Beyond Melancholy

This latest book in Oxford’s ‘Emotions in History’ series examines the cultural, medical and literary connotations of sorrow and sadness in the period c.1560–1660. Starting with the famously enigmatic opening line spoken by Antonio in The Merchant of Venice—‘In sooth, I know not why I am so sad’—Erin Sullivan considers the ways in which sadness was classified, diagnosed and recorded; and further, the ways it was reinvented and imagined. Concerned with ‘both the managerial and the improvisatory dimensions of Renaissance sadness’, the author posits that ‘the two were constantly in conversation with each other’ (p. 11). ‘[E]motive improvisation’ (p. 9) is a key concept of her study, referring to the kinds of activity that challenge or contradict cultural norms and standards. Literary writing of the period, she suggests, finds new paths through the emotional territory mapped out in guides to godly living or textbooks about melancholy, and, moreover, it reaches creatively beyond them. In the case of Antonio, for instance, sadness is an experience in flux during the first hundred lines of the play, ‘from a puzzle to a precondition to a pose’ (p. 2)

Aesthetics · Anger · Art · Art history · Conversation · Improvisation · Key (lock · Literature · Period (music · Psychoanalysis · Sadness · Sociology · Sorrow · The Renaissance · Visual arts · Communication · Computer Science · History · History of Science and Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology