The Introduction situates the book’s contribution in relation to the historiographies of madness, medicine, emotion, selfhood, and personhood. While mania and melancholy have enjoyed perennial scholarly interest, the same cannot be said of early modern frenzy. The Introduction offers some thoughts as to why frenzy has been neglected, and reflects on some of the conceptual and methodological difficulties which accompany its study. It explains the book’s scope (and limits), and offers short summaries of its six chapters. Sketching out the book’s central claim – that frenzy had devastating effects on personhood, and that these effects drove its early modern observers to unpick the tangle of mind, soul, and brain – it engages with recent claims about the emergence of a distinctively modern ‘cerebral self’. It sets out to test the claim that the possession of certain ‘psychological features, such as memory, consciousness, and self-awareness’ was not constitutive of ‘personhood’ until the end of the seventeenth century.

Leveraging the late José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown, this contribution proposes Brownness as a structuring concept for the study of racial affect in the Roman Mediterranean. Scholarship on race in the Roman Mediterranean has privileged somatic and/or phenotypic paradigms; approaches to race and racial formation that do not accord primacy to the inscription of race on the body are generally rare in the secondary literature, which has not systematically engaged with explorations of racialisation and affect in Black studies, Ethnic studies, and Queer studies. Moving in step with recent efforts to bring critical race theory to bear on the figuration of Blackness in ancient Greek texts, this chapter maps several interpretative strategies for tracking and evaluating Brownness in Roman texts – as a matrix of shame, anxiety, and melancholic subjection.

The book concludes with a reflection on one of the main features of the joy of love, its unreality: joy is or feels like it is out of this world. For many of the authors surveyed in this book, joy’s unreality does not suggest its naivety or foolishness but its very power to bridge phantasm and reality, the transcendent and the immanent. The conclusion opens up onto the European Renaissance: while the language of phantasmatic love’s joy is taken up by Petrarchist poetry, it is in seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry that is found the continuation of a language of love’s joy as the arresting and expansion of the present moment. John Donne and Thomas Traherne write of a joy that is here and now yet experienced as an everywhere, they write of its power to bring us out of ourselves and to reveal the transcendent within human love.

This chapter brings together literary responses to the ruins of Rome. Over the centuries after Petrarch, the ruins had acquired historical, cultural and aesthetic validation, all the outcome of the development of a sentiment favourable to ruination; in short, ruin-mindedness. For an emotional validation we must turn to writers, who put into plain words how they felt about the ruins. The feelings are surprisingly various: sometimes elation, sometimes moral disgust. Whatever the reaction, it is usually founded, as was Petrarch’s, on the fact that the ruins of Rome have a historical and cultural context, thanks to the survival of Latin literature. The physical remains of the ancient city are given meaning by the Roman literary heritage, and it is that above all which enables writers to record a varied range of nuanced responses to them that are not likely to be evoked by a ruin without a history. Reactions to the ruins are affected by shifts in sensibility, especially the influence of romanticism, which insisted upon recording impressions of the ruins in moonlight. The ruins of Rome are signs to be interpreted in endless ways. This cannot be said of any other ruins anywhere.

This chapter covers the period from the late 1780s through the late 1840s, and introduces two closely intertwined cultural movements: Russian Sentimentalism (or the age of sensibility) and Russian Romanticism (also known as the Golden Age of Russian poetry). Departing from debates on the paradoxes of Russian Romanticism, the chapter considers the genealogy and basic features of the movement by assessing the oeuvre and literary impact of the ‘father of Russian Romanticism’, the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii. To paraphrase a dictum wrongly attributed to Fedor Dostoevskii, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the literary spectre of Russian Romanticism came out of the angelic robes of this lofty, melancholy, and chaste poet, who playfully called himself the ‘poetic guardian of the English and German devils and witches’.

Appreciations of Nietzsche as a so-called poet-philosopher reveal little about Nietzsche’s thinking about the poets and they pay insufficient attention to his conception of philosophy. This chapter offers a corrective by examining how he figures the task of the poets in his middle writings. The focus is on what he has to say about the poets in relation to the passions, as this provides the best way of approaching the problem. His criticisms of the poets – that they are fundamentally melancholic and that they too readily give vent to naturalizing impulses – is best seen in the context of his upholding philosophy’s classical concern with and teaching of the mastery of the passions. The concern with self-cultivation informs Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy at a deep level, and it also drives his reflections on the poets. Poets are significant because they assume the task of providing signposts to the future by developing images of what he calls “beautiful human beings.” I attend to Nietzsche’s interest in Adalbert Stifter’s novel Indian Summer in the final section of the chapter, since it is from Stifter that Nietzsche may have derived, at least in part, his conception of the cultivation of beautiful human beings.

Melancholy is an ‘epidemicall’ disease, Burton says, noting the multitude of causes which, along with human wickedness and inherent humoral imbalances, explain the extensive and increasing suffering he observes around him. His observations tell us little about seventeenth-century epidemiology, I argue. Moreover, the meanings accorded to seemingly familiar terms such as ‘disease’, ‘symptom’, and ‘epidemic’ rest on assumptions that leave them orthogonal to today’s standard etiological medical assumptions. Yet they find resonance within recent broad theorizing about the concept of disease, in public health emphases and alternative medicine, as well as in the larger health culture of our times.

In the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, writers across a range of political opinions had to reconcile their approval of martial ardour with their dread of popular violence. As a result, attempts to imagine patriotic ardour often coincided with, or coalesced with, attempts to encourage peace. This resulted in a melancholy call-to-arms. Writers linked collective support for war, or protest against it, with tranquilising communal mourning, or else focused on the wars of a lost past that preceded modern commercial and industrial relations, or else pushed the prospect of collective armed struggle for social justice stoically into an indefinite future. These strategies provided forms of moral insulation for like-minded communities. The discussion includes works by Anna Barbauld, Walter Scott, Helen Porter and Lord Byron, among others.

