In this post, Jonathan Willis introduces his new article, ‘“your poore distressed suppliant”: ‘Madness’, Emotion and the Archive in Early Modern England’, published this week in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
The article focusses on the British Library’s MS Lansdowne 99, a collection of letters written to the government of Elizabethan England and annotated at several points in their history to describe their authors or contents as ‘crazy’, ‘mad’, ‘frantic’, and ‘insane’.
Jonathan’s article explores the relationships between archives, letters and emotion in early modern England.
It argues that understanding their distress not only brings us closer to marginalised people in the past, but grants us a richer knowledge of past societies and the experience of being human in them. The article is now available Open Access.
On 28 June 1587 a man named Miles Fry, calling himself ‘Emmanuel Plantagenet’, wrote an extraordinary letter to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Lord Treasurer of England and trusted minister and confidante of Elizabeth I.
In it, he claimed to be the product of a union between Elizabeth I and God, taken away at birth by the angel Gabriel to Axminister in Devon and raised there by a couple named John and Joan Fry. Now aged thirty-five, Fry had travelled to London, where, ‘at the signe of the rose and crowne in Saint Johns street beyond smithfelde’ he wrote:
yf you do not presently helpe me uppon the sight hereof I shal then presently depart unto Devonshire againe: and yf I do so as trewli as god livith and as my ladi doth live immediatli upon my returne thither I shal end my life: as by my letters unto my ladi and her counsel I did signifi longe gon: and then wil god punish this land.
Fry’s letter is one of almost sixty letters in the British Library’s Lansdowne MS vol. 99 whose authors or contents are described as ‘mad’.
These descriptors originate from several different stages in the formation of the archive: annotations made by the sixteenth-century secretariat of Lord Burghley; notes from the seventeenth-century antiquarian John Strype (who came into possession of a great number of Burghley’s papers); pencil annotations made by the nineteenth-century Keeper of the Manuscripts at the British Museum, Francis Douce; and the nineteenth-century printed catalogue of the Lansdowne Manuscripts.
Historians have generally been happy to follow the judgements of these annotations and the printed catalogue in regarding these letters as evidence of ‘madness’, although they have acknowledged that we cannot be sure when, how or why they came to be grouped together in Lansdowne 99.
This is an astonishing example of the potential of archival practices to create thematic coherences in sources which might not otherwise have been evident at all.
Although some of the details remain foggy, I show in my new article for Transactions of the Royal Historical Society that the presence in the volume of three overlapping but distinct bodies of material – groups of letters annotated in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries – strongly suggests that the material was ultimately brought together by Douce, who was working under a royal commission to ‘methodise, regulate and digest’ the papers under his authority. I argue that this is an astonishing example of the potential of archival practices to create thematic coherences in sources which might not otherwise have been evident at all.
I also argue that accepting at face value third-party judgements of historical subjects as ‘mad’ – judgements based solely on the evidence of, in many cases, a single letter – is not only methodologically but ethically problematic.
Instead, I propose that in the case of Lansdowne 99 a history of emotions perspective is a more fruitful one, which recognises the evident distress of the Lansdowne authors without attempting to pathologise it (either according to modern or early modern understandings of mental illness).
Early modern authors such as Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) discussed a range of causes of distress, from practical circumstances like penury through to spiritual and emotional matters. Indeed several of the Lansdowne 99 authors used variants of the word ‘distress’ to describe themselves and their situations.
Mapping the contours of the Lansdowne 99 authors’ distress through the evidence of their letters reveals, if not a specific ‘script’, then at least a common repertoire of cultural resources and preoccupations which those experiencing distress drew upon in distinctive combinations but not entirely dissimilar ways.
Despite being dismissed by the archive as ‘mad’, [these individuals] all expressed a strong actual and rhetorical sense of their own deservingness.
Shaped in part by the nature of the evidence these individuals all had pressing needs, often financial or material, relating to lawsuits, patronage, reputation, and other fears. Despite being dismissed by the archive as ‘mad’, they all expressed a strong actual and rhetorical sense of their own deservingness, framed and narrated in a variety of ways: in relation to reputation, credit, status, loyalty, godliness, a duty of care over dependents of various kinds, and the duty of the authorities (particularly the queen) to care for them.
For many authors, marginalisation tipped over into a sense of victimisation. They wrote in fear of their lives, whether from the direct machinations of enemies known or unknown, or highlighting existential fears which made a particularly prominent impact on the popular psyche – the fear of Spanish invasion and the fear of God’s wrath being the most powerful examples.
One common way in which individuals frequently sought to understand their situation and demonstrate their worthiness was by establishing their status through narrating links to the great and the good, sometimes engaging in the construction of inventive and even fantastical pedigrees to demonstrate their deservingness for aid while simultaneously attempting to leverage an influence which they otherwise lacked over those in authority, like Miles Fry, with whose case I began.
Understanding distress not only brings us closer to marginalised people in the past, but grants us a richer knowledge of past societies and of the experience of being human in them.
As well as indicating the kinds of categories and tropes which shaped the construction and expression of distress, therefore, we also gain a sense from the letters of Lansdowne 99 of some of the central preoccupations, categories and concerns of the late-sixteenth-century English psyche.
Fundamentally, I argue that understanding distress not only brings us closer to marginalised people in the past, but grants us a richer knowledge of past societies and of the experience of being human in them.
About the author
Jonathan Willis is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Birmingham, UK.
His research focusses on the relationship between religious change, belief, practice and identity in England over the course of the long sixteenth century.
Following projects on Church music in post-reformation England, and the impact of the English Reformation on the Ten Commandments (and vice versa), Jonathan is in the early stages of a new project on the visual and material culture of the post-Reformation English parish church.
Submitting an article to Transactions
Transactions is the flagship academic journal of the Royal Historical Society, published by Cambridge University Press. Today’s journal publishes a wide range of research articles and commentaries on historical approaches, practice and debate. In addition to traditional 10-12,000 word research articles, Transactions also welcomes shorter, innovative commentary articles. In 2023, we introduced ‘The Common Room’—a section of the journal dedicated to commentaries and think pieces by academic historians and historical practitioners.
The journal welcomes submissions dealing with any geographical area from the early middle ages to the very recent past. The journal’s co-editors and editorial boards are interested in articles that cover entirely new ground, thematically or methodologically, as well as those engaging critically on established themes in existing literatures.
From August 2024, all articles accepted for publication in Transactions are published open access, without a charge for any author or reader. This ensures content published in Transactions can be shared, circulated and read by the widest possible readership. We very much hope this initiative will encourage a growing range of submissions from authors, worldwide, including those who practice history outside Higher Education, in related sectors or as independent researchers.
HEADER IMAGE: From the British Library Collection: BL MS Lansdowne 99 no. 6, fo. 13r. Letter from Miles Fry, signed ‘Emmanuel Plantagenet’, to William Cecil, Lord Burghley (28 June 1587).
