“The Power of Imagination”: Psychological Explanations in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England

Glanvill Joseph , The vanity of dogmatizing (London, 1661), 196–8.

Empiricus Sextus , Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. by Bury R. G. (London, 1967), I.85.

See Ackerknecht E. H. , “The history of psychosomatic medicine”, Psychological medicine, xii (1982), 17–24; Fischer-Homberger E. , “On the medical history of the doctrine of imagination”, Psychological medicine, ix (1979), 619–28; McMahon C. E. , “The role of imagination in the disease process: Pre-Cartesian history”, Psychological medicine, vi (1976), 179–84.

Thucydides , History of the Peloponnesian war, trans. by Crawley R. (London, 1910), II.51; Aristotle, On the motion of animals, 7–8.

Aquinas, quoted by Kors A. C. and Peters E. (eds), Witchcraft in Europe 1100–1700: A documentary history (London, 1973), 73 (my emphasis).

See de Montaigne M. , Essay on the power of the imagination , in Frame D. M. (ed.), The complete works of Montaigne (London, 1958), 68–76.

See Thomas K. , Religion and the decline of magic (London, 1971), 210; Davies John , “Life of Hall”, appended to Hall John , Hierocles … (London, 1657), unpaginated; Pierre Bayle, quoted by Kors and Peters , op. cit. (ref. 5), 364.

See Slack P. , The impact of plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985).

Sharp Jane , The midwives' book (London, 1671), 122.

Ross Alexander , Arcana microcosmi (London, 1651), 80, 97, 84; cf. 121.

ibid., 80. For a study of the glass- and other delusions, with associated literary references, see G. Speak, “An odd kind of melancholy: Reflections on the glass delusion in Europe (1440–1680)”, History of psychiatry, i (1990), 191–206. I am indebted to Dr Roy Porter for this reference.

Casaubon Meric , A treatise concerning enthusiasme (London, 1655), fascimile of 2nd edn, ed. by Korshin P. J. (Gainesville, Fl., 1970), 75, 77–78.

ibid., 123 (my emphasis), 124, 111.

Gott Samuel , Nova Solyma the ideal city: Or Jerusalem regained (London, 1648), II.129; White Thomas , Peripateticall institutions (English tr., London, 1656), 113.

Brown T. M. , “Descartes, dualism, and psychosomatic medicine”, in Bynum W. F. Porter R. and Shepherd M. (eds), The anatomy of madness: Essays in the history of psychiatry (London and New York, 1985), 40–62. See also Fischer-Homberger, op. cit. (ref. 3), 620; and for post-Cartesian “imagination” and its importance for eighteenth-century literature, cf. Rousseau G. S. , “Science and the discovery of the imagination in Enlightened England”, Eighteenth-century studies, iii (1969–70), 108–35 — a reference for which I am indebted to Dr Roy Porter.

Moryson Fynes , Itinerary … (1617), ed. by Hughes C. as Shakespeare's Europe (New York, 1967), 410; Overbury Thomas Sir , The miscellaneous works, ed. by Rimbault E. F. (London, 1890), 42: So faire at least let me imagine her; That thought to me is truth: Opinion Cannot in matter of opinion erre; With no eyes shall I see her but mine owne. And as my fancy her conceives to be, Even such my senses both, doe feele and see.

Bacon Francis , Advancement of learning (London, 1605), II.iv; Novum organum (London, 1620), I.civ.

Burton Robert , The anatomy of melancholy (Everyman edn, London, 1932), I.160.

Galileo , Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), in Drake S. (ed.), Discoveries and opinions of Galileo (New York, 1957), 173–216, pp. 182–3.

Gott , op. cit. (ref. 14), 11.127; Parker Samuel , A free and impartial censure of the Platonick philosophie (Oxford, 1666), 108; Charleton Walter , Concerning the different wits of men (London, 1669), 12; Glanvill , Vanity (ref. 1), 99.

