Exploring how attitudes toward human emotions changed in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this book emphasizes the shared concerns of the 'non-literary' and 'literary' texts produced by Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Robert Burton, and John Milton. Douglas Trevor asserts that 'scholarly' practices such as glossing texts and appending sidenotes influenced the methods by which these writers came to analyze their own moods.

Douglas Trevor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is co-editor of Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (2000), and has published articles on Michel de Montaigne, Thomas More, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, and other early modern writers. He is also a contributing editor to The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (2002), and serves on the Editorial Board of the Shakespeare Yearbook.

1. The reinvention of sadness; 2. Detachability and the passions in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender; 3. Hamlet and the humors of skepticism; 4. John Donne and scholarly melancholy; 5. Robert Burton's melancholic England; 6. Solitary Milton; Epilogue: after Galenism: angelic corporeality in Paradise Lost.