International Social Science Journal (Chinese Edition)

No.3, 2021

 

The problem of early modern melancholy in the context of religion, politics and societies

(Abstract)

 

Angus Gowland

 

The subject of melancholy has long featured prominently in modern historical and literary scholarship on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but our understanding of its religious, social and political meanings remains limited. The cultural significance of early modern medicine is now well-explored territory, yet most of the extant accounts of melancholy are concerned with its internal theoretical structure or literary expression. Although there are now many useful studies of the extra-medical aspects of melancholy, little sustained attention has been paid to the specific contexts in which such aspects became significant, or to the varieties of use to which the concept of melancholy was put in these contexts. More specifically, the notion that melancholy had become an especially prevalent disease has not been directly related to contemporary perceptions of the early modern environment, and as a consequence a number of problematic explanations for its allegedly high incidence stand in need of correction or at least refinement. The vexed question of the causes of the perceived frequency of melancholy in later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe is best answered by attending to the flexible utility of the concept of melancholy in different religious, political and social contexts.