The Elizabethan Mind attempts nothing less than a comprehensive summary – within the limits of existing scholarship – of the literary, philosophical, theological, religious, scientific, political, social, emotional, and cosmic contexts for understanding the nature of the mind in the age of Elizabethan England. Insofar as is possible for a cultural history of this kind, the book succeeds. It is an impressive achievement. The prose is not only lucid, but at times positively breezy. And yet, within the confines of its particular approach, The Elizabethan Mind does not betray the complexity of its subject in achieving this lucidity.

The book’s subject is demanding, and we can understand some of those demands by looking at a single word that appears throughout the book: ‘melancholy’. In the Elizabethan age, the term melancholy ‘referred to both the humoral substance in the body – black bile – and the psychological state it produced’. It referred as well to the black, dark, and sluggish planet Saturn, which principally governed the humour. At the same time, Jean Bodin and others claimed that Africans suffered from an excess of black bile and melancholy because the hot climate made Africans ‘swarthy and deeply black’.