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1990 1: 191History of PsychiatryGill Speak

An odd kind of melancholy: reflections on the glass delusion in Europe (1440-1680  

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An odd kind of melancholy:reflections on the glass delusion in Europe

(1440-1680)

GILL SPEAK*

A history of psychiatry, says Tellenbach, should ideally be a ’history ofproblems’, describing not only abnormal psychic states, but also historicalattitudes towards them, by recourse to ideological and sociological factors.This research should then lead to rediscoveries of the past, often conceivedas new revelations. In accordance with these premises, the present studydescribes the glass delusion of Early Modern Europe, not as a series ofisolated cases, but viewed within a contemporary cultural setting, for theGlass Man’s cry of pain is only truly audible through the layman’s literature.A brief survey of modern variants on this delusion reveals that man’s preoc-cupation with the problem of body-soul remains largely unchanged.

History ofPsychmoy, i ( 1990), 191-206. Printed in England

Introduction

It has been said that psychology underwent popularization in the last years of thesixteenth century. This process allegedly led to an unreal differentiation between’man’ and ’man under passion’, with the implication for today that only studiesof the first type merited the attention of empirical psychology, whilst the literarystereotype had little reliable to offer except a ’psychiatry of the philosophers’.But psychiatry is concerned with the most difficult of all medical-physiologicalproblems: the body-soul problem, which still remains unsolved today. As ’manunder passion’ is more likely than his rational counterpart to voice that innerconflict, it is possible that behind the posturing of the literary melancholic, therelies sufficient material with which to reconstitute the ’problem’, as perceived

* Department of Spanish Studies, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL,England.I should like to thank Roger Cooter and Roy Porter, of the Wellcome Institute for the History ofMedicine in Manchester and London respectively, for their enthusiasm and help with an earlier draftof this article. For expert guidance in the research and valued moral support, special thanks to BarryWhite and P. Cummings of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. Department of SpanishStudies, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, England.

191

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and articulated by contemporary writers.l The aim of this paper is to examinethe contribution of literary works to the corpus of knowledge on Melancholy,and to assess its value for medical historians today. The study will focus onglass delusions affected or experienced by scholars and lovers in Early ModernEurope: probably the best-documented, but the least-studied melancholic aber-ration.2 Eclectic by definition, the study examines all parallel cases regardless ofnational boundaries. The term delusion is used in its modern sense of: ’Anythingthat deceives the mind with a false impression; a fixed false opinion with regardto objective things, especially as a form of mental derangement’ (OED).The melancholic generally succumbed to some form of self-delusion which

alienated him from his fellows. In fact the difference between poseur or

genuinely-afflicted melancholic, and his literary stereotype was only one ofdegree, for as the Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius remarked, melancholicshad as many affectations, gestures and fancies as though they were Stage Players. 3Two quite distinctive symptoms, however, set the Glass Man apart from othermelancholics: an irrational fear that he was fragile and therefore likely to shatterinto pieces, and an aversion to sunlight.

I. Fragility: the earth-bound bodyThe fragile delusion received relatively more attention than the second symptomin its day. Classical and Medieval accounts of Earthenware Men abound, andwhilst they persist into the Early Modern period, it is an obsession with glassbodies which comes to the fore.4 The Glass Man came in a variety of forms. He

1 For general ideas on the history of psychiatry, which influenced the structure of this paper, seeHubertus Tellenbach, Melancholy: History of the Problem Endogeneity, Typology, Pathogenesis, ClinicalConsiderations, translated by Erling Eng, Duquesne Studies - Psychological Series, 9, third edition(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980), 1-2, and 4. For ’psychiatry of the philosophers’ see E. A.Ackerknecht, Kurze Geschichte der Psychiatrie (Stuttgart: Enke, 1957), I, 2, cited in Tellenbach, Melan-choly, 1. For comments on ’literary and scientific types’ see Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass: theElizabethan Mind in Literature, fifth edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 115-117; Lawrence Babb,The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642, second edition(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1965), 72; and J. S. Madden, ’Melancholy in Medicineand Literature: some Historical Considerations’, British Journal of Medicine and Psychology, xxxix (1966),125-130 (125).2 Titles and texts have been translated, where appropriate, into English. Unless otherwise indicated, all

translation is my own. For comprehensive studies on Glass Men in the North of Europe see F. F. Blok,Caspar Barlaeus: from the Correspondence of a Melancholic, translated by H. S. Lake (Amsterdam: vanGorcum, Assen, 1976); and J. M. W. Binneveld et al., Een Psychiatrisch Verleden: Uit de geschiedenisvan de psychiatrie (Baarn: Amboboeken, 1982). I am indebted to Roy Porter for this last source.3 Levinus Lemnius, De habitu et constitutione corporis (Antwerp: apud Guilielmum Simonem, 1561),

fol. 147v-8v, cited by Blok, Caspar Barlaeus, 114. Compare Tellenbach, Melancholy, 127, for a moderninterpretation of role and identity.

4 Thomas Walkington, The Opticke Glasse of Humours or the Touchstone of a Golden Temperature,reproduced from Henry E. Huntington Library (London, 1607), 69v, 71r; Reginald Scot, The Discoverieof Witchcraft (Arundel: Centaur Press, 1584;1964), 64; André Du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservationof the Sight: of Melancholicke Diseases; of Rheumes, and of Old Age ... , translated out of French ... byRichard Surphlet, practitioner in phisicke, introduction by Sanford V. Larkey, Shakespeare AssociationFacsimiles, 15 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 97,102.

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might be a urinal, an oil lamp or other glass receptacle, or else he might himselfbe trapped within a glass bottle.

