The purpose of the article is to describe melancholic moods in the elegies of Clemens Ianicius (1516–1543), a prematurely deceased Polish Neo-Latin poet. First, the author recapitulates briefly the poet’s biography (his peasant pedigree, education, studies at the Collegium Lubranscianum in Poznań, interrupted because of his father’s poverty, his fortunes and misfortunes resulting from the ecclesiastical and nobility patronage, his stay and studies in Padua, graduation with doctoral degree, coronation with a laurel wreath, and finally his illness and death). The analysed poems include elegies from two main collections of Ianicius’verses: the Variae elegiae and the Tristia. The author traces the development of the poet’s melancholic temperament, starting with the elegies concerning his favourite patron’s (the Primate Andrzej Krzycki) fever and the mourning after his death, and finishing with the elegies from the Tristia, treating the poet’s disease and sadness.

The sixteenth century inherited three discourses on melancholy: the medical, philosophical, and religious ones. While the first presented it as a mental illness linked to a disorder of the humours, the second, with the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Problem XXX, saw it as a sign of creative genius, and the third reminded us that it was, according to Saint Jerome’s expression, the balneum diaboli; it allowed Satan to take possession of the patient’s mind, causing him to hallucinate. So how can we distinguish the melancholy of the genius from the pathology of the same name, especially when the latter is associated with the devil?

The devil’s ability to create illusory worlds on the border between dream and reality coincides with Renaissance artists’works populated by ghosts, monsters, witches and demons. Could not these scenes, presented both as manifestations of the devil and projections of the hallucinated mind, be linked to the figure of the melancholic artist?

This article examines melancholia and its stylistic rendering in three of Marguerite de Navarre’s Chansons spirituelles that do not deal with bereavement, namely Songs 29, 45, and especially 34. The Queen uses various medical, philosophical, and literary sources to describe melancholy, although she never quotes Aristotle or humoral medicine. The same applies to literary borrowings from the Imitation of Christ, which enable her to give a willful Christian response to life’s sufferings. Most of all, Marguerite spiritualises love motifs used by Petrarch in his Canzoniere, especially the dolce pena concetto. This is achieved thanks to the interpenetration of Petrarch’s amorous vocabulary with the inner life discourse of her characters’ souls, tossed between euphoria and suffering, in their quest for divine love. This study also reviews Marguerite’s use of melancholia in La Coche, la Comédie des quatre femmes and l’Heptaméron, where it remains in the realm of worldly concerns and raises moral and ethical questions.

The article proposes to show how the poets of the late sixteenth century give new energy to the paradigm of love madness that runs through the literary tradition, from the desperate heroes of the Greco-Latin pastoral to the Roland Furious, not forgetting the “fools-for-love” of the courtly Middle Ages, by taking advantage of expanding philosophic-medical knowledge and a demonic imaginary in vogue.

Marot’s Psalm paraphrases have been widely hailed as a major poetic achievement in French Renaissance poetry. Although Marot wants to stay as close as possible to his biblical source, his rendering of Ps. 137 stands out due to some of its metrical features and tone, as shaped by the initial rime aquatiques-melancoliques, which is totally absent from earlier translations. Far from being ornamental, such an innovative move imparts a new reading to the text, reworking some of its features while thoroughly rephrasing the expression of loss that pervades the entire poem. Engaging in a close exegetical reading of the text, the article aims at showing how Marot achieves to convey a deeper poetic meaning in addressing one of the most violent, excruciating songs of the Psalter, thus turning its bitter harshness into a meditative piece of sorts and a genuine masterpiece, testifying to both his spiritual commitment and his aesthetic position.

In Louis de Caseneuve’s Melancholicus aeger emblem, we find a strange imaginary iconographic universe which, through the original associations proposed by the author, was to facilitate the memorization of the most frequent phantasmata in patients with melancholy. In the article, I analyze the engraving of this emblem as well as the Latin commentary that accompanies it. I distinguish five categories: melancholic bestiary, fragility, infirmity, gloomy and prophetic ideas, extravagance ‒the disorders of the senses and of the imagination evoked by the Caseneuvian iconography which, in a representative way, illustrate the pathologies from which melancholics may suffer. I also demonstrate the importance of the mnemonic method present in this medical collection created for didactic purposes, as well as attempt to identify the ancient sources that probably inspired Caseneuve.

There are few areas of late 16th-century literature in France from which melancholy is absent. Religious literature does not escape it either, as testified by a very popular theme of vanitas. It is also evident in apocalyptic writing where religious rhetoric and melancholy meet. The French apocalyptic epics of the time take advantage of these possibilities to reinforce the effectiveness of the message. This article explores the melancholic landscapes in Michel Quillian’s La Dernière Semaine and considers the place that this imagery and these themes might have had in its author’s parenetic design and rhetorical choices.

The article aims to clarify the point in literary history concerning the composition of the Regrets by Du Bellay, taking into account the sonnets written on the occasion of the poet’s trip to Italy that he later left out of the collection. This enables us to situate melancholy in the context of the function of all the humours in the book. Already the first part, clearly marked by melancholy, anticipates the therapy developed in the next two parts; therefore, the itinerary of the poet and of the book becomes that of a gradual recovery. Melancholy as a temperament constitutes a new point of departure; it could therefore no longer be presented, as was the case of the omitted sonnets, in the form of simple, medically operable humour crises, but as a temperament to be transformed progressively, from the sense of perdition to the salvation of a recovered balance.

During his stay in Rome (1553–1557), Joachim Du Bellay composed the collection of sonnets Les Antiquités de Rome, often overshadowed by the more famous Les Regrets. However, the charm of the poems dedicated to the eternal city, and the history of its greatness and fall, is increasingly appreciated. The poet consistently describes the impressions of a sixteenth-century visitor contemplating the image of the ancient city from which only ruins seem to have remained. The mood of melancholy is built by a specific construction of images and appropriately selected vocabulary. It is a vision of the city turned into ruin, where even the honor is turned into ‘ashes’, and the only remnants of the past glory is its name. However, the poet does not want to leave the reader in a mood of despondency, and carefully interweaves melancholic and optimistic motifs: traces of the greatness of ancient Rome have survived in the finest literary works, and Du Bellay himself emphasizes that he is the first French poet to describe the glory of the eternal city. This is also important because the collection is dedicated to King Henry II and is probably conceived to show him the path that France should follow in striving for the perfection of the Roman empire, while avoiding its weaknesses. Therefore, the collection is not only a melancholic reminiscence of ancient Rome, but also a canzoniere dedicated to the beautiful city, where one can find inspiration to build France in the spirit of Gallicanism.