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Past and Present, no. 191 (May 2006) The Past and Present
Society, Oxford, 2006
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtj012
THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY
Surveying the world outside his study in Christ Church, Oxfordin
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton diagnosedan
epidemic. Melancholy was now, he wrote, a disease so fre-quent . .
. in these our daies, so often happening . . . in our mis-erable
times, as few there are that feele not the smart of it. Itbeing a
disease so grievous, so common, he claimed to knownot wherein to do
a more generall service, and spend my timebetter, then to prescribe
means how to prevent and cure so uni-versall a malady, an
Epidemicall disease, that so often, so muchcrucies the body and
minde.1 Burton had little difculty innding a range of neoteric
philosophical and medical authoritiesto support his diagnosis.
Whilst examining the spleen and itsrole in generating
hypochondriacal melancholy in the 1552edition of his De anima,
Philipp Melanchthon had remarkedthat there were so many cases of
the disease it was pointless tocount the sufferers.2 Later in the
century Andr Du Laurenshad concluded his chapter on the same
species of melancholyby noting its frequency in these miserable
times, and pointingout that there are not many people which feele
not some smatchthereof.3 This disease is most frequent in these
days, agreedGirolamo Mercuriale, in the chapter on melancholy in
his Medi-cina practica (1601).4 These observations were further
supported
I would like to thank Peter Burke, Ingrid Schrder, Richard
Serjeantson, QuentinSkinner, Peter Stacey, and seminar audiences in
Cambridge and London, for theirexceptionally helpful comments on
earlier drafts of this article.
1 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C.
Faulkner, NicolasK. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair, commentary J. B.
Bamborough and MartinDodsworth, 6 vols. (Oxford, 19892001), i, 110,
Democritus Junior to the Reader.
2 Philipp Melanchthon, Liber de anima, recognitus ab auctore
(Wittenberg, 1552), sig.F2: Exempla ade crebra sunt, ut hic nomina
eorum recitare nolum, quos vidimushoc morbo laborare.
3 Andr Du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation of Sight: Of
Melancholike Diseases;of Rheumes, and of Old Age, trans. Richard
Surphlet (London, 1599, STC 7304), 140.
4 Girolamo Mercuriale, Medicina practica . . . Libri V, 2nd edn
(Lyon, 1617), II.10. 55: Sed istud satis est intelligere, hanc
affectionem esse temporibus nostrisfrequentissimam, ut propter hoc
pertineat ad culturam ingeniorum vestrorumdiligenter curationem
hanc intelligere.
*
*
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78 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
by Giulio Cesare Chiodini, who asserted in his Responsiones
etconsultationes medicinales (1607) that in our times
scarcelyanyone can be found who is immune from its
contamination.Melancholy, according to Chiodini, had not only
spread through-out the population; it was, as he put it, the
fountain of almostall other diseases aficting his society.5
Had he still been living in the second half of the century,
Burtoncould have found conrmation of the persistence of
thismelancholic epidemic, notably in England, where divines
andphysicians continued to lament the frequency of the
disease.Richard Baxter complained in 1671 at having to console
amultitude of melancholly Persons from several Parts of theLand,
some of high Quality, some of low, some very exquisitelylearned,
some unlearned.6 In the following year, Thomas Willisobserved that
more new and admirable observations andexamples of melancholic
raving daily happen.7 And in 1691the Lincolnshire divine Timothy
Rogers prefaced his DiscourseConcerning Trouble of Mind and the
Disease of Melancholly withthirty-six pages of letters from other
divines, thanking him foraddressing the psychological sickness of
their parishioners.8 Butwhat should we make of these
perceptions?
The subject of melancholy has long featured prominently inmodern
historical and literary scholarship on the sixteenth andseventeenth
centuries, but our understanding of its religious,social and
political meanings remains limited. The cultural signi-cance of
early modern medicine is now well-explored territory,yet most of
the extant accounts of melancholy are concerned with
5 Julius Caesar Claudinus [= Chiodini], Responsiones et
consultationes medicinales(Venice, 1607), consultatio no. 98, p.
232: Affectus melancholicus, maxim verqui atulentus, &
Hypochondriacus vocatur, adeo nostris temporibus frequenteringruit,
ut quemadmodum nullus fer ab eius labe immunis reperitur, ita
proprianatura omnium quasi morborum, omnium pen Symptomatum occasio
existat, idquod in omnibus, at praesertim in illustrissimo.
6 Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae: or, Mr. Richard Baxters
Narrative of the MostMemorable Passages of his Life and Times, ed.
Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), pt 3,184, pp. 856.
7 Thomas Willis, De anima brutorum quae hominis vitalis ac
sensitiva est, exercitationesduae (Oxford, 1672), XI. 454: horum
exempla [sc. melancholicorum deliria] quotidienova, & admiranda
eveniunt. For the English translation, see Two DiscoursesConcerning
the Soul of Brutes, Which Is That of the Vital and Sensitive of
Man, ed.S. Pordage (London, 1683), 188; see also ibid., 193.
8 Timothy Rogers, A Discourse Concerning Trouble of Mind and the
Disease ofMelancholly (London, 1691), pp. xxivlx.
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 79
its internal theoretical structure or literary expression.9
Althoughthere are now many useful studies of the extra-medical
aspectsof melancholy,10 little sustained attention has been paid to
thespecic contexts in which such aspects became signicant, orto the
varieties of use to which the concept of melancholy wasput in these
contexts. More specically, the notion that melancholyhad become an
especially prevalent disease my principalconcern here has not been
directly related to contemporaryperceptions of the early modern
environment, and as a conse-quence a number of problematic
explanations for its allegedlyhigh incidence stand in need of
correction or at least renement.According to one long-standing
view, widespread melancholy,
9 See Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of
Melancholia in EnglishLiterature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing,
1951); Jean Starobinski, Histoire dutraitement de la mlancolie des
origines 1900 (Acta psychosomatica, iv, Basel, 1960);Raymond
Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and
Melancholy:Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion,
and Art (Cambridge, 1964);Hellmut Flashar, Melancholie und
Melancholiker in den medizinischen Theorien derAntike (Berlin,
1966); Heinz-Gnter Schmitz, Phantasie und
Melancholie,Medizinhistorisches Journal, iv (1969); Heinz-Gnter
Schmitz, Das Melancholie-problem in Wissenschaft und Kunst der
frhen Neuzeit, Sudhoffs Archiv, lx(1976); T. H. Jobe, Medical
Theories of Melancholia in the Seventeenth andEarly Eighteenth
Centuries, Clio Medica, xi (1976); Ilza Veith, Elizabethans
onMelancholia, Jl Amer. Medical Assoc., ccxii (1976); Stanley
Jackson, Melancholiaand Depression from Hippocratic Times to Modern
Times (New Haven and London,1986); Martine Alet, La Mlancolie dans
la psycho-physiologie du dbut du XVIIe
sicle, Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, xxvii
(2000). Amongst themany useful literary and art-historical studies,
see Margaret and Rudolf Wittkower,Born under Saturn: The Character
and Conduct of Artists. A Documented History fromAntiquity to the
French Revolution (London, 1963); Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices
ofMelancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in
Renaissance England(London, 1971); Udo Benzenhfer, Melancholie in
Literatur und Kunst (Hrtgenwald,1990); Teresa Scott Soufas,
Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden AgeLiterature
(Columbia, 1990). I am excluding the large literature on modern
forms ofmelancholy.
10 See Roy Porter, Mind Forgd Manacles: A History of Madness in
England from theRestoration to the Regency (London, 1987); Winfried
Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius,and Utopia in the Renaissance
(Wiesbaden, 1991); Michael Heyd, Be Sober andReasonable: The
Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth
Centuries(Leiden, 1995), chs. 23; Noel L. Brann, The Debate over
the Origin of Genius duringthe Italian Renaissance: The Theories of
Supernatural Frenzy and Natural Melancholyin Accord and in Conict
on the Threshold of the Scientic Revolution (Leiden, Bostonand
Cologne, 2002); H. C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in
Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford, 1999); David Lederer,
Melancholie und andereKrankheiten des Geistes: Pldoyer fr eine
Geschichte der frhmodernen Seelenarznei,in Reiner Jehl and Wolfgang
Weber (eds.), Melancholie: Epochenstimmung Krankheit Lebenskunst
(Stuttgart, 2000), 2633.
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80 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
along with its suicidal conclusion,11 was an accompaniment
ofProtestantism.12 According to another, the frequency of the
diseasewas a peculiarly English characteristic, reected the
generaltemper of the age,13 and was caused by a variety of social
factorsincluding spiritual and intellectual malaise, economic
depression,and the threat of Spanish invasion.14
Assessing the validity of the rst explanation is not
straight-forward, and I shall return to this task later. But the
second mustobviously be dismissed. As those even only vaguely
familiar withnon-Anglophone scholarship on the subject know very
well,and as much of the material I shall be discussing shows,
theperception of a high rate of melancholy was a European
phenom-enon.15 The authorities Burton cited to support his
diagnosis ofthe epidemic were German, French and Italian, and,
likethem, he was claiming that the whole Continent was aficted.More
generally, the Durkheimian attribution of frequentmelancholy to
social causes has typically been premised upona questionable
correspondence between modern depression
11 For the association of suicide and melancholy, see, for
example, Burton, Ana-tomy of Melancholy, i, 42838 (pt 1, sect. 4,
memb. 1, subsect. 1).
12 See N. Paulus, Die Melancholie im 16. Jahrhundert,
Wissenschaftliche Beilagezur Germania: Bltter fr Literatur,
Wissenschaft und Kunst, xviii (1897); mileDurkheim, Suicide: A
Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George
Simpson(London, 1952), 88, 3534, and esp. 15270; Walter Benjamin,
The Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London,
1977), esp. 13858. On thelink between Protestantism and melancholy
in England, see S. E. Sprott, The EnglishDebate on Suicide from
Donne to Hume (La Salle, Ill., 1961), 28, 357, 4752;
JohnStachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism
and the Literature ofReligious Despair (Oxford, 1991).
13 Vieda Skultans, English Madness: Ideas on Insanity, 15801890
(London, Bostonand Henley, 1979), 202.
