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Therapies for Melancholy andInordinate Passion in the Letters ofDorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple(1652–1654)Femke Molekampab

a Institute of Advanced Study, IAS, University of Warwick,Coventry, UKb Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick,Coventry, UKPublished online: 30 May 2014.

To cite this article: Femke Molekamp (2014) Therapies for Melancholy and Inordinate Passion inthe Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple (1652–1654), The Seventeenth Century, 29:3,255-276, DOI: 10.1080/0268117X.2014.918522

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2014.918522

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Therapies for Melancholy and Inordinate Passion in the Letters ofDorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple (1652–1654)

Femke Molekampa,b*

aInstitute of Advanced Study, IAS, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK; bCentre for the Study of theRenaissance, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

Reflecting on her melancholy in 1652 in a letter to her secret suitor Sir William Temple,Dorothy Osborne complained “I desyr’d to bee rid on … a Scurvy Spleen that I had everbin subject to.”1 Osborne styles herself as a constitutional melancholic in her letters toTemple, as well as expressing the pains suffered by the pair on account of their protractedcourtship and uncertain future. She encountered Temple by chance when she travelled toSt Malo in 1646, where her royalist family was residing during the civil war. Temple wasembarking on a tour of the continent. The pair travelled together, and a courtship began,leading to their eventual marriage nine years later. Both families initially opposed themarriage, largely on financial grounds, each wishing for a more prestigious match. In1648, Temple left for Paris, remaining abroad for much of the ensuing five years, whileOsborne went back to the family home, Chicksands Abbey, in Bedfordshire. In 1652,however, Temple resumed contact with Osborne, and they became correspondents.Seventy-seven of Osborne’s letters to Temple survive, written between 1652 and 1654.The pair saw each other very little during this time. Osborne wrote the letters covertlyfrom her family home and arranged for each letter to be smuggled out to be delivered toTemple in London, using several different carriers. Only one of Temple’s letters survives,as the others were each destroyed after reading. In her letters, Osborne weaves together arich and multifaceted discourse of melancholy and is frequently interested in findingtherapies for the disordered passions that she imputes to both herself and Temple. Thisessay argues that Osborne particularly values the therapeutic use of various modes ofreading and writing. A study of her approaches can richly contribute to our understandingof attitudes towards melancholy and the passions in seventeenth-century England.

Studies of the history of emotion in early modern England have interrogated the roleof the “passions” in the functions and dysfunctions of the body as conceptualized in earlymodern medicine, in moral philosophy, and in relation to political discourses. Sourceshave predominately consisted of treatises, to see how passions were theorized, and literarytexts, especially plays, to explore how they were represented.2 What remains less exam-ined, however, is the lived approach to emotional life as expressed, and indeed negotiated,within a given relationship in correspondence. Letters do also, of course, engage literaryforms and rhetorical constructions, but Osborne’s letters are at once artfully constructed,and richly expressive of her ideas and emotions. They articulate her application of a rangeof discourses concerning the passions to herself, and to her lived experience of herrelationship with Temple. The letters both express the passions aroused by this illicit

*Email: femke.molekamp@warwick.ac.uk

The Seventeenth Century, 2014Vol. 29, No. 3, 255–276, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2014.918522

© 2014 The Seventeenth Century

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relationship and seek to manage these organically within the very framework of therelationship that the correspondence holds in place.

Versions of melancholy

Before examining the therapies Osborne describes or appears to develop for the regulationof excessive passion, it is useful to consider the dominant conceptions of melancholy inher era. Cultural, medical, and literary historians have often emphasized the inseparabilityof mind and body in early modern conceptions of the passions, including those ofmelancholy.3 Gail Kern Paster argues that

For the early moderns, emotions flood the body not metaphorically but literally, as thehumors corse through the bloodstream carrying choler, melancholy, blood and phlegm tothe parts and as the animal spirits move like lightening from brain, from muscle to brain.4

Following the Galenic system, melancholy was understood to be caused either by anexcess of black bile (also called “melancholy”) or by the corruption of other humours, forinstance if they became “burnt” due to obstructions in the body. Fear and sorrow werecommonly understood to be the most prominent symptoms of melancholy, together with“damaged mental faculties.”5

Erin Sullivan, also focusing on ideas of the mutual influence of body and soul in earlymodern approaches to melancholy, has emphasized that sadness was commonly consid-ered the most dangerous of the passions in this era. It was believed to bring the risk ofdeath to its sufferer, and it was therefore important “to moderate sorrowful passions beforephysiological changes could take hold.”6 Such changes were believed to affect principallythe brain, heart, or digestion; the melancholy humour was also believed, “being cold anddrie,” to “dryeth the whole body, and maketh it wither away.”7 It appears that Osbornewas aware of this notion that death, through sadness itself, was regarded as a serious andrealistic danger of the disease of melancholy in seventeenth-century culture. Whenhearing a report of Temple’s own melancholy, Osborne cautions him, “what doe youmean to bee soe melancholy? … if you loved mee you would not give yourself over tothat which will infallibly kill you, if it continue.”8

While it is undeniable that a materialist approach to melancholy underscored theinterrelation of body and mind in the early modern era, scholars have recently pointedout the importance of considering other discourses involved in early modern approachesto melancholy, besides humouralism. Angus Gowland has argued that melancholy“carried spiritual and ethical as well as medical significance, and assumed a prominentplace within religious, moral philosophical and political discourses on the passions of thesoul.”9 While Dorothy Osborne does not privilege religious discourses relating to thepassions, she certainly demonstrates interest in the moral philosophical consequences ofmelancholy and passionate excess. She is also particularly interested to examine both herown and Temple’s passionate suffering within a literary context, and I would add theliterary tradition to Gowland’s list of important cultural contexts for the understanding ofearly modern melancholy, generative as it was of particular meanings for melancholy, asscholars have shown.10

The interpenetration, or at times, competition, between different discourses of melan-choly in the seventeenth century complicates the status and value of sadness in Osborne’sera. Galenic materialism, designating melancholy as a disease caused by potentiallydangerous excesses of black bile, partly displaces earlier Renaissance notions of genial

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melancholy, popularized by Florentine neoplatonists. Ficino’s influential blend ofPlatonism with Aristotle’s concept of genial melancholy associates melancholy withartistic and scholarly brilliance and, potentially, with divine frenzy.11 Writers of theseventeenth century including Donne, Burton, Milton, Cowley, Margaret Cavendish,Lucy Hutchinson, and Dorothy Osborne continued to invest in the status of the inspiredmelancholy scholar. Douglas Trevor argues that “learnedness and mental ability remainconnected” in this era, but that the “material trajectory of Galenism, replaces genialmelancholy with scholarly depression in the seventeenth century.”12 This portrait ofscholarly depression emerges strongly in Robert Burton’s influential Anatomy ofMelancholy,13 which, it can be argued, tacitly retains an interest in higher associationswith scholarly melancholy. In the prefatory address, “Democritus Junior to the Reader,”Burton ventriloquizes the philosopher to give a performance of scholarly melancholy. Healso asserts that he has been “confined to my Colledge, as Diogenes to his tube,” where, ina melancholy state of mind, “To doe my selfe good I turned ouer such Physitians ourLibraries would afford, & haue taken this paines [to author the Anatomy].”14 Melancholy,learning, and authorship are linked together in Burton’s self-presentation, and I will showthat Osborne demonstrates an interest in these connections when it comes to her own self-inscription in the letters to Temple. It is interesting to note that in her letters Osborneincludes ideas both of the undesirable, frightening dangers of melancholy as conceived ofwithin the materialist Galenic system and of artistic or scholarly melancholy functioningas what Juliana Schiesiari has termed “a discursive practice” and a “cultural category.”15