Albertus Magnus was not a physician but manifested a positive attitude towards medicine. His main interest was in harmonising Galenic and Aristotelian doctrines that seemed to overlap on certain subjects; thus, he created a medico-philosophical approach to many illnesses and how they develop. In his On Minerals he writes of the special properties of stones and refers to certain stones as being capable of treating such diseases as epilepsy and melancholy. Yet Albertus does not refer to the way in which these stones could act and affect the aforementioned diseases. Therefore, the question that emerges is whether one can detect passages in his oeuvre which allow us to reconstruct a possible medico-philosophical explanation for the way in which these properties became associated with specific diseases. This chapter’s aim is to attempt to gather the scattered pieces of information from Albertus’ work and reconstruct this potential medico-philosophical formula

The essay sketches the development of W.G. Sebald’s poetry from its beginnings in the mid-1960s through the unpublished writings of the 1970s, the 1980s long poem Nach der Natur (After Nature), and the poems written for the volumes For Years Now and Unerzählt (Unrecounted) shortly before his death. The first section introduces Sebald the poet with several general remarks, touching on a poem from the 1960s, passages from Nach der Natur (After Nature) and two poems from the 1990s. This is followed by sections illustrating effects of the non-simultaneous reception of After Nature in German and English and considering the influence of Southern German, Austrian and Swiss prose on the language of Sebald’s poetry. The final section visits the poet’s ‘lyrical workshop’, in other words the development of his poetry in manuscript form between the 1960s and mid-1980s, and the integration of a significant part of the manuscript ‘Across the Land and the Water’ into the final two sections of After Nature. The essay concludes that Sebald wrote poems throughout his life, and that it is likely he would have published further volumes of poetry had he lived longer.

Trakl was the master of transfiguration and poetic enigma. His poetry uses a very specific number of colours (black, purple, blue), strikingly simple rhyme and – at times obstinate – repetition to unmatched effects. The expressive quality of his poetry never amounts to dogmatic expressionism but relates, and reflects, the deeper qualities of introspection. It tries to identify the very roots of expression in the troubled human existence. His poetry originated in feelings of guilt (often connected with the biographical fact that he had induced his sister to the misuse of drugs) and utter desolation. We have seen already that to him the self-destruction of occidental culture was a certainty years before the outbreak of World War One. This chapter discusses whether it can be argued that Trakl’s poetry reflects, to a certain extent, an anticipation of the horrors that became manifest and unbearable to him already in the very first weeks of this European tragedy with disastrous global implications.

From the Iberian colonization on, the American Indians were understood based on their skin color and the place where they were living. They were imputed a corporal condition and/or a complexio linked to the preponderance of the melancholic and phlegmatic ‘humor’ which expressed a kind of specific morality and behavior according to medical discourse of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This chapter analyzes how these medical assessments were transferred to the American Indians with a high degree of generalizing essentialism in order to naturalize a condition of permanent servitude. This knowledge transfer used to describe them, implied a series of strategic analogies and correspondences among the generalized significations and representations of complex melancholy on the individuals in the Old World and the observed practices and behaviors of the Natives of the New World.

Is there such a thing as an English compositional tradition in the twentieth century? And if so, what is Britten’s place in it? Harrison Birtwistle thought not, and one can understand why. There is no obvious point of continuity from one generation to another: Parry and Elgar’s reference points are Austro-German, while Holst’s and Vaughan Williams’s music is modally based and considerably affected by English folk music. Delius spent most of his life outside England, and his aesthetic and compositional predilections are the most difficult to relate to a tradition. Britten and Tippett both abjured what they saw as the stultifying nationalism of Holst and Vaughan Williams and embraced aspects of international modernism. Despite the fractures, however, there are aspects in common: it is through themes from English landscape and literature that connections between generations are most clearly seen: in pastoralism, for instance, whether ‘soft’ or ‘hard’; in the role of melancholy; in the preference for particular genres; and in the reworking of aspects of the English musical past.

Sadness and fear are usually considered as basic emotions. In society and in education, they are normally cast as undesirable, but also as partly unavoidable. This chapter examines sadness, fear, and anxiety in society and education. It argues that these feelings should not be judged as simply negative, devoid of value or positive function. On the other hand, they should be critically considered and explored, rather than simply accepted, in education and society. Neither good nor bad in themselves, feelings of sadness, fear, and anxiety can be righteous, functional, and normal, and interrelated with critical understanding. Yet they can also be problematic and pathological in other cases.

Grief permeates all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and many of his comedies and histories too, but none is so resolutely focused on what it means to feel loss as Hamlet. From the personal loss of a father, to the social loss of a king, to an existential loss of meaning and place in the world, Hamlet explores what happens when one’s sense of life and individuality collapses into something rote and mechanical. This chapter investigates how Hamlet the play, and Hamlet the character, exceed early modern conventions concerning grief in an effort to turn a harrowingly ‘common’ emotion into something much more ‘particular’. By moving away from established understandings of grief, Shakespeare’s play explores how this devastating passion might create new worlds of meaning and, in doing so, help set ‘out of joint’ ones ‘right’. At the same time, the chapter examines how an over-investment in the idiosyncratic nature of grief undermines and even callously contributes to other tragedies in the play, including Ophelia’s death and Denmark’s crumbling political order. Ultimately, the play dramatises both the difficulty and urgency of balancing the ‘particular’ and the ‘common’ when it comes to grief, even as it leaves the possibility of their coexistence unresolved.