Empire against Melancholy: Healing the Body Politic in Britain, c. 1558-1630

我的研究探讨了17世纪初英国殖民背景下的病态政体的概念。我将挑战当前对早期现代帝国的理解，认为懒惰作为忧郁的病态迹象在扩张主义话语中发挥了核心作用。因此，我提出，有机身体和国家的寓言比学者们之前认为的更真实地构思，遵循亚里士多德和伽利安的传统，从身体政治的微观和宏观世界来呈现世界。我的项目将遵循一种在思想史上占据主导地位超过50年的方法论：在其背景中解释思想。然而，知识分子历史学家往往未能将他们的背景扩展到狭隘的政治背景之外。在实践中，如果不是在理论上，思想史仍然局限于一部久负盛名的经典。我的项目提供了扩大我们对背景的欣赏。我将提供政治和宗教材料、医学著作和以前被忽视的手稿材料的互文分析。我要研究的文本都是为了帮助建立新的殖民地而写的，为了做到这一点，它们都在很大程度上依赖于疾病身体及其治疗的概念。由于这些作者都活跃在殖民过程中，我的研究的部分方法论意义将是证明，思想史研究的来源根本不是理论上的，相反的：它们被非常多地使用、辩论和实践。通过将注意力引向这些文本，我将证明，身体、精神和国家的健康是早期现代英国公民理所当然的。任何形式的“好”宪法要有效发挥作用都是至关重要的，在要求公民参与政治生活的共和国中更是如此。因此，我的研究是探索个人健康和国家正常运作之间联系的重要性。

My research explores the idea of the diseased body politic in the context of colonisation in early seventeenth-century Britain. I will challenge the current understanding of early modern empire by arguing that idleness as a pathological sign of melancholy played a central role in the expansionist discourse. Accordingly, I propose that the allegory of the organic body and the state was conceived much more literally than scholars previously thought, following the Aristotelian and Galenic traditions that rendered the world in terms of micro- and macrocosms of the body politic.My project will follow a methodology in intellectual history that has been dominant for over fifty years: to interpret ideas in their contexts. Intellectual historians, however, have routinely failed to expand their contexts beyond the narrowly political. In practice if not in theory, intellectual history has remained restricted to a long-established canon. My project offers to expand our appreciation of context. I will provide an intertextual analysis of political and religious tracts, medical writings, and previously ignored manuscript material. The texts my research will focus on were all written to assist the establishment of new colonies, and to do so they all relied heavily on the concept of the diseased body and its treatments. As these authors were all active in the process of colonisation, part of the methodological implications of my study will be to demonstrate that the sources for the study of intellectual history were not at all theoretical, quite the opposite: they were very much used, debated, and put into practice.By directing attention to these texts, I shall demonstrate that the inseparability of the health of the body, mind, and the state was taken for granted by the citizens of early modern Britain. It was crucial for any form of "good" constitution to work effectively, but even more so in republics where citizens were required to participate in political life. My study, therefore, is an exploration of the importance of the connection between individual health and the proper functioning of the state.