Worse Than Beasts : An Anatomy of Melancholy and the Literature of Travel in 17th and 18th Century England 9781935790617, 9781888570779

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Worse Than Beasts

Contexts and Consequences: New Studies in Religion and History Cathy Gutierrez and Lisa Poirier, Series Editors This series provides a forum for scholarship at the nexus of religion and history in which the contexts and consequences of change are examined. Forthcoming titles will explore pivotal historical moments, or propose alternative readings of history. Authors are invited to submit works to the series that employ innovative methods in the study of religion. Projects accepted in the series will be marked by originality and creativity and, while maintaining the standards required in scholarly research, will be accessible, engaging, and suitable for use across disciplines. Proposals should be prepared in duplicate and directed to: Cathy N. Gutierrez Department of Religion Sweet Briar College Sweet Briar, VA 24595 Lisa J. Poirier Department of Comparative Religion Miami University Oxford OH 45056 Queries may be emailed to: [email protected], or [email protected]

Worse Than Beasts An Anatomy of Melancholy and the Literature of Travel in 17th and 18th Century England

Jennifer I. M. Reid

A volume in the series Contexts and Consequences: New Studies in Religion and History Cathy Nora Gutierrez and Lisa J. Poirier, Series Editors

The Davies Group, Publishers

Aurora, Colorado

Worse Than Beasts: An Anatomy of Melancholy and the Literature of Travel in 17th and 18th Century England. ©2005 Jennifer I. M. Reid All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the express written permission of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Submit all inquiries and requests to the publisher. Address all requests to: The Davies Group, Publishers, PO Box 440140 Aurora CO 80044-0140 USA Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reid, Jennifer, 1962Worse than beasts : an anatomy of melancholy and the literature of travel = in seventeenth and eighteenth century England / Jennifer I.M. Reid. p. cm. -- (Contexts and consequences) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-888570-77-6 (trade pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Travelers’ writings, English--History and criticism. 2. English prose literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism. 3. English prose literature--18th century--History and criticism. 4. British--Foreign countries--History--18th century. 5. British-Foreign countries--History--17th century. 6. Burton, Robert, 1577-1640. Anatomy of melancholy. 7. Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745. Gulliver’s travels. 8. Foreign countries--In literature. 9. Melancholy in literature. 10. Travelers in literature. 11. Travel in literature. 12. Melancholy. I. Title. II. Series. PR756.T72R45 2004 820.9’32--dc22 2004012765 Cover illustration by Jeff Hall III Design by The Davies Group Printed in the United States of America Published 2005. The Davies Group Publishers, Aurora CO 80044 1234567890

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

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Chapter One: Angry Brutes and Men with Horns Chapter Two: Mad and Foreign “Antipodes” Chapter Three: The Yahoo in the Mirror Bibliography: Index

131 139

11 55

105

For Mark

Acknowledgments 

This volume could not have been completed without the support of a number of people, to whom I must express my deepest gratitude. First, I am thankful to the University of Maine at Farmington and the University of Maine system for affording me the time and resources to work on the project during a sabbatical leave, as well as a leave that accompanied the award of the UMS Trustee Professorship. I must express my appreciation to Moira Wolohan for her patience and continual efforts on behalf of my research; and to Lisa Poirier and Cathy Gutierez for their encouragement and assistance in bringing this monograph to publication. I wish also to thank Robert Choquette for his lessons in overturning as many stones as possible in constructing an historical argument. I am, as always, grateful to Charles H. Long for his friendship and forbearance in respect to ongoing conversations. Finally, I must appreciate Kate Reid and Margaret Reid for their editorial assistance in completing this project, and Mark McPherran for many indulgent discussions without which the writing of this monograph would never have occurred.

Introduction 

If a landing be effected, whether with or without resistance, it might not be amiss to lay some few trinkets, particularly looking Glasses upon the Shore: Then retire in the Boats to a small distance, from where the behaviors of the natives might be distinctly observed, before a second landing be attempted.1 When I was a little refreshed I went up into the country, resolving to deliver myself to the first savages I should meet, and purchase my life from them by some bracelets, glass rings, and other toys which sailors usually provide themselves with in those voyages, and whereof I had some about me.2 These two passages—the first from the Royal Society’s recommendations to James Cooke, and the second from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—typify a particular British approach to the non-European world during the colonial period. Between the mid-sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the colonial English came into contact with the people of five continents and yet, according to much of the literature of the period, the English were rarely surprised by the people they encountered. Rather, this literature betrayed a series of ideas regarding non-Europeans that,

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although often contradictory, provided a ready interpretive framework for understanding and describing the human beings they met. Despite the vast array of social, ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences that characterized the non-European world of the period, indigenous peoples emerged in much of English travel literature (as well as other literary forms influenced by these accounts) in notable conformity with one another. One aspect of this interpretive framework within the broader Western European imagination was the subject of Henri Baudet’s brilliant little volume entitled Paradise on Earth. In the book, Baudet explored the evolution and imaginative power of the idea of the Noble Savage in Western Europe during the Medieval and Atlantic eras; tracing incarnations of the figure through the travel accounts of Marco Polo, Mandeville, Columbus, Las Casas, Martyr, and the literary and philosophical work of, among others, Bergerac, More, Montaigne, Lafitau, Campenella, and Rousseau. His underlying interest in the work concerned the sustained coincidence of both exoticism (reflected in the idea of the Noble Savage and the figure’s association with images of paradise), and violence against nonEuropeans enacted within European colonial enterprises. Baudet suggested that this fundamental ambivalence was embodied early in the colonial period within the conflict between Las Casas and Sepulveda: a conflict that he believed was ultimately between “idealism” and “realism,” and expressed in antithetical images of non-Europeans as (i) naturally good and (ii) idolatrous and immoral. This conflict, Baudet pointed out, subsequently became characteristic of the entire Atlantic era.3

Introduction

3

In his Forward to Paradise on Earth, Franklin Baumer argued that the value of the book resided to some degree in the author’s suggestion that ambivalences are characteristic of all cultures.4 Charles H. Long, in his frontispiece to the text, went further, suggesting that Baudet raised a serious issue relating to the nature of Western European consciousness during the colonial period. Referring to W. E. B. Dubois’ notion of a “double consciousness” possessed by African Americans, Long invited the reader to consider whether it is possible that the development of multiple forms of consciousness may have been the experience of not only the colonized, but of colonizing cultures as well.5 The thematic motif of multiplicity permeated Paradise on Earth, culminating in the final pages where Baudet discussed this cultural ambivalence in relation to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a book that he believed occupies a unique place in Western literature. As he aptly pointed out, in Defoe’s characters of Friday and the neighboring “mauvais sauvages” (who wish to murder Friday), we are confronted with both imaginative strains: the noble denizen of a lost paradise, and the immoral savage.6 In the context of his discussion of Robinson Crusoe, Baudet noted in passing that Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, aside from being an indictment of contemporary English society, was also a potent example of “comparativist thought”7 of Swift’s day. Baudet, nonetheless, did not discuss the book further. Paradise on Earth is a treasure-trove for tracing the development of European idealism in the Atlantic era. Understandably, Baudet did not anatomize the oppositional realism he discerned as existing in concert with colonial idealism since, as he pointed out, his goal was to explore

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one side of a “many sided dilemma.”8 This essay will explore another side of this dilemma: that of the development of a particular language of negativity pertaining to non-Europeans, and portraying them as, in some measure, Baudet’s ‘immoral idolators’. This language, we should note at the outset, does not conform to what might be regarded as a strict ‘idealism versus realism’ schema, since within the strain of discourse to be presently considered, there appears to have been little (if any) more basis upon the experience of actual contact with nonEuropean peoples than with that of ‘idealism’. Still, this language was coincidental with the imaginative construct of the Noble Savage, and both existed concomitantly with the conquests, enslavement, commerce, and intimate intercultural relations of the Atlantic period. Given the coincidence of this historical experience and apparently antithetical European ideational and discursive constructions of non-Europeans, it is clear that in respect to the formation of Western European consciousness, the Atlantic era engendered noticeable multiplicity. Taking a cue from Henri Baudet, this exploration of a specific negative discourse will briefly begin with a consideration of Gulliver’s Travels—its resonances with Robinson Crusoe and, more critically for our purposes, its peculiar melding of two ostensibly different contemporary English discourses. We will subsequently consider the development of a set of key notions regarding non-Europeans in seventeenth century England, notions that permeate the English imagination throughout that century and the next, and are ultimately expressed in the work of Swift. These notions revolve around an intriguing association in English discourse

Introduction

5

between non-Europeans and the mad; and they find their earliest coherent expression in the work of Robert Burton, who penned the first major treatise in what would later be referred to as cognitive science. Later in this essay, Gulliver’s Travels will be reconsidered within the context of this discursive association. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726. The book chronicles the adventures of a ship’s surgeon, Lemuel Gulliver, who is shipwrecked and encounters a variety of humanlike characters in the course of making his way back to England: the very small people of Lilliput; the very large ones of Brobdingnag; misguided scientists, philosophers, physicians, and linguists; the revolting Yahoos; and the dignified Houyhnhms, who are horses endowed with reason. The work is satirical and, as Baudet pointed out, levels a pointed critique at Swift’s contemporaries. Like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels also presented its audience with obvious derivatives of two established imaginative constructions of non-Europeans, most notable in Part IV of the book where Swift juxtaposes the Houyhnhms, who are noble inhabitants of a lost paradise, with the Yahoos who are immoral and bestial creatures. In fact, it has been plausibly argued that the final book of Gulliver’s Travels constitutes a sustained comparison of two contemporary theories of the state of nature, best represented by the contrast between Hobbes and Locke. The Yahoos, in Hobbesian terms, have “no arts, no letters, no society,” and their lives are undoubtedly “nasty” and “brutish;” while the Houyhnhms live together in an unmistakably Lockean society epitomized by its foundation in reason.9 In Part IV of the book, Swift’s indictment of contemporary English

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society is framed in terms of Gulliver’s relationship to each of these stylized constructions of the non-European. In many respects, the Houyhnhms, like Defoe’s Friday, more broadly resonate with the image of the Noble Savage prior to the Fall, as figures who inhabit an Edenic paradise. Yet, unlike Friday, they are possessed of perfect rationality reminiscent of the classical Stoics or of Plato’s rulers.10 The Yahoos are purely bestial and, hence, revolting. Gulliver himself is an Englishman, and of a culture both temporally and spatially removed from that of the Houyhnhms and Yahoos and, presumably, of a culture that is infused with reason. Gulliver’s relationship with these caricatures is the fulcrum on which Swift constructs his social critique. When confronted by the Houyhnhms, Gulliver is questioned concerning his reason for wearing clothing, and his immediate response is that the English dress in order to “avoid the inclemencies of air, both hot and cold” and, more importantly, “for decency.” The truth, however, involves more than this, since Gulliver has continued to fastidiously dress himself in spite of both the temperate climate in the land of the Houyhnhms, as well as the Houyhnhms’ (whom Gulliver admires more greatly than any of his own countrymen) belief that nature does not “teach us to conceal what nature has given.”11 The truth is that Gulliver has recognized a distinct resemblance between himself and the Yahoos, and he has continued to clothe himself “in order to distinguish himself as much as possible from that cursed race of Yahoos.”12 Later in Part IV, Gulliver’s distaste for his resemblance to the Yahoos becomes virtually unbearable: upon apprehending his own image in a pool of water, and

Introduction

7

discerning fully the resemblance, he turns away “in horror and detestation of myself, and could better endure the sight of a common Yahoo than of my own person.”13 The moment is poignant, and its critical edge would not have been lost to Swift’s contemporaries; Gulliver is horrified to discover that he overwhelmingly resembles the Yahoos, whom he finds loathsome in their bestiality. Swift’s indictment is obvious in the image: the European mishandling of reason is bestial.14 The critique is undeniably significant, but what is perhaps more salient for the purpose at hand is a rather curious coincidence in Gulliver’s Travels of classic images of non-Europeans, the valuation of reason, and the presence of madness as a literary motif. In Gulliver’s coming face to face with his resemblance to the Yahoos rather than the Houyhnhms, an intriguing relationship is constructed by Swift. Beyond a doubt, the Yahoos embody most every negative attribute the English of the period variously associated with non-Europeans. Additionally, they are predominantly defined by the Houyhnhms as utterly lacking in reason. It is, further, reason that is at stake the moment Gulliver beholds his own likeness to the Yahoos; for at that moment he becomes quite recognizably deranged, declaring that he can no longer bear the sight of himself. Shortly thereafter, he begins to carry himself as a horse.15 Although there is every promise of recovery when Gulliver returns to England at the end of Part IV, he remains nonetheless more firmly drawn toward the company of horses than to his own family. In fact, upon his arrival, he cannot bring himself to touch his children and is rendered unconscious for an hour by a kiss from “that odious animal” who is his

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wife. Beyond doubt, Gulliver is quite clearly imbalanced.16 Amusing though it is, Gulliver’s madness is firmly associated with the recognition of his resemblance to the Yahoos. This pairing of madness with the most revolting of humanoid creatures (who themselves bear an undeniable resemblance to contemporary images of non-Europeans, a concurrence that will be considered more fully later in this essay) is not, however, simply an idiosyncratic literary trope of Swift’s construction but, arguably, resides within a century-long similar association within the English imagination. This association provides a point of departure from which to trace the development of a negative ideational and literary counterpart to the figure of the Noble Savage in its English context. Like the Noble Savage, this negative image of non-Europeans is not primarily a product of actual contact with non-Europeans; rather, it is at least in part a result of a curious melding of perceptions of madness with those of indigenous peoples, beginning most identifiably during the Elizabethan period in England. The association seems to have clearly coalesced early in the seventeenth century; and the publication of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in 1631 figures notably in this cultural production. Although it would be an over simplification to attribute responsibility for the confluence of images to Burton’s treatise, the work undoubtedly reflected contemporary views; and, further, served to legitimize and propagate them. It is for this reason that The Anatomy of Melancholy warrants particular attention.

Introduction

9

Notes 1. Hints offered to the consideration of Captain Cooke, Mr Banks, Doctor Solander, and the other Gentlemen who go upon the Expedition on Board the Endeavour. Written by James Douglas, 14th Earl of Morton (1702-1768), who was President of the Royal Society from 1764-1768. In James Cooke, The Journals of Captain James Cooke on his Voyages of Discovery, ed. J. C. Beaglehole, vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 17681771. Hakluyt Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 515. 2. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (New York: Simon and Schuster Pocket Books, 1996), IV, 1, 243. 3. Henri Baudet, Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man, trans. Elizabeth Wentholt (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 31. Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 21, draws a similar conclusion. Focusing on the medieval and Renaissance figure of the Wild Man, Greenblatt suggests that “Europeans had, for centuries, rehearsed their encounter with the peoples of the New World, acting out, in response to the legendary Wild Man, their mingled attraction and revulsion, longing and hatred.” Hayden White, “The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish,” Fredi Chiappelli, ed., The First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), I, 121, regards the Wild Man image as the predecessor of negative constructions of non Europeans. It is in relation to the Wild Man, he argues, that the Noble Savage “derives and against which it was ostensibly raised in opposition.” 4. Baudet, Paradise on Earth, xiii. 5. Ibid., ix. W. E. B Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 2. The idea of duality is expressed also by Ashis Nandy, who describes it in terms of a position of cognitive superiority made necessary, for the sake of survival of intimately understanding not only oneself but also the opposing colonizer. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy:

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Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). Patrick Chamoisseau, in his novel Texaco, likewise describes a state of consciousness in which “One side was worth its reverse and two sides were often one side.” Patrick Chamoisseau, Texaco, trans. Rose-Myriam Réjous and Val Vinokurov (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 70. 6. Baudet, Paradise on Earth, 41. 7. Ibid., 42. 8. Ibid., xv. 9. T. O. Wedel, “On the Philosophical background of Gulliver’s Travels” in Milton P. Foster, A Casebook on Gulliver Among the Houyhnhms (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961), 87. Cf. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), I, 13; and John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), II, 2, 6, 271. 10. Ronald Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels: The Politics of Satire (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 119-121 and 126127. See also Max Byrd, Visits to Bedlam: Madness and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), 84-85. 11. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 4,3, 259. 12. Ibid., 4, 3, 258. 13 Ibid., 4, 10, 307. 14. Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 119-126. 15. On Gulliver’s apparent insanity Byrd writes, “Gulliver’s alienation equals that of any maid who thinks herself a bottle or any tramp who thinks himself a king.” Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 85. See also Charles Peake, “Swift and the Passions,” in Foster, A Casebook, 296. 16. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 4, 2, 321. While in the land of the Houyhnhms, we might note, Gulliver refers to the Yahoo species as “an odious animal for which I had so utter a hatred and contempt” (4, 3, 259). See also Edward Stone, “Swift and the Horses: Misanthropy or Comedy?” in Foster, A Casebook, 189.

Chapter One Angry Brutes and Men with Horns

ef

Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy is a comprehensive treatise in three volumes, dealing with the causes, symptoms and cures of a variety of medical and psychological conditions. These conditions, which include folly, madness, and delirium, are all contained beneath Burton’s umbrella-term: melancholy. The author did not intend in the Anatomy to put forward any new medical interpretation of this broadly-defined condition; but rather, to draw together in a single text a vast array of known medical, religious, philosophical, historical, scientific, and geographical work that bore relevance to his subject. He was a voracious reader and scarcely an available text on the subject, from Hippocrates and Galen to William Perkins, escaped inclusion in his manuscript. The Anatomy was extremely popular with the English reading public and was reprinted in five separate editions during Burton’s lifetime. A contemporary, Thomas Fuller, attested to its popularity, writing, “Scarce any book in philology in our land hath in short a time passed so many impressions.”1 Burton’s method, arguments, and, ultimately, his conclusions were far from consistent throughout the text, likely owing to the fact that his desire was not to present an original interpretation of the condition he called melancholy,

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but to synthesize all extant material he considered to be of relevance. As a result, and in spite of internal inconsistency, it is considered to be the most complete available compendium of seventeenth-century English intellectual views on medicine, psychology, cosmology, and ethics.2 Burton, however, was not the first Englishman to write on the subject of melancholy, despite being the most erudite of the period. The subject had been of interest to English intellectuals for a generation, beginning with Timothy Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie, published in 1586. Since Burton’s work was situated within this intellectual tradition (which itself drew on earlier resources) something should be said of the classical and medieval understandings of madness and melancholy that influenced Burton and his immediate predecessors. Medieval and Renaissance views on the condition in some measure echoed more ancient conceptions of its causes and symptoms. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, for instance, mental imbalance was attributed to individuals whose observable actions or beliefs were somehow unintelligible; whose relationship to reality deviated excessively from the norm. Sanity or madness, consequently, was based on the extent to which a behavior or thought was deemed socially appropriate. According to Xenophon, Socrates held that most “do not call those mad who err in matters that lie outside the knowledge of ordinary people: madness is the name they give to errors in matters of common knowledge;” and the first-century physician Aretaeus likewise suggested that the mad see the same things that other people do, “but do not form a correct judgment on what they have seen.”3 This kind of deviation was generally thought to have not

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only natural causes but, in some instances, supernatural ones, a distinction drawn by Herodotus (484-425bce) in his Histories, and echoed by Democritus (460-370bce), Plato (427- 347bce), and Euripedes (480-406bce). Considering the madness of the Spartan king Cleomenes I (520490bce), Herodotus reported that some Spartans believed it to have been caused by excessive consumption of wine, but he himself (as well as many other Greeks) regarded the madness as divine punishment for sacrilege.4 Similarly, in the Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates distinguished between madness caused by illness, and that caused by divine intervention— “madness that is heaven-sent;” and in the Timaeus he attributed the power of divination to a mind that was altered either by physical illness or possession.5 The concept of divine madness appeared in Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Democritus, and was repeatedly associated with Socrates in the Platonic dialogues. In the Ion, for instance, Socrates claimed that there was a direct relation between poetic inspiration and divine possession: the lyric poet, he said, did not always consciously produce his art, but was “possessed…and reason is no longer in him.” Elsewhere, he was more adamant, claiming that “if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought…” Even Aristotle, who applied medical terminology to his description of madness, did not challenge the view that madness and insight were somehow mysteriously related to one another. “Why is it,” he asked “that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry, or the arts are melancholic…?”6

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Recourse to physical causes of madness (in the form of imbalanced fluids and humours) as well as to divine causes remained constant in the work of medieval and Renaissance writers on the subject. In respect to physical causes, it was Avicenna (d. 1337) who firmly incorporated the melancholic state into the system of the four humours. According to Avicenna, Melancholy is either natural, or secretious and unnatural…Of secretious melancholy, one sort originates from the bile when burnt to ashes…another originates from the phlegm when burnt to ashes…another is generated from the blood when burnt to ashes…a fourth finally comes from natural melancholy when this has become ashes.7 Depending upon which fluid (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, or pure black bile) was mixed with the black bile of melancholy, symptoms could range from laughter and happiness, introspection, stillness, and silence, to agitation, obsessions, and violence.8 Avicenna’s theory remained authoritative until at least the seventeenth century, when it was incorporated by Burton into his Anatomy of Melancholy.9 Reginald Scot (a member of parliament and justice of the peace) argued in 1584, for instance, that women accused of witchcraft were mentally deranged and therefore posed no danger to society. “Howbeit, these affections,” he wrote, “though they appear in the mind of man, yet are they bred in the bodie, and proceed from this humor, which is the verie dregs of bloud, nourishing and feeding those places, from whence proceed feares, cogitations, superstitions, fastings, labours, and such like.”10

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The belief that melancholy could derive of supernatural intervention was also widely held throughout the period, although many of the positive connotations of divine madness held by more ancient writers gave way to a generalized notion of madness as a form of divine penalty. Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat (“Whom God would destroy, he first makes mad”), an ancient adage warned; and during the medieval and early Renaissance periods, Europeans generally believed that madness could be a punishment for individual transgressions such as pride or disobedience, often inflicted upon the sinner by devils. It was thought in many cases to end in death and damnation, but could also function as a form of penance leading to self-knowledge and contrition.11 A repository of symptoms of madness and their relation to sin exists in the Renaissance text Malleus Maleficarum, a treatise that reflected an increasing fear during the period that the mad were agents of the devil. The text appeared first in 1584 and was the work of two German Dominicans, Jacobus Sprenger and Heinrich Krämer, who were witch-hunters and official Inquisitors of Pope Innocent VIII. Malleus Maleficarum was extremely popular with England’s reading public, appearing in five editions between 1584 and 1669. It was also unquestionably grotesque in its depictions of the modes by which the devil assumed control of the human soul; still, the symptoms of such madness were relatively typical of the period: fear, struggle, guilt, repressed hostility, and sexual desire.12 Many treatments of the mad during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reflected the belief in the association between madness and the supernatural. Acts of

