Melancholy’s Uneasy Throne: Medical and Religious Understandings of Sorrow in Early Colonial Mexico

The colonization of New Spain was contemporaneous with an unprecedented outpouring of interest in melancholy among learned Europeans, whether demonologists or medical men. The sorrowful condition was a transatlantic concern, to judge from the medical and religious treatises and the Inquisition cases that form the basis of this paper. Using Barbara Rosenwein’s “emotional communities” as a starting point, I explore the continuities and ruptures between the colony’s two most prestigious discourses on melancholy, the humoural/medical and the religious, arguing that both enshrined and naturalized the condition through the lens of their own understandings of human nature. I also consider the extent to which these understandings permeated plebeian society in the colony.