Gowland, A - Problem of Early Modern Melancholy, (2006) 191 Past & Present 77

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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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.

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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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).


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).


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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).


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.


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).


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.


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.


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).


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.


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).


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).


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.


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).


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

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