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sacrilege, for instance, were often regarded as evidence of mental imbalance, and treated by exorcism or prescribed pilgrimage. Corporal punishment was also considered appropriate treatment, as Thomas More described in his Dialogue of Comfort (1533), when he ordered that a madman be whipped for lifting women’s skirts at the elevation of the host during Mass.13 Generally speaking, European perceptions and treatments of the mad during this period were based upon classical ideas, current medical knowledge, and theological and popular beliefs concerning demonic or divine possession. This unique blending of ideas can be discerned in the account of the madness of Brother Hugo van der Goes, written by Gaspar Ofhuys at the turn of the sixteenth century: Certain people talked of a peculiar case of frenesis magna, the great frenzy of the brain. Others, however, believed him to be possessed of an evil spirit. There were, in fact, symptoms of both unfortunate diseases present in him…. There are, of course, several types of the disease depending on its original cause: sometimes the cause is melancholic food; at other times it is the consumption of strong wines which heat the body juices and burn them to ashes. Furthermore, frenzies may occur because of certain sufferings of the soul.14 Ofhuys’ own conclusion was that the Brother had become overly arrogant due to the amount of flattery he had received from other members of the Order for his artistic ability. Further, Hugo’s high opinion of himself would undoubtedly have brought about his spiritual destruction had

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it not been for his affliction with madness, which was “a great mercy” visited upon him by God.15 This amalgam of views concerning madness or melancholy was the inheritance of Robert Burton’s immediate predecessors who wrote on the subject. English texts on the condition properly began with Timothy Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie, published in two editions in 1586. Bright’s principle concern in the Treatise was with delineating the causes and treatment of two distinct forms of illness: physiological melancholy and spiritual despair. True to the Renaissance tradition in which he situated himself as a physician, Bright identified the root of melancholy in an imbalance of bodily humours, which was caused principally by bad diet. Beets, cabbage, olives and dates, unleavened bread, various meats, birds and fish, as well as red wine and ale were singled out by the author as particularly unhealthy culprits that could upset the humours in such a way as to cause fear and sadness. Further, once a melancholic condition had arisen, it could be exacerbated by unhealthy air, too much study, insufficient exercise, or inadequate rest. Although Bright maintained that melancholy and spiritual despair were distinct from one another, he nonetheless believed that a melancholic state increased a patient’s vulnerability to the more threatening spiritual disorder. Invoking an image that would infiltrate discourses on madness over the next two centuries, Bright argued that melancholy affected the mind by impairing reason and, in such a condition, human life was reduced to “the condition of the brute beasts.” We might note that the same image was invoked by Bright’s contemporary, Reginald Scot, who noted that mad women were

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often known to believe that they themselves were “brute beasts.”16 A decade and a half after the first publication of Bright’s Treatise, Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Mind appeared in England, and was an immediate success with the reading public (further editions were produced in 1604, 1621, and 1628). Wright’s central contention was that the mind was principally affected by an individual’s virtue, and he regarded mental illness as a product of sin. In the absence of an appropriate spiritual life, he argued, passions would run rampant, resulting in selfindulgence and a fixation on sensual gratification. This would not only breed mental disorder, but invite eternal damnation: “without prayer, meditation, and the Sacraments of Christ’s Church, exercise of virtue, and works of pietie,” he wrote, one would become “not unlike a dead body, which for lacke of a living soule daily falleth away by putrification…and becometh ghastly, loathsome and stinking.”17 Wright’s work was followed by that of Thomas Walkington, whose The Optick Glass of Humours (1607) resided well within the territory mapped out by his predecessors. Like these other writers, Walkington’s central concern was with determining the relationship between the body and the mind; and he concluded that a sound mind was dependent upon a temperate style of life and, particularly, a diet of moderation. These were critical, he wrote, “lest that we leving the golden mean, and with corrupted judgements embracing the leaden extremity… swimming as it were with the eddy and current of our base humours, wee do perish on the sea of voluptuousness, long before we come to our wished port.”18

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Two other texts on the subject are of note, both of which were printed during the decade preceding the publication of Burton’s Anatomy. The first was William Perkins’ The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1613), and the second was Thomas Adams’ The Diseases of the Soule: A Discourse Divine, Morall, and Physicall (1616). Adams, as the title of his treatise indicates, followed in the path of Thomas Wright, contending that all mental and physical diseases were products of the moral state of the individual or, more specifically, of the health of the individual’s soul. Adams reduced all human illnesses to a subset of nineteen physical diseases, and systematically demonstrated how each had a companion disorder that affected the soul. Each of these nineteen pairs was described in terms of its causes, symptoms, and cure; and the result was a volume that Adams hoped would assist the English in “straitening our warped Affections; and directing the Soule to heaven.” Perkins, on the other hand, was principally concerned with the causal relationship between the state of the physical body and that of the mind. His work was of particular interest to Burton, who cited the Cases of Conscience specifically a number of times in the Anatomy.19 From both his immediate and more distant predecessors, Robert Burton inherited a tradition within which mental disease was related to a loss of reason, indulgence of the passions, imbalances of bodily humours, spiritual health, and divine intervention. The brilliance of The Anatomy of Melancholy lies to a substantial degree in Burton’s capacity to integrate these often-contradictory ancient and contemporary views into a single text. As noted earlier, the treatise is not entirely consistent in a variety of respects, owing

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to this heterogeneous quality; nonetheless, it is possible to identify the broad parameters of Burton’s understanding of melancholy within his three-volume mosaic. To begin, Burton employed the term melancholy in reference to a variety of conditions that were known to his contemporaries: “Folly, melancholy, madness, are but one disease, delirium is a common name to all.”20 He believed that all human beings had the capacity for self-reflection; and were possessed of innate ideas that allowed for understanding and, consequently, rationality. It was the faculty of rationality, he contended, that permitted human beings to act in an appropriate fashion: Understanding is a power of the soul, by which we perceive, know, remember, and judge as well singulars, as universals, having certain innate notices or beginnings of arts, a reflecting action, by which it judgeth of its own doings, and examines them.21 Will, is the power of the rational soul, which covets or avoids such things as have been before judged, and apprehended by the understanding. If good, it approves; if evil, it abhorres it: so that his object is either good or evil…we are moved to good or bad by our appetite, ruled and directed by sense; so in this we are carried by reason.22 Burton differentiated between humans and animals on the bases of understanding, innate notices, and reasoned reflection: “As first, the sense only comprehends singularities, the understanding universalities. Secondly, the sense hath no innate notions. Thirdly, brutes cannot reflect

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upon themselves.”23 When reason failed, as in the case of a person who was beset by chronic melancholy, the sensual appetites prevailed. For Burton, melancholy thus amounted to a corruption of reason brought about, he generally argued, by the exercise of unbridled imagination. As many doubts arise about the affection, whether it be imagination or reason alone, or both…they make away themselves oftentimes, and suppose many absurd and ridiculous things. Why doth not reason detect the fallacy, settle and persuade if she be free?…it is first in imagination, and afterwards in reason.24 Two broad categories of causes of melancholy were presented in the text: those that we might identify as ‘supernatural’ and those that we might call ‘natural’. Within the general category of supernatural causes, Burton referred to a wide range of divine and demonic forces that he, like most of his contemporaries, undoubtedly regarded as substantial; forces that were “from God and His angels or by God’s permission from the devil and his ministers.”25 The devil and his legions of devils and witches were invoked much more often throughout the text than God himself, as instigators of melancholy (as well as the forces behind a host of other contingencies in both the human and natural worlds): Thus the devil reigns, and in a thousand several shapes…. Sometimes he tempts by covetousness, drunkenness, pleasure, pride, etc., errs, dejects, saves, kills, protects, and rides men as they do

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their horses. He studies our overthrow, and generally seeks our destruction.26 Of witches, Burton claimed that they could do almost as much harm as the devil, and could “cause tempests, storms…hurt and infect men and beasts, vines, corn, cattle, plants, make women abortive, not to conceive, barren.27 The moral corruption wrought by devils and witches could lead to dangerous excesses of the imagination that would not only bring about the onset of melancholy, but would “crucify the souls of mortal men.” In the state of religious melancholy created by these demonic forces, human beings were rendered incapable of recognizing their delusions or, worse still, their superstitions, the latter of which injured not only the brain, but also the will, heart, understanding, and the soul.28 Within this category of natural causes of melancholy, Burton broadly identified two forms: those that can be called experiential and those that were physiological. Among experiential causes that he identified and discussed at length were fear,29 climatic and atmospheric conditions (“Such as is the air,” he wrote, “such be our spirits, and as our spirits, such are our humours”),30 illness,31 inactivity and excessive study,32 bad diet (he advised, for instance, against the consumption of numerous fish, but cited Timothy Bright specifically in excluding lobster and crab from the censured list),33 poverty,34 and the pursuit of pleasure, against which he issued the dire warning: It is a wonder to see, how many poor, distressed, miserable wretches, one shall meet almost in every

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path and street, begging for alms, that have been well descended, and sometimes in flourishing estate, now ragged, tottered, and ready to be starved, lingering out a painful life, in discontent and grief of body and mind, and all through immoderate lust, gaming, pleasure and riot. ’Tis the common end of all sensual epicures and brutish prodigals, that are stupefied and carried away headlong with their several pleasures and lusts.35 In respect to the physiological causes of melancholy, he included aging,36 facial complexion,37 and biological sex: men, he suggested, were more prone to melancholy than women, “yet women misaffected are far more violent, and grievously troubled.”38 These natural causes of melancholy could create imbalances of fluids and fumes within the body, both of which directly related to the four humours of medieval and Renaissance medicine: sanguine (blood), phlegm (pituita), yellow bile (choler), and black bile (melancholy). Consequently, melancholy affected those with “a hot heart, moist brain, hot liver and cold stomach;”39 and the disease, in most of its varied forms, could be traced to “those dark, obscure, gross fumes, ascending from black humours…by which the brain and phantasy are troubled and eclipsed.”40 In order to fully map the pathology of melancholy, Burton delineated the causes, symptoms, and cures of the disease in an unprecedented fashion. In the pages of the Anatomy, we find references to the works of Herodotus, Epictetus, Pythagoras, Xenophon, Plato, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Plutarch, Pliny, Seneca, Galen, the Hebrew prophets, St. Paul and the Evangelists, Plotinus, Avicenna, Ignatius

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Loyola, Martin Luther, and scores of others whose writing bore some relevance upon the author’s project. Burton was clearly attempting to draw upon every source on the subject that was available at the time; and among these sources was another important body of literature not represented fully in the above list: that of the literature of travel. It is impossible to ascertain how much of this material Burton actually read, but given the number of direct textual citations within the Anatomy, as well as his obviously ravenous literary appetite, it is safe to conclude that he was familiar with a good deal of the travel literature in print at the beginning of the seventeenth century in England. Within the corpus of published travel accounts available to Burton, there were two principle forms: the marvelous accounts of the non-European world of ancient, medieval, and early Renaissance writers, and the accounts of explorers and adventurers of the late Renaissance and early Atlantic periods. In respect to the former, he inherited a substantial body of legendary material that described wondrous people, societies, and natural phenomena located at the fringes of the known geographical world; and the earliest such articulations to survive into the modern period were contained in the records of Herodotus (484425bce). Herodotus’ descriptions of lands with which he had familiarity were curious, but relatively accurate (his description of Egyptian crocodiles, for instance, depicted creatures that bear a definite resemblance to crocodiles as we know them); but in what he called the “extreme regions of the earth”—those areas situated at the peripheries of the world he and his contemporaries knew—his descriptions assumed a wondrous character. In Arabia there were trees

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bearing frankincense that were “guarded by winged serpants;” in India, the animals and birds were much larger than in any other region of the world; and in Libya, there was an abundance of creatures that were composed of both human and animal parts.41 A century after the death of Herodotus, much of the material he recorded found its way into the writing of Ctesias, who claimed to have had first- or second-hand knowledge of the wonders of which he wrote; these included such marvels as composite human and animal creatures (which he transplanted from Libya to India) and griffins.42 The material contained in Ctesias remained alive in the ancient imagination, finding its way ultimately into the writing of Pliny (23-79ce), and in particular into his Natural History, a text that remained influential with encyclopaedists well into the thirteenth century. The eleventh century pseudo-Alexandrian text, Wonders of the East, for instance, was ostensibly an informative tract of the marvels located at the peripheries of the known world; the text, however, drew substantially upon the images of antiquity recorded by Pliny, including bizarre animals and birds, and many varieties of human beings with animal parts.43 Two successors to Alexander’s Wonders were chiefly responsible for sustaining these images into Renaissance England. The first was Marco Polo’s Notable and Famous Travels, which appeared in English translation in 1579, and contained not only detailed descriptions of the Mongols and the natural history of Cathay, but fantastic images harkening back to Herodotus of such marvelous creatures as unicorns and men with both animal and human attributes. The second text was a compilation of known travel material by Jehan

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d’Outremeuse, who has been described as the “father of English sensation writers.”44 Long-known as Sir John Mandeville’s Travels, the work was published in London in 1499; and we may presume that it was extremely popular, given the fact that three hundred manuscripts are still in existence dating from before the advent of the printing press. Mandeville’s Travels was filled with fantastic descriptions; and in spite of its obviously fictive character, it was included in the first edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages (1582), a text that is regarded as the most influential collection of recorded voyages produced in Tudor England.45 Records of travelers’ voyages began appearing in England in quantity from the mid-sixteenth century onward. A great deal of the earliest available travel material was published in the collections of Richard Eden, beginning in 1553 with his first collection of translated accounts, A Treatyse of the Newe India, and other NewFound Landes and Ilands. This volume was followed by The Decades of the Newe World (1555), and The History of Travayle in the West and East Indies (1577). By means of these three collections, the English reading public was afforded access to accounts of voyages by Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Amerigo Vespucci, various Jesuits who had traveled to China and Japan, and fragments of accounts from Francisco Lopez de Gómara, Oviedo y Valdez, and Peter Martyr. A full version of Gómara’s The Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the West India was subsequently published in 1578, and Martyr’s The Decades of the New World was produced in a complete edition, De Nouo Orbe, at the urging of Richard Hakluyt in 1612.46 The first text

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written and published by an English traveler was John Hawkins’ A True Declaration of the troublesome Voyage of Mr. John Hawkins to the Partes of Guynea and the West Indies (1569); and it was followed by others such as George Best’s A True Discourse of the Late Voyage of Discoverie…of Martin Frobisher (1578), Francis Drake’s A Summarie and True Discourse of Sir Francis Drake’s East Indian Voyage (1589), Walter Raleigh’s Discoverie of the large, rich and beautiful Empyre of Guiana (1596), and William Strachey’s For the Colony in Virginea Britannia (1612).47 These texts penned by Englishmen were extremely popular with the reading public, appearing in several editions in the years immediately following their initial publication.48 Also available during the period were translations of Las Casas’, The Spanish Colonie (1583), and Mendoza’s The Historie of the great and mightie Kingdome of China (1588), which was a compilation of the missionary accounts of Gaspar da Cruz, Martin de Rada (Herrada), Pedro de Alforo, and Martin Ignaxio. Giovanni da Verrazano, John Cabot, and Jean Robaut appeared in translation in Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages (1582); the account of Jacques Cartier’s 1534 voyage to the Gaspé Peninsula appeared in 1580 and was reprinted in the first edition of Hakluyt’s Principle Navigations in 1589 (Hakluyt’s project was modeled on Giovanni Ramusio’s Delle Navigationi [1554ff], an Italian text that was widely read, despite the fact that it was not translated into English until the seventeenth century); and Acosta’s Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies was published in London in 1604 (a popular adaptation of which was published in 1656 under the title The Tears of the Indians).49

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Accounts of English travelers would multiply during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as British colonial interests commenced in earnest. Nonetheless, for a resolute scholar such a Robert Burton, there was a substantial body of available literature at the beginning of the seventeenth century concerning non-Europeans that provided English readers with a blend of actual accounts and legendary images. It is clear that Burton was familiar with a good portion of this material, based upon the number of specific references in the Anatomy to ancient writers, medieval and Renaissance travelers, actual texts, and recently acquired cultural and geographical data. As noted previously, Burton referred repeatedly in his treatise to Herodotus and Pliny, both of whom had written extensively regarding marvelous phenomena at the fringes of their respective worlds. He extensively cited Pliny, in particular, whose Summarie of the Antiquities and wonders of the World was printed in English translation in part in 1566, and in its entirety in 1601.50 In addition, specific references to a number of travelers and their accounts were interspersed throughout all three volumes of the Anatomy. In Democritus Junior to the Reader (his introduction to the text), for instance, Burton wrote of “Mat. Riccius the Jesuit, and some others, [who] relate the industry of the Chinese.”51 Elsewhere, he referred to “Acosta the Jesuit,”52 “Cabeus the Jesuit,” “Herrera and Laet,”53 “Marcus Polus, Lerius, Benzo,”54 and even more specifically, “P. Martyr in his Ocean Decades.”55 We find also in the text numerous references to recorded geographical ‘discoveries’ that point to Burton’s familiarity with published contemporary travel accounts. He asked in Part II, for instance, whether “the

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Venetian’s [Marco Polo] narrative be true or false of that great city of Quinsay and Cambalu;” and whether the “miraculous mountain Ybouyapab… or that of Pariacacca” in Brazil and Peru actually existed. He referred to the Sierras, Andes, and Ilanos; to Nova Hispana; to “those spherical stones in Cuba;” and to the discovery of “Terra Australis Incognita.” In addition, he wrote of recent maps that indicated that California was an island rather than a cape, and mused about whether “Hudson’s discovery be true of a newfound ocean.”56 Elsewhere he mentioned an equatorial region of which he had learned from Acosta, that was a “most temperate habitation, wholesome air, a paradise of pleasure.”57 Alongside references to geographical discoveries recorded in travel literature, Burton also referred specifically throughout the treatise to non-Europeans of both legend and contemporary travelers’ accounts. In Part II, for example, he wrote of Amazons; and in his introduction to the work, mentioned “anthropophagi who eat one another.” Although the phenomenon of Amazons was undoubtedly the stuff of legend, we might note that these figures appeared also in current travel accounts, such as Walter Raleigh’s description of Guiana.58 Cannibals, too, were frequently described in legendary reports. In Alexander’s Wonders we read, for instance, of the natives of a Red Sea island who took pleasure in devouring foreigners; and in Mandeville’s Travels, the inhabitants of an island called Mica were said to slaughter men in order to “drink their blood,” and the humanoid creatures of Ynde were reported to enjoy “eating men whenever they can get them.” Cannibals were situated also in the Americas from an early date. Columbus, for

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instance, wrote of a Caribbean island “inhabited by a people who are…very ferocious, and who eat human flesh;”59 and a 1505 “Description of a Wood Engraving Illustrating the South American Indians,” claimed that the natives “ete also on[e] another.”60 Drawing again on the marvelous tales of the medieval period, Burton recounted a curious legend of which he had read in Marco Polo’s Travels, concerning walking spirits who were said to inhabit Asian deserts: “if one lose his company by chance, these devils will call him by his name, and counterfeit voices of his companions, to seduce him.” We might note that a derivative of the same legend appeared in Alexander’s Wonders, where the author described, An island in the Red Sea where there is a race of men called by us Donestre. They are shaped like soothsayers from the head to the navel…and they know all human languages. When they see a man of foreign race, they address him and his relatives, the names of acquaintances, and with lying words they beguile him.61 Traditional marvels aside, there are a number of notable instances in which non-Europeans of current travel literature appeared in the Anatomy. Musing, in his introduction to the text, on what radical reforms might be accomplished by an unnamed ‘visitor’ with the strength of ten thousand men, Burton included: the discovery of a cure for all rampant diseases, the subversion of atheism (Burton was an Anglican clergyman), the irrigation of the deserts of Arabia, the discovery of a Northwest Passage, and the eradication of “barbarism” in America. He concluded,

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however, in resigning himself to the fact that these were “vain, absurd, and ridiculous wishes not to be hoped…all must be as it is.”62 In the context of a discussion of women’s clothing, jewelry, and make-up later in the treatise, Burton referred to “John Lerius the Bergundian,” from whose account he had learned of the native Brazilians’ refusal to be persuaded to wear clothing of any sort.63 Elsewhere in the text, he wrote of barbarous Indians, among whom “tyrannical and bloody sacrifices of men…are still in use;”64 and of the Chinese who, despite their intelligence, were “so gulled, so tortured with superstition, so blind as to worship sticks and stones.”65 The problem of superstition looms large in the book, and was afforded particular attention in the third volume, where the author wrote at length on the subject of religious melancholy—a disease that he called “a quintessence of madness.”66 Burton noted that some Europeans suffered from the disorder (most notably, Roman Catholics); but what was perhaps more intriguing was his contention that everyone who resided at the geographical limits of the European world was plagued by this form of melancholy. The natives of Mexico received special attention owing to the fact that, according to the author, they were known to have “daily sacrificed…the hearts of men yet living, 20,000 in a year…to their idols made of flour and men’s blood, and every year 6,000 infants of both sexes.”67 Still, no non-Europeans escaped his censure, as he related the global extent of the disease: Idolaters and Mahometans possess almost Asia, Africa, America, Magellanica. The kings of China, Great Cham, Siam, and Bornay, Pegu, Deccan,

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Narsinga, Japan, etc., are all gentiles, idolaters, and many other petty princes in Africa, all Terra Australis Incognita, most of American pagans, differing all in their severall superstitions; and yet idolaters.68 Based upon the volume of references in the Anatomy, it is safe to assume that Burton was well acquainted with the various literatures of travel available in England at the time in which he wrote. What is not perhaps immediately obvious to the reader of the text, is that in addition to direct references and citations such as these we have considered here, there are curious resonances throughout the text between (i) the delusions of the mad, and the causes and other symptoms of melancholy described by Burton and (ii) the images of non-Europeans contained within the travel accounts available during the period. The direct incorporation of material from these accounts, as well as this second more subtle association (to be presently considered), created a relationship between the discourse of madness and that of the non-European world that ran through the entire treatise. The subject of melancholic delusions was one to which Burton devoted a great deal of attention in the Anatomy, and by far the most common delusion he associated with individuals who suffered from the condition was their tendency to believe themselves to be beasts or animals. The generic term ‘beasts’ appeared in this respect in numerous places in the text,69 as did a variety of specific references to dogs, wolves, apes, bears, foxes, asses, and various birds.70 In addition, Burton believed that melancholics, especially

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those whose condition was caused primarily by the wrongful use of their will, were not only plagued by delusions of bestiality, but that they themselves were ultimately “like so many beasts.”71 Images of non-Europeans as likewise bestial and animal-like permeated much of the travel literature available to English readers during the same period. The unspecific term ‘beast’, for instance, was a common designation of many accounts. It appeared in the correspondences of Columbus’ physician on his second voyage, who wrote in respect of the native peoples he encountered, “their degradation is greater than any beast in the world;” and in the reflections of Villegagnon on the Tupinamba of Brazil: “it seemed to me that we had fallen among beasts bearing a human countenance.”72 Hakluyt’s Principle Navigations contained a number of accounts in which non-Europeans were described as “brute beasts,” and “wilde beast[s];” and Robert Gray wrote of the people of Virginia, that they were “brutish savages” who were “worse than… beasts.”73 Legendary and contemporary depictions of non-Europeans as particular kinds of animals also abounded during this period. Mandeville referred to men who walked on all fours; in Alexander’s Wonders we read of those who had camels’ feet and donkeys’ teeth; and even Columbus invoked the image in describing native youths whose hair was “coarse,” like “the hairs of a horse’s tail.”74 Human-animal conglomerates were also prominent features of, especially, legendary accounts. Ctesias, for example, described mortikhara—creatures who were part human, part lion, and part scorpion; and Mandeville recorded the existence of men with horses’ feet, and those who were half man and half horse. Creatures with the heads or faces of dogs were

