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The thesis examines the relationship between reprobation fears and melancholic illness in puritan culture over a period of approximately ninety years. Reprobation formed part of the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, by which God had chosen a few for salvation (the elect), and many for destruction (the reprobate). When a person came to believe that they were reprobate, this could give rise to symptoms of fear and despair similar to those associated with melancholy (an imbalance of black bile believed to affect the brain). The thesis shows how puritans used explanations based on melancholy in order to explain how otherwise godly people came to doubt their election. The first chapter shows how the Calvinist physician, Timothy Bright, incorporated ideas from medieval scholastic and medical texts into his Treatise of melancholie (1586), in order to explain how physiological causes could be at the root of reprobation fears. The second and third chapters examine the religious context in which Bright was writing. The second chapter shows puritan ambivalence about pronouncing a person to be reprobate through an examination of responses to the death of the apostate, Francesco Spiera. The third chapter shows how the Elizabethan puritan clergy developed a form of consolation for those suffering from despair of salvation based on the medieval idea that melancholy was the ‘devil’s bath’. The fourth and fifth chapters show the importance of physiological explanations for despair in defending the reputations of the dying. When a godly person despaired on their death-bed, or committed suicide, this was blamed on a combination of forces external to themselves – melancholy and the devil. The final chapter shows how Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy adapted puritan ideas about despair, to be more acceptable in the context of growing resistance to the preaching of double predestination in the 1620s and 30s.

While Richard Baxter (1615-91) is well known and rightly held in high esteem for his practical divinity and his evangelistic zeal, he has hitherto been conspicuously neglected as a theologian. In particular there have been no major studies of him with respect to the renewed paradigm of Protestant Scholasticism and none at all of his Methodus Theologiae (1681), which represents the fruit of a lifetime of theological reflection and study and which is arguably, in both scope and vision, one of the last great Summas of English scholastic divinity. This thesis focuses on the Methodus and on Baxter‟s theological method, which he took, though imperfect, to be the closest to the true Scripture method of theology that anyone had yet come. Baxter believed that every level of (active) created reality reflected the impress of God‟s Triune being in metaphysical composition, structure and activity. This he described, following the Italian metaphysicist Tommaso Campanella, in terms of the divine primalities or principles of Power, Wisdom and Love. In the Methodus these insights are systematised into a kind of Trinitarian logic. Baxter held that human reason should be sanctified in order to conform to the Trinitarian structure of created reality, and therefore espoused a method of trichotomising organised according to these same divine principles, derivative of both Ramist and Lullist method. This thesis argues that the whole of Baxter‟s mature thought is structured in a Trinitarian fashion according to his own „hallowed logic‟ and that two themes, often interlinked, are the key to interpreting his thought: the metaphysics of the divine principles and the Christian‟s baptismal covenant with the Triune God. Furthermore it examines Baxter‟s analogical ascent from the general vestigia Trinitatis present in the whole created order through the special vestigium of man‟s soul fashioned in the image of God and finally to the Trinity itself. This detailed exposition provides the basis, in the concluding chapter, for an examination of the whole of the Methodus and a demonstration that this represents a methodological unfolding of the covenant between the believer and God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the threefold Kingdom of Nature, Grace and Glory. In this way the Methodus may be seen as having taken its inspiration from the Theo-Politica (1659) of Baxter‟s friend George Lawson. Finally this thesis concludes that Baxter‟s thought has pronounced Scotist and Nominalist accents. His Scotism in particular runs deep and has strong ties with his Trinitarian thought, which is especially significant in light of the recent increasingly vocal discussions of the Scotist character of Protestant Scholasticism. Overall therefore it is suggested that Baxter is a neglected figure who deserves to be rediscovered and whose mature theology represents a fascinating reconstrual of biblical ideas according to a Trinitarian and scholastic paradigm.

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