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Secondary
Anglo, Sydney. ‘Melancholia and Witchcraft: The Debate between Wier, Bodin, and Scot’, in Alois Gerlo (ed.), Folie et Déraison à la Renaissance (Brussels: Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1976), pp. 209-22
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Brann, Noel. ‘Is Acedia Melancholy? A Re-Examination of This Question in the Light of Fra Battista da Crema’s Della cognitione et vittoria di se stesso (1531)’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 34 (1979), pp. 180-99
Brann, Noel. The Debate over the Origin of Genius during the Italian Renaissance: The Theories of Supernatural Frenzy and Natural Melancholy in Accord and in Conflict on the Threshold of the Scientific Revolution (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002)
Céard, Jean. ‘Folie et démonologie au XVIe siècle’, in Alois Gerlo (ed.), Folie et Déraison à la Renaissance (Brussels: Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1976), pp. 129-48
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Delumeau, Jean. ‘L’âge d’or de la mélancolie’, L’histoire 42 (1982), pp. 28-37
Fish, Stanley. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972)
Flashar, Hellmut. Melancholie und Melancholiker in den medizinischen Theorien der Antike (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966)
Fox, Ruth A. The Tangled Chain: The Structure of Disorder in ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976)
Gowland, Angus. ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, Past & Present no. 191 (2006), pp. 77-120
Gowland, Angus. The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Gowland, Angus. ‘The Ethics of Renaissance Melancholy’, Intellectual History Review 18:1 (2008), pp. 103-117
Gowland, Angus. ‘Melancholy, Imagination and Dreaming in Renaissance Learning’, in Yasmin Haskell (ed.), Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 53-102
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Klibansky, Raymond. Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964)
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Pigeaud, Jackie. Melancholia: Le malaise de l’individu (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2008)
Ruvoldt, Maria. The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Schleiner, Winfried. Melancholy, Genius and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wisebaden: Harrassowitz, 1991)
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Schmitt, Charles B. Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1983)
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Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990)
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Notes
Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 303-52.
For more discussion of the relationship between literary and intellectual-historical interpretations of the Anatomy, see Angus Gowland, ‘Robert Burton and The Anatomy of Melancholy’, in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to Early Modern English Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
I am using the term ‘tradition’ here without any strong epistemological connotation, simply to designate groups of works that fall into the same (or very similar) disciplinary categories over time.
See, for instance, Isidore of Seville, Etymologia IV.vii.9 (trans. and ed. S. A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and O. Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 111; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum (Nuremberg, 1492), IV.11, sigs C4[iv]; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, eds. R. Blair, T. Faulkner, and N. Kiessling, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989-2000), 1.1.3.1, vol. 1, p. 162.
On Rufus and his influence on subsequent theories of melancholy, see Rufus of Ephesus, On Melancholy, ed. and trans. Peter E. Pormann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). On the ancient medical theory of melancholy and its subsequent influence, see Jean Starobinski, Histoire du traitement de la mélancolie, des origines à 1900 (Basle: Geigy, 1960); Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964); Hellmut Flashar, Melancholie und Melancholiker in den medizinischen Theorien der Antike (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966); Stanley Jackson, Melancholia and Depression from Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986); Jackie Pigeaud, Melancholia: Le malaise de l’individu (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2008).
‘Ἤν φόβος ἢ δυσθυμίη πολὺν χρόνον διατελῇ, μελαγχολικὸν τὸ τοιοῦτον.’ (Hippocrates, IV, trans. W. H. S. Jones (London: Heinemann, 1931), pp. 184–5; translation modified). The Greek term δυσθυμία, literally ‘distempered spirit’, was sometimes rendered in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as pusillanimitas, i.e. ‘timidity’, or literally again, ‘smallness of spirit’—for example, in Bernard de Gordon, Opus, lilium medicinae inscriptum, de morborum prope omnium curatione… (Lyon, 1574), II.19, p. 211: ‘hoc est quod dicebat Hippocr. timor & pusillanimitas, si multum tempus habuerint, melancholicum faciunt.’
