Katharine Hodgkin, Madness in seventeenth-century autobiography, Early Modern History: Society and Culture Series, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. vi, 266, £50.00 (hardback 978-1-4039-1765-2).

Abstract

This study on madness in seventeenth-century England is based on three autobiographical accounts. Katherine Hodgkin starts with an expose of madness in a historical context including a useful discussion of ideas that have developed during the last decades. She stresses not only how blurred the border is between madness and its opposite, but also how closely madness and religious inspiration were connected in the seventeenth century. The discussion on autobiographical writing in the past is less elaborate. This subject is elusive because of changing definitions and blurred borders with other genres, in particular between fiction and described realities. Tales of madness and religious autobiography seem to overlap to a great extent. Three texts are analysed. The first was written by Dionys Fitzherbert, daughter of an Oxfordshire landowner. Her tale of recovery from mental disorder was written around 1610. Besides the surviving autograph, there are fair copies still kept in libraries. She described a delirious condition lasting several months which is, however, not presented as madness but as spiritual affliction. The second author is Hannah Allen, daughter of a Presbyterian merchant family living in Derbyshire and London. She descended into melancholy in the 1660s, after she was widowed and left with a child. Her life story was published in 1683. She tells her readers about her conviction that she was damned, worthless and monstrous, and how at one point she refused to eat. This is all a familiar part of a conversion story, but her sufferings are not presented as a punishment by God, but as an illness from which she recovered. George Trosse, the third author, also had a mercantile background, and after his spell of madness became a nonconformist minister in Exeter. He wrote his Life in 1693, which was published after his death in 1713. He describes his hallucinations, deliriums and violent behaviour, which in this case are all seen as God's punishment for his sinfulness. This text even more resembles a conversion story, especially with the happy outcome. Besides belonging to the same genre, the three stories have another thing in common: all the authors were cured of their madness. They give some information about the physical and spiritual help they received. In the end, guidance was more important than medicines. Fitzherbert thanks the wife of her doctor for her counsel, without even mentioning his medicines. Hannah Allen was cured by an unnamed minister. A kinsman also proposed to bring her into contact with the nonconformist divine, Richard Baxter. Trosse was cured by a lay woman, maybe also a doctor's wife. The escape from madness was in all three cases through conversation. How the process of healing should be phrased, is a point of discussion. Hodgkin stresses the metaphor of travel as well as, in the case of Trosse, actual travelling through Europe. Writing down this experience was perhaps of help too. Unfortunately, little is said about the authors themselves and their texts. Is it important that the first has survived only in manuscript and the two other texts were published in print? In fact the existence of fair copies of a manuscript point to a form of manuscript publishing still common in the seventeenth century. In the other two cases, the possible role of an editor or publisher is not even mentioned. The text of Trosse is obviously studied only from a modern edition. The important work by Michael Mascuch in this field is mentioned, but not really used. However, the next publication by Katharine Hodgkin will be an edition of the manuscripts of Dionys Fitzherbert, which will offer an opportunity to return to this aspect of madness and autobiographical writing.