Melancholy’s History

Zusammenfassung

Even as understandings of melancholy have changed over its long history, the term has described a consistent cluster of symptoms: sadness, grief, fear, loss of interest, and affective withdrawal from the world. Likewise, whether melancholy was seen to stem from physiological imbalances (too much black bile, melaina-kole, as in the Hippocratic Writings), astrological misfortune (born under the sign of Saturn), failures of faith (the sin of acedia or sloth) or unmourned losses, also persistent is the sense that there is something valuable in this condition. Thus, for example, the Aristotelian Problemata XXX asks: “Why do all men of extraordinary ability in the field of philosophy or politics or literature or the arts prove to be melancholics?” (Radden 2000, 57) Or, moving to the 17^th Century, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton affirms the knowledge that might be produced by the creative contemplation uniquely facilitated by melancholy states: “They get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing” (Burton 1977, 22).