Marion A. WELLS, The Secret Wound. Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance, Stanford University Press, 2007, 384 p.
ISBN 0804750467
SUMMARY
Thisbook offers a new reading of early modern romance in the light ofhistorically contemporary accounts of mind, and specifically themedical tradition of love-melancholy. The book argues that the medicalprofile of the melancholic lover provides an essential context forunderstanding the characteristic patterns of romance: narrativedeferral, epistemological uncertainty, and the endless quest for aquasi-phantasmic beloved. Unlike many recent studies of romance, thisbook establishes a detailed historical basis for investigating thepsychological structure of romance. Wells begins by tracing thedevelopment of the medical disorder first known in the Latin west as amor hereos(lovesickness) from its earliest roots in Greek and Arabic medicine toits translation into the Latin medical tradition. Drawing on thisdetailed historical material, the book considers three important earlymodern romances: Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, and Spenser's The Faerie Queene,concluding with a brief consideration of the significance of thisliterary and medical legacy for Romanticism. Most broadly, theinterdisciplinary nature of this study allows the author to investigatethe central critical problem of early modern subjectivity insubstantially new ways.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction : Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance
1- From Amor heroes to Love-Melancholy : A Medico-Literary History
2- Vunus caecum : The Secret Woud of Love-Melancholy
3- Solvite me : Epic, Romance, and the Poetic of Melancholy in the Orlando Furioso
4- Il primo error : Love-Melancholy and Romance in the Gerusalemme Liberata
5- Rewriting Romance : Arthur's "Secret Wound" and the "Lamentable Lay" of Elegy
6- "The Love-sicke hart" : Female Love-Melancholy and the Romance Quest
Conclusion : La Belle Dame Sans Merci : Romance and the dream of "Language Strange"
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marion A. Wells is Associate Professor of English at Middlebury College.