Melancholy and the Care of the Soul

Melancholy is rightly taken to be a central topic and concern of early modern culture, and it continues to generate scholarly interest among historians of medicine, literature, psychiatry, and religion. This book considerably furthers our understanding of the issue by examining the extensive discussions of the treatment of melancholy provided in seventeenth and eighteenth century religious and moral philosophical publications, many of which have received only scant attention from modern scholars. Arguing that melancholy was considered by many early modern writers to be as much a disease of the mind as a condition which originated in some physiological disturbance, Dr Schmidt reveals how religious consolation and spiritual confession were employed as important elements of the treatment. This underlines a common contemporary view that mental illness was regarded as in some way related to a sinful condition, rather than a guiltless medical problem. The book also explores ways in which the language used to express and treat melancholy shaped the experience of melancholy and its behavioural manifestations, suggesting that the use of religious languages to treat the condition could enable the sufferer to conceive of themselves as struggling with the kinds of moral and spiritual problems that beset their contemporaries. As a study in intellectual history, "Melancholy and the Care of the Soul" offers new insights into early modern texts on melancholy, including dramatic and literary representations of melancholy and melancholic suffering, and critically engages with a broad range of current scholarship dealing with early modern medical, religious and cultural issues.

ISBN 0754657485   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9780754657484 (What's this?)   Pages 268 Publisher Ashgate Publishing Group   Volumes 001 Imprint Ashgate Publishing Limited   Published in Aldershot Format Hardback   Series title The History of Medicine in Context Publication date 28 Feb 2007   Height (mm) 234 Library of Congress BT732.4   Width (mm) 156 DEWEY 616.8527009420903   Academic level Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly

		Introduction : melancholy, language, and madness		1
1		Therapeutic languages : ancient moral philosophy and patristic Christianity		19
2		Melancholy among the passions in seventeenth-century thought		27
		Spiritual exercises and the anatomy of melancholy		29
		Melancholy and the moral physiology of Thomas Willis		38
3		The pastoral care of melancholy in Calvinist England		47
		Religious despair and religious melancholy		49
		The devil's bath		64
		Ministers, madmen, and women		77
4		Anglicanism, melancholy, and the restoration critique of "enthusiasm"		83
		Anti-calvinist antidotes : Simon Patrick and the Latitudinarians		85
		An Anglican tradition of consolation		98
5		The "Puritan tradition"? : nonconformist practical divinity and the critique of "enthusiasm"		103
		Richard Baxter : the sin of melancholy		105
		Women, melancholy, and the critique of "enthusiasm"		114
		Timothy Rogers : rewriting Calvinist consolation		118
6		From religious despair to hypochondria : the languages of melancholy transformed		129
		The devil dissolved in his bath		131
		Politeness and religious despair		139
		Rewriting melancholy : medical theory in polite society		150
7		Curing Augustan hysterics : morality, politics, and religion		163
		Hypochondria, hysteria, and the "contrivances of passion"		164
		Luxury's plague : hypochondria and commercial society		174
		Nervous disorder as conscience : George Cheyne's "wounded soul"		176

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