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particularly noted by many writers, including Herodotus, Ctesias, and Marco Polo;75 and images of humans as apelike were likewise a common motif, appearing in both legendary and contemporary accounts: Mandeville described men who could climb to the tops of trees “as lyghtely as any ape,” and Purchass described native Americans as “speaking apes.”76 Finally, we might note that Burton identified another common delusion whereby melancholics believed that they were creatures with horns,77 a marvelous image that was notable also in legendary accounts: Ctesias and Marco Polo vouched for the reality of unicorns, and in The Wonders of the East we read of “women who have boars’ tusks.”78 There were resonances, beyond the contours of bestiality, between the images of travel literature and the delusions of melancholics that Burton presented in the Anatomy. Notable in this respect were (i) the propensity of individuals suffering from melancholy to believe that they were disproportionately large or small, and (ii) their fear of becoming—or belief that they were—headless. Burton reported in the treatise that some madmen were convinced that they were giants, while others maintained that they were dwarfs,79 two images that were familiar occurrences in available travel accounts, especially in Ctesias, in the Wonders, and in Mandeville’s Travels, where human were described who were “eight feet tall and eight feet wide,” and others who were “fifteen feet long” and “twenty feet tall.” Vespucci wondered at the women he encountered on Curacao, who were “so lofty in stature that we gazed at them in astonishment” (he subsequently named the place the Isle of Giants); and these images made their way

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even into a sixteenth-century work on astronomy, where the author noted the existence of a region of giants where Magellan, having “passed the straight and narrow see, beyonde America, dyd measure them to be ten fote long.”80 Legendary Amazons, present in wonder literature—and, of course, in the Anatomy—up to the account of Marco Polo, also appeared in contemporary travel tracts such as Walter Raleigh’s description of Guyana; 81 and human beings who were very small populated many of the regions described by early writers. Mandeville recorded the existence of pygmies, for instance, and Marco Polo similarly reported having seen “little men.”82 A delusion relating to decapitation was also discussed a number of times in the Anatomy, and in particular in Part I, where Burton noted that some patients who suffered from the disease were “afraid their heads will fall off their shoulders,” while others simply “suppose they have no heads.”83 This acephalous image was also present in the traditional literature of marvels, where Burton and his contemporaries could read of anthropophagi—or, as the writers of Alexander’s Wonders and Mandeville’s Travels described them, “men begotten without heads,” and “foule men of figure without heads.”84 Turning from the delusions of melancholics to the causes of madness, we can recognize again a peculiar affinity between many of Burton’s offending impulses and the character of non-Europeans and their cultures described in the texts of the period. Among the variety of causes of melancholy identified in his text, Burton discussed inappropriate diet, superstition and idolatry, and uncontrollable passions. Each of these reverberated in contemporary travel accounts. Three subsections of the first volume of

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the Anatomy were devoted to the problem of diet; under the title of ‘Bad Diet a Cause’, Burton described in detail how specific foods, or the state of foods—their “quantity, quality, or the like”—could induce madness. Meat was noted as particularly problematic in this respect, since mental derangement could result from not only the kind of meat consumed, but by the “quantity, disorder of time and place, unseasonable use of it, intemperance, overmuch or overlittle taking of it.85 There is no doubt that the subject of diet was a concern also of writers of travel literature prior to, and during, the period in question; and many of these writers focused their attention on two issues: the disturbing quality of the food consumed outside of Western Europe, and the intemperance of non-Europeans. Most obviously, references to cannibalism (discussed previously) pointed to what could only be interpreted by purported witnesses as an extremely distasteful dietary habit. Human flesh aside, many writers described the foods consumed by their subjects in clearly revolting terms. In Mandeville’s Travels, for instance, we discover one-eyed giants who ate “raw flesh and fish;” the physician, Chanca, writing during Columbus’ second voyage, claimed that the natives he had encountered ate snakes, spiders, lizards, and worms. Magellan reported having witnessed natives in the Philippines eating “rats without skinning them;” Robert Fabian claimed to have witnessed three kidnapped native Americans eating “raw flesh;” and George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote that the Americans “had amongst them no good or wholesome food, for even that Maize, whereof they make their bread, had in the root thereof a most venomous kind of liquor, which is no better than deadly

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poison.”86 Over-indulgence was a vice that was also often noted by these writers who, like Vespucci, faulted the native peoples they encountered for failing to eat properly organized meals and for exhibiting an “Epicurean” lifestyle. Similarly, an anonymous English tract describing the Japanese in the sixteenth century, pointed out a propensity for consuming too much alcohol, as did the account of a contemporary English sailor, John Chilton, who claimed to have narrowly avoided being eaten by Mexicans due to his lanky physique and his having plied the king with wine: “For wine,” he wrote, “they will sell their wives and children.”87 Looking to the subject of superstition and idolatry, we can again discern a relationship among the texts at hand. Burton was particularly interested in the problem of religious melancholy, a disorder that he believed was caused primarily by superstition and idolatry, and that he regarded as among the most devastating forms of the disease. “There is nothing so mad and absurd,” he wrote of religious melancholics, “so ridiculous, impossible, incredible, which they will not believe, observe, and diligently perform…nothing so monstrous to conceive, or intolerable to put into practice, so cruel to suffer, which they will not undertake.”88 He claimed further that superstition had destroyed more human souls than wars, plagues, and famine.89 There was good reason for Burton’s claim that most of the world’s people suffered from the affliction; references to idolatry and superstition among the people encountered by travelers abounded in the literature of the period. Most in fact concurred with Vespucci, who wrote, “While among these people we did not learn that they had

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any religion…they are worse than heathen.”90 Columbus wrote that the natives he encountered “belonged to no religion;” Jacques Cartier described the Huron deity he called Cudouagny as a “wicked spirit who deceived them;” and in other texts, non-Europeans were accused of “godless ignorance & blasphemous idolatrie,” of being devoid of religion and of any related “knowledge of honesty or virtue;” and of being infidels.91 A final broad class of causes for the state of melancholy that resonated with depictions of non-Europeans during the period of the Anatomy’s composition was that of uncontrolled passions. These, wrote Burton, generally became pronounced when an individual lost control over the sensual appetite, and allowed free reign to certain natural inclinations. The results of such a loss of control were “violent perturbations of the mind…vicious habits, customs, [and] feral diseases.”92 Two forms of uncontrolled passions were particularly significant as we turn to contemporary travel accounts: sexual immodesty and anger. In terms of the first, Burton targeted women in particular as prone to lasciviousness, noting that the free exercise of sexual appetite was a cause of melancholy in young women especially. Those who fell into this category of unbridled passion were women who were “wonton, idle flirt[s]…which are too forward many times, and apt to cast away themselves on him that comes next, without all care, council, circumspection, and judgement.”93 Burton also regarded sexual lasciviousness as a pure evil, and maintained that women who indulged this inclination not only brought about their own mental imbalance, but were the cause of melancholy in men.94 Prostitutes received particularly acute censure

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in the Anatomy, where they were described as polluters of the young, destroyers of men, and the devil’s “fodder.” He went further still in asserting that a prostitute was “more envious than the pox, as malicious as melancholy, as covetous as hell. If from the beginning of the world any were… bad in the superlative degree, ’tis a whore.”95 Allegations of prostitution and sexual lasciviousness among peoples encountered by European travelers were commonly leveled also in the literature of the period. Marco Polo wrote that although there were no prostitutes within the Khan’s cities, there were multitudes of such women in the suburbs, where they plied their trade with foreigners. In one suburb in fact, he claimed to have witnessed twenty thousand of these women, who were all able to make a good living. Mandeville claimed that in Ynde (Ethiopia) there were no marriages, “but all the women of that country are common to every man;” Vespucci characterized the natives of Mexico (or perhaps Yucatan) as “libidinous beyond measure, and the women far more than the men;” and Cartier described what he regarded as a terrible custom among the Huron, whereby young girls were placed in brothels when they reached puberty where they remained until they were selected as wives by the men of their communities.96 A second form of uncontrolled passion—that of anger—is also worth noting in relation to this body of literature. As a cause of melancholy, anger in a variety of guises was of great concern to Burton; so much so, in fact, that he devoted a number of entire subsections of his treatise not only to the general subject of anger, but to fury, hatred, and the desire for revenge.97 These, he warned, “heap upon us hell and eternal damnation.”98 Unwarranted hostility

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and revengefulness were often presented as features of non-European peoples too, as they were portrayed in early reports (although the image, as we will see, became even more prevalent in subsequent literature). Mandeville, for instance, described “wicked men” who derived their greatest pleasure from slaughtering other men; Vespucci, adding to his description of Mexican women as libidinous, claimed that they were heartless and cruel, a disposition typified by the fact that when they were angered by their husbands they would kill their unborn children for spite; and the previously noted anonymous English tract from the sixteenth century claimed that the Japanese were prone to anger, wrath, and fury, and would “suffer not the least injurie in the worlde to passe unrevenged.”99 Turning finally to the symptoms of melancholy and their reverberations within voyagers’ accounts, a number of striking parallels can again be discerned. In a discussion of melancholy brought about by witchcraft, Burton claimed that witches had the ability to create a form of madness in which “men feel no pain on the rack…or feel other tortures.”100 The idea that the mad could tolerate unnatural degrees of discomfort would become a commonly held view well into the eighteenth century; and a similar notion regarding peoples of foreign lands would become equally commonplace, although it was already recognizable in the literature of Burton’s day. In a general sense, the anonymous Englishman noted above, wrote that the Japanese he had encountered were capable of displaying “incredible pacience in sufferinge.” Cartier’s description of the Huron was illustrative of this notion as it related to climate; since here, according to the explorer, were people

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who were “more indifferent to the cold than beasts.” Cartier went on to explain that in the coldest weather that he and his companions had experienced (which, he stressed, was “extraordinarily severe”), the natives traveled daily to the French ships through snow and ice, wearing virtually no clothing. The phenomenon, he wrote, was “incredible unless one has seen them.”101 A second symptom that Burton associated with melancholy that is worth noting, was the propensity of the mad toward child-like behavior. In Part I of the Anatomy, he considered at length the problem of aging, and the fact that melancholy was “necessary and inseparable” from this naturally-occurring decline. The aged, he wrote, were noticeably melancholic by virtue of the fact that they had become “children again.”102 Elsewhere, he identified simple-minded pursuits—spending “time in toys, idle questions, and things of no worth”—with madness; and declared that the fears of the mad were “foolish, ridiculous, and childish.”103 Portrayals of non-Europeans as childlike and easily amused were common elements in early travel literature, often revolving around the natives’ purported interest in things of no worth. Columbus, for instance, is said to have recounted in his journal the distribution of red caps and glass beads, “and many other things of little value,” an act that apparently won for him entirely the friendship of the natives he encountered. Verrazano recorded a similar exchange in North Carolina, involving “trinkets”, small bells, mirrors;” Vespucci claimed that the natives of Mexico placed great value on “feathers…[and] little rosaries which they make out of fish bones, or of white and green stones…and many other things to which we attach no value;” and Frobisher

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was said to have presented a native man of Baffin Island with “trifles” that pleased the man greatly.104 In addition to a proclivity for child-like behavior, Burton’s symptoms of melancholy included also uncontrolled actions and utterances; a characteristic that was present too in contemporary travel reports and, again, would ultimately gain ascendancy in the years following the publication of Burton’s treatise. Discussing “frenzy,” Burton targeted uncontrolled dancing as symptomatic of mental disorder, and referred to St. Vitus Dance by way of example. He found it strange, he wrote, that it was possible for people (including pregnant women) to dance so long and ardently that they could “stir neither hand nor foot, but seem to be quite dead.”105 Inappropriate speech and other utterances were also identified as indications of melancholy: those who suffered from “lycanthropia” (wolfmadness), for example, were known to howl mournfully at night;106 others suffering from various forms of the disease were said to “cry like horses,” “bray like asses,” and “low” like cattle; and still others, suffering from bird-like delusions, were prone to singing from dusk until dawn.107 A more specific form of bizarre articulation was identified in the Anatomy as a consequence of madness: that of speaking unusual languages. Those suffering from head melancholy, for example, were said to speak such “strange” languages; and Burton claimed that in the “fits” of melancholics of all forms, “you shall hear them speak all manner of languages.”108 In terms reminiscent of Burton’s ‘lycanthropia’, John Smith in his account of the natives of Virginia recorded hearing “the most dolefullest noyse” he had ever heard, from a group of men and women outside his cabin; while the

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images of unbridled motion and sound merged early in the Atlantic period in Magellan’s Patagonian giants who were repeatedly reported as having a propensity for dancing and leaping and singing.109 Contemporary descriptions of the speech of foreigners generally echoed Burton’s thoughts on the strange languages of the mad, characterizing native languages as unknown and incomprehensible. Three kidnapped native Americans who were transported to England in the sixteenth century, for instance, were described by a witness as uttering “such speech that no man could understand them.” The sense of the overwhelming alterity of non-European languages was expressed with particular acuity by Columbus, who purportedly wrote in his journal of his intention to kidnap six natives upon his departure “that they may learn to speak.”110 All this is to say that in terms of the Anatomy’s author, we can safely draw two initial conclusions. The first is that Robert Burton was undoubtedly familiar with a substantial amount of early seventeenth century published travel literature, both legendary and related to Renaissance and early Atlantic era voyages of exploration; and the second is that actual references to this literature in the Anatomy indicate that Burton associated non-European cultures generally with the disease of melancholy or madness. The curious intersection of Burton’s images relating to the delusions, causes, and symptoms of melancholy with contemporary depictions of non-Europeans raises a third issue of wider cultural significance. If Burton’s treatise is, as is generally thought, the most comprehensive compendium of English thought on virtually every subject during the early seventeenth century, the question arises concerning

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whether the intersection of images indicates a more general cultural association between the mentally deranged and non-Europeans. The issue can be considered by pursuing two related lines of inquiry. These concern the extent to which the images of madness presented in the Anatomy remained operative within the English imagination in the years following its publication; and whether contemporary English depictions of non-Europeans continued to reflect these images and, consequently, to sustain the discursive association that is discernable in Burton’s treatise.

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Notes 1. Lawrence Babb, Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1959), 1; cf xi. 2. Ibid., 10. 3. Xenophon, Memorabilia, 9, 6-7, cited in George Rosen, Madness in Society: Chapters in the Historical Sociology of Mental Illness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 94; cf. 97. 4. Rosen, Madness in Society, 71-73. 5. Phaedrus 244a-b; Timaeus 71d-e. At Phaedrus 265a,Socrates says, “there are two kinds of madness, one resulting from human ailments, the other from a divine disturbance….” Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., The Complete Dialogues of Plato (New York: Bollingen Series, Pantheon Books,1966). See also Rosen, Madness and Society, 84. 6. Ion 533e, 534b and Phaedrus 245a in Hamilton and Cairns. See also Rosen, Madness in Society, and Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, xiii, for Aristotle’s famous Problem xxx. 7. Liber canonis (Venice, 1555), I, I, 4, ch. I, fol.7; III, I, 4, ch. 19, fol. 205r; cited in Kiblansky, Saturn and Melancholy, 87-88. 8. Liber canonis, III, I, 4, ch. 19, fol. 205r; cited in Kiblansky, Saturn and Melancholy, 89. 9. Raymond Klibansky notes that the theory appeared in the work of medieval encyclopaedists (eg. Albert Magnus, Liber de animalibus and Barthomomeus de Glanvilla, De proprietatibus rerum), and physicians (eg. Gordonius, Practica medicinae nuncupata,Guglielmode Corvi, Practica, Giovanni da Concorreggio, Practica nova). Ramond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 88-89. 10. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), cited in Lillian Feder, Madness in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 118. 11. See Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, xiii-xv, and Feder, Madness in Literature, 109-110.

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12. Feder, Madness in Literature, 112, 109-110. 13. Rosen, Madness in Society, 140-142. 14. Ofhuys was infirmarius of the Roode Cloister, 1482-1523. His account is cited in Rosen, Madness in Society, 145-146. 15. Ibid. 16. Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586), cited in Feder, Madness in Literature, 118; and William R. Mueller, The Anatomy of Robert Burton’s England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 13-16. Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, is cited in Feder, Madness in Literature, 117. 17. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601), cited in Mueller, The Anatomy of Robert Burton’s England, 17-18. 18. Thomas Walkington, The Optick Glass of Humours (London, 1607), cited in Mueller, The Anatomy of Robert Burton’s England, 20. 19. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (London, 1613), and Thomas Adams, The Diseases of the Soule: A Discourse Divine, Morall, and Physicall (London, 1616). Both are cited in Mueller, The Anatomy of Robert Burton’s England, 18-20. 20. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: Dutton Everyman’s Library, 1964 and 1968),”Democritus Junior to the Reader, Part I, 39. 21. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec.1, Memb.2, Subs. 10. 22. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 1, Memb. 2, Subs. 11. 23. Pt. I, Sec. 1, Memb. 2, Subs. 10. 24. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 1, Memb. 3, Subs. 2. 25. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 1, Subs. 1. See also Mueller, The Anatomy of Robert Burton’s England, 91. 26. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 1, Subs. 2. 27. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 1, Subs. 3. 28. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 1, Subs. 2. See also Pt III, Sec.4, Memb.1, Subs. 1 and 3. 29. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 3, Subs. 6. 30. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 2, Subs. 5. 31. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 1, Memb. 3, Subs. 2.

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32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 2, Subs. 1. 34. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 4, Subs. 6. 35. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 3, Subs. 13. 36. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 1, Subs. 5 and 6. 37. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 1, Memb. 3, Subs. 2. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 3. Burton wrote elsewhere in the text that old age, which was the unavoidable end of all existence, was “cold and dry, and of the same quality as melancholy is, must needs cause it, by diminuation of spirits and substance, and increasing of adjust humours,” Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 1, Subs. 5. For further discussion of the impact of “melancholy juice” upon the brain, see Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 2, Subs. 1. 41. Herodotus is cited in Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 50-51. 42. See Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 49, 51. 43. Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 7; and Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 57, 64, 68-69. 44. Edward Godfrey Cox, A Reference Guide to the Literature of Travel: Including Voyages, Geographical Descriptions, Adventures, Shipwrecks and Expeditions, 3 volumes (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1935 and 1938), I, 260, 69. 45. The Most Notable and Famous Travels of Marcus Paulus (London, 1579) was translated from Rodrigo de Santaelle’s Spanish version of 1503. The original title of Mandeville’s Travels was Here begynneth a lytell treatyse or book named Johan Mandevyll, Knight…and speketh of the wayes of the Holy Londe towarde Jherusalem and the marveyles of Ynde and of other diverse countree. See Cox, A Reference Guide, I, 3, 319-320. See also Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 8. 46. Cox, Reference Guide, I, 1-2, 5-6 and II, 236; Myron P. Gilmore, “The New World in French and English Historians of the Sixteenth Century,” Chiappelli, The First Images of America, II, 519; Benjamin Bissell, The American Indian in

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English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Hamden City: Archon Books, 1968), 1, 18-19; Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 214. 47. Cox, Reference Guide, II, 2, 198, 201, 253, 46. 48. Gilmore, “The New World,” 520. 49. Cartier’s account was titled A Shoret and Briefe Narration of the two Navigations and Discoveries to the Northwest Portes. Hakluyt’s The Principle Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or overland to the Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at any time within the compasse of these 1500 yeeres was revised and expanded into three volumes published between 1598 and 1600. See Cox, Reference Guide, I, 3-4, 28, 322; II, 35, 200; Gilmore, “The New World,” 519; Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 4-5, 18-19; Eric Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 385. 50. Cox, Reference Guide, I, 70; II, 334. The full translation was titled The Secrets and wonders of the world. 51. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, 91. “Riccius” (Matteo Ricci) is mentioned also at Pt. III, Sec. 4, Memb. 1, Subs. 2. 52. Ibid., Pt. III, Sec. 4, Memb. 1, Subs. 2. Acosta appears also at Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 2, Subs. 5 and Pt. II, Sec. 2, Memb. 3. 53. Ibid., Pt. II, Sec. 2, Memb. 3. Antonio de Herrera was official historian to Philip II, III, and IV. Jean de Laet’s De Imperio Magni Mogolis (1631) is considered one the best early accounts of India. See Cox, Reference Guide, II, 212, 317. 54. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. III, Sec. 4, Memb. 1, Subs. 2. Marco Polo is mentioned a number of times in the text; see Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 1, Subs. 2, Pt. II, Sec. 2, Memb. 3. Jean de Léry traveled to Brazil in 1556 with the intention of settling, but returned to France the following year after apparently coming into conflict with Villegagnon. His account, The History of America, Or Brasill, was published in London in 1611. Girolamo Benzoni, History of the New World…Showing his Travels in America appeared in Purchas, His Pilgrims (1613). See Gilmore, “The New World,” 521; Cox, Reference Guide, II, 255256, 182.

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55. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. III, Sec. 4, Memb. 1, Subs. 2; cf Pt. II, Sec. 2, Memb. 3. 56. Ibid., Pt. II, Sec. 2, Memb. 3. 57. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 2, Subs. 5. 58. Ibid., Pt. II, Sec. 2, Memb. 3; Pt. I, 67. Raleigh, The Discoverie of the large, rich and beautiful Empyre of Guiana (1596), cited in Cox, Reference Guide, II, 253. 59. The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels, M. C. Seymor, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 139, 97. I have transliterated the text here, and will do so throughout this essay. Christopher Columbus, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, trans. and ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: The Heritage Press, 1963), 185. No original copy of Columbus’ journal exists; contemporary editions are based on Las Casas, who claimed to be quoting Columbus directly. See Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 17. 60. Wilberforce Eames in Edward Arber, ed., The First Three English Books on America (Birmingham, 1885), xxvii; cited in Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 22; See also Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 69-70. 61. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 1, Subs. 2. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World,69-70. 62. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, 96-97. 63. Ibid., Pt. III, Sec. 2, Memb. 2, Subs. 3. 64. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 1, Subs. 2. 65 Ibid., Pt. III, Sec. 4, Memb. 1, Subs. 2. 66. Ibid., Pt. III, Sec. 4, Memb. 1, Subs. 1. 67. Ibid., Pt. III, Sec. 4, Memb. 1, Subs. 3. 68. Ibid., Pt. III, Sec. 4, Memb. 1, Subs. 1. Burton added at Pt. III, Sec. 4, Memb. 1, Subs. 2, “And even in these our days, both in the East and West Indies, in Tartary, China, Japan, etc., what strange idols, in what prodigious forms, with what absurd ceremonies are they adored.” 69. Ibid. See, for instance, Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 1, Subs. 3, and Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 3. 70. Ibid. See, for instance, Pt.I, Sec. 2, Memb. 3, Subs. 2; Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 1, Subs. 3; and Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 3.

