Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography

Abstract

The seventeenth century has routinely been posited as a time when the histories of madness and religion took important new directions. The upheavals of the period produced new forms of religious enthusiasm that we might well expect to overlap with madness, and they were indeed perceived to be frequent bedfellows. Here, three narratives of madness, written by the recovered sufferers, are unravelled to illustrate the complex and contested ways in which mental disorder was experienced and identified. The three texts, by Dionys Fitzherbert, Hannah Allen, and George Trosse, have much in common. They are all located in the important genre of spiritual autobiography, meaning that their subjects' afflictions are presented as formative religious experiences. They share ways in which they differ from conventional spiritual autobiographies, notably in their attention to social context. Since the interests of accounts of madness and of spiritual autobiographies converge at specific points, especially the subject's relationship with God and understanding of what constitutes (God's) truth, these texts should offer us important perspectives on those points of intersection. There are also significant differences between the texts, and the disparities from each other as well as their shared deviance from conventional godly self-writing are telling. Fitzherbert wrote significantly earlier than the others, in the early seventeenth century when the genre was very young. The later seventeenth-century narratives of the nonconformists Allen and Trosse, written in a very different climate, conformed more closely to a recognised model. Unlike Allen and Trosse, Fitzherbert disputed her diagnosis, insisting that her disorder was spiritual affliction as opposed to melancholy or madness, a distinction not recognised by the later writers. Allen's work embraced the concept of religious melancholy; and Trosse, whose madness was more violent than melancholic, found the relationship between his disorder and his sin to be self-evident.