Katharine Hodgkin (ed.), Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert, The Early Modern Englishwoman 1500–1750: Contemporary Editions

Extract

In the early seventeenth century, a young gentlewoman living in the household of the Countess of Huntingdon suffered what we might now call a mental breakdown. The trigger seems innocuous: she could not afford a New Year's gift for her ladyship, and feigned illness. Even considering the complex rules of social exchange in the period, this does not account for the magnitude of what transpired. Dionys Fitzherbert succumbed to a mental crisis which lasted many months, during which she became obsessed with the ideas that she would be burned to death, that she had committed the unforgivable sin, that she had stolen her own clothes, that all her attendants were conspiring against her. She was moved eventually back to her family, and visited by physicians and ministers. Her recovery, when it came, seems to have been as sudden as her original mental unravelling, and she ascribed it to God's mercy.