The Secret Wound: Love, Melancholy and Early Modern Romance (review)

This book draws on the existing medical history literature on love sickness, for example, Mary F. Wack's Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (1990), to argue that the merger of love sickness and melancholy in the early modern period prepared the ground for the Romantic poets' transformation of love-melancholy in the eighteenth century. This is a literary study, based on close reading of a limited number of texts: Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, and Spenser's The Faerie Queene. These readings are prefaced by a long chapter establishing the medico-literary history of ideas about love and mlancholy and by a chapter on the theme of the "secret wound" in which, Wells argues, medicine and literature most closely meet.

Is all love a disease, as Ferrand argued, or is there one normal form of love that is caused by suffering of the heart but another pathological form in which the estimative faculty is affected, as Peter of Spain claimed? In investigating ideas about love in the early modern period, Wells examines the shifting relationship between love and melancholy until their fusion into one variant of melancholy in the work of Thomas Burton. Her most important source is the Neoplatonist Ficino's De amore (1469), and she examines early modern writers' engagement with classical sources, in particular, Virgil and Lucretius. Along the way, she explores theories of the imagination, phantasms, sight, fascination, beauty, and the voice, all of which she demonstrates are relevant to theories of love and its obsessive, pathological form in which the lover's thoughts adversely affect his judgment.

Wells sets her study within two wider sets of ideas. First, she argues against Stephen Greenblatt in her claim that it is possible to talk of early modern concepts of "the self"; for her, love-melancholy is a way into understanding how early modern subjects thought about the mind and constituted themselves as "selves." She argues convincingly that love sickness is important because it is a situation in which, contrary to the ideal of classical philosophy and of its Christian adaptation, the mind is not able to control the body. Love threatens the sovereignty of reason. Yet, and at the same time, the Platonic view that it is possible to move from the love of a particular object to a love of universal beauty means that love cannot be dismissed as simply a delusion or a disease. Second, and more controversially, Wells claims that contemporary psychoanalytic thought is applicable to this period. In particular, she makes much of what she calls "regressive orality" (p. 11), looking at the imagery of feeding and exploring the ways in which love-melancholy's quest for the lost—and forbidden—love object evokes the loss of the mother. Here, Wells points out that the secret wound, an image for the disease of love taken from Lucretius and developed by Ficino, resembles Freud's description of melancholia as "an open wound" and argues that all three authors see love-melancholy in terms of an uncontrollable urge to consume the love object.

This book is very much a literary study within the history of ideas, so there is little on the social context of the individuals studied. A rare (and brief) exception is a reference to Gail Kern Paster on wet nursing, which is used to suggest that this practice was important in causing such interest in love-melancholy in early modern Europe (p. 80). However, it was also a widespread practice in the Roman Empire, but this is not discussed here. While the use of psychoanalysis allows Wells to produce some interesting readings of her main texts, it can go too far: for example, when she applies the phrase "talking cures" while discussing Constantine's recommendation of conversation with one's friends as a remedy for love sickness (p. 33). Her work is generally well situated within medical history, but more background...