‘Melancholia – and its aesthetic representation’, argues the Hispanist Luis F. López González, ‘stands as one of the greatest legacies of the Iberian Middle Ages to the baroque imaginary; one that contributed to the notion of the “melancholy Spaniard’’’ (p. 233). To reach this conclusion González aims to demonstrate that there existed in thirteenth-century Iberia a fertile tradition in literature depicting melancholia, one described well before the Renaissance and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ‘melancholy’ figures (artists, writers and favourites) such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Teresa of Avila, Timothie Bright, Robert Burton and Samuel Butler. González endeavours to show how melancholia, within this Iberian tradition, may relate to madness or insanity (madness in part but also rabies/hydrophobia), to lovesickness or, more precisely, love melancholy, and to acedia, the melancholy of the monastic. González hopes to make clear how each of these variants of melancholia are to be seen in his thirteenth-century authors, the Castilians King Alfonso x in his Cantigas de Santa Maria, Juan Manuel in his El Conde Lucanor and Exemplo 47 and Juan Ruiz in his El libro de buen amor. There is as well an illustrative selection of images taken from the manuscripts of Alfonso's Cantigas de Santa Maria that are designed to highlight González's three themes. The secondary aim of this book, states González, is, ‘to demonstrate the role that melancholia and melancholic discourses played in the ideological shift from a theocentric to a humanistic worldview in literature’. This book will be attractive to Hispanists, medievalists, literary historians and historians of the traditions of melancholia alike. For those concerned with the history of melancholia, the link of melancholia to madness, to love melancholy and to acedia will be of great interest.
Why the ‘aesthetics’ of melancholia? This is because most of González’ evidence is drawn from cultural, in his case poetic, literature. We can see the ‘aesthetic’ operating in part i (chapters i and ii: ‘Melancholia and Madness’) where González examines the role of adust melancholy, a condition in which the internal bodily combustion of black or yellow bile sends fumes to the brain that produce a violent reaction. ‘This psychotropic process … provoked baseless fears, manias, and delusional madness in sufferers before killing them. The psychotropic effects of the melancholic vapors were not only stressed in the influential medical treatises but also in the literary works of Alfonso x, King Sancho iv, Juan Manel and Juan Ruiz, to name a few.’ González illustrates his ideas in King Alfonso's cantigas 65 and 283 and Juan Manuel's Exemplos 46 and 53 in El Conde Lucanor.
Part ii (chapters iii and iv: ‘Rabies or Hydrophobia’) considers ‘the deadly condition of rabies, a melancholic disease that has been utterly neglected by medieval scholars’. The stress remains on the ‘adust’, rather than on depressive melancholy. Alfonso's Cantigas provide, in chapter iii, five examples of the illness (concerning ‘rabid melancholics who adopt a canine demeanor, barking biting, running uncontrollably, and are on the cusp of death before the Virgin Mary heals them’). And melancholic they are according to Alfonso, who speaks of the ‘disease rabies of melancholia’ (‘enfermidade rravia de melanconia’). Chapter iv examines a single example of melancholic rabies, or hydrophobia, in a female character in Exemplo 47 of Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor: ‘the tale's protagonist suffers [not] from a moral … condition’, but from a somatic condition, namely ‘rabid melancholy’. The stress as I have said is on the late version of melancholia (late for antiquity at any rate), adust melancholy. These rabid characters exemplify a melancholic condition popular in the medieval and later periods.
Rabies/hydrophobia in ancient writers such as Aretaeus of Cappadocia (second century ce) or Caelius Aurelianus (fifth century ce – who terms hydrophobics phrenetici), however, are violent, but free-standing illnesses not necessarily to be related to melancholia, but to furor or madness.
Part iii (chapters v and vi: ‘Lovesickness or Amor Hereos’) has as its focus lovesickness in King Alfonso's Cantigas (5) and Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor (6). In Alphonso's work the stress is on ‘lovesickness's physical, mental, and spiritual causes and effects and shows how they give rise to dysthymia, ahedonic states … and can lead to spiritual damnation and death’. In González's illustrations, however, the illness is often as violent (adust) as it is depressive, thus continuing with his theme. ‘Juan Ruiz, on the other hand, self-fashions his literary persona as a melancholic genius whose humoral complexion and astral influence predispose him to amor heroes [erotic lovesickness].’ For Ruiz, lovesickness can lead, just as we might expect, ‘to physical emaciation, psychological instability, spiritual corruption, and, if untreated, to death’. In antiquity comparable examples, say from the Greek novels, though physically destructive are seldom violent but seem to remain largely depressive.
Part iv (‘Acedia and Mystical Lovesickness’, chapters vii, viii and ix) discusses acedia, the melancholy of the anchorite or the cloistered religious that causes them to doubt the value of their religious vocation. González understands acedia, in his period, more broadly to affect ‘religious and non-religious people alike in the secular world’. He explains: ‘I study this phenomenon in Chapter 7 through Cantigas 88, 254, and 365 and in Chapter 8 through Ruiz Libro, a text that was allegedly written … to counter the insidious attacks of acedia.’ The stress once again is ‘adust’. González's final beguiling chapter, ‘Mystical lovesickness’, eschews acedia and looks back to chapters v and vi to examine Alphonso's cantiga 188, ‘a poem that dramatizes the mystical [depressive?] melancholia of a young maiden whose overpowering lovesickness for Mary induces her to renounce the world so that she can live in mystical union with the virgin, the absent beloved’.
The stress throughout much of The aesthetics of melancholia is on melancholia of a violent type, the mode that seems most emphasised in the literature that González brings to light for us. Although this violent form of melancholia seems to have been common in the later Middle Ages, it was less so in antiquity (Galen, however, does speak of it). Melancholia in antiquity, if we follow Thumiger (A history of the mind and mental health in classical Greek medical thought, Cambridge 2017), is a difficult condition to pin down before Celsus, after whom it is often depressive in our sense (despite the earlier, angry but isolated view of melancholia to be found in the pseudo-Aristotelian Problema 30.1). Madness, furor or mania, is not the same thing as melancholia, but it can be sometimes. González's writers, King Alfonso x, Juan Manuel and Juan Ruiz seem to have understood melancholia in this violent sense, a novel version if you have your eye on antiquity or on the Renaissance. So it is with acedia, a melancholy-like condition which in late antiquity is only occasionally associated with violence; and lovesickness too, which appears most frequently in the Greek novel, and which is there a depressive condition. González's authors often, but not always, draw on a different and instructive tradition. The history of melancholia is the most confusing of traditions. It is fascinating to read of this tradition in the Iberian Middle Ages. Luis F. López González produces in The aesthetics of melancholia an attractive, stimulating and unexpected addition to the long, very challenging and inevitably controversial history of melancholia.
