politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 6. Andrew Boord, The Breviary of Helthe (London, 1547; reprinted Amsterdam and New York: The English Experience no. 362, Da Capo Press, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd, 1971) ff. 91r, 32r, 88r–v. 7. See Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles; Basil Clarke, Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain: exploratory studies (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975); Andrew Wear, ‘Medical Practice in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century England: continuity and unison’, in R. French and A. Wear, eds, The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Wear, Knowledge and Practice. 8. Boord, Breviary of Helthe, f. 85v. 9. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (orig. London, 1621; eds Thomas Faulkner, Nicholas Kiessling and Rhonda Blair, 6 vols, I, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), vol. I, p. 140. 10. See Harvey, Inward Wits. 11. Burton, Anatomy, vol. I, p. 157. 12. Neely, Distracted Subjects, pp. 1, 2. Basil Clarke comments similarly that various writers on the mind at this period, including Timothy Bright, Thomas Wright and Robert Burton, ‘might be put into an association to illustrate the growth of a humane, rather than conventionally medical or popularly irrational, approach they were all casting about for ways of finding some room between theology and biochemistry for new psychological ideas which were still unformed’; Mental Disorder, p. 227. 13. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General (London, 1604), p. 64. 14. Passion is an important concept in the development of seventeenth-century theories of mind, and this is obviously a very abbreviated discussion. For a full survey of the topic, see Susan James, Passion and Action: the emotions in seventeenthcentury philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). For a discussion of the literature on passion in relation particularly to enthusiasm in the later seventeenth century, see Adrian Johns, ‘The Physiology of Reading and the Anatomy of Enthusiasm’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, eds, Religio Medici: medicine and religion in seventeenth-century England (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1996), esp. pp. 146–153. 15. Thomas Adams, Mystical Bedlam, or the World of Mad-men (London: George Purslowe, 1615), p. 35. 16. Thomas Beard, The Theatre of God’s Judgements: Or, a collection of histories concerning the admirable Judgements of God upon the transgressours of his commandements. Translated out of the French, and augmented by more than three

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17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

Notes to pp. 44–48 hundred Examples (London: Adam Islip, 1597). For a fascinating discussion of this text and the culture of providentialism it embodied, as well as further examples of madness as divine punishment, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Edward Reynoldes, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man, with the severall Dignities and Corruptions thereunto belonging (London, 1640), pp. 26, 27. (‘Species’ is an Aristotelian term for things seen.) The ability of demons to disrupt vision was much debated; see Stuart Clark, ‘The Reformation of the Eyes: apparitions and optics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 27 (2), 2003, 143–160. ‘For classical man, madness was not the natural condition, the human and psychological root of unreason; it was only unreason’s empirical form; and the madman disclosed that underlying realm of unreason which threatens man ’ Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 83. John Sym, Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing (London, 1637; facsimile reprint ed. and introduced by Michael Macdonald, Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry, London: Routledge, 1988), p. 250. Beard, Theatre of Gods Judgements, p. 205. Reynoldes, Treatise of the Passions, p. 72. Wright, Passions of the Mind, p. 130. Beard, Theatre of Gods Judgements, p. 184. Sym, Lifes Preservative, p. 172. Compare Ruth Padel’s fascinating account of the ways in which madness was variously imagined as damage, invasion and so on, in ancient Greece: Whom Gods Destroy: elements of Greek and tragic madness (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995). See also Ramin Mojtabai, ‘Delusion as Error: the history of a metaphor’, History of Psychiatry, vol. 11 part 1, issue 41, 2000 (pp. 3–14); Alex Leff, ‘Clean round the bend – the etymology of jargon and slang terms for madness’, History of Psychiatry XI 2000 (pp. 155–162). Adams, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 34–35. Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586), p. 112. Sym, Lifes Preservative, p. 251. Reynoldes, Treatise of the Passions, p. 25. Wright, Passions of the Mind, p. 52. Wright, Passions of the Mind, pp. 48–49. It is interesting to compare the statement in the Encyclopedia nearly a century later on a related topic: ‘To deviate from reason knowingly, in the grip of a violent passion, is to be weak; but to deviate from it confidently and with the firm conviction that one is following it, is to be what we call mad’; quoted by Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness: literature/philosophy/psychoanalysis (Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 2003; orig. La Folie et la chose litteraire, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978), p. 36. Wright seems to have a better understanding of the capacity for self-delusion. Reynoldes, Treatise of the Passions, p. 30. There is no clue, regrettably, as to what strange practices among the learned he has in mind. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690; Peter H. Nidditch, ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 161. Locke, Essay, p. 161. Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs Hannah Allen (London, 1683), p. 16; Dionys Fitzherbert, Bodleian Library MS. e Mus. 169, f. 11v; George Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr George


36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

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Trosse (Exeter, 1614; A. W. Brink, ed., Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), p. 99. Trosse, Life, p. 132. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, ff. 4v, 9r, 10r. Burton, Anatomy, vol. I, p. 302. Burton, Anatomy, vol. I, p. 304. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 29v; f. 22v. Books have a significant part to play in Fitzherbert’s inner world; for further discussion see my forthcoming edition of her manuscript. There is now a substantial literature on the subject of women and writing in early modern Europe. See among others Patricia H. Labalme, ed., Beyond Their Sex: learned women of the European past (New York: New York University Press, 1980); Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English women’s writing, 1646– 1688 (London: Virago, 1988); Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: women writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Margaret Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill, eds, Voicing Women: gender and sexuality in early modern writing (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996); Helen Wilcox, ed., Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke, eds, ‘This Double Voice’: gendered writing in early modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). Allen, Narrative, p. 17. Trosse, Life, p. 115. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 4v. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 3v; f. 10r. On not recognising close kin as a sign of madness, see Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 126–127; Houston, Madness and Society, pp. 188–189. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 3v. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 3v. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 9r. Allen, Narrative, pp. 22–23. Allen, Narrative, pp. 29–30. Trosse, Life, pp. 90, 132. Trosse, Life, pp. 90, 91, 93. Trosse, Life, p. 97. Trosse, Life, p. 100. Trosse, Life, p. 98. Trosse, Life, p. 89. Trosse, Life, p. 87. Trosse, Life, p. 87. Michael Macdonald, ‘Insanity and the realities of history in early modern England’, Psychological Medicine, vol. 11, no. 1, 1981 (pp. 11–25), 16. See Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), on the shifting ways of establishing empirical certainty across the seventeenth century. Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles, p. 35. Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 123. On disordered speech and insanity, see Macdonald, pp. 142–147; Houston, Madness and Society, Chapter 9. Neely gives a thoughtful analysis of the fragmentary and fractured character of mad speech as represented in the early modern theatre, Distracted Subjects, pp. 49–50. For an

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63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Notes to pp. 54–59 extended and illuminating discussion of language and madness in the eighteenth century, see Ingram, Madhouse of Language. See also K. Hodgkin, ‘Conceits of Mind, Conceits of Body: Dionys Fitzherbert and the discourses of religion and madness’, in Stanley E. Porter, ed., The Nature of Religious Language (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). Allan Ingram, The Madhouse of Language: writing and reading madness in the eighteenth century (Routledge: London, 1991), p. 37. For further discussion of conversation in the treatment of madness see Chapter 6. Richard Stafford, A Clear Apology and Just Defence of Richard Stafford for Himself (London, 1690), p. 16. See also Jonathan Andrews’s discussion of Richard Stafford, ‘The Politics of Committal to Early Modern Bethlem’, in Roy Porter, ed., Medicine in the Enlightenment (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine, 1995), pp. 6–63. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 11v. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 23v. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 18r, f. 23r–v. Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 123. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a range of uses for ‘distract’ and ‘distracted’ from the late 14th century on. For relevant 17th-century usages see for example, distract, v., 3. ‘To draw or turn away from actual position, destination or purpose; to turn aside to divert’; distracted, 5. ‘Deranged in mind; out of one’s wits; crazed, mad, insane.’ Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). See also Neely, Distracted Subjects, pp. 2–4. Trosse, Life, p. 132. Trosse, Life, p. 115. For discussion of various aspects of speech and silence in early modern culture, see Peter Burke and Roy Porter, eds, Language, Self and Society: a social history of language (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: women, words and sex in early modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). On ambiguity, excessive speech and anxiety, see Steven Mullaney, ‘Lying Like Truth: riddle, representation and treason in early modern England’, ELH 47, 1980 (pp. 32–47); Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: rhetoric, gender, property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987); K. Hodgkin, ‘Thomas Whythorne and the Problems of Mastery’, History Workshop Journal 29, 1990 (pp. 20–41). Wright, Passions of the Minde, p. 107. Trosse, Life, p. 105. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 15r. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 3v. Trosse, Life, p. 92. Trosse, Life, p. 107. Allen, Narrative, pp. 21–22. Allen, Narrative, pp. 62–63. Allen, Narrative, p. 27. Allen, Narrative, p. 43. Allen, Narrative, p. 40. Allen, Narrative, p. 59. Allen, Narrative, p. 70. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the chief of Sinners, W. R. Owens, ed. (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 35–37.


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1. Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs Hannah Allen (London, 1683), p. 60. 2. For accounts of the uneven shift away from Galenism in seventeenth-century medical practice, see Basil Clarke, Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain: exploratory studies (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975); Andrew Wear, ‘Medical Practice in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century England: continuity and unison’, in R. French and A. Wear, eds, The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 294–320; Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: a history of madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Athlone Press, 1987). 3. The key contemporary works on the topic of melancholy are Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586), and Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (orig. London, 1621; eds, Thomas Faulkner, Nicolas Kiessling and Rhonda Blair, 6 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000). For more recent studies, see Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: a study of melancholia in English literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951); Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: studies in the history of natural philosophy, religion and art (London: Nelson, 1964); Susan Snyder, ‘The Left Hand of God: despair in medieval and renaissance tradition’, Studies in the Renaissance 12, 1965; Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: studies in literary treatments of melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971). See also J. B. Bamborough’s ‘Introduction’ to the Clarendon Press edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, above, vol. I, 1989. 4. See Babb, Elizabethan Malady; Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). On the question of gender, see Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), Chapter 3, and works cited below, note 90. 5. H. C. Erik Midelfort, Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), pp. 154, 155. See also the account of the rise of melancholy in the sixteenth century in his A History of Madness in Sixteenth-century Germany (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990). The phrase ‘a sicknes full of fantasies’ is from Andrew Boord, The Breviary of Helthe (London, 1547; facsimile ed., English Experience reprints no. 362, Amsterdam, New York: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd, 1971), p. 91r. 6. Bright, Treatise, p. 3. 7. Burton, Anatomy, vol. I, pp. 418–419. 8. Burton, Anatomy, vol. I, p. 420. 9. Disorders of perception are discussed in the previous chapter, pp. 50–54. The belief that one is made of glass has an oddly iconic status in early modern writings on melancholy. Locke uses it as an instance in the passage quoted above, p. 47, and it is still being cited by Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours in Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections. With Three Discourses on the Nature and Cure of the Cholick, Melancholy, and Palsies (London, 1725). See Gill Speak, ‘An Odd Kind of Melancholy: Reflections on the Glass Delusion in Europe (1440–1680)’, History of Psychiatry no. 1, 1990 (pp. 191–206). 10. Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 152. 11. On melancholy and gentility, see Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 150–160.

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12. Babb, The Elizabethan Malady, p. 175. 13. Nathaniel Bacon, A Relation of the Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira, in the yeare 1548 (London, 1638), pp. 110–111. 14. Bacon, Fearefull Estate, p. 47 15. The case of Spira is described in A notable and marveilous Epistle of the famous Doctour, Mathewe Gribalde, Professor of the Lawe, in the Universitie of Padua: concernyng the terrible judgemente of GOD, upon hym that for feare of men, denieth Christ and the knowne veritie: with a Preface of Doctor Calvine. Now newely imprinted, with a godly and wholesome preservative against desperation (London, [1570?]). Nathaniel Bacon’s fuller translation was published nearly sixty years later; see note 13 above. For a discussion of the publishing history of the case, and of its influence in spiritual self-narrative in the seventeenth century, see Michael MacDonald, ‘The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, January 1992 (pp. 32– 61). See also John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the literature of religious despair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 37–39. 16. Thomas Beard, The Theatre of God’s Judgements: Or, a collection of histories concerning the admirable Judgements of God upon the transgressours of his commandements (London, 1597), p. 64. 17. Allen, Narrative, pp. iv–v. (The authorship of the preface is open to question; it may be by Allen herself, or by someone else.) 18. Robert Yarrow, Soveraigne Comforts for a troubled Conscience (London, 1634), p. 16. 19. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (London, 1608), Book I, p. 194. 20. Bright, Treatise, pp. 187–188. 21. Bright, Treatise, p. 190. 22. Perkins, Treatise, Book I, p. 195. 23. Burton, Anatomy, vol. III, p. 412. 24. Burton, Anatomy, vol. III, p. 411. 25. Yarrow, Soveraigne Comforts, p. 16. 26. Macdonald, ‘Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira’, p. 50. See also the discussion of Burton in Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, Chapter 5, ‘Robert Burton and Religious Despair in Calvinist England’, especially pp. 226–232. 27. Bright, Treatise, p. 190. 28. Yarrow, Soveraigne Comforts, pp. 2–3. 29. Yarrow, Soveraigne Comforts, p. 14. 30. Neely, Distracted Subjects, pp. 15, 16. 31. Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 151. 32. Bright’s book was widely read. Fitzherbert’s slightly older contemporary Lady Margaret Hoby records reading ‘Bright of Mallincocolie’ in Fitzherbert’s diary in 1599; interestingly, she was brought up in the household of the Countess of Huntingdon, which is also where Fitzherbert was living at the time of her breakdown. See Dorothy M. Meads, ed., Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605 (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd, 1930), p. 77. 33. Lambeth Palace Library, MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47. The fair copies of the MS (in the Bodleian and in Lambeth Palace Library) also contain her most extended argument against understanding her affliction as melancholy, in a preface headed ‘Christian Reader’; this preface is not included in her original MS, so quotations from this preface refer to the Lambeth Palace MS. 34. Fitzherbert, MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, f. 7r.