Gott , Nova Solyma (ref. 14), 128; Glanvill , Vanity (ref. 1), 99.

More Henry , Observations upon Anthroposophia Theomagica (London, 1650), quoted by Vickers B. , Rhetoric and the pursuit of truth (Los Angeles, 1985), 46.

Sprat Thomas , History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), 26, quoted by Vickers , op. cit., 59; Parker , op. cit., 74 (my emphases); Keill John , Examination of Dr Burnet's Theory of the Earth (1698), 11–12, quoted by Spiller M. R. G. , “The idol of the stove: The background to Swift's criticism of Descartes”, Review of English studies, n.s. xxv (1974), 15–24, p. 17.

See Kaplan B. B. , “Greatrakes the Stroker: The interpretations of his contemporaries”, Isis, lxxiii (1982), 178–85; Steneck N. H. , “Greatrakes the Stroker: The interpretations of historians”, ibid., 161–77.

Dick O. L. , (ed.), Aubrey's brief lives (Harmondsworth, 1962), 58. On the “King's Touch”, see Bloch M. , The Royal Touch (London and Montreal, 1973).

Digby Kenelm , A late discourse … touching the cure of wounds by the powder of sympathy (London, 1658). See Petersson R. T. Digby Kenelm Sir , the ornament of England (London, 1956), 260f.

Van Helmont J. B. , in Charleton Walter , (ed.), Ternary of paradoxes, including The magnetick cure of wounds (London, 1650), para 10; Boyle R. , The usefulness of experimental natural philosophy, in The works, ed. by Birch T. (6 vols, London, 1772), ii, 227; cf. 231; The Athenian oracle (4 vols, London, 1703), i, 71–72.

See Boucé P. G. , “Imagination, pregnant women, and monsters, in eighteenth-century England and France”, in Rousseau G. S. and Porter R. (eds), Sexual underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester, 1987), 86–100.

Digby Kenelm , Two treatises (Paris, 1644), 329. Other writers on this subject include Montaigne and Robert Burton, who themselves cite earlier authorities, including Avicenna.

Sharp , op. cit. (ref. 9), 118; cf. 19, 23, 101, 111, 117, 122. The reverse of Digby's example of the black baby is also given here: “Galen taught an Aethiopian to get a white child, setting a picture before him for his wife to look on.” This report is also in Burton , op. cit., (ref. 18), I.254.

Quoted by Wylie I. , Young Coleridge and the philosophers of nature (Oxford, 1989), 137. Wylie shows that a belief in this power of ‘imagination’ in parents to affect their unborn babies persisted widely into the eighteenth century. (I have personally come across examples of such belief in the late twentieth century.) See also Wilson P. K. , “‘Out of sight, out of mind?’: The Daniel Turner-James Blondel dispute over the power of the maternal imagination”, Annals of science, xlix (1992), 63–85.

Digby , op. cit. (ref. 29), 329–30.

White , Peripateticall institutions (ref. 14), 109f.

Ibid., 113–14.

Glanvill , op. cit. (ref. 1), 200, 201 (my emphasis).

White Thomas , An exclusion of scepticks from all title to dispute (London, 1665), 76.

Ross Alexander , The philosophical touchstone (London, 1645), 31. Similar considerations might apply to the cures allegedly effected by Valentine Greatrakes, who instructed his patients to “cast away their tents [i.e. compresses] and plaisters and everything else, and apply only a cleane linnen cloth”. Severn C. (ed.), Diary of the Rev. John Ward … from 1648 to 1679 (London, 1839), 238, quoted by Laver A. B. , “Miracles no wonder! The mesmeric phenomenon and organic cures of Valentine Greatrakes”, Journal of the history of medicine, xxxiii (1978), 44.

Cf. Burton Robert : “All the world knows there is no virtue in such charms or cures, but a strong conceit and opinion …”, op. cit (ref. 18), I.256.