Abstract
Reviewed by: Tessa Storey, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
What this book does is to go ‘beyond’ the boundaries of Melancholy as framed by Galenic medicine, exploring the strikingly different ways in which sadness was constructed in Renaissance England, with particular reference to the context of Reformed Protestantism. Its goal is also to demonstrate that literary texts should be taken as ‘essential materials’ for the study of emotions history and offers some methodological approaches. The premise is that different social and emotional communities constructed sadness in their own ways; providing their explanations for it, and attributing their values to it. Thus people – real and fictional –were confronted with differing understandings of sadness and had to navigate ‘pathways through’ these, sometimes going ‘beyond existing emotional standards and scripts’ (9). This process Sullivan terms ‘emotive improvisation’, a concept which recurs throughout the book in relation to notions of selfhood and identity.
The first form of sadness discussed is ‘worldly sorrow’, caused by adverse external circumstances. Starting with bills of mortality and contemporary accounts of deaths, Sullivan documents how ‘grief’ and sad ‘thowghts’ alone could kill the afflicted person. The chapter develops the view that since grief involved the intellect (according to the Aristotelean conception of the soul), it could be a powerful, ‘agency ridden’ way of asserting one’s identity. This then underpins Sullivan’s analysis of grief-stricken female characters in Renaissance drama who starve themselves to death, which she interprets not as the ‘passive’ consequence of illness, but as ‘active’, as they ‘improvise new forms of emotive identity’ (52).
Chapter 3 discusses ‘melancholy’ itself, challenging a long-standing trend in scholarship which has emphasized notions of melancholic genius and viewed the disorder primarily as a ‘privileged’ identity. Sullivan reintroduces the many physiological symptoms associated with melancholy into the debate and her analysis of four doctors’ casebooks supplies excellent support for her point. She shows that melancholy was a very ‘embodied’ condition, often associated with painful intestinal and gaseous symptoms, and this leads to an entertaining analysis of bodily vapours and toilet humour in ‘humorous’ comedies.
The final two chapters are a fascinating exploration of godly sorrow and religious despair, which amply demonstrates Sullivan’s point about the existence of different ‘paradigms’ of sadness. Through life-writings, illness narratives, devotional poetry and plays, Sullivan reveals how English protestants – particularly amongst the more extreme religious communities – ‘gave meaning’ to forms of sorrow which were distinct from ‘bodily’ melancholy. ‘Spiritual’ sorrow could be connoted positively, as sorrow for one’s sins and corruption, thereby representing a step in the process of spiritual renewal and salvation. Despair, in a society which embraced predestinarian beliefs, was a more extreme version of this, and Sullivan carefully untangles what she describes as its dangerous ‘doubleness’. On the one hand despair of salvation was held to be of great value on one’s spiritual journey; on the other, taken too far it undermined the sufferer’s faith, raising questions about the authenticity of their spiritual journey, potentially leading to suicide.
I had some minor misgivings. In the initial chapters the layering of arguments, theories and multiple aims results in some confusion about where we were going. For example, whilst literature surely can help us ‘consider the question of emotional experience’ in the past (9), it is not really clear what relationship is actually being posited between the ‘emotive improvisation’ of tragic heroines in dramas and the ‘emotional experience’ of the Renaissance public who viewed them (Chapter 1). Also, there is some imbalance in the expositions of ‘medical’ melancholy and grief which potentially serve the author’s arguments, such as not explaining clearly how people died from grief, or why scholars were physiologically predisposed to melancholy. There is also a tendency to refer to ‘mental and emotional suffering’ as if this were distinct from ‘physical disorders’, a separation which did not exist at the time. Moreover, I found the argument that the self-starvation of someone afflicted by grief was an ‘act of will’ unconvincing. The role of the intellect in grief was precisely to repel sad thoughts and seek out positive ones, thus preventing the catastrophic loss of animal spirits that led to the irreversible loss of balance within the humoral body. Starving to death in this context surely meant that the intellect had signally failed in its duties. Additionally, female self-starvation hardly seems to represent an improvisation away from standard emotive ‘scripts’ when religious narratives were bursting with examples of virtuous female saints who had starved themselves to death.
But these reservations do not detract from the fact that overall this book is extremely rich and thought provoking, successfully overcoming disciplinary boundaries by weaving together discussions of medical, philosophical, theological, literary and life-writing sources. As such, it offers methods and insights relevant to all scholars of ‘sadness’ whatever their specific field, period or geographical focus, very much as the author hoped it would.