Wild melancholy. On the historical plausibility of a black bile theory of blood madness, or hæmatomania

Nineteenth-century art historian John Addington Symonds coined the term hæmatomania (blood madness) for the extremely bloodthirsty behaviour of a number of disturbed rulers like Ibrahim II of Ifriqiya (850–902) and Ezzelino da Romano (1194–1259). According to Symonds, this mental pathology was linked to melancholy and caused by an excess of black bile. I explore the historical credibility of this theory of ‘wild melancholy’, a type of melancholia that crucially deviates from the lethargic main type. I conclude that in its pure form Symonds’ black bile theory of hæmatomania was never a broadly supported perspective, but can be traced back to the nosology of the ninth-century physician Ishaq ibn Imran, who practised at the Aghlabid court, to which the sadistic Ibrahim II belonged.

Disembodied Vocal Innocence: John Addington Symonds, the Victorian Chorister, and Queer Musical Consumption

In the early 1890s, both John Addington Symonds and Arthur Symons were fascinated by Paul Verlaine's sonnet “Parsifal” (1886)—in particular, by its final line, which dwells on the voices of singing children. Symonds enthused to Symons that it was “a line [to] treasure forever,” while, nevertheless, noting his reservations to Horatio Forbes Brown that “fine as it is, [it] looks like it […] must be rather of the sickly school.” In an article on Verlaine, Symons praised the poem as a “triumph [of] amazing virtuosity,” echoing the sentiments of his friend George Moore, who in Confessions of a Young Man (1886) exclaimed that he “kn[ew] of no more perfect thing than this sonnet.” With its repetition of assonant vowel sounds, Verlaine's closing line captures the gentle rise heavenward of the ethereal voices of Richard Wagner's offstage choristers, resounding above the stage at the conclusion of the opera. The hiatus with which the line opens functions as a sigh of renunciation, as the listeners abandon themselves to the inexpressible force of the transcendent. In Verlaine's sonnet, these children's voices become the epitome of the “disembodied voice” that Symons sees as so characteristic of Decadent poetics. They sing of the delicate immateriality of spiritual experience, the transient fragility of existence.

Reformation Protestantism

Whereas the third chapter considers the ways in which Protestants used history to come to terms with an opposing religious system, the fourth explores developing Protestant responses to their own, post-Reformation religious heritage. After evangelicals during the 1830s and 1840s used Reformation history to strengthen Biblicist religion, and Tractarians denounced the Reformation’s destructiveness, the growth of developmental historicism pushed debate over the Reformation’s legacies in new directions. Liberal Protestants identified the kernel of modern freedom in the husk of Reformation-era dogmatism, whilst critical evangelicals, such as Henry Wace and Robert William Dale, used developmental understandings of sixteenth-century history to refresh reformed orthodoxy. John Addington Symonds and Karl Pearson, however, began to exalt the Renaissance as the alternative birthplace of the autonomous individual. Whether Reformation religion was to be regarded as the quintessence of the modern spirit, or else as its impediment, became an important dividing line in late-Victorian intellectual culture.

Here Aphrodite Is Not

Bainbrigge’s closet drama is explored from a number of perspectives. These include its debt to Victorian classical burlesques, and responses to other versions of the myth of Achilles, including Homer’s. This chapter explores Bainbrigge’s dramatization of the secrecy that surrounds homoerotic writing, and its use of homoerotic codes. It interrogates the radical homoerotic literary heritage Bainbrigge lays claim to, and his portrayal of lesbianism as equivalent to male homosexuality, not least via a tradition of homoerotic receptions of Sappho, including those of Swinburne and John Addington Symonds. The chapter further explores Bainbrigge’s comments on the links between love between males and classical education, and the continuities between ancient and modern sexualities. The play offers an anarchic range of queer options, encompassing gender fluidity, cross-dressing, and a very wide variety of sexual possibilities and roles.