In other literature of the period, Shakespeare's work offers a snapshot of the early modern interest in ecstasy as a secular, common experience, one that had begun to extend beyond its associations with religious rapture to encompass feelings of desire, sex, grief, loss, anger, jealousy, and alienation, and which could be used as an umbrella term for intense feeling across the emotional spectrum, from the desirable to the torturous. In Macbeth, for example, the contagious grief that afflicts Scotland after the murder of the King is described as a “modern ecstasy”—an intensity of suffering that is so familiar and widespread that it has become an everyday (a now obsolete meaning of “modern”) emotion: “Alas, poor country,Almost afraid to know itself. In his essay “That to Philosophise Is to Learn How to Die”, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne similarly retells a story of a priest “whose soul was ravished into such an ecstasy, that for a long time the body remained void of all respiration or sense”, leaving him with “neither pulse nor breath”. Discussion of epilepsy was unquestionably more clinical than its ecstatic sister-state, but by the second half of the 17th century ecstasy would come to earn a place in Swiss Physician Felix Platter's A Golden Practice of Physick (1662) as a “Consternation of the Mind”, and under an index of “distempers of the brain” in a chapter on “Inward Diseases, and Distempers of the Body” in Alderman Randle Holme's encyclopaedic text of early modern society and daily life, The Academy of Armory (1688).