On the one hand, Osborne presents herself, through her family’s eyes, as diseased andpotentially mad:

all that I ayme at, is but to keep myself from groweing a Beast. They doe soe fright mee withstrange story’s of what the Spleen will bring mee to in time, that I am kept in awe with themlike a Childe; they tell me ‘twill not leave mee common sence, that I shall hardly bee fittcompany for my own dog’s, and that it will ende, either in a stupidnesse that will make meuncapable of any thing, or fill my head with such whim’s as will make mee rediculous.16

The stupidity, ridiculousness, and madness Osborne fears is present in a satirical vein inBurton’s Anatomy when he comments, for instance, that many melancholy scholars “hauelost their wits, or become dizardes … in the worlds esteeme they are accompted ridicu-lous, and silly fooles, Idiots, Asses and (as oft they are) reiected, contemned, and derided,doting, mad.”17 The faculty of the imagination played an important role in melancholy, inwhich, as Gowland has pointed out, it was “deemed to suffer a pathological alteration, and… together with reason was often stipulated as the affected part of the brain of thesufferer.”18 This alteration accounted for the “monstrous fictions” and “prodigious phan-tasies” with which melancholics were believed to suffer, akin to the “whims” Osborne istold will make her “ridiculous.”19 There is no definite evidence that Osborne readsBurton, but her various approaches to melancholy accord with dominant views collectedtogether in this extremely influential text, which made Burton “one of the most widelyread writers of the age.”20 The Anatomy of Melancholy was reprinted in five editionsbetween 1621 and 1638, and as Andrew Wear rightly points out, it was “the definitivecompendium of views on madness, medicine and society in English and EuropeanCulture.”21 The view of melancholy as a disease of body and mind that may lead topitiable madness is also conventional in the wider writings on the passions by Englishauthors of this period, including those by Thomas Wright, and, in the sixteenth century,Timothy Bright and André du Laurens.22 Osborne reflects this contemporary medical

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perspective in her writing, although she does not often own it as her own view, butpresents it as her family’s: she writes that this is what “they tell me,” and “do so fright mewith.”

In other places, however, Osborne appears to invest in a pose of attractive learnedmelancholy, in alignment with earlier Renaissance versions of melancholy that have morepositive associations. Osborne often expresses a preference for retirement, and in oneplace she identifies her preference for solitude and contemplation of her own thoughts as asymptom of her melancholy, and suggests to Temple that he may suffer the samesymptom. It seems that he has denied that he is suffering from the disease and Osbornewrites,

I hope you deal truely with mee, too, in sayeing that you are not melancholy … I am thoughtsoe, many times, when I am not at all guilty on’t. How often doe I sitt in company a wholeday, and when they are gone am not able to give an account of sixe words that was sayd, andmany times could bee soe much better pleased with the Entertainment my owne thoughts givemee, that ’tis all I can do to be so civill as not to let them see they trouble mee, this may beeyour disease.23

Osborne wittily plays here with a version of melancholy. She suggests she is not guilty ofmelancholy if her own thoughts can often provide superior entertainment than the con-versation of the society to which she is subjected, and yet she appears to be self-consciously drawing on the well-known identification of the melancholic’s love ofsolitude. In Burton, such contemplative solitude is pathologized as dangerous, posingrisks of the kind Osborne’s family reportedly described to her.24 Osborne’s construction ofherself as the clever melancholic here contrasts sharply with the portrait of the melan-cholic idiot with which she says her family threatens her, however, and it appears to havemore in common with the Aristotelian conception of genial melancholy, popularized byFicino, and associated with those who possess extraordinary powers of mind. EdwardReynolds also picks up on this notion in the seventeenth century in his Treatise of thePassions and of the Soul of Man (1640), commenting that “melancholy complexions areusually the wisest,” and citing Aristotle.25

In his recent work, Trevor objects to Schiesari’s conception of early modern melan-choly as a “discursive practice” on the grounds that “melancholy by the time of Hamletfunctions as both a condition and a practice,” and this is mostly true, given the increasingemphasis on materialist explanations of melancholy, together with the proliferation ofdiscourses of melancholy in medical, moral philosophical, religious, and literary writingsthat had appeared by the seventeenth century.26 Osborne treats melancholy both as acondition and as a practice in her letters, and while these aspects are sometimes inter-woven, I would point out that condition and practice do also sometimes pull apart inOsborne’s letters, as in the examples discussed above which offer two radically differentversions of melancholy: one a dangerous disease along materialist lines and one a practiceof learned, inspired melancholy.

Furthermore, cultures of melancholy had a particular valence for royalists post 1640,owing to their connection with mourning and loss. While Cavalier poetry has often beenidentified with celebration of wine, women, and song, there is no single, consistentroyalist poetic, as Alan Rudrum points out, and royalist poetics of retirement are attimes marked by melancholy and loss, as well as by the pleasures of conviviality andwine.27 In 1638, George Daniel’s set of pastoral eclogues Polyolgia, circulated in manu-script, herald a melancholic royalist retreat towards retirement: a shepherd Amintas

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recounts an allegorical tale of loss and treachery as a woman named Zephirina whooccupied a position close to the throne has risen against their leader, “the GreatShepherd,” and seems poised to succeed at destroying him and his supporters.28

Amintas and his companion Strephon mournfully decide to retreat into silence and turnhomewards, “For what is left, to Sing? Our Glorie’s gon/Our Loves are Lost or not worththinking on.”29 Melancholy later came to be a posture sometimes adopted in associationwith royalist defeat, as characterized by the title of the royalist journal MercuriusMelancholicus, which came out in 1647. Osborne’s contemporary, and fellow royalist,Margaret Cavendish, associates melancholy with ennobled retirement in her poem “ADialogue Between Melancholy, and Mirth” (1653), imitative of Milton’s comparison ofmirth with melancholy in his poems “L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso” (1645). InCavendish’s poem, the goddess Melancholy proclaims, in defence of her saturnine ways,

I dwell in groves that gilt are with the sun,Sit on the banks by which clear waters run;In summers hot down in the shade I lie(…)In winter cold when nipping frosts come on,Then do I live in a small house alone;Although ’tis plain yet cleanly ’tis withinLike to a soul that’s pure and clear from sin.30

(“Melancholy, & Mirth”, ll. 135–47; 149–52)

There are clear similarities between Cavendish’s elevated contemplative goddess ofmelancholy, who dwells in groves, and Osborne’s portrait of herself to Temple.Osborne writes of how she finds rapture when she retires alone in the garden, whilestill meditating upon the sad fate of her separation from Temple:

When I have supped, I goe into the Garden, and soe to the syde of a small River that runs byit, where I sitt downe and wish you with mee … in Earnest, ’tis a pleasant place, and wouldbee much more soe to mee if I had your company. I sitt there somtimes till I am lost withthinking; and were it not for some cruell thoughts of the Crossnesse of our fortun’s that willnot lett mee sleep there, I should forgett that there were such a thing to be don as going tobed.31

While it is not necessary to insist on a political corollary for Osborne’s romanticdeprivation, her description of melancholy retirement in which rapture is tempered withawareness of loss certainly resonates with royalist literary traditions. In this way, Osborneinvests in melancholy as a cultural practice. She enacts further melancholic self-fashioningin a description to Temple of her sad eyes as a symptom.32 She alludes to the fact thatTemple has said that her eyes have the power to dispel his melancholy. She corrects him,reminding him that her eyes are sad:

Would you could make your words good, that my Ey’s can dispell all mellancholy Cloudedhumors; I would looke in the glasse all day longe but I would cleare up mine owne. Alasse,they are soe farr from that, they would teach one to bee sad, that knew nothing on’t, for inother peoples’ opinion as well as my owne they have the most of it in them that Ey’s canhave.33

Again, Osborne appears conscious of a version of genial melancholy here, which associ-ates sadness with a contemplative, creative mind.

