"Love in the Renaissance"
by Andre DuLaurnes, A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight; of Melancholic Diseases; of Rheums, and of Old Age. 1599.
Chapter X: Of another kind of melancholy which cometh by the extremity of love.
There is another kind of melancholy very ordinary and common, which the Greek physicaians call Erotic because it cometh of a fury and raging love. The Arabians call it Iliscus, and the common sort [called it] the divine passion, imputing the cause thereof to the petty god which the poets have made so great reports of.... I intend to manifest unto every man by the description of this melancholy how greatly a violent and extreme love may tyrannize in commanding both mind and body.
Love, therefore, having abused the eyes as the proper spies and porters of the mind, maketh a way for itself smoothly to glance along through the conducting guides, and passing without any perseverance in this sort through the veins unto the liver, doth suddenly imprint a burning desire to obtain the thing which is or seemeth worthy to be beloved, setteth concupiscence on fire, and beginneth by this desire all the strife and contention. But fearing herself too weak to encounter with reason the principal part of the mind, she posteth in haste to the heart to surprise and win the same. Whereof when she is once sure, as ot the the strongest hold, she afterward assaileth and setteth upon reason and all the other principal powers of the mind so fiercely as that she subdueth them and maketh them her vassals and slaves. Then is all spoiled, the man is quite undone and cast away. The senses are wandering to and fro, up and down. Reason is confounded, the imagination corrupted, the talk fond and senseless, the silly loving worm cannot any more look upon anything but his idol. All the functions of the body are likewise perverted. He becometh pale, lean, swooning, without any stomach to his meat, hollow and sunk-eyed, and cannot (as the poet sayeth) see the night either with his eyes or breast. You shall find him weeping, sobbing, sighing, and redoubling his sighs, and in continual restlessness, avoiding company, loving solitariness, the better to feed and follow his foolish imaginations. ... Love corrupteth the imagination and may be the cause of melancholy or of madness. For in thus busying both the body and the mind, it so drieth the humors as that the whole frame of temperature especially that of the brain is overthrown and marred.
Chapter XI: The means to cure the love, foolish and melancholic.
Here are two ways to cure this amorous melancholy. The one is the enjoying of the thing beloved. The other resteth in the skill and pains of a good physician.... If therefore it happen unto any physician to meet with some of these melancholy patients thus ravished of love, he must first of all assay to draw him with fair words from these fond and foolish imaginations, showing him the danger whereinto he doth cast himself headlong and setting before him the examples of such as have been overthrown thereby as not only losing their loves but their souls also. If all this do no good, we must by some other wile and by the setting a work of divers men strive to make him hate that which so tormenteth him, as in affirming the thing to be evil, in calling his mistress light, inconstant, foolish, devoted to variety, mocking and laughing to scorn his grief and corrosive, disdainful as not acknowledging his deserts, and one which loveth better a base companion to glut her brutish lust than to entertain an honest and chaste love. And look how deeply you dispraise his lady, so highly shall you praise himself, declaring the excellence of his understanding, his worthiness and deserts. If words be not sufficient and able to cure his enchantment, as in very deed they can do very little in place where melancholic conceitedness hath taken root, we must bethink ourselves of some other course.
Removing - that is to say, the changing air - is one of the rarest remedies because that under color of that we may bestow him in some remote place and send him quite out of the country, for the sight of his mistress doth daily blow up the coals of his desire and the only reciting of her name serveth as a bait for his ardent affections to bite upon. It will be good for him to lodge in the fields, or in some pleasant house, to cause him to walk often, to keep him occupied every hour with one or other pleasant pastime, to bring into his mind a hundred and a hundred sundry thing to the end he may have no leisure to think of his love, ...
"He becometh pale, lean, swooning, without any stomach to his meat, hollow and sunk-eyed, and cannot (as the poet sayeth) see the night either with his eyes or breast. You shall find him weeping, sobbing, sighing, and redoubling his sighs, and in continual restlessness, avoiding company, loving solitariness, the better to feed and follow his foolish imaginations..."
