近代早期宗教、政治与社会语境中的忧郁的问题

The problem of early modern melancholy in the context of religion,politics and societies

忧郁长期以来一直是关于16、17世纪近代历史和文学学术研究的突出主题,但我们对其宗教、社会和政治意义的理解仍然有限。近代早期医学的文化显著性如今已是得到很好探讨的领域,但现有大多数关于忧郁的讲述关注的是其内部的理论结构或文学表达。尽管现在有很多医学之外的关于忧郁的有益研究,但人们很少持续关注这些方面变得显著的特定语境,或者关注将忧郁概念置于这些不同语境的用途多样性。更具体地说,对于忧郁当时成为一种特别流行疾病的观念,人们并没有将其与当时对近代早期环境的感知联系起来,因此,对于有关据说忧郁症高发的许多有问题的解释,需要进行纠正,至少是需要完善。对于16世纪后期和17世纪初欧洲人感知到忧郁症频发原因何在这个令人烦恼的问题,通过关注忧郁症概念在不同宗教、政治和社会语境中的弹性功用,可以得到最好的回答。

The subject of melancholy has long featured prominently in modern historical and literary scholarship on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,but our understanding of its religious,social and political meanings remains limited.The cultural significance of early modern medicine is now well-explored territory,yet most of the extant accounts of melancholy are concerned with its internal theoretical structure or literary expression.Although there are now many useful studies of the extra-medical aspects of melancholy,little sustained attention has been paid to the specific contexts in which such aspects became significant,or to the varieties of use to which the concept of melancholy was put in these contexts.More specifically,the notion that melancholy had become an especially prevalent disease has not been directly related to contemporary perceptions of the early modern environment,and as a consequence a number of problematic explanations for its allegedly high incidence stand in need of correction or at least refinement.The vexed question of the causes of the perceived frequency of melancholy in later sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century Europe is best answered by attending to the flexible utility of the concept of melancholy in different religious,political and social contexts.