Published in five editions between 1621 and 1651, The Anatomy of Melancholy marks a unique moment in the development of disciplines, when fields of knowledge were distinct but not yet restrictive. In ...Robert Burton’s Rhetoric , Susan Wells analyzes the Anatomy , demonstrating how its early modern practices of knowledge and persuasion can offer a model for transdisciplinary scholarship today.
In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Robert Burton attempted to gather all the existing knowledge about melancholy, drawing from professional discourses including theology, medicine, and philology as well as the emerging sciences. Examining this text through a rhetorical lens, Wells provides an account of these disciplinary exchanges in all their subtle variety and abundant wit, showing that questions of how knowledge is organized and how it is made persuasive are central to rhetorical theory. Ultimately, Wells argues that in addition to a book about melancholy, Burton’s Anatomy is a meditation on knowledge.
A fresh interpretation of The Anatomy of Melancholy , this volume will be welcomed by scholars of early modern English and the rhetorics of health and medicine, as well as those interested in transdisciplinary work and rhetorical theory.
Angus Gowland investigates the theory of melancholy and its many applications in the Renaissance by means of a wide-ranging contextual analysis of Robert Burton's encyclopaedic Anatomy of Melancholy ...(first published in 1621). Approaching the Anatomy as the culmination of early modern medical, philosophical and spiritual inquiry about melancholy, Gowland examines the ways in which Burton exploited the moral psychology central to the Renaissance understanding of the condition to construct a critical vision of his intellectual and political environment. In the first sustained analysis of the evolving relationship of the Anatomy (in the various versions issued between 1621 and 1651) to late Renaissance humanist learning and early seventeenth-century England and Europe, Gowland corrects the prevailing view of the work as an unreflective digest of other authors' opinions, and reveals the Anatomy's character as a polemical literary engagement with the live intellectual, religious and political issues of its day.
To find a coherent account of normal and abnormal psychology from within Burton’s religious presuppositions and humoral explanations requires selection and interpretation. This reading highlights ...Burton’s stress on the role of the imagination in inciting and averting melancholy; his emphasis on daily habits of thought in engendering, as well as avoiding, severe disorder; the multidirectional feedback loops linking feeling and thought in his particular version of embodied interactionism; and the centrality of symptoms, natural history and habituation in his conception of disease. Much of the Anatomy comes from classical, medieval, and renaissance writing, yet it yields an account that concurs well with present-day cognitivism. Although with its signature fears and sadnesses seventeenth-century melancholy bears only a loose relationship to present-day mood disorders such as depression and anxiety, on this reading, the Anatomy anticipates important present-day findings and hypotheses, including psychiatry’s network models of depression; the part played by affective states and imagination (or simulation) in all cognition, and links between “melancholising” or rumination, and affective disorder. The Anatomy of Melancholy offers a host of recommendations for averting, and remedying, melancholy as disease, and its emphasis on early prevention, eclectic, multifactorial treatments, and consistent self-care are traceable to its underlying cognitive architecture and disease conception. Averted early through adherence to the regimen of Galenic medicine with its six “nonnaturals” that together regulate the passions, it suggests, severe, intractable melancholy can mostly be avoided. It a progressive disorder engendered by neglected cognitive and behavioral habits, so prevention largely lies in attentive self-care—a conception, and conclusion, with likely implications for psychiatry today.
Published in five editions between 1621 and 1651, The
Anatomy of Melancholy marks a unique moment in the development
of disciplines, when fields of knowledge were distinct but not yet
restrictive. In ...Robert Burton's Rhetoric , Susan Wells
analyzes the Anatomy , demonstrating how its early modern
practices of knowledge and persuasion can offer a model for
transdisciplinary scholarship today.
In the first decades of the seventeenth century, Robert Burton
attempted to gather all the existing knowledge about melancholy,
drawing from professional discourses including theology, medicine,
and philology as well as the emerging sciences. Examining this text
through a rhetorical lens, Wells provides an account of these
disciplinary exchanges in all their subtle variety and abundant
wit, showing that questions of how knowledge is organized and how
it is made persuasive are central to rhetorical theory. Ultimately,
Wells argues that in addition to a book about melancholy, Burton's
Anatomy is a meditation on knowledge.
A fresh interpretation of The Anatomy of Melancholy ,
this volume will be welcomed by scholars of early modern English
and the rhetorics of health and medicine, as well as those
interested in transdisciplinary work and rhetorical theory.
The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, is one of the greatest works of early modern English prose writing, yet it has received little substantial literary criticism in recent years. This ...study situates Robert Burton's complex work within three related contexts: religious, medical and literary/rhetorical. Analysing Burton's claim that his text should have curative effects on his melancholic readership, it examines the authorial construction of the reading process in the context of other early modern writing, both canonical and non-canonical, providing a new approach towards the emerging field of the history of reading. Lund responds to Burton's assertion that melancholy is an affliction of body and soul which requires both a spiritual and a corporal cure, exploring the theological complexion of Burton's writing in relation to English religious discourse of the early seventeenth century, and the status of his work as a medical text.
Patricia Vicari demonstrates Burton's control over rhetorical strategies and selection of materials in one of the great prose works of the English Renaissance, The Anatomy of Melancholy. She argues ...that Burton's aim of curing melancholy is both pastoral and therapeutic, since melancholy is both a disease and the state of unregeneracy, but the ultimate authorial presence is that of the preacher trying to bring about conversion. One of his major strategies is to disguise that presence. Throughout much of the book attention is directed toward worldly matters and secular knowledge. The immediate authorial presence therefor is that of 'Robert the experienced,' another victim of melancholy, offering the record of his own self-cure as a main persuasive tactic. Vicari examines the kinds of knowledges that Burton exhibits to the reader in three chapters dealing with nature, God, and man. In each Vicari singles out for more detailed discussion special problems or topics that were timely or of particular interest to Burton. She locates Burton's reading and opinions within the general state of knowledge about them. Finally, she examines his presentation of this knowledge in his own book. Burton's book, Vicari argues, is neither a structured treatise nor a self-indulgent romp, but a fairly well controlled instrument of persuasion, a swollen sermon. Not all is controlled: Burton's notorious self-contradictions, for example, are often due in advertence and the pitfalls of his method of composition. His personality, too, shapes his writing, and the experience of bitterness and frustration, out of which his book was born - not to mention the ethos of charity and benignity appropriate to a preacher - sometimes unsettles his aim. But on the whole, Vicari maintains, the Anatomy is a coherent and deliberate rhetorical process, an original and appropriate adaptation of homiletic rhetoric.
Despite late Jacobean and early Caroline playwrights' appropriation of the idea that theater could serve as an imaginative cure for the melancholic spectator, Robert Burton's 1621 The Anatomy of ...Melancholy articulates a much more ambivalent perspective on using performance to effect change in audiences or in melancholics who partake too readily in the fictions presented before them. Burton's text argues that entertainments can be harmful for the melancholic individual, whose unstable imagination leads him or her to confuse fiction and reality, sometimes transforming into "an actor himselfe." Although Burton occasionally mitigates his condemnation of theater, he presents a picture of impressionable melancholics who are susceptible to fiction's power and might cause self or social harm because of their diseased imaginations. Theater, in this case, only exacerbates an already existing condition of ailing discernment in the mind and body. Burton, a self-styled "Anticke actor," crafts a critique of theater that is part of the wider concern among his contemporaries over unruly audiences and rebellious playwrights, who together threaten to undermine the social structure and political order of England. These concerns help to explain why Burton, in a manner quite different from earlier authors on melancholy, anticipates and participates in a flourishing meta-theatrical discourse in the 1620s and 1630s.
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