The cases of John Bunyan, Part 1.: Taine and Royce

John Bunyan was a seventeenth-century religious reformer who is nowadays widely known for his Pilgrim's Progress and also for his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. In the nineteenth century he was diagnosed, on the basis of his revelations in that autobiography, as suffering from a variety of mental pathologies. In this study we track his 'psychiatric career' through the work of H. Taine and J. Royce (Part 1), and W. James and P. Janet (Part 2). The examination of these authors' practices of 'retrospective psychiatry' allows us to bring to light some changes in psychiatric concepts in the late nineteenth century, and to investigate both the use of cases in psychological reasoning, and translations from religious to psychiatric idioms.