From (Pseudo-)Aristotle's reflections on wine, poetry, and heroes in problems, book 30, to modern psychoanalytic theory and depression, melancholy has claimed the attention of artists and thinkers throughout the history of Western culture. According to Jennifer Radden's historical analysis, melancholy was “a central cultural idea, focusing, explaining, and organizing the way people saw the world and one another and framing social, medical, and epistemological norms” (vii). It takes a number of forms: for ancient Greek physicians it was a somatic malady, an overwrought contemplativeness and moroseness rooted in the body's humors; for Aristotle it was this, too, but was also a fount of artistic inspiration; for the Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino it was the source of poetic and prophetic powers, a requisite for heightened intellect. Melancholy was, in short, a principle of relation between the interior and exterior realms and as such possessed a weighty hermeneutic charge as a lens through which to experience and read the world. In recent years, scholars in literary and cultural studies have begun to explore the perspectives that melancholy offers for understanding such broad topics as the formation of literary subjectivities and cultural constructions of gender. The persistent presence of melancholy in medieval and early modern literature, following Radden's observation, advocates for its many possibilities as an interpretive tool to shape diverse literary positionalities and socioepistemological modes of being.