The Elizabethan Mind
Helen Hackett
(Yale University Press, 448 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Psychology ranks alongside fine art, linear time and human sexuality as a field the Catholic Church first invented, then abandoned, and thereafter shrouded in guilty, confused silence. Whether you consider this separation benign or otherwise depends on how much patience you have for priests and psychiatrists respectively and, correspondingly, whether you’d greet an amalgam of the two with equanimity – or horror. Tragic or not, the bifurcation between spirituality and theories about the mind quietly defined the twentieth century. But it was one contrived in the sixteenth, as amply demonstrated by Helen Hackett’s The Elizabethan Mind, a new study of early modern ideas about interior life.

“As slime and dirt engender toads and frogs,” wrote Thomas Nashe, contemplating the “black bile” of melancholy, “so this slimy melancholy humour engendereth many misshapen objects in our imaginations.” It’s not quite the DSM-IV. And the abiding sense one gets from The Elizabethan Mind is that the definite article of the title is not so definite after all: Hackett’s sources can’t agree what the mind does, or even what it is. Psychology is a matter of humours, four physical substances circulating in the body, educated early-moderns profess – unless it’s all down to spiritual warfare between angels and their demonic opposites.