From Shakespeare's Hamlet to Burton's Anatomy to Hilliard's
miniatures, melancholy has long been associated with the emotional
life of Renaissance England. But what other forms of sadness
existed alongside, or even beyond, melancholy, and what kinds of
selfhood did they help create? Beyond Melancholy explores the vital
distinctions Renaissance writers made between grief, godly sorrow,
despair, and melancholy, and the unique interactions these emotions
were thought to produce in the mind, body, and soul. While most
medical and philosophical writings emphasized the physiological and
moral dangers of the 'dis-ease' of sadness, warning that in its
most extreme form it could damage the body and even cause death,
new Protestant teachings about the nature of devotion and salvation
suggested that sadness could in fact be a positive, even
transformative, experience, helping to humble believers' souls and
bring them closer to God. The result of such dramatically
conflicting paradigms was a widespread ambiguity about the value of
sadness and a need to clarify its significance through active and
wilful interpretation - something this book calls 'emotive
improvisation'. Drawing on a wide range of Renaissance medical,
philosophical, religious, and literary texts - including, but not
limited to, moral treatises on the passions, medical text books,
mortality records, doctors' case notes, sermons, theological
tracts, devotional and elegiac poetry, letters, life-writings,
ballads, and stage-plays - Beyond Melancholy explores the emotional
codes surrounding the experience of sadness and the way writers
responded to and reinterpreted them. In doing so it demonstrates
the value of working across source materials too often divided
along disciplinary lines, and the special importance of literary
texts to the study of the emotional past.
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