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Melancholic Madness and the Puritans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

John F. Sena
John F. Sena
Affiliation:
Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210
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Extract

Since the resurgence of interest in the Augustan period, the myriad of sixteenth- seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary attacks on the Puritans have been enumerated, catalogued, analyzed, and elucidated. Although the Puritans were accused of a seemingly endless series of malefactions, most of the anti-sectarian assaults, we have been told, charged them with ignorance — the inability to see the value of the established church — or hypocrisy — the desire to use religion to advance political ambitions, secure riches, or satisfy libidinous interests. By mid-seventeenth century, however, a change occurred in the nature of the attacks which has not been adequately discussed. Instead of questioning the sincerity of the Puritans' religious countenance or ascribing the usual peccadillos to them, Puritan traducers charged the sectaries with insanity. Although societies in all ages have protected themselves from unpopular and dissenting opinions by declaring them products of a deranged mind, anti-sectarians in the Restoration and eighteenth century established a rationale for their charges of madness by employing contemporary medical theory to demonstrate that the Puritans suffered from mental and emotional disorders as a result of natural physical causes. Enthusiasts were seen as splenetic sufferers, and their erratic behavior and religious delusions were explained as the inevitable consequence of melancholic vapors.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 66 , Issue 3 , July 1973 , pp. 293 - 309
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1973

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References

1 See Elton, Oliver, Reason and Enthusiasm in the Eighteenth Century, Essays and Studies 10 (1924), 122–36Google Scholar; Webster, C. M., Swift's Tale of a Tub Compared with Earlier Satires of the Puritans, PMLA 47 (1932), 171–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Swift and Some Earlier Satirists of Puritan Enthusiasm, PMLA 48 (1933), 1141–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Satiric Background of the Attack on the Puritans in Swift's A Tale of a Tub, PMLA 50 (1935), 210–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williamson, George, The Restoration Revolt against Enthusiasm, Studies in Philology 30 (1933), 571–603Google Scholar; SisterWhelan, M. K., Enthusiasm in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1935)Google Scholar; Steffan, Truman Guy, The Social Argument against Enthusiasm (1650–1660), Studies in English (Austin, Tex., 1941), 39–63Google Scholar; Persky, A. P., The Changing Concepts of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (unpub. doctoral dissertation), Stanford University (1959)Google Scholar; Rosen, George, Enthusiasm “a dark lanthorn of the spirit,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 42 (1968), 393–421Google Scholar.

2 Webster, Swift and Some Earlier Satirists of Puritan Enthusiasm; The Satiric Background of the Attack on the Puritans in Swift's A Tale of a Tub, 223.

3 In 1725 Sir Richard Blackmore, author of several treatises on the spleen, wrote that melancholy was so rife in England that the malady should be called “The English Spleen” (A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: or Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections [London, 1725], p.v.): eight years later Dr. George Cheyne, writer of the widely read The English Malady (1733) and physician to Samuel Richardson, asserted that foreigners observed so close an identity between melancholy and the English nation that they felt the affliction should be termed “The English Malady” (p. i).

Cecil Moore has asserted that in the Augustan period the malady “attained a greater vogue than it had ever had before … Statistically, this deserves to be called the Age of Melancholy” (Backgrounds of English Literature: 1700–1760 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953], 179); see also, Reed, Amy, The Background of Gray's “Elegy” (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1924)Google Scholar; Doughty, Oswald, The English Malady of the Eighteenth Century, Review of English Studies 2 (1926), 257–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

1 See Purcell, John, A Treatise of Vapours and Hysteric Fits (London, 1702)Google Scholar, 1. Dr. William Stukeley, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, cited Thomas Sydenham's assertion that the spleen constituted one-half of all chronic disorders (Of the Spleen [1723], 73), while Dr. Cheyne asserted that melancholy accounted for “almost one third of the Complaints of the People of Condition in England” (The English Malady, p. ii).

5 For the relationship between melancholy and suicide, see below, p. 17.

6 “Vapours … is a Disease which more generally afflicts Humane Kind, than any other whatsoever; and Proteus-like, transforms itself into the shape and representation of almost all Distempers.” Purcell, 1–2.

7 SirBlackmore, Richard, An Essay Upon the Spleen, in Essays Upon Several Subjects (London, 1716–17), II, 204Google Scholar; Robinson, Nicholas, A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriack Melancholy (London, 1729), 220Google Scholar; Cullen, William, Of the Hysteria, or the Hysteric Disease, in First Lines of the Practice of Physic (1777), The Works of William Cullen, ed. Thomson, John (London, 1827), II, 498–500Google Scholar.

8 William Cullen, Of Hypochondriasis, or the Hypochondriac Affection, Commonly called Vapours or Low Spirits, First Lines, II, 389–90; Sydenham, , Epistolary Dissertation, The Works of Thomas Sydenham, trans. Latham, R. C. (London, 1848–50), II, 89Google Scholar; Robinson: “In Conversation they generally are touchy, suspicious, and think every thing said or done to their Prejudice; if two whisper, they certainly are contriving some Plot against their Interest …” (p. 232).

