‘Let Lovers Sigh Out the Rest’: Witnessing the Breath in the Early Modern Emotional Body

Abstract This essay examines how breath is observed, recorded, and accounted for in cases of love melancholy early modern literary medical texts. It draws on the poetry George Herbert works Robert Burton Jacques Ferrand lovesickness to argue that writing respiration melancholic lover Renaissance involves a process performative displacement as well entanglement, most visible practice intertextuality. As Tsentourou shows, intertextual references emotional breathing blur binary between patient physician, casting bodies texts spaces where detached witness conspires with lovesick subject, and, turn, reader.