Madman, Miscreant, or Moderate: George Trosse, Madness, and the Birth of Moderate English Dissent (1631-1713)

Abstract

The following dissertation explores what happened to the English Presbyterians after the Act of Toleration in 1689; how madness was understood in the context of moderate English dissent in late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; also, how the psychology of puritan religious experience – an intellectual system rooted in Providence – adapted to fit the philosophical, cultural, and theological demands of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. These themes are explored through a close analysis of the Life and works of George Trosse (1631-1713, as Trosse was attempting to delineate the reasonable parameters of Reformed spiritual experience in the 1690s. Trosse’s Life is particularly useful, as case study through which to map the continuities and discontinuities of the period, because of its unparalleled descriptions of madness, treatment in a madhouse, personal transformation, Presbyterian training in Oxford, and ministry in Exeter. Trosse’s Life, including his depiction of his madness, while not disinterested in explaining the experience of madness, was concerned with making sense of individual and communal, Presbyterian identity amid the ecclesial politics of the 1690s by way of his own madness and subsequent conversion experience. Trosse believed that his triumph over madness and the loss of reason was evidence of the power of the Presbyterian ministry. The religious polemics motivating Trosse to write an account of his life, more accurately account for the way seventeenth century individuals understood madness, than a study rooted in modern theoretical methodology that supposedly preserves the agency of firsthand accounts of madness. Madness was central to the narrative of Trosse’s Life because it was an answer to the religious debates that he had with the Baptists, the Quakers, and the Anglicans. Madness, according to Trosse, was a product of extreme religion, or enthusiasm, and it was a symbol of a world turned upside down. After the Act of Toleration in 1689, Presbyterian and Independent meetings were established apart from the national church in the 1690s. An unintended consequence of the fracturing of the national church was that the Restoration Church of England also lost its central voice of religious authority in England. In this context, moderate and reasonable religion could be defined without the nationally established institutions of religion, and religious competition became fierce. One way to convince popular society to adapt a particular religious position was to demonstrate that your ministry was reasonable, effective, and moderate. This was the goal of Trosse’s Life, and for this reason it became a part of the legacy of early evangelicalism, which was a movement that also sought to escape the charge of enthusiasm.