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71. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 1, Memb. 3, Subs. 1. 72. Cecil Jane, trans. and ed., Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus, 2 vols., 2nd series, 65 and 70 (London: Hakluyt Society,1930-1933), 1:64; Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 177; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 154 n.13. 73. Hakluyt’s accounts of Robert Fabian (who described three native Americans forcibly transported to the English court), Francis Pretty, and Jacques Cartier (who wrote: “These men may very well and truly be called Wilde”) are cited in Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 18, 22. Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (London, 1609), is cited in Klaus E. Knorr, British Colonial Theories 1570-1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 30. Wilberforce Eames, “Description of a wood engraving Illustrating the South American Indians,” (1505) wrote: “These folke lyuen lyke beastes.” Arber, The First Three English Books on America, xxvii; and Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 22. 74. See The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels, 141; Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 64; Christopher Columbus, “First Contact,” in Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 383. 75. See The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels, 97; Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 6, 8; Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 51, 156. 76. The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels, 141; Samuel Purchas, “A Discourse on the diversity of Letters used by the divers Nations in the World,” Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vol. (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), I, 487; cited in Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 10,153 n. 11. 77. Pt.I, Sec.3, Memb. 3. 78. See Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 88, 68-69; and Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 6, 8. 79. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 1, Subs. 3. 80. Anthony Ascham, A Lytle Treatise of Astronomy (London: 1542) cited in Cox, Reference Guide, II, 251; The Bodley Version of

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Mandeville’s Travels, 129; and Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 6, 64, 71; Amerigo Vespucci, Letter to Soderini (1505), cited in David Beers Quinn, “New Geographical Horizons: Literature,” Chiappelli, The First Images of America, II, 640641. See also Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 6. 81. Cox, Reference Guide, II, 253; Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 2-3; Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 88. 82. The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels; Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 155, cf 102 n.12 for Marco Polo. 83. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 1, Subs. 2, and Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 3. 84. The image was also present in Ctesias. Alexander’s Wonders is cited in Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 69. The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels, 139. See also Campbell, 156, and Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 6. 85. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 2, Subs. 1. 86. The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels, 139; Chanca is cited in Jane, Select Documents, I, 70, and Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 177; Magellan in cited in Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 455; Robert Fabian, who was included in Hakluyt’s Principle Navigations, is cited in Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 18; and George Abbot, A Brief Description of the whole Worlde (London, 1599) is cited in Cox, Reference Guide, I, 70. 87. Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, cites Vespucci, 453-454, the anonymous writer on Japan, 354-355, and Chilton, 461. 88. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. III, Sec. 4, Memb. 1, Subs. 3. 89. Ibid., Pt. III, Sec. 4, Memb. 1, Subs. 1. Burton also added in the same subsection, “Superstition and true religion are poles apart.” 90. Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 454; Columbus, Journals, 65; cf Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 17. 91. Jacques Cartier is cited in Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 385-387. Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (1609), is

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cited in Knorr, British Colonial Theories, 30. Villegagnon, who characterized the people he met as without religion, is cited in Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 154 n.13; and George Best, described an aboriginal man captured by Martin Frobisher as a strange infidel;” Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 18. 92. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 1, Memb. 3, Subs. 1. For the relation between the sensual appetite and “Headstrong passions”, Pt. I, Sec. 1, Memb. 2, Subs. 11. 93. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 2, Subs. 4. 94 Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 2, Subs. 4 95. Ibid., Pt. III, Sec. 2, Memb. 5, Subs. 3. 96. Marco Polo is cited in Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 110, 154 n. 32; and Vespucci and Cartier in Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 453; 386. The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels, 97. 97. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 3, Subs. 8 and 9; Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 5, Subs. 1; Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 4, Subs. 7; and Pt. II, Sec. 2, Memb. 6, Subs. 1. 98. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 3, Subs. 8. 99. The Bodley Version of Mandeville’s Travels, 139; cf. Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 453, 354-355. 100. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 1, Subs. 3. 101. Both are cited in Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 387, 354. 102 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 1, Subs. 6. 103. Ibid., Pt. I, 114; Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 1, Subs. 2. 104. Verrazano and Vespucci are cited in Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 454, 383, 385. Richard Collinson, The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher (London: Hakluyt Society, 1867), 82, cited in Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 109. 105. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 1, Memb. 1, Subs. 4. 106. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 1, Memb. 1, Subs. 4. 107. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 1, Subs. 3. 108. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 2, Subs. 1; Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 1, Subs. 3; Pt. I, Sec. 1, Memb. 1, Subs. 4.

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109. Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 393, 454-455. 110. George Best and the English observer Robert Fabian were included in Hakluyt’s Principle Navigations; cited in Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 18. Columbus, Journals and Other Documents, 65; cf Greenblatt, 17. In Learning to Curse, 3031, Stephen Greenblatt explores early modern European conceptions of native languages as either sub-standard or of little difference from European language. Although the two ideas appear antithetical, Greenblatt argues that both point to a cultural inability to entertain simultaneously the “perception of likeness and difference.” Ultimately, the idea of deficiency functioned to silence non-Europeans, and that of homogeneity served to mask their unique cultural identities.

Chapter Two Mad and Foreign “Antipodes”

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Two motifs that permeated The Anatomy of Melancholy are particularly significant in turning to the issue of cultural views toward madness in the post-Burtonian period. The first is Burton’s firm contention that anyone could be afflicted by melancholy; that “most men are mad,” at least to some degree. In point of fact, Burton extended the diagnosis well beyond the human realm, including in his list of potential victims, animate and inanimate objects, vegetables, date trees, cabbages, wine, oil, birds in cages, dogs, kingdoms, provinces, and all political bodies.1 The second was Burton’s implicit view that although melancholy could be caused by supernatural forces, it no longer appeared to constitute a source of divine inspiration. The notion that any human being could suffer from melancholy or madness was afforded attention in at least two circles of thought during the century that followed the publication of the Anatomy. While increasingly remaining aloof from speculation on the role of the supernatural in the onset of madness, both medical and philosophical writing showed a marked interest in the condition as physiologically-based and, consequently, as a potential affliction for anyone. Writing physicians, in particular, explored a variety of such theories from the late seventeenth century

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onward. An extremely influential text of the period was Thomas Willis’ Essay on the Pathology of the Brain and Nervous Stock. In spite of a moralistic demeanor that to some degree set it apart from other medical tracts of the day, Willis’ treatise nonetheless attributed the condition of madness to internal spirits and passions that could infect the blood, the brain, and the “orderly arrangement” of all the body’s systems. Richard Baxter (who was a clergyman with a sincere interest in medicine) regarded melancholy as a disease that was entirely physiological and curable: “look out for the cure of your disease,” he advised his readers, “commit yourself to the care of your physician, and obey him.” Nicholas Robinson, writing in the early eighteenth century, argued that madness had nothing to do with either experience nor the conceptions of the afflicted individual, but was the result of alterations in the brain’s machinulae of nerves and fibers; and his contemporary, John Woodward, related madness to other physiological disorders that, when treated and neutralized, would simultaneously cure the attendant madness. In a typical case recorded in his Select Cases, and Consultations, in Physick, Woodward described a woman who was beset with increasing mental distress, as well as severe stomach pain. By administering a purge and a “clyster” to relieve the pain in her abdomen, he was able also to cure her of her madness. One of the most influential eighteenth century physicians who dealt with the mad was William Battie, a founder of St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunaticks, a governor of Bethlam Hospital (to be discussed presently), a President of the College of Physicians, and the administrator of his own independent madhouse. Unlike many of his contemporaries and predecessors, Battie did

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not differentiate between numerous forms of madness; rather, he argued that there were only two forms: original (hereditary and congenital) and consequential (caused by inactivity, obsession, illness, or trauma). He believed, further, that consequential madness could be cured simply by removing its trigger in a timely fashion. Failure to do so, he maintained, would cause deranged thoughts to become habitual and untreatable.2 The notion of madness as a state that could potentially afflict any human being was perhaps most clearly represented philosophically within the Scottish Common Sense School of the eighteenth century. Like many other European intellectuals of the period, the Common Sense philosophers demonstrated a marked interest in the problem of the relationship between the body and the mind—a concern that had a direct impact on their theories regarding madness. An early representative of this school of thought was Frances Hutcheson, who suggested at the beginning of the century that everyone was capable of making wrong associations between ideas and, consequently, of losing control of reason. The result of this kind of error, he wrote, was “endless Labour, Vexation, and Misery of every kind.” Later in the century, Thomas Reid would suggest that the mad brain was somehow a derivative form of the sane one, and that proper treatment of deranged minds depended upon acquiring a detailed understanding of the sane. Reid’s view was articulated more fully by his colleague John Gregory, a philosopher who was also a medical doctor and a physician to George III. Gregory believed that the recognition and categorization of the symptoms of madness were not straightforward tasks, since every individual case of the

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disease was a product of the entire life history, personality, and unconscious habits of a patient. Underlying Gregory’s understanding of the disorder was his contention that the mind of one afflicted by madness was not substantially different from that of a sane individual; it simply resided at one end of a spectrum of possible mental forms.3 While remaining convinced that any person could potentially suffer from madness, other writers in medicine and philosophy during the same period began betraying a distinct distrust of the power of the imagination (something Burton had raised but not pursued to a substantial degree in the Anatomy). Writers argued from a variety of perspectives that madness was in one manner or another related to the unbridled exercise of the imagination. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, warned that “without steadiness, and direction to some end, a great Fancy is one kind of madness.”4 John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, defined a person as one who thinks and has the power of reason. The mad, he argued, were possessed of reason, but suffered from their tendency to erroneously connect the ideas they derived from their senses. Thus, they differed from the sane only insofar as they were mistaken in taking “their fancies for realities;” and this error was the result of “the violence of their imaginations.”5 Physicians of the period were equally wary of excesses of the imagination. Typical of this view was Thomas Tyron, who wrote in his Discourse of the Causes, Natures and Cure of Phrensie, Madness and Distraction that pride caused human beings to overindulge emotions such as love, hate, sorrow, envy, and despair, which in turn brought about a loss of control over the imagination. The sane, he argued, were

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those whose judgment controlled their imaginations; and the mad were those whose properties of the imagination had become “rampant, unbounded, or as it were without a Guide.”6 In addition to this developing distrust of the imagination that had begun to take root by the turn of the eighteenth century, even as Burton wrote the Anatomy classical notions of madness as divinely instigated and as a source of inspiration were fading from the British mind. Burton, as we have noted, reflected the movement away from such a valuation of madness; yet early manifestations of the shift were occurring prior to Burton’s treatise and were perhaps nowhere more obvious than on the English stage. The year 1601 generally designates the beginning of the Jacobean period in English drama, a period signaled by Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a concomitant transformation in dramatic representations of madness. Prior to 1601, theatrical presentations of madmen generally endowed deranged characters with a capacity to imagine extraordinary exploits, followed by a recovery to a state of sanity in which they were able to execute a powerful act of vengeance. Thomas Kyd’s Hieronimo, Robert Greene’s Orlando, and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus were such figures. The Jacobean mad, on the other hand, did not represent human potential, but powerlessness (and often foolishness), generally displaying a humour prior to going mad (e.g. melancholy or choler) and rarely recovering from the affliction. The madnesses of Shakespeare’s Ophelia and Lady MacBeth were typical of this shift: the derangement of neither was necessary to the plots of either Hamlet or MacBeth, but was apparently incorporated into each play from the sake of spectacle.7

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Distrust of the imagination and a loss of faith in the capacity for insight contained within madness, however, did not signal the complete termination of a positive relationship between melancholy, the imagination, and inspiration. Beginning in the latter part of the seventeenth century, an interesting convergence of the concept of melancholy with that of the sublime signaled the emergence of a novel conception of madness that valorized the imagination and, at least superficially, appeared to revivify the classical possibility of madness as a form of divine inspiration. The idea sprang into the European imagination via a treatise entitled Peri Hupsous, originally published at Basle in 1554, first made available to the English as a Latin translation printed at Oxford in 1636; and then as John Hall’s English translation bearing the title Peri Hupsous, or Dionysius Longinus of the Height of Eloquence, in 1652. John Hall’s dedication in the 1636 edition is now considered to be the first English formulation of the sublime: “there must be some what Ethereal, some what above man, much of a soul separate, that must animate and breathe into it a fire to make it both warm and shine.” It was with a subsequent 1674 version of the text that Longinus’ Peri Hupsous truly gained an audience in England; 8 and its popularity among intellectuals was substantial. Alexander Pope, for instance, in his 1711 Essay on Criticism applauded Longinus as “himself the great Sublime he draws.”9 Coincidentally with the emergence of English interest in the sublime, the term ‘melancholy’ was itself undergoing a subtle shift. The medieval formulation of melancholy as ‘sadness without cause’ had already, by the early part of the seventeenth century, begun to alter its meaning from

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a temperament to a mood; and as the century transpired, many English intellectuals and aristocrats began to consider melancholy to be a dual frame of mind in which an individual could feel increasingly isolated while at the same time enjoying this sense of loneliness. In this sense, a differentiation between melancholy and madness was being drawn whereby melancholy was becoming a term designating a propitious internal experience that intermingled pleasure and sadness.10 By the turn of the eighteenth century the shift was clearly discernable in the increasing fashionability of introspective poetry that reveled in melancholic inspiration. Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, Robert Blair’s The Grave, and Thomas Warton’s The Pleasures of Melancholy, variously pointed to this turn in literature, as did, in a particularly striking fashion, John Milton’s Il Penseroso: But hail thou Goddess, sage and holy, Hail divinest Melancholy, Whose Saintly visage is too bright To hit the Sense of human sight; And therefore to our weaker view, Ore laid with black staid Wisdoms hue.11 This interest in melancholy, which by the turn of the century expressed a curiosity concerning the contradictory and impulsive nature of the mind, found its compliment in the idea of the sublime. To some degree, the sublime both appropriated the role previously attributed to supernatural forces in creative inspiration, and mined the depths of the individual mind within which melancholy was traditionally located. What was revealed was neither the chaos, nor the bestiality of the older form of melancholy, but an

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ecstatic elevation of the mind itself. “O lead me, queen sublime,” wrote Warton, To solemn glooms Congenial with my soul; to cheerless shaeds, To ruin’d seats,to twilight cells and bow’rs, Where thoughtful Melancholy loves to muse, Her fav’rite midnight haunts.12 In the wake of the publication of Peri Hupsous a number of philosophical theories of the sublime emerged that are worth noting. While early writers on the subject (e.g. Shaftesbury) identified the sublime as an experience revealing an individual’s relationship with an external power, in eighteenth century philosophical and literary circles the sublime became an increasingly internalized phenomenon.13 The two most complete analyses of the sublime to emerge in Britain prior to Edmund Burke’s influential work on the subject were John Baillie’s An Essay on the Sublime (published posthumously in 1749) and David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (1739). Baillie’s Essay was notable in its attempt to consider the sublime from a psychological perspective, making it among the first texts to move toward a theory of aesthetic.14 Hume’s Treatise, however, is of particular interest in respect to the sublime. While his contemporary, John Locke, was writing on the mind’s limitations and capacity for error,15 Hume on the other hand was demonstrating a greater interest in the nature and depth of the perceiving mind rather than its constraints. Although he did not employ the term ‘sublime’, his understanding of greatness (in relation to beauty) was essentially used synonymously, as that

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which gave “pleasure and satisfaction to the soul.”16 The increasing internalization of the sublime was expressed particularly by British poets of the period; and by the mid-eighteenth century the pairing of melancholy with the sublime had come to signify a range of transformative experiences resonant with those forms of irrationality that had been widely distrusted a century earlier. As James Usher would write in A Discourse on Taste: In the poet’s language it flies, it soars, it pursues a beauty in the madness of rapture, that words or description cannot contain; and if these expressions be extravagant and improper in the ordinary commerce of life, they yet exactly describe the intellectual and real state of the mind at the presence of the sublime.17 Melancholy’s relationship with the sublime brought about a transformation of the early seventeenth century understanding of madness, whereby the idea of melancholy was recreated in a manner that was in many respects similar to classical notions of madness as a form of divine inspiration. At mid-century, melancholy was a term applied to any experience, sight, or sound that in some way mentally overwhelmed an individual. Perhaps the most succinct description of the experience was penned by Edmund Burke, who identified it as a sense of terror without real danger. Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was one of the most influential English treatises on the subject of the sublime; in it, Burke outlined an aesthetic theory based upon the opposition of pain and pleasure as bases for experiences of

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the sublime and beauty. According to Burke, pain, as an experience of terror, was the foundation of the sublime. Danger, when it was experienced as too near, could cause no pleasure in an individual; but could do so if the source of danger was situated at a distance sufficiently removed to mitigate possible harm. On his account, even the smallest of objects could trigger a sublime experience, so long as the object caused fear: “whatever is in any sort terrible… or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime…. When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances…they are delightful.”18 What was particularly striking in Burke’s formulation of the sublime was that, in some critical respects, it echoed Robert Burton’s understanding of melancholy. This was particularly true in respect to Burke’s understanding of the sublime as an experience of overwhelming fear without danger. Additionally, in Part II of the Inquiry, he delineated a number of attributes that he believed objects needed to possess in order to be capable of inducing the sublime; and among these, darkness figured predominantly: “mere light is too common a thing to make a strong impression on the mind, and without a strong impression nothing can be sublime;” the sun is no more than “a very good idea…But darkness is more productive of sublime ideas.”19 Within Burke’s formulation of sublimity, it is difficult not to hear Robert Burton’s definition of melancholy as fear and sorrow without cause,20 nor his view on darkness: “Fear makes our imagination conceive what it list, invites the devil to come to us,…and tyrannize over our phantasy more than all other affections, especially in the dark.”21 With the work

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of Edmund Burke, it appears that Renaissance melancholy had come full circle. Stripped of its promise of insight, and compromised by its negative association with the imagination, melancholy was reclaimed by eighteenth century English intellectuals, by virtue of its relationship with the sublime.22 In actuality, it had not come full circle, but by means of a rather circuitous intellectual route, had been appropriated as an internal creative resource for insight by Englishmen who were, by most accounting, sane.23 From this perspective, melancholy had essentially become a metaphor; and had no bearing on the lives of those regarded as clinically mad. Amid late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourses regarding the nature of both madness as natural and curable, and melancholy as a positive resource for insight, public images of the mad—as well as actual treatment of the mentally deranged—betrayed an entirely different perspective. The separation of a revalued melancholy from madness proper appears to have relegated the mad to the unfortunate position of embodying, within the public imagination, all the most distasteful characteristics of the disorder that had been delineated by Burton (and which had echoed in representations of non-Europeans in early travel accounts). This was most evident, perhaps, in an overarching association of the mad with animals and beasts, which was arguably the foundation of late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century views on madness. Those suffering from the condition were not generally regarded as possessing minds that were in some way variations of those of the sane; rather, the mad were by and large regarded as entities that represented everything that a sane English

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human being was not or, as Thomas Willis expressed it in his Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes (1683), as “antipodes” of the sane.24 Treatment of the mad was best represented by the single image of Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam, as it was known during the period. The hospital was founded for the Sisters of St. Mary of Bethlehem in 1247, and the Order retained control of the facility until 1375 when the Crown assumed possession. Final control was transferred to the city of London in 1547. Although the hospital was not conceived as such, it appears that by the beginning of the sixteenth century it was being utilized almost solely as an institution for the mentally deranged. It had certainly by this time become firmly associated with madness in the public’s imagination, with the term Bedlam already being used as a synonym for madness.25 By the eighteenth century, visits to the hospital had become a popular pastime for London’s idle classes, who paid a few pennies on Sunday afternoons for the entertainment of strolling past Bedlam’s cells. This form of amusement was so popular, in fact, that thieves and prostitutes frequented the hospital to ply their trades on Sundays; and it is estimated that in the early years of the eighteenth century, somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 visitors toured Bedlam each year, generating in excess of £400 annually. The practice continued until 1815.26 Bethlam Hospital represented the period’s most brutal attitudes regarding the treatment of the mad. Patients were confined to cells that resembled cages in a zoo, and were routinely chained and beaten. When reforms of the institution began at the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, an observer noted witnessing a man who was

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harnessed around his neck to a chain that ran the length of his cell and over the walls, so that his movements could be controlled from outside. The chain was also connected to the floor and the ceiling of his cell. He had, according to the observer, been constrained in this fashion for seventeen years.27 Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, treatment of the mad generally focused on punishment of one form or another, with the employment of more severe forms of punishment beginning to diminish only toward the end of the eighteenth century.28 The general style of treatment can be gleaned from the records of physicians and apothecaries at Bethlam during the period. The physician John Monro, for instance, wrote in his Remarks on Dr. Battie’s Treatise (1758) that cold baths had a generally “excellent effect”, and although he cautioned against indiscriminate use of the treatment, records indicate that the practice was often employed excessively. Another Bethlam physician, Patrick Blair, made use of “frequent bleedings, violent Emeticks [and] strong purgatives.”29 The recommendations of William Battie (who was considered to be an advocate of more conservative treatments than those prescribed by many of his contemporaries) are worth noting: “the lancet and the cupping glass again and again repeated,” wrote Battie, could be employed successfully to mitigate the “delirious pressures of the brain or medullary substance contained in the nerves.” Neutral salts, such as “Nitre, Sal Catharticus amarus, Magnesia alba, Tartar” could be administered to “provoke stools and urine,” and various other treatments aimed at producing “revulsion [of] delirious pressure” were likewise recommended. Battie cautioned against using “cathartics, emetics, and volatile .

