Corrupted Feelings: Emotions and Mental Health in Medieval Religious Texts

Daniel McCann

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Chapter 1 Corrupted Feelings: Emotions and Mental Health in Medieval Religious Texts

In: The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

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Daniel McCann

Daniel McCann
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 9–28

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004745247_003

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Abstract

This essay explores the role emotion plays in mental disorder, demonstrating that for a number of medieval medical and religious writers the “passions of the soul” could harm rather than heal. It will begin by assessing the interconnection between medical and religious terms in regards to the emotions, highlighting the overlap of medicine and religious discourses in some of the classics of Medieval theology and Middle English spiritual writing. It will then move to consider the work of Arnold de Villanova, offering an analysis of the contextual understanding of mental disorder. Focusing on his De parte operativa, the essay will highlight how his original terms for mental pathologies, insania (insanity), amencia (without mind), and alienatio mentis (alienation of the mind), become subdivided into five separate mental health conditions that are caused by excessive emotions. Inordinate joy, anger, fear, desire, and hatred were each held to be the cause of a dangerous mental condition. The disorders are famose (well known), and are termed Stultitia, Mania, Melancholia, Amor heroicus, and Cicubus. Finally, the essay will move to consider the use of cautions about emotional response in Middle English texts of spiritual discernment, exploring what happens when emotionally stimulating texts corrupt the passions and turn the desire for God into desperate and consuming sicknesses. While it will cover a range of vernacular religious texts from the Cloud author, Walter Hilton, and others, it will focus on one deeply concerned with the emotional problems and pathologies of religious life – The Chastising of God’s Children. In this text, mental health is paramount, as the emotional states of religious life can become excessive, and push the mind into “alienacioun”: a state of corrupted feeling, in which the passions create harm and not health.

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The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

Middle Ages to the Present

Series: Narratives and Mental Health, Volume: 4

Cover The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004745247

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 13 Nov 2025

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African Studies	Education	Media Studies
American Studies	History	Middle East and Islamic Studies
Ancient Near East and Egypt	Human Rights and Humanitarian Law	Musicology
Art History	International Law	Philosophy
Asian Studies	International Relations	Religious Studies
Biblical Studies	Jewish Studies	Slavic and Eurasian Studies
Biology	Languages and Linguistics	Social Sciences
Book History and Cartography	Life Sciences	Theology and World Christianity
Classical Studies	Literature and Cultural Studies

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Chapter 1 Corrupted Feelings: Emotions and Mental Health in Medieval Religious Texts

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The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations

Middle Ages to the Present

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