Madness in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography

Many early modern writers left accounts of their spiritual sufferings and convictions which deal in extremes of emotion and behavior--some identified by their contemporaries as mad, to be treated with medication, counseling, and confinement. Their writings give us a window into the hidden world of early modern madness from the point of view of the mad. How is madness experienced and treated, and how can it be recorded? How do religion, gender, and class inflect the processes of diagnosis and treatment? And what insights can the stories these writers tell give us into early modern culture?