Possibly the first case of a man believing his whole body to be made of glasswas the French king, Charles VI, who allegedly refused to allow people to touchhim, and wore reinforced clothing to protect himself. 5A later case was recorded by the physician to Philip II of Spain, Alfonso Ponce

de Santa Cruz (c.1614). The man in question, possibly a contemporary Frenchprince, was also described by the chief physician to Henri IV, Andr6 du Laurens.At the instigation of his physician, this Glass Man languished on a straw bed toavoid being broken, until a conveniently-arranged fire quickly restored his wits.The Flemish poet and philosopher, Gaspar van Boerle (1584-1648), known asBarlaeus, suffered from periods of Melancholy throughout his life, but his glassdelusion is unsubstantiated, based only on certain lectures he gave in 1635, inwhich he detailed that obsession as one manifestation of Melancholy: ’But howoften the fantasy wants to act absurdly and ridiculously in melancholics, of howmuch does it convince the unhappy fellows! This one thinks he is made of glass,and, terrified, is fearful of people standing close to him’. Barlaeus wrote abouthis Melancholy to the Dutch diplomat and writer Constantijn Huygens, anothermelancholic, who had lampooned the glass delusion in his satirical poem CostlyFolly (1622).6Men of letters, or members of the nobility, these Glass Men could have learnt

of the delusion from earlier medical treatises, and from contemporary literaryaccounts accessible to them in the embryonic literary academies. The distinctionbetween medical account and its literary version is particularly diffuse in thisperiod, marked as it is by a sudden plethora of literary Glass Men. One ofthese is Cervantes’s Glass Licentiate, Tomas Rodaja. Obsessed with the ideathat he is made of glass, and traumatized by any physical contact, he refusesto wear shoes or any restrictive clothing. He eats only fruit offered to him ina urinal-pouch (vasera de orinal) on the end of a stick, and drinks fresh waterwith his hands. He sleeps outdoors or huddled in some hayloft, takes refuge inthe country during a storm, and walks in the middle of the street to avoid injuryfrom falling roof tiles. 7

5 Pius Secundus Pontifex Maximus, ’Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope: the Commentaries of Pius II,Books VI-IX’, translated by Florence Alden Gragg, Smith College Studies m History (Massachussets), xxxv(1951), IV, 413-618 (425).

6 Alfonso Ponce de Santa Cruz, Dignotio et Cura Affectuum Melancholicorum (Madrid: apud ThomamIuntam, 1622), in Antonio Hernández Morejón, Historia bibliográfica de la medicina española (Madrid,1842-50), IV, 170-2; compare du Laurens, A Discourse, 102. (Barlaeus) De Animae Humanae Admirandis(1635), in Orationum Liber (Amsterdam, 1643), 111, cited in Blok, Caspar Barlaeus, 110; Barlaeus toHuygens, 22 November 1647, Leyden U. L., MS. Hug. 37, No. 180, in De Briefwisseling van ConstantijnHuygens: 1608-87, edited by J. A. Worp, 6 vols (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1911-17), IV (1915), 437,No. 4704; Constantijn Huygens, Satyra. Dat is’t Costelick Mal (Middelburgh, 1622), lines 103-8, in DeGedichten van Constantijn Huygens, edited by J. A. Worp, 9 vols (Groningen, 1892-1899), I, 246, cited inBlok, Caspar Barlaeus, 115 .7See Hardin Craig, Enchanted Glass, 119, for an account of psychological tracts available to Renaissance

writers. El licenciado Vidriera, in Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Obras completas, edited by A. ValbuenaPrat (Madrid: Aguilar, 1962), 875-88.

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Less well-known is the Glass Man Tactus in the English play Lingua (1607) byThomas Tomkis. Sitting bolt upright, hands clenched, musing on the brittlenessof life, Tactus rebuffs a bewildered Olfactus, who asks if he is hatching eggs.Still insistent, Tactus warns him that any contact will break his life, saying: ’Iam an urinal, I dare not stir for fear of cracking in the bottom’. Even loud voices,apparently, threaten his physical integrity. In the same year Thomas Walkingtonrecords that a ’ridiculous fool’ from Venice thought that his shoulders andbuttocks were made of brittle glass. Consequently he refused to sit down, andrecoiled from company lest he might break his ’crackling hinderparts’. A fearthat he might be used by a glazier to make the lights in a latticed windowprevented him from leaving the house. Another man with glass buttocks isfound in a fictitious mental asylum by the Spanish writer Polo de Medina.The man is a dandy, inordinately concerned with his appearance. One day,attending to nature’s needs, he had smashed his buttocks and was left badlyscarred. Unable to face the world with these imperfections, he had admittedhimself to the asylum. 8These and other contemporary medical and literary accounts possibly

originated in a treatise by Lemnius written in 1561. Johan van Beverwyckcited a patient of Lemnius in 1636, who had to relieve himself standing up,fearing that if he sat down his buttocks would shatter. Eighteen years laterthe Dutch poet Jacob Westerbaen and the Danish physician Thomas Bartholinwrote about a man with glass buttocks, whilst in France a contemporary compilerof anecdotes about crazed or eccentric people, Tallement des Reaux (1657),described the same derangement in Nicole du Plessis, a relation of CardinalRichelieu. Many of these accounts restricted themselves to a simple statementof facts, but a report by a royal physician, Louis de Caseneuve (1626), revealsthat the medical profession was not averse to anecdotal embellishment. The manconcerned was a glass-maker from the Parisian suburb of Saint Germain, whoconstantly applied a small cushion to his buttocks, even when standing. He wascured of this obsession by a severe thrashing from the doctor, who told him thathis pain emanated from buttocks of flesh.9

8 Thomas Tomkis, Lingua, in A Select Collection of Old English Plays, edited by Robert Dodsley and W.Carew Hazlitt, fourth edition, 15 vols (London, 1874-6), IX (1874), 331-463 (351); Walkington, OptickeGlasse, 71r; Salvador Jacinto Polo de Medina, Hospital de mcurables y viaje de este mundo y el otro (1636),edited by J. M. de Cossio, Los clásicos olvidados, Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (NBAE), 10vols (Madrid, 1928-31), X (1931), Obras escogidas, 281-318 (301).