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35. Fitzherbert, MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, f. 7r; Bodleian Library, MS e Mus 169, ff. 8r, 23v (and see previous chapter). 36. Bright, Treatise, p. 188. 37. Fitzherbert, MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, f. 7r. 38. Fitzherbert, MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, f. 7v. 39. Bright, Treatise, p. 188–189. 40. Bright, Treatise, p. 189; Perkins, Treatise, Book I, p. 195. 41. Fitzherbert, MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, f. 8r. 42. Mary Morrissey, ‘Narrative Authority in Spiritual Life-Writing: the example of Dionys Fitzherbert (fl. 1608–1641)’, The Seventeenth Century, vol. 15, no. 1, 2000 (pp. 1–17). 43. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 3r. 44. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 3v. 45. Fitzherbert, MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, f. 7v. 46. John Hart (Hart On-Hi), Trodden Down Strength, by the God of Strength, or, Mrs Drake Revived. Shewing her strange and rare case, great and many uncouth afflictions, for tenne yeares together, together with the strange and wonderfull manner how the Lord revealed himselfe unto her, a few dayes before her death (London, 1647). A further edition was published in 1654, under the title The Firebrand Taken Out of the Fire, or, the Wonderfull History, Case and Cure of Mrs Drake (London, 1654); this version (the Bodleian Library copy) is also available on Early English Books Online. Her case was still known in the later part of the century. Timothy Rogers refers to it several times, regarding Mr Dod, one of the ministers centrally involved in her case, as a model of sensitive treatment of the distressed; Timothy Rogers, A Discourse concerning Trouble of Mind and the Disease of Melancholly. In Three Parts. Written for the Use of such as are, or have been Exercised by the same (London, 1691), pp. viii, xiv. 47. Hart, Trodden Down Strength, pp. 13–14. 48. Hart, Trodden Down Strength, pp. 14, 24. 49. Hart, Trodden Down Strength, p. 40. 50. Hart, Trodden Down Strength, pp. 7, 9, 10. 51. Hart, Trodden Down Strength, pp. 30–31. 52. Hart, Trodden Down Strength, pp. 66, 65. 53. Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus: Or a discourse of the nature, causes, kinds, and cure, of enthusiasme (London, 1656), p. 14. 54. John Rogers, Ohel or Beth-Shemesh: A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, 1653), p. 364. 55. Testimonies of Elizabeth Chambers and Humphrey Mills in Rogers, Ohel or Beth-Shemesh, pp. 407, 410. 56. Mary Penington, Some Account of Circumstances in the Life of Mary Penington (London, 1821), p. 17. 57. Joan Vokins, Some Account given forth by Joan Vokins great goodness and mercy of the Lord towards her , in Joan Vokins, Works (Cockermouth, 1871), p. 18. 58. John Crook, A short History of the Life of John Crook (London, 1706), p. 6. 59. Elizabeth Stirredge, Strength in Weakness Manifest: in the Life, Various Trials, and Christian Testimony of that faithful Servant and Handmaid of the Lord (London, 1711), p. 7. 60. Stirredge, Strength in Weakness Manifest, p. 16. 61. Allen, Narrative, p. i. 62. Allen, Narrative, pp. 7–8. 63. Allen, Narrative, p. 72. 64. Allen, Narrative, p. 44. 65. Rogers, Discourse, p. i.

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66. Rogers, Discourse, pp. 183–184. 67. Richard Baxter, The Signs and Causes of Melancholy. With Directions Suited to the Case of those who are Afflicted with it. Collected out of the Works of Mr Richard Baxter, for the Sake of Those, who are Wounded in Spirit. By Samuel Clifford, Minister of the Gospel (London, 1716), p. 4. This posthumous compilation of Baxter’s various observations on the topic also demonstrates the continuing purchase of the concept of melancholy in nonconformist circles into the early eighteenth century. 68. Baxter, Signs and Causes, p. 30. 69. Baxter, Signs and Causes, pp. 1–3. 70. Rogers, Discourse, pp. ii, xii. 71. Rogers, Discourse, p. iii. 72. Rogers, Discourse, p. xi–xii. 73. Baxter, Signs and Causes, pp. 77–78. 74. Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours in Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections. With Three Discourses on the Nature and Cure of the Cholick, Melancholy, and Palsies (London, 1725), p. 99. 75. Fitzherbert, MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, f. 7r. 76. Rogers, Discourse, p. v. 77. The analogy with physical illness is not of course unknown in earlier writings; Burton, for example, declares, ‘you may as well bid him that is sicke of an ague not to bee adry; or him that is wounded not to feel paine’, Anatomy, vol. I, p. 420. Baxter and Rogers, however, mobilise the image in the context of a discussion of specifically spiritual suffering. 78. Rogers, Discourse, p. xiv. 79. Baxter, Signs and Causes, p. 18. 80. Baxter, Signs and Causes, pp. 22, 28, 29. 81. Baxter, Signs and Causes, p. 15. 82. For discussion of Baxter’s changing views on melancholy and religious despair, and the increasing importance of medical discourse on the topic in the late seventeenth century, see Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, pp. 55–61. For Baxter’s personal relation to melancholy and other illnesses, see Andrew Wear, ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Roy Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners: lay perceptions of medicine in pre-industrial society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 83. Allen, Narrative, p. 56. 84. Baxter, Signs and Causes, p. 15. 85. Blackmore, Treatise of the Spleen, pp. 11–12. 86. Blackmore, Treatise of the Spleen, pp. 159–160. 87. George Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse, A. W. Brink, ed. (Montreal and London: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974), p. 114. 88. Trosse, Life, p. 114. 89. Trosse, Life, pp. 94, 107, 111; Boord, Breviary of Helthe, f. 88r. See Macdonald on the terminology and treatment of violent madness, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 121–132; interestingly Napier does not seem to use the word mania at all. 90. See for example Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (New York: Doubleday, 1972); Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: women, madness and English culture 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987); Jane Ussher, Women’s Madness: misogyny or mental illness? (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). Much work has also been done in the field of literary criticism and critical theory. See Shoshana Felman, ‘Women and Madness: the critical phallacy’, Diacritics, vol. 5, no. 4, 1975 (pp. 2–10); and in relation to the earlier period, Elaine Showalter,


91. 92.

93.

94.

95. 96.

97. 98.

99.

100.

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‘Representing Ophelia: women, madness and the responsibilities of feminist criticism’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London: Methuen, 1985); Carol Thomas Neely, ‘ “Documents in Madness”: reading madness and gender in Shakespeare’s tragedies and early modern culture’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 3, 1991 (pp. 315–338); Helen Small, Love’s Madness: medicine, the novel and female insanity, 1800–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Unfortunately, I encountered Neely’s recent very significant study only at a very late point in this project: Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 125. See Small, Love’s Madness; Lisa Dawson, Sweet Poison: the representation of lovesickness in early modern English literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Mary F. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The ‘Viaticum’ and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), although chiefly concerned with the medieval period, also gives an overview of later developments. For a general history, Ilza Veith, Hysteria: the history of a disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). More specifically relating to early modern culture, see Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1982); Michael Macdonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover case (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991); Laurinda Dixon, Perilous Chastity: women and illness in pre-Enlightenment art and medicine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). On madness in drama, see Duncan Salkeld, Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); Neely, Distracted Subjects. For Tom o’Bedlam, see Jack Lindsay, ed., Loving Mad Tom: Bedlamite verses of the XVI and XVII centuries, illustrated Norman Lindsay, foreword Robert Graves, musical transcriptions Peter Warlock (London: Fanfrolico Press, 1927). Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. III, p. 55. Schiesari, Gendering of Melancholia, p. 15. Cf. too Elaine Showalter: ‘Women’s melancholy was seen instead as biological, and emotional in origins’; ‘Representing Ophelia’, in Parker and Hartman, eds, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, p. 81. Schiesari, Gendering of Melancholia, p. 14. Neely, Distracted Subjects, p. 70. Neely locates this shift in the context again of a secularisation of the discourse of melancholy, particularly here in relation to the need to find a secular account of phenomena such as bewitchment and possession; she argues that these previously spiritual conditions were refigured as the consequence of particularly female mental disorders. See Chapter 3, ‘Diagnosing Women’s Melancholy’. Burton bases his account of women’s melancholy on Lodovicus Mercatus (Luis de Mercado), whose De mulierum affectionibus libri iiii was published in Corduba in 1579, and Rodericus a Castro, author of De universa mulierum medicina, Hamburg, 1603. As part of a cluster of publications on the subject in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, these texts underline Neely’s point that the elaboration of the concept of women’s melancholy is a new development in this period. Burton, Anatomy, ‘Symptoms of Maids’, Nuns’ and Widows’ Melancholy’, vol. I, pp. 414–418.

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101. 102. 103. 104.

Burton, Anatomy, vol. I, p. 414. Burton, Anatomy, vol. I, p. 414. Burton, Anatomy, vol. I, pp. 414, 416. Helen Hackett, ‘ “A book, and solitarinesse”: melancholia, gender and literary subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Urania’, in Gordon McMullan, ed., Renaissance Configurations: voices/bodies/spaces, 1580–1690 (London: Macmillan 1998/Palgrave, 2001). Among Napier’s patients, bereavement followed by excessive grief was one of the most commonly cited causes for patients falling into melancholy or madness; marital and love problems also played a significant part, and this was particularly true among women. Of the forty-two patients who consulted Napier because of ‘illness, despair or madness’ following the death of a spouse, thirty-three were women, as were three-quarters of those afflicted because of parental refusal to consent to their marriages, 84 per cent of those under stress because of marital conflict, and all but seven of the fifty-eight suffering because of the loss of a child. Homilectic writers recommended moderation in all human emotions; many people clearly found this advice difficult to follow. See Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, Chapter 3 ‘Stress, anxiety and family life’. Burton, Anatomy, vol. I, p. 165. Burton’s discussion of religious melancholy is part III section 4 of the Anatomy; for examples see chapter 5. Baxter, Signs and Causes, p. 120. Baxter, Signs and Causes, p. 121. For further discussion of this aspect, see K. Hodgkin, ‘Dionys Fitzhertbert and the Anatomy of Melancholy’, in Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill, eds, Voicing Women: gender and sexuality in early modern writing (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996).

105.

106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

5 Mad Unto the World: Spiritual and Mental Disturbances 1. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (orig. London, 1621; eds Thomas Faulkner, Nicolas Kiessling and Rhonda Blair, 6 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000). As noted in the previous chapter, the phrase is attributed to him by Michael Macdonald; ‘The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: narrative, identity and emotion in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 1992 (pp. 32–61), p. 50. 2. Burton, Anatomy, vol. III, p. 338. 3. Burton, Anatomy, vol. III, pp. 414, 415. 4. Burton, Anatomy, vol. III, p. 387. 5. Burton, Anatomy, vol. III, p. 356. 6. The phrase is used by the Quaker Elizabeth Stirredge: Strength in Weakness Manifest in the Life, Various Trials, and Christian Testimony of that faithful Servant and Handmaid of the Lord, Elizabeth Stirredge (London, 1711), p. 84. 7. On the often-tricky relations between the godly and the law, see Christopher Hill, Liberty Against the Law: some seventeenth-century controversies (London: Allen Lane, 1996). 8. Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 214–215.


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9. Also known as Eleanor Audeley and Eleanor Douglas; her family and marital connections placed her at the heart of the patronage networks of the Jacobean and Caroline aristocracy, although her turn to prophecy in her thirties placed her at odds with most of her friends and family. For an extended account of her extraordinary life, see Esther Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never Soe Mad a Ladie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); for a selection of her writings, Esther Cope, ed., Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). See also Roy Porter, ‘The Prophetic Body: Lady Eleanor Davies and the meanings of madness’, Women’s Writing 1, 1994 (pp. 51–63). 10. Quoted in Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit, p. 71. 11. Quoted in Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit, p. 86. 12. Eleanor Davies Bethlehem, signifying the house of bread: or war. Reprinted in Cope ed., Prophetic Writings, p. 371. 13. As Jonathan Andrews comments, so long as the threat was not felt to be serious there was a fairly high level of tolerance of religious eccentricity; ‘The Politics of Committal to Early Modern Bethlem’, in Roy Porter, ed., Medicine in the Enlightenment (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine, 1995). Prophets with royalist sympathies or aristocratic connections were perhaps more likely to be put away as mad rather than seditious; Eleanor Davies and Richard Stafford are two examples, and a third might be Arise Evans, commonly known as the ‘royalist prophet’. See Christopher Hill, ‘Arise Evans – Welshman in London’, in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974). 14. John Rogers, ‘Another testimony to the Truth or further Experience of John Rogers’, in Ohel or Beth-Shemesh: A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, 1653), pp. 428–429. 15. Rogers, ‘Another testimony to the Truth’, p. 429. 16. Rogers, ‘Another testimony to the Truth’, p. 429. 17. On radical religion in the mid-seventeenth century and beyond, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: radical ideas during the English Revolution (orig. London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985); Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: language and literature in English radical religion 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: ecstatic prophecy in seventeenth-century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). 18. Henry Jessey, The exceeding riches of grace advanced by the spirit of grace in an empty nothing creature, viz. Mris Sarah Wight (London, 1647), p. 31. 19. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the chief of Sinners, ed. W. R. Owens (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 74. 20. See Mack, Visionary Women, especially Chapter 4 ‘Ecstasy and Self-transcendence’. 21. John Crook, A short History of the Life of John Crook (London, 1706), p. 32. 22. Crook, A Short History, p. 32. 23. On the Christian fool topos, see M. A. Screech, ‘Good Madness in Christendom’, in W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, eds, The Anatomy of Madness: essays in the history of psychiatry, vol. I: People and Ideas (London: Tavistock Publications, 1985); Hill, World Turned Upside Down, Chapter 13, ‘The Island of Great Bedlam’. 24. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 73. 25. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, p. 73. 26. Thomas Tryon, Pythagoras his Mystick Philosophy Reviv’d; Or, the Mystery of Dreams Unfolded (London, 1691), p. 138.

