Course:History 344 Nasty Families/Cultural Topics/Madness and Mental Illness

Early modern England viewed madness as a frightening and mysterious disorder. It’s most extreme manifestations, such as wild ravings, disturbances of the senses, and deep depressions, were disturbing and disruptive events. Those who suffered from mental illnesses were seen as a threat to social order, and there were grave social and economic costs imposed on the ill person’s family.

English men and women believed in supernatural as well as natural ways of understanding and treating mental illness. Even among the elite, religious and magical causation were embraced alongside naturalistic forms of explanation. Divine retribution, demonic possession, witchcraft, and the misalignment of one’s astrological signs were seen as being plausible explanations. Disequilibrium, of the humours, as credited to Hippocrates with applying this idea to medicine, was also an explanation.

There were many ways in which to explain, cope with, and cure the mad. The religious, the astrological, the magical, and the psychological were used alongside or in place of organically based medical interventions.

Clerics, astrologers, village wizards, and folk magicians were as likely as surgeons and apothecaries to be summoned to help fight the malignity of mental disorder.

It’s been argued that very few of the accused witches in Stuart England were in fact insane, but that the accusers were far more likely to be suffering from some form of mental disorder. Witchcraft beliefs in Stuart England were rarely used to attack the mentally ill, and instead were used to explain mental illness in many cases. Histories of psychiatry have contended that those accused of being witches during the late medieval and early modern period were mentally disturbed, in that there was a great upsurge of mental disorders in the 15th century, the mentally disturbed were considered to be witches, and that witches were mentally disturbed because they confessed to bizarre and impossible happenings, exhibited localized analgesia, and were sometimes insensitive to torture.