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Osborne’s awareness of, and interest in different discourses of melancholy, medicaland literary, leads her to write of both material and non-material therapies for melancholy.Materialist conceptions of melancholy and of its cures gain less space in Osborne’s letters,however, than a concern with how to regulate the passions through reading, writing,friendship, and pursuit of the Epicurean good life, as I will demonstrate.

Remedies: physic

In a number of places where Osborne refers to her melancholic suffering as “spleen”(originally a term used, with the Galenic system, to describe “windy” or “hypochondrical”melancholy caused by obstruction of the spleen, and later used more generally to refer tomelancholy), she also writes of material remedies.34 In these instances, Osborne appearsto have a Galenic theory of melancholy in mind, still residually influential in the mid-seventeenth century. She complains of being the reluctant recipient of a steel infusionadministered to her by family. The steel cure was not unusual at this time, used principallyfor clearing internal obstructions that were often associated with humoural excess, andsometimes linked to melancholy and other disorders. Osborne details that the infusion isprepared by laying

a peece of steel in white wine over night … [I] drink the infusion next morning, which onewould think were nothing, and yet ’tis not to be imagin’d how sick it makes mee for an howeror two, and, which is the missery, all that time one must be useing some kind of Exercise.Your fellow-servant has a blessed time on’t. I make her play at Shuttlecock with me.35

Similar remedies frequently found their way into household medical recipe books com-piled in manuscript in the seventeenth century, often with the name of a physicianattached to the recipe. Two different late seventeenth-century recipe books compiledrespectively by Lady Ann Fanshawe and Johanna St John include the same recipe for“Syrop of Steel” – made with steel filings, white wine, mace, sugar, and cream of tartar –which both women specify they obtained from “Dr Lower.”36 Another anonymous bookof recipes includes a similar recipe and specifies that “it was Dr Ridgley’s direction to MrsMerewether for the vapors which ware so strong that she all most mounted to distraction& was her cure.”37

Such obstructions were precisely what the steel infusion was envisaged to cure, andpatients were generally advised to exercise immediately after taking it in order to get themedicine moving around the body. Writing of internal obstructions, the physician LazareRivière explains that

there are divers Medicines made of Steel, both by Galenists, and Paracelsians, which plainlyopening Obstructions presently, compel al men to use them, even those who reject allMedicines made of Mettals, as Enemies to our Natures. These Medicines of Steel are madeeither in the Form of Wine, Syrups, Opiates, Pills, or Lozenges.

Riviere specifies that “in all Medicines made of Steel, this is alwayes to be observed, ThatExercise be used after têem, as Walking, to make the strength of the Medicine to go intothe parts obstructed: This Walking must befor two hours after.”38 Similarly, DorothyOsborne explains that she must “exercise all the while” after taking the steel infusion,often choosing a game of shuttlecock with her companion. Likewise, the anonymousrecipe collector who includes the steel remedy that helped Mrs Merewether’s vapoursspecifies: “take it every morning exercising yourselfe a letle by walking for the space of

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two hours.” Another hand has noted underneath this recipe, “this is very good,” incontrast to Osborne’s protest that “tis worse than dying by the halfe.”39 Osborne suggeststhat the steel infusion is a remedy which her family insists on, and she indicates in anearly letter to Temple that while she has so far complied in taking it, she contemplatesdiscontinuing it, highlighting how sick it makes her feel. She jokes to Temple that shedrinks to his health when she takes it, to make it more bearable:

I drink your health every morning in a drench that would Poyson a horse I beleeve, and ’tisthe only way I have to perswade myself to take it, ’tis the infusion of steell, and makes meesoe horridly sick, that every day at ten o’clock I am makeing my will and takeing leave of allmy freind’s, you will beleeve you are not forgot then. They tell mee I must take this uglydrink a fortnight, and then begin another as Bad; but unlesse you say soe too, I do not thinke Ishall. ’tis worse then dyeing by the halfe.40

As Mary Ann Lund has noted, by the seventeenth century, there had been a “heatedcenturies old debate over whether compound medicines are useful and effective orexpensive, dangerous, and unnecessary.” This critique enters Burton’s Anatomy.41

Osborne observes of the steel wine, I am told “twill do me good, and am content tobelieve; if it does not, I am but where I was.” She, concurs, however, with Temple, “I ampartly of your opinion that ’tis an ill kinde of Physick’.”42 The steel wine is also, notably,the only unpleasant therapy for excessive passion that appears in Osborne’s letters, and itis the only therapy to which Osborne attaches doubt and a degree of resentment. She lacksagency in its use, and it appears to be identified with the strictures of her domestic lifewhich also entailed the prohibition of her courtship with Temple, her close surveillance byher brother who was anxious to prevent the match, and introductions to a string of suitorsshe did not desire: designs which she describes as “my persecution.”43

Remedies: reading and writing

I know not whither I told it you or not, but I concluded (from what you sayed of yourindisposition), that it was very like the spleen.44

Osborne not only writes of her own melancholy suffering in her letters, she also refersin numerous places to Temple’s own apparent struggles with “melancholy” and“spleen.” Her letters are concerned with expressing and regulating the shared passionsand sufferings of the couple. Her construction of their mutual suffering invests heavilyin shared reading and writing practices concerned with romantic narratives, melancholy,and the passions and their regulation. Situating herself within a literary culture ofmelancholy, Osborne develops a range of non-material therapies for sadness in herletters, especially those associated with reading and writing. I will examine howOsborne draws in particular on prose fiction; on the reading and writing processesassociated with familiar letters; and on Epicurean moral philosophy. These literary andmoral philosophical approaches to health emerge as more salient in the letters thanmaterial remedies like the steel cure. Notably, however, she often weaves medicaldiscourses into these non-material, literary cures in a syncretic fashion that mirrors thedensely interwoven discourses of melancholy in the seventeenth century, and the con-siderable variety of recommended cures.