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27. ‘A fuller Testimony as it was taken from Elizabeth Avery’, in Rogers, Ohel or BethShemesh, p. 405. 28. Anna Trapnel, A Legacy for Saints (London, 1654), pp. 36–37. 29. Trapnel, Legacy, pp. 25–26. 30. Trapnel, Legacy, pp. 35–36. 31. Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: the rhetoric of enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 32. Barbara Blaugdone, An Account of the Travels, Sufferings and Persecution of Barbara Blaugdone (London, 1691), p. 28. 33. Thomas Adams, Mystical Bedlam, or the World of Mad-Men (London, 1615), p. 47. 34. George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, John Nickalls, ed. (Philadelphia: Religious Society of Friends, 1997), pp. 43–44. See also Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 228; George Fox, George Fox’s ‘Book of Miracles’, Henry Cadbury, ed. (Philadelphia, PA; London: Quaker Homes Service, 2000). 35. Richard T. Vann, The Social Development of English Quakerism 1655–1755 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 29. 36. On the changing relationship of Quakers to insanity in the century and a half between Fox and Tuke, see Fiona Godlee, ‘Aspects of non-conformity: Quakers and the lunatic fringe’, in W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, eds, The Anatomy of Madness: essays in the history of psychiatry, vol. 2, Institutions and Society (London: Tavistock, 1985). 37. Agnes Beaumont, ‘The Narrative of the Persecution of Agnes Beaumont’, in John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco, eds, Grace Abounding with other spiritual Autobiographies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, World’s Classics, 1998), p. 209. 38. Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll (orig. London, 1649), in Nigel Smith, ed., A Collection of Ranter Writings from the Seventeenth Century (London: Junction Press, 1983), pp. 61–62. 39. Jane Turner, Choice Experiences of the kind dealings of God before, in, and after Conversion (London, 1653), p. 27. 40. Anna Trapnel, Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (London, 1654), preface (n. p.); The Cry of a Stone (London, 1654), p. 67. 41. Elizabeth Avery, Scripture-Prophecies Opened, which are to be accomplished in these last times, which do attend the coming of Christ, in several Letters written to Christian friends (London, 1647), preface. 42. Thomas Parker,The Copy of a Letter written by Mr Thomas Parker, Pastor of the Church of Newbury in New-England, to his Sister, Mrs Elizabeth Avery, sometimes of Newbury in the county of Berks, touching sundry Opinions by her professed and maintained (London, 1650), pp. 5, 13. 43. Meric Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm (London, 1655; Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Fascsimiles and Reprints, 1970); Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, or: a discourse of the nature, causes, kinds, and cure, of enthusiasme (London, 1656). (Originallypublished under pseudonym‘PhilophilusParresiastes’.) 44. Michael Macdonald, ‘Insanity and the realities of history in early modern England’, Psychological Medicine, vol. 11, no. 1, 1981 (pp. 11–25), p. 15. 45. More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, p. 16. 46. More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, p. 17. 47. More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, p. 51. 48. John Sena, ‘Melancholic Madness and the Puritans’, Harvard Theological Review, vol. 66, no. 3, 1973.


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49. Macdonald, ‘Insanity and the Realities of History’, p. 12. 50. Casaubon, Treatise, pp. 86, 129. Like Burton, Casaubon comments on the susceptibility of women, whom ‘all men know to be naturally weaker of brain, and easiest to be infatuated and deluded’, p. 119. 51. Casaubon, Treatise, pp. 131, 213. 52. For a variation on this theme see K. Hodgkin, ‘Reasoning with Unreason: witchcraft, visions and madness in seventeenth-century England’, in Stuart Clark, ed., Languages of Witchcraft: narrative, ideology and meaning in early modern culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 53. Allen mentions reading ‘blessed Mr Bolton’s Books’, probably referring to Robert Bolton’s Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences, 1631, which was puritan in ethos but nonetheless orthodox; Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs Hannah Allen (London, 1683), p. 5. 54. Louise Yeoman, ‘Archie’s Invisible Worlds Discovered – spirituality, madness and Johnston of Wariston’s family’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society 27, 1997 (pp. 156–186), p. 175. 55. George Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr George Trosse, ed. A. W. Brink (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), p. 72. This should not perhaps be taken too literally, though; it forms part of a series of oppositions between his godless youth and his devout nonconformist present, and the opportunity to represent ecclesiastical hierarchy and ceremony as part of the package of godless youth has a structural as well as a personal significance. 56. Trosse, Life, pp. 72–73, p. 71. 57. Trosse, Life, p. 119. 58. Christopher Hill and Michael Shepherd, ‘The Case of Arise Evans: a historicopsychiatric study’, Psychological Medicine, vol. 6, no. 3, 1976 (pp. 351–358), p. 357. 59. See Edward Hare, ‘Schizophrenia before 1800? The case of the Reverend George Trosse’, Psychological Medicine, vol. 18, no. 2, May 1988. 60. Phyllis R. Freeman, Carley Rees Bogarad and Diane E. Sholomskas, ‘Margery Kempe, a new theory: the inadequacy of hysteria and postpartum psychosis as diagnostic categories’, History of Psychiatry, vol. 1, no. 2, June 1990 (pp. 169–190), p. 190. 61. George MacLennan, Lucid Interval: subjective writing and madness in history (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), p. 55; Allan Ingram, The Madhouse of Language: writing and reading madness in the eighteenth century (London: Routledge, 1991) (and see also his essay ‘Time and Tense in Eighteenth-Century Narratives of Madness’, Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 30, 2000, pp. 60–70, which also discusses Southcott). 62. See Lyndal Roper’s comments in her review essay ‘Witchcraft and fantasy’, History Workshop Journal 45, spring 1998 (pp. 265–270). 63. Macdonald, ‘The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira’, p. 55. John Stachniewski’s terrifying account of the inner lives of many seventeenth-century Calvinists, indeed, comes close to suggesting that the extreme pressure of the demands made by the Calvinist belief system drove people into states of mental disorder, although his analysis is too sophisticated to collapse into seeing religious zeal as intrinsically a sign of madness; John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the literature of religious despair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Cf. also Anne Laurence’s comment, ‘It is important not to make to crude an equation between religious language and modern psychiatric disorders. On the other hand, religion did provide the vocabulary of abstract expression and provided explanations for extremes of mood, for ecstasy, doubt and despair’; ‘Women’s Psychological Disorders in Seventeenth-Century Britain’, in Arina Angermann et al., eds, Current Issues in Women’s History (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).

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6 The Thread Out of the Labyrinth: The Experience of Cure 1. On the view of the asylum as an institution of control, see Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason, tr. and abridged Richard Howard (London: Tavistock Publications, 1987). Classics of ‘anti-psychiatry’ include Klaus Doerner, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: a social history of insanity and psychiatry, tr. J. Neugroschel and J. Steinberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981); Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (London: Harper Row, 1974); and see also Jeffrey A. Schaler, ed., Szasz Under Fire: the psychiatric abolitionist faces his critics (Chicago, Illinois: Open Court, 2004). For eighteenth-century asylums more generally see next note. 2. On eighteenth-century asylums, see William Llywelyn Parry Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: a study of private madhouses in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); Roy Porter, Mind-forg’d Manacles: a history of madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Athlone Press, 1987); Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: madness and society in Britain 1700–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Andrew Scull, Charlotte Mackenzie and Nicholas Hervey, Masters of Bedlam: the transformation of the mad-doctoring trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); R. A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-century Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). For autobiographical accounts, see, for example, the eighteenthcentury narratives collected in Allan Ingram, Voices of Madness: four pamphlets, 1683–1796 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1997), which are explosions of outrage against confinement, as the titles make plain: Alexander Cruden’s The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured (1739), Samuel Bruckshaw’s One More Proof of the Iniquitous Abuse of Private Madhouses (1774), and William Belcher’s Address to Humanity: Containing, a Letter to Dr. Thomas Munro; a Receipt to Make a Lunatic, and Seize his Estate; and a Sketch of a True Smiling Hyena (1796). 3. Indeed, the growing interest in experimenting with cures for madness was in some cases worse for the patient than straightforward neglect. Doctors zealously trying out the effects of pouring huge quantities of water on a patient, or swinging them vigorously through the air, might be acting with the best of intentions, but their patients must at times have pined for a quiet straw-lined cell. But less innovative doctors were not necessarily any more trusted by their patients, and the assumption that the mentally disordered did not feel pain, heat or cold in the same way as the sane justified countless abuses. Hostility to doctors is frequently noted as a symptom in the case records of the very traditionally minded John Monro in the middle of the century; see Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade: the management of lunacy in eighteenth-century London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). See also the protests against medical brutality in the autobiographical narratives cited in previous note. 4. Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenthcentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 230. 5. Neely describes similar approaches to madness in the drama of the period: ‘The speech and emotions of the mad are paid close attention to The mad are cared for with compassion’. She argues that this is in fact associated with the secularisation of madness: supernatural explanations were discredited and madness was brought ‘into the realm of the human’, Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 67. However in the cases discussed in this study it is clear that religious


6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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discourse was part of that process of humanisation, allowing mental disorder to be placed on a continuum with other forms of human spiritual suffering; how far similar approaches might have shaped the treatment of the mad in other contexts is hard to determine, although her argument in general tends to confirm Macdonald’s brighter picture of seventeenth-century attitudes to madness (see previous note). Hannah Allen’s account of her breakdown was published nearly twenty years later, and though it is not clear when it was written, the fact of publication implies a subsequent life of calm and piety. George Trosse wrote his narrative fifty years after the crisis, and gives a brief account of his life in the intervening decades as well, with no indication of any subsequent mental disorder. Dionys Fitzherbert’s manuscript was written immediately after the event, but various documents dating from later in her life give no indication of recurrence. Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs Hannah Allen (London, 1683), p. 26. Allen, Narrative, p. 34. For an overview of the status of physicians in seventeenth-century England, see Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers and Healers: the experience of illness in seventeenthcentury England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), Chapter 2. See also Margaret Pelling, ‘Compromised by gender: the role of the male medical practitioner in early modern England’, in Hilary Task and Margaret Pelling, eds, The Task of Healing: medicine, religion and gender in England and the Netherlands, 1450– 1800 (Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing, 1996), for a discussion of the insecurities as well as the social prominence of the physician. George Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr George Trosse, ed. A. W. Brink (Montreal and London: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974), p. 92. There are two Dr Listers in William Munk’s Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London (vol. I, 1518–1700; London, 1878) in practice at this time, both eminent men with high-ranking patients: Edward Lister, who died in 1620, and Matthew Lister (1564–1656). It is not clear which was in attendance on Fitzherbert. Dr Carter does not appear in Munk’s Roll, and has not so far been traced elsewhere. Dionys Fitzherbert, Bodleian Library MS. e Mus. 169, f. 12v, 13r. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 12r. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 13v. Further discussion in K. Hodgkin, ‘Loving Ministers: sexuality, speech and silence in women’s spiritual writings of the mid-seventeenth century’, unpublished paper, Times Trans-Shifting conference, Birkbeck, September 1996. Charismatic ministers are crucial to the success of many of the gathered churches, and the experience of hearing them is described by many autobiographers in intensely charged language. Allen, Narrative, p. 39. This quotation comes from an interpolated third-person passage apparently written by the minister in question. Allen, Narrative, pp. 55–56. Allen, Narrative, p. 47. Allen, Narrative, p. 56. Allen, Narrative, pp. 12–13. Allen, Narrative, pp. 65–66. Medical authority, of course, also had a religious dimension. ‘Ministers of religion were seen as God’s instruments for the healing of the soul’s sicknesses’, comments David Harley, ‘physicians and surgeons as his instruments for the healing of the body’; ‘The Good Physician and the Godly Doctor: the exemplary life of John

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23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

Notes to pp. 107–113 Tylston of Chester (1663–99)’, The Seventeenth Century, vol. IX, no. 1, spring 1994 (pp. 93–117), p. 95. Elspeth Graham, ‘Women’s Writing and the Self’, in Helen Wilcox, ed., Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Graham’s comments on masculine authority in Allen’s life in her earlier article, ‘Authority, Resistance and Loss: gendered difference in the writings of John Bunyan and Hannah Allen’, in Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens and Stuart Sim, eds, John Bunyan and his England, 1628–1688 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990). Trosse, Life, p. 113. Trosse, Life, pp. 96, 101, 102. Trosse, Life, p. 98. Allen, Narrative, pp. 52–53. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, ff. 17r, 16r. Trosse, Life, p. 96. Dionys Fitzherbert, Lambeth Palace Library MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, 8r. Trosse, Life, p. 96. Trosse, Life, p. 97. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 13r. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 11v. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 11r. Typically, he also argues elsewhere that amongst the ‘recreations of the minde within doores, there is none so fit & proper to expell Idlenesse and Melancholy, as that of Study’, providing that the malady is not the consequence of excessive study in the first place. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (orig. London, 1621; eds, Thomas Faulkner, Nicolas Kiessling and Rhonda Blair, 6 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press,), vol. I, p. 302; vol. II, p. 84. Timothy Rogers, A Discourse concerning Trouble of Mind and the Disease of Melancholly. In Three Parts. Written for the Use of such as are, or have been Exercised by the same (London, 1691), p. xix. Fitzherbert, MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, 8r. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. II, pp. 91, 92, 95. Richard Baxter, The Signs and Causes of Melancholy. With Directions Suited to the Case of those who are Afflicted with it. Collected out of the Works of Mr Richard Baxter, for the Sake of Those, who are Wounded in Spirit. By Samuel Clifford, Minister of the Gospel (London, 1716), p. 122. John Hart (Hart On-hi), Trodden Down Strength, by the God of Strength, or, Mrs Drake Revived (London, 1647), pp. 49, 60, 65. Fitzherbert, MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, f. 8r. ‘For in the patient’s insane words there is a voice that speaks; it obeys its own grammar, it articulates a meaning The same language must continue to make itself understood, merely bringing a new deductive element to the rigor of its discourse the problem is not to pursue the delirium, but by continuing it to bring it to its end. It must be led to a state of paroxysm and crisis in which it is confronted by itself and forced to argue against its own truth.’ Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 188. See also the discussion of these therapeutic techniques in Neely, Distracted Subjects, p. 78. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, 15v–16r. Hart, Trodden Down Strength, p. 62. Rogers, Discourse, p. 147. Trosse, Life, p. 110.

Notes to pp. 113–118 48. 49. 50. 51.

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58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 18r. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, 18v. Allen, Narrative, p. 72. George MacLennan, Lucid Interval: subjective writing and madness in history (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 72–73. See also, in a secular context, Neely; the remedies used on the mad are designed ‘to coax them back to their “business,” back into the rituals of everyday life’; Distracted Subjects, p. 67. Trosse, Life, p. 111. Trosse, Life, pp. 109–110. Allen, Narrative, p. 71. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, 16v, Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, 17r. Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: elements of Greek and tragic madness (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 238. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, 7r. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, 5v. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, 7r. Allen, Narrative, p. 71. Trosse, Life, p. 133.