14 G. B. Harrison, Essay on Elizabethan Melancholy, in Nicholas
Breton,Melancholike Humours, ed. G. B. Harrison (London, 1929), 49;
L. C. Knights,Seventeenth-Century Melancholy, Criterion, xiii
(19334), 110, 114 ff.; GeorgeWilliamson, Mutability, Decay, and
Seventeenth-Century Melancholy, Eng. Lit.Hist., ii (1935); Babb,
Elizabethan Malady; Jackson, Melancholia and Depression,105. For
the eighteenth-century French image of the English as melancholic,
seeEric Gidal, Civic Melancholy: English Gloom and French
Enlightenment, Eight-eenth Century Studies, xxxvii (2003).
15 See, for example, Jean Delumeau, Le Pch et la Peur: la
culpabilisation enOccident (XIIIeXVIIIe sicles) (Paris, 1983) in
English as Jean Delumeau, Sinand Fear: The Emergence of a Western
Guilt Culture, 13th18th Centuries, trans. EricNicholson (New York,
1990), esp. 16885. This will also be discussed in DavidLederer,
Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian
Beacon,Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming.
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 81
and early modern melancholy. In my view we would do well
toresist the temptation to begin our study by redescribing the
dis-ease in terms of modern psychiatric or psychoanalytic
language,for example as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Although
thereare family resemblances between melancholy and what we
mightnow term depression, there are also, as we shall see,
signicantdiscontinuities.16
We should also question whether there really was
anythingresembling an early modern epidemic in Burtons sense of
aquasi-universal disease seriously aficting all the social
orders.The argument that the steep increase in the number of
recordedsuicides in England was a direct product of widespread
(andProtestant) melancholy,17 though supported by
contemporarytestimony,18 has been undermined by MacDonald and
Murphysdemonstration that cases of felo de se were more likely to
bebrought before the courts and approved by juries in theseyears
because of a conglomeration of legal, religious andsocial
changes.19 More importantly, it is rare for sixteenth-
orseventeenth-century physicians casebooks or daily notebooksto
have survived, and, when they have, the detail supplied isoften
meagre and question-begging. At least for England theexisting
casebooks offer only weak support for the idea thatthere was a real
epidemic, or even that there was a signicantlywidespread increase
in the number of diagnoses of the condition.One might cite the
casebooks of Theodore Turquet de Mayerne,a Genevan physician who
practised in courtly circles in Franceand England, which reveal
that in the period from 1611 to 1624
16 See, variously, Bergen Evans, The Psychiatry of Robert Burton
(New York,1944); W. I. D. Scott, Shakespeares Melancholics (London,
1962); F. F. Blok,Caspar Barlaeus: From the Correspondence of a
Melancholic (Amsterdam, 1976), 218;and the editors comments in
Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, iv, 17. For criticalappraisals of
this type of procedure, see Michel de Certeau, What Freud Makes
ofHistory, in his The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New
York, 1988),287307; Jon Arrizabalaga, Problematizing Retrospective
Diagnosis in the Historyof Disease, Asclepio, liv (2002).
17 See Sprott, English Debate on Suicide, 278.18 See, for
example, George Cheyne, The English Malady, ed. Roy Porter
(London
and New York, 1991), LII. 36. For discussion, see Michael
MacDonald andTerence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early
Modern England (Oxford,1990), 23944.
19 MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, 35, 1516, 228, 5660,
1278,23847, 30314.
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82 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
he diagnosed melancholy far more frequently than any
otherdisease.20 But Mayernes clinical environment was rareed,
andthe casebooks of other learned and popular practitioners suchas
Richard Napier, Thomas Willis, Nathaniel Johnston andEdmund King
suggest that melancholy formed only a smallfraction of the
conditions treated in the period.21 Most strikingly,in Thomas
Sydenhams chronicle of the epidemics afictingEngland between 1661
and 1676, multiple epidemics of fever,plague and smallpox are
diagnosed, amongst other conditions, butno substantial mention is
made of melancholy.22
Medical casebooks raise more complications. In the rst place,the
diagnostic categories employed by physicians varied acrossboth time
and space. One doctors melancholic might beanothers hypochondriac,
or (s)he might be both. Sydenhamperceived a high incidence of the
female mental afiction hysteria,and its male equivalent
hypochondria, in the period from 1675to 1680,23 yet it is clear
from his discussion of the aetiology andsymptomatology of these
diseases that many other physicians,especially those practising fty
years earlier, would have diag-nosed them as cases of melancholy.24
As the Newtonian physicianNicholas Robinson noted in his treatise
on nervous diseases,A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and
HypochondriackMelancholy (1729), medical theorists had long been
perplexedby the question of how properly to classify these forms of
mental
20 Brian Nance, Turquet de Mayerne as Baroque Physician: The Art
of MedicalPortraiture (Clio Medica, lxv, Amsterdam and New York,
2001), 1326. The 16 percent of cases diagnosed as melancholy would
rise to 25 per cent if Mayernes desig-nation of hypochondria
indicated hypochondriacal melancholy.
21 See Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and
Healing inSeventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), 31; Thomas
Willis, Williss OxfordCasebook (165052), ed. Kenneth Dewhurst
(Oxford, 1981), 978, 1267, 1367;Katherine E. Williams, Hysteria in
Seventeenth-Century Case Records and Unpub-lished Manuscripts,
History of Psychiatry, i (1990), 388, 3912.
22 Thomas Sydenham, The Whole Works of That Excellent Practical
PhysicianDr. Thomas Sydenham, trans. John Pechy (London, 1696), 15
ff.
23 Sydenham, Whole Works, 44078; Thomas Sydenham, Dissertatio
epistolaris adspectatissimum doctissimumque virum Gulielmum Cole,
M. D., de observationibus nuperiscirca curationem variolarum
conuentium nec non de affectione hysterica (London,1682).
24 Sydenham, Whole Works, 440, 442, and esp. 4446, 4512. See
also WillissOxford Casebook, ed. Dewhurst, 145; Thomas Willis, An
Essay of the Pathology of theBrain and Nervous Stock, trans. S. P.
(London, 1681), 907. For the relationshipbetween hypochondria and
melancholy, see ibid., 901, 956.
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 83
derangement.25 Given such terminological instability in
medicaltexts, reliable quantitative appraisals are virtually
impossible.
It may still be the case that there was an epidemic, a series
ofepidemics, or perhaps just a substantial rise in the number of
diag-nosed cases, either broadly spread across the Continent or
inspecic geographical locales. But if so, we must accept
thatmelancholy did not leave its mark on the historical record
inthe manner of the plague epidemics by which Europe
wasindisputably aficted and distressed. In short, for the
historianthe problem of early modern melancholy cannot be why so
manysuffered from the disease, but why so many were preoccupiedwith
its assumed frequency. Instead of asking why people wereaficted
with melancholy, we must ask why people describedthemselves or
others as melancholic, and consider what theymeant by this.26 My
main task, therefore, is to review some ofthe possible explanations
for the heightened early modern con-sciousness of the incidence of
melancholy, with particular atten-tion to discussions within the
learned community of Europe inthe later sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries. I rst outlinethe basic theory of the
disease, and proceed by exploring someof the intellectual
developments and external contextual factorsthat inuenced its
application and stimulated the perception thatmelancholy was on the
rise.
My suggestion is that contemporary European notions of
theincreased incidence of the condition especially amongst
certainsocial groups such as elderly women, courtly elites, and
scholars are attributable neither to endogenous technical changes
in thetheory of the disease, nor to developments within learned
med-ical discourse more generally. Rather, they are best
understoodas the product of two wider concerns that rose to
promin-ence in late sixteenth-century intellectual culture. First,
the in-creased interest in the occult aspects of natural philosophy
andmedicine in this period stimulated additional learned interest
inmelancholy, which because of its peculiar characteristics was
25 Nicholas Robinson, A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and
HypochondriackMelancholy: Wherein All the Decays of the Nerves, and
Lownesses of the Spirits, areMechanically Accounted For. To Which
Is Subjoind, a Discourse upon the Nature,Cause, and Cure, of
Melancholy, Madness, and Lunacy (London, 1729), 175.
26 For this reformulation, see Wolf Lepenies, Melancholie und
Gesellschaft (Frankfurtam Main, 1972) in English as Wolf Lepenies,
Melancholy and Society, trans. JeremyGaines and Doris Jones
(Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1992), 1, 1645.
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84 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
especially suitable for use in controversies over a number of
im-portant questions relating to witchcraft and demonology.
Sec-ond, because the disease was understood to be primarily
anemotional condition, it carried spiritual and ethical as well
asmedical signicance, and assumed a prominent place within
re-ligious, moral-philosophical and political discourses on the
pas-sions of the soul. Here, then, I shall be addressing the
complexand occasionally antagonistic relationship between
medicaland theological perspectives on melancholy, as it is from
thisperspective that its signicance can be comprehended as
beingdeeply embedded within some of the most pressing concerns
ofpost-Reformation European intellectual culture. The key to
theproblem of the apparently high incidence of the disease is
thusthe increased domain in which the concept of melancholycould be
applied.
I
That the subject of melancholy was becoming more interestingand
important to the learned population of late sixteenth- andearly
seventeenth-century Europe is suggested by the rapidincrease in the
production of treatises and university disputationsdevoted solely
to the disease, in the vernacular as well as inLatin. Authors like
Timothy Bright, Andr Du Laurens, ErcoleSassonia, Jourdain
Guilbelet, Robert Burton and CaspareMarcucci, all of whom published
substantial works on melan-choly in this period, were
representative of an apparent increaseof interest amongst the
educated elite.27 In England at least thisconcern also permeated
less rareed domains of public dis-course, and melancholy received
special attention in print fromthe middling sort amongst popular
medical practitioners and
27 Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie: Containing the
Causes thereof, &Reasons of the Strange Effects It Worketh in
our Minds and Bodies (London, 1586, STC3747); Du Laurens, Discourse
of the Preservation of Sight; Ercole Sassonia, De melancholia,repr.
in his Opera practica (Padua, 1639); Jourdain Guilbelet, Trois
discours philoso-phiques, 1. de la comparaison de lhomme avec le
monde, 2. du principe de la generationde lhomme, 3. de lhumeur
mlancholique (vreux, 1603); Burton, Anatomy ofMelancholy; Caspare
Marcucci, Quadripartium melancholicum (Rome, 1645). Forthe peak of
interest in melancholy in this period, see Oskar Diethelm,
MedicalDissertations of Psychiatric Interest Printed before 1750
(Basel, 1971), 3249, 164206.See also Hermann Schling,
Bibliographisches Handbuch zur Geschichte der Psychologie:das 17.
Jahrhundert (Giessen, 1964).
