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.
In this essay, I explore the pathological aspects of solitude in The Anatomy of Melancholy. The first part outlines Burton's account of the medical dimension of solitude, in which the desire to be ...alone is, according to the teachings of physicians from antiquity to the seventeenth century, a prominent symptom of the melancholic disease. Here, the Anatomy draws on a range of medical authorities to connect solitariness with the characteristically melancholic passions of fear and sorrow. However, when analysed in conjunction with physical idleness and excessive thinking, solitude could also be regarded as part of an unhealthy physical and psychological regimen, and thereby come to be a cause of melancholy. As we shall see, Burton is particularly interested in the effects of solitude upon the mind of the melancholic sufferer, and describes the process of ‘melancholizing’, the passage from pleasurable meditation to painful mental fixation, as one of the intrinsic dangers of the voluntary withdrawal from the external world. In the second part of the essay, I turn to the spiritual significance of solitude in Burton's work. Whilst solitude had been regarded for many centuries as an important part of Christian devotion, its potentially hazardous dimensions had also long been recognised, particularly in early accounts of acedia (sloth) and diabolical temptation. This perspective on solitude was incorporated in Protestant writing about melancholy, especially in English works concerned with the ‘afflicted conscience’. These sources provided the background for Burton's account of ‘religious melancholy’, which combined spiritual and medical ideas about solitude to describe its destructive function in generating superstitious delusions and mental self-torment.
This article gives a detailed description and analysis of Robert Burton's copy of Theatrum urbium italicarum, a Venetian ‘city‐atlas’ produced in 1599 by the engraver and publisher Pietro Bertelli. ...Burton's copy of the book is especially noteworthy because it has had a number of the maps removed. The article uses the Theatrum in order to add fresh emphasis to Burton's understanding of cartography, and to suggest new ways in which early modern maps can be related to literary works. I begin with a survey of the renaissance ‘city‐atlas’, proceeding to locate the Theatrum within a distinctly Venetian milieu of map‐production, and showing the surprisingly various contexts in which the Venetian maps could appear. I then detail the bibliographical oddities of Burton's copy, suggesting possible reasons for the removal of the maps. I conclude by suggesting that the form and construction of the Theatrum – hastily assembled, gathered from a range of sources – can be related in productive fashions to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. I situate the Theatrum and similar works among a recent critical trend of ‘material metaphors for literary form’, considering the ways in which early modern authors thought of the structures of their works as analogous to various material objects.
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.
Kiessling critiques The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Geography was always in the forefront of the mind of Burton when he wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621 and ...revised for publication in five additional editions. He cited over 1600 different places and these occur some 7000 times, an average of eight times a page in the final edition of 800 pages and 516.000 words.
Nicolas Kiessling drew some attention to verses of Lucretius that Robert Burton translated, and untidily scribbled, in one of his books (Oxford, Christ Church Library, f.8.64). These verses--being De ...rerum natura, III.79--81--remain of interest, since the translation Burton drafted here soon found its way into the first edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), as well as all subsequent editions. Burton makes an interesting and unnoticed change to the original Lucretian text, the motivation for which can be found in the draft. Kiessling also asks two questions of relationship including the correlation of the page that contains bibliographical annotations related to the entire Sammelband.
The “direction” that Johnson quoted came from the last page of Robert Burton's compendium of psychiatric lore, first published in 1621 using the pseudonym Democritus Junior, and revised and expanded ...on many occasions before the author's death in 1640. Its full title was The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it.
Understanding the relationship between Burton's approach to interpretation opens a counternarrative within "La biblioteca de Babel" that disrupts the explicit claims of the narrator while refocusing ...our attention on his own process of engaging with language while his society of seekers falls into a state of disarray, beset by despair, waves of suicides, and a deadly epidemic of respiratory disease (I, 763). When it is read with an awareness of the story to come, this approach can feel validated: scholars have thus approached it as a succinct representation of the central ideas in the story.1 However, when we turn to Burton's book, the "art" being referenced is purely mathematical: he is simply describing the joy in learning the calculations that allow us to arrive at the vast quantities produced by the logical combination of known elements. Who is he that is now wholly overcome with idleness, or otherwise involved in a labyrinth of worldly cares, troubles and discontents, that will not be much lightened in his mind by reading of some enticing story, true or feigned, whereas in a glass he shall observe what our forefathers have done, the beginnings, ruins, falls, periods of commonwealths, private men's actions displayed to the life, &c. . we have thousands of authors of all sorts, many great libraries full well furnished, like so many dishes of meat, served out for several palates; and he is a very block that is affected with none of them. The problem is compounded when Burton considers the torrents of books that seem to pour out of presses-he laments that "the number of books is without number" in his "scribbling age" and compares their proliferation to the expansion of a "paper kingdom" (19).
Ancient, medieval and Renaissance natural philosophy or physics considered the influence of Venus and Saturn as being inextricably yet fatally connected and reasoned that those born under the sign of ...Saturn, who were consequently more prone to the ill effects of melancholia, share certain fundamental characteristics with those born under the sign of Venus (especially if in conjunction with Mars and/or Luna), who are more predisposed to the stimuli of the flesh.
