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Melancholy [ Feelings & Emotions ]

… Abstract While melancholy was essentially a solitary affliction, one that traditionally shunned society and regarded its activities as … by religious counsellors and also, increasingly, by medical professionals. Writers exploring various aspects of melancholy included Shakespeare, Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy , and the poet Thomas Gray in such works as Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard . Concepts > Feelings & …

Solitude [ Feelings & Emotions ]

… century. There was no vocabulary for loneliness in this period, but solitude was a state often associated with melancholy and thus frequently employed in a negative sense. A range of eighteenth-century writers warned about the … Concepts > Feelings & Emotions Keywords loneliness Religion Social relations Conversation Gender roles Politeness melancholy privacy In 1711 Joseph Addison spoke of his vision for his new periodical, The Spectator . In his desire to … affect spiritual, mental, and physical health. The frontispiece to Robert Burton’s seminal work, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), explicitly linked solitude and melancholy, with a visual depiction of solitude. Here, solitude was …

Samuel Taylor Coleridge [ Art and Literature ]

… childhood days and his propensity to find refuge in books and reveries to justify his dreamy temperament and bouts of melancholy. He had a quarrelsome relationship with his older brother Francis who enjoyed beating him up, but he was …

Scottish Enlightenment [ Political & Moral philosophy ]

… and situations he termed ‘ unsociable, ’ a quality he encountered in London and elsewhere and which prompted a degree of melancholy that made life almost unbearable. 2 But the passage also opens a window onto the wider subject of sociability …

Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury [ Philosophy / Art and Literature / Aristocracy ]

… of expression cripple our natural affections and capacity for rationality, leading to persecution and violence: 'the melancholy way of treating Religion is that which, according to my Apprehension, renders it so tragical, and is the … reality such dismal Tragedys in the World' ( Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,  346 [1.20]). To counter such manipulative 'melancholy' and its tragic consequences, Shaftesbury opposes the 'fierce unsociable way of modern Zealots ' ( The …