Beyond Melancholy

Sullivans sustained examination of the 'more personal and practical manifestations' of sadness are refreshingly sensitive to, and engagingly positive about, the easily obscured felt experience of a historically specific but messy emotion. * Eric Langley, The Seventeenth Century. *
[a] fine first book ... Sullivan's very readable study draws on sources as diverse as moral treatises, mortality records, devotional poetry, letters and ballads. * Karen Shook, Times Higher Education *
brilliant ... Sullivan's masterstroke is to show that the world of letters and of drama unlocks the history of experience, connecting discursive debates about conceptual incommensurabilities to a lived reality in which the meaning of embodied and spiritual feelings were sought. * Rob Boddice, Contributions to the History of Concepts *
an elegant study ... This book is significant for complicating our understanding of sadness to encompass not only the corporeal and medical but also the religious, philosophical and immaterial ... Beyond Melancholy shows the value of literary texts and methods to the history of emotions and to the history of medicine more broadly. * Olivia Weisser, Medical History *
Erin Sullivan's scholarly and consistently engaging contribution to OUP's Emotions in History series, Beyond Melancholy, sets out not only to add nuance, local complexity, and taxonomic specificity to broad period conceptions of sadness, but also to make sadness less depressing, showing how depictions of this temperamental excess may be pervasive but not exclusively negative ... Sullivan has recourse to an impressive array of period texts and sources, often devoting considerable time to detailed, and often suitably graphic, accounts of medical practice and case-records, full of scurvy, flatulence, cramps, and fluids. This study, quite intentionally and to its credit, is as comfortable with medical history as cultural history ... There is a real wealth of material here for future scholars * Eric Langley, The Seventeenth Century *
Erin Sullivan's remarkably wide-ranging new book achieves a level of scholarly balance that would secure the approval of any discerning Renaissance physician. In it, she sifts a large and diverse range of historical sources to offer colour and nuance to many 'emotionologies' (conventions) of sadness, recent and contemporary, and their relationships with differing and dominant conceptions of self, body, mind and soul.
This book has helped me further appreciate the complexity of human emotions and has shown me the relevance of an unfamiliar period of history to my daily clinical practice. * Tom Russ, The British Journal of Psychiatry *
Erin Sullivan's Beyond Melancholy offers ample proof of how much there is still to be gained from an in-depth, meticulously contextualized study of an emotion. Marshalling an impressive array of sources ... Beyond Melancholy offers a powerfully synthesizing approach which is nevertheless careful to respect the multi-faceted, contested and often seemingly contradictory ways in which sadness was experienced, viewed by different interpretative communities, and represented. * Freya Sierhuis, Shakespeare Jahrbuch *