See the outline in Pormann, ‘Introduction’, in Rufus, op. cit., pp. 5-6.
See also Rufus, op. cit., F 33, pp. 46-7: ‘People of excellent nature are predisposed to melancholy, since excellent natures move quickly and think a lot’ (trans. Pormann).
In Opera omnia, ed. by C. G. Kühn, 20 vols in 22 (Leipzig: Cnobloch, 1821–33), vol. 7, pp. 200-4, vol. 8, pp. 173-93. Cf. Rufus, op. cit., FF 11-12, pp. 32-7.
See Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, op. cit., pp. 82-102; Manfred Ullmann, Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978), pp. 72-9; Jackson, op. cit., pp. 56-64.
On Constantine’s influence see Danielle Jacquart and Françoise Micheau, La médecine arabe et l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1990), pp. 96-129. On the influence of Salerno, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The School of Salerno: Its Development and its Contribution to the History of Learning’, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, 2nd edn (Rome, 1969), pp. 494-551.
Nancy G. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The ‘Canon’ and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).
Printed in Constantinus Africanus, Opera, 2 vols (Basel, 1536), vol. 1, pp. 280-98.
‘Sicut Galenus Platonem dixisse testatur: Quicquid, inquit, mente nostra recondimus, de autoritate est sapientiae, cuius anima recordatur. Intentio Platonis fuit, ut anima alligata corpori, autentice recordetur, quicquid scierit antequam innecteretur corpori. Huiusmodi melancholiae sunt vicini, propter investigationem scientiae, & fatigationem suae memoriae, & tristitiam de animae suae defectione, & propter intentionis suae complementum ac firmamentum. Omnia haec memoriam eorum deficere faciunt & rationem, ac intellectum. Sicut dixit Hippocratis in epidemiarum libris sexta particula: Animae, inquit, labor est cogitatio. Sicut est corporis labor ambulare, quare pessimos generat morbos, utpote corporis labor. Ita & labor animae in melancholiam facit cadere.’
‘Quod autem dicendum est de eis qui amata sua perdiderunt, sicut qui filios & charissimos amicos perdiderunt, vel rem preciosam quam restaurare non possunt. Sicut sapientes libros suos subito amittentes. Vel si cupidi & avari perdiderunt rem, quam se non recuperare sperent. Haec omnia his gemitum, & tristitiam, & angustiam faciunt. Quem & mentes percutiunt, & ad melancholiam paratas reddunt.’
Jackson, op. cit., pp. 249-54.
This passage refers to the Hippocratic Epidemics VI.8.31.
Avicenna, Liber canonis, medicinis cordialibus et cantica (Venice, 1555), III.1.4.19, fols 204v-205r: ‘Et species [signorum melancholiae] quidem sunt indefinitae… Amplius quidam eorum subt, qui rident: & proprie quorum melancholia est sanguinea, quoniam imaginantur quod placet, & delectat eos.’
For general surveys, see John Livingston Lowes, ‘The Loveres Maladye of Hereos’, Modern Philology, vol. 11, no. 4 (1914), pp. 491-546; Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella, ‘Introduction’, in Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise of Lovesickness, ed. and trans. D. A. Beecher and M. Ciavolella (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), pp. 39-70. For a late-antique Arabic discussion of lovesickness, see H. H. Biesterfeldt and D. Gutas, ‘The Malady of Love’, Journal of the American Oriential Society vol. 104, no. 1 (1984), pp. 21-55.