9 When melancholy resulted from a functional failure in any of a group of abdominal organs known collectively as the “hypochondria,” or “hypochondries” (liver, gall bladder, spleen, uterus), it was called “hypochondriacal melancholy,” “hypochondria,” “hyp,” or “hypo.” These terms were almost exclusively used to refer to melancholy in men. The hypochondriacal organ most frequently associated with melancholy was the spleen. If the spleen failed to function properly and allowed a superabundance of black bile to accumulate in the blood, the resultant melancholy was termed “spleen.” The spleen was so intimately associated with melancholy from classical times to the eighteenth century, however, that frequently melancholy was called the spleen regardless of the cause of the malady. Melanchoy experienced by women was called “hysteria,” “fits of the mother,” and “mother's fits.” See Chambers, Ephraim, Cyclopaedia; or, an Universal Dictionary (London, 1728), HypochondriacGoogle Scholar; Dover, Thomas, The Ancient Physician's Legacy to his Country (London, 1733), 42Google Scholar.

10 For an illuminating discussion of Elizabethan melancholy, see Babb, Lawrence, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1951)Google Scholar.

11 Thomas Elyot, Castel of Health (London, 1547), 66.

12 Animal spirits, described by Richard Mead as “a thin, volatile Liquor” of great power and elasticity (Introduction to A Mechanical Account of Poisons [1702], in The Medical Works of Richard Mead, M.D. [Dublin, 1767], xiv), were an object of scientific faith rather than scientific fact. The basis upon which physicians argued for their existence was that without them “no man could ever explain the Modus of the Union” between the mind and the senses (Edward Strother, An Essay on Sickness and Health [London, 1725], 436). It was the consensus of medical opinion that animal spirits circulated in a manner not unlike that of the blood. Rather than using arteries and veins, however, they traveled either along the nerves or in thin tubes especially created for their movement. Large quantities of these spirits were constantly being manufactured by the body, for they were the sine qua non of life; without them all thought, sensation, and locomotion would cease. See Chambers, Animal Spirits; Armstrong, John, The Art of Preserving Health (London, 1744), Bk. IV, II. 29–30Google Scholar.

13 A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight: of Melancholike Diseases; of Rheumes, and of Old Age, trans. Richard Surphlet (London, 1599), 91. This work appeared first in French in 1597. Du Laurens was the principal physician to Henry IV and chancellor of the faculty of Montpellier.

14 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Shilleto, A. R. (London, 1926–27), I, 442Google Scholar.

15 Treatise on Madness (London, 1757), 1.

16 Du Laurens cited Aristotle as writing that “the melancholike are most wittie and ingenious … and when this humour groweth hot, by the vapours of blood, it causeth as it were, a kinde of divine ravishment, commenly called Enthousiasma, which stirreth men up to plaie the Philosophers, Poets, and also to prophesie,” A Discourse on the Preservation of Sight, 100.

Riolan remarked in Ad libros Fernelii de abditis rerum causis commentarius: “Itaque non est necesse, ut ad daemonem, tanquam ignorationis extremum perfugium, confugiamus, cum naturalem causam teneamus,” Opera Omnia (Parisiis, 1610), I, 134.

Continental physicians throughout the eighteenth century considered enthusiasm as a mental and emotional disorder. See Ph. Hecquet, , Le naturalisme des convulsions dans les maladies de l'epidemie convulsionnaire (Soleure, 1733)Google Scholar; Lorry, A. C., De melancholia et morbis melancholicis (Paris, 1765), I, 134–51Google Scholar; Weikard, M. A., Der philosophische Arzt (Frankfurt a.M., 1799), 151–59Google Scholar.

17 The Anatomy of Melancholy is a pivotal work in the changing conception of enthusiasm. Burton begins Part Three, Religious Melancholy, of the Anatomy by echoing the conventional indictments of the Puritans: their zeal was the result of ignorance or hypocrisy. He added, however, that the religious fanaticism of the extreme Protestant sects was also attributable to psychological and physiological disorders, and thus could be diagnosed and treated as a disease arising from natural causes, the primary cause being melancholy: “They are certainly far gone with melancholy, if not quite mad, and have more need of physic than many a man that keeps his bed, more need of helebore than those that are in Bedlam” (III, 372). See Webster, The Satiric Background of the Attack on the Puritans in Swift's A Tale of a Tub, 211–12, 223; Evans, Bergen, The Psychiatry of Robert Burton (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1944), 58–70Google Scholar.

18 A Treatise concerning Enthusiasme. As it is an Effect of Nature: but is mistaken by many for either Divine Inspiration, or Diabolical Possession (London, 1655), 4.

19 More repeatedly affirmed that vapors resulted from the “Melancholy humour” being overheated, although he at one point briefly stated that a vaporous condition may arise from burnt bile accompanied by a “dash of Sanguine.”

20 Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (London, 1662), 10.

21 Ibid., 22.

22 Ibid., 28–36.

23 Ibid., 12.

24 Way of Happiness (1670), in Some Discourses, Sermons, and Remains of the Reverend Mr. Jos. Glanvill, ed. Horneck, Anthony (London, 1681), 79–80Google Scholar. For an informative discussion of Glanvill's attitude toward enthusiasm, see Cope, Jackson I., Joseph Glanvill Anglican Apologist (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

25 (London), 99. Glanvill discusses varieties of religiosity arising from melancholic vapors in A Loyal Tear dropt on the Vault of our Late Martyred Sovereign (London, 1667), 29.

