Melancholia: The Western Malady by Matthew Bell

Author:Matthew Bell [Bell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

3 National varieties of melancholia in early modern Europe

Some early modern European writers, and needless to say Burton was among them, believed that the whole of Europe was experiencing an epidemic of melancholia.15 But some writers (often the same ones) claimed that one or other nation either had a special claim to be melancholy or was suffering from its own unique species of melancholia. Could both claims be true? Could melancholia be both a Europe-wide epidemic and a nationally specific one? As long as we think of melancholia as a culture-bound syndrome, this does not pose a problem. On the one hand, by the seventeenth century, melancholia seems to have become nearly universal in Western Europe. Galenic medicine, newly cleansed of medieval scholasticism by the Renaissance humanist scholars and physicians, spread throughout learned Europe, bringing the diagnosis of melancholia with it. Ficino’s Neoplatonist theory of melancholy genius took first Italy, then Germany, and then England by storm. The diffusion of ideas was greatly assisted by northern Europeans travelling to Italy, whether to be educated at the Italian universities or to learn from the great Italian artists or simply to take the Grand Tour, which began to be fashionable in the sixteenth century. By the time of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Neoplatonism and its doctrine of melancholy genius had become a feature of cultural life at the English court,16 just as it had earlier at courts right across Europe.17 There was even a mini-epidemic of melancholia in the royal houses of Europe.18

On the other hand, regional variants of melancholia were quick to appear. By the seventeenth century it could plausibly be argued that melancholia had increased in incidence in some countries more than others or had taken on particular national forms. This might be attributed to national climatic conditions or socio-political circumstances. Melancholia was perhaps more adaptable to different national environments than any other disease. This was in part because its causes were so various and uncertain, as we saw in the case of melancholia hypochondriaca. If Burton is to be believed, the number of potential causal factors was vast, and this might have added to melancholia’s adaptability to national circumstances. It was a simple matter to find a plausible causal factor that was specific to local conditions. In one country the poor climate could be blamed, in another the unhealthy diet, in another social or political factors. Whether these national species of melancholia were real or pretended is, however, another matter altogether. The adaptability of melancholia made it all too easy to construct specious arguments for its national specificity.

The advent of fashionable melancholia in England is usually taken as evidence that the English had a particular susceptibility to the disease, to the extent that melancholia became known as the ‘English disease’. (The habit of giving diseases national epithets was a traditional form of cross-border name-calling in early modern Europe: syphilis was variously known as the French disease by most Europeans, the Italian disease by the French, the Spanish disease by the Dutch, and the Polish disease by the Russians.

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