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

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 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.