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Melancholy and the Therapeutic Language of Moral Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Thought Jeremy Schmidt The concept of melancholy comprehended a wide range of characteristics and conditions in seventeenth-century European culture, from the brooding introspection of the genius and the scholar to a condition of delirious and delu- sory madness. Its central and most immediately identifiable characteristic, however, was the excessive and unreasonable nature of its symptomologically defining emotions of fear and sorrow. As Robert Burton noted out in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the melancholic condition was commonly taken to be “a kind of dotage without fever, having for his ordinary companions fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion.” The presence of a pervasive and unreasonable sense of fear and sorrow invariably solicited the melancholic la- bel. Indeed, melancholic emotions were the primary substance of melancholic dotage; the ravings of the melancholically mad and their frequent obsession with a single idea were often driven by an overwhelming feeling of fear and sorrow. The concept of melancholy as a mental disorder involving these specific emotions had coalesced under the gaze of medical observation in ancient Greece, and the melancholic condition was thought by many medical theorists of clas- I would like
Journal of the History of Ideas – University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: Jun 22, 2005
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