CHAPTER THREE

STRANGE, BUT NATURAL EFFECTS": THE MEDICAL CRITIQUE OF ENTHUSIASM IN THE WORKS OF MERIC CASAUBON AND HENRY MORE

Menc Casaubon

As has often been pointed out, the Anatomy of Melancholy was highly influential among a long line of Anglican critics of enthusiasm in the second half of the seventeenth century, from Meric Casaubon to Jonathan Swift.1 Meric Casaubon is indeed an important critic of enthusiasm in the mid-seventeenth century, and the medical inter• pretation of enthusiasm was the central theme of his Treatise Concern• ing Enthusiasmen It is thus natural to turn first to him and to the relationship between melancholy and enthusiasm in his work. The son of the famous humanist scholar Isaac Casaubon, Meric was born in Geneva in 1599, went to school in Sedan, and in 1611, moved with his family to England. He studied first at Eton, and later, after his father's death in 1614, at Christ Church, Oxford, where very probably, he also came to know Robert Burton. Meric Casaubon

1 See CM. Webster, "Swift and Some Earlier Satirists of Puritan Enthusiasm", PMLA 48 (1933): 1141-53; idem., "The Satiric Background of the Attack on the Puritans in Swift's A Tak of a Tub", PMLA 50 (1935): 210-23; Truman G. Stefan, "The Social Argument against Enthusiasm (1650-1660)", in Studies in English, No. 4126 (Austin, University of Texas, 1944), pp. 39-63; George Williamson, "The Res• toration Revolt against Enthusiasm", Studies in Philology 30 (1933): 571-603; Phillip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961), pp. 105-116; George Rosen, "Enthusiasm: 'a dark lanthorn of the spirit'", Bulletin of the History of Medicine 42 (1968): 393-421; M.V. DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne and Augustan ideas of madness (San Marino, Calif: The Huntington Library, 1974); John F. Sena, "Melancholic Madness and the Puritans", Harvard Theobgical Review 66 (1973): 293-309; Michael McDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 224- 226, and note 245 on pp. 296-297. 2 The subtitle reads "As it is an Effect of Nature: but is mistaken by many for either Divine Inspiration, or Diabolicall Possession". The first edition was published in 1655, the second edition a year later, in 1656. There is a facsimile reproduction of the second edition of the Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme with an Introduction by Paul J. Korshin (Gainsville, Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970), and it is to this edition that I shall refer henceforth. MERIC GASAUBON AND HENRY MORE 73 became a protégé of Lancelot Andrewes, then Bishop of Ely, and later of , by whom he was preferred to a prebend at Canterbury in 1628. From his early years, Casaubon was thus con• nected with the Arminian party in the Anglican Church. Indeed, during the Revolution he was evicted from two other livings he had held, and with the abolition of episcopacy he lost his prebend as well. In the 1650's he was employed by Sir John Cotton in his li• brary at Westminster, and it was in those years that he wrote and published the Treatise Concerning Enthunasme and later, on Cotton's ini• tiative and perhaps even pressure, the enigmatic A True and Faithfull Relation of what passed between and Certain Spints. Most of his earlier work was typically humanistic in origin—defending his father's reputation, continuing Isaac's polemics against Baronius' Annah and against Catholic historiography in general, and editing and translat• ing various classical texts, chief among them the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. He also composed, in addition, a few religious tracts with a clear anti-Puritan thrust.3 In Meric Casaubon we have an instance not just of an Anglican like Burton, nor even a fierce anti-Puritan Laudian, but a character• istic classical scholar who provides an interesting link between Re• naissance humanism and late seventeenth-century neo-classicism. Indeed, Casaubon is an upholder of the ideal of "learning" and eru• dition, and as we shall see in Chapter 5 below, it is from this per• spective that he criticised the new experimental science of the Royal Society.4 Enthusiasm for him was a grave threat primarily to be tra• ditional "bookish" learning which he valued most. For that reason, he characterized as enthusiasts not only those who claimed to pre• dict the future (what he called "Divinatorie Enthusiasme", to which

3 The most up-to-date and detailed survey of Meric Casaubon's life may be found in Michael R.S. Spiller, "Concerning Natural Expérimental Philosophie": Mène Casaubon and the Royal Society (The Hague: Martinus NijhofF, 1980), chapter I. A list of his printed works is on p. 218. Earlier discussions of his life are the Introduction by Paul J. Korshin to the facsimile reproduction of A Treatise Concerning Enthunasme; Charles Cotton, "Meric Casaubon, Canon of Canterbury 1628-1671", Friends of the Canter• bury Cathedral 11 (1938): 51-57; and the article in the DJV.B., vol. Ill, pp. 1170-71. Two published sources which serve as a basis for these surveys are , Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (1813-1820), vol. Ill, cols. 934-36, and TJ. ab Almeloveen, ed., Isaaci Casauboni Epistolae. . . (Rotterdam, 1709). For a list of manu• script sources see Spiller, pp. 218-219. 4 On Casaubon as an advocate of "learning" see Michael Hunter's review on Spiller's book in Annah of Science 39 (1982): 187-192.