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Fiction

Two aspects of Osborne’s self-construction, her inclination for pastoral retreat and formelancholy, are common to romance fiction, a literary genre that emerges in Osborne’s lettersas a favourite of both herself and Temple. Osborne weaves her readings of romances into herletters to engage an affective reading process serving an as outlet for the sorrows of theromantic trials which she and Temple endure, and to associate their courtship with the turnfrom anguish to regeneration usual to the structure of romance. The sharing of emotions andopinions relating to specific romances appears to have been very much a reciprocal exchangebetween Osborne and Temple, along with the sharing of actual books. In several places,Osborne refers to sending romances via her friend Lady Diana Rich. On one occasion, shereminds Temple he is supposed to have forwarded La Calprenède’s Cleopatra on to Diana:

let mee aske you if you did not send my letter & Cleopatra where I directed you for my Lady[Diana], I received one from her to day full of the kindest reproaches that shee has not heardfrom mee this three week’s … she seems not to have received that which I sent to you nor thebook’s…45

Osborne and Temple formed a small book exchange network together with Osborne’sfriend Lady Diana Rich for circulating romances. In her letters, Osborne mentions readingFrench romances: Marin le Roy de Gomberville’s Polexandre (1647), Scudéry’sArtamene, ou Le Grand Cyrus (published in 10 volumes, 1647–1657), La Calprenède’sCléopâtre (1648), and Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa (1652). She reads some in both Frenchand English, but complains “I have noe Patience neither for these Translatours ofRomances. I met with Polexandre and L’Illustre Bassa, both soe disguised that I whoam theire old acquaintance hardly knew them.”46

Osborne’s principal interest in romance, as expressed to Temple, lies in the character-ization and the emotional valences of individual romance plots.47 She seeks to performtherapeutic readings of her painfully protracted courtship with Temple through the narrativestructures and characters of romance fiction. On one occasion, she refers to a recent raremeeting with Temple, when he came to visit, and she writes of the fear associated withdiscovery, and the pain of not knowing when she will see him again. She exclaims,

Good God! the fear’s and surprizes, the crosses and disorders of that day, ’twas confusedEnough to bee a dream, and I am apt to think somtimes it was noe more[.] but no, I saw you,when I shall doe it againe god only know’s, can there bee a more Romance Story then ourswould make if the conclusion should prove happy.48

This comparison registers both the moving sorrow of the trials of separation and uncer-tainty which she and Temple must endure, and the hope that there will be an eventualhappy “conclusion,” in line with the eventual regeneration offered by the conventionalplot structure of romance. There is a therapeutic purpose to this imagining of her courtshipwith Temple through the lens of “a romance story.”

After this comparison, Osborne moves into a melancholy position:

Ah! I dare not hope it; somthing that I cannot discribe draw’s a cloude over all the light myfancy discovers somtimes, and leav’s mee so in the darke with all my fear’s about mee that Itremble to think on’t. But no more of this sad talke.49

This pose is also consonant with the conventions of romance fiction, in which love-melancholy frequently played a central role. Marion Wells has argued that “the medical

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profile of the erotic melancholic, whose judgement is subverted by the obsessive thoughtpassions (assiduo cogitans) and corrupt imagination associated with this disease, consti-tutes a crucial model for the questing subject of romance.”50 Osborne certainly blendsmedical conceptions of melancholy with the literary materials of romance. Her descriptionof a descent of a sudden dark cloud of melancholy covering her and inciting her fears usesa conventional natural philosophical conception of melancholy. Timothy Bright used asimilar description in his Treatise of Melancholy, and Burton cites Lemnius in hisdescription of spleen bringing sudden darkness upon the sufferer: “as a blacke and athick cloud couers the Sun, and intercepts his beames and light, so doth this melancholyvapor obnubilate the mind, and inforce it to many absurd thoughts and Imaginations.”51

Osborne performs her own literary love-melancholy through her reference to the“romance story,” followed by her profession of melancholy, and it appears that romancehas a therapeutic function permitting Osborne expression of her romantic feelings.

Paul Salzman has identified two main currents in the development of prose fiction inthe seventeenth century, which strongly differentiate the genre from earlier romances: thepolitical turn of the genre as influenced particularly by John Barclay and Sir PercyHerbert, and, as a separate current, the concern with vraisemblance that emerges inFrench heroic romance, theorized by Madeleine de Scudéry in particular.52 In her prefaceto Ibrahim, de Scudéry emphasizes the importance of the rule of vraisemblance to herhandling of romance:

To give a more true resemblance to things, I have made the foundations of my workHistorical, my principal personages such as are marked out in the true history for illustriouspersons, and the wars effective … for when as falshood and truth are confounded by adexterous hand, wit hath much adoe to disentangle them, and is not easily carried to destroythat which pleaseth it; contrarily whenas invention doth not make use of this artifice, and thatfalshood is produced openly, this gross untruth makes no impression in the soul, nor givesany delight.53

Vraisemblance functions as an aesthetic of truth-seeming and social realism, with the aimof affecting the reader more profoundly. Osborne is interested in this affective dimensionof reading romance, and in the interchangeability of romance narratives with the narrativeof her own courtship with Temple. To this extent, she is pleased where the romance storiesshe reads are life-like. One of her favourite stories, she writes to Temple, sending him acopy, is Amestris and Aglatides, which she lauds as “one of the prittiest I have read, andthe most Naturall” (my emphasis).54 The vraisemblance of French romance servesOsborne’s interest in reading her own plight through these stories, and sharing her readingwith Temple. Temple himself paraphrased several French romance stories during theperiod of his courtship of Osborne between 1648 and 1650, and he asserts in his prefaceto the collection that “as those Romances are best which are likest true storys, so are thosetrue storys which are likest Romances.”55

Through the circulation and discussion of romances, Osborne and Temple establish astrongly shared reading culture centred upon this genre. In a number of places, Osbornedwells in her letters to Temple upon stories within romances that most pain her, or uponcharacters who particularly elicit her sympathy. Hintz has observed that most of the placesin romances upon which Osborne comments in her letters to Temple “involved lovers whosuffered from unfulfilled desire.”56 Notably, Osborne declares to Temple that some ofthese lovers elicited her tears. She writes, “I know you will pitty Poore Amestris stranglywhen you have read her Storry [.] i’le swear I cyred for her when I read it first though shee

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were an imaginary person, and sure if any thing of that kinde can deserve it hermisfortunes may.”57

Her readings of romance appear to a serve a similar cathartic function to that oftragedy, as conceptualized by Renaissance theorists such as Lorenzo Valla, who stated that“the aim of tragedy is to produce or reproduce tears and lamentations.”58 Temple affirmeda similar cathartic purpose in the process of writing romance stories, alleged for his ownbenefit. The preface of his romance A True Romance or The Disastrous Chances of Loveand Fortune (1648) is addressed “To My Lady” – almost certainly Osborne – and Templealludes in it to the “pains” of their separation before they were married:

I thought never [it] would have ended but with my life, having lasted so much longer then Icould ever figure to myself a possibility of living without you … I found it to no purpose tofly from my thoughts and that the best way was to deceive them with the likeness of obiectsand by representing others misfortunes to them instead of my owne. Those books becamepleasant to mee which would have been painfull to a better humor; and whilst I pittyed othersI sometimes forgot how much I deserved it myself. 59

In this way, Temple expresses that writing romance involved processes of both catharsisand distraction. There is a certain literary posture being assumed here, as Temple castshimself as one who has suffered in love, resembling the heroes of his romance fiction, andyet there is also the connection to what Temple calls “true storys”: the long separationfrom Osborne, to which he alludes. Osborne likewise draws upon her readings of romancefiction in her self-construction as a melancholy lover within her letters. Notwithstandingtheir literary poses, both Osborne and Temple are keen to affirm the therapeutics of thegenre in their respective reading, writing, and self-fashioning.

