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Here is another study of the legendary association between madness and creativity, but two things are unique about this book, and both are related. First, it is written by two literary scholars (medievalist Pryor and Victorianist Watkins, both retired teachers) and an academic/clinical psychologist (Gordon Claridge, at Oxford), which means that unwarranted speculations typical of psycholiterary studies are at a minimum. Second, it is psychobiological in approach, and so the science is convincing and up-to-date.
For the most part, the partnership works well. Pooling their resources, the three authors look for interdisciplinary connections while respecting each other's expertise. The result is a book that attempts to tease apart psychotic symptoms from the skein of literary or historical conventions in which the artists wrote, a tricky proposition. The authors are aware that “creativity” is itself an ambiguous concept, and that different eras regarded both it and madness differently. This historical breadth is especially well illustrated in the authors' discussion of the middle ages, where madness was regarded as a punishment for unacknowledged or un-repented sin, making it a kind of theological neurosis. Considering the strong religious atmosphere in which she lived, it is not surprising that Margery Kempe (1377-??), for instance, displayed symptoms of schizoaffective illness only within the context of her religious beliefs: when depressed, she heard devils urging her to commit suicide; when manic, she believed that God the Father wanted to marry her. It would be easy to dismiss her beliefs as delusions simply because they are unrealistic, but Pryor realizes that a crucial distinction must first be made: how do we tell the difference between a mystic, who sees profound meaning embodied in anomalous experiences, and a psychotic, whose “visions”