Beyond Melancholy finds a place within the burgeoning sub-field of Humanities scholarship that takes emotions as its subject matter. Senior Lecturer and Fellow at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, Erin Sullivan describes herself as an emotions historian, although literary emotions historian might be a helpful qualification for the readers of this review, since many (although by no means all) of her closely analyzed texts are works of fiction, drama and poetry, and a professed aim of the book is to show how with their distinctive power to create new realities through their readers’ affective engagement, literary sources offer a special contribution. Using texts in English from Renaissance and Early Modern times, Sullivan builds a group of theses about different forms of sadness as they were construed by those suffering, and writing of, them: sadness itself, grief, melancholy, Godly sorrow, and despair. While it is granted that much of what are here separated might be seen as parts of a whole (as different forms of Melancholy, for example, along the lines Burton employs accommodating each one of these in the Anatomy), she devotes separate chapters to each of these five with the aim of drawing out their distinctive saliences, contexts, and connotations. Textual analysis can then be employed emphasizing the way each form of feeling is elaborated: grief through the contrast between passivity and action, and the possibility of self-knowledge; melancholy with the relation between the bodily and non-bodily, and consoling attitudes linking it to creative genius; religious distress with religious growth and closeness to God; and despair with the promise of self-authorship and self definition it brings.

We are encouraged to care about these fine shades of meaning and interpretation between the different forms of sadness and sorrow by Sullivan’s emphasis on their very real and urgent importance, in Renaissance England. Learned men, clergy, and doctors, as she shows, were agreed: sorrow could be life-threatening, leading to dire diseases, even death. Dying of grief is little more than a metaphor in our own era; then, it held substantial, alarming danger.

These separate chapters are not equally persuasive, to my mind, in part because of their uneven, incommensurable and diverse subject matter. But they are granted cohesion by a few overarching themes: whether in the guise of sadness, grief, melancholy, Godly sorrow, or despair, it is shown, these forms of sadness are not simple, unalloyed feelings of suffering (nor, for that matter, are they bodily sensations). Each is embedded in, and interpolated through, separate, complexly ambiguous attitudes, beliefs, and expectations. Not all sorrows, as Sullivan says, were created alike. Particularly, each contains contradictory elements, offering promise of hope, amelioration, and compensation, for the distress they bring. This is especially true of the anguished complexity around ideas of predestination in English Protestantism, and Sullivan writes with clarity and force about those conflicts that, to present-day awareness, often seem over-wrought, and confusing.

Much here is interesting and important. Not all is new. For example, the anomalous and shifting role played by the passions in the Aristotelian embodied minds (and Christian souls) envisioned by Elizabethan and later thinkers, has long been emphasized and is treated more thoroughly elsewhere. So has the fluidity of ambiguous linguistic forms, here metaphorical, there apparently more literal. (Nowhere is this more apparent than in the humoral language of someone like Burton, not only writing satire, but coming at the tail end of the period, during a time when Galenic humoralism was losing its grip on the imagination.)

From asides, we learn that this book is something of a corrective. In recent scholarship about the emotions a surge of strongly-literal interpretation emphasizing their corporeal, and sensory, qualities, has tended to under-play, and perhaps obscure, the complexities bound up in ideas about these feelings, Sullivan demonstrates. (One of these, introduced in her valuable discussion of “dis-ease,” lies in the era’s use of classical ideas of health and ill-health. Applicable to mind and body alike, and no mere metaphors in the former, as they would be today, these belie the clunky reductionism implicit in some of the modern-day humoral emphasis Sullivan wishes to revise.) A similar corrective aimed at social constructionism may not be so telling (depending on how that thesis is defined). If anything, the particularist approach adopted here, serving to disassemble universalist assumptions and expectations about “basic emotions,” would seem grist for the social constructionists’ mill.

Clearing the way for recognition of a more open-ended, interpretive, and idiosyncratic view of experiences of sadness allows Sullivan to go, as she says in her title, beyond melancholy, with respect to the way feelings of sadness affected the construction, experience, and presentation of self. The elusive phenomenology and inescapable mental privacy of affective experience are part of this mix as well, but sadness is remarkable for its relation to self in those times, as she insists: when it was a “potent, tumultuous fullness…[with] powers to kill, to discover truth, to be made a laughing stock, to demonstrate genius, to speak to God, to atone for sin, to face damnation, to seek salvation” (page 201). 

Matters of what and how, in these claims for selves, are left to the reader to ponder and other scholars to explore.  There is no reference to individualism, particularism, or types of self construction, nor to the possibility of comparing selves, among individuals in that era, or between those then, and ours now. She is prepared to hint that there might be some cross-historical constants (“sorrow continues to mark our lives…in very meaningful and self-altering ways” [page 200]). And appealing to contemporary philosopher Alain De Botton, she asserts that among the emotions, sadness possesses distinctive resonance for self construction. But the emphasis here is on clearing the way, and with that goal, Sullivan has amply succeeded.

© 2017 Jennifer Radden

Jennifer Radden, previously of University of Massachusetts, Boston, has recently published Melancholic Habits: Burton’s Anatomy & the Mind Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2016)