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1 Introduction: Studying the History of Madness Notes 1 Introduction: Studying the History of Madness 1. D. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, tr. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (Moriae Enconium, orig. 1512; tr. 1941; Ware, Herts: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1998), p. 39. 2. Wharton’s manuscript is in the British Library: BL Add. MSS. 20006, 20007, ‘Auto- biography of the Hon. Goodwin Wharton’, 2 vols, 1686–1704. The account of Wharton that follows is drawn from this manuscript. See also J. Kent Clark, Goodwin Wharton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), for a biographical account. Roy Porter gives a fuller summary of Wharton’s supernatural adventures (though still at a fraction of their original length), and a characteristically lively and illumin- ating discussion of the issues this narrative raises for the history of psychiatry, in ‘The Diary of a Madman, Seventeenth-Century Style: Goodwin Wharton, MP, and communer with the fairy world’, in R. M. Murray and T. H. Turner, eds, Lectures on the History of Psychiatry: the Squibb series (London: Gaskell, 1990). 3. Although he came quite close even to this; see Roy Porter, ‘Diary of a madman’, pp. 137–138, on his expectations in relation to various ladies of the royal family, and his ambitions for a more significant role in the public sphere. ‘After all’, as Porter comments, ‘his divine mission was to become an earthly power’ (p. 138). 4. Porter, ‘Diary of a Madman’, p. 139. The Fifth Monarchist preacher John Rogers describes how when he was an impoverished student, ‘the Devil did often tempt me to study Necromancy & Nigromancy, and to make use of Magick and that then I should never want’; John Rogers, ‘Another Testimony for the Truth’, in Ohel or Beth-Shemesh: A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, 1653), p. 433. 5. On science, religion and belief systems in seventeenth-century England, see (taking a few texts from a very large field) Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971); Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Brian Easlea, Witch-hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy: an introduction to debates of the scientific revolution, 1450–1750 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980); Christopher Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980); Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: astrology in early modern England (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 6. For discussion of this, see for example Basil Clarke, Mental Disorder in Earlier Britain: exploratory studies (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), Introduc- tion; R. A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), Chapter 1; Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: elements of Greek and tragic madness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), Part V. 7. Roy Porter, ‘ “The Hunger of Imagination”: approaching Samuel Johnson’s melan- choly’, in W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, eds, The Anatomy of Madness: essays in the history of Psychiatry. vol. I: People and Ideas (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985), p. 63. 198 Notes to pp. 4–10 199 8. This point also provides a rationale for the potentially problematic use of the word ‘mad’. The history of madness is full of examples of the resistance and refusal of those called mad to accept this view of their condition; on the other hand, its usefulness for the historian is in its ability to signal a generic and transhistorical phenomenon, rather than attempting to attach possibly anachronistic diagnostic labels to sufferers in the past. For a thoughtful discussion of the concept of sanity, see Adam Phillips, Going Sane (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005). 9. For a fascinating example of how concepts of madness are shaped by these cultural differences, see Padel, Whom Gods Destroy. 10. See for example Michael Macdonald, ed., Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover case (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991); K. Hodgkin, ‘Reasoning with Unreason: visions, witchcraft and madness in early modern England’, in Stuart Clark, ed., Languages of Witchcraft (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001). 11. The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published in 1952 by the American Psychiatric Association, listed 60 disorders; DSM IV, the most recent, published in 1994, lists hundreds. 12. Louise Yeoman, ‘Archie’s invisible worlds discovered – spirituality, madness and Johnston of Wariston’s family’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society 27, 1997 (pp. 156–186). 13. A. Walsham, ‘ “Frantick Hacket”: prophecy, sorcery, insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan movement’, Historical Journal 41, 1998 (pp. 27–66). 14. Michael Macdonald, ‘Insanity and the realities of history in early modern England’, Psychological Medicine, vol. 11, no.1, 1981 (pp. 11–25). 15. BL Lansdowne MSS 99, Burghley papers, ‘Letters of Several Madmen’. The annota- tions are later than the letters themselves, but probably seventeenth century. 16. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason, tr. Michael Howard (London: Tavistock Publications, 1967). This is an abridged translation of Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961); a full version has not yet been published in English. 17. This is a large and continuing debate. For a critical view of Foucault’s work, see H. C. Erik Midelfort, ‘Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe’, in Barbara C. Malament, ed., After the Reformation: essays in honour of J. H. Hexter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980); he also discusses Foucault briefly in A History of Madness in Sixteenth-century Germany (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990) and in Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany (Char- lottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1994). For a response to Midelfort’s critique, in an informative and thoughtful collection, see C. Gordon, ‘Histoire de la folie: an unknown book by Michel Foucault’ in Arthur Still and Irving Velody, eds, Rewriting the History of Madness: studies in Foucault’s Histoire de la Folie (London: Routledge, 1992). Other essays in this collection (based on a special feature in History of the Human Sciences 3.1, 1990) respond variously to the empirical and philosophical issues raised. 18. Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: madness, anxiety and healing in seventeenth- century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 147; Midelfort, ‘Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe’; and see Roy Porter, ‘Foucault’s Great Confinement’, in Still and Velody, eds, Rewriting the History of Madness. Jonathan Andrews revisits the question of confinement in ‘The Politics of Committal to Early Modern Bethlem’, in Roy Porter, ed., Medicine in the Enlight- enment (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine, 1995). 200 Notes to pp. 10–12 19. The history of madness has seen something of a boom in the last two or three decades, especially the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For the eighteenth century specifically, see n. 20. More generally, see for example Klaus Doerner, Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: a social history of insanity and psychiatry, tr. Joachim Neugroschel and Jean Steinberg (Oxford: Blackwell 1981); Joseph Melling and Bill Forsythe, eds, Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800–1914: a social history of madness in comparative perspective (London: Routledge, 1999); Andrew Scull, Madhouses, Mad-doctors, and Madmen: the social history of psychiatry in the Victorian era (London: Athlone Press, 1981) and The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: women, madness and English culture 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); William Llywelyn Parry Jones, The Trade in Lunacy: a study of private madhouses in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971). See also the three- volume collection edited by W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd, The Anatomy of Madness: essays in the history of psychiatry, vol. 1, People and Ideas; vol. 2, Institutions and Society (London: Tavistock, 1985); vol. 3, The Asylum and its Psychiatry (London: Routledge, 1988). 20. Significant works on the eighteenth century include Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: a history of madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Athlone Press, 1987), as well as numerous articles and essays on the topic; Allan Ingram, The Madhouse of Language: writing and reading madness in the eighteenth century (London: Routledge, 1991); R. A. Houston, Madness and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 21. Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam. 22. Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: madness and gender in Shakespeare and early modern culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); see also her earlier survey essay, ‘Recent Work in Renaissance Studies: Psychology. Did Madness have a Renaissance?’, Renaissance Quarterly vol. 44 no. 4, winter 1991 (pp. 776–789). For other discussions of madness
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