Search results
8 Love melancholy and the senses in Mary Wroth’s works Aurélie Griffin In his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton defines the effects of love on humankind: How it tickles the hearts of mortall men, Horresco referens, — I am almost afraid to relate, amazed, and ashamed, it hath wrought such stupend and prodigious effects, such foule offences. Love indeed (I may not deny) first united Provinces, built citties, and by a perpetuall generation, makes and preserves mankind, propagates the Church; but if it is rage it is no more Love, but burning lust, a
This book attempts to interrogate the literary, artistic and cultural output of early modern England. Following Constance Classen's view that understandings of the senses, and sensory experience itself, are culturally and historically contingent; it explores the culturally specific role of the senses in textual and aesthetic encounters in England. The book follows Joachim-Ernst Berendt's call for 'a democracy of the senses' in preference to the various sensory hierarchies that have often shaped theory and criticism. It argues that the playhouse itself challenged its audiences' reliance on the evidence of their own eyes, teaching early modern playgoers how to see and how to interpret the validity of the visual. The book offers an essay on each of the five senses, beginning and ending with two senses, taste and smell, that are often overlooked in studies of early modern culture. It investigates Robert Herrick's accounts in Hesperides of how the senses function during sexual pleasure and contact. The book also explores sensory experiences, interrogating textual accounts of the senses at night in writings from the English Renaissance. It offers a picture of early modern thought in which sensory encounters are unstable, suggesting ways in which the senses are influenced by the contexts in which they are experienced: at night, in states of sexual excitement, or even when melancholic. The book looks at the works of art themselves and considers the significance of the senses for early modern subjects attending a play, regarding a painting, and reading a printed volume.
in works of art, including contexts of night, of sexual pleasure, and of love melancholy. These investigations yield clear suggestions about early modern sensory configurations, as well as emphasizing the contingency of sensory experience. Once again, attention to the senses provides a distinctive route through the texts being interrogated, offering mutual illumination of cultural context and work of art. The final section asks what sensory experiences might have been enacted when early modern subjects actually engaged with works of art, considering practical
conflict, vulnerable to deception and held hostage to the emotions. Aurélie Griffin shows in her contribution, for instance, how this is noted by early modern writers who were concerned about the effects of love melancholy upon the eyes. Griffin also highlights an important point that medievalists tend to pay more attention to than those of us working with later texts, and that is the notion that there are five external and three internal senses. As scholars of early modern texts, we need to be aware of the ways in which sensory theory changed or evolved from one epoch
. Drexel and Osório provide support for an unflinchingly visual approach to God. There is no trace of anxiety about the dangers of idolatry here, although later he will launch a searing attack upon ‘superstitious Idolaters’ (vol. 3, p. 338) old and new. It is significant that in ‘Love Melancholy’ Burton repeatedly cites the idea that Christ was
staging a pretend voyage to a Mandevillian-inspired fantasyland. In The Antipodes , Brome represents the characters’ various social problems and health issues as types of madness or moral sickness: Peregrine is travel mad, Martha is full of love melancholy, Joyless is ‘horn-mad’ (1.1.79). Yet it becomes apparent that it is not just the Joyless family that
I cannot be merry’) though to the knowing audience she reveals that in her emotional state of hopeless love, despondency and wry self-criticism, the ‘music’ will be the sound of Proteus’s voice, no matter how badly he has treated her. Suffering from betrayal and love melancholy, she is as good as invisible to the other characters on stage except the Host, and Proteus later
English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 2, 7. 26 A discourse of the preseruation of the sight (1599), R3r. 27 Burton, Z2r; West, ‘On this Learned Treatise Love-Melancholy’, in Erotomania, by Jacques Ferrand (1640), b3r–c1v (b3v). 28 For a discussion of the physical and material conditions of ‘private’ reading in early modern England, see Sasha Roberts, ‘Shakespeare “creepes into the womens closets about bedtime”: Women Reading in a Room of Their Own’, in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690, ed. by Gordon McMullan
books, in which cures for love melancholy frequently appear. In presenting this prose recipe, she also plays upon the form and imagery of the love sonnet, with the speaker offering advice to a friend who is suffering the mental turmoil and physical symptoms characteristic of unrequited love. The first ten lines follow the form of a typical recipe: we begin with ingredients
overrun by passionate desire that reason, judgement and even, it seems, reliable vision are entirely overthrown. Driven by the need to secure his own position in contradistinction to sufferers of love-melancholy (a distinction clearly in doubt given the speaker’s repeated admission of his own propensity to melancholy), the speaker insists that a well regulated male subject, that is, the implied reader