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 85
divines. In 1652, the London physician John Marriott offered
anew Dish, called a Frigazee to expel all sadness and
melancholy;seven years later, Richard Amyas produced a compendium
of53 Rare Secrets and Arts gathered together as An Antidoteagainst
Melancholy; and in 1698, the clergyman William Chilcotpublished a
Practical Treatise Concerning Evil Thoughts . . .Especially Useful
for Melancholy Persons with his parishioners inExeter particularly
in mind.28 A signicant degree of awarenessof the same subject
amongst those of lower social rank is alsoapparent in the
conspicuous increase in the publication of inex-pensive popular
collections of witty stories, jokes, songs, historiesand dialogues
labelled as psychological remedies for melancholy.Very many texts
of this kind can be cited, from the anonymousTyros Roring Megge:
Planted against the Walles of Melancholy (1598),to Laurence Prices
New Dialogue between Dick of Kent, and Watthe Welch-man . . . to
Make Folks Merry in Time of Sadnesse . . .and Pass the Tedious
Melancholy Nights (1654).29
28 See J. Marriot[t], The English Mountebank: or, A Physical
Dispensatory . . . withSundry Directions . . . How to Make his New
Dish, Called a Frigazee: The Operationwhereof, Expells All Sadness
and Melancholy (London, 1652); Richard Amyas, AnAntidote against
Melancholy (London, 1659); William Chilcot, A Practical
TreatiseConcerning Evil Thoughts: Wherein Are Some Things More
Especially Useful for MelancholyPersons (Oxford, 1698); D. Irish,
Levamen Inrmi . . . Concerning Melancholy,Frensie, and Madness
(London, 1700).
29 Anon., Tyros Roring Megge: Planted against the Walles of
Melancholy (London,1598, STC 24477); Nicholas Breton, Wonders Worth
the Hearing: Which Being Reador Heard . . . May Serve Both to Purge
Melancholy from the Minde, & Grosse Humooursfrom the Body
(London, 1602, STC 3714); Samuel Rowlands, Democritus, or
DoctorMerry-Man his Medicines, against Melancholy Humors (London,
1607, STC 21366);Samuel Rowlands, Doctor Merry-Man: or, Nothing but
Mirth (London, 1616, STC21374); W. C., The First Part of the
Renowned Historie of Fragosa King of Aragon . . .Right Pleasant for
the Aged to Drive Away Melancholy Thoughts (London, 1618, STC4319);
Anon., Robin Good-Fellow, his Mad Prankes, and Merry Iests, Full of
HonestMirth, and Is a Fit Medicine for Melancholy (London, 1628,
STC 12016); Anon.,The Pennilesse Parliament of Threed-Bare Poets .
. . Composed by Doctor Merry-Man:Not Onely to Purge Melancholy, but
Also to Procure Tittering and Laughing (London,1649); Anon., A PILL
to Purge Melancholy: or, Merry Newes from Newgate (London,1652);
Anon., Mirth in Abundance . . . Contrivd to Relieve the Melancholy,
andRejoyce the Merry; to Expell Sorrow, and Advance Jollity
(London, 1659); Anon., AnAntidote against Melancholy: Made Up in
PILLS. Compounded of Witty Ballads, JovialSongs, and Merry Catches
(London, 1661); Laurence Price, A New Dialogue betweenDick of Kent,
and Wat the Welch-man . . . Written and Printed on Purpose to
MakeFolks Merry in Time of Sadnesse . . . and Pass the Tedious
Melancholy Nights (London,1654); Humphrey Crouch, Englands Jests
Rend and Improvd, [which] May Serveas the Witty-Mans COMPANION, the
Busie-Mans DIVERSION, and the Melancholy MansPHYSICK and
RECREATION, 3rd edn (London, 1693); Anon., Wit and Mirth: or, PILLS
toPurge Melancholy (London, 1699).
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86 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
We should be cautious about accepting anecdotal citations
asconclusive evidence of an increased preoccupation with
melancholyacross the social orders, whether in England or Europe
generally.Although there are clearly more learned and popular
textsbeing produced on the subject, it is difcult to disentangle
thisphenomenon from the massive expansion of publishing generallyin
these years, and until adequate statistics are available
thequestion of whether melancholy attracted a
disproportionateamount of attention remains open.30 But if the
quantitativedimension of this issue must for now remain unresolved,
thecontemporary perceptions of the importance and frequency ofthe
disease remain strongly suggestive that melancholy didbecome more
signicant in this period. It is clear that the writerswho perceived
the frequency of the disease and analysed it indetail, like
Melanchthon, Du Laurens and Burton, were inu-ential across Europe
in terms of numbers of books sold andread, and their status as
eminent authorities gave their viewswide dissemination in learned
circles at least.31 However, it isalso striking that so many of the
humorous seventeenth-centuryEnglish texts mentioned above identify
their popular audiencesspecically as melancholics, rather than
people simply weigheddown with sorrow as might be expected were
melancholytruly on a par with other pathological conditions in
terms ofsignicance. This is an oddity, and it indicates a
problemrequiring explanation.
In terms of medical theory, the history of melancholy
fromantiquity to early modernity is predominantly one of
continuityrather than change. As with many other diseases, the
early moderntheory of the condition was based principally upon
classicalteachings, and despite the progress of medical humanism
didnot differ radically in content from its medieval predecessors.
Inancient Greek medicine, melancholy was conventionally con-sidered
to be one of the three species of madness, drawing its name
30 Using the typology presented in Heinrich Laehr, Die Literatur
der Psychiatrie,Neurologie und Psychologie von 14591799, 4 vols.
(Berlin, 1900), a case could bemade for a similar boom of interest
in mania or fevers.
31 On Melanchthon, see Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of
Natural Phil-osophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge,
1995). On Du Laurens, seeJacques Ferrand, A Treatise on
Lovesickness, ed. Donald A. Beecher and MassimoCiavolella
(Syracuse, NY, 1990), 1035. For Burtons inuence, see nn.
11920below.
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 87
from a direct aetiological association with the noxious
humourblack bile (e oh).32 It was differentiated rst fromphrenitis
(frenzy) on the basis that it was chronic rather thanacute, and
unaccompanied by fever; and second, from maniaon account of its
depressive symptoms and the absence of vio-lent raving. This
tripartition of madness was reproduced in themajority of orthodox
learned medical texts in the sixteenth andseventeenth
centuries.33
Notwithstanding minor adjustments and additions to theclassical
theory such as the formulation of erotic melancholy,34
ancient Greek ideas especially those of Rufus of Ephesus,
andsubsequently of Galen in the third book of the De locis affectis
comprised the substantial core of medieval accounts of the
dis-ease. From causes to cures, these theories focused on the
detri-mental physiological and psychological effects that, it
wasposited, black bile had on both body and mind.35 The same istrue
of early modern writings. Humanist philology contributedlittle of
substance, although it did stimulate closer (and in some
32 On the etymology of melancholy, see Du Laurens, Discourse of
the Preservationof Sight, 86; Giovanni Manardi, IATRODGIA
EPISTOLIKH sive curia medica(Hanover, 1611), IX. 2. 183;
Mercuriale, Medicina practica, II. 10. 39.
33 See, for example, Du Laurens, Discourse of the Preservation
of Sight, 81, 878;Manardi, IATRODGIA EPISTOLIKH, XVIII. 1. 315;
Mercuriale, Medicina practica,I. 15. 76; I. 16. 84. For notable
exceptions, see Marsilio Ficino, Commentarium inConvivium Platonis
de amore, VIII. 3, in Commentary on Platos Symposium on Love,2nd
revised edn, trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas, 1985), 158, followed in
FranoisValleriola, Observationum medicinalium libri sex (Lyon,
1588), 196; Paracelsus,De morbis amentia, II. 3: Four Treatises of
Theophrastus von Hohenheim, CalledParacelsus, trans. C. L. Temkin
et al. (Baltimore and London, 1996), 1523.The topic is discussed in
Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. Beecher and Cia-volella,
256.
34 See John L. Lowes, The Loveres Maladye of Hereos, Modern
Philology, xi(1914); Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella,
Jacques Ferrand and theTradition of Erotic Melancholy in Western
Culture, in Ferrand, Treatise onLovesickness, ed. Beecher and
Ciavolella. For the classication of melancholicsubspecies according
to the affected part, see Rufus of Ephesus, uvres, ed.and trans.
Ch. Daremberg and Ch. E. Ruelle (Paris, 1879), 3589; Galen, Delocis
affectis, III. 910; V. 6, 8, in On the Affected Parts, trans.
Rudolph E. Siegel(Basel, 1976), 8994, 153, 1667; Avicenna, Canon
medicinae, 2 vols. (Venice,1608), i, 489 (bk 3, fen 1, doctrina 4,
ch. 18); Bernard Gordonio, Liliummedicinae (Frankfurt am Main,
1617), II. 19. 250; Burton, Anatomy of Melan-choly, i, 1667 (1. 1.
3. 3).
35 See Arnald of Villanova, Breviarum practicae, I. 18, in Opera
omnia (Basel,1585), cols. 10928; Bartholomew the Englishman, De
proprietatibus rerum(London, 1582), fos. 88v89r; Gordonio, Lilium
medicinae, II. 19. 24655; II.20. 2559.
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88 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
cases new) attention to the Hippocratic and Galenic texts.36
Italso entrenched the position of the De locis affectis as the
touch-stone of learned orthodoxy throughout the sixteenth and
wellinto the seventeenth century, when the disease was
typicallydened as a species of madness (delirium) involving the
im-pairment of a principal internal mental faculty, and
usuallyaccompanied by groundless fear and sorrow.37 In
England,revolutionary iatrochemical and iatromechanical challenges
toGalenism were mounted in the later seventeenth century, butin
most of the medical writings on melancholy by so-callednew scientic
authors, different physiological explanationswere more or less
straightforwardly grafted onto the traditionalGalenic external
aetiology, symptomatology and therapeutics.38
The internal factor of black bile was gradually being
removedfrom causal explanations, yet as Thomas Williss
neurochemicalaccount in the De anima brutorum (1672) well
illustrates, thegeneral intellectual structure of the disease dened
by Willisas raving without a Feavour or fury and characterized by
thesymptoms of fear, sadness and hallucinations persistedlargely
unaltered.39
36 See Vivian Nutton, John Caius and the Eton Galen: Medical
Philology in theRenaissance, Medizinhistorisches Journal, xx
(1985); Vivian Nutton, De PlacitisHippocratis et Platonis in the
Renaissance, in Paola Manuli and Mario Vegetti(eds.), Le Opere
Psicologiche di Galeno: atti terzo colloquio Galenice
InternazionalePavia, 1012 settembre 1986 (Naples, 1988); Vivian
Nutton, The Rise of MedicalHumanism: Ferrara, 14641555, Renaissance
Studies, xi (1997). For the continuitybetween medieval and early
modern medical knowledge, see Siraisi, Avicenna inRenaissance
Italy, 4376; Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A
Studyin the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in
European Intellectual Life(Cambridge, 1980).
