Melancholy and Material Unity of Man, 17th-18th Centuries (review)

Ever since Saturn and Melancholy (1964) by Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, melancholy has been one of the "star" diseases among cultural historians of medicine. The fascination with the disease has continued unabated in recent years, partly because depression, a modern heir of melancholy, has become an important part of the social and cultural landscape across the globe. The work under review is thus a testimony to historians' engagement with both the scholarly tradition and the present controversies.

This special issue of Gesnerus has assembled ten articles. One of these is Caroline Petit's French translation of a chapter on melancholy from Prosperus Alpinus's De medicina methodica (1611). This is a useful exercise that makes the little-known but important work more accessible, like the French translation of Galen's treatise on melancholy by Vincent Barras, the editor of the journal.¹ The other nine papers present original research conducted from various historiographical viewpoints.

Analysis of etiological concepts of melancholy, in the spirit of Stanley Jackson's Melancholia and Depression (1986), is represented by penetrating works by Jackie Pigeaud, Frédéric Gabriel, Claire Crignon de Oliveira, and Mariana Saad. Pigeaud compares two late seventeenth-century works on hypochondria by Thomas Sydenham and Thomas Willis, and reveals the fundamental theoretical difference in the conception of the unity of man between the two eminent English doctors. Other papers examine melancholy in the context of early modern human sciences—namely, religious controversies, theories of the genesis of man, and Cabanis's Enlightenment theory of man's body and mind.

The social history of love-melancholy is examined in an ambitious work by Michael Altbauer-Rudnik, based on an analysis of the writings of Jacques Ferrand in France and Robert Burton in England. In these countries at that time the rise of the new absolutist state was redrawing the boundaries between the public and the private, and the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation were transforming the internal dynamics of the family. Under these conditions, the pathology of love provided a highly politicized and ideological realm of discourse. In turn, medical or quasi-medical accounts of love-melancholy were integrated into the culture as a component of behavioral norms. As the author concludes, "one should acknowledge the cultural component of [love-melancholy] which both shaped society and was shaped by it" (p. 44), while at the same time recognizing the almost universal and timeless nature of the disease. This is an interesting and promising line of inquiry.

The new subject of material culture in early modern Europe is analyzed in a short but perceptive paper by Bernard Hoepffner. As Hoepffner rightly points out, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy was a product of books and libraries, which were the most important cultural artifact and device at that time. Burton cited 1,600 authors and 2,700 volumes in the book; his private library contained 2,000 books, and he had easy access to the libraries of Oxford. Although this enormous bibliophilia was certainly an exceptional case, the new availability of books in libraries was an important new resource for the conceptualization of melancholy in early modern times, when many an elite medical practitioner's identity was less that of a scientist than that of a humanistic scholar.

Allan Ingram and Clark Lawlor represent the maturity of a quickly growing field of "literature and medicine" in the context of melancholy studies. Ingram brings the old theme of melancholy as a badge of distinction to a new height of scholarly sophistication and paints a broad picture of the period. Lawlor's analysis of Clarissa explores the original and important insight of the close relationship between melancholy, sensibility, and "consumption"—another highly literary disease of the Western culture.

This special issue puts together interesting and original papers on an important topic. It is also...