The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy

Surveying the world outside his study in Christ Church, Oxford in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton diagnosed an epidemic. Melancholy was now, he wrote, 'a disease so frequent . . . in these our daies, so often happening . . . in our miserable times, as few there are that feele not the smart of it'. It being 'a disease so grievous, so common', he claimed to 'know not wherein to do a more generall service, and spend my time better, then to prescribe means how to prevent and cure so universall a malady, an Epidemicall disease, that so often, so much crucifies the body and minde'.¹ Burton had little difficulty in finding a range of neoteric philosophical and medical authorities to support his diagnosis. Whilst examining the spleen and its role in generating hypochondriacal melancholy in the 1552 edition of his De anima, Philipp Melanchthon had remarked that there were so many cases of the disease it was pointless to count the sufferers.² Later in the century André Du Laurens had concluded his chapter on the same species of melancholy by noting its frequency 'in these miserable times', and pointing out that 'there are not many people which feele not some smatch thereof '.³ 'This disease is most frequent in these days', agreed Girolamo Mercuriale, in the chapter on melancholy in his Medicina practica (1601).⁴ These observations were further supported by Giulio Cesare Chiodini, who asserted in his Responsiones et consultationes medicinales (1607) that 'in our times scarcely anyone can be found who is immune from its contamination'. Melancholy, according to Chiodini, had not only spread throughout the population; it was, as he put it, the 'fountain of almost all other diseases' afflicting his society.⁵

Had he still been living in the second half of the century, Burton could have found confirmation of the persistence of this melancholic epidemic, notably in England, where divines and physicians continued to lament the frequency of the disease. Richard Baxter complained in 1671 at having to console 'a multitude of melancholly Persons from several Parts of the Land, some of high Quality, some of low, some very exquisitely learned, some unlearned'.⁶ In the following year, Thomas Willis observed that 'more new and admirable observations and examples' of melancholic raving 'daily happen'.⁷ And in 1691 the Lincolnshire divine Timothy Rogers prefaced his Discourse Concerning Trouble of Mind and the Disease of Melancholly with thirty-six pages of letters from other divines, thanking him for addressing the psychological sickness of their parishioners.⁸ But what should we make of these perceptions?

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.⁹ Although there are now many useful studies of the extra-medical aspects of melancholy,¹⁰ 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 — my principal concern here — 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. According to one long-standing view, widespread melancholy, along with its suicidal conclusion,¹¹ was an accompaniment of Protestantism.¹² According to another, the frequency of the disease was a peculiarly English characteristic, reflected the 'general temper of the age',¹³ and was caused by a variety of social factors including spiritual and intellectual malaise, economic depression, and the threat of Spanish invasion.¹⁴

Assessing the...