In this post, Jonathan Willis introduces his new article, ‘“your poore distressed suppliant”: ‘Madness’, Emotion and the Archive in Early Modern England’, recently published in 'Transactions of the Royal Historical Society'. The article focusses on the British Library's MS Lansdowne 99, a collection of letters written to the government of Elizabethan England and annotated at several points in their history to describe their authors or contents as ‘crazy’, ‘mad’, ‘frantic...