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diaphoretics,” as well as the lancet, in cases where “the subject is either naturally infirm or shattered and exhausted.”30 With the advent of case studies in the mid-eighteenth century, we might expect there to have been a concomitant tendency toward more humane treatments of the mad, since a number of case histories from the period indicate an authentic concern with having patients intricately describe their experiences. Physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists constructed comprehensive records of the early details and significant events in their patients’ lives, but ultimately these files had little impact on actual treatments. John Haslam, for instance, recorded a large number of case studies with the sole intention of gathering comparative data for his interpretation of autopsies. Consequently, all his histories ended in the same fashion, with his cutting open of a patient’s brain, weighing it, draining it, and generally measuring it against a standard sane brain.31 While treatments remained relatively brutal throughout the period, representations of the mad by physicians, playwrights, novelists, and essayists similarly demonstrated a marked relationship with those that had earlier emerged from the pen of Robert Burton. Bestiality, wild speech, uncontrolled passions and the like, undeniably resonated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ various literatures of madness. The period’s images of the mad stressed, in particular, their parity with animals and beasts. Unlike the images contained in the Anatomy, however, bestiality was no longer predominantly the delusion of the mad but, echoing earlier travel accounts, defined the way in which they were perceived by the sane. The cells of Bethlem Hospital,

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we must recall, were organized to facilitate public viewing, rendering the facility something similar to a ‘human zoo’;32 and the hospital’s physicians in many cases likewise regarded their patients’ as individuals for whom, as John Monro put it, every “quality, which distinguishes a man from a brute…seems totally obliterated.”33 A similar association was made by Thomas Willis (who is purported to have been the highest paid physician in London during the 1670s), who titled his treatise on madness, Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes, and argued that the disorder was caused primarily by “animal spirits”34 running rampant through the body. Depictions of the mad as animals and beasts were also characteristic of the work of the period’s writers and essayists. John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy (1628), for instance, contained a “Masque” in which there were depicted six madmen, each of whom was a direct reverberation of images in Burton’s Anatomy. One of these was afflicted by lycanthropy (wolf madness), and was said to exclaim, “Bow, bow! Wow, wow! The moon’s eclipsed; I’ll go to the churchyard and sup. Since I turned wolf, I bark, and howl and dig up graves. I will never have the sun shine again.”35 The London Spy, Ned Ward’s satirical portrait of London at the turn of the eighteenth century, curiously inverted the image. The “Journal” contained scenes at the Tower Zoo and the Poultry Countner Prison in which readers were entertained with a series of vignettes incorporating madness, animality, and criminality into the text such that they appeared analogous. At the zoo, for example, there was a leopard that was “as cunning as a cross Bedlamite who loves not to be looked at;” and in the prison there were inmates who resembled hogs and who

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were “as great Enemies to Cold Weather, as the Mad Fellow.” Echoing contemporary medical opinion, the novelist Samuel Richardson described Bethlam Hospital in the 1740s, through the eyes of a fictitous English lady: “there we see man destitute of every mark of reason and wisdom, and leveled to the brute creation.”36 Animal tropes in the period’s literature were accompanied by overwhelming criticism of the speech and related actions of the mad. Physicians, in particularly, regarded altered speech as a clear indication of madness. Thomas Tyron described the language of madmen as “unfit,” and like the sound of animals; and John Monro claimed that the mad could utter only “unconnected, incoherent words.” Other physicians described patients who spoke wildly and all night long, or unintelligibly, or simply too much. Most would have agreed with Nicholas Robinson, who wrote that “lunacy” was a state of madness “where Men rave in an extravagant Manner.”37 The ascription of wild speech—and equally wild actions—to the mad appeared also in contemporary literature. In John Ford’s previously mentioned “Masque of Melancholy” there were in addition to the poor soul afflicted by lycanthropy, a woman suffering from “clamorous phrenitis,” and another beset by wonton melancholy who danced wildly—”Women with child,” wrote Ford, “possessed with this strange fury, often/Have danc’d three days together.” In Richardson’s fictional description of Bethlam, there were similar references to patients’ “hideous roarings, and wild motions.”38 The association of wild speech with mental imbalance was also attested to by a witness to the madness of George III, which lasted from October 1788 until March

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1789. George’s immanent affliction, wrote the observer, was discernable in his “incessant loquaciousness,” and the rapidity, hoarseness, volume, and vehemence of his speech. The relationship was also ultimately enshrined by Samuel Johnson in his mid-eighteenth century dictionary, where the word rave was defined as “1. To be deluded; to talk irrationally. 2. To burst out in furious exclamations as if mad.”39 We might note, additionally, that many physicians believed not only that the language of the mentally deranged was highly irregular, but that those afflicted were incapable of relating or responding to the language of the sane. Typical of this view were John Haslam, who maintained that madmen could not be reasoned out of their “nonsense,” and Nicholas Robinson, who cautioned, “you may as soon attempt to councel a Man out of the most violent Fever, as endeavour to work any Alteration in their Faculties by the Impression of Sound.”40 Seventeenth and eighteenth descriptions of madness were often reminiscent of Burton’s earlier depictions in the Anatomy in a number of other respects. Among these were the tendencies toward uncontrolled passions and blasphemy, the ability to withstand discomfort, and the perception of the mad as childlike. The belief that madmen were subject to the vicissitudes of unbridled passions was expressed primarily in terms of their propensities toward anger, fury, violence or, at the very least, threats of violence. Thomas Sydenham, for instance, listed among the symptoms exhibited by one suffering from hysteric passion, not only wild speech, but the beating of one’s own breast, the inability to control negative passions such as terror, anger, or distrust, and the tendency to quickly shift

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from loving to hating another person without cause. Other physicians made specific note in their case studies of their patients’ unnatural levels of hostility. In these accounts, we can read of men who repeatedly ripped the clothing of other patients to shreds or of men so furious that they were capable of seemingly unbelievable feats. One man, for instance, was said to customarily chew completely the heavy wooden bowls in which his food was served in order to sharpen his teeth for each subsequent meal. We can read too, of women who felt compelled to harm themselves, or to kill their own children, as in a case recorded by John Woodward in which a woman was so fixated on the idea of a porpoise that she felt an urge to “fling her Child into the Fire, beat its Brains out, and the like.” We might note too, that in addition to attributing high levels of hostility to the mentally deranged, some physicians regarded mental illness itself as a particular form of violence wrought upon an otherwise stable physical condition. Thomas Tyron, for instance, maintained that the physiological alterations caused by madness were a violent intrusion into the body’s various systems; and described this state with terms such as “confusion,” “strife,” and “intestine Civil War.”41 A second form of uncontrolled passion—that of immodesty—was also commonly attributed to the mad, in respect to both lasciviousness (and other forms of sexual deviance) and unnatural behavior relating to excrement. In the eighteenth century especially, a common perception of the deranged held that they could be expected to urinate and defecate in public, an assumption that was evident in Ned Ward’s London Spy. At the Poultry Countner Prison, where criminals were compared to madmen, Ward

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described inmates lying “round the Fire, almost cover’d with Ashes, like Potatoes Roasting, with their Noses in Conjunction with one anothers Anuses;” and referred to the mad who appeared naked in public and were “apt to salute you with a Bowl of Chamber-Lie.”42 Sexual immodesty was also noted in relation to the mad. As his mental illness progressed, for instance, George III’s verbal ramblings were said to have become increasingly “indecent with constant allusion to Lady Elizabeth, Countess of Pembroke.”43 In a religious biography of 1693, George Trosse attributed his experience of mental derangement to his “brutish and carnal Way of Life;” and John Haslam recorded the case of a woman, recently widowed, who was convinced that all the overseers of her parish were sexually attracted to her and were planning to fight one another for the right to claim her. In an interesting twist, Patrick Blair recorded treating a woman whose madness consisted largely in refusing her husband’s sexual advances, and in insisting to anyone who would listen that “she was not a whore.” Her treatment was considered complete when she promised that “she would go to bed with her husband that night.”44 That the mad were also prone to blasphemy and spiritual error was born out in the records of physicians who reported, particularly in relation to afflicted women, patients who behaved in a bizarre fashion in church and who were convinced that they were subject to the influence of demonic forces. Among early eighteenth century accounts, we learn of women uttering “horrid Oaths” in church, and claiming to be victimized by the devil’s suggestions toward violence—behaviors that apparently ceased once a cure for their madness was effected. Religious autobiographies of

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the period also related madness to spiritual transgression. Hannah Allen, whose pamphlet describing her own madness from which she had recovered was published in 1683, was typical: “As my melancholy came by degrees, so it wore off by degrees…And God convinced me by degrees; that all this was from Satan, his delusions and temptations, working in those dark and black humors.” William Cowper in a similar tract, recorded, “I slept my usual three hours well and then awakened with ten times a stronger sense of my alienation from God than ever. Satan plied me close with horrible, vicious, and more horrible voices.”45 Acceptable treatments for curing mental derangement, as we have noted, varied throughout the period; underlying many of the prescribed cures, however, was a general assumption that the mad were capable of withstanding intense pain and cold. A common treatment, consequently, was the administration of repeated “cold bathing,” a practice that was often taken to extremes. Records indicate that at Bethlem, for instance, patients were taken nearly to drowning by having successive vats of near-freezing water poured over their heads, until they promised to alter their behavior (or fell into unconsciousness). Patrick Blair, in particular, was known to promote the efficacy of such treatment, and to have on occasion come close to drowning his patients. The treatment he prescribed for the woman who refused to sleep with her husband, for instance, was described by Blair in the following manner: I train’d her into the Engine house putting her in hopes of getting home from thence that night but when she went into the Room in which she was

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to Lay I ordered her to be blindfolded. Her nurse and other woman stript her. She was lifted up by force, plac’d in and fixt to the Chair in the bathing Tub. All this put her in an unexpressable terror especially when the water was let down. I kept her under the fall 30 minutes, stopping the pipe now and then and enquiring whether she would take to her husband but she still obstinately deny’d till at last being much fatigu’d with the pressure of the water she promised she would do what I desired. The woman did not keep her word and was subjected to the same treatment twice more, with each session lasting longer and with more water. Blair calculated that in the final session, “in 90 minutes there was 15 Ton of water let fall on her.”46 Finally, we can note that the association of the mentally ill with children, suggested by Burton, appears to have continued in the period we have been considering. A late seventeenth century writer on the subject claimed that only madmen and children “do speak forth whatever ariseth in their Phantasies,” a claim that would be reiterated in later case studies, such as John Haslam’s account of a patient at Bethlem who spent his time in “childish amusements, such as tearing pieces of paper and sticking them on the walls of his room.”47 Keeping in mind these sustained Burtonian images of the mad as bestial, childlike, capable of withstanding pain and cold, and prone to wild utterances and actions, uncontrolled passions, and blasphemy, we turn our attention now to English depictions of non-Europeans during the same period, within which we can discern a number of distinct parallels. The quantity of available literature regard-

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ing non-Europeans burgeoned in the seventeenth century, and impacted on every field of English letters. A dramatic increase in the number of voyages toward the end of the century reflected an intensifying interest in experimental science, fueled by publications like Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), as well as the creation of Britain’s Royal Society, which received its charter in 1662.48 The Royal Society in particular had been established for two specific purposes that were reflected in its original charter: “to extend not only the boundaries of Empire but also the very arts and sciences.”49 To this end, the Society was among interested parties who sponsored voyages of discovery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reminding those voyagers whom they supported that if their “ships should fortunately discover any part of a well inhabited Continent, many new subjects in Natural History might be imported, and usefull branches of Commerce set on foot, which in process of time might prove highly beneficial to Brittain.”50 The scientific spirit of such voyages was duly expressed by Narborough, whose voyage to the South Seas was commissioned by Charles II in 1669: his desire, he wrote, was to record the “severe, full and punctual Truth.”51 The inevitable array of accounts that followed on the heels of these voyages found their way onto the desks of writers of every variety. Scholars of virtually all branches of scientific inquiry, for instance, combed these new sources for empirical data; naturalists, geologists, medical doctors, and astronomers alike referred repeatedly in their published work to these new sources.52 Edmund Halley’s “Variations of the Magnetical Compass,” published in

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1723, was a case in point. In the essay, Halley revisited a theory concerning compass variation that he had published in Philosophical Transactions some forty years earlier—at that time with inconclusive proof. In this second article, he produced tables that he was convinced demonstrated the truth of his theory, tables he had constructed from the notes of Woods Rogers (whose A Cruising Voyage Round the World has been called a “buccaneering classic”) whom Halley “lately had the Opportunity of perusing.”53 Writers in religion, philosophy, and political theory followed suit, drawing into their various theoretical formulations the new data that was being provided by travelers. Shaftesbury attested to the popularity of travel accounts among “philosophers” and “wits” of his day, in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times: Histories of Incas or Iroquois, written by friars and missionaries, pirates, and renegades, sea-captains and trusty travelers, pass for authentic records and are canonical with the virtuosi of this sort. Though Christian miracles may not so well satisfy them, they dwell with the highest contentment on the prodigies of Moorish and Pagan countries. They have far more pleasure in hearing the monstrous accounts of monstrous men and manners than the politest and best narrations of the affairs, the governments, and lives of the wisest and most polished people.54 The accounts of these missionaries and pirates were, as he pointed out, extremely influential. In his Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), for instance, Matthew

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Tindall concluded a discussion of Leibnitz’ contention that the ancient Chinese were as morally virtuous as European Christians, with a reference to the writing of “Navareete, a Chinese missionary,” whom Tindall noted “agrees with Leibnitz.”55 Hobbes claimed that accounts of the New World supported his view of the state of nature, noting that “the savage people in many places of America…have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before.”56 James Tyrell, in an argument against Hobbes’ view, referred to the “Relations of modern travelers concerning the customs of those West-Indian Nations;” Bollingbroke cited the Jesuit Relations and Acosta; and John Nalson referred to Columbus in constructing his political theory.57 An anonymous text of 1705, titled Civil Polity: A Treatise Concerning the Nature of Government, is considered to be the best example of its day of political theory reliant on travel literature. “I shall now directly proceed,” wrote the author, to prove that these general Doctrines, that I have laid down as principles of Government, are not merely National, but are such as have always been practiced…in all Ages, and in all Countries, as will Evidently appear, from the Records that are left us by the Ancients; and by the Voyages, Travels, Discoveries, and Observations, of the Moderns.58 John Locke drew on a good deal of contemporary travel accounts in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, referring specificially in the text to Peter Martyr’s Decades, Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royale Commentaries, Jean de Lery’s Histoire d’un vouage fait en la terre du Bresil, John

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Ovington’s Voyage to Surat, and Melchisedec Thevenot’s Relations des divers voyages curieux. We might note too, that Locke’s interest in voyages of discovery extended beyond his own philosophical work; a 1704 collection of travel accounts compiled by Awnsham Churchill contained a preface written by Locke.59 Although it stands outside the English context proper, the work of Jean Jacques Rousseau was extremely influential in England; his construction of nonEuropeans contributed substantially to an impulse toward literary exoticism among English writers of the period, and bore the unmistakable imprint of Jesuits like Charlevoix and Lafitau.60 These exotic elements could be identified in a broad range of eighteenth-century English literary texts, such as John Shebbeare’s Lydia and Frances Brooke’s Emily Montague, where the author made direct references to Rousseau and Lafitau.61 The influence of travel accounts, beyond the images of Rousseau’s exoticism, was substantial in English literature and drama. Much of Francis Godwin’s The Voyage of Domingo Gonzales to the Moon (1638) was based on what the author knew of the Incas, as well as on Campenella’s Civitas Solis, which had been published in English in 1623.62 Robert Howard’s The Indian Queen, first performed in 1664 and published a year later, was set in Mexico and contained images of native barbarism that appear to have been commonly accepted during the period. These surfaced again in John Dryden’s sequel to Howard’s play, The Indian Emperor (1665)—a play that was performed until the 1730s, and provided a template for Henry Brooke’s Montezuma in the latter part of the eighteenth century.63 Daniel Defoe’s A New Voyage Round the World (1725) was likely based on

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Dampier; and the hero of his Robinson Crusoe (1719) was based on the figure of Alexander Selkirk, who appeared in Woods Rogers and Edward Cooke.64 Toward the end of the eighteenth century, ‘Peruvian’ dramas became extremely popular in England, a trend that was instigated by the publication of Marmontel’s epic poem, Incas (published in France in 1777, and translated into English the same year). The poem, which was highly influenced by Garcilaso and Las Casas, signaled the beginning of a run on exotic American dramas, the most popular of which was Richard Sheridan’s Pizzaro, a play that was performed well into the nineteenth century.65 We should note, finally, George Coleman’s opera, Inkle and Yarico (1787), which played at London’s Haymarket Theatre to substantial acclaim in the latter part of the century. The opera concerned the love between a European man and a Native American woman. The earliest account of the tragic love affair appeared in Jean Macquet’s Voyages (1616), but was related also by Richard Ligon in his History of Barbados (1657), who recounted a tale in which “poor Yarico for her love, lost her liberty” (her lover sold her into slavery).66 As Baudet noted more broadly in relation to Western Europe, there were indeed two interpretive strains that were articulated within this English material. One was that of the non-European as a noble figure, the other as one that was bestial. The image of the Noble Savage drew its imaginative and literary resources from the records of figures such as Las Casas and Garcilaso and later, as we mentioned, from the writing of Rousseau.67 As we have noted, it was most discernable in its British incarnation in the fields of literature and drama; but it was also very

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much in vogue with political theorists, by whom the image was utilized in the interest of advancing various theories of society, monarchy, freedom, and moral law, as natural states of the human. As early as 1678, for example, John Nalson argued in The Common Interest of King and People that “if with Columbus we discover new Worlds…if there be humane Inhabitants we shall find Monarchy the Government they live under: as is abundantly testified by all the later Discoveries of both the East and Western Regions of the World.” James Tyrell, responding to Hobbes in 1692, wrote: “I have added concerning the Customs of those West-Indian Nations commonly counted Barbarous, who yet by their own amicable living together, without either Civil Magistrates, or written Laws, serve sufficiently to confute Mr. H’s [sic] extravagant Opinion, That all Men by Nature are in a State of War;” and John Locke, arguing that humans naturally exercised the right to choose their form of government, referred to “the people of America, who (living out of the reach of the Conquering Swords, and spreading domination of the two great Empires of Peru and Mexico) enjoy’d their own natural freedom.”68 Within a substantial array of other literature of the period, however, non-Europeans were portrayed as immoral savages, defined to a noticeable degree in terms of the descriptive motifs we have been exploring in earlier travel accounts and medieval and early modern depictions of the mad: as animalistic and bestial, beset with wild speech and actions and uncontrolled passions, as blasphemous, capable of withstanding pain and cold temperatures and, ultimately, as childlike. References to non-Europeans as animals were common in travel accounts of the seventeenth

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and eighteenth centuries, where we discover human beings variously portrayed as cows, cocks, wolves, or, more generally, as “filthy animals”—a descriptive trope to which Daniel Beeckman, in his discussion of the natives of Borneo, added who “hardly deserve the name of rational creatures.”69 More often, however, the images of foreigners that emerged from the period’s various literatures focused on the notion of bestiality. William Funnell (who sailed with Dampier in 1703 and 1704) described humans who were the most “next to Beasts of any People on the Face of the Earth;” Edward Cooke referred to “the most filthy, beastly People of any yet discovered;” Dampier himself claimed that the natives of New Holland “differ but little from Brutes;” and Daniel Beeckman, describing orangutans, claimed that they were “handsomer, I am sure than some Hottentots I have seen.”70 The images of non-Euopeans engaging in wild utterances and movements were also familiar elements within these accounts. Ligon reported that on Sundays slaves in Barbados would “dance a whole day, and ne’r heat themselves; yet now and then, one of the activest among them will bolt upright, and fall in his place again…When they have danc’d an hour or two, the men fall to wrestle, the Musick playing all the while.” Writers of many other accounts did not share Ligon’s apparent sense of amusement. In the narrative of her captivity, Mary Rowlandson wrote, “Oh the roaring, and singing, and dancing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night which made the place a lively resemblance of hell”; and Robert Beverly, describing a native pow wow in Virginia likewise reported wild howling and dancing about the bed of the sick. Recalling a first

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meeting with the natives of Poverty Bay, James Cooke’s 3rd Lieutenant described the way in which they “distort’d their Mouths, Lolling out their Tongues and Turn’d up the Whites of their Eyes Accompanied with a strong hoarse song,” and Cooke’s surgeon, William Monkhouse, similarly described the “gesticulations” of a Maori man, in which “great savageness was expressed-in bending forward, throwing his Arms behind him, elevating his head, staring wildly upwards, and thrusting his tongue forward.”71 These wild motions and utterances noted by travelers often pointed to more general perceptions of unbridled anger and violence as a characteristic of non-European peoples, and the portraits that emerged from accounts such as those of Cooke’s traveling companions seem particularly reminiscent of those drawn by Robert Burton. Fury and violence as symptoms of madness, Burton wrote, make a man’s “eyes sparkle fire, and stare, teeth gnash in his head, his tongue stutter.”72 Richard Ligon, while admitting that there were exceptions to the rule, wrote nonetheless of slaves in Barbados, “there be a mark set upon these people, which will hardly ever be wiped off, as of their cruelties…” More specific narratives of such ‘cruelties’ employed adjectives such as murderous, merciless, ravenous, revengeful, mercenary, brutal, and indocile; and even the titles of accounts often alerted readers to the lurid descriptions they contained, as in the case of Francis Brooks’ Barbarian Cruelty, being a true History of the distressed Condition of the Christian Captives under the Tyranny of Muly Ishmael, Emperor of Morocco (1693), and Robert Drury’s Madagascar: or, Robert Drury’s Journal, during Fifteen Years Captivity on that Island…

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[with] an Account of the….Murder of Captain Younge and his Ship’s Company, except Admiral Bembo’s Son, and some few others, who escap’ d the Hands of the barbarous Natives (1729).73 We might note that these sorts of depictions were employed not only by travelers, but by those who described foreigners residing in England. In the late eighteenth century, for example, a group of Lascars were brought to London by the East India Company; and with no means of employment they were exploited, impoverished, and in many cases turned to begging in order to survive. A contemporary Englishman, describing these men, wrote that they were “practically and abominably wicked.”74 By the mid-eighteenth century, conceptions of nonEuropeans as prone to uncontrolled anger and violence had entrenched themselves in English literature. Robert Howard’s Indian Queen and John Dryden’s Indian Emperor, both of which were ostensibly set in Mexico, alluded to the prevalence of human sacrifice among the natives; Dryden’s play, in particular, was influential well into the 19th century. Timothy Dwight’s America (1780) began with “Sunk in barbarity these realms were found,” and continued descriptively, No soft endearments, no fond social ties, Nor faith, nor justice calm’d their horrid joys: But furious vengeance swell’d the hellish mind. And dark ey’d malice all her influence join’d, Here spread broad plains, in blood and slaughter drown’d…75 Harkening to earlier captivity narratives, Ann Eliza Bleeker’s The History of Maria Kittle (1793) reveled in lurid

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descriptions of native cruelty. “An Indian, hideously painted,” begins one such passage, Strode ferociously up to Comelia (who sunk at the sight; and fainted on a chair), and cleft her white forehead deeply with his tomahawk. Her fine azure eyes just opened, and then suddenly closing forever, she tumbled lifeless at his feet. His sanguinary [my italics] soul not was yet satisfied with blood; he deformed her lovely body with deep gashes; and tearing her unborn babe away, dashed it to pieces against the stone wall and with many additional instances of infernal cruelty.76 In this text, as well as others of the period, it is impossible not to hear echoes of Robert Burton’s description of those afflicted by sanguinary melancholy: “they are bold and impudent, and…apt to quarrel and think of such things, battles, combats, and their manhood, furious…and if they be moved, most violent, outrageous, ready to disgrace, provoke any, to kill…”77 In addition to uncontrolled anger and violence, much of the literature we are considering held fast to the belief that nonEuropeans were immodest and, more specifically, that they had a propensity for sexual lasciviousness. We might note that writers such as William Dampier— who described natives and monkeys flinging their own excrement from the tops of trees—mirrored contemporary images of the mad in pointing to foreigners’ affinity for excrement, as well as for sex;78 yet the subject of prostitution seemed to particularly elicit the attention of travelers. James Cooke, for example, related in his journal

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the details surrounding an “embarrassing present” made to him in New Hebrides in 1774, in which he refused the services of a young woman provided for his amusement. Claiming that he lacked the resources to pay the woman, Cooke recorded finding himself embroiled in an argument with an older woman who assured him that he could “retire with her on credit;” and who subsequently cast aspersions on his manhood when he denied the offer. In other accounts, we read of parents prostituting their daughters as young as “eight or nine years of age for a small lucre;” and of married women who would take other sexual partners when their husbands were absent.79 Aside from the charge of lasciviousness, among the most common allegations leveled at non-Europeans were their proclivity toward idolatry and blasphemy, and their innate capacity to withstand physical discomfort. Following in the footsteps of the early Jesuit accounts (which were, as we have noted, widely influential and tended to stress the pagan beliefs of the people the Jesuits encountered80 ), some English writers claimed that their subjects had no religion at all, that, in the words of Narborough, they had no form of worship “either sun or moon.” Others maintained that native religious practices were demonic, as was the case with John Smith who declared (on the basis of what he had gleaned from Portuguese accounts) that in Africa, “the devil hath the greatest part of their devotions.” Still others, like William Dampier, made both claims: while among the Moskita Indians of Panama, he wrote in 1697, he could “never perceive any Religion nor any Ceremonies…Only they seem to fear the Devil, whom they call Wallesaw.”81

