Alexander the Corrector: the tormented genius who unwrote the Bible Julia Keay HarperCollins, 269pp, £16.99 ISBN 000713195X

Playwright Nathaniel Lee's line "They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me" kept popping into my head while reading this life of Alexander Cruden. He was the 18th-century Scot who wrote the definitive concordance, or index, to the Bible, a work that has never been out of print in more than 250 years. Over the course of his life, Cruden was repeatedly incarcerated in lunatic asylums. Although he protested his sanity, he is remembered as much for being mad as for his astonishing scholarship. Indeed, that he single-handedly compiled a concordance four times the length of the Bible is cited as evidence of his craziness. But was he insane?

No, says Julia Keay, whose new biography is based on research that is often electrifying. Keay has pieced together evidence suggesting that Cruden's first incarceration, in the disgusting conditions of the Aberdeen Tollbooth when he was only 20, was the result of a trumped-up conspiracy by a powerful local family, the Blackwells. Earlier biographers claimed that Cruden had been sent mad by unrequited love for a clergyman's daughter. Cruden himself, who thanked God for his sanity, suggested later that a "conceited" man had plotted to put him away.

In his will, Cruden left a mysterious bequest to a Christiana Blackwell. Keay has discovered that this woman was probably the daughter of an incestuous union between Elizabeth Blackwell, a botanist, and her brother. After much detective work, Keay infers that Cruden's tragic first love was Elizabeth Blackwell, and that he was locked up in the Tollbooth because the Blackwells were anxious to cover up evidence of her incest. Keay surmises that the Reverend Thomas Blackwell, Elizabeth's father, wanted to dispose of this inconvenient suitor before passing off the illegitimate baby as his own.

None of this can be proved exactly. But Keay does a very good job of reminding us how unjust the treatment of the "insane" could be in this supposed century of enlightenment, retreading much ground for those familiar with Roy Porter's work. We read of the overcrowding of madhouses, the insanitary conditions, the large iron instruments used to force down medicines or milk porridge for those on hunger strike, the torture, the humiliation. Cruden himself petitioned for private madhouses to be much better regulated.

What is particularly disturbing - and it is a familiar story - is that confinement itself may have driven Cruden over the edge. As he said, quoting Ecclesiastes, "oppression tends to make a wise man mad". It was after a spell in a Chelsea madhouse, his fourth incarceration, that Cruden began speaking of himself in the third person, styling himself as "Alexander the Corrector", a title he adopted because he wanted to "put a stop to profane swearing and sabbath breaking". He petitioned the king and took to the streets, handing out leaflets beseeching people not to break the sabbath by working.

Yet just as he really seemed to be losing his marbles - whatever Keay may say - Cruden also enjoyed his greatest success. In 1758, the second edition of his great concordance came out, winning this peculiar, benevolent Aberdonian both fame and money late in life.

Keay never fully explains how Cruden managed to produce his immense book all by himself at the same time as holding down the job of bookseller to the queen and then proof-reader. He must have had a mind like a human search engine, coupled with incurable logorrhoea. Keay's quotations from the concordance are tantalisingly brief. What made Cruden so single-minded? Why did he dare take on a task similar to Samuel Johnson's dictionary but with none of Johnson's resources? And how on earth did he pull it off? The odd banal judgement such as "Alexander Cruden was a deeply religious man" does little to clear up matters.

At the end of this engaging book, I was left wishing that, instead of spending quite so much time protesting Cruden's sanity, Keay had done more to unravel the brilliant product of this strange mind.

Bee Wilson's The Hive will be published by John Murray in September

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