Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2026
The Conclusion draws together the book’s various thematic strands: the perceived primacy of the ‘reason’, the right of its possessors to rule, the exculpatory effect of a frenzy diagnosis, and the high cost paid by those who received one. It returns to the larger question posed at the outset: whether the organ of the brain and the faculties of the mind were seen as constitutive of ‘personhood’ in pre-1700s England. The responses to frenzy which we have encountered in this book suggests that they were. The operations of the mental faculties known as ‘reason’, ‘will’, and ‘memory’ (or simply the ‘wits’) were located in (and often colloquially identified with) the brain. The functionality and continuity of these faculties was integral to the maintenance of legal, social, and spiritual personhood. Yet what troubled frenzy’s witnesses the most, the Conclusion argues, was the way it disrupted its sufferers’ predictable ways of being in the world – the values they had once held dear, the ways they had once looked and spoken. It was a disease which had the power to change friends, neighbours, and loved ones beyond recognition.
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