9 Lemnius, De habitu, 141v. Compare Johan van Beverwyck, Schat der Ongesontheyt, third edition, 2

vols (Dordrecht, 1642), 380; Jacob Westerbaen, Arctoa Tempe. Ockenburgh (The Hague, 1654), 123;Thomas Bartholinus, Histonarum anatomicarum rariorum centuria I & II (Amsterdam: apud JoannemHenrici, 1654), I, 114; Tallement des Réaux: Historiettes (1657-9), edited by Antoine Adam, Bibliothèquede la Pléiade, 142, 2 vols (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1967), I, 316; Ioannes Pierius Valerianus, Hiero-glyphica ... : authore Ludovico a Casanova, consiliario et medico regio (Leyden: apud Paulum Frellon,1626), 58, in Blok, Caspar Barlaeus, 114; see also Simon Goulart, Admirable and memorable Histories,translated by E. Grimeston (London: G.Eld, 1607), 375, and Nathaniel Wanley, The Wonders of the LittleWorld: or a general History of Man in six Books (London, 1678), II, 95, citing Bartholinus, Historiarumanatomicarum, I, 114.

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Some fragile delusions affected other parts of the body. Reports of glassbones, arms, and legs appeared much later, but Early Modern accounts wereparticularly rich in allusions to glass hearts/chests, and fragile heads. TommasoGarzoni, an Italian monk, wrote a series of character sketches of mentally-disturbed people in 1586. In one of these cameos, drawn from Galen, thefragile delusion presents as a man who thought that his body consisted of onlya large head, which he protected from injury by avoiding all contact with hisfellows. lo

Garzoni’s melancholics frequently revealed an obsession with urine and theurinal. This seems to have been a general feature in other literary accounts.The Siennese melancholic who refused to urinate is one of several examples.Many Glass Men even admitted to being a glass urinal. This was a contemporarysynonym for a small flask, but it also carried a certain mystique, probably due tothe classical diagnosis of melancholy from urine, and also to the recent emergenceof ’piss-pot prophets’: specialists in urinary infections and syphilis.ll Tactusthought he was a urinal, and so did Cervantes’s Glass Licentiate, who assumedthe name Vidriera (urinal). The Urinal Man seems to have been a poor relation ofthe Glass Man, as contemporary attitudes show. James Howell, HistoriographerRoyal to Charles II, spoke disparagingly of a Urinal Man in Venice ( 1621 ): ’Con-sidering the brittleness of the stuff, it was an odd kind of melancholy in him thatcould not be persuaded but he was an urinal, surely he deserved to be pissed inthe mouth’. And in an obscure Spanish dramatic version of the Glass Licentiateby Agustin Moreto, Carlos cries out when he accidentally knocks himself. Hislackey, Gerundio, asks if he has chipped himself, and Carlos replies, ’No, butI think I may be cracked.’ Gerundio suggests he take a drink to see if he is

leaking anywhere, offering to plug up the affected part with wax. When thedanger is past, still teasing, Gerundio persuades Carlos to equip himself witha protective sheath (vasera), but his comment that now he looks like a urinalenrages Carlos. 12

Reasons for this fear of breaking are complex. Folk culture and bibli-cal tradition supplied several interpretations, chiefly connected with chastity,

10 For glass feet see du Laurens, A Discourse, 10. For glass bones, arms and legs see Binneveld, EenPsychiatrisch Verleden, passim. See also ’The Broken Heart’ (1633), in John Donne: The Elegies and theSongs and Sonnets, edited by Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 51-2. For head delusionssee Tommaso Garzoni, L’Ospidale dei’ pazzi incurabili, in Opere, edited by Paolo Cherchi (Naples: CasaEditrice Fulvio, 1972), 254; Goulart, Admirable Histories, 372; and Thomas Milles, The Treasurie ofauncient and moderne Times, 2 vols (London: W. Jaggard, 1613-19), I, 477.

11 For urine obsessions see Garzoni, L’Ospidale, 336, 343; Walkington, Opticke Glasse, 70r-72v; DuLaurens, A Discourse, 132; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, edited by Holbrook Jackson(London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1972), I, 400, citing Cristóbal de Vega, Opera nempe: Liber de arte medendi(Leyden: apud Gilielmum Rovillium, 1576), and du Laurens, A Discourse. Thomas Brian, The Piss-Prophet, reprint of first edition (London, 1637; 1968); K. D. Gardner, Jr., ’The art and gentle science ofpisse-pot prophecy’, Hawaii Medical Journal, xxx (1971), 166-9.

12 James Howell, Familiar Letters or Epistolae Ho-Elianae, 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1903), I, 63.Agustin Moreto y Cabaña, La Gran Comedia: El licenciado Vidriera, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles(BAE), 71 vols (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1858-1902), XXXIX (1873), 264.

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purity, or fortune. Several Spanish writers represented the goddess of fortuneas a glass figure to denote her inconstancy. Fortuna’s palace in Juan deMena’s Labyrinth of Fortune (1444) was supported by glass pillars. By the earlyseventeenth century the modified emblem reflected recent optical innovations.In a play called The Melancholic Gypsy (1614) by Gaspar Aguilar, for instance,the benighted Numa protests that although a lover is blind, he can still seeif he wears the spectacles of his honour. As fortune made them out of glass,which makes them very fragile, their use, he says, is to be commended. The

specific application to women of this capricious honour is chastity. There arecountless images in popular works of the misogynistic ’fragile-fickle’ kind, butliterary usage also had its lighter moments. Trying to ingratiate himself into theFamily of Love, the gallant Gerardine in Thomas Middleton’s work (1608), saysto one of the Brothers, a merchant: ’0 my most precious Dryfat, may none of thydaughters prove vessels with foul bungholes... but all true and honorable Dryfatslike thyself.’ 13 3

Purity, of course, had another meaning for the mystical writers. Speaking ofchastity, the French bishop Saint Franqois de Sales compared human bodies toglasses, because they could not be carried together without danger of collisionand breakage. The motif of fragile vessels also appears in Sebastidn de Cordoba’sexpurgated version of Garcilaso’s poetry, and in Santa Teresa’s works, for whomthe broken vessel meant sinfulness: ’Lord, put not so precious a liquid in thisfragile container, for you know that I shall spill it’.14 Something similar wasintended by Sancho Panza, who said of Quixote’s ingenuousness that he hada soul like a pitcher, to which the Knight of the Wood replied, somewhatenigmatically, that if the blind were to lead the blind, they were both in dangerof falling into a pit. 15 5

Cervantes was clearly alluding to the complex, and often conflicting biblicaltradition of earthenware vessels, one aspect of which, as Sancho knew, stoodfor simplicity and truthfulness. Another aspect, referring to man’s fleetingexistence, attributed his origins and destiny to clay or earth. Saint Augustineand the Church Fathers had warned of man’s ephemeral nature by reference

13 Juan de Mena, El laberinto de Fortuna, edited by J. M. Blecua, Clásicos castellanos (Madrid:Espasa-Calpe, 1943). Gaspar Honorat de Aguilar, La gitana melancólica, BAE, XLIII (1857), 150.Thomas Middleton, The Family of Love, edited by Simon Shepherd (Nottingham: Nottingham DramaTexts, 1979), IV. 2. 1312.

