Both “illness and temptation of the enemy”: melancholy, the medieval patient and the writings of King Duarte of Portugal (r. 1433–38)

Recent historians have rehabilitated King Duarte of Portugal, previously maligned and neglected, as an astute ruler and philosopher. There is still a tendency, however, to view Duarte as a depressive or a hypochondriac, due to his own description of his melancholy in his advice book, the Loyal Counselor. This paper reassesses Duarte's writings, drawing on key approaches in the history of medicine, such as narrative medicine and the history of the patient. It is important to take Duarte's views on his condition seriously, placing them in the medical and theological contexts of his time and avoiding modern retrospective diagnosis. Duarte's writings can be used to explore the impact of plague, doubt and death on the life of a well-educated and conscientious late-medieval ruler

Passionate Uprisings in Shakespeare’s 'Lucrece'

The phenomenon of passionate riot and its role in uprisings, fictional and historical, remains an analytical blind spot. Despite “the affective turn” in the humanities at the outset of the twenty-first century, scholarly studies have continued to focus on the social, political, economic and religious motives of participants in uprisings and on their methods of protest with little sense that these might include instances of passionate protest. To bring the phenomenon into focus, this article turns its attention to Shakespeare’s Lucrece, one of several Shakespearean texts that provide compelling evidence in the imaginative literature of the period of a perception that grief could motivate and be used to provoke political protest and instigate political transformation