Utilising a corpus of popular health regimens, including Robert Burton's magnum opus The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), this article takes account of the climatic conditions that shaped contemporary understandings of emotional cycles, with specific reference to sunlight. As such, this article moves beyond previous histories of sunlight that have cast it as a purely material force, and contributes an entangled environmental, embodied and emotional history of sunlight in early modern England. England's interest in climate, I argue, was less characterised by chronic malaise than by a complex matrix of passions and affections. From the dog days of summer when choler ran high, to the dark, melancholy evenings of midwinter, the English climate bred a cycle of competing passions. Such a cycle is indicative of a much more complex relationship between seasons and emotions than is reflected in the existing historiography. Rather than producing a fluctuating cycle of different moods because of an essential biological link between seasons and feelings, the early modern climate produced a range of affects that were contingent upon how people understood weather, climate, sunlight and their influences.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Drew Daniel;
(2013)
The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance
Book
Erin Sullivan;
(2016)
Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England
Review
Timothy Barr;
(2019)
Review of "Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism"
Book
Lund, Mary Ann;
(2010)
Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading “The Anatomy of Melancholy”
Article
Degroot, Dagomar;
(2014)
“Never Such Weather Known in These Seas”: Climatic Fluctuations and the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century, 1652--1674
Article
Macadam, Joyce;
(2012)
English Weather: The Seventeenth-Century Diary of Ralph Josselin
Thesis
Christopher Ryan Gilson;
(2015)
Strange and Terrible Wonders: Climate Change in the Early Modern World
Book
Todd H. J. Pettigrew;
Stephanie M. Pettigrew;
Jacques A. Bailly;
(2018)
The Major Works of John Cotta: The Short Discovery
Book
Stephanie Shirilan;
(2016)
Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy
Book
Susan Wells;
(2019)
Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge
Book
Stephanie Shirilan;
(2016)
Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy
Article
Amneris Roselli;
(2020)
Male sollertibus vs male feriatis. Robert Burton e i lettori dell'Anatomy of Melancholy
Article
Giuliano Mori;
(2016)
Democritus Junior as Reader of Auctoritates: Robert Burton’s Method and The Anatomy of Melancholy
Article
Weisser, Olivia;
(2013)
Grieved and Disordered: Gender and Emotion in Early Modern Patient Narratives
Article
John Emrys Morgan;
(2022)
An Emotional Ecology of Pigeons in Early Modern England and America
Chapter
Adam Zucker;
(2020)
Vexed and Insatiable: Unfeelable Feelings and the Marketplace of Early Modern Drama
Book
Jennifer Radden;
(2009)
Moody Minds Distempered: Essays on Melancholy and Depression
Book
Jonathan Flatley;
(2008)
Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism
Article
Jan Verplaetse;
(2020)
Wild melancholy. On the historical plausibility of a black bile theory of blood madness, or hæmatomania
Book
Sam White;
Christian Pfister;
Franz Mauelshagen;
(2018)
The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History
Be the first to comment!