Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (review)

Contextualist historians following the methodological lead of scholars such as Quentin Skinner and Kevin Sharpe are beginning to reconsider the early modern understanding of melancholy. In The Worlds of Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Angus Gowland submerges The Anatomy of Melancholy in an expansive range of traditions and texts, putting Burton into conversation with neo-Galenic physicians, Aristotelian philosophers, Paracelsians, Calvinist preachers, Arminian divines, Jacobean political theorists, and Neoplatonic occultists, to name just a few points of contact. In Melancholy and the Care of the Soul, Jeremy Schmidt wants to resist the current scholarly fixation on medical theories and practices in the early modern period and argue instead that “the precise severity, nature, and prognosis of [melancholy] . . . was determined not only by the condition of the body, but also by the state of the soul” (2). In opposition to Michel Foucault principally, Schmidt points out that moralists, divines, and physicians were invested not merely in labeling melancholics as mad and nonsensical, but also in providing cures. For Schmidt, “[e]arly modern healers thus might very well have seen more moral agency than Foucault’s reified explication of early modern madness as unreason would suggest” (14).

Schmidt’s attempt to rescue a measure of moral agency from Foucault’s taxonomies succeeds, although beyond Foucault there are not a lot of historians, or literary scholars, who need convincing that medical and spiritual cures were pursued in tandem by physicians and moralists in the early modern period. Chapters 1 and 2, which cover, respectively, the Augustinian high regard for sorrow and the early modern view that “some level of psychic complicity” contributed to melancholic suffering (35), mark only mild alterations to the view of early modern melancholy already detailed by Michael MacDonald and others. When Schmidt takes up pastoral care as it was enlisted to combat religious melancholy in chapter 3, however, the book’s research and range begin to pay more dividends.

Arguing against the lingering characterization of Calvinist habits of thought as constituted principally by fear and self-loathing, Schmidt insists that it “is crucial to understand that early modern English evangelical Protestants were not fostering a peculiarly abject and tormented ‘Puritan’ psychology when describing . . . spiritual experiences” of godly sorrow (58). On the contrary, “writers like [Robert] Bolton, [William] Perkins, [Richard] Greenham, and [Robert] Burton were, like Chrysostom and Augustine, arguing for a dialectic of sorrow and joy in the Christian life, a fruitful tension curbing presumption through despair and despair through grace, ultimately centering the soul in a posture of humble hope in the efficacy of he [sic] work of Christ” (59).

Attending fully to the seventeenth century, Schmidt considers the differences between “pastoral approaches to the treatment of melancholy articulated before and after the Restoration,” and argues that a “distinct Anglican consolatio emerged after the Restoration” but that this consolatio is in many significant ways “continuous with the Calvinist past” (129). Such a continuity is possible because Schmidt significantly alters the traditionally perceived sides of the equation: seventeenth-century Calvinists in his study emerge as less punitive with regards to mental infirmity, while Restoration Anglicans more cautiously embrace the merits of medical cures. Working against MacDonald’s claims that “Anglican works on the consolation of religious melancholy all tended to foreground the medical understanding of melancholic religious thoughts,” Schmidt contends instead that advice offered by writers such as Gilbert Burnet and Samuel Clarke “hardly consists of a dismissal of the religious melancholic as a merely medical problem” (100, 101). Instead, Schmidt traces “in the second half of the seventeenth century a revival of interest in the idea of melancholy as a spiritual medium” (134). Schmidt sees this revival as cutting across sectarian divides, which in turn leads him to argue that such divides are less clear than...