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The period’s travel accounts were replete also with references to non-Europeans’ capacity for withstanding pain and cold—to be, as John Lawson claimed, “Patient under all Afflictions.” That the Tierra Del Fuegans “must be a very hardy race” was abundantly clear to James Cooke, who noted that their houses were shabbily constructed and offered little protection against rain, hail, or snowstorms. Narborough, too, made note of people in the Galapagos Islands who were able to endure extreme cold, who wore no clothes and yet did not “shrink from the weather.”82 Others contended that the people of whom they wrote were oblivious to pain and capable of undergoing the most excruciating ordeals without the least bit of concern. Janet Shaw, a Scottish traveler who described African slaves in Antigua (whom she called “brutes”), claimed that whipping “inflicts no wound on their mind, whose natures seem made to bear it, and whose sufferings are not attended with shame or pain beyond the present moment.” Hugh Jones wrote of the natives of Maryland in 1699, “when taken Prisoners and Condemned, they’l dye like Heroes, braving the most Exquisite Tortures that can be invented, and singing all the Time they are upon the Rack;” and James Adair wrote in a similar fashion of a native American man being tortured: “he underwent a great deal, without shewing any concern; his countenance and behavior were as if he suffered not the least pain, and was formed beyond the common laws of nature.”83 Finally, in respect to ongoing resonances between discourses about madness and foreigners, we can note the continued ascription of childlike qualities to those peoples encountered by English travelers during the seventeenth and

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eighteenth centuries. In particular, the notion that non-Europeans were enamored, as Columbus had noted, by ‘glass beads…and many other things of little value’ remained a common assumption, reflected in the Royal Society’s directive to James Cooke cited at the outset of this essay: “If a landing be effected, whether with or without resistence, it might not be amiss to lay some few trinkets, particularly some looking Glasses upon the Shore.” Cooke, for his part, confirmed the value of the Society’s recommendation, recording in his journal that the Tierra del Fuegans were “extremely fond of any Red thing and seemed to set more Value on Beads than any thing we could give them.”84 Throughout the time frame we have been considering, commonly held images of non-Europeans and the mentally deranged revolved around certain common motifs: those of bestiality; of wild and uncontrolled speech, actions, and passions; of blasphemy and spiritual error; of the capacity to unnaturally withstand pain and cold temperatures; and of being childlike. These shared images were unremittingly disparaging. “Now flam’d the Dog star’s unpropitious ray,/Smote ev’ry Brain, and wither’d ev’ry Bay;” wrote Alexander Pope in The Dunciad, Sick was the Sun, the Owl forsook his bow’r, The moon-struck Prophet felt the madding hour; Then rose the Seed of Chaos, and of Night, To blot out Order, and extinguish Light, Of dull and venal a new World to mold, And bring Saturnian days of Lead and Gold.85 The mingling of madness sent by the ‘Dog-star’s unpropitious ray’ (a traditional conveyor of madness) 86 with cha-

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os and night (‘order’ and ‘light’ signifying both civil and moral constructions) 87 were mirrored in Timothy Dwight’s America, where the image of pre-Columbian America was melded also with chaos and night: O’er all, the impenetrable darkness spread Her dusky wings, and cast a dreadful shade; No glimpse of science through the gloom appeared; No trace of civil life the desert chear’d; ...... Here ceaseless riot and confusion rove; There savage roarings shake the echoing grove. Age after age rolls on in deepening gloom, Dark as the mansions of the silent tomb.88 The more general shared conceptions of madness and non-Europeans that underlay these poems situate both groups within a similar antithetical space in the minds of their English contemporaries. The mad, wrote Thomas Willis, were the ‘antipodes’ of the sane; and, according to travelers like John Ovington, non-Europeans were “the very reverse of Human kind.”89 Both, apparently, were the foils for English humanity.

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Notes 1. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, 40, 79. In respect to the widespread existence of melancholy, Burton wrote at Pt. I, 78: “all the world is of this humour.” 2. Thomas Willis’ Essay on the Pathology of the Brain and Nervous Stock (London, 1672), cited in Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 117; Feder, Madness in Literature, 148-149. Richard Baxter, Christian Directory in The Practical Works of Rev. Richard Baxter, ed. William Orme (London, 1830), 237-238, cited in Mueller, The Anatomy of Robert Burton’s England, 20. Nicholas Robinson, New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriak Melancholy (London, 1729), cited in Allen Ingram, The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1991), 24-25. Woodward’s text was published posthumously in 1757 and Battie’s Treatise on Madness (London: 1758), are cited in Ingram, 66, 44-46. 3. References and more detailed discussion of the Common Sense School are included in Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 57-62. 4. Thomas Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1966), III, 5758. The general distrust of the imagination is discussed in more detail in Michael De Porte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne, and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1974); cf Feder, Madness in Literature, 152. 5. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), II. xi, 106. See also Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 10-11, and Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 50-51. 6. Feder, Madness in Literature, 152-155. 7. Robert Rentoul Reed, Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage (New York: Octagon Books, 1970), 368-370. 8. Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 18-21.

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9. Monk, The Sublime, 22. George Turnbull cited Longinus in his A Treatise on Ancient Painting (London, 1740); and Richard Hurd, Epistola ad Augustum (London, 1751) listed Longinus alongside Addison as the “most eminent, at least the most popular” of commentators, and identified Longinus as the “most instructve” of all. Both are cited in Monk, 24. 10. Klibansky et al, Saturn and Melancholy, 231; Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 118. 11. John Milton, Il Penseroso, Poets’ Corner online http://www. geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/milton02.html. For discussion of Young (1683-1765), Blair (1699-1746), and Warton (1729-1790) see Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 122-123. 12. The Pleasures of Melancholy, cited in Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 123; cf 136-137, 140. 13. Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, is discussed by Martin Price, “The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers,” Yale Review 58 (winter 1969), 196. Price summarizes Shaftesbury’s understanding of the sublime as “a moment both of supreme self-realization and of rhapsodic oneness with a divine ordering power in the world at large.” See also Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 138. 14. Monk, The Sublime, 72,77. Broadly speaking, aesthetic theory would come to concern itself with the nature of the perceiving mind in relation to the object of perception, through which aesthetic experience could result. 15. “the understanding,” wrote Locke, “is not so much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left to let in external visible resemblances or ideas of things without.” Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I. xi. 17, 107. 16. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968), Book, II, Pt. I. i, iv, viii, and Pt. II, ii. See also Monk, The Sublime, 63ff. 17. James Usher, A Discourse on Taste (Dublin, 1778), 104; cited in Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 136. John Dennis (1657-1734) described the reading of a sublime poem in similar terms: it “ravishes and transports us a certain Admiration, mingled

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with Astonishment and with Surprise, which is quite another thing than the barely pleasing…it gives a noble Vigour to a Discourse, and invincible Force.” Cited in Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 136, and Monk, The Sublime, 53. 18. Burke differentiated between beauty and the sublime, arguing that pleasure, rather than pain, was the basis of beauty. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Part II, cited in Monk, The Sublime, 91-92. Speaking of a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Burke wrote that in the text “all is dark, uncertain, confused terrible, and sublime to the last degree.” Part II, cited in Louis I. Bredvold and Ralph G. Ross, eds., The Philosophy of Edmund Burke: A Selection from his Speeches and Writings (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 258. 19. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry, Part I, cited in Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 142. 20. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 1, Mem. 3, Subs. 2. 21. Ibid., Pt. I, Sec. 2, Mem. 3, Subs. 6. 22. Outside of the English context, it was Immanuel Kant who would synthesize and refine eighteenth century aesthetic concepts into a single philosophical system, with the publication of The Critique of Judgement in 1790. In his discussion of the sublime (Part I, Book II) Kant detached the aesthetic experience from its object, arguing that the gratification experienced in the sublime was not founded upon a conceptual recognition but rather a reflective judgment. Ultimately, Kant’s sublime involved the attempt to represent what was unrepresentable, and it was the inevitable failure in such an attempt that evoked the emotional power of the sublime. The relationship between melancholy and the sublime reached its most complete form in the Critique of Judgement: “He whose emotions incline him to melancholy does not have that name because he is afflicted with gloomy depression as being robbed of life’s joys, but because his sensibilities, when strung above a certain pitch, or when for some reason given a wrong direction, attain to this condition more easily than to any other. In particular, he has a sense of the sublime…” See

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Klibansky et al, Saturn and Melancholy, 123. See also Monk, The Sublime, 4-7. 23. Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 145; Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963). 24. Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes (London, 1683), 208; cited in Feder, Madness in Literature, 148. 25. Rosen, Madness in Society, 139, notes that in 1403, Bethlehem Hospital listed among its nine patients, six men who were mente capti [“deprived of reason”]. See also “Bedlam,” Catholic Encyclopedia online, http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/02387b.htm. 26. Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 39; “Bedlam,” Catholic Encyclopedia. 27. Samuel Tuke, Report on the Condition of the Indigent Insane, cited in Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1965), 72. Another observer noted in 1656 that he had witnessed many patients who were chained to their cells. See “Bedlam,” Catholic Encyclopedia. 28. The shift was evident in the writing of John Haslam, who was a pharmacist at Bethlam from 1795-1816. In his Observations on Insanity (1798), Haslam recommended public humiliation rather than more deplorable forms of punishment, so long as the afflicted individual understood the reason why their physicians were “wounding their pride.” See Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 27. Indicative of the shift was also the creation of York Retreat, by a Quaker by the name of William Tuke in 1796. The institution was, in the words of the founder’s grandson, an attempt to institute a “milder and more appropriate system of treatment” in order to “awaken the slumbering reason, or correct its wild hallucinations.” This facility ultimately operated under the same assumptions as Bethlam, insofar as its physicians presumed that patients had to be coerced into controlling themselves. At Bethlam, patients were often tortured until they promised to act properly; whereas at York they were isolated from friends and loved ones until they acquiesced to expected behavioral norms. At both institutions, interestingly, patients

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were taken at their word. See Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat, an Institution Near York, Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine (London: 1964), 1; Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 7375; Feder, Madness in Literature, 148. 29. Monro is cited in Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 26; cf 74. Blair is cited in Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 1535-1860: A History Presented in Selected English Texts (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 327; and Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 40. 30. William Battie, Treatise on Madness (London, 1758), cited in Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 71; cf 44. 31. Haslam, Observations on Insanity (1798). Other case studies of the period include John Woodward, Select Cases, and Consultations, in Physick (1757), and John Hunter, “Lectures on the Principles of Surgery,” recorded in the 1780s. See Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 64-70. 32. Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 45. 33. John Monro, Observations on Insanity, cited in Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 37. 34. Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes (1683), cited in Feder, Madness in Literature, 149. See also Richard S. Westfall, “Thomas Willis,” Catalogue of the Scientific Community, online, http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/Catalog/ Files/willis.html. 35. Cited in Reed, Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage, 133. 36. Ned Ward’s London Spy was published in eighteen parts, with one appearing each month between 1698 and 1700. See Steven Earnshaw, “Ned Ward,” The Pub in Literature: England’s Altered State, online, http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/ cs/teaching/sle/chapterextras/ward.htm; Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 45-46. Samuel Richardson, Familiar Letters CLIII, in Byrd, 89. 37. Thomas Tyron, A Treatise of Dreams and Visions (London, 1689); John Monro, Remarks on Dr. Battie’s Treatise (1758); John Haslam, Observations on Insanity (1798); Nicholas Robinson, New System of the Spleen (1729). Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 24-37, 22-23, notes also the significance of works by David Kinneir and Thomas Sydenham.

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38. John Ford, The Lover’s Melancholy (1628), Act II, scene iii; cited in Reed, Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage, 133-134. Richardson, Familiar Letters; cited in Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 89. 39. The madness of King George was reported by Fanny Burney, 25 October 1788. Burney’s report and Johnson’s dictionary are cited in Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad Business (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 18 and Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 1-2, 37. 40. Haslam, Observations and Robinson, New System of the Spleen, cited in Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 25-28. 41. Thomas Tyron, Discourse of the Causes, and John Woodward, Select Cases, cited in Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 67, 2223, 64; and Feder, Madness in Literature, 162. 42. Ward is cited in Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 45-46. See also Feder, Madness in Literature, 162. 43. Macalpine and Hunter, George III and the Mad Business, 26; Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 3. 44. George Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr George Trosse… Written by Himself (Exeter, 1714); John Haslam, Illustrations of Madness (London, 1810). Among the woman’s other symptoms of mental illness were her refusals to leave her room, or to converse with her family, and her propensity for spitting. The case is cited in Hunter and Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, 329. See also Ingram, 42, 112, 121. 45. Hannah Allen, A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings With That Choice Christian Mrs Hannah Allen (1683). William Cowper, Memoire of the Early Life of William Cowper, Esq. (1767). See Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 37, 67-68, 120, 125, who discusses also the medical reports of David Kinneir and John Woodward, in which Woodward, in particular, reports that his patient stopped hearing demonic voices upon the physician’s administration of a purge and a clyster. 46. See Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 41, 42, 26, 74; Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 45; Feder, Madness in Literature, 162. 47. Thomas, A Treatise of Dreams and Visions (1689), and Haslam cited in Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 36, 65; cf Feder, Madness in Literature, 154.

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48. The Royal Society existed informally from 1645, but was officially established in 1660 and received its charter in 1662. See David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, vol. II, (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1970), 556; Frantz, The English Traveller and the Movement of Ideas, 1660-1732 (New York: Octagon Books, 1968), 15; Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 12. 49. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 261; Martha Ornstein, The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 105. 50. From Hints offered to the Consideration of Captain Cooke, from James Douglass (President of the Royal Society, 17641768) in Cooke, Journals, 516. 51. Tancred Robinson, An Account of the Several Late Voyages and Discoveries to the South and North…By Sir John Narborough, Captain Jasmen Tasmen, Captain John Wood, and Frederick Marten of Hamburgh (London, 1694), published under Narborough in 1711. See Cox, A Reference Guide, I, 8; Frantz, The English Traveller, 34. 52. As examples, “A Further Relation of the Whale-Fishing about the Bermudas, and on the Coast of New England, and New-Netherland,” unsigned, Philosophical Transactions, 1 (1865 and 1866); John Woodward, An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth… (London, 1695); John Woodward, “Some Thoughts and Experiments Concerning Vegetation,” Philosophical Transactions, 21 (1700); Hans Sloane, “Some Observations…[concerning] plants in Jamaica,” Philosophical Transactions, (1700); Hans Sloane, Catalogue Plantarum (London, 1696); James Petiver, “An Account of divers rare plants,” Philosophical Transactions, 28 (1714); Thomas Molyneux, “A Discourse concerning the Large Horns frequently found under Ground in Ireland, Concluding from them that the Great American Deer, call’d a Moose, was formerly common in that Island,” Philosophical Transactions, (1698); Edward Tyson, Carigueya, seu Marsupiale Americanum (London, 1699); Samuel Dale, Pharmacologiae seu Manuductio ad Materium (London, 1694). These are cited in Frantz, The English Traveller, 143-144.

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53. Halley’s second article was published in Philosophical Transactions, 31 (1723). Woods Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712). See Cox, A Reference Guide, I, 46; and Frantz, The English Traveller, 143-144. 54. Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, J. M. Robertson, ed., vol. I (New York, 1900), 222; cited in Frantz, The English Traveller, 140. 55. See Frantz, The English Traveller, 153; Frantz, 145, mentions also in this respect Richard Burthogge, Divine Goodness Explicated, in which the author drew from a variety of travel accounts to support his argument for the providential nature of God. 56. Hobbes, The English Works, I, xiii, 83. 57. The Earl of Clarendon, in A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State, in Mr. Hobbes’s Book, Entitled Leviathan (1676) likewise referred to the inhabitants of America; and William Temple, despite an absence of direct acknowledgement of specific travelers, demonstrated a familiarity with the literature in An Essay upon the original and Nature of Government (1680). James Tyrell, A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature (1692); Henry St. John Bollingbroke, Philosophical Works (1754); John Nalson, The Common Interest of King and People (1678). See Frantz, The English Traveller, 152-57. 58. Civil Polity: A Treatise Concerning the Nature of Government. Wherein the Reasons of that Great Diversity to be observed in the Customs, Manners, and Useages of Nations, are Historically Explained (1705), cited in Frantz, The English Traveller, 155. 59. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I, iii, 26-42, arguing, for instance, against the notion of an innate ‘moral rule’, referred to the accounts of travelers in Asia, the West Indies, and Peru. In his First Treatise on Government, I. vi, 57, too, Locke referred specifically to the literature of travel, citing, for example, Garcilasca’s history of Peru. See also Frantz, The English Traveller, 145-146. Awnsham Churchill and John Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels some now first Printed from Original manuscripts, Others Translated out of Foreign Languages (London, 1704). See Cox, A

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Reference Guide, I, 10, 31. 60. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’ inégalité parmi les homes (1754). Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 42-43. 61. John Shebbeare, Lydia; or Filial Piety (London, 1755); Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague (London, 1769). Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 89-104, notes also in this respect, The Adventures of Emmera; or, The Fair American (Dublin, 1767), and The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield (London, 1767). 62. Cox, A Reference Guide, II, 471; Baudet, Paradise on Earth, 28. Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Comical History of the States and Empires of the World of the Moon and Sun (1657), drew on the same resources, and was translated into English and published in London in 1687. Cox, A Reference Guide, II, 474. 63. John Dryden played some role in the authorship of Howard’s Indian Queen, and the play is now commonly included in collections of Dryden’s work. Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 121-127. 64. Defoe, Daniel, A New Voyage Round the World by a Course never Sailed before: being a voyage undertaken by some Merchants, who afterwards proposed the setting up of an East-India Company in Flanders (London, 1725); The Life and strange surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (London, 1719); Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World: First to the South Seas, thence to the East Indies, and homewards by the Cape of Good Hope (London, 1712); Edward Cooke, SA Voyage to the South Sea and Round the World (London, 1712). Cooke was second captain to Woodes Rogers. Cox, A Reference Guide, I, 46; II, 478. 65. Thomas Morton’s Columbus; or, A World Discovered (London, 1792), another in the strain of Peruvian dramas, made substantial use of Marmontel. See Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 148-161. 66. Richard Ligon, History of the Island of Barbados, illustrated with amp of the island, as also the Principle Trees and Plants there…1657 (London: Frank Cass and Company, 1970), 55;

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Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 138. 67. Garcilaso de la Vega, The Royal Commentaries of the Incas was published in two parts in Lisbon in 1609, and in Cordova in 1617. It was first translated into French in 1633, and an abridged English translation was made available in 1688. Cox, A Reference Guide, II, 261; Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 17-18. 68. John Nalson, The Common Interest of King and People Shewing the Original, Antiquity and Excellency of Monarchy (1678); and James Tyrell, A Brief Disquisition (1692) are cited in See Frantz, The English Traveller, 154-157. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, II, 106, 337. Edmund Burke, in a revised work that was more than likely originally written by his brother William, discussed his notion of liberty as the “darling possession of the Americans.” Account of European Settlements in America (London, 1757), cited in Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 20; cf 12-13 n.26. 69. Daniel Beeckman, A voyage to and from the island of Borneo, in the East Indies; with a description of the said island … (1718); cited in Frantz, The English Traveller, 36-37; Cox, A Reference Guide, I, 286. See also Ligon, History of the Island of Barbados, 47; the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson (1682), cited in Charles H. Lincoln, Narratives of the Indian Wars 1675-1699 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913) and Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 8. 70. William Funnell, A Voyage Round the World: Containing an Account of Captain Dampier’s Expedition to the South Seas, in the Ship St. George… (London, 1707); Edward Cooke, SA Voyage (London, 1712); William Dampier, A Collection of Voyages, containing: I. Captain William Dampier’s Voyage Round the World. II The Voyage of Lionel Wafer… (London, 1729); Beeckman, A Voyage (1719). See Cox, A Reference Guide, I, 12-13, 44-46, 286; Frantz, The English Traveller, 104. Monsters, beasts, and brutes abounded in other texts. Shaftesbury wrote: “Monsters and monster-lands were never more in request;” William Ten Rhyne, whose travel account was published in English in 1732, described the Hottentots he had met in terms that Cox maintains placed them “at

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the very bottom of the scale of brutishness and beastiality;” and a Scottish traveler, Janet Schaw, wrote of African slaves as “brutes.” Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 225; William Ten Rhyne, An Account of the Cape of Good Hope and the Hottentots, the Natives of that Country… (London, 1732); Janet Schaw, “Slaves at Mount Misery, Antigua,” (1774) is cited in Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 465. Cox, A Reference Guide, I, 374. 71. Ligon, History of the Island of Barbados, 50; Rowlandson is cited in Lincoln, Narratives of the Indian Wars, 116, and Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 8; Robert Beverly, History and Present State of Virginia (1705), cited in Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton, 76), 48 n.22; Cooke’s 3rd Lieutenant, Gore, is cited in Cooke, The Journals, 169 n.2, and Monkhouse’ journal is included in the same volume. In the journal, he notes also “sometimes they [the Maori] bend forwards exceedingly low and then suddenly raise themselves extending their arms, and staring most hideously… (p. 569, 578). The images were reiterated in eighteenth century literature. Timothy Dwight’s poem, America (1780) echoed the revulsion of these accounts, in its depiction of the continent prior to the arrival of Europeans: “Here ceaseless riot and confusion rove;/There savage roarings shake the echoing grove.” Francis Hopkinson’s poem. The Treaty (1792) likewise drew heavily on the motifs of captivity narratives. Dwight’s America (1780) and Hopkinson, Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings (1792) are cited in Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 174175. 72. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb. 3, Subs. 10. 73. Ligon, History of the Island of Barbados, 53. For descriptions employing the imagery of barbarism and cruelty, see the narrative of the captivity of Mary Rowlandson, in Lincoln, Narratives of the Indian Wars, 116, and Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 8; John Lawson, The History of Carolina (London, 1709), cited in Cox, A Reference Guide, II,

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91, Frantz, The English Traveller, 127, and Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 396; Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies (London, 1727), cited in Cox, A Reference Guide, I, 287 and Frantz, The English Traveller, 127. For Francis Brooks and Robert Drury, see Cox, A Reference Guide, I, 366, 371. 74. M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), 139. 75. On Dryden and Dwight, see Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 121-123, 174. 76. The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleeker (London, 1793), cited in Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 111. 77. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 3, Memb. 1, Subs. 3. 78. Vespucci, in Voyage to Megellanica (first published in 1501, with a full English translation not appearing until 1766), wrote of the natives of South America, “dirty and shameless are they in making their water.” See Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 453, and Cox, Reference Guide, II, 279. For Dampier, A Collection of Voyages (1729) see Stone, “Swift and the Horses,” 183, and Cox, Reference Guide, I, 12. 79. Cooke’s “Embarrassing Present, New Hebrides, South Pacific,” June 1774 is cited in Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 503. Daniel Beeckman, A Voyage to and from the Island of Borneo, related the prostitution of children; see Cox, A Reference Guide, I, 286, and Frantz, The English Traveller, 37. John Lawson, History of Carolina, pointed out that, unlike their fellow native Carolinians, married women were not “mercenary,” since when they slept with men aside from their husbands, they “never ask any Reward.” Cited in Frantz, The English Traveller, 102; cf Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 396-397. 80. The German Fr. Samuel Fritz, for example, recorded that the god of the people he encountered in the Amazon Valley (1686-1723) was named “Guaricaya,” and was actually the devil; and the Frenchman Fr. Pierre Biard noted in 1612 that the native people of Acadia were prone to “ungodliness,” and

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without conversion to Catholicism would remain “Heathen whose souls were to be lost.” See Cox, A Reference Guide, II, 291 and Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 464-465; and Reuben GoldThwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, (New York: Pageant Book Company, 1959), vol. III, 203-205. 81. Narborough, An Account of the Several Late Voyages (1711) is cited in Frantz, The English Traveller, 35. For John Smith, see Edward Arber and A. G. Bradleye, eds., The Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, President of Virginia and Admiral of New England, 1580-1910 (Edinburgh, 1910), vol. II, 876, cited in Jennings, The Invasion of America, 46 n.12. For William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World, vol. I (London, 1697), see Cox, A Reference Guide, I, 42, and Frantz, The English Traveller, 35. Captivity narratives, such as that of Mary Rowlandson, were replete with descriptives like “atheistical,” “diabolical,” “bloddy heathen,” “infidels,” and “pagans.” See Lincoln, Indian Wars, 116, and Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 8. As Francis Jennings (p. 47) points out, in the seventeenth century “devil language was the rule.” 82. Cooke, The Journals , 44-45. Lawson, History of Carolina, and Narborough, An Account of the Several Late Voyages, cited in Frantz, The English Traveller, 113, 35. Cooke, The Journals, 4445. Hannah Swarton, in her narrative of her captivity among the natives of Maine in 1690, noted that when she was dressed in the clothing of her captors-an “Indian Dress, with a sleight Blanket, no Stockins, and…Indian Shoes”— she was “pinch’d with Cold for want of Cloathing.” See Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 395. 83. Janet Shaw is cited in Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 465. For Hugh Jones, “Part of a Letter from the Reverend Mr. Hugh Jones…concerning several observables in Maryland,” Philosophical Transactions (1699); and James Adair, The History of the American Indians (London, 1775), see Frantz, The English Traveller, 117; Cox, A Reference Guide, II, 146; Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 15. 84. Cooke, Journals, 515, 45.

