Love, madness and social order: love melancholy in France and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Abstract

The concept of "illness's social course" can be approached from two stand-points. We can trace both the way the social world shapes the course of an illness and the way an illness' symptoms shape the social world. The purpose of this study is to locate the specific illness of love melancholy in a specific historical and social context, namely that of France and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in order to explain the intense discussion on the disorder during that period. This attempt is done with respect to the two dimensions of the concept of "illness' social course" and in the light of constructivist commentary on psychological disorders, which regards them as local stress idioms shaped by a specific social and cultural context.