The book

The Language of Melancholy

by Robert Vinkesteijn

2025 · 243 pages · 1040449042

This book explores how the demise of the traditional language of melancholy lies at the root of contemporary difficulties in engaging with darker aspects of human affective experience. Melancholy – or melancholia – was a concept transmitted for millennia through a living tradition involving philosophers, physicians, poets, theologians, novelists and artists. Over the years, varied analogies, metaphors, images and ideas amassed around this notion of melancholy, and those suffering from it had powerful means to speak and write about their experiences. After the discarding of melancholy as a diag…