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 psychogical
reasoning, and translations from religious to psychiatric idioms.
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