37 The denition offered in Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, i,
1626 (1. 1. 3. 12), is representative in this sense. See also
Manardi, IATRODGIA EPISTOLIKH,IX. 2. 1827; Donato-Antonio Altomari,
De medendis humani corporis malis: ars medica(Lyon, 1559), I. 7.
74; Felix Platter, Praxeos, seu deo cognoscendis,
praedicendis,praecavendis, curandisque affectibus homini
incommodantibus, 2 vols. (Basel, 16023), i,989 (I. 3); Mercuriale,
Medicina practica, I. 10. 3940. The pseudo-Galenic Medi-cal
Denitions was considered authentic and also widely quoted: Galen,
Denitionesmedicae, Iona Philologo interprete (Paris, 1528), fo.
19v; see, for example, LeonellusFaventinus de Victorius, De
medendis morbis, XIII, in Practica medicinalis (Lyon,1574),
101.
38 See Jobe, Medical Theories of Melancholia, esp. 217.39
Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, ed. Pordage,
XI. 188201,
esp. 1889, 1923, 199201. For the traditional character of new
scientic theoriesof melancholy, see also Robinson, New System of
the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypo-chondriack Melancholy, 226,
324408.
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 89
There were admittedly two signicant occultist alternativesto the
conventional Galenic theory available from the mid six-teenth
century onwards. The rst originated with Paracelsus,who explained
melancholy physiologically as an excess of vitalspirit in the
brain,40 but whose rather confusing corpus of writingssuggested
that the inuences of planets and angelic or demonicspirits were
directly involved.41 Astrology was also fundamentalto the other
important reformulation of the orthodox medicalconception of
melancholy, namely Marsilio Ficinos revival ofthe
pseudo-Aristotelian idea that melancholics were endowedwith
profound intellectual and prophetic capacities, and hisassociation
of melancholic genius with the celestial inuence ofSaturn.42 Still,
neither of these alternatives seriously disturbedthe general
scholarly consensus on the disease. The non-dogmatic eclecticism of
the majority of learned medical theo-rists and practitioners
enabled them to absorb specic aspectsof the Paracelsian and
neo-Platonic theories which could t intotheir Galenic schemes some
occult and chemical remedies,and the symptom of enhanced
intellectual ability respectively and reject those which could not.
Burtons Anatomy gives theclearest example of this capability to
pick and choose.43
Perceptions of the increased prevalence of melancholy fromthe
late sixteenth century onwards, then, cannot readily beattributed
to any radical alteration in the orthodox medicalaccount of the
disease, at least in terms of the general outlinefrom causes to
cures. However, this is not to say that writingson melancholy were
untouched by a range of controversieswhich occurred in early modern
philosophy and medicine inthis period. In fact, the presence of
melancholy in a number oftechnically extra-medical debates is the
rst indication of thewider intellectual and cultural signicance of
the condition.Although there was a broad consensus on the Galenic
outline
40 Paracelsus, Four Treatises, 157.41 See Walter Pagel,
Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the
Era
of the Renaissance (Basel, 1958), 6972; Midelfort, History of
Madness, 11332.42 Marsilio Ficino, De vita, I. 5; III. 2, in Opera,
2 vols. (Basel, 1576), i, 4968,
533. See also ibid., I. 4. (p. 496). See Klibansky, Panofsky and
Saxl, Saturn andMelancholy, 24174; Brann, Debate over the Origin of
Genius, ch. 2.
43 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, i, 3912 (1. 3. 1. 2); ii,
21922 (2. 4. 1. 4),2515 (2. 5. 1. 5). See, more generally,
Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia,chs. 12.
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90 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
of melancholy in the medical faculties of Europe until the
laterdecades of the seventeenth century at least, a number of
con-tentious developments emerging in the second half of the
previ-ous century bestowed a new degree of importance upon
thedisease.
In the rst place, more conspicuous and divisive than thetheories
of melancholy formulated by Paracelsus or Ficino werequestions
raised by the growth of interest in occultist doctrinesmore
generally in philosophical and medical circles. In theory,the
disease produced symptoms commonly acknowledged asquintessentially
outlandish. Most obviously, it was said to beaccompanied by
hallucinations and delusions. But the periodicraving, misanthropy
and emotional turmoil thought to accom-pany melancholy also
contributed to its disturbing and unnaturalaura. Of particular
importance here is the fact that the explana-tion for these
symptoms was most frequently located in theinternal mental faculty
of the imagination, which in melancholywas deemed to suffer a
pathological alteration, and whichtogether with reason was often
stipulated as the affected part inthe brain of the sufferer.44
In itself, this explanation was unremarkable, but as thenature
and powers of the imagination became the subject ofincreased
speculation amongst physicians and natural philoso-phers in the
sixteenth century, its pathological state in melancholybecame the
focus of particular interest. At issue generally inlearned
discussions were the capabilities of the imagination notonly to
cause pathological or therapeutic physical changeswithin the body
that housed it,45 but also as a faculty fre-quently conceived to
act as a bridge between material objectsand the immaterial soul
through the transmission of subtlespirit to affect the bodies of
others in a similar fashionthrough occult means. Here, in fact, was
a quasi-naturalistictheoretical framework capable of accounting for
the spread ofpsychological disorders, comparable to contemporary
explanations
44 See Du Laurens, Discourse of the Preservation of Sight, 87,
1004; Platter, Praxeos,i, 98 (I. 3); Filoteo Eliano Montalto,
Archipathologia (Paris, 1614), IV. 2. 2245;Mercuriale, Medicina
practica, I. 10. 39, 41; I. 16. 84; Ferrand, Treatise on
Lovesickness,ed. Beecher and Ciavolella, 260; Burton, Anatomy of
Melancholy, i, 1635 (1. 1. 3.12), 249 (1. 2. 3. 1); iii, 578 (3. 2.
1. 2).
45 See, for example, Edward Jorden, A Briefe Discourse of a
Disease Called theSuffocation of the Mother (London, 1603, STC
14790), 1117.
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 91
of plague or syphilis.46 These occult powers of imaginationwere
the object of speculation in Italian neo-Platonic andAristotelian
circles (where in 1556 they received their mostfamous elaboration
in Pomponazzis De incantationibus), in theneo-Galenic medical
community,47 and also, as the writings ofMontaigne, Bacon and
Burton suggest, in the mainstream ofEuropean humanist
philosophy.48
The crucial question posed by the melancholic
imagination,however, related not to its role in transmitting the
disease butto the causation of its strange symptoms. Was the
affection ofthe imagination a natural pathology, or were
preternatural orsupernatural factors involved? Across the
Continent, for neo-Platonic philosophers, neo-Galenic physicians
and demonologistsalike, the imagination interacted not only with
the physicalworld, but also with the preternatural and celestial
domains.49
Thus, according to the demonologist Francesco Maria Guazzo,evil
spirits were able to enter the body aficted with melancholythrough
the imagination, and thereby corrupt the animal andvital spirits.
This was an argument accepted by many otherwiserationalist and
generally sceptical physicians, such as LevinusLemnius and Du
Laurens.50 In large part, this was because
46 See Vivian Nutton, The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of
Contagion andInfection from the Greeks to the Renaissance, Medical
Hist., xxvii (1983). For asimilar approach, see Brann, Debate over
the Origin of Genius, 3957.
47 Pietro Pomponazzi, De naturalium effectuum admirandorum
causis seu de incanta-tionibus (Basel, 1556); see Du Laurens,
Discourse of the Preservation of Sight, 7480,989; John Cotta, The
Triall of Witch-Craft Shewing the True and Right Methode ofthe
Discovery: With a Confutation of Erroneous Wayes (London, 1616, STC
5836),589. For the medieval Arabic roots of this idea, see E. Ruth
Harvey, The InwardWits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance (London, 1975),503.
48 Michel de Montaigne, Essays, I. 20, in The Complete Essays of
Montaigne, trans.Donald Frame (Stanford, 1958), 745; Francis Bacon,
The Two Bookes . . . Of theProciencie and Advancement of Learning
(London, 1605, STC 1164), fos. 37v38v,46r47v; Burton, Anatomy of
Melancholy, i, 2505 (1. 2. 3. 3).
49 See Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental
Science, 8 vols. (NewYork, 192358), v, 3947; D. P. Walker,
Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino toCampanella (London,
1958), 3840, 7680; Charles B. Schmitt and Dilwyn
Knox,Pseudo-Aristoteles Latinus (London, 1985), 3441; Stuart Clark,
Thinking withDemons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early-Modern Europe
(Oxford and New York,1997), chs. 1213.
50 Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium malecarum, ed. M. Summers,
trans.E. A. Ashwin (London, 1929), 106; Du Laurens, Discourse of
the Preservation of Sight,99100; Levinus Lemnius, The Secret
Miracles of Nature in Four Bookes (London,1658), II. 1. 869.
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92 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
such theories of demonically induced or exacerbated
melancholyaccorded with ancient authorities,51 and were widely
availablein the medical and natural-philosophical literature of the
era.52
More specically, they also dovetailed neatly with the
commonassumption that devils were analogically attracted to
interferewith complexionate melancholics because of the dark
andsemi-excremental nature of the black bile predominating intheir
bodies.53
Alternatively, in accordance with the classical and
medievalmedical tendency to interpret the symptoms of melancholy
andother mental illnesses without recourse to supernatural oroccult
factors,54 hallucinations and other strange forms of
psychicdisturbance could be attributed to a corrupted
imagination(prava imaginatio). Some physicians did prefer this type
ofexplanation, but it was rarely used to buttress purely
naturalistictheories in medical texts. For instance, extreme
Galenic ration-alism can be found in the writings of Mercuriale,
who con-centrated exclusively on the natural causes of
melancholicdelusions, and in the work of the Antwerp physician
ThomasFeyens, who argued in his De viribus imaginationis
tractatus(1608) that prava imaginatio could itself be responsible
for thepredominance of black bile in melancholy.55 However,
indebates between natural and occult interpretations of
melancholyit was far more common for physicians to take the
middleground also occupied by many demonologists. In this
respect,Du Laurenss theory of melancholy differed little from
theinterpretation of hallucinations offered by the Swiss
clericLudwig Lavater, who cited ancient medical authors to
explainthe majority of supernatural visions experienced by
common
51 Paul of Aegina, The Seven Books, trans. with commentary
Francis Adams, 3 vols.(London, 18447), i, 383 (I. 4).
