Lovesickness

Is there a thing such as a ‘crazy ex-girlfriend’? A closer inspection indicates that this idea might as well be a myth. Indeed, one only needs to take a quick look at the statistics per sex of stalking, coercive control, or emotional abuse to see that the idea of a ‘crazy ex-girlfriend’ does not match with the numbers. Still, in the media and the minds of people, the myth lives on.
This dissertation, therefore, aims to demonstrate, through an analysis of the stories of Medea, Joanna of Castile, and Rebecca Bunch, three ‘crazy ex-girlfriends’, that the myth of the crazy ex-girlfriend is a  social tool of control founded on a patriarchal fear of women's power. It also looks at how this myth is nowadays being reappropriated, and if it can be subverted. Ultimately, it aims to open a discussion about how love is nowadays still a gendered subject.

In this paper I will discuss the romantic love from a cultural anthropological aspect
focusing on the problem of the universal and relative features of love. In what terms are the definitions of love general? How can one decide that he or she is in love? Do all the people around the world feel and define their feelings and experiences regarding to love the same way? What role do the surrounding social network, the society and culture play in defining love? I aim to answer these questions on the basis of my research in the Gyimes Region of Romania. I argue that romantic love is a biosociocultural phenomenon: such a drive determined by biological and evolutionary factors and would be a numerous different sociocultural meanings. Love may be celebrated, admired, or the love passion may be kept down by certain cultural habits, social-economic rules and institutions, as it emerges like an underground river and confuses social relationships. It is certain that in the above mentioned region the romantic, passionate love has only started to be treated as a positive thing during the last few decades and it became the basis for the choice of a partner and a spouse only from the 2000s. Earlier the love was treated as subversive phenomena and tried to keep it under control. It is typical to the near past and present days that behind the
relatively universal “symptoms” of love, depending on the circumstances, they assume
something different: romantic love or illness, curse or love magic.

En el presente artículo se pretende llevar a cabo un estudio del tópico literario de la enfermedad de amor en la literatura griega de la época helenística. En este sentido se hará un repaso de la presencia de dicho tópico en los tres principales géneros literarios de la época (el epigrama, la bucólica y la épica) con un doble objetivo: por un lado estudiar la evolución del tópico en aquella época, y analizar las aportaciones al mismo de los nuevos autores. Por el otro comprobar si durante este periodo existe alguna tendencia predominante en la representación de la enfermedad de amor tal como han defendido algunos estudiosos.

This thesis critically engaged with the narrative of the Hypnerotomachia and with Poliphilo as a character within this narrative. Using narratological analysis, it examines the journey of Poliphilo and the series of symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical experiences narrated by him that are indicative of his metamorphosing interiority within a mystagogic journey. This is conducted through an analysis of the relationship between Poliphilo and his external surroundings in sequences of the narrative pertaining to thresholds; the symbolic architectural, topographical, and garden forms and spaces; and Poliphilo’s transforming interior passions pertaining to his love of antiquarianism, language and rhetoric, and of Polia, the latter of which leads to his elegiac description of lovesickness. The thesis analyses the relationship between the narrative, which functions both realistically and symbolically to portray the protagonist’s transforming self into its final state at the climax of the narrative, and the symbolic function of the architecture and objects of art within the narrative. The thesis engages with the source material for the narrative drawn from classical, medieval and humanist literature in the areas of philosophy, poetry, natural history, travel diaries and architectural treatises, using a mixed methods methodology combining philology with narratology and socio-historic approaches. It demonstrates, through analysis of the broad literary source material of the Hypnerotomachia, how antiquarian objects, buildings, gardens, and topography are used as expressive narrative devices by the author, drawing on medieval and Renaissance concepts, to demonstrate Poliphilo’s transforming interiority, symbolically, metaphorically or allegorically, established through the character’s encounters during the narrative.

The Pervinca love charm is an inedited 15th century German text, preserved in clm. 7021, ff. 165v-166r. This article represents the first attempt to make its complete transcription from the manuscript, an interpretative translation into English and a description of its content. The Pervinca charm displays a perfectly coherent rhetorical structure enriched by Christian images of brightness and fire; the structure lays on a large set of older non-Christian motifs, like: “as the wax melts, let N. melt / neither eat nor drink / neither sleep nor be awake”, as well as on ancient rituals with silver, gold, salt and wax. The theological frame gives even more power to the Pervinca, whose (Latin) name is here the key device of its irresistible magical power. A part of this charm is based on ancient curses and maledictions meant as a punishment if the beloved tried to resist the love charm. The performer needs the efficacy of the Pervinca in order to gain emotional, physical and mental power over a woman.