7

Inside and Outside: The Body and its Boundaries

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

1. On the history of the body, see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1 (The History of Manners), vol. 2 (State Formation and Civilization), tr. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982); Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), and more recently Witch Craze: terror and fantasy in baroque Germany (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2004); Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: women, touch and power in seventeenth-century England (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2003); David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds, The Body in Parts: fantasies of corporeality in early modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1997); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986); G. S. Rousseau, ed., The Language of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: bodies, plagues and politics (London: Palgrave, 2001); Gail Kern Pastor, The Body Embarrassed: drama and the disciplines of shame in early modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 2. See Elias, Civilizing Process; Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression. The most influential figure here is Mikhail Bakhtin; see M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). On Lent and Carnival, see also Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978). 3. Norbert Elias, Civilizing Process, vol. 1. As Anna Bryson points out, of course, the assumption that conduct books describe behaviour on the ground is problematic, and overlooks the extent to which rhetorical exaggeration shapes the descriptions of low behaviour. Nonetheless the overall narrative is persuasive in many ways. Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: changing codes of conduct in early modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 4. See Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: dissection and the human body in Renaissance culture (London: Routledge 1995); Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

Notes to pp. 118–122 Body: essays on subjection (London: Methuen, 1984); Steven Mullaney, ‘Lying Like Truth: riddle, representation and treason in Renaissance England’, ELH vol. 47, no. 1, Spring 1980 (pp. 32–47). Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975); Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: the body enclosed’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers, eds, Rewriting the Renaissance: the discourses of sexual difference in early modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), part I; Gowing, Common Bodies. See also Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: early modern and twentiethcentury representations (London: Routledge, 1996), Chapter 4, ‘The House, the Body, the Child’. Gowing, Common Bodies. Laura Gowing comments that ‘Norbert Elias’s narrative of the civilisation of the body takes the male body as universal, as does much of the courtesy literature’, and is very little concerned with the regulation of female bodies; Common Bodies, p. 7. Whether this should be taken to mean that women’s bodies were fundamentally uncivilisable, or conversely that women were assumed already to have a higher level of bodily self-governance (not spitting on the floor or blowing noses in sleeves), is a moot point. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo (London: Routledge, 1996). See also Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Sigmund Freud, ‘On negation’, On Metapsychology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984; Pelican Freud, vol. 11), p. 439. See Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), for a detailed account of the ways in which diet and the health of the body interact in humoural theory. See Ulinka Rublack, ‘Fluxes: the early modern body and the emotions’, tr. Pamela Selwyn, History Workshop Journal 53, 2002 (pp. 1–16). The Anathomie of Sinne, briefely discovering the braunches thereof, with a short method how to detest and avoid it (London, 1603), f. B3r; Thomas Adams, The White Devil, or the Hypocrite Uncased: in a sermon preached at Pauls Crosse, March 7 1612 (London, 1613), p. 32. The more technical meaning of hypocrisy, which in Calvinism meant a mistaken belief in one’s own election, also feeds this anxiety; see John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: Puritanism and the literature of religious despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 91–93. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, drawne out to the full body (London, 1631), pp. 106, 114. See also the character of ‘A She-Precise Hypocrite’, in John Earle’s Micro-cosmographie, Or, a peece of the world discovered, in essayes and characters (London, 1628) – one of only two female characters in the collection. Dionys Fitzherbert, Bodleian Library MS. e Mus. 169, f. 9r. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 8v. Fruit was generally regarded as apt to produce wind, and to be consumed with care. See Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. I, p. 216. Andrew Boord’s entry for colic includes the warning, ‘beware of cold and beware of eating of colde meate and frutes’; The Breviary of Helthe (London, 1547; facsimile ed., English Experience reprints no. 362, Amsterdam, New York: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd, 1971), f. 38r.


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17. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 9r. The word ‘uvula’, surprisingly, was quite widely used in early modern English; see Oxford English Dictionary for examples. 18. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 9v. 19. See Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 153–154; Gowing, Common Bodies, pp. 22–24. The fantasy of uncontrollable urination is still being cited in the early eighteenth century; see Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours in Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections. With Three Discourses on the Nature and Cure of the Cholick, Melancholy, and Palsies (London, 1725), p. 162. 20. It also suggests language: the matter coming out of the mouth may be clean or vile. Trosse, referring to his scornful comments about ministers in his irreligious youth, describes himself as ‘vomiting out the Language of Hell against them’; Life, p. 79. 21. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 10r. 22. For medieval precedents, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: the religious significance of food to medieval women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). See also Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500– 1720 (London: Routledge, 1992), especially Part II; Caterina Albano, ‘Questioning Starvation’, Women’s Writing, vol. 8, no. 2, 2001, pp. 313–326; Diane Purkiss, ‘Producing the voice, consuming the body: women prophets of the seventeenth century’, in Isobel Grundy and S. Wiseman, eds, Women, Writing, History, 1640– 1740 (London: Batsford, 1992). 23. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 27r. 24. Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone: or a Relation of Something spoken in Whitehall (London, 1654); Henry Jessey, The exceeding Riches of Grace advanced by the spirit of grace in an empty nothing creature, viz. Mtis Sarah Wight (London, 1647). See also Purkiss, ‘Producing the voice’. 25. Barbara Blaugdone, An Account of the Travels, Sufferings and Persecution of Barbara Blaugdone (London, 1691), p. 9; see pp. 11, 14, for prison fasts (probably a good idea given the likely quality of food and water in prison). 26. For example, Anna Trapnel ‘was judged by divers friends to be under a temptation for not eating’, and went to the Lord to check: ‘it was answered me, no, for thou shalt every way be supplied in body and spirit, and I found a continual fullness in my stomack ’ Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, p. 5. 27. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 13r. 28. Dionys Fitzherbert, Lambeth Palace Library MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, f. 8r. 29. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 18r. 30. George Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr George Trosse, A. W. Brink, ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974), p. 91. 31. Trosse, Life, p. 91. 32. Trosse, Life, p. 97. 33. Trosse, Life, pp. 54, 55. 34. Trosse, Life, p. 55. 35. Trosse, Life, p. 74. 36. Trosse, Life, p. 85. 37. Thomas Whythorne, ed. James M. Osborn, The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (London: Oxford University Press, 1962; modern spelling edition), p. 50. The autobiography was written in the 1570s. See also K. Hodgkin, ‘Thomas

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38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59.

Notes to pp. 126–129 Whythorne and the Problems of Mastery’, History Workshop Journal 29, 1990, pp. 20–41. Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs Hannah Allen (London, 1683), p. 65. Jessey, The Exceeding Riches of Grace, p. 109; Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, p. 8. There is a recurrent historical interest in religious fasting, and in the parallels between self-starvation among young women in the past and today. See works cited in note 22 above. Allen, Narrative, p. 64. Allen, Narrative, p. 65. Allen, Narrative, p. 36. Allen, Narrative, pp. 33–34. Allen, Narrative, p. 33. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 3. See Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing; Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: women and drama in the age of Shakespeare (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983). See Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, pp. 21–24; Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: literature and the nature of womankind, 1540–1620 (Brighton: Harvester, 1984). W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and all that: a memorable history of England (London: Methuen, 1930). See Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing; Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, p. 2. See Gowing, Common Bodies, pp. 34–40, on dress and its removal; Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, pp. 218–225, on clothing and material culture. Elizabeth Stirredge, Strength in Weakness Manifest, in the Life, Various Trials, and Christian Testimony of that faithful Servant and Handmaid of the Lord, Elizabeth Stirredge (London, 1711), p. 12. Mary Rich, ed. T. C. Croker, Autobiography of Mary Countess of Warwick (London: Percy Society Reprints, 1848), p. 21. Dorothea Gotherson, To All that Are Unregenerated: a call to Repentance from dead works (London, 1661), pp. 77–78. Brathwait, English Gentlewoman; Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583). A vigorous polemic continued in countless advice books and attacks on women throughout the period; see Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance; Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English books for women, 1475–1640 (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1982). Thomas Adams, Mystical Bedlam, or the World of Mad-Men (London, 1615), pp. 51–52. The four-sailed vessels are wide skirts; and ‘surphul’d beauties’ refers to the use of sulphur to whiten the skin. See Carroll Camden, The Elizabethan Woman: a panorama of English womanhood, 1540 to 1640 (London: Cleaver-Hume Press Ltd, 1952), p. 179. Brathwait, English Gentlewoman, p. 37. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in generall (London, 1604), p. 29. Wright goes on to derive from this another illustration of natural subordination: ‘By this wee may knowe the cause, why children, and especially women, cannot abide to looke in their fathers, masters, or betters faces, because, even nature it selfe


60.

61.

62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

8

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seemeth to teach them, that thorowe their eyes they see their hearts ’ and while this is allowable for superiors, it would be presumptuous in inferiors ‘to attempt the entry or privy passage’ into the minds of their betters; Wright, p. 29. Two anonymous pamphlets summarise the issue: Hic Mulier: or the Man-Woman; being a Medicine to cure the Staggers in the Masculine-Feminines of our Times (London, 1620), and the response, Haec Vir: or the Womanish Man; being an Answere to a Late Booke (London, 1620). See also Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, Chapter 5 ‘Effeminacy and Manhood’. Joan Kelly’s classic essay, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ discusses the disquieting convergence of the courtier and the feminine; Women, History and theory: the essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Adam’s hair ‘hung/Clustring, but not beneath his shoulders broad’. Eve’s hair is more powerfully meaningful: ‘Shee as a vail down to the slender waste/Her unadorned golden tresses wore/Dissheveld, but in wanton ringlets wav’d/As the Vine curles her tendrils, which impli’d/Subjection ’ John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 301–308. Trosse, Life, p. 56. As Ophelia describes him, ‘with his doublet all unbrac’d/No hat upon his head, his stockings foul’d/Ungarter’d and down-gyved to his ankle ’ William Shakespeare, Hamlet II. I, lines 78–80 (Arden Shakespeare, ed. Harold Jenkins, London: Methuen, 1982). Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 131 (and see 129–131 in general). See also R. A, Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 176–182, on clothing and appearance as indices of insanity. Trosse, Life, p. 105. Trosse, Life, p. 96. Trosse, Life, pp. 86–87. Trosse, Life, p. 88. Trosse, Life, p. 96. Trosse, Life, p. 96. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 10r. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 10v. The version quoted here is taken from the Geneva bible, the standard translation in the late sixteenth century, and the one normally used by Fitzherbert. See The Cambridge Geneva Bible of 1591: a facsimile reprint, introduced by David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 9v. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 4v. Miranda Chaytor, ‘Husband/ry: narratives of rape in the seventeenth century’, Gender and History, vol. 7, no. 3, 1995, pp. 378–407.

Beyond the Human Body: Life, Death and the Devil

1. Death in recent years has become a strikingly popular topic among early modernists, particularly in relation to debates about the impact of the Reformation. See Ralph Houlbrooke, ed., Death, Ritual and Bereavement (London: Routledge, 1989); Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1450–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: religion, ritual and the life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford

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2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

Notes to pp. 135–136 University Press, 2002). On gendered aspects of death and mourning, see Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); also Lucinda Becker, Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2003). For an overview from medieval to modern times, see Philippe Aries, tr. Helen Weaver, The Hour of Our Death (London: Allen Lane, 1981). See also Natalie Zemon Davis’s influential article ‘Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny: some features of family life in early modern France’, Daedalus, vol. 106, no. 2, spring 1977 (pp. 87–114). Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-century England: household, kinship and patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For mothers’ legacies, see Philippy, Women, Death and Literature; Becker, Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman; see also Sylvia Brown, ed., Women’s Writing in Stuart England: the mothers’ legacies of Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Joscelin and Elizabeth Harrison (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999). On family portraits and memorials, see Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Fatherly Authority: the politics of Stuart family images’, in Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy Vickers, eds, Rewriting the Renaissance: the discourses of sexual difference in early modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Davis, ‘Ghosts, Kin and Progeny’; see also her essay ‘Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France’, in Thomas C. Heller et al., eds, Reconstructing Individualism: autonomy, individuality, and the self in western thought (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986). See Philippy, Women, Death and Literature, on women’s physical intimacy with dead bodies. Henry Batchelor recalls being taken to see a corpse as a small boy in the early nineteenth century: ‘The mother of the dead girl made me touch her hand: and when I felt it as cold as a stone, it sent a shudder through me, which has never wholly left me.’ Peter Barber, ed., Gin and Hell-Fire: Henry Batchelor’s memoirs of a working-class childhood in Crouch End, 1823–1837 (London: Hornsey Historical Society, 2004), p. 25. Dionys Fitzherbert, Bodleian Library MS. e Mus. 169, f. 13v. Hamlet is the most celebrated example of conversations with skulls, but one might add, for example, Vindice, anti-hero of Thomas Middleton and Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) addressing his dead mistress’s skull. The John Donne reference is to his Holy Sonnet 7, inviting the dead to reassemble themselves for the day of judgement. For a discussion of the intense anxiety this uncertainty might cause, see John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: Protestantism and the literature of religious despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). For examples, see John Fox, Actes and monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, touching matters of the Church (London, 1563; reprinted and expanded in numerous subsequent editions); Thomas Beard, The Theatre of God’s Judgements: Or, a collection of histories concerning the admirable Judgements of God upon the transgressours of his commandements. Translated out of French, and augmented by more than three hundred Examples (London, 1597). Faustus in his last moments wishes that the doctrine of reincarnation were true, and that he might ‘be chang’d/Into some brutish beast’, rather than face eternal damnation; Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr Faustus, Act V, scene ii.