52 See the citations in Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, i, 17499
(1. 2. 1. 23).53 See, for example, Juan Huarte, Examen de ingenios:
The Examination of Mens
Wittes, trans. R. C. [Richard Carew] (London, 1594, STC 13891),
925. The dis-tinction between complexionate and pathological
melancholy is discussed below.
54 For early modern medical authors the most authoritative
treatise sanctioningthe naturalistic explanation of mental disease
was the Hippocratic On the SacredDisease, cited and discussed in
Jorden, Briefe Discourse, 24. See also Avicenna,Canon medicinae, i,
489 (bk 3, fen 1, doctrina 4, ch. 18) cited in Mercuriale,Medicina
practica, I. 10. 49, and misread in Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy,
i, 400(1. 3. 1. 3), 428 (1. 3. 3. 1).
55 Thomas Feyens, De viribus imaginationis tractatus (Louvain,
1608), 107; cf.Cotta, Triall of Witch-Craft, 59.
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 93
people as cases of melancholic or mad delusion, but
whoseoverarching purpose in the De spectris was to prove the
realexistence of ghosts.56
For my present concerns, it is signicant that the examina-tions
of the melancholic imagination found in the writings ofEuropean
authors like Guazzo, Lavater and Feyens occurredoutside the
orthodox framework of medical analysis that is,in works of
systematic demonology, spectrology or psychology,as opposed to the
volumes of practica or treatises De melancholiatraditionally used
in universities and by learned medical practi-tioners. Such
discussions are indicative of the way in which thedisease was
beginning to attract attention that was technicallyextra-medical in
nature, and so was becoming less and less thepreserve of the elite
stratum of learned physicians. More specic-ally, the role
attributed to the depraved melancholic imagin-ation in early modern
witchcraft and possession controversiesacross Europe considerably
raised and broadened the culturalprole of the disease. As has been
well illustrated in a numberof recent studies, the potential in the
medical notion of the cor-rupted melancholic imagination to
undermine prevailing ideasabout witchcraft and possession was
realized by contemporarydemonologists, many of whom were by no
coincidence alsomedical practitioners.57 In his De rerum varietate
(1557), forexample, Girolamo Cardano had intimated that witches
mightnot really be witches but victims of melancholic visions.58
TheLutheran physician Johann Weyer developed this view sixyears
later in his De praestigiis daemonum, where he stated that
56 Ludwig Lavater, Of Ghostes and Spirites, Walking by Night,
2nd edn, trans.R. H. (London, 1596, STC 15321), 913. See also
Cotta, Triall of Witch-Craft, 412, 823; Burton, Anatomy of
Melancholy, i, 17499 (1. 2. 1. 23); Thomas Browne,Religio Medici,
I. 30, in Thomas Browne, The Major Works, ed. C. A.
Patrides(London, 1977), 98.
57 Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 1526; Wolfgang
Behringer, Melancholieund Hexenverfolgung, in Jehl and Weber
(eds.), Melancholie, 3842; SydneyAnglo, Melancholia and Witchcraft:
The Debate between Wier, Bodin, and Scot,in A. Gerlo (ed.), Folie
et draison la Renaissance (Brussels, 1976); Jean Card,Folie et
dmonologie au XVIe sicle, ibid.; Maxime Preaud, La
Mlancholiediabolique, la sorcellerie, Les Cahiers du Fontenay,
xixii (1978); Sydney Anglo,Reginald Scots Discoverie of Witchcraft:
Scepticism and Sadduceeism, in SydneyAnglo (ed.), The Damned Art:
Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London, 1977);Clark,
Thinking with Demons, 113, 11718, 18792, 197213, 239, 265, 273,
394;Brann, Debate over the Origin of Genius, 18998, 3878.
58 Girolamo Cardano, De rerum varietate, VIII. 40, in De
subtilitate libri XXI (Basel,1557), 289.
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94 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
witchcraft, and the belief that one was endowed with
magicalpowers, was nothing more than melancholic
hallucinationbrought about by demons.59
In England, perhaps the most famous sceptical argumentagainst
witchcraft that employed the concept of melancholy wasdelivered in
the following century by the physician John Websterin The
Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, Wherein Is Afrmed thatThere Are
Many Sorts of Deceivers and Impostors, and DiversPersons under a
Passive Delusion of Melancholy and Fancy(1677).60 Similarly, twelve
years later in his Table-Talk, JohnSelden ridiculed exorcism as
meere Jugling; they never cast outany but what they rst cast in,
and recalled that when a personof quality came to him complaining
of having two Devills in hishead, Selden quickly discerned that
twas only Melonchollythat troubled him.61 However, the essentials
of these argumentshad been anticipated long before by Reginald
Scot, who con-tributed to the European debate in 1584 by arguing
that bothwitchcraft and demonic possession should be interpreted
natural-istically as products of the almost incredible delusory
effects ofmelancholy on the imagination.62 In a counterblast to
this sub-versive argument, James I devoted a chapter of his
Daemonolo-gie (1597) to a rebuttal of the identication of
witchcraft andmelancholy. Employing unimpeachable neo-Galenic
orthodoxy,James pointed out that many convicted witches had not
exhibitedthe melancholic symptoms of solitariness, leanness and
paleness.In fact, they were some of them rich and worldly-wise,
some ofthem fatte or corpulent in their bodies, and most part of
themaltogether given over to the pleasures of the esh, continual
havingof companie, and all kind of merrines.63
59 Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, et incantationibus ac
veneciis libri V,3rd edn (Basel, 1566), III. 23. 45960.
60 John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, Wherein
Is Afrmed thatThere Are Many Sorts of Deceivers and Impostors, and
Divers Persons under a PassiveDelusion of Melancholy and Fancy, but
that There Is a Corporeal League Made betwixtthe Devil and the
Witch . . . Is Utterly Denied and Disproved (London, 1677), 4,
326.
61 The Table-Talk of John Selden (1689), ed. Sir Frederick
Pollock (London,1929), 401, 145.
62 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1651),
43, 3689. Seealso sigs. B2B3, 56, 1112, 378, 417, 534, 778, 341,
and the related discussionat 65, 1303, 136, 1745, 2012.
63 James I and VI, Daemonologie, 2nd edn (London, 1603, STC
14365.5), 30.The procedures for detecting supernaturally caused
disease are outlined in Cotta,Triall of Witch-Craft, 6978.
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 95
In these widely read controversies, the medical conceptionof the
depraved melancholic imagination had evidentlybecome a theoretical
tool that could be used to support orundermine sceptical cases
against different varieties of preter-natural or supernatural
explanations. It is important toemphasize, however, that this type
of usage of medical ideasabout melancholy was not restricted to the
domain of abstractlearned debate. The distinction between real
witches andthose deemed to be suffering from melancholic delusions
hadimportant legal connotations and a concrete social impact
inwitchcraft trials across the Continent and in America.64 Totake
the most notorious example, in the controversies at Loudunin the
1630s,65 the Scottish physician Marc Duncan proposedthat the
remarkable spectacle of the collective possession ofthe community
of nuns could be explained generally by thetheory of melancholy. In
the rst place, Duncan proposed anexpansive symptomatology of
melancholy encompassing appar-ently preternatural or supernatural
phenomena; more specically,and in accordance with Pomponazzian
doctrine, he argued thatthe problem of the apparent spread of the
symptoms couldbe solved by a proper understanding of the
interpersonal com-munication of infected spirits effected by the
depraved imagin-ation.66 Another anonymous commentator implied
facetiouslythat some of the nuns were probably suffering from a
collectiveprava imaginatio, by ridiculing possession as literally a
dramaticperformance staged by the Church and acted out by
either
64 D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in
France and England inthe Late-Sixteenth and Early-Seventeenth
Centuries (London, 1981), 1013; Clark,Thinking with Demons, 20810;
H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in SouthwesternGermany,
15621684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, 1972),
4950,834, 185; Midelfort, History of Madness, 182227; Lyndal Roper,
Oedipus and theDevil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in
Early-Modern Europe (New York, 1994),2378; David Harley, Explaining
Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosisof Possession, Amer.
Hist. Rev., ci (1996); Norman Gevitz, The Devil HathLaughed at the
Physicians: Witchcraft and Medical Practice in
Seventeenth-CenturyNew England, Jl History of Medicine and Allied
Sciences, lv (2000).
65 See Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe
sicle (Paris,1968), 194203, 24462; Michel de Certeau, The
Possession at Loudun, trans.Michael B. Smith (Chicago and London,
1996); de Certeau, Writing of History,ch. 6.
66 M. Duncan, Discours sur la possession des Religieuses
ursulines de Loudun (Saumur,1634), cited and discussed in de
Certeau, Possession at Loudun, 129, 1357. Seealso ibid., 11721.
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96 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
cunning Mimicke[s] or people of a melancholly nature.67
Againstthe antipossessionists, some physicians implemented the
strategywe have seen employed by James I. The writer and physician
Piletde la Mnardire wrote a Traitt de la mlancholie specically
aimedat the controversy at Loudun, which argued that no natural
melan-cholic symptomatology could be so broad as to include the
range ofsigns exhibited by the nuns. The logical conclusion, that
they werewitnessing something that goes beyond nature, signalled
that inthis instance medicine had to yield to divinity.68
In New England some forty years later, in the case of thedemonic
possession of Elizabeth Knapp, the Calvinist divineSamuel Willard
asserted the priority of divinity in a different man-ner, stating
that even if the subject was melancholic, this cause wassubordinate
to the true cause of her afiction namely hersinfulness.69 Such
cases in the law court hinged upon the applica-bility and exibility
of the pathological theory of melancholy.As in the parallel
instance of hysteria, another disease whose theorywas widely used
to support naturalist interpretations of apparentlyoccult
phenomena, the concept of melancholy had become aweapon in an
age-old intellectual and professional turf war.70
II
The prominence of the role of melancholy in these
controversiesderived from the fact that it was understood to afict
both thebody and the soul.71 As such, it could be used to shed
light onwhat Montaigne called the narrow seam between these two
partsof the human being,72 a subject that had been popularized
in
67 Anon., Observations upon the Relation, sig. Cr, printed in A
Relation of theDeuill Balams Departure out of the Body of the
Mother-Prioresse of the Ursuline Nuns ofLoudun (London, 1636, STC
1232). See also Ren Pintard, Le Libertinage rudit(Paris, 1943),
2213.
