Love sickness , Passions , Medieval Italian Literature
Abstract
Love trouble is a well described ‘pathology’ in Italian medieval literature, often indebted to the humoral medical theories of the School of Salerno, especially in the idea of love sickness as the result of the balance or imbalance of the four Hippocratic humors and of the cyclical pattern of the seasons and stages of life. Unbridled passions, not controlled by the ‘amor cortese’, deform bodies and torment souls and lead both men and women away from the search for a celestial balance, only guaranteed by the union of the heart spirit and bodily heat.