14 Saint François de Sales, Introduction a la vie dévote (1604), edited by Henry Bordeaux, CollectionNelson (Paris: Nelson, Editeurs, [1910]), 182; ’Vida’, in Obras de Santa Teresa de Jesús, edited by P.Silverio de Santa Teresa C.D., Biblioteca Mistica Carmelitana (BMC), 9 vols (Burgos, 1915-24), I. 131;see also Sebastián de Córdoba Sacedo, ’Egloga I’, in Garcilaso a lo divino (1575), edited by Glen R. Gale(Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1971), 165, line 279.

15 El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, II, 13, edited by F. Rodriguez Marin, fourth edition,10 vols (Madrid, 1947-9), IV (1948), 283. Also see Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos, Comedia Eufrosina,edited by Eugenio Asensio (Madrid: CSIC, 1951), III. 4. 209, et passim; and Baltasar Gracián, El Criticón,edited by Antonio Prieto (Barcelona: Planeta S.A., 1985), 467.

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to the fragile, corruptible body.l6 This was still in vogue in the seventeenthcentury, especially after official Tridentine recognition of the Apocryphal booksas Scriptural Canon in 1546. Their eschatological imagery overlapped with thatof Saint John’s Apocalypse, except that the optimistic note of bodily resurrectionwas missing: life ended when the soul left the body. Consequently Man’sbody was represented as a fragile, transient, earthenware receptacle, whoseintegrity signified possession of wisdom (Ecclesiasticus 21. 17; 22. 7; Isaiah30. 14), and vitality, and conversely the broken jar or boat denoted death.The image is used in Velez de Guevara’s play, The Potter of Ocana, whichrevives a medieval fable of the ass who stumbles and smashes his load ofglass jars. Cursing the ass roundly, its owner suddenly reflects, as did theearlier English fable, on the connection between broken crockery and theDay of Judgement: ’Earth returns to the earth,/ And the clay returns toclays

II. Photophobia: windows on the mindEmphasis on the body thus accounts in large measure for the Glass Man’s fragiledelusion. The second characteristic of the Glass Man was his aversion to sunlight.Hippocrates was among the first to refer to this photophobia. Apparently of onlypassing interest to physicians in relation to other manifestations, it neverthelesspresented contemporary dramatists with a useful emblem in their melancholicstereotyping. When the king asks the melancholic Hamlet: ’How is it that theclouds still hang on you?’, his reply signals photophobia: ’Not so, my lord; I amtoo much in the sun’. Tactus was also troubled by sunlight:

No sooner had I parted out of doors,But up I held my hands before my face,To shield mine eyes from th’light’s piercing beams;When I protest I saw the sun as clear

Through these my palms, as through a perspective.No marvel; for when I beheld my fingers,I saw my fingers were transformed to glass 8

The Glass Man’s fear of sunlight must have been connected with the notion that

16 Genesis 2. 7; 3. 19; Psalms 114. 29; Job 34. 14; Daniel 2. 31; Ecclesiastes 12. 6; Saint Augustine,Specchio dei peccatori, edited by Ugo Antonio Amico, reprint of 1866 edition by Gaetano Romagnoli(Bologna: Editrice Forni, 1968), 6-7. See also Fray Juan Eusebio Nieremberg y Ottin, De la diferenciaentre lo temporal y eterno, y crisol de desengaños (1640), in Obras escogidas, edited by D. Eduardo Zepeda-Henriquez, BAE, 104, 2 vols (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1957), II, 39, and 53.

17 Luis Vélez de Guevara, El ollero de Ocaña, BAE, XLV (1858), 151b. Compare A Mirror for Fools. TheBook of Burnel the Ass by Nigel Longchamp of the Benedictine Priory of Christchurch, Canterbury [ 1180],edited by J. H. Mozley (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 13-14; and Thomas Lodge,’Sonnet XI’, Phillis: Honoured with pastorall sonnets, elegies, and amorous delights (London, 1593), 17.

18 Hippocrates Liber de insania et melancholia, cited by Burton, Anatomy, I, 386; Du Laurens, ADiscourse, 89, 82, and 96; Hamlet, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Peter Alexander(London and Glasgow: Collins, 1964), I. 2. 66-7; Tomkis, Lingua, 350.

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his body was, not fragile, but transparent, as the poet John Donne said: &dquo;Tismuch that Glasse should bee/ As all confessing, and through-shine as I’. Tactusdescribed this phenomenon, whilst also providing an exposition of one side of thecontemporary debate on the seat of the soul and its rationalizing faculty:

Opening my breast, my breast was like a windowThrough which I plainly did perceive my heart:In whose two concaves I discern’d my thoughtsConfus’dly lodged in great multitude. 19

The other side of the debate is seen in a reference to photophobia by Lope deVega, whose melancholic character, Fernando, in La Dorotea apparently favoursa link between the soul and the eyes. Exclaiming after a lover’s quarrel that heis dying, he has the window closed to stop the light from striking his eyes.His soul, he declares, has departed for ever. Lope’s inspiration for this sceneprobably comes from a similar scene in La Celestina [ 1499] .2° Barlaeus’s letterto Huygens in 1647 reveals that he has suffered the same ’spiritual blindness’during his latest bout of Melancholy. He says that he was senseless like Niobe,and like Morpheus, a creator of idle, fanciful imaginations. Claiming to be theequal of Huygens’s Moria and Eufrasia, imprisoned by his eyes, he says he meritsa place in the latter poem. Eufrasia (Eyebright) was written to comfort a womanfor the loss of an eye, pointing out that many with two eyes are still blind inspirit. Among those listed in this category are victims of delusions arising fromthe vapours of inflamed blood.21 1