68 Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de la Mnardire, Traitt de la
mlancholie, savoir si elle estla cause des effets que lon remarque
dans les possdes de Loudon: tir des Rexions deM. [de la Mnardire]
sur le Discours de M. D[uncan] (La Flche, 1635); de
Certeau,Possession at Loudun, 129, 114, and 10951 generally.
69 See Harley, Explaining Salem (quotation at p. 314).70 For
some English examples, see Jorden, Briefe Discourse, sigs. A2vA4v,
15;
Cotta, Triall of Witch-Craft, sig. A4rv, 6978; Willis, Essay of
the Pathology of theBrain and Nervous Stock, 7689. For discussion,
see Michael MacDonald, Witchcraftand Hysteria in Elizabethan
London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (Londonand New York,
1991).
71 See particularly Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, i, 223,
Democritus Junior tothe Reader.
72 Montaigne, Essays, I. 20. 74.
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 97
European humanist circles by the publication in 1525 of
theAldine edition of Galens De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis,
andsubsequently by the psycho-physiological theories in treatises
Deanima by important authors like Melanchthon and Juan LuisVives.73
In the case of melancholy, it seems, no neo-Galenic phys-ician
risked heresy accusations by claiming that the immortalrational
soul, or the understanding, could itself be directly touchedor
primarily affected by melancholy. Rather, the derangement wassaid
to afict the mortal physical habitation of the soul particu-larly
the front ventricle of the brain where the imagination
wasconventionally located and thereby distort the operation of
itsfaculties.74 By employing this type of explanation, medical
theor-ists were able to maintain that the powers of the sensitive
part ofthe soul in particular were damaged in melancholy, and so
pre-serve its status as a psychological as well as physiological
condition.
Crucially, it was the diverse effects of melancholy on
theoperations of the sensitive soul, most notably the production
ofemotions, which extended the potential usefulness of the con-cept
beyond medicine and its intersection with demonology.The disease
was broadly understood as a species of madness orunreason, yet its
most prominent features were undoubtedly itsmost characteristic
symptoms fear and sadness. Above all, itwas a passionate condition,
and it is perhaps signicant thatearly modern writers claimed to
detect a prevalence of thehypochondriacal melancholy in particular,
since, if we followBurtons account, psychological perturbations had
a primaryaetiological role in this subspecies.75 But to understand
thebreadth of the cultural resonance of melancholy we must
alsorecognize the multiple and interrelated psychological meanings
ofthe term, which could signify more than just a technically
denedpathology in medical discourse. In one sense, the word
couldsignify the humour black bile. In another, as seen in works
such asLemnius De habitu et constitutione corporis (1561), it
denoted one
73 See Nutton, De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis in the
Renaissance. The Deanima of Melanchthon and the De anima et vita of
Vives were published together onseveral occasions in the later
sixteenth century: see, for example, Johannes LudovicusVives, De
anima et vita libri tres . . . P. Melanthonis liber unus (Zurich,
1563).
74 See, for example, Du Laurens, Discourse of the Preservation
of Sight, 823; cf.Huarte, Examen de ingenios, 904. For this
problem, see Grazia Tonelli Olivieri,Galen and Francis Bacon:
Faculties of the Soul and the Classication of Knowledge,in Donald
R. Kelley and Richard H. Popkin (eds.), The Shapes of Knowledge
fromthe Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht, 1991).
75 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, i, 3789 (1. 2. 5. 4).
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98 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
of the four basic temperaments, or humoral complexions, inwhich
black bile predominated in a stable imbalance.76 In medievaland
early modern characterology, complexionate melancholyshared the
core qualities of the disease of melancholy: the indivi-duals
concerned were affected by black bile with consequencesthat were
similarly deleterious for their health and behaviour,
butnevertheless not indicative of a pathological state.
However,because of the excess of black bile in their bodies,
complexionatemelancholics were also deemed to be especially
susceptible to thedisease of melancholy.77 Hence, one of the
problems facingmedical writers was the maintenance of an effective
distinctionbetween the emotional symptoms resulting from a normal
melan-cholic complexion and those rooted in a melancholic
disease.78
To complicate matters still further, although the innate
tem-perament was thought to be relatively settled, it was
technicallytheorized as being in permanent ux. The humoral
complexionwas always, as Lemnius translator wrote, suffring chaung
&alteration through a range of internal and external
non-naturalfactors such as diet or mental perturbations that
weredeemed capable of modifying the elemental qualities in the
body.Temperaments were easelye one into an other transmuted.79
In its complexionate sense, melancholy could thereforedescribe
not only the character-type of someone with ahumoral temperament
more or less permanently dominated byblack bile, but also the
disposition of those experiencing emotionssuch as fear or sadness,
who were thereby temperamentally iftemporarily melancholic. As
Burton put it, no man living isfree from melancholy in this sence,
which was the Character ofMortalitie in postlapsarian man.80 As a
consequence, melancholycould legitimately be said to afict anyone
experiencing any degreeof certain kinds of mental perturbation. The
term could be usedloosely or metaphorically to refer to a range of
passionate
76 Levinus Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions: Generallye
Applicable, Expedientand Protable for All Such, as Be Desirous
& Carefull of their Bodylye Health, trans.Thomas Newton
(London, 1576, STC 15456), fo. 148r.
77 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, i, 138 (1. 1. 1. 15).78 Burton
solved this problem by employing the Aristotelian distinction
between
disposition and habit: ibid., i, 1369 (1. 1. 1. 5).79 Lemnius,
Touchstone of Complexions, fo. 84r; see also ibid., fos. 4r6r,
26r31r,
33v, 88r.80 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, i, 136 (1. 1. 1. 5).
See also Thomas Wright,
The Passions of the Minde in Generall, 2nd edn (London, 1604,
STC 26040), 623.
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 99
conditions, from temporary sadness to extreme
irrationalderangement, in non-technical literary contexts as in
ThomasDekkers description of the still and melancholy streets of
plague-torn London81 and, one presumes, in everyday speech as
well.
Melancholy, then, had direct reference in early modernEurope to
particular forms of behaviour and experience thatwere emotional. It
is perhaps in part because of this that thereis some indication in
this period that women, usually deemedespecially susceptible to
imaginative depravation and so also tostrong passions, were
marginally more likely to be diagnosedwith the disease than men.82
For the same reason, the subjectof melancholy attracted a large
quantity of moral and spiritualas well as medical attention. As a
passionate disease, complex-ion and disposition it was necessarily
given a location withinthe schemes of virtue and holiness or of
vice and sinfulness thatwere widely propagated orally and in print
by learned and popularmoralists and divines, and which undoubtedly
had a deepexperiential impact upon the lives of the early modern
popula-tion.83 In fact, although both ancient and medieval writings
onmelancholy had attributed moral and spiritual qualities
tomelancholic emotions (the latter through discussions of
tristitiaand more particularly the fusion of acedia, the sin of
sloth, withmelancholy),84 early modern writings about melancholy
are
81 Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare 1603: Wherein Is Shewed
the Picture ofLondon, Lying Sicke of the Plague (London, 1603, STC
6535.5), sig. C3v. See alsothe discussion in Burton, Anatomy of
Melancholy, i, 1368 (1. 1. 1. 5).
82 For example in Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. Beecher
and Ciavolella,2645, 31112; for other gendered aspects of
melancholy, see Burton, Anatomy ofMelancholy, i, 1959 (1. 2. 1. 3),
32830 (1. 2. 4. 1), 41418 (1. 3. 2. 4). See alsoMidelfort, History
of Madness, 378; de Certeau, Possession at Loudun, 11821.
83 The work of Jean Delumeau on this subject is essential: see
particularly hisNaissance et afrmation de la Rforme (Paris, 1965);
Le Catholicisme entre Luther etVoltaire (Paris, 1971) in English as
Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, trans.Jeremy Moiser
(London, 1977); La Peur en Occident (XIV eXVIIIe sicles): une
citassige (Paris, 1978); Le Pch et la Peur; and Prescription and
Reality, in EdmundLeites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in
Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1988). Seealso John Bossy,
Christianity and the West, 14001700 (Oxford, 1985); PeterMarshall,
Fear, Purgatory and Polemic in Reformation England, in WilliamG.
Naphy and Penny Roberts (eds.), Fear in Early Modern Society
(Manchester, 1997).
84See Mark D. Altschule, Acedia: Its Evolution from Deadly Sin
to PsychiatricSyndrome, Brit. Jl Psychiatry, cxi (1965); Siegfried
Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acediain Medieval Thought and Literature
(Chapel Hill, 1967); Noel L. Brann, Is AcediaMelancholy? A
Re-Examination of This Question in the Light of Fra Battista
daCremas Della cognitione et vittoria di se stesso (1531), Jl
History of Medicine andAllied Sciences, xxxiv (1979).
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100 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
most effectively distinguished from their predecessors by
theexpansion of the cultural context in which melancholic emo-tions
were discussed. The moral-philosophical aspect of thisrange can be
seen in the remedies involving wisdom and self-knowledge commonly
proposed for melancholy by learnedphysicians;85 in the
psychological analysis of the virtues and vicesaccompanying
complexions found in works of characterologyespecially fashionable
after Huartes Examen de ingenios (1575)and Casaubons edition of
Theophrastus (1592);86 in the moral-psychological writings on the
passions by authors such as ThomasWright and Edward Reynolds;87
and, most famously of all, indramatic characterizations found in
works such as ShakespearesHamlet and As You Like It.88 In all these
areas, there is the recog-nition that the excessive emotions
accompanying either com-plexionate or pathological melancholy are
at least potentiallyvicious, and therefore either explicitly or by
implication thatany remedy must involve moral or spiritual
self-discipline.
