ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which both melancholy and music and understood independently as potential effeminizing agents. Anxiety for socially elite men abounds in writings on the disorder of melancholy and in relation to the act of listening to, music. Melancholy and music were perceived as having effeminizing agency, and the discourses attached to them both were prime sites at which masculine anxiety was played out. An excess of melancholy humour was widely thought, in the humoral tradition, to be the main cause of cancer and other tumours, ulcers and paralysis, along with the disorder of melancholy itself. Women and music both provided a discursive blank screen in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England onto which men could project the most feared and disruptive elements of the male self–primarily any elements that might be deemed effeminate and maintain 'normative' adult masculine status and identity.
