Melancholy in John Dryden’s All for Love

Love, madness and social order: love melancholy in France and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The concept of "illness's social course" can be approached from two stand-points. We can trace both the way the social world shapes the course of an illness and the way an illness' symptoms shape the social world. The purpose of this study is to locate the specific illness of love melancholy in a specific historical and social context, namely that of France and England in the late sixteenth and...

All you need is love?

'Long grief, dark melancholy, hopeless natural love': Clarissa, Cheyne and narratives of body and soul.

The paper deals with Clarissa's wasting combination of love and religious melancholy, and the way in which ailments of the mind have an immediate effect on the body in this period. George Cheyne's theories of melancholy and hypochondria explain at least some of the mechanisms by which the eighteenth century understood this phenomenon. 'Clarissa' is an important text because it influenced so man...

Melancholy and society

WOLF LEPENIES, Melancholy and society, transl. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. xviii, 253, £31.95 (0-674-56468-5). Melancholy has always been a catchall phrase as universal as the human condition: widespread, if disparate, in every epoch; an affliction of the young and old that has been virtually incapable of adequate definition; ...

The anatomy of melancholy

Arguably, this means that the book's title is itself slightly misleading: though the editors explain that the "medical revolution" that they are chronicling is the process by which "the classical renaissance of the sixteenth century gave way to the enlightenment of the eighteenth" (p. 8), it might be felt that "medicine in an age of revolution" would more aptly have described the work's content...