Barr, Timothy
(2019)
Without Apparent Occasion: Melancholy and the Problem of Motive in Baroque England.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
Melancholy primarily presented itself to the English seventeenth century as a problem
concerning the causes of passions that were, in the words of Robert Burton, “without any apparant
occasion.” The configuration of this problem varied as it moved through a range of discourses. In
this dissertation, I attend most closely to those configurations in medicine, dialectic, theater, and
an emergent civil science. The desire to discover the possible causes of melancholic passions led
medical texts to reproduce nearly the whole range of causality. The baroque medical texts, then,
produced a “topics,” a collection of potential arguments, of the causes of melancholy.
Melancholics also developed their own set of topical practices, adopting the methods of humanist
dialectic for articulating their experience. In the theater, the problem of the melancholic's passion
served as a form of encounter between a civil logic that sought to determine its causes and the
melancholic articulation of the situation through their own passion. Finally, I argue that the modern
architecture of the state as envisioned in Hobbes' Leviathan is premised upon the power to
eliminate collective melancholy, that is, the arousal of “causeless fears” while instituting a power
that keeps the imagination of the people in fear of the sovereign's punishments. I show that this
vision of the state required a repression of the image of the melancholy tyrant.
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| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
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| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
|
| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
26 September 2019 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
30 April 2019 |
| Approval Date: |
26 September 2019 |
| Submission Date: |
8 August 2019 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
371 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Communication: Rhetoric and Communication |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
melancholy
Baroque
history of medicine
history of rhetoric
early modern rhetoric
history of emotions
Hobbes
Burton
Shakespeare |
| Date Deposited: |
26 Sep 2019 20:55 |
| Last Modified: |
26 Sep 2019 20:55 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/37341 |
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