Osborne’s engagement with moving romance stories within her letters to Temple notonly makes use of the cathartic process of weeping but appears also to privilege sympathyfor amorous suffering, and to solicit this from Temple. Having heard that Temple has justread the first three volumes of Cyrus, she sends him the fourth, containing four stories offour afflicted lovers:

There are fower Pritty story’s in it, “L’Amant Absente,” “L’Amant non Aymé,” “L’AmantJaloux,” et “L’Amant dont La Maitresse est mort.” Tell mee which you have most compass[ion] for. This, and the little Journy’s (you say) you are to make, will Entertain you till Icome.60

These romance stories provide entertainment as a distraction to the pain of the couple’sseparation, but more importantly, perhaps, they elicit “compassion” for afflicted lovers,with their presentation of a typology of different sorrows of love. The affective readingpractices that Osborne demonstrates in her readings of romance prefigure the rise ofcultures of sympathy in the eighteenth century. They reform to a positive function thepowers of romance fiction to sway the affections, when critics of the genre frequentlyportrayed such powers as dangerous. Theophilus Dorrington, the author of a conduct bookfor women, warns that in reading romances,

mischief enters insensibly into our Soul with the pleasing words and under the charm of thoseadventures that affect us. Whatever Wit a person has, however innocent he is, yet as ourbodies do without our consent partake of the quality of things we eat; so our minds espouse,even in spite of us, the Spirit of the Books we read: Our humour is altered while we think notof it. We laugh with them that laugh … and we rave with the Melancholick. To that degree we

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are influenced as to find our selves altogether changed: we entertain other Passions and Steeranother course of life.61

There is a striking anxiety here with the reader’s involuntarily incorporation of passionsthat are foreign to her: that belong in this case to a fictional narrative and not to the realityof her own lived experience. Such an invasion by foreign passions is felt to effect changeto the self that amounts to corruption. For Osborne, however, the process of imaginativesympathy as a reader appears to serve as a therapy for personal pain, or at least this issuggested by her insistent inclusion of romances within the discourse of courtship sheweaves with Temple. The implication then is that for Osborne, the affective reading ofromances wrought therapeutic change as opposed to corruption. Once again, Osborne ispartly in step with Burton here, for while Burton felt that reading can be dangerous formelancholics, because they are particularly susceptible to the corruption of the imagina-tion, he also felt that the beneficial pleasures of reading included the power of artfullyconstructed texts to move the reader, for “who is he that is now … inuolued in a Labyrinthof worldly cares, troubles, and discontents, that will not bee much lightned in his mind byreading of some inticing story, Poeme, or some pleasant bewitching discourse.”62 Lund’sstudy of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is centred upon the attitudes Burton displays toreading and writing through his text, especially his approach to reading as a remedy formelancholy. Lund asserts that “his interest in the experience of reading takes his textbeyond the normal scope of medical writing on disease, since it aims to perform a curethough its pages.”63 It is interesting to consider a similar purpose for Osborne’s incorpora-tion of literary romance into her letters, and the extent to which it aims to perform a curefor the lovers’ suffering.

Seventeenth-century romance has been identified as possessing strong associationswith royalist literary culture, although it is worth adding that the popularity of romancefiction in the mid-seventeenth century grew to such an extent that its appeal rangedbeyond royalist aristocrats, and numbered both authors and readers who cannot beincluded in the royalist camp.64 However, the English translation of seventeenth-centuryFrench romance is heavily connected to royalists in exile, such as Digby and Cotterell,and Henrietta Maria took a notable interest in the romance genre.65 Once again, therefore,Osborne appears to be drawn to a therapy that is embedded within her particular culturallocale, shared with Temple. She appears to be more compelled by the vraisemblance ofportraits of love-melancholy, and by the fates of lovers in romance narratives, than bypolitical readings, however. In her letters Osborne expresses disinterest in politicalallegory in romance, in her disparagement of Edmund Waller for choosing so “sad” asubject as the civil war for his romance:

My Lord Saye, I am told, has writ a romance since his retirement in the Isle of Lundee, andMr. Waller, they say, is makeing one of our wars, which, if hee do’s not mingle with a greatdeal of pleasing fiction, cannot bee very diverting, sure, the Subject is soe sad.66

Osborne’s stress on the necessity of mingling the realistic depiction of a war with“pleasing fiction” closely matches de Scudéry’s theory of prose romance, in which hercommitment to vraisemblance is accompanied by a reminder to the reader that she ishowever in the business of “inventing a fable, not writing a history.”67 While Osborne’sreading of romances are highly affective, sometimes involving weeping, she is interestedin reading of the fictional, real-seeming sadness of lovers in stories, and not of reading ofthe true sadness inherent in civil war there.

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The memory of tears elicited by the process of reading fictional narrative resurfaceselsewhere in Osborne’s letters, when she explicitly compares herself and Temple to themythological couple Philemon and Baucis in Ovid’s tale. She has cast her mind back to avisit to Herm, one of the Channel Islands, which she may have been to with Templeduring their first meeting in 1648. In particular, she remembers a little cottage (evokingthe scenery of pastoral romance) and writes to Temple:

Doe you remember Arme and the little house there [?] shall we goe thither [?] that’s next tobeing out of the worlde [.] there wee might live like Baucis and Philemon, grow old togetherin our little Cottage and for our Charitty to some shipwrakt stranger obtaine the blessing ofdyeing both at the same time. How idly I talk tis because the Storry pleases mee, none inOvide soe much. I remember I cryed when I read it, mee thought they were the perfectestCharacters of a con[ten]ted marriage where Piety and Love were all there wealth and in theirepoverty feasted the Gods where rich men shutt them out.68

The story of Baucis and Philemon is that of an elderly married couple who have spenttheir lives together and reside happily in poverty and retirement in their cottage, until oneday they were visited by Jupiter and Mercury in disguise. While a thousand others hadshut their doors on these travelling Gods, Baucis and Philemon showed them hospitalityand their cottage was subsequently transformed into a temple, and the couple into priests.Their single request to the Gods was granted: that they might be allowed to die together.Both Baucis and Philemon metamorphosed into trees near the time of death, and theirtrunks and branches grew intertwined.69

Osborne’s inclusion of this memory of reading and weeping over a fictional story isagain therapeutic, although this narrative enables her to imagine romantic and domesticfulfilment with Temple, as opposed to expressing sorrow and despair.70 It also legitimizesthe illicit courtship, through the imagined life of marital devotion, together with thehumility, charity, and piety demonstrated by the pair in Ovid’s tale. She adopts theOvidian narrative to fashion a possible happy and sanctioned conclusion to her courtship,in the same way that we saw in another place she urges “Can there be a more romancestory than ours would make if the conclusion should prove happy?”. In this way, Osborneassembles a variety of narratives concerned with fictional love and weaves her passionatereadings of them into the letters. The parallels of these stories with her own romanticplight are either explicitly or implicitly evoked, and they contribute to the highly affectivereading and writing processes in which Osborne is involved in the composition of theletters themselves.

