Summer, Sun and SAD in Early Modern England

Abstract

Utilising a corpus of popular health regimens, including Robert Burton's magnum opus The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), this article takes account of the climatic conditions that shaped contemporary understandings of emotional cycles, with specific reference to sunlight. As such, this article moves beyond previous histories of sunlight that have cast it as a purely material force, and contributes an entangled environmental, embodied and emotional history of sunlight in early modern England. England's interest in climate, I argue, was less characterised by chronic malaise than by a complex matrix of passions and affections. From the dog days of summer when choler ran high, to the dark, melancholy evenings of midwinter, the English climate bred a cycle of competing passions. Such a cycle is indicative of a much more complex relationship between seasons and emotions than is reflected in the existing historiography. Rather than producing a fluctuating cycle of different moods because of an essential biological link between seasons and feelings, the early modern climate produced a range of affects that were contingent upon how people understood weather, climate, sunlight and their influences.