ABSTRACT
During the final years of the sixteenth century following the publication of Timothy Bright’s Treatise on Melancholie in 1586, and the translation of Andre du Laurens’ (Laurentiu’s) discourse on melancholy in 1599, the Elizabethan concept of melancholy underwent a radical transformation. 1 What made these publications so crucial was not that they drew attention to a condition hitherto unknown, either to physicians or to poets—from Chaucer’s “Knights Tale” to Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helth, there were in fact numerous printed references to melancholy. More fundamentally, both Bright and Laurentius assigned melancholy a genuinely new status: henceforth it would be treated as an object of study in its own right. Whereas earlier medical treatises had described melancholy, both as a substance and as a condition replete with various symptoms (such as a morose and withdrawn disposition, or a tendency to seek out solitude), it was clearly understood that it made up only one humor among the four that comprised the normal animate body. The notion that melancholy deserved special consideration, let alone a full length study, simply had not occurred to English physicians until Bright’s Treatise undertook precisely that task. And while physicians like Bright and Laurentius may not have been solely responsible for creating what subsequently became known as “The Elizabethan Malady,” 2 it was through such medical treatises that the production of melancholy as a discourse takes on a distinctly new character.