The spread of moralized approaches to melancholy and theemotions
with which it was associated was a complex phe-nomenon that derived
from an array of different cultural andintellectual sources. In
part, it is a development that can be tracedto movements in
humanist moral philosophy in the late sixteenthcentury, and it is
particularly tempting to reformulate therelationship posited by
Benjamin between melancholy andneo-Stoicism. I would suggest that
the two were not analogousor essentially identical in their lived
states, but instead weredomains of intellectual concern that
overlapped signicantlyand originated from a common source.89 It is
certainly thecase that the conspicuous increase in interest in
Stoic moralphilosophy best exemplied on the Continent by the
self-consciously dogmatic writings of Justus Lipsius and
Guillaumedu Vair, but also a signicant phenomenon in England in
the
85 Manardi, IATRODGIA EPISTOLIKH, IV. 5. 40; Ferrand, Treatise
on Lovesickness,ed. Beecher and Ciavolella, 366.
86 Lemnius, Touchstone of Complexions, fos. 4rv, 146r, 149v;
Huarte, Examen deingenios, 1478; Theophrasti characteres ethici,
sive descriptiones morum Grc, ed.Isaac Casaubon (Lyon, 1592).
87 Wright, Passions of the Minde in Generall, 613; Edward
Reynolds, A Treatise ofthe Passions and Faculties of the Soule of
Man, with the Severall Dignities and Corruptionsthereunto Belonging
(London, 1640, STC 20938), 2912.
88 See Hamlet, II. ii. 6005; As You Like It, IV. i. 1019.89
Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 140.
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 101
writings of those such as Ralegh, Bacon and Joseph Hall90
prompted deep consideration of many of the same moral-psychological
issues raised by the subject of melancholy. Thehumanistic search
for a Christianized model of self-sufcientwisdom, whether it drew
on Stoic or other classical tenets, wascentrally constituted by the
recognition of the detrimental roleof strong emotions to
psychological health and by the discussionof various measures to
combat them.91 As such, neo-Stoicism wasan outcrop of a more
general concern with the perturbations ofthe soul,92 of which
moralized discourses on melancholy wereanother manifestation. It is
suggestive, for instance, that afterthe death of his wife in 1635,
one of the ways the humanistscholar Caspar Barlaeus chose to
express his melancholic pre-dicament was by meditating on the
difculty of applying to hisown life the Stoic principles on which
he lectured students atLeiden.93 A close relationship between
melancholy and thehumanist engagement with classical moral
psychology generallyis also found in the eclectic and widely read
writings of bothMontaigne, who said of himself that he was prompted
to with-draw from the world and write by a melancholy humour,94
and Pierre Charron, who opposed the destructive and viciouschaos
of the passions and the general misery of mankind withthe
cultivation of Epicurean tranquillity.95
The same psychological preoccupations are present in theearly
modern consolatio, a genre which burgeoned in a variety of
90 Adriana McCrea, Constant Minds: Political Virtue and the
Lipsian Paradigm inEngland, 15841650 (Toronto, Buffalo and London,
1997).
91 See Justus Lipsius, De constantia libri duo, qui alloquium
praecipue Continent inpublicis malis (London, 1586) in English as
Iustus Lipsius, Two Bookes ofConstancie, trans. John Stradling
(London, 1595, STC 15695), esp. I. 28. 313; I.1214. 1924; I. 22.
3840; II. 23. 616; II. 19. 724; Guillaume du Vair, TheMoral
Philosophie of the Stoicks, trans. Thomas James, 2nd edn (London,
1598,STC 7374), 201, 25, 2931, 3345, 4954, 719, 83113, 13054.
92 See Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in
Seventeenth-CenturyPhilosophy (Oxford, 1999), ch. 1; the essays
collected in Stephen Gaukroger (ed.),The Soft Underbelly of Reason:
The Passions in the Seventeenth Century (London andNew York, 1998);
Richard Serjeantson, The Passions and Animal Language,15401700, Jl
History of Ideas, lxii (2001).
93 Blok, Caspar Barlaeus, 53.94 Montaigne, Essays, II. 8. 278.
On Montaignes Stoicism, see Hugo Friedrich,
Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan, trans. Dawn Eng (Berkeley and
Oxford, 1991), 16975.95 Pierre Charron, Of Wisdome Three Bookes,
trans. Samson Lennard, 4th edn
(London, 1630, STC 5054), esp. I. 39. 14460; II. 6. 30511; II.
12. 3658. Seealso I. 1833. 73106; II. 1111. 235365; III. 6. 44955;
III. 2035. 53969.
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102 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
literary forms from epistles and funeral orations to
full-lengthtreatises and dialogues. The writing of consolations had
been animportant philosophical project for early Italian
humanists,96
but it is notable that the production of this type of
discoursemarkedly accelerated across the Continent from the later
six-teenth century onwards. This was particularly the case
innorthern Europe after the Reformation, where the
spiritualdimension of the consolation became increasingly
visible.97 InEngland, the nal decades of the century marked the
begin-ning of an extended period in which sermons, treatises
andepistles offering comfort, commonly composed by divines
andexpounding scriptural topoi, issued from the presses in
remark-able numbers.98 These took their place alongside a number
ofvernacular translations of contemporary continental and
classical
96 See George W. McClure, Sorrow and Consolation in the Italian
Renaissance(Princeton, 1991).
97 I am unaware of any comprehensive analysis of European
consolationes inthis period, but for a case study, see William L.
Cunningham, Martin Opitz:Poems of Consolation in Adversities of War
(Bonn, 1974). On the consolatio inEngland, see G. W. Pigman III,
Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge,1985), chs. 12.
98 For the period from c.1575 to c.1650, see, for example,
Andrew Kingsmill,A Most Excellent and Comfortable Treatise, for All
Such as Are Any Maner of WayEither Troubled in Minde or Aficted in
Bodie (London, 1577, STC 15000);Robert Linaker, A Comfortable
Treatise for the Reliefe of Such as Are Aficted in Con-science
(London, 1595, STC 15638; repr. 1601, 1610, 1625); Robert
Southwell, TheTriumphs over Death: or, A Consolatorie Epistle, for
Aficted Mindes, in the Affects ofDying Friends. First Written for
the Consolation of One, but Now Published for the Gen-erall Good of
All (London, 1595, STC 22971; repr. 1596, 1600); John Hayward,The
Strong Helper, Offering to Beare Every Mans Burthen: or, A
Treatise, Teachingin All Troubles How to Cast our Burthen upon God:
but Chiey Delivering InfallibleGrounds of Comfort for Quieting of
Troubled Consciences (London, 1609, STC12985; repr. 1614, 1637);
John Donne, Deaths Duell: or, A Consolation to theSoule, against
the Dying Life, and Living Death of the Body (London, 1632,
STC7031; repr. 1633); Phineas Fletcher, Joy in Tribulation: or,
Consolations for theAficted Spirits (London, 1632, STC 11080);
Richard Sibbes, The Soules Conictwith It Selfe, and Victorie over
It Selfe by Faith: A Treatise of the Inward Disquiet-ments of
Distressed Spirits, with Comfortable Remedies to Establish Them
(London,1635, STC 22508.5; repr. 1638); Henry Church, Divine and
Christian Letters: ToRelieve the Oppressed, Comfort the Mourners,
Direct the Wandring (London, 1636,STC 5215); William Gilbert,
Architectonice consolationis: or, The Art of Building Com-fort
Occasioned by the Death of That Religious Gentlewoman, Jane Gilbert
(London,1640, STC 11882); John Duncon, The Returnes of Spiritual
Comfort and Grief in aDevout Soul: Represented (by Entercourse of
Letters) to the Right Honorable the LadieLetice, Vi-Countess
Falkland, in her Life Time, and Exemplied in the Holie Life
andDeath of the Said Honorable Ladie (London, 1648; repr. 1649,
1653).
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 103
consolationes.99 That the emotional concerns of this growingbody
of literature overlapped with medical and philosophicaldiscourses
on melancholy is indicated not only by the justica-tions that
contemporaries provided for this genre HenryPeacham, for instance,
described the consolatio as most neces-sarily required in this vale
of misery, where mens harts are oftenfainting, and their mindes
falling into despaire100 but alsoby the substantial consolationes
found within both TimothyBrights Treatise of Melancholie and
Burtons Anatomy.101
As the large number of consolatory works written by
divinesindicates, interest in disturbing passions was not the
exclusivepreserve of humanist philosophy. In fact, I would suggest
thatthe development of the spiritual aspect of early modern
ideasabout disturbing emotions was the single most important
factorfuelling the expansion of the potential usage of the idea
ofmelancholy across European intellectual discourse. On thispoint,
we would do well to consider Jean Delumeaus suggestionthat both
Protestant and Catholic reform movements shared asignicantly
increased attentiveness to the psychological interioras the
location of spiritual health. Although Delumeaus ana-lysis invites
multiple local qualications, if he is broadly correctthe soul
increasingly became prescribed as the proper object ofinternal
eschatological expectations, as well as external
disciplinarypressures, that were of an unprecedented
intensity.102
In the rst place, Delumeaus case is strongly supported bythe
fact that the principal strains of Protestant theologyascribed a
specic role to extreme passions of the soul, particu-larly despair,
in the drama of individual salvation. Luther, who
99 See Girolamo Cardano, Cardanus comforte, trans. Thomas
Bedingeld (London,1573, STC 4607; repr. 1576); Juan Prez de Pineda,
An Excelent Comfort to AllChristians, against All Kinde of
Calamities: No Lesse Comfortable, then Pleasant, Pithy,and
Protable, trans. John Daniel (London, 1576, STC 19626); Caspar
Huberinus,A Riche Storehouse, or Treasurie, for the Sicke, Full of
Christian Counsels: HolesomeDoctrines, Comfortable Persuasions, and
Godly Meditations, Meete for All Christians,Both in Sicknesse and
in Health, trans. Thomas Godfrie (London, 1578, STC13905); L. A.
Seneca the Philosopher, his Book of Consolation to Marcia, trans.
SirRalph Freeman (London, 1635, STC 22215a); Hugo Grotius, The
Mourner Comforted:An Epistle Consolatory, trans. Clement Barksdale
(London, 1652).
100 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, 2nd edn (London,
1593, STC19498), 1001.
101 Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, 182242; Burton, Anatomy of
Melancholy, ii,125207 (2. 3. 1. 1 to 2. 3. 8. 1).
102 See the works cited in n. 83 above.
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104 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
described himself as an experienced melancholic, referred onmany
occasions both to melancholia and its spiritual equivalentof
tristitia. Sadness, for him, was simultaneously a salutarymeans of
comprehending ones own weakness and a pathologyof the soul. It was
both to be fought as a devilish temptation,and to be welcomed as
provoking a turning to God for help the experience of misery could
thus be a precondition for thebelievers salvation, by prompting the
acknowledgement thatjustication would come sola de. However, if the
individualchose to struggle using his or her own means, then
suchpresumption and inadequate comprehension of divine omnipo-tence
would herald the onset of sinful despair, true spiritualtristitia
or melancholy.103 Similarly, according to Calvin, theactivity of
self-examination before the mirror of Gods lawcreated anxiety and
dejection, but this would provoke the turn-ing to God required for
the reception of saving grace. In con-trast to Luthers ambivalent
appraisal of tristitia, therefore, forCalvin, despair had a
necessary and unequivocally positiveeschatological function.
Properly interpreted, it was a sign ofthe working of divine
providence, part of the punishment pre-ceding redemption that
manifested itself in the aficted con-science.104 David Harley has
shown that seventeenth-centuryEnglish physicians often applied
Calvinist psychology of thissort, interpreting the melancholic
passion of sorrow as adivinely sent afiction that was propaedeutic
to godly virtue,and constructing fear as a useful stimulus to the
realization ofspiritual weakness.105 Such ideas were also publicly
articulated
103 Martin Luther, Table Talk, trans. William Hazlitt (London,
1995), 282, 2912,3002, 3045, 307, nos. 587, 589, 600, 61112, 634,
636, 638, 645, 647, 649,656. For discussion, see Schleiner,
Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia, 6672; Midelfort,History of Madness,
83108.
104 Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 7th edn,
trans. J. Allen, revisedB. B. Wareld, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1936),
i, 398 (II. 8. 3).
105 David Harley, Spiritual Physic, Providence and English
Medicine, 15601640, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham
(eds.), Medicine and the Refor-mation (London and New York, 1993);
David Harley, The Theology of Afictionand the Experience of
Sickness in the Godly Family, 16501714: The Henrys andthe
Newcombes, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.),
ReligioMedici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England
(Aldershot, 1996). Seealso Michael MacDonald, Religion, Social
Change, and Psychological Healing inEngland, 16001800, in W. J.
Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing (Oxford,1982). I have not yet
been able to consult David Lederer, Psychiatry in the
SixteenthCentury? Spiritual Physic in Early Modern Europe, in F.
Fuentenebro, R. Huertasand C. Valiente (eds.), Historia de la
Psiquiatra en Europa (Madrid, 2003).
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 105
by learned divines like Reynolds, but were viewed by others
inthe Reformed Church as misleading and spiritually dangerous hence
Richard Baxters caveat against placing Religion too muchin fears,
and tears.106
As Delumeau has demonstrated, however, it is quite wrongto
associate the increased internalization of spirituality,
andspiritualization of psychology, solely with
Protestantism.Heightened consciousness of the souls vicious
passions as aconsequence of original sin can be seen, for instance,
in themyriad of Catholic works portraying the Christian life as a
per-petual psychomachy. Although important to Reformed reli-gious
culture, in Delumeaus view this was a tradition exemplied most
famously by Erasmus Enchiridion militisChristiani (1503), though
more typically by Lorenzo Scupolispopular Combattimento Spirituale
(1589) that encapsulatesCounter-Reformation spirituality in
toto.107 Reading suchworks, it is easy to see how in the
pervasively Augustinian reli-gious culture of Europe the
melancholic emotions of fear andsadness became spiritually loaded.
Signs of the just divine punish-ment for Adamic transgression,
irrational passions served as aconstant reminder of the corrupted
postlapsarian will, the rec-ognition of which was frequently
portrayed as the rst step inredemption.
Such generalizations are inevitably precarious, and the
reli-gious signicance of melancholy, increasingly evident in
medicalas well as moral-psychological writings in
post-ReformationEurope, must be assessed carefully in specic
contexts. This isnot least because the theory of the disease was
perfectly suitedfor use in sectarian controversy.108 Most simply,
religious schis-matics could be demonized as suffering from
brain-sicke zeale
106 Reynolds, Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the
Soule of Man, 2213, 2267,2989; Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, pt 3,
184, p. 86.
107 Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 186326 and passim. Scupolis work was
translatedinto English in 1598 Lorenzo Scupoli, The Spiritual
Conict (Antwerp, 1598,STC 22126.3) and reprinted several times
throughout the seventeenth century.On English portrayals of
psychomachy in this period, see also MacDonald, Religion,Social
Change, and Psychological Healing, 11315.
108 See Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia, 74110; Heyd,
Be Sober andReasonable, 1171; H. C. Erik Midelfort, Religious
Melancholy and Suicide: Onthe Reformation Origins of a Sociological
Stereotype, in Andrew D. Weiner andLeonard V. Kaplan (eds.),
Madness, Melancholy and the Limits of the Self (GravenImages, iii,
Madison, 1996).
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106 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
and melancholic delusions this was the use made of differ-ent
forms of madness by Luther,109 and of melancholy byZwingli.110 Of
greater importance in the later sixteenth and seven-teenth
centuries, however, was the direct association repeatedlymade
between predestination and melancholy. Again, the scenefor this
linkage had been set by Luther, who had warned expli-citly that
meditation upon ones future election was sinful,spiritually
dangerous, and productive only of anxiety.111 InGermany from the
1560s onwards, this warning was developedinto a charge specically
against Calvinism, which was increas-ingly attacked by Lutherans as
fostering melancholy through itsterrifying overemphasis on the
predestinarian decree.112
The association of particular interpretations of the theologyof
grace with melancholy persisted across the Continent in
theseventeenth century,113 and in England we can see its
contro-versial potential being exploited to the full. Here, until
the end ofthe sixteenth century, the polemical usefulness of the
idea ofmelancholy was limited by Protestant physicians and
puritandivines, who upheld a rigorous distinction between, on the
onehand, the kind of despair betokening a naturally caused
melancholy,and, on the other, that indicating a divinely aficted
con-science. Medical and theological perspectives on the
diseasewere thus kept apart at the theoretical level, even if in
practicethe divide between the professions of physician and divine
wascommonly traversed. Melancholy had its causes in either bodyor
soul, but theological ideas had no explicit aetiologicalrole.114 In
the divisive climate of the Laudian 1620s and 1630s,however, as the
doctrine of predestination became increasinglyfraught with
controversy, this situation changed. The crucialtheoretical and
polemical intervention in this respect was made
109 Midelfort, History of Madness, 836.110 For Zwinglis attack
on the Anabaptists, and its anti-puritan application in
England, see Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia, 118,
121. See also James Iand VI, Basilikon Doron (London, 1603, STC
14353), sig. B5.
111 Martin Luther, Letters of Spiritual Counsel, ed. and trans
T. G. Tappert, 1378;Luther, Table Talk, 310, no. 661.
112 See Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia, 745.113 For
example, see the case related in Blok, Caspar Barlaeus, 1634.114
See, for instance, Bright, Treatise of Melancholie, 182242, esp.
187; William
Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience
(Cambridge, 1606, STC19669), I. 712. 88197. Compare the confusion
of the two in Lemnius, Touchstoneof Complexions, fos. 144r145r.
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THE PROBLEM OF EARLY MODERN MELANCHOLY 107
by Burton in the nal section of the Anatomy, where he drewupon
the ancient association of spiritual enthusiasm withmelancholy to
designate a new religious subspecies of the dis-ease. This was a
wide category, including conditions rangingfrom superstitious
Catholic madness and atheistic apostasyto the frenzied enthusiasm
of radical Protestant sects.115
Although supercially Burton offered a systematic analysis ofall
the different kinds of religious melancholy, his deepermotivation
in this part of his work was anti-Calvinist. First,he eroded the
distinction between theological and medicalunderstandings of
divinely sent despair and natural melancholy,by initially
distinguishing but then confusing the two in anextended consolatory
discourse at the end of the book.116
Subsequently, and barely concealing his Laudian sympathies,he
revived the Lutheran case against Calvinism by attackingdogmatic
predestinarianism as a form of enthusiasm thatcaused widespread
melancholy.117
It is in this part of the Anatomy, which relied upon the
tradi-tionally sanctioned role of strong passions in inducing
melancholybut referred only obliquely to medical technicalities,
that thepotential expansiveness and polemical utility of the
earlymodern concept of melancholy is most visible. And it is
noaccident that here lay Burtons most important legacy. Sermonsand
treatises dealing with religious melancholy becamecommonplace in
England, from Edmund Gregorys HistoricalAnatomy of Christian
Melancholy (1646) through to RichardBaxters Signs and Causes of
Melancholy (1706).118 More criti-cally, Burtons analysis of
spiritual enthusiasm as a form ofmelancholic madness was developed
and employed for similarpurposes in learned circles by Mric
Casaubon (like Burton a
115 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, iii, 330446 (3. 4. 1. 1 to 3.
4. 2. 6).116 Ibid., 40811 (3. 4. 2. 2), 42446 (3. 4. 2. 6).117
Ibid., 42935 (3. 4. 2. 6). I give a detailed analysis of this
strategy in Angus
Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in
Context, CambridgeUniv. Press, forthcoming, ch. 3.
118 See, for example, Edmund Gregory, An Historical Anatomy of
Christian Melancholy(London, 1646); John Humfrey, A Brief Receipt
Moral & Christian, against thePassion of the Heart, or Sore of
the Mind (London, 1658); Thomas Powell, A Salvefor Soul-Sores
(London, 1679); John Moore, Of Religious Melancholy (London,1692);
Richard Baxter, The Signs and Causes of Melancholy (London, 1706);
RichardBaxter, Preservatives against Melancholy and Over-Much
Sorrow, or the Cure of Both(London, 1716).
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108 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 191
Student of Christ Church) and Henry More,119 and was put
todevastating satirical use by Swift in his Tale of a Tub
(1704).120
Moreover, the specically Lutheran terms of the critique
ofmelancholic Calvinist spirituality remained relevant to
theEnglish religious and political climate in the nal decades of
theseventeenth century, as the title of a sermon commendingmirth
heard by Ralph Thoresby, and recorded in his diary,
wellillustrates: Spiritus Calvinisticus est spiritus
melancholicus.121
For their part, eighteenth-century physicians had no qualmsabout
incorporating the vocabulary and much of the content ofthe older
account of religious psychopathology within their self-consciously
new scientic teachings of nervous disease, asRobinsons New System
of the Spleen attests.122 Even more strik-ingly, the bifurcated
theory systematically presented in theAnatomy underlay David Humes
dissection of the perniciouspsychological and political effects of
the two species of falsereligion, superstition and enthusiasm, in
his famous essay of1742.123
As the range and com