Avicenna, op. cit., III.1.4.23-4, fol. 206v: ‘Haec aegritudo est solicitudo melancholica simlis melancholiae, in qua homo sibi iam induxit incitationem seu applicationem cogitationis suae continuam super pulchritudine ipsius quarundam formarum, & gestuum, seu morum, quae insunt ei.’ For the identification or connection with lycanthropy, see Rhazes, Continens Rasis… quia omnem fere medicinalem artem contineret (Venice, 1529), I.9, fols 18v-19r, 20v: ‘Et hoc accidit ex melancholia & ambulant de nocte tanquam lupi & desiccantur eorum lingue: et hec species est de vsues idest birsem melancholica’; Haly Abbas, Liber medicinae dictus regius [Pantegni] (Venice, 1492), IX.7, fols 60v-61r,‘De malincolia et canina et amore causisque eorum et signis’; Avicenna, Liber canonis, III.1.4.21, fols 206r-v: ‘Species est melancholiae plurimum eveniens in februario, quae facit homo diligat fugere ab hominibus vivis…’, etc.
‘Videmus enim multos religiosos & in bona vita reverendos, hanc passionem incidentes, ex dei timore, & futuri iudicij suspitione, & summi boni videndi cupiditate. Quia omnia superant eorum animas. Unde nec cogitant, nec investigant, nisi ut solum deum ament, & timeant, & in hanc passionem incurrunt, & sicut ebriosi fiunt, de nimia sua solicitudine, & sua quasi vanitate. Corrumpuntur igitur actiones animae, & corporis in huiusmodi.’ Translation by Peter Pormann, in Rufus, op. cit., p. 291.
See, for instance, the noticeably brief treatment in Jackson, op. cit., pp. 63-4, summarising the contributions of medieval Latin physicians in a single paragraph.
On the influence of the Viaticum, see Mary Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Michael R. McVaugh, ‘Introduction’, in Arnau of Vilanova, Opera medica omnia, eds. Luis García Ballester, Juan A. Paniagua, and Michael R. McVaugh (Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 1985), vol. 3, pp. 11-39, at pp. 14-16, 21-2; Beecher and Ciavolella, op. cit., pp. 70-82.
According to McVaugh, this work was in most respects ‘merely a résumé of current medical knowledge’, although it analysed amor hereos as a condition that was distinct from melancholia (McVaugh op. cit., p. 29). On Arnau, see further Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, ‘L’amour “héroique” à travers le traité d’Arnaud de Villeneuve’, in Jean Céard (ed.), La folie et le corps (Paris: Presses de L’Ecole Normale Supérieure, 1985), pp. 143-58, and Ian Maclean, Learning and the Marketplace: Essays in the History of the Early Modern Book (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009), pp. 87-106. See also the discussion ‘De amore qui hereos dicitur’ in Bernard de Gordon, Opus, lilium medicinae inscriptum, II.20, pp. 216-19.
Arnau de Vilanova, Practica medicinae I.26, in Praxis medicinalis. Universorum morborum humani corporis, tam internorum quam externorum, curandi viam ac methodum, summa cum doctrina & cerca experientia praescribens (Lyon, 1586), p. 33a; Bernard de Gordon, op. cit., II.19, p. 208. Cf. Isidore of Seville, Etymologia IV.vii.9, p. 111, where it is asserted that ‘epilepsy arises in the imagination, melancholy in the reason, and mania in the memory’.
Bernard, op. cit., II.19, pp. 208-11: ‘Causa igitur immediata est humor melancholicus corruptus … Causae autem antecedentes, sunt omnia illa quae multiplicant melancholiam, sive per se, siver per accidens, sive per viam adustionis, & corruptionis … Secunda causa potest esse … Tertia causa esse …’, etc.
See, for example, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, op. cit., VIII.23, where as a cold and dry planet, Saturn is associated with the melancholic complexion.
The absence of Arabic astrology is particularly noticeable, for example, in the theories of melancholy elaborated by Ishâq and Avicenna.
Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, op. cit., pp. 127-33. For a case-study of learned medical astrology in the Renaissance see Nancy G. Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); for its more popular incarnation, see Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
For instance, see Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium maleficarum, ed. Montague Summers (London: John Rodker, 1929), II.8, pp. 105-6; cf. Juan Huarte, The Examination of Mens Wits, trans. Richard Carew (London, 1594), pp. 92-3.
Avicenna, op. cit., III.1.4.18, fol. 204v: ‘Et quibusdam medicorum visum est quod melancholia contingat a daemonio: sed nos non curamus cum physicam docemus, si illud contingat a daemonio aut non contingat, postquam dicimus, quod si contingat a daemonio tunc contingit ita ut convertat complexionem ad choleram nigram, & sit causa eius propinqua cholera nigra: deinde fit causa illius daemonium, aut non daemonium.’ For Renaissance discussions of this passage see Noel Brann, The Debate over the Origin of Genius during the Italian Renaissance: The Theories of Supernatural Frenzy and Natural Melancholy in Accord and in Conflict on the Threshold of the Scientific Revolution (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002), pp. 24, 211-12, 342-3.
See, for instance, Johann Weyer, De Praestigiis Daemonum, et Incantationibus ac Venificiis Libri V (1563), in Opera omnia (Amsterdam, 1660), III.7, pp. 179-83. On witchcraft, demonology and melancholy generally see Jean Céard, ‘Folie et demonologie au XVIe siècle’, and Sydney Anglo, ‘Melancholia and Witchcraft: The Debate between Wier, Bodin, and Scot’, both in Alois Gerlo (ed.), Folie et Déraison à la Renaissance (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1976), pp. 129-48, 209-22.
On the apparent prevalence of melancholy in this period, see Jean Delumeau, ‘L’âge d’or de la mélancolie’, L’histoire 42 (1982), pp. 28-37; Erik Midelfort, ‘Melancholische Eiszeit?’, in Wolfgang Behringer, Hartmut Lehmann, and Christian Pfister (eds.), Kulturelle Konsequenzen der ‘Kleinen Eiszeit’ (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), pp. 239-254; Angus Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, Past & Present no. 191 (2006), pp. 77-120.
Charles B. Schmitt, ‘Aristotle among the physicians’, in A. Wear, R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie (eds.), The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p.12.
Aristotle, Problems II: Books XII-XXXVIII, trans. W. S. Hett (London and Cambridge, Mass.: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1937), pp. 154-5. On the later reception of this work see P. de Leemans and M. Goyens (eds.), Aristotle’s ‘Problemata’ in Different Times and Tongues (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006). Melancholy was also associated in the Parva naturalia with disturbing and apparently predictive dreams: Aristotle, De insomniis, III (461a23-5); De divinatione per somnum, II (463b17-22, 464a1-464b6), trans. W. S. Hett (London: Heinemann, 1936), pp. 362-3, 380-5.
See Peter Toohey, ‘Rufus of Ephesus and the Tradition of the Melancholy Thinker’, in Rufus, op. cit., pp. 221-43.
Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, op. cit., pp. 254-399; Brann, op. cit., passim.
In Antonio Guainerio, Practica (Venice, 1516), concluding that ‘[e]x illa sequitur quod sensibus ligatis ut in melancholias exeuntibus in extasi maxime contingit, quod anima talis omnia intelligit sine discursu.’
Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, trans. M. J. B. Allen and ed. James Hankins, 6 vols (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001–6), XIII.ii.2–3, 24, 33, vol. 4, 121–5, 150–1, 162–5; id., De vita libri tres, esp. I. 4-5, III. 2, in Opera (Basel, 1576), pp. 497-8, 533.
See Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, op. cit., and the corrective analysis in Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wisebaden: Harrassowitz, 1991). The most useful comprehensive study is now Brann, op. cit. In Ficino’s influence upon Italian Renaissance art, see also Maria Ruvoldt, The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
See, for example, Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586), XXII, pp. 126-7; Thomas Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors (London, 1607), pp. 131-2; Burton, op. cit, 1.3.1.2, vol. 1, p. 391, and 1.3.1.3, vol. 1, p. 400.
Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1983).
See E. P. Mahoney, ‘Neoplatonism, the Greek Commentators and Renaissance Aristotelianism’, in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, ed. D. J. O’Meara (Albany, 1982), pp. 169-77, 264-83; Eckhard Kessler, ‘The Transformation of Aristotelianism during the Renaissance’, in New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought: Essays in the History of Science, Education and Philosophy in Memory of Charles B. Schmitt, ed. John Henry and Sarah Hutton (London: Duckworth, 1990), pp. 137-47, at pp. 142-4.
As in Aristotle, Parva quae vocant Naturalia, trans. and comment. Niccolò Leonico Tomeo (Paris, 1530), pp. 189-90. For further discussion, see Angus Gowland, ‘Melancholy, Imagination and Dreaming in Renaissance Learning’, in Yasmin Haskell (ed.), Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 53-102.
This is charted in detail in Brann, op. cit., pp. 153ff.
Agostino Nifo, De artificiosa somniorum interpraetatione, quae divinatio dicitur artificiosa, XIII, in Aristotle, Parva naturalia, comm. Agostino Nifo, 2nd edn (Venice, 1551), fol. 111r; De demonibus libri tres (Venice, 1503), XII, fol. 74r.
Pietro Pomponazzi, Opera. De naturalium effectuum admirandorum causis, Seu de Incantationibus Liber. Item de Fato: Libero arbitrio: Praedestinatione: Providentia Dei, Libri V (Basel, 1567). See also his explanation for the predictive dreams of melancholics at p. 140.
Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584).
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1926), VII.vii.8, pp. 416-7, VII.x.3-4, pp. 426-9, and VII.xiv.5-6, 444-7.
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (London: Heinemann, 1927), III.iv.11, pp. 236-9.
As in Seneca, De tranquillitate animi, in Moral Essays, trans. J. W. Basore, 3 vols (London, 1928-32), I.2, I.15, II.8, II.10, vol. 2, pp. 202-3, 210-11, 216-19.
There are some exceptions, however: see Angus Gowland, ‘The Ethics of Renaissance Melancholy’, Intellectual History Review 18:1 (2008), pp. 103-117, at 111-14.
Francis Bacon, The Works, eds. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 15 vols (London : Longman and Co., 1857-74).
This work, which has survived only in three MS copies, has now been printed in Neven Jovanovic (ed.), ‘Nicolai Modrussiensis De Consolatione Liber’, Hrvatska Knjizevna Bastina 1 (2002), pp. 55-251; I am referring to this edition. For another discussion of melancholy in a consolatory discourse see Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. Francesco Novati, 4 vols in 5 (Roma, 1891-1911), IV.15, vol. 1, pp. 298-307.
‘Illud enim animo nostro res tristes illatae faciunt, quod corpori exhibitum virus; ex quo liquet, cum nulla aliarum passionum ita infesta face animum impetat, nec ullam aliam esse quae cor hominis deterius exedat. Quippe quae appetitum impedit ne se extra diffundat, necesse est cor viribus destituatur nec ceteris membris debitum possit praestare officium. Itaque exsiccatur ac gelu constringitur humorque eius generis, quem Graeci melancholiam appellant, incrementum capit ac invalescit vehementius; et quoniam siccus quodammodo ac gelidus est, itinera spirituum vitalium occupat, nec foveri membra permittit, atque ita nutrimento subtracto virere vigereque desinunt et in dies extenuantur magis ac usque ad exinanitionem consumuntur.’
Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversatione, ed. Amadeo Quondam, 2 vols (Modena: Panini, 1993), vol. 1, p. 15-19, 26-9.
Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, eds. Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien, and Catherine Magnien-Simonin (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2007), I. 38, pp. 241- 246-7, and II.17, p. 679. See M. A. Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy: The Wisdom of the ‘Essais’ (London: Duckworth, 1983).
