"'I [...] told him it was only a Melancholy Fancy': the Writing of Insanity in Seventeenth-century Religious Autobiography

Starting from a tentative definition of ‘religious melancholy’, a label first used by Robert Burton in his 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy, this essay aims at exploring this notion within the generic frame of spiritual autobiography. The debate over the difference between melancholy and the affliction of conscience, or better, between melancholy and supernaturally-inspired guilt is first tackled by offering a round up of medical and religious early modern literature that extensively dealt with this problematic distinction. Many authors and divines, from William Perkins and Thomas Bright, to Robert Burton, to Richard Baxter, lengthily wrote upon the subject, but more often than not, especially in the second half of the seventeenth-century, instances of ‘godly sorrow’ were also voiced by spiritual autobiography, a literary expression that had its roots in Pauline and Augustinian traditions as well as in the Calvinistic thrust towards the investigation of one’s own conscience. These writings stemmed from a religious context but were also concerned with theological and medical issues, which animated the contemporary late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debate over melancholy and affliction of conscience. And this is especially relevant with regard to ‘narratives of madness’ that the essay will discuss. Seventeenth-century England saw the flourishing of spiritual autobiographies, especially from the 1640s onwards, but life-accounts that merge experiences of spiritual trouble with melancholy and madness are rarely to be found. Nevertheless, three narratives, either published or circulated in manuscript between 1608 and 1714, show interesting and diverse approaches to mental disorder and spiritual suffering, leading to different handlings of problematic issues not only about sanity and religion, but also about the definition of one’s individuality. Even though they stemmed from a religious context, these writings were also concerned with theological and medical issues, which animated the contemporary late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debate over melancholy and affliction of conscience. This is especially true in Dionys Fiztherbert’s account, which posits itself as a ‘statement of purification’ of a divinely afflicted conscience, also operated by the dismissal of any allegation of melancholy. Hers is a manuscript account. Born into a gentry family in Oxfordshire around 1580, Dionys led the anonymous existence of an early modern umarried woman but, despite her obscure and socially uneventful life, she managed to leave a written record of it, with special regard to the nervous breakdown she suffered in her twenties. Later in the century, another woman, Hannah Allen, reported a similar experience in A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs Hannah Allen, which was published in London in 1683. The text illustrates a period of melancholy and spiritual crisis that Allen, a Derbyshire widow born in 1638, lived through in the 1660s. A formally more accomplished testimony is The Life of the Reverend Mr George Trosse, a rather long autobiography in which Trosse, a nonconformist minister born at Exeter in 1631, recalls three episodes of psychotic disorder he experienced in the mid-1650s, even though he finished compiling his Life much later (1692), and had it posthumously published in 1714. George Trosse’s autobiography retraces the stages of a ‘descent into madness’ that saw him gliding into insanity after a drinking bout, almost unawares. His later preoccupation will be to find a language apt to describe what he perceives as his disrupted self: religion undoubtedly provides one, even though eventual conversion will share a consequential and not a causal connection with healing. A similar pattern is to be found in Hannah Allen’s narrative. Affected with melancholy (she does not even mention the affliction of conscience), Hannah struggles to reconstruct what she feels she has lost: health, social relationships, sanity, but most of all her own self. What we discover, especially in these two later texts, is a sort of ‘secularizing’ tendency in the interpretation of a melancholic state which escapes the model of spiritual autobiography by trying to explore the meanderings of one’s mind also from a ‘not-strictly-religious’ point of view. The context in which both Allen and Trosse live and write is informed by religion and practical devotion, and they cannot fully manage their descriptive and interpretative task without recurring to that kind of discourse. Yet, they both recall their recovery as due to medical cures rather than to pastoral care, seemingly anticipating a later orientation in the interpretation of religious melancholy. At the beginning of the century, the language of religion, especially through the conceptualization of the affliction of conscience, could still voice and even overcome (as is the case with Dionys Fitzherbert) the experience of mental disorder; later on, as the secularization of madness gradually set it, supernaturally inspired affliction could not provide an explanation for what was gradually taking the shape of a disturbed relation of an individual to her/his self. In this scenario the religious perspective progressively lost its ability to comprehend and formulate within its fabric the sufferings of a broken individuality which had to start looking for a new, if still forgotten, language.