Suicide was regarded as a deplorable act, subject to savage punishments, in Tudor and Stuart England. In Georgian England it was de-criminalized, tolerated, and even sentimentalized. Drawing on a wide variety of contemporary sources, Sleepless Souls traces the causes of this dramatic shift in attitude. Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy relate changes in opinion and practice to the complex framework of life in early modern England--including political events, religious changes, philosophical fashions, and differing class interests. Their analysis uncovers the forces that were reshaping...

Witchcraft was at its height in Elizabethan London. Edward Jorden showed that hysteria and not demons lay behind the witch-craze.
Edward Jorden's Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) is said to have reclaimed the demoniacally possessed for medicine and to have introduced the concept of hysteria into English psychiatry. The aim of this book is to reassess the reasons why Jorden wrote his famous pamphlet and to set it in its actual historical context.
This book brings Jorden's pamphlet together with two works by Jorden's adversaries, John...

This book explores the complex ways in which England's gradual transformation from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant nation presented men and women with new ways in which to fashion their own identities and to define their relationships with society. The past generation's research into the religious history of early modern England has heightened our appreciation for the persistence of traditional beliefs in the face of concerted attacks by followers of Henry VIII and his successor Edward VI. The book argues that the present challenge for historians is to move beyond this revisionist...

Mystical Bedlam explores the social history of insanity of early seventeenth-century England by means of a detailed analysis of the records of Richard Napier.