The Matter of Early Modern Female Melancholy

<p>The Renaissance is often touted as the age of melancholy. For fictional personages like Hamlet as well as for writers like Robert Burton, melancholy served both as a burden and a blessing, facilitating intellectual activity at the expense of psychological and bodily comfort. Precisely because of its Aristotelean associations with brilliance, melancholy was off-limits to early modern women, who were afforded a pathology different not merely in degree but in kind to that of the male melancholic. Female melancholy was understood as an entirely corporeal illness, lacking any semblance of the creative or intellectual fecundity which its male sufferers enjoyed. Literary critics and cultural historians have long taken the authors of early modern medical treatises at their word, and because of this, the extant scholarship on melancholy projects an overwhelmingly masculinist history of the emotion. Those scholars who have addressed the subterraneous literature of women’s emotion in the Renaissance, moreover, have commonly understood female-voiced articulations of negative affect through the lens of “grief” or “sorrow”. A poetics of female melancholy in the English Renaissance is thus still awaiting formulation, and it is this critical absence that I move to redress. Putting male-authored, canonical works of literature in dialogue with the poetry of three seventeenth-century women writers, this thesis pursues the topic of a literary melancholy that is specifically female, or female-voiced. Chapter One explores the shape of female melancholic discourse in two Shakespearean texts – Hamlet and The Two Noble Kinsmen – and in the poetry of devotional poet An Collins. Chapter Two considers the telos of self-marmorisation (the female melancholic’s turn to stone) first in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Milton’s Comus, and then in the verse of Hester Pulter. Finally, Chapter Three discusses the presence of postlapsarian melancholy in the elegies of Lucy Hutchinson. All three chapters argue for the significance, the matter, of artistic representations of women’s affect in a period which has traditionally seen male expressions of melancholy raised above female expressions of the same.</p>

The Matter of Early Modern Female Melancholy

<p>The Renaissance is often touted as the age of melancholy. For fictional personages like Hamlet as well as for writers like Robert Burton, melancholy served both as a burden and a blessing, facilitating intellectual activity at the expense of psychological and bodily comfort. Precisely because of its Aristotelean associations with brilliance, melancholy was off-limits to early modern women, who were afforded a pathology different not merely in degree but in kind to that of the male melancholic. Female melancholy was understood as an entirely corporeal illness, lacking any semblance of the creative or intellectual fecundity which its male sufferers enjoyed. Literary critics and cultural historians have long taken the authors of early modern medical treatises at their word, and because of this, the extant scholarship on melancholy projects an overwhelmingly masculinist history of the emotion. Those scholars who have addressed the subterraneous literature of women’s emotion in the Renaissance, moreover, have commonly understood female-voiced articulations of negative affect through the lens of “grief” or “sorrow”. A poetics of female melancholy in the English Renaissance is thus still awaiting formulation, and it is this critical absence that I move to redress. Putting male-authored, canonical works of literature in dialogue with the poetry of three seventeenth-century women writers, this thesis pursues the topic of a literary melancholy that is specifically female, or female-voiced. Chapter One explores the shape of female melancholic discourse in two Shakespearean texts – Hamlet and The Two Noble Kinsmen – and in the poetry of devotional poet An Collins. Chapter Two considers the telos of self-marmorisation (the female melancholic’s turn to stone) first in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Milton’s Comus, and then in the verse of Hester Pulter. Finally, Chapter Three discusses the presence of postlapsarian melancholy in the elegies of Lucy Hutchinson. All three chapters argue for the significance, the matter, of artistic representations of women’s affect in a period which has traditionally seen male expressions of melancholy raised above female expressions of the same.</p>

Robert Burton on the Society of Jesus and Coimbra

O presente artigo explora a attitude ambígua de Robert Burton face aos Jesuítas, centrando-se na sua leitura dos Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis Societatis Iesu. Após uma contextualização da sua detecção da Companhia de Jesus nas peças teatrais de Burton, passo em revista as referências do académico à articulação da melancholia nos manuais do curso conimbricense ao longo da Anatomia da Melancolia. Por forma a identificar e compreender as especificidades da sua leitura, pautada por adaptações selectivas e imprecisões, empreenderei uma apresentação da doutrina dos temperamentos dos Conimbricenses. Sustento que, apesar da sua riqueza, da qual os ecos na obra de Burton dão testemunho esmaecido, a abordagem de De Góis permaneceu como um episódio obliterado na história médica e intelectual da melancolia. Este percurso permitirá uma compreensão das perspectivas terapêutica e organizacional subjacentes ao (e complementares do) ensino conimbricense. Trata-se, como se tornará evidente, de valências e aplicações dos Commentarii que Burton ignora. Ironicamente, uma parte significativa do seu conhecimento das terras distantes, as suas viagens por “mapa e carta” e as suas perspectivas socioeconómicas sobre a China, aspectos centrais da transição de uma observação da melancolia para uma observação melancólica, bem patente no recurso à sátira e à utopia como vias terapêuticas, está consideravelmente dependente da articulação entre as capacidade formativa e a organização das missões jesuíticas.

‘Let Lovers Sigh Out the Rest’: Witnessing the Breath in the Early Modern Emotional Body

This essay examines how breath is observed, recorded, and accounted for in cases of love melancholy in early modern literary and medical texts. It draws on the poetry of George Herbert and the works of Robert Burton and Jacques Ferrand on lovesickness to argue that writing on the respiration of the melancholic lover in the Renaissance involves a process of performative displacement as well as entanglement, most visible in the practice of intertextuality. As Tsentourou shows, intertextual references to emotional breathing blur the binary between patient and physician, casting bodies and texts as spaces where the detached witness conspires with the lovesick subject, and, in turn, with the reader.

Proust invertido: uma leitura avessa da Recherche e a aproximação com a melancolia a partir de Robert Burton

O presente artigo visa investigar a problemática da melancolia a partir da conjunção entre a Recherche de Marcel Proust e Anatomia da Melancolia Robert Burton. É possível estabelecer semelhanças discursivas entre os autores, criando um paralelo entre as personagens Demócrito Júnior e Marcel, já que a investigação sobre o problema da mortalidade permeia os dois livros. Considerando que Burton não compreende a temporalidade como mortalidade, portanto, como melancolia, é possível introduzir Proust no debate uma vez que este compreende a passagem do tempo como um processo de degeneração se lido seu romance de modo invertido. Assim, os vínculos de mortalidade e perda são analisados a partir do tempo uma vez que Saturno seria o deus detentor do tempo. Pode-se concluir que Proust se relaciona com a temática da melancolia, sendo ao mesmo tempo herdeiro e criador de uma nova concepção sobre o tema com o conceito de tempo perdido.