The Anatomy of Melancholy

Yet though she is such an old crone, a hag, unable to see or hear, walk or stand, a mere corpse, a witch, scarcely able to feel, she caterwauls and must have a stallion, a champion. She must and will marry again, pledging herself to some young man who hates to look at her except for her wealth, who abhors the sight of her—all to the damage of her reputation, her own undoing, her friends’ grief and her children’s ruin.

But to expand on or illustrate this power of love and its effects is to set a candle in the sunlight. It rages among people of every rank and condition, yet is most apparent in the young and vigorous, in the flower of their years, nobly born, richly fed, living idly and at ease.

For that reason this “wild, mad love,” this mad and beastly passion which our theologians call burning lust, is, as I have said, called heroic love by our physicians. They give it a more honourable title, “noble love,” as Savonarola styles it, because noble men and women commonly practise it and are so frequently affected by it.

Avicenna, book 3, fen 1, treatise 4, chapter 23, calls this passion Ilishi and defines it as “a disease, or melancholic distress, or anguish of mind, in which a man continually dwells on the beauty, bearing and manners of his mistress and torments himself about them,” longing, as Savonarola adds, with all his concentration and eagerness “to win or enjoy her.” “As hunters commonly concern themselves with their sport, and the covetous with their gold and possessions, so he is continually tormented about his mistress.”

Arnald of Villanova, in his book on heroic love, defines it as “continual thought of what one desires, with confidence or hope of obtaining it”—a definition his commentator disputes.

For continual thought is not love’s general class but a symptom of it. We continually think of what we hate and abhor as well as what we love; and we covet and desire many things without any hope of attaining them.

Charles de Lorme, in his Questions, raises the issue “whether love is a disease”—whether this heroic love is an illness. Julius Pollux, Onomasticon, book 6, chapter 44, settles it: those who are in love are also sick; “the lustful, the lecherous, those behaving wantonly and those mad for sex are truly ill.” Arnald considers disease an improper name for it, and regards it as a disorder of the body rather than the mind.

Cicero, in his Tusculan Disputations, defines it as a raging disease of the mind; Plato as madness itself; and his commentator Ficino, chapter 12, as a species of madness: “For many have gone mad for women,” Esdras 4.26. But Rhazes calls it “a melancholic passion,” and most physicians make it a species or kind of melancholy, as will appear from the symptoms, and treat it separately.

I intend to follow them: to discuss it in all its forms, examine its various causes, and explain its symptoms, indications, prognoses and effect, so that it may more readily be cured.