‘your poore distressed suppliant’: ‘Madness’, Emotion and the Archive in Early Modern England

Abstract This article explores the relationship(s) between ‘madness’, emotion and the archive in early modern England, taking as its case study the letters of British Library Lansdowne MS vol. 99, sent between c . 1570 and c . 1600 to the government of Elizabethan England and annotated at several stages in their history to describe their authors and contents as ‘mad’. Firstly, by examining the complex history of the archive, it demonstrates the potential for archival practices to bring into focus, and thereby facilitate historical examination of, past emotion. Secondly, it explores some of the ethical and methodological problems of third-party historical descriptions of madness, demonstrating that a focus on emotion – in particular ‘distress’ – offers a more fruitful path to understanding the significance of this material. Thirdly, it explores the Lansdowne 99 authors’ experiences of distress, revealing the ways distressed subjects exercised rhetorical agency when petitioning those in power. It identifies a series of prominent themes: desperation and deservingness; victimhood and persecution; and appeals to status and lineage. Ultimately, I argue that understanding their distress not only brings us closer to marginalised people in the past, but grants us a richer knowledge of past societies and the experience of being human in them.