Abstract

The discourse of love, which is subjective, private, and instinctive, is also culturally constructed, public, and learned; it emphasizes the way in which the expression of reflexive feelings is bound up in wider historical narratives about bodies and interiority. In early modern medical texts, intense unfulfilled erotic desire is held to be a real and virulent disease: it is classified as a species of melancholy, with physical aetiologies and cures. This book analyses literary representations of lovesickness in relation to medical ideas about desire and wider questions about gender and identity, exploring the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of frustrated passion. It considers the relationship between women's lovesickness and other female maladies (such as hysteria and green sickness), and asks whether women can suffer from intellectual forms of melancholy generally thought to be exclusively male. It also examines the ways in which Neoplatonism offers an alternative construction of love to that found in natural philosophy, inverting much of the medical advice for what is held to be healthy in romantic love and promoting a different hierarchical relationship between the sexes. Finally, this study considers how anxieties concerning love's ability to emasculate the male lover emerge indirectly in remedies for lovesickness, illuminating ideas about masculinity as well as some of the psychic contradictions of erotic desire. Authors considered include: Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, and William Davenant.