‘C’est une humeur melancolique, et une humeur par consequent tres ennemie de ma complexion naturelle, produite par le chagrin de la solitude en laquelle il y a quelques années que je m'estoy jetté, qui m’a mis premierement en teste cette resverie de me mesler d’escrire.’ I am referring to Montaigne, Les Essais, eds. Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien, and Catherine Magnien-Simonin (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). For Montaigne’s complex attitude towards philosophical consolation see I.24, p. 143; II.12, p. 512; III.4, pp. 871-5, III.12, p. 1098.
For the spiritual aspects of melancholy in early modern England see Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 47-82. See also Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, pp. 101-8, and id., The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 50-6. pp. 16-18, 69-70, 139-204.
In the Vulgate Latin: ‘quae enim secundum Deum tristitia est paenitentiam in salutem stabilem operatur saeculi autem tristitia mortem operatur’; in the English of the King James Version: ‘For the sorrow that is according to God worketh penance, steadfast unto salvation: but the sorrow of the world worketh death’.
See Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); Susan Snyder, ‘The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition’, Studies in the Renaissance 12 (1965), pp. 18-59.
See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, qu. 23, art. 2, 4, opposing gaudium to tristitia.
‘Habuisti per sanguinem dulcedinem charitatis. Habes nunc per choleram nigram, seu melancholia, tristitiam pro peccatis’, in P. L. Migne (ed.), Patrologia Latina, vol. 176, col. 1191; discussed in Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, op. cit., pp. 107-9.
Caution against identifying acedia with melancholy is sounded in Noel Brann, ‘Is Acedia Melancholy? A Re-Examination of This Question in the Light of Fra Battista da Crema’s Della cognitione et vittoria di se stesso (1531)’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 34 (1979), pp. 180-99.
As Bacon wrote, ‘if it be said that the cure of men’s minds belongeth to sacred Divinity, it is most true: but yet Moral Philosophy may be preferred unto her as a wise servant and humble handmaid’, to whose discretion ‘many things are left’ to provide ‘(within due limits) many sound and profitable directions.’ Bacon, op. cit., II, in Works, vol. VI, p. 330.
See John T. McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls (New York: Harper and Row, 1951). On German ‘spiritual physic’ in this era see David Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
See H. C. Erik Midelfort, ‘Religious Melancholy and Suicide: On the Reformation Origins of a Sociological Stereotype’, in Graven Images 3 (1996), pp. 41-56.
The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S, ed. Joseph Hunter, 2 vols (London, 1830), 9 Jan. 1681, vol. 1, p. 76.
See also the discussion of the simultaneous occurrence of melancholy and affliction of conscience in the same person at XXXIV, pp. 193-8.
For this reason Bright went on to offer a separate ‘consolation unto the afflicted conscience’, a lengthy and thoroughly spiritual address for his melancholic friend ‘M.’, which continued the ‘heavenly meditations and spirituall conferences’ they had conducted ‘in times past’ (XXXV, pp. 206-7, and XXXVI, pp. 207-84).
Robert Bolton, Instructions for a right comforting afflicted consciences with speciall antidotes against some grievous temptations (London, 1631), pp. 207-9.
Richard Baxter, The right method for a settled peace of conscience, and spiritual comfort in 32 directions. Written for the use of a troubled friend (London, 1653), p. 9.
There is, however, an important historical dimension to Burton’s conception of the evolution of medical knowledge: see, for example, the discussion of changing therapeutic methods over time in Burton, op. cit., 2.4.1.5, vol. 2, p. 225, and 2.4.2.2, vol. 2, pp. 232-3; see also 2.4.1.1, vol. 2, pp. 209-10.