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12. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. W. R. Owen (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 29. 13. Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 188. 14. John Donne, ‘Devotions upon Emergent Occasions’ VII, 1624. Baptism has the same meaning of incorporation into the body of the church; by baptism, ‘that child is thereby connected to that Head which is my Head too, and engraffed into that body, whereof I am a member’. John Donne, Selected Prose, chosen by Evelyn Simpson, eds Helen Gardner and Timothy Healy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 100–101. 15. See Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead. 16. Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs. Hannah Allen (London, 1683), pp. 23–24. 17. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 4v. 18. Allen, Narrative, p. 31. 19. Allen, Narrative, pp. 28, 57. 20. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 10v. 21. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 23r. 22. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 23r. 23. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 10r. 24. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 13v. 25. Elspeth Graham similarly comments on the ‘slippery lack of self-identity’ apparent in the narrative in her illuminating discussion of Fitzherbert and Allen; Elspeth Graham, ‘Women’s Writing and the Self’, in Helen Wilcox, ed., Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 223. 26. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, ff. 10v–11r. 27. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 12r. This startlingly vivid image also throws a disconcerting light on early modern care of the insane; bed-sharing was, of course, a normal part of life, but to put a child to share with someone in what was at the time quite a seriously disturbed condition is unexpected. On bed-sharing as an index of intimacy and friendship, see Laura Gowing, ‘The Politics of Women’s Friendship in Early Modern England’, in Michael Hunter, Laura Gowing and Miri Rubin, eds, Love, Friendship and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 28. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 13v. 29. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 13v. 30. See Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, especially Chapters 1 and 2, for vivid illustrations of this state of mind. 31. George Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse, A. W. Brink, ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974), p. 93. 32. Trosse, Life, p. 111. 33. Allen, Narrative, p. 31. 34. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 23r. 35. Richard Baxter, The Signs and Causes of Melancholy. With Directions Suited to the Case of those who are Afflicted with it. Collected out of the Works of Mr Richard Baxter, for the Sake of Those, who are Wounded in Spirit. By Samuel Clifford, Minister of the Gospel (London, 1716), p. 10. 36. Trosse, Life, p. 95. 37. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 10r. 38. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 23r–v. 39. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 23v, 10r.

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40. Michael Macdonald and Terence Murphy, Sleepless Souls: suicide in early modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 65. 41. See Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, pp. 46–52, for numerous examples of suicidal temptations and actual suicides on religious grounds. As he comments, ‘What is staggering is that people in despair of salvation, believing what they believed, should have attempted suicide at all They seem to have found life so unbearable that they did not believe hell could be worse’, pp. 48–49. 42. See Macdonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, for a comprehensive account of attitudes to suicide in early modern England, and how they change. For further discussion of the shift from spiritual to secular understandings in a European context, see Jeffrey Watt, ed., From Sin to Insanity: suicide in early modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 43. Fulke Greville, sonnet xcix. 44. Paul Seaver, Wallington’s World: a Puritan artisan in seventeenth-century London (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 26; Richard Carpenter, Experience, Historie and Divinitie. Divided into five Books (London, 1642), p. 34. Wallington also records his own temptations to suicide, and notes stories of the suicides of others; pp. 16, 31. 45. Baxter, Signs and Causes of Melancholy, pp. 85–86. The intention is to contrast the self with the light and love that is God, but for the melancholy the effect seems less than consoling. 46. Satan looks down into himself and finds that he is himself the pit of hell – a defining moment of early modern subjectivity, and frequently cited. ‘Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;/And in the lowest deeps a lower deep/Still threatning to devour me opens wide ’; John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 75–77. 47. Trosse, Life, p. 86. 48. Trosse, Life, p. 87. 49. Trosse, Life, p. 87. 50. Allen, Narrative, pp. 35–36. See also Allan Ingram’s discussion of this passage as ‘an escape from time and tense’; Allan Ingram, ‘Time and Tense in Eighteenth-century Narratives of Madness’, Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 30, 2000, pp. 60–70. 51. Allen, Narrative, p. 36. In her account of this episode she replicates an association between wandering in the woods and confining oneself in the chamber which is characteristic of melancholy at the time; her family, she explains, ‘concluded I had stolen out the door unknown to them, to go lose myself in some wood, which I much talked of’, p. 36, and had indeed attempted. See Conclusion. 52. Trosse, Life, p. 87. 53. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 15v. 54. Compare the phrasing in John Sym’s 1637 treatise on suicide, describing the signs of an inclination to self-murder: ‘a strange change in outward behaviour, with gastly lookes, wilde frights and flaights’; ‘ghastly looks’ may have been a standard coding for suicidal impulses. John Sym, Lifes Preservative against SelfKilling (London, 1637; ed. and introduced by Michael Macdonald, Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry, London: Routledge, 1988), p. 260. 55. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 1r. 56. Her story also hints at the presence of Catholicism as the skeleton in Fitzherbert’s own family cupboard; there is a distant family connection between these Fitzherberts and the prominent recusant Fitzherberts of Derbyshire and Northamptonshire, and throughout her narrative Catholicism and the potential for conversion appears as a disruptive force. See K. Hodgkin, Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: the autobiographical writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Ashgate, forthcoming 2008).


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57. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 13r. 58. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 13r. 59. Nathaniel Bacon, A Relation of the Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira, in the yeare 1548 (London, 1638), pp. 122–123. Psalm 69 pleads, ‘Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink: let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters./Let not the waterflood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.’ Psalm 69, 14–15. Most familiar, of course, is Psalm 130, 1–2: ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord;/Lord, hear my voice ’. 60. Fitzherbert, MS. e. Mus. 169, f. 14v. 61. Philip Barrough, The Method of Phisick, containing the causes, signes and cures of inward diseases in mans body . . . (London, 1601), p. 45. 62. For Goodwin Wharton, see Chapter 1, pp. 1–3. 63. From a large body of work on magic and magical beings, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971); Katherine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies (London: Allen Lane, 1976); Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the ritual year, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: a history of fairies and fairy stories (London: Allen Lane, 2000). 64. See Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic; J. A. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: witchcraft in England, 1550–1750 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996); Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: the social and cultural contexts of European witchcraft (London: HarperCollins, 1996). 65. See Loving Mad Tom: Bedlamite verses of the XVI and XVII centuries. Jack Lindsay, ed., illustrated Norman Lindsay, foreword Robert Graves, musical transcriptions Peter Warlock (London: Fanfrolico Press, 1927), pp. 25, 39. (It should be noted though that the classical gods and goddesses are even more prominent in these literary ballads than the traditional occupants of the magical world.) 66. Trosse, Life, p. 91. 67. See Michael Macdonald, ed., Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover case (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991); Louise Yeoman, ‘Archie’s invisible worlds discovered – spirituality, madness and Johnston of Wariston’s family’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society 27 (1997), 156–186.? 68. Michael Macdonald, ‘Women and Madness in Tudor and Stuart England’, Social Research, vol. 53, no. 2, 1986 (pp. 261–281), p. 279. See also Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 208–211; R. A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-century Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), esp. pp. 319–322. 69. On this see K. Hodgkin, ‘Reasoning with unreason: visions, witchcraft and madness in early modern England’, in Stuart Clark, ed., Languages of Witchcraft: narrative, ideology and meaning in early modern culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001). See also Carol Thomas Neely, who argues that changing accounts of mental disorder are bound up with the wish to distinguish between natural and supernatural causes, and that witchcraft is central in these debates; Distracted Subjects: madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 70. Sexual intercourse with devils or spirits might be regarded as the extreme form of this exchange, transgressing the human/non-human boundary in a very literal

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71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97.

98.

Notes to pp. 150–156 way; though very seldom invoked in English legal proceedings against witches, it was regarded by theologians as among the worst of sins. Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 134. For example, see Bunyan, Grace Abounding, pp. 29, 30. John Rogers, ‘Another testimony to the Truth or further Experience of John Rogers’, in Rogers, Ohel or Beth-Shemesh: a tabernacle for the sun (London, 1653),pp. 428–429. Seaver, Wallington’s World, p. 24. Seaver, Wallington’s World, p. 65. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 12r. Trosse, Life, p. 92. Trosse, Life, pp. 93, 99. Trosse, Life, p. 107. Trosse, Life, p. 108. Allen, Narrative, pp. 40, 43. Allen, Narrative, p. 54. Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: elements of Greek and tragic madness (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 125. Padel’s discussion of daemonic possession and madness in the ancient Greek context is fascinating, though in many ways quite different to early modern versions of possession. For a detailed account of Protestant and Catholic attitudes to possession in the early modern period, see David Walker, Unclean Spirits: possession and exorcism in France and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (London: Scolar Press, 1981). See also Neely, Distracted Subjects. Macdonald, ‘Women and Madness in Tudor and Stuart England’, p. 279. Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 156. Houston, Madness and Society, p. 321. As Walker points out, following a late-sixteenth-century exorcism scandal, the Church clamped down, and after 1604 a clergyman had to obtain permission from the bishop to conduct an exorcism; Walker, Unclean Spirits, p. 77. Nonetheless the idea of possession remains potent throughout the seventeenth century. Allen, Narrative, pp. 53–54. Allen, Narrative, p. 42. Michel de Certeau, tr. Michael B. Smith, The Possession at Loudun (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 100. John Hart [Hart On-Hi], Trodden Down Strength, by the God of Strength, or, Mrs Drake Revived (London, 1647), p. 40. Hart, Trodden Down Strength, p. 71. The subtitle similarly refers to her ‘great and many uncouth afflictions’. John Hart, The Firebrand taken out of the Fire, or, the Wonderfull History, Case, and Cure of Mrs Drake (London, 1654), preface, n. p. This later edition of Trodden Down Strength has a new title and preface, but the rest of the text is unchanged. Trosse, Life, p. 93. Trosse, Life, p. 93. The juxtaposition of the fly and the reference to Beelzebub recall an iconic moment in Spira’s narrative, when ‘divers flies that came about him, and some lighted on him: Behold (said hee) now also Belzebub comes to his banquet, you shal shortly see my end ’ Nathaniel Bacon, A Relation of the Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira, in the yeare 1548 (London, 1638), p. 99. The reference is to Beelzebub as Lord of the Flies. Trosse, Life, p. 100. (He is referring to the cause of visionary experiences among Catholics; earlier he makes the same point about Quakers.)


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99. Compare Padel on the Greek medical tradition, very similar to the early modern (not surprisingly): ‘Doctors in the Greek tradition thought of cause and treatment in terms of invasion and eviction. Disease got in. Doctors had to get it out.’ Whom Gods Destroy, p. 49. 100. On the multiple meanings of Antichrist, see Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); on Catholicism in particular, see Chapter 1, ‘Before 1640: the Roman Antichrist’. 101. Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, p. 94. 102. See Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: multiple personality and the sciences of memory (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1995), for a fascinating account of how some more recent disorders put the idea of the bounded self under pressure.

9

Family Histories: The Self and Others

1. This perspective on the early modern family in England is particularly associated with the important and influential work of Lawrence Stone; see The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977). See also Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (London: Collins, 1976); Philippe Aries, tr. Roger Baldick, Centuries of Childhood (London: Cape, 1962). 2. See for example, Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450–1700 (London: Longman, 1984); Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: modes of reproduction 1300–1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin: an essay in historical anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: parent-child relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 3. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-century England: household, kinship and patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 8–9. 4. See Margaret Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: literary evidence and the history of the family (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: gender and class in early modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500– 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 5. Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: seventeenth-century radical sectarian writing and feminist criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 44. 6. Dionys Fitzherbert, Bodleian Library MS. e Mus. 169, f. 3r. 7. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, 3r, quoting Ezekiel chapter 16 verse 3. The version quoted here is taken from the Geneva bible, the standard translation in the late sixteenth century, and the one normally used by Fitzherbert. See The Cambridge Geneva Bible of 1591: a facsimile reprint, introduced by David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 8. Ezekiel 16.49. 9. Ezekiel 16.45. The King James translation a few years later gives, ‘Thou art thy mother’s daughter, that lotheth her husband and her children; and thou art the sister of thy sisters, which lothed their husbands and their children ’ 10. On this see also Suzanne Trill, ‘Speaking to God in his Phrase and Word: women’s use of the psalms in early modern England’, in Stanley E. Porter, ed., The Nature of Religious Language (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).

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11. Thomas Adams, Mystical Bedlam, or the World of Mad-Men (London, 1615), pp. 6–7. Adams is concerned with the nature of original sin, and the inheritance by all mankind of Adam’s doom. 12. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 4r. 13. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 7v–8r. 14. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 22r. 15. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 8r. 16. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 8r. 17. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 8r. 18. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, ff. 11r, 9v. Michael Macdonald notes the frequency of this motif as a means of identifying mental illness: ‘To prove that a man was an idiot, one began by showing that he could not name his mother and father. To indicate that a lunatic was insensible, one might note that he did not know his family ’ Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 126. 19. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 10r. 20. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 11r. It is not clear what kind of indebtedness is in question, although the phrasing seems to suggest financial (‘somewhat’ would be odd in relation to other kinds of obligation). 21. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 10v. 22. Mary Rich records being visited by her two brothers when she was involved with a man her father disapproved of, and ‘threatened, in my father’s name, if I did not renounce ever having any thing more to do with him ’ T. C. Croker, ed., Autobiography of Mary Countess of Warwick (London: Percy Society Reprints, 1848), p. 11. 23. Elspeth Graham, ‘Women’s writing and the self’, in Helen Wilcox, ed., Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 223. 24. John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the literature of religious despair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 95; and see pp. 95–102 in general. 25. Paul Seaver, Wallington’s World: a Puritan artisan in seventeenth-century London (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 30. See also Tadmor, Family and Friends, pp. 157–158, for examples of the multiple significances of the word ‘father’. 26. On patriarchal theory and the politics of the early modern family, see Amussen, Ordered Society; Margaret R. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: attitudes to women in early modern society (London: Arnold, 1995). For petty treason, see Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: identity and difference in Renaissance drama (London: Methuen, 1985), especially chapter 5, ‘Alice Arden’s Crime’; Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, pp. 144–145. See also Graham’s reflections on the significance of burning in Fitzherbert’s imaginary world; ‘Women’s Writing and the Self’, pp. 223–224. 27. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 8v. 28. On the importance of gifts in Jacobean aristocratic culture, see Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance literature and the practice of social ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 29. Houlbrooke, English Family, p. 177. 30. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 13v. 31. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 14r. 32. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 14v. 33. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 14v. 34. John Rogers, ‘Another testimony to the Truth or further Experience of John Rogers’, in Rogers, Ohel or Beth-Shemesh: a tabernacle for the sun (London, 1653), pp. 425, 435.