Dino del Garbo, an italian physician active in the first decades of the XIVth century, is well known for his commentary on Guido Cavalcanti’s poem Donna me prega. The present study offers the edition of a quodlibetal question on the imagination’s ability to alter the body, disputed in Bologna or Siena in the 1320s. We examine the medical and philosophical context in which this question occurs, by showing in particular how the debate gradually focused on the opposition between the Avicennian and Aristotelian models of the soul/body relationship. The analysis of this debate allows to shed new light on the gloss of Dino del Garbo on Donna me prega and also, incidentally, on the poem itself.

Given the central place it occupies in human life and relations, it is hardly surprising that romantic love as well as the distress caused by unrequited love is a universal phenomenon that has been explored by numerous writers over the years. Passionate love can be defined as a state of intense desire for fusion with another. When love is reciprocated and union is achieved, the lover feels a sense of fulfilment and joyful ecstasy. If the lover is rejected or scorned, however, s/he is overwhelmed with an acute sensation of emptiness, often accompanied with feelings of anxiety and despair. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on representations of lovesickness in two novels from the Victorian period: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Drawing on the sociologist Eva Illouz' Why Love Hurts? and the psychologist Dorothy Tennov's conceptualization of love and limerence, I will examine how the emotional trauma experienced by Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Rosanna Spearman in The Moonstone causes all three characters to feel intense suffering and prolonged misery, leading-eventually-to their destruction. Öz İnsan hayatı ve ilişkilerinde kapladığı merkezi yer göz önünde bulundurulduğunda, romantik aşk ve karşılıksız aşkın seneler boyunca birçok yazar tarafından incelenmiş olması hiç şaşırtıcı değildir. Tutkulu aşk bir başkasıyla birleşmeye yönelik kuvvetli bir arzu duymak olarak tanımlanabilir. Aşkı karşılık görürse seven kişi derin bir tatmin ve coşkunluk hissi yaşar. Aşkı karşılıksız kalırsa ya da hor görülürse ise şiddetli bir boşluk hissiyle beraber sıklıkla endişe ve umutsuzluk duygularına kapılır. Bu makalenin amacı, Viktorya döneminde yazılmış Emily Bronte'nin Uğultulu Tepeler ve Wilkie Collins'in Aytaşı romanlarında karasevda betimlemelerini irdelemektir. Sosyolog Eva Illouz'un Aşk Neden Acıtır? adlı çalışması ve psikolog Dorothy Tennov'un aşk ve tutkulu aşk hakkındaki düşüncelerinden yola çıkarak, bu romanlarda karakterlerin yaşadığı duygusal travmanın nasıl derin acılar hissetmelerine ve en nihayetinde yok olmalarına sebep olduğu incelenecektir.

En el presente artículo nos proponemos llevar a cabo un análisis desde una perspectiva comparatista de la presencia del tópico literario de la “enfermedad de amor” en la obra de dos autores coetáneos como son Lucrecio y Catulo. Este análisis nos permitirá, no sólo conocer mejor la manera de pensar de cada uno de estos autores, sino, además y más importante aún, mostrar el modo en que el tópico evolucionó con ellos e indagar en las razones de dicha evolución.

The work studies a decir of fray Diego de Valencia de León (collected in the Cancionero de Baena, n. 509), whose significance can be fully understood only by making reference to certain concepts of ancient medicine, such as the galenic doctrine of the four qualities, and with some fundamental texts of ancient medicine in mind, in particular Aristotle's Problemata Physica, Garioponto's Passionarius and Hippocrates' De diaeta, which fray Diego seems to mention in several passages of his poems.

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

This essay explores the literary motif of lovesickness with in the Acts of Andrew, a second century Christian apocryphal text. I argued that lovesickness is used within this ascetic narrative to portray the erotic connection between two male characters: the apostle Andrew and his disciple Stratocles. I read the Acts of Andrew alongside two Greek novels, Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon and Xenophon's An Ephesian Tale, both of which contain male homoerotic relationships where one or both of the male partners exhibit symptoms of lovesickness specifically occurring when the love of the partner is threatened or lost. I suggest the portrayal of the character as physically sick is an intentional narrative strategy functioning to show the depth of the love experienced between two men.