For the various occult aspects of melancholy see Burton, op. cit., 1.2.1.2, vol. 1, pp. 174-95; 1.2.1.3, vol. 1, p. 199; 1.2.1.4, vol. 1, pp. 199-201; 1.2.3.2, vol. 1, pp. 253-4; 1.2.3.5, vol. 1, p. 260; 1.3.3.1, vol. 1, pp. 418, 426-8; 2.4.1.4, pp. 219-22; 2.4.1.5, vol. 2, pp. 224, 251-5; 2.5.1.5, vol. 2, p. 255; 3.1.1.4, vol. 3, pp. 135-7; 3.2.2.1, vol. 3, p. 49; 3.2.2.2, vol. 3, pp. 88-90; 3.2.2.5, vol. 3, p. 138; 3.2.5.2, vol. 3, p. 240; 3.3.4.2, vol. 3, p. 318.
See, for instance, R. Grant Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy’, English Literary History vol. 68, no. 3 (2001), pp. 593-613, where (at p. 594) the book is described as an ‘epistemological aberration’.
For my own interpretation of Burton’s scepticism see Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, cit., pp. 98-138.
See, for example, Brian Nance, ‘Wondrous Experience as Text: Valleriola and the Observationes medicinales’, in Elizabeth Furdell (ed.), Textual Healing: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Medicine (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005), pp. 101-117.
This impression has typically been expressed in readings that see Burton’s satirical introduction, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, as the interpretative key to the book: see, for example, Fish, op. cit., 303-52; Ruth A. Fox, The Tangled Chain: The Structure of Disorder in ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
Alexander of Tralles, Oeuvres médicales, 4 vols, ed. F. Brunet (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1933-6), vol. 2, p. 223; Paul of Aegina, The Seven Books of Paul of Aegineta, 3 vols, trans. and comment. Francis Adams (London: The Sydenham Society), vol. 1, p. 383.
See, for instance, Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (London, 1642), p. 1.
See Burton, op. cit., 1.1.1.1, vol. 1, pp. 121-28; 1.1.2.5-11, vol. 1, pp. 147-61. On Melanchthon’s De anima see Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philipp Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 85-123.
See especially the ‘Digression of the Nature of Spirits, bad Angels or Divels, and how they cause Melancholy’, in Burton, op. cit., 1.2.1.2, vol. 1, pp. 174-95.
See the similarly materialistic account in Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors, pp. 131-2. There is a more positive use of Ficino’s account of erotic fascination in Anatomy, 3.2.2.2, vol. 3, pp. 88-90, though the precise nature of Burton’s commitment to this is unclear.
For more discussion of this aspect of the Anatomy, see Angus Gowland, ‘Consolations for Melancholy in Renaissance Humanism’, Society and Politics, vol. 6, no. 1 (2012), pp. 10-38.
Nearly all of this Subsection appeared for the first time in the second edition of 1624.
Burton notes that some of his predecessors had discussed the spiritual symptoms of melancholy, but also claims (in my view accurately) that his analysis, which treats it as a discrete subspecies, is innovative: Anatomy, 3.4.1.1, vol. 3, pp. 330-1.
See Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, cit., pp. 139-204.
For example, in Burton, op. cit., ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, vol. 1, p. 6, where Burton misquotes the phrase ‘de furore, & insania, maniave’ (Hippocrates, Opera, trans. M. Fabio Calvo (Rome, 1525), p. 714) as ‘Melancholy and madnesse’; and ‘fellis, bilisve’, as ‘atra bilis or melancholy’. See also the inclusion of spiritual despair within the category of ‘defective’ religious melancholy in Burton, op. cit., 3.4.2.2-6, vol. 3, pp. 408-45.
Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995); Claire Crignon-De Oliveira, De la mélancolie à l’enthousiasme: Robert Burton (1577–1640) et Anthony Ashley Cooper, comte de Shaftesbury (1671–1713) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006).
See the works, which are generally light on medical-physiological detail, discussed in Schmidt, op. cit., pp. 47-128.
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