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35. John Hart, Trodden Down Strength, by the God of Strength, or, Mrs Drake Revived (London, 1647), p. 133. 36. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 16r. 37. George Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr George Trosse, A. W. Brink, ed. (Montreal and London: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974), p. 47. 38. Trosse, Life, p. 47. 39. Trosse, Life, p. 48. 40. Trosse, Life, p. 49. 41. Trosse, Life, p. 49. 42. Trosse, Life, p. 56. 43. Trosse, Life, pp. 49, 56. 44. Trosse, Life, pp. 71, 78. 45. Trosse, Life, p. 78. In a variation on the equivalence of father and king, discussed above, the editor’s note to this suggests that Cromwell ‘was an easy target for irrational hostility, especially so if Trosse felt resentment towards his absent father’, pp. 78–79. 46. Trosse, Life, p. 113. 47. Trosse, Life, p. 119. The phrase he uses is in fact ‘I was satisfy’d, that by my Dissent ’; the double meaning here may be more than a matter of changing idiom. 48. Trosse, Life, p. 96. 49. Trosse, Life, p. 106. 50. Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs. Hannah Allen (London, 1683), p. 1. 51. Allen, Narrative, p. 25. 52. Allen, Narrative, p. 33. 53. Ramona Wray, Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century (Tavistock, Devon: Northcote House Publishers/British Council, 2004), pp. 95–96. Wray’s thoughtful discussion locates widowhood as central to Allen’s account, suggesting that ‘the text plots a course of behaviour which works against the Calvinistic insistence that to cultivate “solitariness” was the widow’s main daily duty and ideal defining virtue’, p. 96. 54. Jonathan Andrews, ‘Letting Madness Range: travel and mental disorder, c1700–1900’, in Richard Wrigley and George Revill, eds, Pathologies of Travel (Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi, 2000), p. 33. 55. Allen, Narrative, p. 25. The fact that not all of these uncles are alive may contribute to this characterisation. 56. Allen, Narrative, pp. 28, 34. 57. Allen, Narrative, p. 24. 58. Allen, Narrative, p. 32. As Graham comments, Allen has a habit of putting significant points in parenthesis; ‘Women’s Writing and the Self’, pp. 218–219. 59. Allen, Narrative, p. 59. 60. Allen, Narrative, p. 47. 61. Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’ (1909), in Pelican Freud Library vol. 7, On Sexuality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

10

Love and Desire: Disordered Passions

1. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (orig. London, 1621; Thomas Faulkner, Nicolas Kiessling and Rhonda Blair, eds, 6 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), vol. III, p. 2.

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2. Burton, Anatomy, vol. III, p. 199. 3. Burton, Anatomy, vol. III, p. 162. 4. See, for example, Social Research 53.2, 1986, special issue on madness and sexuality – ‘two apparently quite disconnected aspects of human behaviour’, comments Arien Mack, the issue editor, which ‘have been and continue to be intimately connected’ (editor’s note). There is also a gendered dimension to this link: Duncan Salkeld in his discussion of Bedlam scenes in Jacobean drama notes ‘their preoccupation with women’s sexuality as an issue connected with madness’; Madness and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 118. 5. René Major, ‘Crises de raison, crises de folie, ou “la folie” de Foucault’, in Elisabeth Roudinesco, ed., Penser la folie: essais sur Michel Foucault (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1992), pp. 130–131. Major’s point here is about Foucault’s separation of madness and sexuality, despite their many common aspects. By contrast, he suggests, ‘What psychoanalysis uncovers is not the endless chatter of reason on the subject of sexuality, but its intimate link with the secret murmurings of unreason’, p. 132 (my translation). 6. For lovesickness as an aspect of melancholy in Elizabethan England, see Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: a study of melancholia in English literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951); Lisa Dawson, Sweet Poison: the representation of lovesickness in early modern English literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), chapter 4, ‘Destabilizing Lovesickness, Gender and Sexuality’. See also Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, translated and edited by Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990) (translation of Traité de l’essence et guérison de l’amour, 1610; also translated as, Erotomania; or, A treatise discoursing of the essence, causes, symptomes, prognosticks, and cure of love, or erotique melancholy, tr. Edmund Chilmead, Oxford 1640); Nicholas Breton, Melancholike humours, in verse of diverse natures (London, 1600). On the medieval tradition, see Mary F. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The ‘Viaticum’ and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); and cf. Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: elements of Greek and tragic madness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 104. 7. Helen Small, Love’s Madness: medicine, the novel, and female insanity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 7, 6. See also Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: feminism, psychoanalysis, and the symbolics of loss in Renaissance literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 8. See Small, Love’s Madness, Chapter 1; Elaine Showalter, ‘Representing Ophelia: women, madness and the responsibilities of feminist criticism’, in Geoffrey Hartman and Patricia Parker, eds, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London: Routledge, 1993); and for a later context, Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: women, madness and English culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago Press, 1987). 9. Burton, Anatomy, vol. III, p. 163. 10. Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: women, touch and power in seventeenth-century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 87, 101–102. 11. Andrew Boord, The Breviary of Helthe (London, 1547; English Experience no. 362, Amsterdam/New York: Da Capo Press, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd, 1971), f. 19v. 12. See, for example, John Bunyan, whose chief vices were swearing, bell-ringing and Sabbath games, and who describes himself as given to ‘all manner of vice and ungodliness’, John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, W. R. Owens,


13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

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ed. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987), p. 8. Sins acknowledged by men in John Rogers’s Dublin congregation include being ‘given to drinking’ (William Walker, p. 412/416); ‘that vile lust of Drunkennesse’ (John Chamberlain, p. 412/419); being ‘a childe of wrath’ (John Hewson, p. 395); ‘swearing, and drinking, &c’ (Adrian Strong, p. 412/419); John Rogers, Ohel or Beth-Shemesh: A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, 1653). John Crook’s chief vices were apparently ‘idle Talk, and vain Company’, ‘minding Pride too much in my Apparel’, ‘wearing long Hair’, and ‘spending my Money in vain, which I thought might have been better employed, if I had bought some good Books, or been charitable to the Poor’; A short History of the Life of John Crook (London, 1706), pp. 9–10. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I: The Will to Knowledge, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978/Vintage Books edn, 1980). He gives a characteristically brilliant and contentious account of the process by which speaking about sex comes to be identified with telling the deepest truths of the self: ‘we demand that sex speak the truth and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness’, p. 69. Dionys Fitzherbert, Bodleian Library, MS. e Mus. 169, f. x. (The epistle ‘To the glorious and renowned church of England our dear mother’ exists in two copies, one draft and one fair, both on loose sheets of paper inserted into the book, numbered ff. viii–ix (fair copy) and ff. x–xiii (draft). Quotations here are taken from the draft copy.) See Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 38–52, on English Protestant attitudes to women and the family. See also Marie Rowlands, ‘Recusant Women 1560–1640’, in Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London: Methuen, 1985), for Catholic women, celibacy and marriage in the same period. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, ff. x–xi, xiii. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 8r. On the role of gentry parents in arranging marriages for their children, see Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450–1700 (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1984), pp. 68–78; Margaret Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: literary evidence and the history of the family (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 17–34. For seventeenth-century women preferring to live single, see Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 168–174. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 8v. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 14v. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 25v. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 29v. In fact since the fair copy of the manuscript removes such phrases as ‘my dear’ in copying this letter, it may be that others felt Fitzherbert overestimates her distance from such misunderstandings. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 10r. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 17r. For the shifting meanings of lewd, see Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. lewd, a., esp. 1, 2, 5, 7; the word moves from meaning ‘lay’ through ‘unlettered’ and into a wider sense of ignorant, vulgar and bad, eventually acquiring specifically sexual misconduct as its primary sense somewhere in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 16v. On the attractiveness of the idea of the nunnery to early modern Protestant women, see Bridget Hill, ‘A Refuge from Men: the idea of the Protestant nunnery’, Past and Present 117, 1987, pp. 107–130.

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26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

Notes to pp. 182–186 For a masculine version, compare also Richard Carpenter’s account of how he converted to Catholicism and then back again; a powerful attraction, he explains, was ‘the imagination of an excellent Sanctity, and a spotless Recollection of life, in their Orders of Religion’; Richard Carpenter, Experience, Historie and Divinitie. Divided into five Books (London, 1642), p. 26. Crawford, Women and Religion, p. 46. Fitzherbert, MS. e Mus. 169, f. 8v. On her subsequent relation to her family and the various Fitzherbert wills, see K. Hodgkin, Women, Madness and Sin: the autobiographical writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Ashgate, forthcoming 2008). Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs Hannah Allen (London, 1683), p. 7. Allen, Narrative, p. 71. As Allan Ingram comments, what we have of her autobiography is ‘a very brief span of her life, the time in fact when she was Hannah Allen. Of Hannah Archer we know very little, and of Hannah Hatt only that she is secure in God and that she has written a pamphlet under her former name ’; Allan Ingram, ed., Voices of Madness: four pamphlets, 1683–1796 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1997), ‘Introduction’, p. xv. See also Elspeth Graham’s reading of this narrative in relation to ‘inner versus outer incongruences’, in her essay ‘Authority, Resistance and Loss: gendered difference in the writings of John Bunyan and Hannah Allen’, in Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens and Stuart Sim, eds, John Bunyan and his England, 1628–1688 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990), p. 123. For example, Anna Trapnel in visionary ecstasy: ‘my outward man at this sight was stricken very weak, and all in a sweat, but I received much joy ’; A Legacy for Saints; being several Experiences of the dealings of God with Anna Trapnel (London, 1654), p. 14. Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88 (London: Virago Press, 1988), p. 74. Allen, Narrative, p. 40. See the editorial note to the citation, Ingram, Voices of Madness, p. 139; Ramona Wray, Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century (Tavistock, Devon: Northcote House Publishers, 2004), p. 93. ‘In loving thou dost well; in passion not’, as Raphael sternly reminds Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost, responding to his confession of adoration of Eve; ‘carnal pleasure’ is shared by the beasts, but married love should be rational and (in the case of the husband) authoritative. John Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII. ll. 588, 193. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, as originally published by John Bunyan; being a facsimile reproduction of the first edition [1678] (London: Elliot Stock, n.d.), p. 3. British Library Add. MSS 5858, Athenae Cantabrigienses, vol. III, William Cole, ‘Oliver Cromwell’s Cousin’s Diary’. The writer is identified only as a relative of Cromwell’s, in an eighteenth-century copy of the original. Vavasor Powell, Spiritual Experiences, of Sundry Beleevers (London, 1652), p. 34. Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenthcentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 77–78, 103–104, 159–160. See discussion of women and melancholy, Chapter 4. George Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse, A. W. Brink, ed. (Montreal and London: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974), p. 63. Trosse, Life, p. 81. John Bunyan similarly credits God with having preserved him against the temptation to fornication: through ‘a miracle of precious grace’ he was kept from those sins which might have both damned him eternally and laid


43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

11

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him open to legal penalties. He also notes that the Ranter doctrine of perfection was tempting ‘to my flesh, I being a young man and my nature in its prime’, but he resisted; Grace Abounding, pp. 8, 16. The musician Thomas Whythorne a century earlier claimed that whatever sexual freedoms he might have indulged in, they stopped short of ‘the conjunction copulative’: ‘neither my hand, nor any other part of mine, did once touch the part of hers where the conjunction is made’; James Osborne, ed., The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne: modern spelling edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 33. Evidently Bill Clinton was not without precursors in his uncertainty about the boundaries that define the sexual act. Trosse, Life, p. 62. On the history of masturbation as a sin, see Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: a cultural history of masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003). Trosse, Life, pp. 62, 63. Trosse, Life, p. 59. Trosse, Life, pp. 58, 59. Trosse, Life, p. 63. Trosse, Life, p. 81. Trosse, Life, p. 81. On the inclusive uses of terms for immediate kin to cover in-laws, step-family and so on, see Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-century England: household, kinship and patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 145. Tadmor, Family and Friends, p, 145. Whythorne, Autobiography; see also K. Hodgkin, ‘Thomas Whythorne and the Problems of Mastery’, History Workshop Journal 29, 1990, pp. 20–41; Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994). See also Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: male friendship and fictions of women in sixteenth-century England (London: Routledge, 1994), on humanism and shifting ideas of masculinity. See Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: ecstatic prophecy in seventeenth-century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). Alice Hayes, A Legacy, or Widows’ Mite (London, 1723); Agnes Beaumont, The Narrative of the Persecutions of Agnes Beaumont, in John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco and John Bunyan, eds, Grace Abounding, with other spiritual autobiographies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). On marital and family tensions around women’s piety, see Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: seventeenth-century radical sectarian writing and feminist criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 49–50, 72–79; Crawford, Women and Religion, pp. 95–97, 147–152. Hayes, A Legacy, pp. 48, 55–57. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I. Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Foucault for Historians’, History Workshop Journal 14, autumn 1982, pp. 106–109.


1. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (orig. London, 1621; Thomas Faulkner, Nicolas Kiessling and Rhonda Blair, eds, vol. I, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 66. 2. Burton, Anatomy, p. 397. For wandering madness in general, see Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenth-century

240

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

Notes to pp. 192–193 England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 140–141; Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: elements of Greek and tragic madness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 99–129. The discussion of wandering and madness in the following pages is an abbreviated version of a longer article: K. Hodgkin, ‘The Labyrinth and the Pit’, History Workshop Journal 51, 2001, pp. 37–63. Thomas Adams, Mystical Bedlam, or, the World of Mad-men (London, 1615), p. 46. Frenzy, technically speaking, was a type of madness (see, for instance, Philip Barrough, The Method of Phisick, London, 1610, 4th edition, p. 21). The elided part of the passage continues: ‘an opinion without ground, a going without a path, a purpose to do it knows not what, a getting and losing, bending and breaking, building up and pulling downe: conceyving a multitude of thoughts, with much anxiety, and with a sudden neglect scattering them here, wildenes is madnes; an indefatigable frenzy; an erring starre reserved for the blacke darkenesse ’ Jack Lindsay, ed., Loving Mad Tom: Bedlamite verses of the XVI and XVII Centuries, illustr. Norman Lindsay, foreword Robert Graves, musical transcriptions Peter Warlock (London: Fanfrolico Press, 1927), pp. 25, 23. Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: reflections on the reality of transient mental illness (London: Free Association Books, 1999), p. 51. Padel, Whom Gods Destroy, p. 105. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason, tr. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock Publications, 1987), p. 9. For a brief bibliography of publications relating to Foucault on madness, see references in introductory chapter. It is interesting that perhaps the most hotly disputed crux sentence, whose accurate translation is argued over in several articles in the collection edited by Arthur Still and Irving Velody (Rewriting the History of Madness, London: Routledge, 1992), is concerned precisely with the life of the wandering insane: ‘Les fous alors menaient une existence facilement errante’, translated by Richard Howard as ‘Madmen then led an easy wandering existence’, and variously criticised and queried; Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 8. Philip Barrough, The Method of Phisick, containing the causes, signes and cures of inward diseases in mans body, from the head to the foote (orig. London, 1583; 4th edition, 1610), p. 22. Adams, Mystical Bedlam, p. 21. For a related discussion, see George MacLennan’s account of the persistence of this metaphor from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, in writers including Tasso, Holderlin, Clare and Nerval: ‘Psychological instability is, it would seem, externalised through spatial movement. Conversely, it is when these writers are immobilised and held in one place that an inner confrontation with subjective crisis becomes unavoidable. For the later writers, the pattern of movement away from or towards a place of asylum seems to involve the problem of what constitutes home ’ George MacLennan, Lucid Interval: subjective writing and madness in history (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), p. 36. See also Jonathan Andrews, ‘Letting Madness Range: travel and mental disorder, c1700–1900’, in Richard Wrigley and George Revill, eds, Pathologies of Travel (Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi, 2000), pp. 25–88. He is concerned with travel as treatment, and the therapeutic aspects of the journey, rather than with the imaginative dynamics of mad travel, but he also notes that the mentally disturbed might ‘strenuously resist journeys’, or ‘might be impelled to travel by a desire to escape from their own demons and the constraints they were under’, p. 33. Hannah Allen is one of the cases he discusses.