The controversy over spiritual blindness was long and fierce. Galen had saidthat the melancholic’s inordinate fear originated in a blindness of the brainproduced by looking on a black substance, whose colour it absorbed. Rejectingthis, du Laurens agreed with Averrhoes that as colours were only a visual object,they influenced nothing but the eyes, and that although there was a reciprocalrelationship between mind and eyes, there was no eye in the brain. Besidesdisclosing his familiarity with trends in optical sciences, the passage also betraysthe persistent animosity between philosopher and physician. And yet it is curioushow closely his argument runs to that of the fifteenth-century philosopher, Picodella Mirandola (1463-94), a pioneer of the Renaissance Neo-Platonist move-ment. Pico had compared the mind to an eye, saying: ’The eye on the corporalworld is the mind in the spiritual field’. Even if the eye possessed its own innate

19 ’A Valediction of my Name in the Window’, in John Donne: The Elegies, 64. Compare also: ’Thesefollies are within you, and shine through you like the water in an urinal, that not an eye that sees you butis a physician to comment on your malady’ (Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona (1584), II. 1. 35).Tomkis, Lingua, 350.

20 Lope de Vega y Carpio, La Dorotea, edited by José Manuel Blecua (Madrid: Ediciones de la

Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1955), I. 5. 155; Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Caltsto yMelibea, edited by Dorothy S. Severin (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1969), 47.

21 Barlaeus to Huygens, loc. cit. (ref. 6); Huygens, Eufrasia: Oogen-troost, in De Gedichien, IV, 89.

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light, he claimed, it still needed external light with which to see colours and enjoythe gift of vision. 22By the early seventeenth century the developing sciences of optics, physiog-

nomy, and psychology were still borderline disciplines which attracted manyliterate men. Looking at the world through corrective spectacles became aliterary commonplace, and countless works were published bearing the words’Looking Glass’ or similar in the title, with the implication for the layman thatoptical glass facilitated discovery of one’s inner nature. An allegorical work, ElCriticon by Gracian is laced with these clairvoyant devices. One notable characteris the Seer of Everything, who claims to penetrate mens’ hearts and brains as ifthey were made of glass. Such perspicacity has taught him that many living peoplelack a soul. 23Given this prevailing spirit of inquiry, it is likely that the melancholic’s photo-

phobia was related to a fear of self-revelation. Yet paradoxically, the very source ofthis apprehension also exerted a strong attraction on its victim. Walkingtonexplained this paradox using a traditional biblical emblem: although the soul wasnot completely blind like a bat, it was, like an owl, dazzled by sunlight, seeing asif through a latticed window, the body casting a sable night over the understand-ing. The Knight of the Wood’s rejoinder to Sancho Panza about the blind leadingthe blind may allude to this emblem. It could have also inspired the bat delusionsuffered by Cellini’s jailer, the constable of the castle of Sant’Angelo. This man,Cellini implies, was not truly afflicted with Melancholy, as it is Cellini himself whoI xperiences a blinding mystical revelation whilst he is immured, in response to hisfervent prayers to see the sun. Inspired by this vision, he prophesies his imminentrelease, which both impresses and frightens his jailers. His poetic interpretationof the experience, written for the constable, earns his release.24The poem describes his soul illuminated with a divine light. This was a

well-known conceit in the sixteenth century. The concept of light striking the soulas through a latticed window had come from a passage in Song of Songs, whichwas repeatedly used by the mystical writers San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa,Sebastidn de Cordoba, and Giordano Bruno.25 However, accounts of their efforts

22 Du Laurens, A Discourse, 90. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, De Hominis Dignitate Heptaplus de Enteet Uno, edited by Eugenio Garin, 3 vols (Florence, 1942), I, 289.

23 For corrective spectacles see Don Quijote, II. 19, edited by Rodriguez Marín, V, 92; Salvador JacintoPolo de Medina, Academias del Jardín (1630), in Obras escogidas, 105-270 (136); Rodrigo Fernández deRibera, Los anteojos de mejor vista, edited by Victor Infantes de Miguel (Madrid: Edición Legasa Literaria,1979). Between 1475-1640 at least 28 known works printed in England bore this title (Titles of EnglishBooks and of Foreign Books Printed in England, edited by A. F. Allison & V. F. Goldsmith (Folkestone:Dawson, 1976), I, ’1475-1640’). Gracián, Criticón, 467.

24 Walkington, Opticke Glasse, 11. Benvenuto Cellini: la Vita, edited by Guido Davico Binino (Turin:Giulio Einaudi, 1973), I, CVII, 237ff; CXXII, 268-71.

25 ’Noche oscura’, in Obras de San Juan de la Cruz, edited by P. Silverio de Santa Teresa C.D., BMC, 5vols (Burgos, 1929-31), II (1929), 457, et passim; ’Vida’, in Obras de Santa Teresa, BMC, I, 157; Sebastiánde Córdoba, ’Canción IV’, Garcilaso a lo divino, 131, line 65; Giordano Bruno Nolano, ’Primo Dialogo’,De gl’heroici furori (1585), edited by Francesco Flora, Collezione di Classici Italiani, second series, 374 vols(Turin: Editrice Torinese, 1918-), XIX (1928),13, quoting Song of Songs 2. 9.

