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

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 12; p. 128
• Main Author: Sim, Stuart
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2006
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); English literature; Philosophy; Religion
• ISSN: 0954-0970

For Calvinists, religious despair was a necessary stage on the road to salvation, and Bunyan scholars are familiar with how the author deployed it to that effect in both Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim 's Progress. By the later seventeenth century, however, Anglican clergymen are increasingly seeing such despair as presumptuous, part of the overweening sense of individualism that religious enthusiasm tended to promote and that they are trying to eradicate from English culture. Schmidt is very succcessful in communicating how 'the problem of melancholy was at the center of a series of religious and cultural conflicts and tensions in early modern English history', and his book will be a valuable source for historians and literary scholars alike (p. 185).