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12. For a discussion of the figure of the labyrinth in relation to knowledge and truth, see John M. Steadman, The Hill and the Labyrinth: discourse and certitude in Milton and his near contemporaries (California: University of California Press, 1984). For the closely related figure of the dark wood, see Eugenio Donato, ‘ “Per Selve e Boscherecci Labirinti”: desire and narrative structure in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso’, in Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds, Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 13. Dionys Fitzherbert, Bodleian Library MS. e Mus. 169, ff. 6r, 8r. 14. Dionys Fitzherbert, Lambeth Palace Library MS Sion arc: L40.2/E47, f. 7r. 15. Alexander Cruden, The London Citizen Exceedingly Injur’d (London, 1739); reprinted in Allan Ingram, Voices of Madness: four pamphlets, 1683–1796 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1997). Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber, 2001, orig. 1963). For discussion of autobiographical accounts of madness in the last 300 years, see Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: stories of the insane (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987); Dale Peterson, ed., A Mad People’s History of Madness (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982); George MacLennan, Lucid Interval. 16. See Porter, Social History of Madness, especially Chapter 10 ‘The American Dream’. 17. Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture (Ithaca: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 180. 18. Jacques Derrida, ‘Etre juste avec Freud’, in Elisabeth Roudinesco, ed., Penser la folie: essais sur Michel Foucault (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1992), p. 152. ‘That which is excluded’, he comments, ‘is evidently never simply excluded, neither by the Cogito nor by anything else, without coming back: this is what a certain psychoanalysis has enabled us to understand’, p. 161 (my translations).

Bibliography Manuscript sources Bodleian Library: MS e Mus. 169 MS Bodley 154

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Index

Adams, Thomas on corruption, 163 on hypocrisy, 23, 121 on spiritual madness, 43, 93–4, 192, 193 on women, 129 Alexander, Sally, 15 Allen, Hannah and autobiographical narrative, 4, 12, 16–17, 20, 27, 29, 35, 37, 114, 184, 185–6 and clothing, 130 conviction of sinfulness, 30–1, 58, 109 death: her father’s, 173; her husband’s, 173; her own, 51–2, 138–9; as punishment, 141, 143 family: father, 173, 175; involved in care, 104–5, 159, 173–5; mother, 104, 173–4 and fasting, 124, 126–7 and journeys, 194 and language, 57–8, 59 and learning, 49, 175 and madness: confusion, 48, 51; disturbed perceptions, 51–2; recovery, 59, 117, 194; religious explanations, 29, 100; symptoms, 97 and melancholy, 17, 29, 61, 70; bodily disorder, 74–5, 78–9, 98; gender and, 85, 184; spiritual disorder, 60, 100, 114, 183 on Mr Baxter, 78–9, 98, 106 and Presbyterianism, 16, 98 and religion, as cure, 103, 114, 115; bible, 51, 163; and madness, 29, 100; religious despair, 17 and the self, 176, 183; and gender, 189; separate from melancholy, 74–5 and sexuality, 85, 179–80, 183–6 on Spira, 64 and suicide, 126–7, 138, 145–6, 175

treatments, 102, 104–5, 106–7; conversation, 103, 109; with ministers, 106–7 Andrews, Jonathan, 11, 174 Antichrist, 150, 157 Archer (family), 173, 175 asylums Bedlam, 12, 81, 88, 89, 94, 151, 177 in early modern period, 12, 102, 104, 194, 196 Glastonbury, 17, 57, 105, 125, 141, 172–3 as repressive institutions, 10, 195 see also Foucault, Michel; madness, treatments autobiographical writing, chapter 2 passim development of, 12, 15, 16–17, 19–23; diaries, 22, 23 and madness, 2, 9, 20–1; in later periods, 195 and memory, 20 and the self, 26 autobiography, spiritual and the bible, 51 conversion narratives, 17, 20, 27–8 the devil in, 150, 151 family in, 25, 39, 159, 161, 170, 173 gender identity in, 189 as genre, 4–5, 16–17, 18, 19–20, 22–7, 29, 37–9 and madness, 5–6, 12, 20–2, 26–31, 37–9, 48, 93, 100, 141, 195 and memory, 20, 28, 32, 34–7 ministers in, 106 sexuality in, 179–80, 189 suffering in, 26–7, 29, 37–8, 72–4, 141 see also Allen, Hannah; Fitzherbert, Dionys; Trosse, George Avery, Elizabeth, 92, 94 Babb, Lawrence, 63 Baptists, 24 Barrough, Philip, 148, 193

258

Index Baxter, Richard on melancholy, 61, 76–9, 142; of Hannah Allen, 98, 106; reading as cure for, 111; in women, 84–5 on vileness of self, 144–5 Beard, Thomas, 44, 64 Beaumont, Agnes, 94, 189 bible in early modern religious culture, 51, 58, 162, 163, 168 references in autobiographies: Dionys Fitzherbert, 139, 142, 161–4, 169, 180, 185; George Trosse, 53; Hannah Allen, 184–5 as treatment for madness/ melancholy, 12, 111 Blackmore, Richard, 77, 79 Blaugdone, Barbara, 37, 93, 123 body, chapter 7 passim in autobiographies: Dionys Fitzherbert, 121–4, 133–4, 139–42; George Trosse, 124–5, 141, 142, 188; Hannah Allen, 126–7, 138–9, 183–4 boundaries of, 118–20, 121–2, 133–4, 135, 137, 157–8 dead, 135–6, 137, 138–41; women and, 136 in early modern culture, 118–20, 134, 158 madness and, 120, 134, 143, 178 naked, 132–3 punishment of, 141–3 self and, 157–8 sexual, 133, 178 women’s bodies, 82, 83, 118–19, 128–9 see also clothing; death; food, in early modern culture; sexuality Boord, Andrew, 21, 42–3, 179 Brathwait, Richard, 128–9 Bright, Timothy, 45, 61 on religious melancholy, 65, 66, 67–8, 69 Bunyan, John and the devil, 91, 151 Grace Abounding (autobiography), 23–4, 25, 59, 91, 136 and madness, 99, 100, 151 Pilgrim’s Progress, 185

259

Burghley, Lord Robert, 8 Burton, Robert melancholy: causes of, 43, 44, 62; love, 177, 178; religious, 65, 66, 86–7, 97; of scholars, 49, 110–11; wandering, 192; women’s, 83, 84 Calamy, Richard, 98 Calvin, Jean, 64 Calvinism, 7, 116, 136 Carpenter, Richard, 144 Carter, Dr and Mrs, 105–6, 132, 140, 151–2, 164, 168 Casaubon, Meric, 95, 96 Catholicism in autobiographies: Fitzherbert and, 55, 123, 139, 147, 150, 157, 164, 180; George Trosse and, 53 and celibacy, 180 and death, 135, 136–7 fasting, 123 possession, 153; Loudun, 155 and the self, 91 Certeau, Michel de, 155 Chambers, Elizabeth, 73 Chaytor, Miranda, 133 childhood in early modern family, 159 in spiritual autobiography, 25, 173; in George Trosse, 170; in Hannah Allen, 173 Church of England, 87, 98 Clark, Stuart, 13 clothing, 127–33 in autobiographies: Dionys Fitzherbert and, 131–3; George Trosse and, 130–1 and madness, 130 men and, 129–30 religious significance of, 128–30 women and, 127, 128–9 confinement, see asylums; madness, treatments Coppe, Abiezer, 94 Crawford, Patricia, 182 Crook, John, 73, 91 Cruden, Alexander, 195 Davies, Lady Eleanor, 88–9 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 13, 81, 118

260

Index

death, 135–43, 146 in early modern culture, 135–8 and madness: confusion about, 138–41; fear of, 138–9, 141–3 religious attitudes to, 135–7; Catholic, 135, 136–7; Protestant, 135, 136–7 see also body; suicide Derrida, Jacques, 21, 196–7 Descartes, René, 41 desire, see love; lovesickness; sexuality devil/ devils, 148–53 and eating/ drinking, 124–6 and melancholy or madness, 56, 70, 71, 72, 74, 78, 108, 109–10, 112, 114, 150, 151 as non-human, 137–8, 143 and possession, 78, 153–8 in spiritual autobiography, 51–3, 150–1 tempting to sin, 59, 91, 157; to suicide, 92, 144, 145, 148, 150 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness, 7 diaries, see autobiographical writing distraction, see madness doctors, 40, 102–3, 104–6, 173 see also Carter, Dr and Mrs Donne, John, 24, 136, 137 Douglas, Mary, 119 Drake, Joan [Mrs] and the devil, 71, 72, 111–12 father’s house, 168–9 melancholy of, 70–2, 74, 75, 84, 111, 113 and possession, 155–6 dreams of Francis Spira, 64 of John Rogers, 168 in radical religious groups, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93 see also visions drunkenness, 44, 56, 125, 179, 188 Elias, Norbert, 118 enlightenment madness and, 10–11, 41 Wharton and, 3 enthusiasm, 87, 90, 92–5, 99 and madness, 8, 13–14, 87, 89, 94–7 and political dissent, 8, 88, 95–7

see also religious culture, early modern; sectarian churches Erasmus, Desiderio, 1 Evans, Arise, 99 family, chapter 9 passim early modern, 15, 135, 159–61, 176; hierarchy in, 165–7; historiography, 159–60 and madness, 71, 159, 161, 174, 175; involved in care of mad, 102–5 and sexuality, 187–8 in spiritual autobiography, 38–9, 159, 170, 173; Allen, 173–5; Fitzherbert, 161–70; Trosse, 170–3 fancy, see imagination fasting, see food, in early modern culture Faustus, Dr, 136 Fifth Monarchists, 13, 33, 73 language, 37 and madness, 90 and the self, 91 Fitzherbert, Dionys and autobiographical narrative, 4, 16, 17, 20, 28; authority of experience in, 37, 68–70; manuscript, 16, 28 and the body, 121–4, 183; dead bodies, 136, 140 and clothing, 130, 131–3 death: fear of burning, 165, 166; her own, 139–40; as punishment, 141–3 and the devil, 67, 70, 104–5, 150, 151–2; possession, 156–7 family, 131–2, 139, 159, 161–70, 174, 176, 182–3; brothers, 109, 131, 164–5, 168, 169, 187; father, 113, 166–9, 181, 182, 183; mother, 104, 109, 113–14, 115, 169; sisters, 109, 113, 140, 165, 169 and food, 123–4 and journeys, 193–5 and the labyrinth, 194–5 and language, 55, 56, 58 and learning, 29, 49, 162 and madness: as defect of reason, 48–9; definitions of, 16, 97, 100; delusions, 30, 121–2; distraction, 55; disturbed perceptions, 50–1, 112–13; as punishment, 16; rejection of diagnosis, 16, 183

Index and melancholy, and affliction of conscience, 66–70, 72, 74, 75, 77; gender and, 85, 183; symptoms, 67–8 and memory, 32, 35–6 and religion, 103; atheism, 142; blasphemy, 31, 139, 166; Catholicism, 55, 139, 146, 147, 150, 157, 164, 180, 181; conversion, 163–4; spiritual cure, 113–14, 115; use of bible, 161–3 and the self, 115, 116–17, 139–40, 142–3, 156–7, 183; and gender, 188; and hypocrisy, 116–17, 121 and sexuality, 179, 180, 183, 186; friendships: with men, 181–2; virginity, 180–1, 182 and suicide, 146–8 and treason, 110, 139, 142, 166, 167 treatments, 102, 105–6; conversation, 109, 110; and doctors, 105–6, 107, 110; and ministers, 110, 116–17; reading, 110–11 food, in early modern culture, 119, 121–7 in autobiography: Allen and, 126–7; Fitzherbert and, 121–2; Trosse and, 124 devil and, 124–5 fasting, 90, 123–5, 126 and madness, 123–6 spiritual significance of, 123–4, 126 women and, 126 Foucault, Michel and history of madness, 9–11, 21, 44, 102, 112, 177, 193, 196 and history of sexuality, 177, 189–90 Fox, George, 94, 98 Frame, Janet, 20 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 119, 160, 175, 196 Galen, 62 Gay, Peter, 14 gender and the body, 118–19 and clothing, 127–30, 133 and the family, 160, 165 and food, 126

261

and learning, 49, 162 and madness, 81–2; and melancholy, 82–5, 178, 184–5 and religion, 182, 189 and self, 188–9, 190 and sexuality, 133 and unreason, 179 see also family; lovesickness; sexuality Glover, Mary, 149 Gollop, Mrs, 107–8, 109, 172 Gotherson, Dorothea, 19, 128 Gowing, Laura, 118, 179 Graham, Elspeth, 26, 107, 166 Greenblatt, Stephen, 15 Greville, Fulke, 144 Hacket, William (Frantick Hacket), 8, 96 Hackett, Helen, 83 Hacking, Ian, 193 Hamlet, 130, 178 Hare, Edward, 99 Hart, John (Hart On-hi), 71–2 Hawes, Clement, 37, 92 Hawkins, Jane, 88 Hayes, Alice, 24, 189 Hill, Christopher, 99 Hinds, Hilary, 160 Hobby, Elaine, 184 Holland, Catherine, 33 Houlbrooke, Ralph, 167 Houston, R. A., 11, 12, 13, 154 humoural theory, 42–3, 47, 60–1, 119–20 and love melancholy, 177 and madness, 12, 42–3 and religious melancholy, 79; Mrs Drake’s case, 71–2 and women, 82, 83 hypocrisy, 23, 56, 116–17, 121 women and, 121 imagination in autobiographers, 50–4 madness/ melancholy as disturbance of, 45–6, 50–4, 62, 63, 77, 78, 79, 80, 86, 96 as one of inward wits, 43, 44, 122 incest, 187–8 individualism, see self, early modern; subjectivity

