Melancholia in the Writing of a Sixteenth-Century Spanish Nun

Abstract

Since the time of Hippocratic writers, melancholia has fascinated its observers. From Greek doctors and philosophers through to Robert Burton in the seventeenth century, there has been a remarkably consistent focus on the humoral imbalances thought to underlie these conditions and on the subjective moods of apprehension and generalized dejection, long characterized as “fear and sadness without cause,” through which they are identified. This set of ideas—found in the writings of Galen, the Greco-Arabic doctors such as Avicenna and Rhazes, and Renaissance thinkers such as Ficino, followed by Weyer and Paracelsus in the Early Modern era—is well known. Less well known are the unsystematic discussions of melancholy and melancholia ∗ by the Spanish abbess Teresa de Alhumada (1515‐82), later Saint Teresa of Avila, who noted the apparently widespread melancholia that she encountered in the cloistered world of the nunnery. A mystical writer, poet, and reformer of prodigious energies and effectiveness, Teresa of Avila helped forge the Roman Catholic Church’s own internal reform (the CounterReformation) by founding the Discalced (barefoot) Carmelite order. At a time of religious and political turmoil in Spain, when her efforts placed her at risk from the Inquisition,