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to separate soul from body (commentatio or meditatio mortis) frequently evokedimages of light as a consuming source of heat. A mystical love poem by GiordanoBruno, for example, crystallizes his religious Melancholy into condensed imagesof dryness and heat, and establishes a relationship between eyes, soul, and body:’Beauty’, he said, ’coursing through the eyes to the heart, made a hot furnace inmy breast, first absorbing all the visual humour in a glaring viscous wave, andthen devouring the other bodily fluids, and liberating the dry element, with whichit rendered me into formless dust’.26

This strange polar attraction-repulsion towards light experienced by mysticsand melancholics found an explanation in Pico’s philosophy. Light as a sourceof heat was seen as the optimum means of heating and reviving the spirit orluce, which linked the celestial soul to the earth-bound body. Developing thistheory a hundred years later, the philosopher Donio explained photophobia insimilar terms. The spirit, he said, should ideally be surrounded by hot, lucentsubstances, ’but in the body it is enclosed in cold, dark, crass flesh and bones.A sign of its resultant discontent is that it cannot bear the direct light of the sun,which should be eminently congenial to itA related literary convention, that of the soul imprisoned in a dark, clay body,

owes much to this debate, as also to the Song of Songs, seen as an allegoricalaccount of the flight of the soul towards communion with God.28 Imprisonmenthad, in any case, become one of life’s vicissitudes, which lent the motif addedflavour. Writing from prison about his Melancholy in 1643, James Howell said:’I consider that my soul while she is cooped within these walls of flesh, is butin a kind of perpetual prison. And now my body corresponds with her in thesame condition; my body is the prison of the one, and these brick walls theprison of the other’. Cervantes’s Vidriera was presumably referring to the soul’sambivalent photosensitivity, when he invited his friends to test his remarkableunderstanding, acquired through being made of glass instead of flesh. As glasswas transparent and delicate, he explained, the soul could function more effi-ciently than if it were enclosed in a dense, earthen body.29

It seemed that acquisition of intellectual genius, as the first stage in the soul’s

26 For an authoritative account of commentatio see M. A. Screech, ’Good Madness in Christendom’, inThe Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, edited by W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, &Michael Shepherd, 3 vols (London: Tavistock Publications, 1985-8), I (1985), 25-39 (29). Bruno,’Dialogo quarto’, De gl’heroici furori, 205. For other mystical trances see Sebastián de Córdoba, ’EglogaII’ Garcilaso a lo divino, 185, lines 500-08; and Thomas Lodge, ’Sonnet XIX’, Phillis, 25.27 Pico, De Hominis Dignitate, 271. He said that, according to Moses, uomo came from Latin HUMUS.

Donio cited by D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (London:University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 193.

28 See The Merchant of Venice [1594], V. 1. 58-65; José de Valdivielso, ’El Hospital de Locos’, in Teatrocompleto, edited by Ricardo Arias y Arias and Robert V. Piluso (Madrid: Ediciones Isla, 1975), I, 84, and105; Sebastián de Córdoba, ’Soneto XXV’, Garcilaso a lo divino, 119; and Ferreira, La Eufrosina, III. 2.177.

29 ’To Sir Bevis Thelwall, knight (Petri ad vincula), at Peter House in London’ (1643), in Howell,Familiar Letters, II, 79. See also’To Sir Ed.B., knight’ (1635), II, 54. Cervantes, Licenciado Vidriera, 880b.

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mystical ascent, was caused by dryness of the brain, more than by temperature.Du Laurens specifically mentioned the Glass Man in this context, stressing thatdryness was at the root of the melancholic delusion. If these men happened tolook at some common household article, he said, such as a pitcher or glass, thisobject would impose itself upon their self-perception. But he also endorsed theAristotelian theory of over-heating, saying that when the humour grows hot,it causes a kind of divine rapture called Enthousiasma, which incites men toimitate philosophers, poets, and prophets. Dryness was indeed a notable featureof mystical experiences, as San Juan de la Cruz confirmed. In popular literature,Cervantes’s Vidriera also becomes very thin, and ’dried up’ after his illness, andin Lingua Olfactus attributes Tactus’s Melancholy to dryness of the brain.3oThe ultimate stage of these mystical excursions of the soul was evidently a

purification by fire on the Day of Judgement. According to the Book of Rev-elations all bodies fused on this day into one ’glassy sea’. The ascetic writerPadre Nieremberg explained that Saint John used the symbol to signify Man’stransparency in the sight of God, whose divine vision penetrates Man as easilyas if he were glass. A lay variation on this meaning is found in a report fromVenice in 1621 about glass-making, when James Howell mused on the apparentconnection between glass and the Day of Judgement:

But when I pried into the materials, and observed the furnaces and the calcina-tions, the transubstantiations, the liquefactions that are incident to this art, mythoughts were raised to a higher speculation: that if this small furnace-fire hathvirtue to convert such a small lump of dark dust and sand into such a preciousclear body as crystal, surely that grand universal fire which shall happen at theday of judgement, may by its violent ardour vitrify and turn to one lump ofcrystal the whole body of the earth, nor am I the first that fell upon this conceit.31 1

There could be no literary metaphor more germane to this eschatologicalconcept than that of the alchemist’s still or ’limbeck’. Just a few years beforeHowell’s observation, John Donne’s ’Elegy to the Lady Marckham’ had portrayedthe hand of Death, like a potter, re-fashioning the dead body into porcelain. Thepoem ends by describing the fire on the Day of Judgement, which will blend allinto an elixir capable of giving new life. 32

30 Du Laurens, A Discourse, 97, 95, and 86. Compare Historia Vitae et Mortis (1623), in The Works ofFrancis Bacon, edited by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols(London, 1857-1901), II (1857), 119. Saint John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, edited byThomas Baker, fourth edition (London, 1916), 38; Cervantes, Licenciado Vidriera, 888b; Tomkis, Lingua,351. Compare Lope, La Dorotea, I. 5. 167-68.

31 Nieremberg, De la hermosura de Dios y su amabilidad, in Obras, 373-4; compare The Seer ofEverything in Gracián, Criticón, 467. Revelations 4. 6; 15. 2; compare Daniel 12. 3; and Wisdom 3. 7.Howell, Familiar Letters, 63.

32 ’Elegie uppon the Death of the Ladie Marckham [1609]’, in The Complete Poems of John Donne, editedby Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols (Blackburn: The Fuller Worthies’ Library, 1872-3), II, 128, lines 18-28;Thomas Lodge, Phillis, 54.

