Happy Saturday everyone! This is @Patricksmcg, continuing with my #twittertakeover! Today we’ll talk about some of the medical aspects of atheism and unbelief in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. 1/10

Yesterday, I highlighted an English puritan minister whose response to ‘unbelief’ reflected a pastoral effort to assuage doubts and explain the partial absence of faith according to English Calvinist theology. This was one intervention in an ongoing conversation… 2/10

Medical writers such as Timothy Bright and Robert Burton argued that atheism was partly a product of physical processes that exacerbated spiritual uncertainty. They made numerous connections between the bodily humors, the doctrine of predestination, and divine providence. 3/10

Timothy Bright’s ‘A Treatise of Melancholie’ was published in 1586. (See Elizabeth Hunter’s excellent analysis of this text at [ https://tinyurl.com/4aqt7e3e ]!) Resulting from humoral imbalance, melancholy compromised the senses, producing 'darkenes, perill, doubt, frightes'. 4/10

According to Bright, people who said they ‘beleeue not’, felt this way because their ‘imagination’ was ‘now disguised and blemished with melancholie conceits’. In this state, they began to fear that they were among the reprobate, condemned to hell by God’s eternal decree. 5/10

Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ (1621) also associated atheism with physical illness. Burton argued that the root of ‘Athisme’ was ‘indulgence to corrupt affection’. James Hankins wrote a brilliant article about this aspect of the text [ https://tinyurl.com/3kcgaj6q ]. 6/10

Enflamed passions could produce intense bodily and sensory trauma during which people thought they could ‘smell brimstone’ and were ‘already damned’. This in turn could lead people to ‘curse, blaspheme, deny God, call his power in question’, and ‘abjure religion’. 7/10

Coinciding with the quatercentenary of Burton’s text, ‘A User’s Guide to Melancholy’ by @BurtonsAnatomy is out this year! [ https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/users-guide-to-melancholy/DA9226A7A527F9EEE6EDEFBC266E5398] 8/10

So, today we’ve looked at some prescriptive medical texts that sought to explain atheism as a consequence of both physical and spiritual processes, including bodily illness and emotional responses to religious doctrine. 9/10

Tomorrow, I’ll conclude this #twittertakeover by shifting away from England and towards North America. We’ll look at the kinds of atheism that Protestants experienced as they migrated overseas and sought to establish stable religious communities in often unfamiliar worlds. 10/10