The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern RomanceThis book offers a new reading of early modern romance in the light of historically contemporary accounts of mind, and specifically the medical tradition of love-melancholy. The book argues that the medical profile of the melancholic lover provides an essential context for understanding the characteristic patterns of romance: narrative deferral, epistemological uncertainty, and the endless quest for a quasi-phantasmic beloved. Unlike many recent studies of romance, this book establishes a detailed historical basis for investigating the psychological structure of romance. Wells begins by tracing the development of the medical disorder first known in the Latin west as amor hereos (lovesickness) from its earliest roots in Greek and Arabic medicine to its translation into the Latin medical tradition. Drawing on this detailed historical material, the book considers three important early modern romances: Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, and Spenser's The Faerie Queene, concluding with a brief consideration of the significance of this literary and medical legacy for Romanticism. Most broadly, the interdisciplinary nature of this study allows the author to investigate the central critical problem of early modern subjectivity in substantially new ways. |
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... 72 ; knight's dream , 268-69 ; portrait of melancholic love , 261-63 ; Spenserian influences , 262-63 Bellerophon , 14-15 , 120 , 139-40 Belphoebe , 206 , 207 , 208 , 211 Bernard of Gordon , 83 Birdsong : curative power , Index 354.
... 72 ; knight's dream , 268-69 ; portrait of melancholic love , 261-63 ; Spenserian influences , 262-63 Bellerophon , 14-15 , 120 , 139-40 Belphoebe , 206 , 207 , 208 , 211 Bernard of Gordon , 83 Birdsong : curative power , Index 354.
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acedia Agamben Alcyon amor hereos Amoret ancholy Angelica Archimago argues Ariosto's Arthur's quest atra voluptas Avicenna beauty beloved Belphoebe blood body Britomart's Busirane Canzone chapter Ciavolella Clorinda conception context death desire despair discourse discussion disease dolce dream early modern elegiac epic epyllion eros erotic estimative faculty Faerie Queene fantasy female Ferrand Ficino's figure Freud furor Giorgio Agamben grief Ibid imagination introjection italics Keats's Kristeva language literary loss lost object love-melancholy lover Lucretian Lucretius Lucretius's madness maternal medical texts medieval melan melancholic love Middle Ages mind mother mourning narrative Neoplatonic notes obsessive Orlando Orlando Furioso passage passion Peter of Spain Petrarch's Petrarchan phantasm Platonic poem poem's poetic precisely psychic psychoanalytic reading Red Crosse's romance Scudamour's Secretum seems sexual song sorrow soul Spenser's spirit Stanzas structure suggests Tancredi Tasso's tears theory Timias tion transformation translation Treatise on Lovesickness University Press Viaticum Virgil's Virgilian vision voice Wack