Conclusion

Abstract

The Conclusion offers a set of propositions about early modern life-writing and illness. It argues that: seventeenth-century illness needs to be interpreted as a part of a complex of personal experiences intricately entangled with family, social and religious life; textual responses to illness were commonly prescribed by standardised models, or borrowed from scriptural or other religious writings; religious and non-religious models for describing illness often shared similar methodological frameworks; in religious and non-religious accounts of illness, the rational faculty was often called on to defend against the imaginative; correspondents often found refuge in familial or intimate epistolary communities; and collecting textual responses to illness might be considered as important a habit as composing.