Análisis de las aportaciones que sobre la enfermedad del amor hicieron Hipócrates, Platón y Aristóteles. Sobre todo estos dos últimos inauguran una corriente científico-filosófica respecto al tema, cuya importancia será fundamental en la tradición cultural occidental posterior y que correrá paralela, al menos en el mundo clásico, a la representación literaria de la enfermedad de amor como tópico amatorio.

espanolAnalisis de las aportaciones que sobre la enfermedad del amor, hicieron Hipocrates, Platon y Aristoteles. Sobre todo estos dos ultimos inauguran una corriente cientifico-filosofica respecto al tema, cuya importancia sera fundamental en la tradicion cultural occidental posterior y que correra paralela, al menos en el mundo clasico, a la representacion literaria de la enfermedad de amor como topico amatorio EnglishAn analysis of Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle�s contributions about lovesickness. Specially the last two authors, begin a scientific-philosophical tendency about the point. This tendency will have a great importance in the whole later occidental cultural tradition and will run parallel, at least in the classical world, to the literary representation of lovesickness as a love topic

It is not possible to define love because it belongs to the world of ideas that people cannot capture in words. Regardless of it being for a family member, one’s significant other, a friend, or even a favorite book, at some point of life, every person has felt such emotional attachment towards something or someone. While there are many forms of love, the romantic interest between the people has by far been the most intriguing aspect of research in the scientific community. In the majority of cases, people associate love with the reproduction, which is understandable because a marriage usually results in the continuation of a bloodline. Despite the excessive interest in the human reproduction from the biological point of view, psychologists have been exploring the human mind, when in love, and the results have shown that the phenomenon, which seems so familiar to everyone, is far more complicated.

En el presente artículo nos proponemos llevar a cabo un análisis desde una perspectiva comparatista de la presencia del tópico literario de la “enfermedad de amor” en la obra de dos autores coetáneos como son Lucrecio y Catulo. Este análisis nos permitirá, no sólo conocer mejor la manera de pensar de cada uno de estos autores, sino, además y más importante aún, mostrar el modo en que el tópico evolucionó con ellos e indagar en las razones de dicha evolución. ABSTRACT: Our intention with the present article is to analyze from the comparative perspective the presence of the literary thopic “lovesickness” in the works of two contemporary authors as Lucretius and Catullus. This analysis will allow us, not only to improve our knowledge of the way of thinking of each one of these authors, but, besides and even more important, it will allow us to show the way the thopic evolutioned with them and to inquire into the reasons of this evolution.

Like Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” which it adapts, Sarah Polley’s first feature film, the 2006 Away from Her, reprises the classical theme of lovesicknes as a form of melancholy depression with a twist: lovesickness is brought on by (in Grant’s case), and confused with (in Fiona’s), a form of dementia that resembles Alzheimer’s. This chapter proposes to untangle the specific poetics deployed in the film to conjure up the overwhelming presence of the disease (dramatically and aesthetically) and the dissemination of meaning (symbolically). It examines, first, the structural modifications made in the film adaptation, before concentrating on how cinematographic space serves to dramatize and express human (dis)connections through a combination of acting techniques, camerawork and editing. By resorting to an aesthetics of contamination more obviously suitable for a virus to represent the effects of (love)sickness, Away from Her elaborates a poetics of lovesickness that evokes the contingency of one’s connection to others, one’s environment and even one’s self.

This article is in Icelandic. English abstract:
The focus in this essay is on Egill's display of amorous feelings and its close connection  to the ideology, imagery and aesthetics of lovesickness – which was regarded a very real and grave illness from antiquity to the 18th century. Its symptoms manifest clearly in ancient Greek and Latin literature, as well as medieval European writings in the 12th century onwards. It is argued that the world of meanings connected to lovesickness plays a substantial part in the narrative and imagery of Egils saga and function as a sounding board for the saga´s love story. Additionally, it is argued that Egils saga bears witness to its author´s familiarity with the romance Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, which in return could add clues to the writing time of the former.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, health was conceived as the balance (eucrasia) between the four humors –blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile–, whereas sickness was the result of the excess or the lack (discrasia) of any of those substances. One of the diseases –of the ‘imbalances’– that drew much attention and reflection over the long period between Antiquity and the 17th century is melancholy, the malady that results from the excess of black bile. This text studies some of the physical symptoms related to melancholy –especially so called “love-melancholy”– and compares them to symptoms of amor hereos (‘lovesickness’) that appear in love poetry. The comparison between poetical and medical texts –two separate genres between which, nonetheless, influences can be traced– reveals a series of ambivalences, tensions, contrasts and paradoxes that operate at the center of the ideas of sickness and of love.