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85. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book IV, 13-16, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, John Butt, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). 86. Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 12-13. 87. John Butt 766 n.14 and 15, in Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope. 88. Timothy Dwight, America, cited in Bissell, The American Indian in English Literature, 174-175. 89. Willis, Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes (1683), 208; cited in Feder, Madness and Literature, 148. John Ovington, A Voyage to Surat (London, 1696); cited in Cox, A Reference Guide, I 279, 367, and Frantz, The English Traveller, 104.

Chapter Three The Yahoo in the Mirror

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Gulliver’s Travels It is within the context of the curious association between discourses of madness and non-Europeans that Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is situated, since in Gulliver contemporary images of madness and savagery are intertwined, producing a work that blends social critique and exoticism. It is generally assumed that Swift himself was familiar with contemporary travelers’ accounts, and that he owned books chronicling real and imaginary seventeenth century voyages of discovery. Critics agree, for instance, that Swift owned Lionel Wafer’s New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (1699); and that he was likely influenced by Richard Ligon’s History of the Island of Barbados (1657), Joseph Hall’s fictitious The Discovery of a New World (1609), and Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Worlds of the Moon and Sun (in English translation in 1687). The giants and griffin-like birds that appear in Gulliver’s second voyage echo those in Bergerac’s work, and both appear to have drawn upon traditional images that traced back to Ctesias and Pliny. The former, at least, was known to Swift who, in his earlier A Tale of a Tub (1704), referred directly

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to Ctesias through the character of Dr. Bentley.1 Gulliver’s Travels follows the contours of actual seventeenth century travel accounts, sharing with this literature a meticulous narrative, an apparently sincere desire to arrive at an understanding of exotic foreign lands, detailed accounts of latitudes, shorelines, and wind directions, and, of course, the requisite maps.2 The result is a work of satire consciously constructed on the model of travelers’ tales (both authentic and fictive), in which the description of foreign lands was ultimately a stage on which Swift could play out a critique of English society. The images of non-Europeans contained in Gulliver’s Travels were familiar to anyone acquainted with the literature of travel; yet these images were also inextricably bound to contemporary conceptions of madness. A most obvious melding of these images is unmistakable in Gulliver’s third voyage, which culminates in the fifth chapter with a satirical foray into madness at the Grand Academy of Lagado. The Academy is patterned after the Royal Society, considered in Swift’s day to be a centre of the English scientific community (among its members were Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle). Many of Swift’s contemporaries had begun equating the Royal Society with a kind of absurdity inherent in pushing the scientific method too far, and the image of the mad scientist was already emerging in the public imagination. In the Academy of Lagado, it appears that all the scientists have been rendered insane by the idea of scientific advancement; a warden watches over them in a situation that is reminiscent of Bethlam Hospital while Gulliver, like contemporary Londoners on Sunday afternoons, tours the cells in which ridiculous experiments are

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being conducted.3 One scientist, for instance, is attempting to transform human excrement into food; another is concerned with developing a method by which houses might be constructed from the roof down; still another, who is blind, is instructing his students in the art of mixing colors for painters by smell and touch. Elsewhere, Gulliver encounters a physician who is experimenting with curing colic with a pair of bellows, which he inserts into the anus of a dog (the dog dies, of course, at which point the physician attempts to re-animate him by the same method); and a linguist who is experimenting with shortening discourse by constructing only monosyllabic words, and eliminating verbs and participles because, he claims, “all things imaginable are but nouns.”4 Swift’s interest in targeting the Royal Society is evident also in Part I of the book, where Gulliver is scrutinized by the Lilliputians he has recently encountered. In an amusing reversal of roles, Swift pokes fun at the ‘correspondence instructions’ furnished to voyagers by the Royal Society, as the natives reflect on the contents of Gulliver’s pockets. His pocket-watch, in particular, elicits speculation and, ultimately, the Lilliputians’ conclusion that it must be “either some unknown animal, or the god he worships.”5 Most striking in respect to the blending of images of travel and madness is Gulliver’s fourth voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhms in the course of which, as noted at the outset of this essay, Gulliver appears to be driven mad in the wake of apprehending his own image in a pool of water. Like Burton’s melancholics, who think themselves to be animals of one sort or another, Gulliver begins to mimic the Houyhnhms’ “gait and gesture,”

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takes to trotting like a horse, and finds himself speaking in “the voice and manner of the Houyhnhms.”6 By the most popularly held eighteenth-century standards, however, he is not truly mad, since he merely wishes to be a horse. He is not, as were contemporary madmen, “destitute of every mark of reason and wisdom and leveled to the brute creation;” 7 but appears to be only temporarily eccentric—subject only to habit—already having begun at the end of the book to adjust to his former life in England: “I began last week to permit my wife to sit at dinner with me…although it be hard for a man late in life to remove old habits.”8 It is, in fact, the Yahoos who are ‘brute creations’. It is they who stand in opposition to English impressions of cultured life, and whose existence would be little better than chaos were it not for the strong hand of their masters, the Houyhnhms. Indeed, Gulliver’s own master tells him that the Yahoos are utterly devoid of reason, whereas the Englishman is “a little more civilized by some tincture of reason.”9 The grotesque Yahoos are in fact creatures who would have been all too familiar to an eighteenth-century reader. It has been noted that Swift’s contemporaries would have readily associated the Yahoos with natives of current travel literature;10 yet, given contemporary correspondences between representations of non-Europeans and the mentally deranged (as well as the conflation of these motifs throughout the text) it is possible that readers would have recognized both within this single creature. Like depictions of both foreigners and madmen, the Yahoos are described as animals and beasts; they are characterized by wild utterances and gestures; they suffer from uncontrolled passions; and they are childlike.

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In describing the Yahoos, both Gulliver and the Houyhnhms consistently employ the imagery of animals, variously describing them as weasels, foxes, jack-daws, monkeys, frogs, odious animals, odious vermin, and brutes who congregate in herds.11 References in the text to Yahoo language are practically nonexistent, although these creatures are on numerous occasions said to howl and groan,12 and to “chatter.”13 We might note that Dampier referred to native “chattering,” and in Lionel Wafer’s New Voyage (which Swift owned), Panamanian monkeys were described as “chattering and making a terrible Noise.”14 Gulliver also makes note of the Yahoos’ “antic gestures and grimaces,” and recalls his first encounter with one of the creatures who “distorted several ways every feature of his visage.”15 These brutes are also subject to flights of uncontrolled passions; like popular conceptions of non-Europeans and the mentally imbalanced, they are portrayed as prone to anger and violence, and as immodest and libidinous. We are told, for instance, that they are insolent, cunning, malicious, treacherous, revengeful, and cruel, with a propensity for fighting battles without any apparent cause.16 Gulliver is first acquainted with their libidinous tendencies soon after arriving in the Country of the Houynhms, when his master describes to him the sexual effrontery of the species’ females, as well as the nature of an illness carried by Yahoo prostitutes that breeds “rottenness in the bones of those who [fall] into their embraces.”17 Soon after, the voyager discovers for himself the pitch of their lasciviousness when an amorous female Yahoo, no more than eleven years of age, jumps on him while he is bathing.18 Females, who are

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held in common by male Yahoos, are recalled by Gulliver as physically grotesque, to a noticeable degree resembling various contemporary travelers’ accounts of Hottentots and African slaves: “Their dugs hung between their forefeet, and often reached almost to the ground as they walked.”19 The Yahoos are still more hideous by virtue of their obsession with excrement, from which it is said they even make their medicines.20 In images that again echo contemporary depictions of monkeys, natives, and madmen, the Yahoos repeatedly urinate in public view, in one case climbing a tree over Gulliver to “discharge their excrements on my head.”21 Additionally, they are known to lick each other’s feet and posteriors,” a spectacle that resonates with Ned Ward’s description of lunatic-like criminals lying around a fire with their noses pressed into each others’ behinds.22 The Yahoos’ diet is also worth noticing, as it exhibits all the properties that Robert Burton regarded as potential causes of melancholy: it offends in substance, in quantity, and in quality.23 Gulliver reports on numerous occasions the Yahoos’ tendency toward gluttony, and lists among the foods they consume, all manner of vegetation, roots and berries, the “corrupted flesh of animals,” and wild rats, which they consume singly or “all mingled together.” We should note revulsion concerning the diet of non- Europeans, found in many early voyagers’ accounts, continued well into the eighteenth century where writers made note of foreign food as repulsive: Daniel Beeckman, for instance, wrote that the diet of the natives of Borneo was “very beastly;” and Hannah Swarton, in the narrative of her captivity of 1690, recalled having to eat “Dogs Flesh” and a boiled moose bladder “well fill’d with Maggots.”24

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Finally, conforming to the commonly-held assumption that both non-Europeans and the mentally deranged were childlike, the Yahoos clearly demonstrate a proclivity for what the physician John Haslam would describe as “childish amusement.” In particular, Gulliver’s Houyhnhm master describes “certain shining stones of several colours whereof the Yahoos are violently fond,” and over which they are willing to fight one another. Losing these stones, Gulliver is told, can cause a Yahoo to become violent, to stop eating and sleeping, and to generally “pine away;” yet the stones are said to have neither value nor utility and there is, according to the Houyhnhm, “no reason of this unnatural appetite.”25 There is an additional manner in which the Yahoos mirror images of contemporary madmen and foreigners, and this revolves around their general association with filth. Writers of the eighteenth century frequently described the peoples of other regions as “filthy;” and by the end of the century, immigrants were being painted with the same brush: listing the principle patrons of licensed establishments in the city’s Tower Hamlets, for instance, a turn of the century London police report included “foreign sailors, lascars, Chinese, Greeks, and other filthy dirty people of that description.”26 In Gulliver’s Travels, the Yahoos likewise have a “strange disposition to nastiness and dirt.”27 In fact, Gulliver learns from the Houyhnhms that the species’ origins—not only its inclinations-are firmly associated with filth: “many ages ago two of these brutes appeared together upon a mountain, whether produced by the heat of the sun upon corrupted mud and slime, or the ooz and froth of the sea, was never known.”28 The

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myth was not Swift’s construction, but was borrowed from Burton’s classic treatise on melancholy. In the Anatomy, Burton recorded a “pleasant tale” traced back to Hyginus, in which “Dame Cura by chance went over a brook, and taking up some of the dirty slime, made an image of it . . . His name shall be Homo ab humus.”29 The Yahoos are an illustrative blend of conceptions of non-Europeans with those of the mad; and, as we have previously noted, it is Gulliver’s too-intimate experience of Yahoo-ness that renders this proper Englishman, at least temporarily, mentally imbalanced. Like a Patagonian giant, whom Magellan recorded as having been “greatly terrified” upon beholding his own face for the first time in a steel mirror,30 Gulliver turns away “in horror” from the pool of water that has revealed to him his likeness to the Yahoos. Gulliver’s Travels is a conglomeration of images harkening to English perceptions and discourses concerning non-Europeans and the mentally deranged. The amalgamation of images is particularly striking in Swift’s construction of the Yahoo, a creature whose degeneration is repulsive to Gulliver—as it would have been to Swift’s readers. This was a creature, as Gulliver discovered, that threatened to transform the human being into an animal. Discourse of Silence Returning to the broader historical and discursive context within which Gulliver’s Travels was situated, it seems prudent, finally, to afford some attention to the influential work of Michel Foucault concerning madness in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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In 1961, Foucault published Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’ âge classiques (translated four years later as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason), a penetrating exploration of the history of Western madness and, more particularly, the history of madness in France.31 The book mapped out a field of interest that would ultimately concern Foucault throughout his career: that of the economy of social marginalization.32 The book emerged from Foucault’s belief that cultural alterity has consistently been associated with a lack of value in the West, because of the threat posed by all forms of alterity to established social structures. Foucault discerned two possible modes by which social difference can be confronted: (i) complete exclusion, or (ii) absorption (enacted through a society’s apparatus for control); and Foucault argued that the dominant voices in Western culture have consistently followed the latter course. In respect to madness, he undertook to demonstrate how a complete breakdown in communication was enacted between the sane and the mad, in order to effect this neutralization: In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on the one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity. As for a common language, there is no such thing.33

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Foucault believed that this disruption in communication could be dated and placed within the mid-seventeenth century. Whereas medieval Europeans had generally associated mental derangement with supernatural forces (with the mad permitted relative freedom of mobility), madness was recreated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a disease lacking sacred connotations. Prior to this, the mad were a visible presence in society, were commonly encountered, and were respected—or feared—depending upon whether their madness was considered to be derived of divine or demonic forces. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ dissociation of madness and the divine effectively removed the mentally deranged from their previously valued position in society, and silenced them. Foucault argued that the process was signaled in practice by the “Great Internment” of 1657, when the mad were incarcerated in Paris.34 He believed, however, that the shift began earlier in European intellectual circles, and was set in motion with the publication of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641. The text, Foucault argued, effectively removed the voice of madness from any discourse about rationality. In a preamble to his second chapter of Histoire de la folie (this portion of the text, unfortunately, was not included in the English translation), he focused his attention on the First Meditation and, more particularly, on the three initial grounds for doubt set out by Descartes: (i) the senses, that could permit perceptual error; (ii) dreams, that could produce fantasies; and (iii) madness.35 Only the first two, according to Foucault, allowed for the notion of truth to be maintained; neither errors of

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the senses nor the images of dreams could lead the meditator to absolute doubt. The capacity of both the senses and dreams to fall short of complete error was preserved by their objects of thought—the fact that one could accurately perceive things that were sufficiently large or near, and that such things as shape and color in dreams referred to actual entities in the world. For this to hold, however, the thinking subject had to be sane; no object of thought could assure the truth in the case of madness. Foucault concluded, consequently, that Descartes believed that one who thinks cannot be mad.36 Foucault regarded Descartes’ philosophical pronouncement on madness as the intellectual antecedent of both the Great Internment of 1657 (through which six thousand Parisians were incarcerated) and of the creation of “an entire network” of institutions aimed at confining the mad throughout Western Europe. It was on this intellectual basis, Foucault argued, that reason silenced madness with which there had previously been dialogue; or, to put it another way, reason entered into a monologue about madness. Foucault’s project was to discover another mode of historical and philosophical discourse capable of negating, or subsuming, that language which had allowed for the isolation of reason from madness.37 Madness and Civilization has had a sustained influence since its publication. Even those most critical of the work have generally agreed that it constituted a catalyst in the late twentieth century for a reconsideration of the historical meaning of insanity in the West.38 Still, the book elicited its share of criticism, most notably perhaps from the pen of Jacques Derrida, who believed Foucault’s project

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to be fundamentally impossible and, worse, hypocritical. To Derrida’s mind, the utilization of the discursive constructs of reason, which were themselves implicated in the silencing of madness, was an exercise in futility: anyone who would undertake to speak intellectually about madness had already entered into the discursive structure of rationality; so that the desire to criticize reason was ultimately bound by reason.39 Thinking specifically about the cultural forces represented by language, Derrida criticized Foucault for thinking that it was possible to step outside the dominant Western worldview, as though he had at his disposal another comparable structure.40 Taken to its extreme conclusion, Derrida’s critique could well make the writing of any critical historical treatise in the West a hypocritical and possibly futile undertaking; still, for those who would stubbornly resist such an eventuality, his critique of Foucault did raise some potentially fruitful issues revolving around the idea of silence. He argued that there was nothing more unique about the silence of madness than of any other form of silence; rather, that silence in any mode is a condition of language—its potential for sound and meaning. Silence “haunts” language, he wrote; Silence plays the irreducible role of that which bears…language, outside and against which alone language can emerge—‘against’ here simultaneously designating the content from which form takes off by force, and the adversary against whom I assure and reassure myself by force. Although the silence of madness is the absence of a work, this silence is not simply the work’s epigraph, nor is it, as concerns language and meaning, outside

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the work. Like nonmeaning, silence is the work’s limit and profound resource [my italics].41 Together, perhaps, Foucault’s history of the silencing of madness and Derrida’s understanding of silence itself can bear upon our broader discussion. Derrida’s notion of silence as ‘outside and against which language can emerge’ reverberates in a religious sense with the historian of religion Charles H. Long’s assertion that silence is a “fundamentally ontological position,”42 as at once a limit and a profound resource containing the possibility of all sound and signification. This ontological character of silence is worth considering briefly, both in respect to the Cartesian Meditations and our specific English context. In respect to Descartes, Foucault argued in Madness and Civilization that the recognition of God in the Meditations was contingent on the prior acceptance of other fundamental ideas.43 From Foucault’s perspective, Descartes’ God was a divine extension of those ideas (whose primary characteristics were logical truth, causality, and moral perfection). The elevation of reason to a contiguous relationship with the divine was philosophically enacted simultaneously with a devaluation of madness so that, by Foucault’s account, madness was divested in the seventeenth century of the ontological status it had possessed during the medieval period.44 On this point, we might take issue with Foucault; and by revisiting the Meditations briefly—armed with Derrida’s notion of silence as at once an oppositional and defining structure for language and meaning—we may discern in Descartes a foundational European philosophical pronouncement of the modern status of insanity that

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bears upon our discussion of English images of the mad and non-Europeans. Foucault argued, after all, that Descartes’ intellectual formulation was implicated in the Great Internment, and that confinement of the mad in Paris was part and parcel of a widespread European shift in practice reflecting a post-Renaissance understanding of reason: What we now know of unreason affords us a better understanding of what confinement was….It assumed its precise meaning in this fact: that madness in the classical period ceased to be the sign of another world, and that it became the paradoxical manifestation of non-being…. Confinement merely manifested what madness, in its essence, was: a manifestation of nonbeing; and by providing this manifestation, thereby suppressed it, since it restored it to its truth as nothingness. Confinement is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as the empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing.45 Foucault maintained that from the inception of the Hôpital Général in Paris (which was followed by other similar institutions in Germany and England) until the turn of the nineteenth century, “the age of reason confined.”46 If Descartes was indeed implicated in this confinement, some further reflections on the Meditations might be useful. Turning again to the issue of the ontological status of the madman in the Cartesian Meditations, we might begin by briefly revisiting Descartes’ treatment of the idea of God, in relation to which he charted a peculiar course. It is accurate to say, as L. J. Beck has noted, that the “Cogito and the

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existence of God are twin threads running through the texture of the Cartesian argument;”47 for Descartes clear and distinct ideas (such as that I have of myself as a thinking person) could exist only in relation to God: “Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself.”48 Without God, the cogito of the First and Second Meditations remained instantaneous and fragile; it was a proposition of immediate reference, insofar as the meditator came to know for the first time that he existed by means of being a thinking, judging entity. He did not conclude that he existed because he thought—that would require a prior knowledge that all that thinks is—rather, the general proposition of existence comes to be known at the particular moment of thinking. In other words, at the moment of thought, he knows he must exist because he is thinking; and it is this unstable awareness alone of which he can be certain. Once God’s existence is established in the Third Meditation, the truth of the meditator’s own existence becomes grounded in the principle of an infinite being.49 Knowing himself to be finite and imperfect, the meditator concludes that his idea of the infinite and perfect (God) must necessarily have hailed from elsewhere—to doubt this would be to doubt his own thought, rationality, and existence: no effect, after all, can be greater than its cause.50 Ultimately, the meditator’s knowledge of God is founded on an internal act of thought and the “natural light” (the light of reason)51—a knowledge that provides for a radical intimacy between the meditator and God. God, for this vantage point, is known not by an external silent pause such as that, for instance, which Abraham experienced when he

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was instructed to ‘be still and know that I am God,’ but in terms of an inward motion of thinking “attentively on the subject,” that allows for the recognition of “the mark of the craftsman upon his work.”52 If in the Meditations there is an ontological structure akin to what Anselm would have described as that than which nothing greater can be thought, it may be the madman, rather than the meditator’s God, who occupies this position. God, after all, is a being with whom the meditator, by virtue of his will, shares a qualitative likeness: “The will is the chief basis for my understanding that I bear a certain image and likeness of God.”53 Madness, on the other hand, stands in silent alterity to the thinking, willing I, as that which can be conceived, and yet is situated beyond the outer limits of the cogito—in spite of his doubt, the meditator arbitrarily assures himself that he is not mad.54 Foucault believed that Descartes’ exclusion of madness from the possible modes of a thinking human signaled the intellectual beginning of the European silencing of the mad. Perhaps Descartes’ synoptic placement of (i) this exclusion with (ii) the recognition of a qualitative symmetry between the thinking human and God, suggests also an ontological innovation within Western European thought, whereby human beings could be afforded a sort of ontological status ‘outside and against which meanings can emerge’. Certainly we can discern in England, during the same period, a developing tendency to imaginatively cast groups of people into positions at the furthest frontiers of conceivable existence—as antipodean structures in relation to which the most essential modes and meanings of rational human existence could be determined.

