Journal Article

Melancholia, Mammon, and Magic

Quitslund, Jon

2009

Overview

Focusing on Guyon’s encounter with Mammon, this essay examines melancholia in The Faerie Queene in relation to Marsilio Ficino’s Three Books on Life. Ficino recognizes melancholia as a serious malady, but he also claims that some melancholics are extraordinarily intelligent and creative. In Spenser’s poem, some melancholy characters (Despair, Mammon, and Maleger, for example) are dangerous, while others (Phantastes, the youthful sage in Alma’s castle, and the poem’s most idealistic lovers) appear in a more positive light. Ficino traces the causes of a melancholy temperament to astrological factors. Saturn’s influence predisposes an individual to inquire into the depths of experience, aspiring also to self-transcending knowledge and power. The ill effects of black bile can be tempered by habits that nourish the vital spiritus and connect the human microcosm with beneficial daemons and angels. Describing heavenly influences that can be captured to cure melancholia, Ficino stresses the importance of Phoebus Apollo, Venus, and Jupiter, the “Three Graces.” Two engravings by Dürer, St. Jerome in His Study and Melencolia I, provide pictorial analogues to architectonically significant passages in Books I and II of The Faerie Queene; the pattern of textual echoes and contrasts continues in Book III. A Platonic program emerges from details in Guyon’s encounter with Mammon, his sojourn in Alma’s castle, and his testing in the Bower of Bliss. This sequence is capped by all that is revealed in the Garden of Adonis canto (FQ III.vi) under the aegis of the three Graces.

• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press,University of Chicago Press
• Subject: Epic literature / Ficino, Marsilio (1433-1499) / Literary characters / Literary influences / Mental depression / Poetry / Spenser, Edmund (1552?-1599)