Letters and friendship

Osborne arguably mobilizes the acts of reading and writing in her correspondenceitself as a vital therapy for the pains of melancholy. The notion of friendship plays animportant role in this process, since these are familiar letters, and Osborne explicitlyevokes friendship as a protection against the dangers of melancholy. In both of thesetherapies for melancholy, Osborne is closely in keeping with royalist cultural values.Letters clearly sustain Osborne and Temple during a long period of difficult separationand uncertainty about their future. In her second surviving letter to Temple, she opensby suggesting that their exchange of letters might establish mutual pleasure, each letterfeeding for its composition on the delight that the other’s letter has brought: “SIR,–Ifthere were any thing in my letter that pleased you I am Extremely glad on’t, ’twas alldue to you, and made it but an Equall retourne for the sattisfaction yours gave mee.”71

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As familiarity and clandestine courtship develop, she begins a later letter with avehement expression of the alleviation Temple’s letters bring to her suffering, compar-ing it to a stay of execution: “Sir – Your last letter came like a pardon to one upon theblock” (an apt metaphor for supporters of the lately beheaded king). She professes thatwhen the letter finally arrived, “in Earnest, I was not able to disguise the Joy it gavemee.”72

The practice of familiar letter writing while not confined to the royalist context duringthe interregnum was certainly a strong feature of it. Indeed, there was a move towards thepublication of royalist familiar letters during the 1640s.73 Diana Barnes has highlightedthat “letter writing became an important site for imagining royalism during the republicanperiod.”74 It was a mode of sustaining alliances and values associated with royalistculture, within the privileged matrix of friendship. Gary Schneider has asked the question“what do familiar letters mean in these uncivil, unstable, dangerous, deceitful, and corrupttimes,” and notes that four different sets of royalist letters that were published tend to“advocate within them friendship, resilience, and stoicism.”75 Osborne’s letters to Templeadvocate all three practices and present them, at times explicitly, at others implicitly, asremedies for the passions associated with the lovers’ separation and uncertain futuretogether.

Hearing accounts of Temple’s own melancholy, reported in his letters both to herand by her companion Jane (referred to as Temple’s “fellow servant”), Osborne severaltimes elicits the office of friendship to establish a kind of contract of mutual self-care,mirrored implicitly in the mutual exchange of letters between the pair. She demandsof him,

what doe you mean to bee soe melancholy? …. if you loved mee you would not give yourselfover to that which will infallibly kill you … I know too well that our fortunes have given usoccasion Enough to complaine and to be weary of her Tirranny but, alasse would it bee betterif I had lost you or you mee. Unlesse wee were sure to dye together … Therfore, by all ourfriendship I conjure you and, by the power (you have given mee), comande you, to preserveyourself with same care that you would have mee live.76

Osborne registers the mutual suffering of herself and Temple but suggests that their bondsof friendship enjoin them both to diligent self-care in the regulation of their passions forthe other’s sake. Elsewhere, she urges him, “you must consider my interest in you, andpreserve yourself to make mee happy.”77 She then progresses to an emphasis on the vitalrole of their mutual correspondence as a vehicle for their protective friendship andcorollary to it, providing a therapy for sadness:

Scrible how you please, so you make your Letters longe enough; You see I give you goodExample. Besyd’s, I can assure you wee do perfectly agree if you receive noe sattisfaction butfrom my letters, I have none but what yours give mee.78

In this way, the letters both enact and symbolize the friendship and the mutuality andreciprocity that lie at the heart of it. They function as a remedy for melancholy, bothbecause each missive brings pleasure and sustains the courtship and because the lettersestablish a pact of mutual self-care, which Osborne aligns with the pact of friendship.The dual currents of melancholy and an urge to resilient friendship can of course befound in much royalist literature.79 They famously intermingle in Lovelace’s poem,“The Grasshopper,” written to his friend Charles Cotton, sounding a plea for the

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pleasures of friendship as sustenance during the bleak wintriness of a harsh politicalclimate:

Thou best of men and friends! We will createA genuine summer in each other’s breast;And spite of this cold time and frozen fateThaw us a warm seat to our rest.80

Osborne’s secret letters to Temple with their emphasis on friendship as protectionagainst melancholy resonate with Royalist cultural practices of familiar letter writing, ofsecret correspondence in times of oppression, and of according a privileged status to theresources of friendship during circumstances of deprivation. The therapeutic effects offriendship for sufferers of melancholy were also recognized within seventeenth-centurymedical discourses, and it is a notable feature of Osborne’s letters that they frequentlyappear to resonate both with royalist cultures and with contemporary medicine andphilosophy. Burton writes of the sweetness of the “bands” of amity that tie two friendstogether:

For the nature of true friendship is to combine, to be like affected, of one minde … Andwhere this loue takes place there is peace & quietnes, a true correspondence, perfect amitie, aDiapason of vowes and wishes … Where this true loue is wanting there can be no firmepeace … and all manner of bitter melancholy discontents.81

Francis Bacon also extols the comforts of friendship and advocates it as a superior cure for“spleen” to steel remedies:

A Principal Fruit of Friendship is, the Ease and Discharge of the Fulness and Swellings of theHeart, which Passions of all kinds do cause and induce … You may take Steel to open theSpleen … but no Receipt openeth the Heart, but a true Friend, to whom you may impartGriefs, Joys, Fears, Hopes, Suspicions, Counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the Heart tooppress it, in a kind of Civil Shrift or Confession.82

Osborne’s letters, though artfully constructed, certainly impart a good measure of “Griefs,Joys, Fears, Hopes, Suspicions, Counsels” to Temple and respond to those she finds in hisletters. This therapeutic functions of letter writing and friendship appear to hold a moreprivileged place in Osborne’s correspondence than the steel remedy, in close agreementwith Bacon’s perspective. Osborne can be seen to make use of the process of epistolaryexchange to manage her excessive passions. In addition to styling herself as melancholyby disposition, she gives voice to the painful and disruptive passions that arise circum-stantially through the trials of her forbidden courtship with Temple. In letters 48–53(December 1653–January 1654), Osborne enters a phase of despair about their future andadvises that they give up their courtship altogether. The force of her own passions comesinto view as she expresses her despair to Temple. She tells him she is “lost” and“wretched,” protesting that their courtship

has made the trouble of your life, and cast a cloude upon mine, that will help to cover mee inmy grave… it wrought soe upon us both as to make neither of us friends to one another, butagree in running wildely to our owne distructions … Alasse were I in my own disposall, youshould come to my Grave to bee resolved; but Greif alone will not kill … I have noe End’snor no designes nor will my heart ever be capable of any, but like a Country wasted by aCivill warr, where two opposeing Party’s have disputed theire right soe long till they have

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made it worth neither of theire conquest’s, ’tis Ruin’d and desolated by the long striffe withinit to that degree as ’twill be usefull to none, nobody that knows the condition ’tis in will thinkit worth the gaineing.83

Her writing retains its rhetorical control, but is full of exclamations and expressions ofanguish, with more than one reference to death: the first a notion that their strife will helpher to her death, casting “a cloude … that will help to cover mee in my Grave,” and thesecond a longing for suicide, and regret that grief alone cannot kill. The striking metaphorof a country wasted by civil war for her heart was of course powerfully evocative to bothOsborne and Temple, for whom the war had only recently ended, having destroyed thekingdom their families had supported, and laid waste to the social order as they knew it. Itis also akin to Plato’s image of the “civil war” taking part in the soul, between appetiteand reason, sometimes used as a trope in Petrarchan poetry.84 As in many places in theletters, there is potentially a dense intertexture, including contemporary culture andpolitics. In any case, Osborne is performing here the dangerous “strength” of “passion”to which she refers in her previous letter. Interestingly, in a later letter to Temple, sheexpresses concern at his unhappy “violent passion” and bids him,

If you have Ever Loved mee … preserve yourself from the Violences of your passion. Vent itall upon mee call mee and think mee what you please make mee if it be possible morewretched than I am, i’le beare it all without the Least murmure.85

In the earlier impassioned letter in which she expresses her despair, Osborne is alsoenacting this therapeutic process of venting that she comes to recommend to Temple,although she does not blame him as she “vents” her suffering. Arguably, letter writingitself was a therapeutic intervention for Osborne, and possibly for Temple, too: certainlyOsborne attempts to use her letters to construct a therapeutic space for both of them, inwhich she diagnoses them both with melancholy, and discusses cures, as well asexpressing all the pain of their obstacles to marriage. Burton notably recommendswriting as a therapeutic activity, stating that “I write of Melancholy, by being busie toauoid Melancholy,” and going on to cite the examples of both Cardano and JustusLipsius, both of whom he claims wrote as a therapy for grief following the deaths oftheir children.86 He also advocates reading as a therapy, emphasizing the “sweetcontent” to be got from reading, and recommending both “Scriptures and humaneauthors.”87 Lund has highlighted Burton’s investment in “literary therapeutics,” arguingthat “Burton’s text has a curative purpose intrinsic to itself, to the act of reading.”88

Letters of course have the special function of providing both writing and readingactivities for the correspondents.

