ABSTRACT
Any survey of madness during the turbulent years of civil war, revolution, and interregnum, runs the risk of itself becoming a maddening endeavor—all the more so as the question of madness during this period becomes entangled with disputes over the nature of religious enthusiasm. As Daniel Fouke has commented, the enormous outpouring of writings ultimately leaves contemporary historians with a picture that is anything but clear: “The anti-enthusiasm of the seventeenth century has been extremely difficult for scholars to characterize … Clear battle-lines fail to emerge, and any portrait of the typical enthusiast never gets so far as a bare outline”; hardly an improvement on Michael MacDonalds remark that “The history of mental disorder in early modern England is an intellectual Africa.” 1 While the period saw a tremendous production of pamphlet literature that made reference to madness, this does not mean that all writers operated according to a widespread understanding of what madness was.
