Melancholy and the Care of the Soul

[Dave Monroe]

Melancholy and the Care of the Soul
Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern
England
Jeremy Schmidt

Melancholy is rightly taken to be a central topic of
concern in early modern culture, and it continues to
generate scholarly interest among historians of
medicine, literature, psychiatry and religion. This
book considerably furthers our understanding of the
issue by examining the extensive discussions of
melancholy in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century
religious and moral philosophical publications, many
of which have received only scant attention from
modern scholars.

Arguing that melancholy was considered by many to be
as much a 'disease of the soul' as a condition
originating in bodily disorder, Dr. Schmidt reveals
how insights and techniques developed in the context
of ancient philosophical and early Christian
discussions of the good of the soul were applied by a
variety of early modern authorities to the treatment
of melancholy. The book also explores ways in which
various diagnostic and therapeutic languages shaped
the experience and expression of melancholy and
situates the melancholic experience in a series of
broader discourses, including the language of
religious despair dominating English Calvinism, the
late Renaissance concern with the government of the
passions, and eighteenth-century debates surrounding
politeness and material consumption. In addition, it
explores how the shifting languages of early modern
melancholy altered and enabled certain perceptions of
gender.

As a study in intellectual history, Melancholy and the
Care of the Soul offers new insights into a wide
variety of early modern texts, including literary
representations and medical works, and critically
engages with a broad range of current scholarship in
addressing some of the central interpretive issues in
the history of early modern medicine, psychiatry,
religion and culture.

https://www.ashgate.com/shopping/title.asp?isbn=0%207546%205748%205

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