26 Way of Happiness, 58–59.

27 Libertas Evangelica: Or, A Discourse of Christian Liberty (London, 1680), 212–13. For a brief discussion of Fowler, see Tindall, William York, John Bunyan, Mechanick Preacher (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1934)Google Scholar.

28 A Discourse of the Use of Reason in Matters of Religion (London, 1683), 33.

29 Preservatives against Melancholy and Overmuch Sorrow. Or the Cure of both by Faith and Physick (London, 1713), 83.

30 John Wesley also attempted to supply his followers with medical counsel by publishing in 1747 a work entitled Primitive Physic, a collection of homespun remedies which blended popular myths with advice gleaned from the writings of Dover, Mead, Cheyne, Sydenham, and Boerhaave.

31 The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Reynolds, Myra (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1903)Google Scholar.

32 Probably the best discussion of Swift's indebtedness to More can be found in Harth's, PhilipSwift and Anglican Rationalism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961)Google Scholar.

33 A Tale of a Tub, ed. Guthkelch, A. C. and Smith, D. Nichol (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), 167Google Scholar.

34 The Natural History of Superstition, 19–20.

35 Ibid., 19–20.

38 Ibid., 15.

37 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Fraser, Alexander C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), II, 431Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., II, 432.

39 Hume, David, Of Superstition and Enthusiasm, in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Green, T. H. and Grose, T. H. (London, 1907), I, 145Google Scholar.

40 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Robertson, John M. (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964), I, 38fGoogle Scholar.

41 Ibid., II, 198. Shaftesbury's caustic antagonist, the author of Remarks upon the Letter, agreed with him that enthusiasm occurred “especially in those in whom the Melancholic Humour is predominant” (London, 1708), 49.

42 “For Vapours naturally rise; and in bad times especially when the spirits of men are low as either in public calamities, or during the unwholesomeness of air or diet hellip;” (I, 13).

43 Ibid., I, 17; see below, p. 18.

44 An Essay Upon the Spleen, Essays, II, 216.

45 A new System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriack Melancholy, 236.

46 Ibid., 240. One aspect of “Britannia's bitter bane” that approached a national scandal was the tendency to suicide caused by melancholy. In the Preface to The English Malady, Cheyne, himself a sufferer from melancholy, stated that he had planned posthumous publication of his work, but the great increase in suicide prompted him to publish immediately in the hope of mitigating this dreaded national evil (iv).

Two of the country's leading poets of melancholy expressed their disdain at what was believed to be the greatest rash of suicides in English history. Robert Blair in The Grave lamented: “Self-murder! — name it not: Our Island's shame,/ That makes her the reproach of neighboring states” (ll. 403–04). Edward Young rebuked his countrymen in a similar fashion in The Complaint: Or, Night Thoughts: “O Britain, infamous for suicide!/An island in thy manners! far disjoin'd/From the whole world of rationals beside!/In ambient waves plunge thy polluted head,/Wash the dire strain nor shock the Continent” (V, 442–46).

47 An Essay on Health and Long Life (1724), 157.

48 (London), 9.

49 (London), I, 287.

50 Spectator 494 (Sept. 26, 1712). Addison denounced the Puritans “of a sorrowful Countenance, and generally eaten up with Spleen and Melancholly,” for looking upon mirth and pleasantry as marks of a carnal mind. Puritans, he declared, feel obliged to be sad and disconsolate, looking “on a sudden Fit of Laughter, as a Breach of his Baptismal Vow.” Such behavior, he thought, deters men from being religious, for it represents religion as an unsocial state that extinguishes all joy and humor. Instead, a contemplation of the Deity should imbue the devout with “Chearfulness” and “Gladness of Heart.” See also, Spectator 381 (May 17, 1712); Spectator 387 (May 24, 1712); Spectator 302 (Feb. 15, 1712).

51 The Christian Life, I, 288.

52 Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul (1747), in The Works of George Lord Lyttelton (London, 1776), II, 63–64. Theophilus Evans, in The History of Modern Enthusiasm from the Reformation to the Present Times (London 1752), attempted to distinguish between the true enthusiast and the imposter, and concluded that the enthusiast suffered from “a' dust” humors, while the imposter merely “pretends to Raptures and Visions” (5).

53 Ibid., 61

54 Discussion of the anti-Puritan charges of ignorance and hypocrisy that occurred in the Restoration and eighteenth century are beyond the purview of this paper. For an excellent treatment of these charges, consult the series of articles by C. M. Webster cited in footnote 1.

55 Webster, The Satiric Background of the Attack on the Puritans in Swift's A Tale of a Tub, 212.

56 See my Melancholy in Anne Finch and Elizabeth Carter: The Ambivalence of an Idea, Yearbook of English Studies, I (1971), 108–19.

57 See also Lavington, G., The Enthusiasm of Methodist and Papists Compared (London, 1749)Google Scholar.