Moral philosophy

Friendship, which has a privileged and at times therapeutic status in Osborne’s letters (aswell as in royalist literature more widely), is also an important component in an Epicureanapproach to happiness. Diogenes Laertius lists as a principal doctrine of Epicurus thenotion that, “Of all the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happinessthroughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.”89

Osborne sounds an Epicurean note when she professes to Temple, “One may bee happy toa good degree, I think, in a faithfull friend, a Moderate fortune and a retired life, fartherthan this I know nothing to wish.”90 The principle of moderation and the repose to be

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found in retirement are two other Epicurean features of the good life that find their wayinto the writings of Osborne and Temple, who both prioritize “tranquillity of mind” intheir approach to the passions.91 Temple includes a passage on spleen in his essay “OnHealth and Long Life,” published posthumously in 1701 and remarks that “fear, andregret, and melancholy apprehensions, which are the usual effects of the Spleen, with thedestractions, disquiets, or at least intranquillity they occasion, are the worst accidents thatcan attend any diseases.” The aversion to “intranquillity, disquiets, distractions anddisturbances,” is consonant with both neo-Stoic and Epicurean emphasis on the value oftranquillity of the spirit. We see a similar language enter Osborne’s discussions of thenecessity of regulating the passions and avoiding strife. In letter 48, she announces toTemple a resolution that they must end their courtship, as the strife associated with it istoo great, and that on this occasion she has managed to reach this decision “before myReason could overcome my passion.”92

Here Osborne is echoing the consensus of most seventeenth-century philosophers thatreason should be employed to moderate passion. Interestingly, it is when Osborne’sdespair reaches its fullest expression in the letters that this philosophical register entersher writing to temper her passions and to call for an end to the disturbing effects of thecouple’s uncertain future. The argument that she goes on to deploy stresses the dangersthe continuing strife of their troubled courtship poses to virtue and tranquillity. She writes,

There can bee noe pleasure in a struggling life … But passion gives a Strength above Nature,wee see it in mad People, (and not to fflatter ours elves, ours is but a refined degree ofmadnesse. What can it bee else to be lost to all things in the world but that single Object thattakes up on’s ffancy, to loose all the quiet and repose of on’s life in hunting after it, whenthere is soe litle likelyhood of ever gaineing it?93

This carefully reasoned argument opens with a phrase that is strikingly Epicurean: “therecan bee no pleasure in a struggling life,” an emphasis that recurs later in the passage,when Osborne asserts that fixation upon obtaining a desired object can lead one “to loseall the quiet and repose of one’s life.” This language of pleasure, quiet, repose, and theavoidance of struggle resonates with Epicurean ideals of the pleasure of repose and thenecessity of prudence, both of which promote the tranquility of soul and the absence ofagitation – ideas which Temple himself later outlines in an essay, “Upon the Gardens ofEpicurus, or Gardening in the Year 1685.” He explains that Epicurus viewed public life asdisruptive to “tranquility of mind” and

For this reason Epicurus passed his life wholly in his garden … and indeed no other sort ofabode seems to contribute so much to both the tranquility of mind and indolence of body,which he made his chief ends.94

These ideas are also compatible with Osborne’s preference for retirement in her garden,which can also be associated with the Epicurean good life. She also constructs anEpicurean argument for prudence in order to avoid strife and excessive passion. Sheargues, essentially, that her relationship with Temple is imprudent, faced as they both arewith obstacles to marriage and with family disapprobation, and that it would therefore bewiser to relinquish the courtship. In suggesting this to Temple, she pleads, “I would haveyou doe this upon the justest growne’s and such as may conduce most to your quiet andfuture satisfaction.”95 This closely echoes the Epicurean ethic that prudence and justicenaturally lead to repose and pleasure, as recorded by Diogenes Laertius: “By pleasure wemean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul … we cannot lead a life of

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pleasure which is not also a life of prudence, honour, and justice; nor lead a life ofprudence, honour and justice which is not a life of pleasure.”96

Osborne was writing in 1654 – considerably earlier than Temple’s 1685 essay onEpicurus, and Epicurus’s ideas relating to tranquility and repose hardly appeared inEnglish treatises on the passions. Epicureanism does inhabit Burton’s Anatomy ofMelancholy to a limited extent, although Angus Gowland has argued that Burton prior-itizes Stoic features over the Epicurean in his construction of Democritus in the preface tothe Anatomy.97 While English interest in Epicurean atomism flourished in the seventeenthcentury, the relative absence of Epicurean moral philosophy in English theories of thepassions was to change with the publication of Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy in1655 and Walter Charleton’s Natural History of the Passions, published in 1674. Thelatter, in particular, emphasized an Epicurean ethical practice valorizing the pleasure ofrepose and tranquility. The letters of Osborne, and probably those of Temple, anticipatethese aspects of neo-Epicureanism. It is possible that either Osborne, Temple, or both readthe French author Pierre Gassendi, who revived Epicureanism in the mid-seventeenthcentury and defended the pleasure of rest and tranquility. It is also possible that Osbornecame across Lucretius’s Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura, in which there was notableinterest in intellectual and literary circles in seventeenth-century England. Lucretius’spoem encourages its readers to seek the “peacefull quietness” of the Gods, and to avoidstrife, including romantic strife.98

We do not have Temple’s letters, but both Osborne’s letters and Temple’s essayssuggest that the pair evolved a language for discussing the passions and the good lifetogether in their correspondence, and that they shared a reading culture related to theseinterests. Certainly, Osborne’s interests appear to change in the letters from materialtherapies for melancholy to philosophical preoccupations with the disruptive effects ofpassions and emotional suffering upon virtue and tranquility. This interest is consonantwith Burton’s emphasis on the importance of moral philosophy for healthy living, whichthe prefatory frame of Democritus’s letter to the reader in the Anatomy provides, togetherwith the “Consolatory Digression,” which employs theology and moral philosophy“remedies to all discontents and passions of the mind.”99 However, the philosophicalarguments that Osborne mobilizes to recommend the end of her relationship with Temple,at a time when both lovers seem especially unhappy, give way eventually to letters of alighter tone in which this resolution is abandoned, and melancholy appears to have abated.These letters lead on, eventually, to the marriage of the couple. The process of letterwriting itself appears to be more therapeutic than the moral philosophy that at times theyarticulate.

In her letters, Osborne develops therapies for passionate suffering located in reading,writing, moral philosophy, and friendship as alternatives to the steel cure administered toher by her family. Her approaches to the passions seem to reflect the heterogeneous natureof early modern approaches to melancholy and the passions and demonstrate the applica-tion of contemporary discourses on the passions by a seventeenth-century woman to herown life experience. Resonances with perspectives found in Burton’s Anatomy occurthroughout the letters and are blended with other textual influences originating fromOsborne’s literary and philosophical tastes, which often have a connection to royalistcultures. Epicurean emphases on friendship and repose play a privileged part in the modessought by Osborne to temper inordinate passion, while romance motifs are used toindicate the possibility of regeneration after romantic suffering. The characters andnarratives of romance fiction also provide therapeutic relief through the operation ofsympathy in affective reading practices. The therapeutic use of the processes of the

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reading and writing of the letters themselves lies also arguably at the heart of Osborne’scorrespondence.

