Despair and happiness

Abstract

“All my joyes to this are folly,/Naught so sweet as melancholy … All my griefes to this are jolly,/ Naught so sad as Melancholy.” Thus wrote Robert Burton (d. 1640) in his Anatomy of Melancholy . In early modern England, melancholy was both celebrated and decried. To be sure, sad emotions had been well known before this time. Alcuin had much to say about sorrow. The Burgundian chroniclers had been “troubled, sad, and upset at heart.” Gerson's Cuer Mondain wrongly thought that a hermit like Cuer Seulet must be “melancholy and sad.” These emotional communities had dwelled largely on sorrow's pain. Yet even before the early modern period, sorrow had had a positive side as well. Alcuin had talked about two sorts of tristitia , one a vice, the other a virtue. The Burgundians highly valued the pity that sorrows awakened. Margery Kempe found despair, however painful, to be the necessary springboard to joy. In Quattrocentro Italy, Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499) wrote about the wonders of melancholy, which he identified as the source of creativity, discovery, and scholarship. The Reformation brought new appreciation of despair. Luther made it the beginning of salvation as well as, in Angus Gowland's phrase, “a pathology of the soul.” Calvin thought that by falling “into deep despair,” man's conscience would at last seek God. He lauded the “dread of death” and despair because “both these emotions engender humility and self-abasement.” The first sermon that was regularly delivered in English parish churches was on “the misery of all mankind.” In seventeenth-century England, sorrowful emotions gained prestige even as they led some to suicide. If a whole society may be described as an emotional community, then early modern England was one obsessed by melancholy. With William Reddy, we might call this an emotional regime. But if so, the regime's power came not from political clout but rather the prestige of intellectuals, physicians, and divines who valued (variously) genius, inspiration, and religious authenticity. Looked at this way, the regime was hardly monolithic. And to its own variations on the theme must be added some contemporary groups that cared very little about melancholy at all. (For all the place names in this chapter, see Map 6.1.)