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Gauging by the most salient English discourses about madness from the Anatomy onward, dominant seventeenth- and eighteenth-century voices betrayed an increasing perception of the mad as an absolute structure of silent alterity, in relation to which the sane knew who they were. The mad, in this sense, were significant in terms of what they meant for the sane. “She exists in a separate world,” wrote Edward Young on the madness of a woman by the name of Grace Cole, in 1746. “We exist under [the] Reign of Reason; She is in the Kingdom of wild Imaginations only…a Living Monument of [the] Deceased…to show us our possible Misfortunes.”55 Yet, this language of insanity as a foil, which Foucault identified as a means by which the mentally deranged were rendered silent, directly reverberated in its English context with a language about non-Europeans. In this case the discourse of madness was part of a more expansive discourse about silent alterity—a ready resource for the creation and maintenance of an ontologically expedient structure of human meaning that extended well beyond the madhouses of England to the whole non European world. The relationship between the various modalities of this language of silence and the human beings of whom it purported to speak, is difficult to distinguish: Bedlamites, Hottentots, Mexicans, North American Indians all emerged as approximations of one another and, more critically, as oppositional structures in relation to which the English appear to have defined a bonafide existence for all human beings. These were structures of arguably ontological proportion, since they defined—by being situated just beyond— the outermost conceivable parameters of an authentic

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human existence; yet the silencing language may also have reflected a more pressing historical dilemma, for which an ontological solution was well suited. The seeds of an English association between non-Europeans and the mentally deranged were already present in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The text, however, appeared at a point that was characterized by a number of salient historical intersections. As Foucault pointed out, the seventeenth century saw a widespread intellectual shift through which the European mad were generally excluded from the accepted range of meaningful modes of rational human existence. The period saw also the rise of scientism (with its concomitant separation of humans from their objects of inquiry); as well as a dramatic increase in voyages of discovery, and England’s first serious forays into colonial enterprises. The mad began, concurrently, to be treated medically with detached interest, and publicly with detached amusement and revulsion; while non-Europeans became aspects of natural history or components of an expanding economic landscape. From the perspective of the discourse of silence we have been considering here there is a striking irony relating to these various intersecting movements. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries England’s mentally ill were subjected to the most vicious of medical treatments, and were displayed before the paying public in order to generate revenue for the institutions in which they were chained and beaten. Violence, new sexual relationships,56 and an intense interest in commodities were stock in trade of English colonial enterprises of the period; and back in England, writers, travelers, and physicians were speaking

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of foreigners and the mentally ill (adult human beings in virtually all cases) as children and beasts. The irony is, of course, that in the midst of these inhuman medical treatments, colonial conquests, patently imaginative descriptions, and a widespread cultural interest in commodities, the English public was permeated with images of the mad and non-Europeans as subject to the immoderate indulgence of violence and sex, wild speech, and an obsession with trinkets. The discourses of silence mapped out a number of modes of defining human beings of the period. Yet, the wholesale ascription of these definitions to the mad and non-Europeans served to frame these groups as homogenous constructions or, perhaps more accurately, as something akin to what the Greeks called theōreion. The word has a number of meanings, but principally refers to a place for seeing, and is related to thiaōria : the sending of state ambassadors to an oracle or public spectacles. In one sense, the theoretical construction of madmen and foreigners made spectacles of these groups, and historical spectators of the English; a theatrical maneuver that did not go unnoticed by inmates of Bethlam Hospital who, by the late eighteenth century, were exhibiting one another and staging their own dramas for paying visitors.57 Sara Suleri has noted this tendency toward historical spectacle in Edmund Burke’s appeal to a theory of the sublime in the British House of Commons and House of Lords during the impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, the Governor General of the East India Company. Suleri argues that according to Burke, the Indian subcontinent was a “remote object,”58 intransigent and,

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ultimately, unknowable; and as such, constituted also a spectacular and resilient stage on which British colonial interests could play themselves out. The appeal to an Indian ‘sublime’ afforded Burke a level of immunity from a problematic confrontation with the broad human and cultural significance of the English colonial enterprise, an issue that became abundantly clear in Burke’s attack on Hastings during the trial. The expedience of the British colonial project in India was never an issue for Burke whose assault, Suleri convincingly argues, obscured the fact that Hastings was “merely synecdochical of the colonial operation.”59 Ultimately, the House of Lords had no means by which to deal with the corruption charges against Hastings and the East India Company, since the charges themselves raised the problem of broader British “colonial culpability” for which there existed no judicial nor legislative precedents and, hence, “no language.”60 Did the discourse of alterity that we have explored in this essay become something of a repository for a broad range of images of such culpability? In this regard, it is possible that the people of whom this discourse purported to speak were theōreion again, in the second sense of constituting a place for seeing—like an oracle—something significant of oneself. The conflation of the mad and nonEuropeans within a single discourse of silent alterity may well point to a fundamental ambivalence within England of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This discourse established the outermost limits of what the English would admit as an authentic human being during the period; and foreigners and madmen (at the very least) 61 were endowed with those qualities that ensured their location beyond

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these parameters. Yet the discourse undoubtedly harkened also to a number of English cultural practices that attended their treatment of the humans they regarded as mad, as well as those whom they encountered in the process of colonial expansion. The language of silence or alterity does appear to have functioned as a kind of ontological projection based on a particular conception of an authentic human mode. It may have been, additionally, a language that reflected a number of English modes of historical being during the period, for which it is possible, as Sara Suleri suggested, no other language existed. Gulliver, after all, was not revolted at the sight of an actual Yahoo in the pool of water. He was horrified because he saw himself.

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Notes 1. Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 6, 8, 15; Cox, A Reference Guide, II, 470, 474. 2. J. R. Moore, “The Geography of Gulliver’s Travels,” Frank Brady, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Gulliver’s Travels: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 102. 3. Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 83-85; Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 1213. 4. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part III, ch. 5, 195-200. 5. Ibid., Part I, ch. 2, 24. See also Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 158 n.36. 6. Ibid., Part IV, ch. 10, 307-308. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2, Mem. 3, Subs. 2. 7. Samuel Richardson, Familiar Letters, in Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 89. 8. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV, ch. 2, 327-328. See Stone, “Swift and Horses,” 189. 9. Ibid., Part IV, ch. 9, 300. On the Yahoos as ‘brute beasts’, see Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 131. 10. Stone, “Swift and the Horses,” 183. 11. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV, ch. 3, 258 and ch. 8, 291293. 12. Ibid., Part IV, ch. 7, 287, 288, 290. 13. Ibid., Part IV, ch. 7, 288, 290. 14. See Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 15; and Stone, “Swift and the Horses,” 183. 15. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV, ch. 7, 290; ch. 1, 244. 16. Ibid., Part IV, ch. 8, 293; ch. 7, 286. 17. Ibid., Part IV, ch. 7, 290; ch. 6, 278. 18. Ibid., Part IV, ch. 8, 293-294. 19. Ibid., Part IV, ch. 1, 244; ch. 7, 289. Richard Ligon, in his History of the Island of Barbados, 51, wrote: “their breast hung down below their Navels, so that when they stoop…they hang almost down to the ground.” See also Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 15.

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20. Ibid., Part IV, ch. 7, 288. 21. Ibid., Part IV, ch. 8, 292; ch. 1, 245. See also Stone, “Swift and the Horses,” 183. 22. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV, ch. 7, 289. Ward, London Spy, cited in Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 46. 23 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2, Mem. 2, Subs. 1. 24. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV, ch. 7, 286-287; ch. 8, 293. Daniel Beeckman, A Voyage to and from the Island of Borneo (1718), cited in Cox, A Reference Guide, I, 286, and Frantz, The English Traveller, 37. Hannah Swarton’s narrative is cited in Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 394-395. 25. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV, ch. , 286-287. 26. Report of the Police of the Metropolis, 1817, is cited in George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, 362 n.88. References to non-Europeans as filthy are present in the accounts of, for instance, Daniel Beeckman and Edward Cooke. See Frantz, The English Traveller, 37, 104. 27. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV, ch. 7, 289. 28. Ibid., Part IV, ch. 9, 299. 29. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2, Mem. 3, Subs. 10. Ronald Knowles, Gulliver’s Travels, 131, notes that in formulating the origins of the Yahoos, Swift “turned not to Genesis and the creation of Adam but to an earlier mythographer, Hyginus, and his fable CCXX, as rendered by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy. 30. Magellan is cited in Newby, A Book of Travellers’ Tales, 454455. 31. Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’ âge classiques (Paris: Plon, 1961); Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1965). 32. In respect to his subsequent work, Madness was probably Foucault’s least pessimistic. See Roy Boyne, Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason (London: Unwin Hymen, 1990), 54. 33. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, x. See also Boyne, Foucault and Derrida, 124. 34. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 39ff.

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35. We might note that from this perspective, even the hypothesis of an evil genius could not lead the meditator to relinquish the notion of truth, since the meditator, unlike the madman, possessed the capacity to doubt his own perceptions: “Unless perhaps I should compare myself to insane people whose brains are so impaired by a stubborn vapor from a black bile that they continually insist that they are kings when they are in utter poverty, or that they are wearing purple robes when they are naked, or that they have a head made of clay, or that they are gourds, or that they are made of glass. But they are all demented, and I would appear no less demented if I were to take their conduct as a model for myself.” René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Donald A. Cress, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), Meditation I, 14. See also Steven Nadler, “Descartes’ Demon and the Madness of Don Quixote,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 58, no. 1 (January, 1977), 54. 36. Foucault, Histoire do la folie, 57. See also Tom Hayes, “Diggers, Ranters, and Women Prophets: the Discourse of Madness and the Cartesian ‘Cogito’ in Seventeenth-Century England,” CLIO, 26, no. 1 (fall 1996), 31; Boyne, Foucault and Derrida, 45-49; Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 45-47. 37. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 44, 48-49. See also Shoshana Fellman, “Madness and Philosophy or Literature’s Reason,” Yale French Studies, 210, 214; Niall Lucy, Debating Derrida (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 50. 38. Boyne, Foucault and Derrida, 5. 39. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 35. See also Boyne, Foucault and Derrida, 56-60. 40. Derrida was critical also of Foucault’s attenuated discussion of Descartes’ Meditations, given the centrality of the text in his madness project: “In this 673-page book,” Derrida noted, “Michel Foucault devotes three pages—and, moreover, in a kind of prologue to his second chapter—to a certain passage from the first of Descartes’ Meditations.” Derrida, Writing and Difference, 32.

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41. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 54. See also Lucy, Debating Derrida, 54. 42. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, Colorado: The Davies Group, 1999), 69. 43. As an example, we can note Descartes’ assertion that an idea must possess as much formal reality (referring to the properties of the idea itself) as it has representational reality (referring to the properties of the object represented by the idea). 44. Boyne, Foucault and Derrida, 49, 53. 45. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 115-116. 46. Ibid., 65. 47. L. J. Beck, The Metaphysics of Descartes: A Study of the Meditations (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), 243. 48 Descartes, Meditations, Meditation III, 31. See also Jean Marie Beyssade, “On the Idea of God: Incomprehensibility or Incompatabilities?” Stephen Voss, ed., Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 86. 49. Beck, The Metaphysics of Descartes, 242-243; John Veitch, The Method, Meditations, and Philosophy of Descartes (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1901), 14-20. 50. Descartes, Meditations, Meditation III, 28-31. 51. Leonard G. Miller, “Descartes, Mathematics, and God,” Alexander Sesonske and Noel Fleming, eds., Meta-Meditations: Studies in Descartes (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1965), 43, notes that the mode by which the “natural light” functions is left vague in the Meditations. See also Gary Hatfield, “Reason, Nature, and God in Descartes,” Voss, Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes, 275; Boyne, Foucault and Derrida, 42. 52. Descartes, Meditations, Meditation III, 32, 34. 53. Ibid., Meditation IV, 38. 54. See Nadler, “Descartes’ Demon,” 54; and Boyne, Foucault and Derrida, 48. 55. Edward Young’s letter to Margaret, Duchess of Portland, 16 October, 1746; cited in Ingram, The Madhouse of Language, 80-82.

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56. Edward Long, an eighteenth century English historian, wrote, for instance, that he was afraid that working class women were engaging in so many sexual liaisons with African men that “in the course of a few generations more the English blood will become so contaminated with this mixture…as even to reach the middle, and then the higher orders of people.” Cited in Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 159. 57. Byrd, Visits to Bedlam, 39. 58. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 27. 59. Ibid., 52. 60. Ibid., 51, 55. 61. One might argue, for instance, that the working class was defined in similar terms during the period. Edward Long located his fear that English blood was becoming contaminated (by illicit sex) on the working class, and in particular, “The lower class of women in England [who] are remarkably fond of the blacks, for reasons too brutal to mention; they would connect themselves with horses and asses if the laws permitted them. By these ladies they generally have numerous brood.” Cited in Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 159. The images of bestiality and sexual lasciviousness, at least, resonate with the current descriptions we have been considering.

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Nadler, Steven. “Descartes’ Demon and the Madness of Don Quixote.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 58, no. 1, January, 1977: 41-55. Nandy, Ashes. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Newby, Eric. A Book of Travellers’ Tales. NewYork: Penguin Books, 1987. Lucy, Niall. Debating Derrida. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995. Ornstein, Martha. The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928. Peake, Charles. “Swift and the Passions.” Milton P. Foster, ed., A Casebook on Gulliver Among the Houyhnhms. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961: 282-298. Poets’ Corner. Online, www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/milton02. html (accessed fall 2000). Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope. John Butt, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. Price, Martin. “The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers.” Yale Review, 58, winter 1969:194-213. Quinn, David Beers. “New Geographical Horizons: Literature.” Fredi Chiappelli, ed., The First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old. Vol. II: 635-658. Reed, Robert Rentoul. Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage. New York: Octagon Books, 1970. Rosen, George. Madness in Society: Chapters in the Historical Sociology of Mental Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Sesonske, Alexander and Noel Fleming, eds. Meta-Meditations: Studies in Descartes. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1965.

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Index ef Abbot, George (Archbishop of Canterbury), 37-38 de Acosta, José, 27 Adair, James, 77 Adams, Thomas, 19 de Alforo, Pedro, 27 Amazons, 29, 35 Antigua, in travel literature, 77 Aretaeus, 13 Aristotle, 12, 22 Avicenna, 14, 23 Baillie, John, 53 Barbados, in travel literature, 71 Battie, William, 47, 57, 7374 Baudet, Henri, 2-5, 81 Baumer, Franklin, 2 Baxter, Richard, 46, 81n.2 Beck, L.J., 108-109, 119n.47 Beeckman, Daniel, 72, 89n.69, 91n.79, 101 de Bergerac, Cyrano, 2, 88n.62, 95 Best, George, 27 Bethlam Hospital (Bedlam), 10n.10,47, 56-57, 59-60, 83n.28, 96, 113 Beverly, Robert, 73 Blair, Patrick, 57, 63-64

Blair, Robert, 51 Bleeker, Ann Eliza, 75, 91n.76 Bollingbroke, Henry St. John, 69 Borneo, in travel literature, 73 Brazil, in travel literature, 29, 31, 33 Bright, Timothy, 12, 17-18, 22 Brooke, Frances, 69 Brooke, Henry, 69 Brooks, Francis, 73 Burke, Edmund, 53-55, 82n.18, 89n.68. See also sublime Burton, Robert, 5, 8, 11-13, 19-24, 28-32, 34-44, 45, 48-49, 54-55, 58-59, 61, 65, 73, 75, 81n.1, 97, 100, 102, 112, 117n.29 Cabot, John, 27 Campenella, Tommaso, 3, 69 Cannibalism, 29, 36 Captivity narratives, 75, 92n.81 and n.82 Cartier, Jacques, 27, 38-41 Cathay, ancient conceptions of, 25 Chamoisseau, Patrick, 11n.5

140

Worse Than Beasts

Chilton, John, 37 China, in travel literature, 26, 31 Coleman, George, 70 Columbus, Christopher, 2, 26, 29, 33-34, 38, 41, 43, 68, 71, 78 Consciousness (multiple), 3, 10n.5 Cooke, Edward, 70, 72 Cooke, James, 1, 9n.1, 73, 75-78 da Cruz, Gaspar, 27 Ctesias, 25, 33-34, 95 Cuba, in travel literature, 29 Dampier, William, 71-72, 75-76, 99 Defoe, Daniel, 3, 70. See also Robinson Crusoe Democritus, 13, 28 Derrida, Jacques, 105-107, 113n.32, 119n.40 Descartes, René (and the Cartesian Meditations), 104-105, 107-110, 118n.35, 119n.43 Drake, Francis, 27 Dryden, John, 69, 74-75, 89n.63 DuBois, W. E. B., 3 East India Company, 74, 113-114 Eden, Richard, 26 Empedocles, 13 Epictetus, 23 Ethiopia, ancient conceptions of, 33

Fabian, Robert, 36 Ford, John, 59-60 Foucault, Michel, 102-108, 110-112, 119n.40 Frobisher, Martin, 27, 41 Galapagos Islands, in travel literature, 77 Galen, 11, 23 Garcilasca de la Vega, 69-71, 87n.59 George III (King of England), 47, 60, 63, 85n.39 Godwin, Francis, 69 de Gómara, Francisco Lopez, 26 Gray, Robert, 33 Great Internment of 1657 (Paris) 104-105, 108 Greenblatt, Stephen, 9n3, 53n.110 Greene, Robert, 49 Gregory, John. See Scottish Common Sense School Gulliver’s Travels, 1, 3-8, 95102. See also Houyhnhms, Yahoos Guyana, in travel literature, 29, 35 Hakluyt, Richard, 26-27, 33 Hall, Joseph, 95 Halley, Edmund, 66-67 Hamlet. See Shakespeare Haslam, John, 58, 61, 63, 65, 83n28 Hastings, Warren, 113

Index Hawkins, John, 27 Heraclitus, 13 Herodotus, 13, 22-25, 34 Herrada (Martin de Rada) 27 Hippocrates, 11, 23 Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 48, 68, 71 Hume, David, 52 Hutcheson, Frances. See Scottish Common Sense School Hottentots, 72, 89n.70, 100, 111 Houyhnhms, 5-7, 97-99, 101 Howard, Robert, 69, 74 Hudson, Henry, 29 Huron peoples, 38-40 Ignaxio, Martin, 27 India, ancient conceptions of, 25-26 Inca peoples, 77 Iroquois peoples, 77 Jacobean drama, 59 Japan, in travel literature, 26, 32 Johnson, Samuel, 71 Jones, Hugh, 87 Kant, Emmanuel, 92n.22 Kyd, Thomas, 59 Lafitau, Joseph-François, 2 Las Casas, Bartolomé, 2, 27, 80 Lawson, John, 87, 101n.79 de Léry, Jean, 48n.54, 78

141

Libya, ancient conceptions of, 25 Ligon, Richard, 80, 82-83, 105, 126n.19 Locke, John, 5, 58, 62, 76, 78-79, 81, 91n.15, 97n.59 Long, Charles H., 3, 117 Longinus, 60, 91n.9 Loyola, Ignatius, 24 Luther, Martin, 24 Macbeth. See Shakespeare Magellan, Ferdinand, 26, 3536, 53, 112 Malleus Maleficarum, 15 Mandeville, Jean (Jehan d’Outremeuse), 2, 26, 29, 33-36, 39-40 Maori peoples, 83 Marco Polo, 2, 25, 29-30, 34-35, 39 Martyr, Peter, 2, 26, 28,78 Maryland, in travel literature, 87 Melancholy (madness), ancient conceptions of, 11-12; and animals/beasts, 22, 32, 65, 68-69, 82; and childlike behaviour, 4142, 71; and diet, 16-17; and humours, 14, 17-19, 24; and imagination, 2122, 58-60; and language, 70-72; medieval and Renaissance conceptions of, 13-14; and pain, 40, 56, 65, 74-75; and passions, 18-19, 35, 38,

142

Worse Than Beasts

56, 68, 71, 75, 81; and reason, 17, 19-21, 5758, 92n.22, 108, 113; and religious error, 22, 31, 37, 73, 98, 51n.9; and religious insight, 13, 60, 65; and the sublime, 60-65, 91n.13, 91n.17, 92n.22; and witchcraft, 14, 40 Mendoza, 27 Mexico, in travel literature, 31, 39, 41, 79, 84 Milton, John, 61 Monro, John, 67, 69-70 Montaigne, 2 More, Thomas, 2, 16

Oviedo y Valdez, 24 Ovington, John, 69, 78 Panama, in travel literature, 86 Peri Hupsous. See Longinus Perkins, William, 11, 19 Peru, in travel literature, 29, 81, 97n.59 Peruvian dramas, 80, 98n.65 The Philippines, in travel literature, 36 Plato. See Socrates Pliny, 23, 25, 28, 105 Plotinus, 23 Plutarch, 23 Pope, Alexander, 53, 77 Pythagoras, 23

Narborough, John, 76, 86-87 Nalson, John, 78, 81 Nandy, Ashis, 9n.5 Newton, Isaac, 76 Noble savage, 2-4, 6, 8, 9n.3, 80 Non-Europeans, and animals/beasts, 33, 41, 65, 82, 99n.70; and child-like behaviour, 41; and diet, 35-36; and exoticism, 2, 79, 105; and language, 42, 53n.110, 102n.81; and passions, 38-39, 72; and pain, 40, 75, 81; and religious error, 37, 86 North Carolina, in travel literature, 41

Raleigh, Walter, 27, 29, 35 Reid, Thomas. See Scottish Common Sense School Religious autobiography, 73 Richardson, Samuel, 70 Robaut, Jean, 27 Robinson Crusoe, 3-5, 80 Rogers, Woods, 77, 80 Rowlandson, Mary. See captivity narratives Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 2, 79, 80 Royal Society, 1, 9n.1, 76, 88, 96n48, 106-107

Ofhuys, Gaspar, 16, 46n.14 d’Outremeuse, Jehan, 26

Scot, Reginald, 14, 17 Scottish Common Sense School (philosophy), 57, 90n3 Seneca, 23 Sepulveda, 2

Index Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) 62, 77, 99n.13 Shakespeare, William, 55-59 Shebbeare, John, 79 Sheridan, Richard, 80 Smith, John, 42 Socrates, in Plato, 13, 45n.5; in Xenophon, 12. Strachey, William, 27 St. Vitus Dance, 42 Sublime, 60-62, 91n.17; and Edmund Burke, 63-65, 92n.18, 123. See also John Baillie, Robert Blair, David Hume, Emmanuel Kant, melancholy, John Milton, Shaftesbury, James Usher, Thomas Warton, Edward Young Sulari, Sara, 123 Swarton, Hannah. See captivity narratives Swift, Jonathan, 1, 105. See also Gulliver’s Travels Sydenham, Thomas, 71 Tindall, Matthew, 77 Tyrell, James, 78, 81 Tyron, Thomas, 58, 70, 72 Unicorns, 25 Usher, James, 63 Virginia, in travel literature, 33, 42, 82 da Verrazano, Giovanni, 27, 41

143

Vespucci, Amerigo, 26, 34, 37, 39-41, 101n.78 Villegagnon, 33 Wafer, Lionel, 105, 109 Walkington, Thomas, 18 Ward, Ned, 69, 72 Warton, Thomas, 61-62 White, Harden, 9n.3 Wild man, 9n.3 Willis, Thomas, 56, 66, 69, 89 Wonders of the East, 25, 33-35 Woodward, John, 56, 72 Xenophon, 12, 23. See also Socrates Yahoos, 5-8, 10n.16, 108112 York Retreat, 93n.28 Young, Edward, 61, 121