Notes1. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple. All citations to this edition.2. Important recent studies include Carrera, Emotions and Health; Cockcroft, Rhetorical Affect;

Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance; James, Passion and Action; Lund, Melancholy, Medicineand Religion; Paster, Humoring the Body; Paster et al., Reading the Early Modern Passions;Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul; and Trevor, Poetics of Melancholy.

3. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression; Paster, Humoring the Body; Sullivan, “A DiseaseUnto Death”; and Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves.

4. Paster, Humoring the Body, 14.5. Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, 77. Fear and sorrow, together with impairment

of the faculties of reason and the imagination, are emphasized as principal symptoms ofmelancholy in most early modern treatises dealing with melancholy and the passions,including Bright, Treatise of Melancholie; Wright, Passions of the Minde; Reynolds,Treatise of the Passions; and Bradwell, Physick for the Sicknesse.

6. Sullivan, “A Disease Unto Death,” 160.7. Wright, Passions of the Minde, 45. On effects to the brain and heart, see Burton, Anatomy of

Melancholy, 47–8.8. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 152.9. Gowland, “Problem of Early Modern Melancholy,” 84.10. See especially Babb, Elizabethan Malady; Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender; Lyons, Voices

of Melancholy; Neely, Distracted Subjects; Schiesari, Gendering of Melancholia; Trevor,Poetics of Melancholy; and Wells, Secret Wound.

11. See especially Brann, Origin of Genius.12. Trevor, Poetics of Melancholy, 4, 9.13. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy.14. Burton, “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” Anatomy of Melancholy, 6.15. Schiesari, Gendering of Melancholia, 186, 95.16. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 61.17. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 170.18. Gowland, “Problem of Early Modern Melancholy,” 191.19. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 243, 7920. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 150. Scholarship on Burton’s copious text mostly focused on

his style prior to important, more recent, studies by Gowland, Renaissance Worlds ofMelancholy and Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, & Religion, which have heralded moreextensive considerations of the medical, religious, philosophical, and political content ofthe Anatomy of Melancholy.

21. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 33.22. Wright, Passions of the Mind; Bright, Treatise of Melancholie; and du Laurens, Discourse.23. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 144–5.24. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 115–16.25. Reynolds, Treatise of the Passions, 37.26. Trevor, Poetics of Melancholy, 7.27. Rudrum, “Royalist Lyric,” 181.28. For a more detailed allegorical reading, see Wilcher, Writing of Royalism, 133–5.29. Daniel, Selected Poems, 172–9 (contains Eclogue V only).30. Cavendish, Poems and Fancies.31. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 89–90.32. Hintz has also associated Osborne’s description of her sad eyes with the discourse of love-

melancholy involving a Ficinian (neoplatonic) emphasis on the role of the gaze in theaffliction, Audience of One, 139.

33. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 106.34. On hypochondriacal melancholy see Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 53, 227–9.35. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 61.

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36. Wellcome Library, MS 7113, fol. 138; MS 4338, fol. 113.37. Wellcome Library, MS 8575, fol. 133.38. Rivière, Practice of Physick, 331.39. See note 37 above.40. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 59.41. Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, & Religion, 102. On Burton’s critique of compound medicines,

see Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 94.42. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 61.43. Ibid., 85.44. Ibid., 111.45. Ibid., 73.46. Ibid., 131.47. Fitzmaurice and Rey have written about Osborne’s interest in characterizing herself as a

Romance heroine, and about her use of Romance style. See Fitzmaurice and Rey, “Letters byWomen.”

48. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 164.49. See note 48 above.50. Wells, Secret Wound, 4.51. Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, 100; and Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 258.52. Salzman, “Theories of Prose Fiction,” 300–2.53. de Scudéry, Ibrahim, sig. A2v.54. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 128.55. Preface to “A True Romance or The Disastrous Chances of Love and Fortune,” in Temple,

Early Essays and Romances, 35.56. Hintz, Audience of One, 81. Hintz argues that Osborne makes use of romances for catharsis,

to perform emotionality, and to investigate different love-relationships (64–86).57. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 125.58. Valla, cited in Steggle, Laughing and Weeping, 83.59. Temple, Early Essays and Romances, 36. Cited in Hintz, Audience of One, 70.60. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 124.61. Dorrington, Excellent Woman, 16.62. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 351.63. Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, & Religion, 2.64. On associations between royalism and romance see especially Patterson, Censorship and

Interpretation, Chapter Four: “The Royal Romance,” 167–198; Khan, “ReinventingRomance.” Nigel Smith has remarked that “Romance was seen to be a political form bymembers of both sides in the political conflict” of the civil war: Smith, Literature andRevolution, 236.

65. On the vogue of French Romance in England, see Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 114.66. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 132.67. de Scudéry, 4; quoted in Davis, Factual Fictions, 28. With thanks to Alice Eardley who first

drew my attention to this interest of de Scudéry, and who has helped me with the Englishreception of seventeenth-century French Romance.

68. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 164–5.69. Ovid, Metamorphoses, viii 620–724.70. Hintz has suggested that with this story, Osborne reveals her “desire for a fully-fledged

domesticity in the midst of an uncertain courtship,” Hintz, Audience of One, 123.71. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 40.72. Ibid., 58.73. Schneider, “Royalist Approaches,” 559.74. Barnes, “Restoration of Royalist Form,” 204.75. Schneider, “Royalist Approaches,” 562. The collections are Howell’s Epistolae Ho-Elianae;

Ford’s Faenestra in Pectore; Loveday’s Loveday’s Letters Domestick and Forrein; andCavendish’s CCXI Sociable Letters.

76. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 113–14.77. Ibid., 140.78. Ibid.79. See Schneider, “Royalist Approaches”; Wilcher, Writing of Royalism, 221–61.

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80. Lovelace, Lucasta, “The Grasshopper,” ll. 21–4.81. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 517.82. Bacon, “Of Friendship.”83. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 155–6.84. Plato, Republic, IV. 439b. For uses/adaptations of the trope, see for instance Sir Philip

Sidney’s Astrophil & Stella, 39: “O make in me those civil wars to cease” (l. 7); andShakespeare Sonnet 35, adapting the trope: “Such civil war is in my love and hate” (l. 12).

85. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 160.86. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 6–7.87. Ibid., 353, 437.88. Lund, Melancholy, Medicine, & Religion, 96.89. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, X: 148 (p. 673). Texts of the Lives were

recovered in the early fifteenth century.90. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 126.91. Temple, “Gardens of Epicurus,” 214.92. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, 151.93. Ibid., 152.94. Temple, “Gardens of Epicurus,” 214.95. See note 92 above.96. Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, X; 131–2.97. Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, 10, 13.98. During the 1650s, Lucy Hutchinson, John Evelyn, Alexander Brome, and a possible prose

translator were all at work on translations of the poem. The three poetic translations were notcompleted until well after Osborne composed her letters. Evelyn mentions visiting Temple’sgardens in his diary in 1688 and appears to have been an acquaintance of Temple. SeeEvelyn, Diary, 271.

99. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 281.

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