Melancholy and the care of the soul: Religion, moral philosophy and madness in England, 1580--1750

This dissertation argues that practical divinity and moral philosophy were central to the care of the soul in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, and analyses the reasons why melancholy, recognised as a medical problem caused in part by a physiological disorder, was seen by many clerics, moralists and physicians as a condition requiring moral philosophical and spiritual intervention. Early modern moral philosophical writing, deeply influenced by classical moral philosophy, represented the passions as the diseases of the soul where these were not ruled by reason, and moralists in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries argued that even where such passions stemmed from the body, they could be controlled and managed through the philosophical discipline of the mind's thoughts. Practical divinity was concerned with turning the soul towards reflection on God as its source of well-being, through the cultivation of humility and repentance. At the same time, divines were careful to guard against the despair that feelings of human moral worthlessness could produce. According to many early modern English divines, the melancholic despairing of his salvation was, like the non-melancholic suffering from religious despair, to be comforted with the hope of the Gospel at the same time that he was to be instructed to repent in order to obtain that hope. While many pastoral writers recommended the judicious use of medicine, they asserted that the spiritual anxiety of the melancholic was to be treated on its own terms as a spiritual concern. The dissertation shows that practical divinity and moral philosophy remained as important ways of thinking about the melancholic condition until well into the eighteenth century. At the same time, it traces significant changes and transformations in these languages in the context of such movements as the popularisation of English Calvinist practical divinity; the reaction to evangelical Calvinism during the Restoration; the rise of an ethic of polite sociability; the early eighteenth-century debate over the commercialisation of society; and the early eighteenth-century popularisation of medical language for describing melancholic affliction.