This study examines the religious music of John Dowland as it relates to his association with the Elizabethan cult of melancholy. In examining his music, I have distinguished several different types of melancholy and I feel that Dowland’s musical treatment of these types is more nuanced then has yet been recognized. While scholars from the early modern era realized that the complaint of melancholy was a highly complex, multi-faceted issue, modern scholars tend to identify the melancholy tendencies of Dowland’s music as a one-dimensional concept. By exploring the expression of religious melancholy in the music of Dowland through the lens of contemporaneous medical and religious treatises, I am applying the early seventeenth-century conception of melancholy in my own interpretation of Dowland’s religious-themed music