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III. The familiar in a bottle : immortal questsThe Glass Man’s fatal attraction for light thus betrayed a profound concern forthe welfare of the soul as the substance of life. Many contemporary medicalaccounts of melancholics list a series of delusions focussing on the existentialquestion - men of butter, wax, mud, and straw - all motivating elaborateschemes of protection for the body. But evidence of a preoccupation with the soulis also found in a series of derangements which, like photophobia, concentratedmore on essence than accident. They merit inc’usion here because of a commonpurpose: to preserve the contents of a fragile vessel and so guarantee its vitalfunction. One obsession was based on the oil-lamp principle. Garzoni cites oneNicoletto da Gattia who thought that he was the wick of an oil-lamp. A fear ofburning too weakly motivated his request that people blow on him from all sidesto fan the flame. The same delusion was recorded by Walkington. Existentialconfusion also afflicted Cellini’s jailer at Sant’Angelo, who periodically imaginedthat he was either dead or a pitcher of oil, although it is unclear what behaviourthis last aberration provoked. 33Emphasis on contents and/or function rather than container suggests a variant

on the body/soul preoccupation which probably still originates in Aristotle, butwhich aspires, not to commentatio, but to immortality. Aristotle’s image of aburning lamp as a metaphor for life was subsequently assimilated into Galen’shumoral physiology. Comparing the heart to the wick of an oil lamp, andthe blood to oil, Galen claimed that the heat of the wick attracted the oilin a continuous process. Doubtless influenced by Galen, Walkington’s tractincorporates the motif, comparing man’s heart to the flame of a burning lamp,the moisture serving as its oil. As in the lamp, he said, there had to be efficientuse of fuel; too much heat exhausted the oil, whereas an excess of oil suffocatedthe flame. He warned against extravagant living which would exhaust the supplyof oil and extinguish the lamp prematurely. 34

Besides medical influence on the Lamp Man’s self-perception, popular folk-lore also contributed the notion of the Life-Index - a charm consisting of anabsent person’s urine or blood preserved in a corked bottle. Any changes inits appearance signified illness or death. When used as a repository of luck,guaranteeing protection against evil spells, this was known as the ’witches’bottle’. It was a short step from the idea of a vessel containing a beneficentgenius, whose release by breaking the pot would bring disaster, to the idea thatthe vessel was the prison of a disarmed evil spirit. This must have been the basis

33 For Oil Lamp/Candle Men see Garzoni, L’Ospidale, 254, and Walkington, Opticke Glasse, 70v. ForOil/Water Jug Men see Cellini, La Vita, I, CVII, 237; and Lorenzo Selva, Della Metamorfosi cioètrasformazione del virtuoso, second edition (Florence: Filippo Giunti, 1598), 154, cited in G. Hainsworth,’La source du Licenciado Vidriera’, Bulletin Hispanique, xxxii (1930), 70-2 (71).

34 Peter H. Niebyl, ’Old Age, Fever, and the Lamp Metaphor’, Journal of the History of Medicine, xxvi(1971), 351-68 (356). Walkington, Opticke Glasse, 33r, and see 57r. See also Luigi Cornaro, ’La vitasobria’ (Padua, 1558); Leonard Lessius, Hygiasticon (Antwerp, 1614), cited in Niebyl, 363.

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of the final variant on the Glass Man - the familiar in a bottle. Generally definedas a ’familiar devil or spirit supposed to be under man’s power’, and obligedto ’attend at call’ (OED), the most famous of these was the fifteenth-centurySpanish sorcerer/alchemist, Enrique de Villena, who was popularly supposedto have preserved himself in a glass flask. Literature through the ages keptthis tradition alive, and his name became a metonym for the familiar in Spain.Quevedo alluded to him in several works. The connection between familiarsand melancholics is also evident in Salas Barbadillo’s The Inveterate Malcontent,whose protagonist is served by ’ministers of the flask, those the world call famili-ars’, in his quest for happiness.3sBy the early seventeenth century, it seems, awareness of familiars was acute.

Scot and Wier described and derided the practice, whilst in Spain the executionof the hated Italian Caraffa brothers invited allusions to familiars, becausegarrafa was another synonym (besides vidriera and redoma) for the urinal orflask. Said the court chronicler Luis Zapata (c.1592): ’On reflection, onecould say that they lived up to the meaning of their name: bottling up allthe wealth and estates they could during the papacy of their uncle, andfinally breaking like fragile flasks, when one was garrotted, and the otherquartered’. The same imagery recurs in a burlesque application for entranceinto a literary academy, when a candidate declares: ’Licentiate Garrafa, Butlerof Hippocrates, Dispenser of Dioscorides, desires to infuse himself into thisacademy, and although he is so crafty/bottle-shaped (redomado), as everyoneagrees, he would undertake to evacuate conceits, because he has as manygraduations as the best university by virtue of the courses he has conducted’.His application is rejected because no poet, say the Junta, ever came out of abottle.36

Conclusion

Throughout this study of melancholic glass delusions - the Glass Man, the UrinalMan, the Lamp Man, and the Familiar in a Bottle - there emerges a constantpreoccupation with the nature of body and soul, doubtless influenced by a recentschism in the Christian world over the question of salvation and the after-life.

35 On Villena see Polo de Medina, Obras completas, 274; Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, ’Sueño de lamuerte’, in Sueños y discursos de verdades descubridoras de abusos, vicios y engaños en todos los oficios y estadosdel mundo (1627), edited by Felipe C. R. Maldonado (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1972), 206-15; andQuevedo, ’Entremés de las sombras’, Premáticas, desenfados, y entremeses (1600), edited by M. Aguilar,Colección de Autores Regocijados (Madrid, 1929), 267. Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, ’Entremésde el Malcontentadizo’, in Colección de Entremeses, Loas, Bailes, Jácaras y Mojigangas desde fines del sigloXVI a mediados del XVIII, NBAE, XVIII, edited by Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, 2 vols (Madrid, 1911), I,280; and see Luis Vélez de Guevara, El Diablo Cojuelo (1641), BAE, XXXIII (1871), 21-45.

36 Scot, Discovene, 342-58; Johann Weyer, De Praestigiis daemonum (French text of 1579), reprinted byBibliotheque Diabolique: Histoires, disputes et discours des illusions et impostures des diables, edited by T.Erastus, 2 vols (Paris, 1885), I, 303-4; Luis Zapata, Miscelánea, in Memorial Histórico Español, 50 vols(Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1851-1963), XI (1859), 244. For Licenciado Garrafa see JoséSánchez, Academias literarias del Siglo de Oro Español (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1961), 119.

