Abstract
In Plutarch’s Life of Antony, when Antony first meets Cleopatra, she appears seated on a golden barge with purple sails. The oars are made of silver, flutes play, boys and girls dressed like Cupids and Nymphs attend her, and “perfumes diffused themselves from the vessels to the shore.”1 When Shakespeare adapted the passage for Enobarbus’s magnificent reminiscence of the meeting in Antony and Cleopatra, he significantly increased the erotic charge of the description: He also infused the passage with ominous suggestions of disaster.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne
Burn’d on the water. The poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them. (2.2.196–200)2
“Medicine may be described as the science of what the body loves”
—Plato, Symposium, 186c
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Plutarch, “Antony,” in Plutarch’s Lives, Volume 2, trans. John Dryden, ed. Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 496.
On the ubiquity of the discourse of lovesickness in early modern England, see Lesel Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
On the relation of Burton’s Anatomy to medical texts in Latin and the vernacular, see Mary Ann Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading the Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: Cambridge, 2010), 77–111.
Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella, “Jacques Ferrand and the Tradition of Lovesickness in Western Culture,” in A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. and trans. Jacques Ferrand, Donald A. Beecher, and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 1–201, 26–38.
Plato, “Symposium,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, trans. Michael Joyce (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 526–574.
Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 6–18; Beecher and Ciavolella, “Jacques Ferrand,” 62–70, 39–54.
Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 107–109.
Jacques Ferrand, Traité de l’essence et guérison de l’amour ou de la mélancolie érotique (1610), ed. Gérard Jacquin and Éric Foulon (Paris: Anthropos, 2001), 74–75. The title page of the 1610 edition of Treatise on Lovesickness identifies Ferrand as being from Agen, (M. Jacques Ferrand, Agenais). The commendatory verses in Latin, Greek, and French are from lawyers who were friends and relatives of Ferrand from Agen and the surrounding area. Ferrand, Traité de l’essence et guérison de l’amour, 1, 6–8.
Petronius, “Satyricon,” in Petronius, Satyricon; Seneca Apocolocyntosis, ed. E. H. Warmington and W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), section 43: “adhuc salax erat. Non mehercules illum puto in domo canem reliquisse.”
Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 104–106. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 6–14.
Avicenna, Liber canonis, trans. Gerard of Cremona (Venice, 1555), book III, fen 1, tr. 5, ch. 23. “Fortasse necessarium erit, ut isti reganter regimine habentium melancholiam, et maniam, et alcutu-but” (Arabic cuturub—i.e., lycanthropy). Haly Abbas’s medical epitome, al-Kitāb al-mālikī (Pantegni) in Opera Omnia Ysaac, trans. Constantius Africanus (Lyon, 1515), chapter 7, treatise 9 (c. 950 A D) is entitled “De malinconia et canina et amore causisque eorum et signis” [on the causes and signs of melancholy, lycanthropy and love-sickness]. See Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Book 3 Love Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 1.1.1.4, p. 141.
My translation. Poem 31: Sappho, Greek Lyric: Sappho and Alcaeus, ed. David A. Campbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 78–81.
Longinus, “On the Sublime,” in Aristotle: The Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 10.2.
Hippocrates, “On the Diseases of Young Women,” in Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Littré (Amsterdam: Adolf Hakkert, 1978), 8.469–471. Quoted in Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, 377, n. 17.
François Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre (Paris, Garnier, 1971), 160–164 (chapter 31).
Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, ed. and trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1985), Speech 7, chapter 11, p. 168. Ferrand rejects drunkenness as a therapy. Various authorities came down on opposite sides of the issue, see Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness, 320–321, 538, n. 9.
Sarah Toulalan, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 93.
J. H. Kellogg, Plain Facts for Old and Young (Burlington, IA: Segner and Condit, 1891), 302. Both Slyvester Graham (1794–1851), inventor of the Graham cracker, and John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes (1852–1943), were extremely concerned to eliminate masturbation as a threat to public health, and both advocated a “purifying” vegetarian diet high in fiber to encourage regular evacuation of the bowels.
See also Jayme A. Sokolow, Eros and Modernization: Sylvester Graham, Health Reform, and the Origins of Victorian Sexuality in America (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), 77–126.
For England, see Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Operations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (New York: Longman, 1998) and Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners 1550–1680 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
On issues of historical classification of disease, see Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 1–19.
Kevin Patrick Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals, and the Urban Poor: London’s “Foul Wards,”1600–1800 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 15–29.
Johannes Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England (Bristol PA: Jessica Kingsley, 1994), 1–3.
Copyright information
© 2014 Ian Frederick Moulton
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Moulton, I.F. (2014). Jacques Ferrand’s On Lovesickness: Love and Medicine. In: Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137405050_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137405050_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48339-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-40505-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)