The Anatomy of Melancholy

But most attribute it to the humour, an opinion Montaltus firmly maintains in chapter 21, refuting Avicenna and the rest and referring it entirely to the quality and disposition of the humour and the person affected. Cardan, in On the Variety of Things, book 8, chapter 10, holds that these people above all others are assassins: bold, hardy, fierce and adventurous, ready to undertake anything because of their scorched choler.

This humour, he says, prepares them to endure death itself and every kind of torment with unconquerable courage; it is astonishing to see how readily they undergo such tortures, “so that the thing seems beyond nature.” He attributes this nobility of spirit, frenzy—or rather insensibility—to this scorching of choler and melancholy. But I consider these people mad or desperate rather than properly melancholic, for this humour, so scorched and hot, commonly degenerates into madness.

If it comes from melancholy itself scorched, these people, says Avicenna, are usually sad and solitary, continually and excessively so, unusually suspicious, more fearful, and troubled by prolonged, distressing and deeply disordered imaginings; cold and dark in complexion, bashful, and so solitary that, as Arnoldus writes, they will tolerate no company. They constantly dream of graves and dead people and think themselves bewitched or dead.

If it is extreme, they think they hear hideous noises, see and speak with black men, and converse intimately with devils and such strange phantoms and visions (Gordonius); or that they are possessed by them, that someone speaks to them or within them. “Such melancholic people are generally demon-possessed,” says Montaltus, consultation 26, citing Avicenna. Valescus de Taranta treated such a woman, who thought she had sexual dealings with the devil; and Gentilis Fulgosius, question 55, writes that he had a melancholic friend who saw a black man in the likeness of a soldier continually following him wherever he went.

Laurentius, chapter 7, has many stories of people who thought themselves bewitched by their enemies, and some who would eat no food because they believed themselves dead. In 1550, a Paris lawyer fell into such a melancholic fit that he firmly believed he was dead. He could not be persuaded otherwise, or to eat or drink, until a relative of his, a student at Bourges, ate before him dressed as a corpse. The story, says Serres, was performed in a comedy before Charles IX.

Some think they are beasts, wolves or pigs, and cry like dogs or foxes, bray like asses and low like cattle, as King Proetus’s daughters did. Hildesheim, in the second collection, On Mania, gives an example of a German baron affected in this way; and Trincavelius, book 1, consultation 11, gives another of a nobleman in his own country who firmly believed himself a beast and would imitate most of their cries, along with many similar symptoms that may properly be assigned to this kind.

If it proceeds from the various combinations of the four humours or spirits—Hercules de Saxonia adds hot, cold, dry, moist, dark, confused, settled, constricted, according to whether it shares in matter or is without matter—the symptoms are likewise mixed. One thinks himself a giant, another a dwarf; one is as heavy as lead, another as light as a feather.