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Theologians reacted to this period of free-thinking by defining strict boundariesbetween orthodoxy and heresy. Many mystics came under interrogation by theInquisition, and in this maelstrom the layman struggled to understand weightydoctrinal issues in some meaningful way, but his simple imagery often broughthim into the Inquisitorial courts. 37

For those whose faith was strong enough to shoulder the Church’s advocationto prepare oneself for dying (and there was a prolific literature on this topic) themelancholic delusion manifest itself in a fervent wish to be released from thisearthly forum. 38 James Howell’s reflections as he languished in prison embody thediverse manifestations of the glass delusion: ’The soul is a spark of immortality,she is a divine light, and the body is but a socket of clay that holds it. In some thislight goes out with an ill-favoured stench. But others have a save-all to preserve itfrom making any snuff at all’ . 39Meanwhile, those men who faltered under the burden of ’dying a good death’

embraced the marginal quest for immortality, as professed by the medievalsorcerors, but in the final reckoning the doctrine was the same - that is, healthand longevity depended upon preserving a vital life force within a fragileand translucent container. Men of letters dabbling in the newer sciences ofphysiognomy, psychology, optics and natural philosophy in their quest fora solution to the existential problem often saved themselves from ecclesi-astical censure by reserving their discussions for the academies where theycongregated.4° The legacy of these academies to the modern world, oftenmasquerading as fiction, is probably the best account there is of Melancholy.Allusions to Melancholy and theories pertaining are consciously and liberally dis-seminated through their works. These, together with the ’unwitting testimony’accompanying them, constitute a fascinating mosaic for medical historianstoday.

Surveys of modern psychiatric institutions have only revealed two specific(uncorroborated) cases of the glass delusion. Foulche-Delbosc reports findingone Glass Man in a Paris asylum, and a woman who thought she was a potsherd

37 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos ofa Sixteenth-Century Miller, translated by Johnand Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1980); Sara Tilghman Nalle,’Religion and reform in a Spanish Diocese: Cuenca, 1545-1650’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,John Hopkins University, 1983), 32, n.60,124, and 249-52.

38 For literature on purification of the anima see Martin B. Becker, ’Aspects of Lay Piety in EarlyRenaissance Florence’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, edited byCharles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 10 (Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1972-), II (1974), 177-99 (195, n.2).

39 ’To the incomparable Lady, the Lady M. Cary. London, [1657]’, Howell, Familiar Letters, III, 107.See also ’The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, in The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, edited by Agnes M. C.Latham (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 49-50; and Donne, ’A Valediction’ in The Elegies.

40 On learning as a means of conquering the fear of death see Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning andNovum Organum (1605), revised by James Edward Creighton (New York: Willey Book Company, 1900),35.

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was recorded at an asylum in Meerenberg.41 However, certain variations endurein life and literature with the same existential connotations. Michael Jackson, thepopular screen star, reputedly lives inside a plastic bubble in an aseptic world. Inliterature Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the Looking-Glass explores a strange worldbeyond the glass. Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda, threaded with allusionsto the after-life, uses glass variously as a cipher for the soul, for purity, and forlife. ’Glass,’ he says, ’is a confession, an accusation, a cry of pain’.42 Finally, arecent poem by George Szirtes resurrects that earlier Glass Man, burdened withexistential apprehension, expressing himself through familiar images of glass,clairvoyance, and psychopathology:

You leave one body, enter another, thinner thanThe one you wore. Having nothing to declareThe customs do not bother you. You passTo other gravities, no longer man or woman,But neuter as the clothes you wearAs thin and transparent as glass.

In the glass you see anatomies,Bacteria and germs in broken places.You see the future in slivers and shards

Faint, farcical lobotomies.I try to discover my disease in tracesOf tea-leaves, life-lines, livers, tarot-cards.

Impossible to read the auguries:The future waits on fiercer surgeries.

For Szirtes the thin, frangible quality of glass makes it an ideal emblem of expo-sure and danger, keeping things at a distance, whilst still exposing what is inside.He relates glass to ’the traumatic process of destabilized identity - fleeing one’scountry and upbringing for example, undergoing official and personal questionswhich raise doubts about the validity of your whole existence’. Szirtes adds thata collection of poems titled ’Being Glass’ by Emma Rose was inspired by thealcoholic breakdown of her father.43

If, as Lillian Feder believes, delusions are ’distorted communications of deeply

41 Le Licencié Vidriera nouvelle traduite en français, edited by R. Foulché-Delbosc (Paris: Librairie H.Walter, 1892), 36. J. Van Deventer, Verslag betreffende het gesticht Meerenberg over het jaar 1896 (Haarlem,1897), 79, cited in Binneveld, Een Psychiatrisch Verleden, 30, n.25. See also F. F. Blok, & D. Folmer,’Zeldzame hypochondrische wanen’, in Tijdschrift voor psychiatrie, xvi (1974), 294-300, cited in Blok,Caspar Barlaeus, 117.

42 Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda (London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1988), 376, 83, 134-5, 16, and134.

43 George Szirtes, ’Border Crossings’, in Metro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); also privatecommunication. Emma Rose, Being Glass (Berkhamsted: Priapus Press, 1982).

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suppressed human impulses’, then these literary works must contain the keyto understanding twentieth-century man in his milieu. Melancholics may wellhave been trapped in myths (some of their own making) but as several modernwriters have pointed out, the responsibility for myth-making lies just as muchwith psychiatrists. To divorce fact from fantasy simply by labelling the one as’history’ or ’medicine’, and the other as ’fiction’ is merely to create a new mythabout ourselves. Life is inextricably linked with literature, and that is why thereare no passports to a myth-free future. As Porter observes of madness in general:’What kind of a delusion would that be?’. The myth of Melancholy, at any rate,is self-perpetuating. 44

44 Lillian Feder, Madness in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980),281. On madmenand myths see ibid., 9; and Roy Porter, ’Grounds of Mental Cruelty’, The Sunday Times, 9 July 1989,p. G5, reviewing Social Order, Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective,Andrew Scull (London: Routledge, 1989).

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