When we talk about melancholy in its modern sense, we usually understand it to mean a state of sadness, dejection, and introspection. Fear does not enter into our definitions of it. In the Renaissance, however, to be melancholic was to live in fear. Anxiety, terror, sudden frights, and phobias were all seen as hallmarks of the disease, along with sorrow. In The Anatomy of Melancholy’s English predecessor, Timothy Bright’s Treatise of Melancholy (1586), fear rather than sadness is the disease’s defining characteristic: it is ‘either a certain fearful disposition of the mind altered from reason, or else an humour of the body, commonly taken to be the only cause of reason by fear in such sort depraved’.