They give some information about the physical and spiritual help they received. This text even more resembles a conversion story, especially with the happy outcome.īesides belonging to the same genre, the three stories have another thing in common: all the authors were cured of their madness. He describes his hallucinations, deliriums and violent behaviour, which in this case are all seen as God's punishment for his sinfulness.
He wrote his Life in 1693, which was published after his death in 1713. George Trosse, the third author, also had a mercantile background, and after his spell of madness became a nonconformist minister in Exeter. This is all a familiar part of a conversion story, but her sufferings are not presented as a punishment by God, but as an illness from which she recovered. She tells her readers about her conviction that she was damned, worthless and monstrous, and how at one point she refused to eat. She descended into melancholy in the 1660s, after she was widowed and left with a child. The second author is Hannah Allen, daughter of a Presbyterian merchant family living in Derbyshire and London. She described a delirious condition lasting several months which is, however, not presented as madness but as spiritual affliction. Besides the surviving autograph, there are fair copies still kept in libraries. Her tale of recovery from mental disorder was written around 1610. The first was written by Dionys Fitzherbert, daughter of an Oxfordshire landowner. Tales of madness and religious autobiography seem to overlap to a great extent. This subject is elusive because of changing definitions and blurred borders with other genres, in particular between fiction and described realities.
The discussion on autobiographical writing in the past is less elaborate. She stresses not only how blurred the border is between madness and its opposite, but also how closely madness and religious inspiration were connected in the seventeenth century. Katherine Hodgkin starts with an exposé of madness in a historical context including a useful discussion of ideas that have developed during the last decades. This study on madness in seventeenth-century England is based on three autobiographical accounts.
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