El presente artículo pretende mostrar cómo tanto Virgilio como Horacio sufren a lo largo de su vida una evolución ideológica y filosófica respecto al tema del amor como pasión enfermiza que les hace oscilar entre las dos concepciones imperantes en su época: la de los epicúreos de Lucrecio y la de los neotéricos de Catulo. Así mismo pretende demostrar cómo esa oscilación ideológica queda patente en su obra a través de la utilización del tópico de la enfermedad y de la visión más positiva o negativa de dicho tópico que se da en cada caso y momento.

In my doctoral dissertation I reconstruct the early modern Spanish category of madness (locura) by exploring the ways it was imagined, theorized, and narrated in medical, lexicographic, and literary texts of the Golden Age (16 th and 17 th centuries). The research focuses on three main problems: (1) the boundaries of madness and its relation to adjacent, overlapping, or opposite categories; (2) the tension between discourses and paradigms to which this category was considered to belong, namely, medical discourse, theological and metaphysical discourses, and social-ethical discourses; and (3), the dialogue between medical writing and literary representations of madness, and the ways inter-discursive tensions shape narratives of madness in both realms. The work consists of three extensive chapters. The first chapter is dedicated to the Golden Age Spanish vocabulary of madness, and lays the philological and conceptual foundations for context-sensitive reading of early modern Spanish representations of madness. Through an analysis of the main lexicographical works written between the late fifteenth century and the early eighteenth century, I examine the boundaries of locura as a cultural-linguistic category, and explore its content through key metaphors, images, and cultural associations underlying the rich vocabulary of Golden Age madness. The second chapter examines the early modern scientific debate concerning the problem of mad genius, and offers a reading of Cervantes's El licenciado Vidriera in light of this debate. In the chapter I offer close, literary readings of clinical case histories from the Examen de ingenios (1575), a celebrated medical treatise by Huarte de San Juan, and point out to the internal tensions between theory and narrative in Huarte's writing, as well as to the multiple discourses present in it. Through a study of the Examen's reception, I show how these polyphonic qualities are echoed in the responses of medical and lay readers. Finally, I propose a reading of Cervantes's novella, in which I problematize the relation between medical writing and narrative fiction, and argue in favor of understanding this relation in terms of a non-hierarchic dialogue, in which literature can both incorporate elements of clinical writing and at the same time challenge the basic postulates underlying the medical view of madness. The third chapter, dedicated to the intersection of locura with Eros, approaches the medico-literary dialogue from the opposite direction: instead of reading a literary work as a response to medical writing, I focus upon medical attempts to appropriate, resist, and reframe the story of Antiochus and Stratonice—a paradigmatic tale of lovesickness whose roots can be traced back to Antiquity. After examining different renderings of the tale that were available to the early modern Spanish reader—translations of the Classics, Italian recreations , and popular romances—I turn to medical appropriations of the tale. I put special emphasis on Alfonso de Santa Cruz's Dignotio et cura affectuum melancholicorum (ca. 1575/1622), in which different elements—and different versions—of the tale are incorporated into a clinical history. In my analysis of Santa Cruz's narration I show how the incorporation of the tale ends up undermining the author's scientific agenda, and reflect on the relation between the medical paradigm and the paradigmatic tale, which, in this case, are both intertwined and opposing.

el presente articulo pretende mostrar como tanto Virgilio como Horacio sufren a lo largo de su vida una evolucion ideologica y filosofica respecto al tema del amor como pasion enfermiza que les hace oscilar entre las dos concepciones imperantes en su epoca: la de los epicureos de Lucrecio y la de los neotericos de Catulo. Asi mismo pretende demostrar como esa oscilacion ideologica queda patente en su obra a traves de la utilizacion del topico de la enfermedad y de la vision mas positiva o negativa de dicho topico que se da en cada caso y momento.