Mélancolie, enthousiasme et folie : pathologie et inspiration dans la littérature dissidente

• Main Author: Anne Dunan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institut du Monde Anglophone 2005-05-01
• Series: Etudes Epistémè
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/2846

This article examines one of the best-known texts of the English Restoration, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) in the light of contemporary medical attacks against religious dissenters. After a brief survey of the so-called « medical revolution » of the seventeenth-century and its consequences in religion, we argue that the composition (and reception) of Bunyan’s text must be analysed in the light of those changes in medical discourse. Although Bunyan was necessarily aware that dreams and allegories were considered to be the productions of diseased minds, his choice of these modes of expression creates a tension, from the very beginning of the allegory, between natural and supernatural explanations of authorial inspiration.