262

Index

Ingram, Allan language and madness, 11, 27–8, 38, 54, 99 insanity, see madness; melancholy Jones, Ann Rosalind, 127 Kempe, Margery, 20, 99 labyrinths, 194–6 language blasphemy, 28, 30–1, 55, 59, 139, 143, 166 conversation as cure, 103, 108–13, 120 and madness, 21, 27–8, 30–1, 38, 54–9, 93, 108 religious community of, 58–9, 115 rhetoric of enthusiasm, 37, 92–3 Laud, Archbishop, 88 learning, 49–50 autobiographers: Allen, 49, 175; Fitzherbert, 29, 49, 162; Trosse, 79–80 books as cure, 110–11 and melancholy, 49, 63, 110–11 women and, 49, 162 see also melancholy, of scholars life-writing, see autobiography, spiritual Lister, Dr, 105 Locke, John, 41, 46–7 love as a form of madness, 177–8 human in tension with divine, 185 see also lovesickness; melancholy lovesickness, 177–8, 179 and gender, 81, 178, 184–6 Macdonald, Michael on the devil, 150; possession, 153–4 on enthusiasm, 8, 95–6 on the history of madness, 10, 11, 103 on melancholy: and class, 63; religious, 66, 99 on suicide, 143 on symptoms of madness: delusions, 53–4; disordered clothing, 130; language, 54 witchcraft, 149 Mack, Phyllis, 24 MacLennan, George, 38, 99, 114 Mad Maudlin, 149, 178

madness and autobiographical writing, 20–2, 26–30, 38–9 and the body, 120; death, 137–8; nakedness, 132–3; restraint of body, 143 causes: devils, 78, 150–3; early modern explanations of, 40–1, 42–7, 113; God’s punishment for sin, 16, 17, 43–4, 108, 141; love, 177–8; possession, 7, 78, 153–8; supernatural causes, 12, 40, 43–4, 149–50; witchcraft, 7, 149 classifications of, chapter 3 passim, 40, 41, 42–3, 80, chapter 11 passim; confusion, 48–9; delusion, 29–30, 34–5, 111–13; distraction, 55–6, 59; mania, 42, 80 and family relationships, 71, 160–1; incest, 187–8; not recognising kin as sign of madness, 164 and gender, 81–5; greensickness, 81; hysteria, 81 history of: in the eighteenth century, 11–13, 102–3; and the enlightenment, 10–11, 41; historiography, 6, 9–15, 99–101 and language, 37, 38; blasphemous speech, 30–1, 55, 59; disordered speech, 30, 54–9, 93; silencing of madness, 10–11, 21 literary approaches to, 11–12, 43 and memory, 34–7 and politics, 8, 88, 95–7 problems of definition, 1, 3–4, 5–9, 89, 93–4, 97–101, 190–1, 196–7 and religion, 4, 5, 7–8, 12–14, 37–8, 87–95, 97–101, 103–4, 108–13; secularisation of, 12–13; spiritual madness (Adams), 43, 93–4 and the self, 116–17, 196 and sexuality, 82–4, 177–8, 187–8, 190–1 symptoms of: belief in criminality, 30; blasphemy, 30–1; disordered dress, 130–1; disordered eating and drinking, 123–5; disordered perceptions, 50–4; disordered speech, 54–9; lack of reason, 48–9; meaningless language, 30;

Index mistakes about the body, 120; suicide attempts, 144; wandering, 192–7 treatments, 40, chapter 6 passim; binding, 28–9, 108; confinement, 10, 12, 193, 197; conversation, 104, 108–13, 116, 120; domestic care, 103, 108; orderly habits, 104, 113–15; persuasion, 111–12; reading, 110–11; spiritual treatments, 104, 106–7, 112–13, 116; women’s role in, 107–8; see also medical, treatments see also Foucault, Michel; lovesickness; melancholy Major, René, 177 Marshall, Peter, 137 Mascuch, Michael, 22, 23 medical theory, 12, 40, 42–3, 60–1, 119–20 treatments: for madness, 40, 42, 102–3, 104–6, 193; for melancholy, 68–9, 116 views of madness, 40, 100, 195–6; of melancholy, 42, 62–3, 76–7, 78 melancholy, chapter 4 passim autobiographers and: Dionys Fitzherbert, 66–70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77; George Trosse, 79–80; Hannah Allen, 17, 29, 60–1, 74–5, 184–6 and class, 63 and gender, 81–5, 178, 184–5 in later seventeenth century, 75–81 literary approaches to, 11–12 medical views, 8, 42, 62–3, 76–7, 78; as disturbance of imagination, 50, 53–4, 62–3, 77–8 philosophical views, 62–3; and women, 82–3 and religion, 63–81 passim, 86–7, 99; and afflicted conscience, 8, 63–6, 72–3; discussed by Fitzherbert, 66–70; and enthusiasm, 95–7 of scholars, 49, 63, 110–11 symptoms of, 62, 63, 80; discussed by Fitzherbert, 68–9 transience of, 195 see also Bright, Timothy; Burton, Robert; lovesickness; madness

263

memory and autobiographical writing, 20–1, 32–8 of the dead, 136, 137 and madness, 34–6, 45 one of inward wits, 43, 45 rehearsed memory, 32–3, 36 mental disorder, see madness; melancholy Midelfort, H. C. Erik, 61 Mills, Humphry, 73 Milton, John, 129, 145, 156 mind, chapter 3 passim early modern theories of, 41–3, 60–1, 78 inward wits, 43; memory, 43, 45 passions, 43, 44, 46, 80; gender and, 81–2 see also humoural theory; imagination; memory; reason ministers, 98, 106–7, 110, 116, 176, 184, 186 More, Henry, 72, 95–6 Morrissey, Mary, 69 Murphy, Terence, 143 Napier, Richard, 11, 55, 153, 185 Nayler, James, 94 Neely, Carol Thomas on history of madness, 12, 43, 195–6 on religion and melancholy, 66 on women and melancholy, 83 Ophelia, 130 Padel, Ruth, 116, 193 passions, see mind patriarchy, 166–7; petty treason, 167 Penington, Mary, 73 perceptions, see imagination Perkins, William, 64–5, 75 Plath, Sylvia, 195 Plumpton, Dorothy, 167 Porter, Roy, 3, 4, 11 possession, 7, 78, 150, 153–8 exorcism, 153 Loudun, 155 Powell, Vavasor, 185 Presbyterians, 16, 97–8

264

Index

Protestantism and celibacy, 180 and death, 135, 136–7, 141 and the devil, 149; possession, 153 and fasting, 123 as rational, 13 and the self, 14–15, 23–5, 37–8, 113, 114, 115, 116–17, 141, 143–5, 157–8, 162 see also religion; religious culture, early modern; sectarian churches providence, 43, 91, 136 psychoanalysis and the body, 119 and the family, 161, 175 and history, 13–14 Quakers, 13, 19, 33, 123 language, 37, 94 and madness, 53, 73, 90, 93, 94, 95 and the and self, 24, 91, 189 Quarles, Francis, 24 reason and madness, 3–4, 21, 41, 43–7, 48–50, 62, 78, 111–13 one of inward wits, 43 Reformation, 11, 13, 118, 137 religion and madness, 5, 7–8, 12–14, 18, 37–8, 43–4, 95–101, 108–13, 190–1 and melancholy, 63–70, 72–6, 78–9, 86–7, 179, 185–6 and politics, 8 and sexuality, 179, 180–2, 186, 189 religious culture, early modern affliction of conscience, 5, 7–8, 16; discussed by Fitzherbert, 66–70; and melancholy, 63–6, 72–5 authority of experience in, 37–8 collective worship, 58–9 death in, 136–7 and devotional writing, 5, 15, 23–5, 37–8, 63–6, 110–11 and fasting, 123–6 memory training in, 33 as rational, 13, 114–15 and self-abandonment, 18, 91 significance of clothing, 128–30 and spiritual conversation, 108–13

see also bible; devil/ devils; enthusiasm; Protestantism; sectarian churches; sin Reynoldes, Edward, 44, 46 Rich, Lady Mary, 128 Rogers, John, 19, 37, 73, 98 and dreams, 168 and hallucinations, 90, 97, 151 on memory training, 33 Rogers, Timothy, 75–8, 111, 113 Roper, Lyndal, 14, 188 sanity in relation to madness, 2, 6, 9, 18, 27, 38, 55, 117, 157, 190–1, 197 Satan, see devil/ devils Schiesari, Juliana, 82–3 Scull, Andrew, 11 Seaver, Paul, 166 sectarian churches, chapter 5 passim fasting among, 90, 123 and gender identity, 189 hostility to, 87–8, 89, 94–7 language, 92–3, 94 madness, 8–9, 13, 87–8, 97–9 melancholy, 73–4, 95–7 politics of, 88, 89 spiritual autobiography, 19–20, 87 visions, 53, 87, 90–4 see also enthusiasm; Fifth Monarchists; Quakers; religious culture, early modern self, early modern, 5–6, 11, 14–15, 22–6 and body, 133–4, 157–8, 190; clothing, 128, 133; death, 135, 137–8 and gender, 188–9 and madness, 5–6, 18, 20–1, 114, 116–17, 190–1, 196–7 in relation to others, 38–9, 159, 175–6 and religion: the devil, 150–3; possession, 154–7; spiritual dissolution, 18, 24, 26, 91 and sexuality, 190 sinfulness of, 23–4, 29, 141, 143–5, 146, 157 and spiritual autobiography, 5, 20–1, 22–6, 27, 38–9 and suicide, 143–5 Sena, John, 96

Index sexuality, 133, chapter 10 passim and the body, 133–4, 178, 188 in early modern autobiography, 179–80 and historiography, 189–90 incest, 187–8 and madness/ melancholy, 82–3, 177–80, 185, 187 men’s, 133, 178, 179, 188 and religion, 189–90 and sin, 178, 185, 186, 190 women’s, 82–5, 118, 133, 178, 179, 185–6, 187 Shepherd, Michael, 99 Shorthose, John and Mrs, 104, 107, 173, 188 sin affliction of conscience, 7–8, 64–6, 75–6 against the holy ghost, 31, 91, 103, 109 madness and, 5, 40, 44, 100, 109, 141–2, 143, 146, 195 and Protestant self, 23–4, 29–30, 93, 117, 141, 143, 157, 170 sexuality, 178, 185, 186, 190 suicide as, 144 Small, Helen, 178 Smith, Nigel, 91 Southcott, Joanna, 99 spiders, 126–7, 146 Spira, Francis, 63–4, 70, 72, 148 spirits, 3, 99, 148–9, 150 angels, 2, 3, 92, 103, 108, 148 fairies, 2, 52, 103, 148 see also devil/ devils; Witchcraft/ witches Stachniewski, John, 29, 157, 166 Stafford, Richard, 54–5 Stallybrass, Peter, 127 Stirredge, Elizabeth, 24, 73–4, 128 Stubbes, Philip, 128–9 subjectivity autobiographical, 21, 25, 38–9 and the body, 157–8 early modern, 22–6 history and subjectivity, 14–15 in psychoanalysis, 14–15, 196–7 see also self, early modern

265

suicide, 44, 45, 46, 126–7, 138, 143–8 thedevil’sagencyin,144,145,146,148 early modern attitudes to, 144 and madness, 144, 148 Sym, John, 44–5, 46 Tadmor, Naomi, 135, 160, 187 Tasso, 178 Tawney, R. H., 11 Tom o’Bedlam, 81, 149, 178, 192–3 see also Mad Maudlin Trapnel, Anna fasting, 123, 126 memory, 32 and sin, 29–30 as visionary, 92, 94–5 Trosse, George and autobiographical narrative, 4, 12, 17, 20, 28–9, 30 and clothing, 130–1 death, 141, 142, 143 and the devil, 52–3, 56, 124–5, 150, 152–3; and possession, 156 and drinking, 125, 188 and eating, 124–5 family, 159, 170–3, 174, 176; brother-in-law, 173; father, 170–1; Mrs Gollop as spiritual parent, 172; mother, 56, 170–3 and journeys, 194 and language, 55–7, 58; blasphemy, 30, 31 and learning, 29, 49 and madness: confusion, 48; disturbed perceptions, 52–3, 56, 109–10; loss of reason, 48; symptoms, 17, 80 and melancholy, 79–80 and memory, 33, 34–5 and religion: as context, 103; as minister, 17, 29, 35, 37, 57; religious affiliation, 17, 97–8; spiritual cure, 113, 114–15, 177, 188 treatment, 17, 102, 105–6, 107–8; binding, 28–9; confinement, 17; conversation, 109–10; reading, 111; recovery, 117 and sexuality, 56, 180, 186–8; in family, 186–8; and masculinity, 188; masturbation, 186 and suicide, 145, 146

266

Index

Tryon, Thomas, 92 Turner, Jane, 24, 25, 32, 33, 94 understanding, see reason unreason in early modern culture, 3–4, 6, 14, 44–5, 50 as error, 111–12 Foucault and, 10–11, 21, 44, 196–7 and memory, 32 and women, 179 visions and madness/ melancholy, 4, 54, 64, 93 among religious groups, 13, 53, 87, 90, 91–3, 99 supernatural: caused by the devil, 53; of the devil, 150; of spirits, 148; caused by witchcraft, 149 Vokins, Joan, 33, 73 Walker, Mr Peter and Mrs, 104, 106, 109, 174

Wallington, Nehemiah, 144, 151, 166 Walsham, Alexandra, 8, 88 Wariston, Archibald, 7, 149 Weber, Max, 11 Weeks, Jeffrey, 190 Wharton, Goodwin, 1–3, 6, 148 Whythorne, Thomas, 125, 188 Wight, Sarah, 90, 123, 126 Wilson, Ann and Samuel, 173, 175 Witchcraft/ witches and madness, 7, 149 and possession, 153–4, 156 and rationality, 13, 14, 148–9, 150, 189 Wray, Ramona, 174 Wright, Thomas on passion and self-control, 43, 44, 46, 56 on women, 129 Wroth, Lady Mary, 83 Yarrow, Robert, 64, 65, 66, 75 Yeoman, Louise, 7, 98

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