‘This silly deluded woman’: rhapsodic experiences and intellectual disability in Humphrey Ellis’s Pseudochristus (1650)

Building on recent research that considers intellectual disability in salvific contexts, Laura Seymour examines the ways in which intellectual disability (or accusations thereof) come into contact, and clash, with the framework of big Christian ideas about foolishness. In British court cases, whether or not a person could understand key tenets of Christianity was often a test of whether that person was an ‘Idiot’, with repercussions for their legal or religious status. Humphrey Ellis's Pseudochristus (1650), documenting the court case against William Franklin and Mary Gadbury, details how Gadbury believed Franklin to be Christ, and herself Christ's bride. Ellis and the court frame Gadbury's clearly very impactful religious experiences as sinful foolishness. Ellis states that Gadbury's foolishness and simple-mindedness, which Franklin exploited, were her gateway not to heaven but to blasphemy, Franklin being ‘very plausible in his speech, that might easily insinuate itself into the mindes of the simple’. Ellis compares Gadbury to Eve, another ‘foolish woman’, easily tempted. Though Ellis aims hereby to insult Gadbury he simultaneously shows intellectual disability as something originary: a God-created prelapsarian state which bears a special, often damagingly metaphorical, relation to heaven in the early modern mind.