Book Review of «The Aesthetics of Melancholia: Medical and Spiritual Diseases in Medieval Iberia»

Abstract

Dr. López González’ recent book, The Aesthetics of Melancholia: Medical and Spiritual Diseases in Medieval Iberia, published by Oxford University Press, is a thorough examination of the influence of humoral theory and, more specifically, of melancholy on the texts of three canonical authors of the Medieval Castilian Literature: Alfonso X, Don Juan Manuel, and Juan Ruiz. López González’ main thesis, which is convincingly argued, is that the incorporation of natural explanations for the origin of illness in the literary texts of the three 13th and 14th centuries authors, contributed to the gradual replacement of a theocratic mental framework with a more humanistic and scientific one, a framework that characterizes the Renaissance.