title: The diary of a madman, seventeenth-century style: Goodwin Wharton, MP and communer with the fairy world.
abstract: Goodwin Wharton (1653-1704) was a nobleman's son and a Whig MP who played no small part in English public life. His manuscript journal shows, however, that he also lived a bizarre secret life of the mind of a kind which, in later generations, would have led to his confinement as suffering from mental illness. Above all, through the offices of his medium and lover, Mary Parish, he entered into elaborate relations both with the fairy world and with God and His Angels. This paper examines our records of Wharton's consciousness.
mesh_terms: D004739:England; D005197:Famous Persons; D005260:Female; D049669:History, 16th Century; D049670:History, 17th Century; D006801:Humans; D012753:Shared Paranoid Disorder / Q000266:history*