Melancholy, Spiritual Experience, and Dissent in England, c. 1650–1700

Abstract

The involvement of melancholy had the potential to undermine the authority of early modern individuals’ religious experiences, reframing their spiritual afflictions as the mere product of a distempered body. This article refines our understanding of the shifting relationship between melancholy and spiritual experience in the second half of the seventeenth century in England. Focusing on the views of Presbyterians and Independents, it explores how various interests and voices shaped attitudes to the disease throughout the challenges of growing anti-enthusiasm and post-Restoration nonconformity. By emphasizing the voices of sufferers themselves and including examination of a range of overlooked texts, it demonstrates that women and laypeople often diverged from learned views when describing their spiritual struggles. Complicating existing narratives, it suggests that sufferers from both groups avoided using melancholy as an explanatory factor in accounts of religious experience in the 1650s to ’70s, before increasingly incorporating the condition in the 1680s and ’90s. The involvement of melancholy remained fraught, however, and under continual negotiation. Bringing manuscript sources into conversation with published texts, the article argues that differences of opinion existed both between and within Presbyterian and Independent communities, as well as between those who suffered from melancholy and those who did not.