'Let Lovers Sigh Out the Rest’: Witnessing the Breath in the Early Modern Emotional Body

Tsentourou, P
Date: 2 October 2021
Publisher
Springer
Publisher DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74443-4_9
Abstract
This essay examines how breath is observed, recorded, and accounted for in cases of love melancholy in early modern literary and medical texts. It draws on the poetry of George Herbert and the works of Robert Burton and Jacques Ferrand on lovesickness to argue that writing on the respiration of the melancholic lover in the Renaissance ...
This essay examines how breath is observed, recorded, and accounted for in cases of love melancholy in early modern literary and medical texts. It draws on the poetry of George Herbert and the works of Robert Burton and Jacques Ferrand on lovesickness to argue that writing on the respiration of the melancholic lover in the Renaissance involves a process of performative displacement as well as entanglement, most visible in the practice of intertextuality. As Tsentourou shows, intertextual references to emotional breathing blur the binary between patient and physician, casting bodies and texts as spaces where the detached witness conspires with the lovesick subject, and, in turn, with the reader.
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HASS Penryn

Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

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© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access. This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Except where otherwise noted, this item's licence is described as © The Author(s) 2021. Open Access. This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.