Sources
The questions in the quiz are mainly drawn from the source base on the humoral system. Below
I've set out which sources were used for which question, with links to the resources online. At the bottom, I've also put some suggestions for further reading.
How likely are you to get angry playing a board game?
This question is drawn from Thomas Wright’s wonderful, The Passions of the Mind in Generall, published in 1604. For Wright, ‘pride, choller, and covetousnesse, commonly wait upon great gamsters’ (p. 125).
With which animal do you most identify?
This question comes from Henry Peacham’s beautiful Minerva Britanna, published in London in 1612. Peacham depicts the four temperaments as human characters, accompanied by their animal symbols, between page 126 and page 129.
Your friend knocks your phone out of your hand and the screen breaks, they’re mortified and offer to pay for a replacement screen, do you?
I made this question up, if they had phones in the early modern period, they didn’t take care of them very well.
Which of these best represents your most recent dream?
The options available from this question are taken from Chapter Fourteen of Thomas Walkington’s 1607 work, The Optick Glasse of Humors, which also gives its name to this website.
If you were a Scooby Doo character, which one would you be?
I also invented this question I’m afraid. Shaggy's tendency to fear and despair paints him as classically cold and dry, that is, melancholic. Daphne is sanguine, the total opposite to Shaggy's melancholia, she is social, bubbly,
and brave. Fred embodies the best of the choleric temperament, he is very brave and active, and can move others into action. Making the case for Velma as phlegmatic is a little harder, but I would argue that her ability to take her time,
before revealing the culprit, is at least indicative of a phlegmatic constitution.
What are your good qualities?
What are your bad qualities?
These questions were developed from Robert Croft’s Paradise Within Us: Or, The Happie Mind, published in 1640. Unfortunately, the only place I could find it online
was on ProQuest, for which you will require an institutional subscription. I love the book as a whole, but the section used for this quiz begins on page 44.
How well do you sleep?
This question is drawn from Samuel Haworth’s 1680 effort, Anthropologia, which contains long descriptions of the different complexions, beginning on page 139.
How do you respond if someone, perhaps justifiably, contradicts you?
Someone who gives only their initials, D. A., provides the source base for this question, in a pamphlet printed in 1683, called The Whole Art of Converse. D. A. goes through the conversation styles of all the different complexions, beginning on page 99.
Which of these best describes your comfort foods?
This question, and the available options, I took from Julius Degravere’s 1662 Thesauraus Remediorum: A Treasury of Choice Medicines Internall. The entire book is wonderful, the pages relevant to this quiz begin on page 7.
Further Reading
Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama, 2003.Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage, 2004.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 1989.
Owsei Temkin, 'Health and Disease', in The Double Face of Janus and Other Essays in the History of Medicine, 1977.
Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680, 2002.