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

This book furthers our understanding of the issue of melancholy in early modern culture by examining the extensive discussions of melancholy in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century religious and moral philosophical publications, many of which have received only scant attention from modern scholars. As a study in intellectual history, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul offers new insights into a wide variety of early modern texts, including literary representations and medical works, and critically engages with a broad range of current scholarship in addressing some of the central interpretive issues in the history of early modern medicine, psychiatry, religion and culture.