2010/10/05 by Mark Edwards · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Psychology · #History of Medicine Studies #Neurology and Historical Studies #Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices #Meaning (existential) #Reading (process) #Gossip #Classics #Audience measurement #History #Philosophy #Art history #Psychoanalysis #Art #Psychology #Law #Epistemology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/brain/awq282
openalex publication_date 2010/10/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Robert Burton’s tomb in Christ Church, Oxford, bears an enigmatic Latin inscription suggesting that ‘Melancholy gave life and death’ to its occupant. Historians and antiquaries have often speculated about its precise meaning. A persistent rumour perpetuated by Burton’s contemporary, the biographer and Oxford gossip Antony Wood, implied that its origins lay in Burton’s reading of an astrological chart predicting his own death in 1640. The melancholic Burton, the gossips suggested, committed suicide and thereby grimly verified the astrologer’s prediction. The evidence on either side is scant, but the rumour has persisted. Thus melancholy, a complex and peculiarly pre-modern disease, may well have killed Burton: it certainly must have occupied much of his time while he lived. Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, which was first published in 1621 and reissued in several subsequent editions in the 17th century, was a vast, erudite behemoth of a book. The Anatomy expanded relentlessly in Burton’s lifetime, since he constantly reworked the text and added extra material to each new edition. It won a wide readership among his learned contemporaries across Europe and remained popular long after Burton’s death. It seems that many of his later readers viewed the Anatomy as both a useful storehouse of impressive learning that could be recycled for their own purposes and, occasionally, as a source of practical advice. One 17th-century physician, Richard Napier, reportedly used some of the remedies he found in Burton’s work to treat his patients. What exactly did the Anatomy anatomize? Any reasonable answer to this question involves stepping back into an unfamiliar and complicated mental world. In the 16th and 17th centuries, melancholy was typically defined in the medical literature (which itself drew on Aristotelian, Hippocratic, Galenic and other classical sources) as a form of delirium (or mental distress) characterized by the impairment of the patient’s mental faculties (typically reason or imagination), combined with a tell-tale absence of fever and accompanied by the passions of fear and sorrow. The early modern understanding of melancholy drew on humoural theory to explain its basis and effects—specifically, it connected melancholy to an excess of one humour, in particular black bile. Medical discussions of the humours were complex, but were built on the assumption that a healthy body exhibited equilibrium between the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile). Each humour had its own distinct characteristics derived from the elements of heat, coldness, wetness and dryness. Blood was hot and moist, yellow bile hot and dry, phlegm cold and moist and black bile cold and dry. Any disruption to this equilibrium was potentially harmful, and produced disorder and disease. The basic humoural building blocks were multiplied by classical and later authors to produce a nuanced analysis of the many possible temperaments or mixtures of humours. The underlying assumption of this account was that the ‘perfect’ humoural mixture rarely occurred—most people were therefore unbalanced in respect to their humours. In the case of melancholy, an excess of the cold and dry humour of black bile produced symptoms affecting both body and soul together—making melancholy what we might anachronistically call a somatic and psychic disorder. Consequently, Burton’s Anatomy contained much discussion of the structure and functions of the body, mostly towards the start of the first part of the work, where he noted that he ‘held it not impertinent to make a brief digression of the anatomy of the body and faculties of the soul, for better understanding of that which is to follow’. Burton cannibalized the work of well-known 16th-century anatomists and medics such as Andreas Vesalius and Jean Fernel for this part of the book. But his approach to melancholy was based on more than simply medical knowledge: among the ‘divers writers’ he cited were works of classical literature, theology and history. This omnivorous attitude to his sources was driven partly by the therapeutic aims of the Anatomy. Burton clearly saw his project as an enterprise driven by the hope of alleviating or curing melancholy, although a dark thread of pessimism about the chances of achieving this goal runs through the book. The Anatomy was also an extended exercise in self-therapy. ‘I write,’ Burton noted in its opening pages, ‘of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy’. A cure might be found in the pastoral care of a priest, or in work (Burton commanded the reader to ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’) as much as in the apothecary’s shop or the physician’s consulting rooms. As a disorder, melancholy therefore inhabited a strange space between the expertise of medics, pastors and moral philosophers. Burton’s anatomy of melancholy was a dissection performed not with a scalpel, but by the book—or, to be more precise, with hundreds of books. He inhabited a deeply bookish world that was physically bounded by the limits of Jacobean and Stuart Oxford (where Burton was a Student of Christ Church for most of his adult life), but which ranged across centuries of learning, encompassing medicine, theology, classical literature and history. Therefore, it is important to recognize what is, and what is not, distinctive about his work. On the one hand, relatively little of the content, whether medical, theological or historical, of the Anatomy is genuinely original. Perhaps the single most characteristic feature of Burton’s approach to his subject was his extensive erudition, and what his learned contemporaries would have called ‘copiousness’—that is, the tangled web of opinion and authority he weaves in the text. The Anatomy was heavily indebted to the cento method of composition, in which the author’s own thoughts are woven together with a tissue of quotations from other writers—so, in outlining the nature and cure of melancholy, Burton engaged in what some modern critics have called a kind of ventriloquism, ostensibly allowing other authors to speak for him. Yet, Burton was not simply a retailer of second-hand learning. The Anatomy’s unique contribution lay not so much in its material, as in the meandering, ironic, playful and persuasive path he cut through it. Since its structure owed so much to quotations from other texts, and more learned works appeared every year, Burton’s compulsive itch to revise the Anatomy could never be satisfied. Consequently, his revisions distended the text well beyond its original size. As much as Burton lamented that ‘we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning’, he seemingly had no desire to draw it to a close. The reasons for this exercise in scholarly perpetual motion are in part banal and in part complex. On the one hand, Burton’s comprehensive, encyclopaedic approach demanded familiarity with an ever-increasing volume of scholarship; on the other hand, the self-therapeutic project on which he was engaged linked writing and reading with the hope of a cure. In a sense, to stop writing and reading about melancholy would be a self-defeating act. Another distinctive feature of Burton’s approach to the intractable problem of melancholy was his concern to situate it in a wider context. Understanding melancholy was not simply a question of individual psychology or pathology, but of the societal and political forces that produced it: to him, the disease was not just an inward state peculiar to a few sufferers, but a Europe-wide problem (the notion of an ‘epidemic’ of melancholy was common at the time) with external causes. Europe in the 17th century was split at the seams by religious war and confessional conflict; few states escaped and, as many historians have pointed out, this background of war and political upheaval shaped the political dimension of Burton’s project. Other causes and contexts of melancholy received equally careful attention. Hence there are sections of the Anatomy dealing with political and church patronage, politics, the role of religion and religious enthusiasm on melancholy and (a pressing problem close to the heart of many of its subsequent academic readers) ‘the Misery of Scholars’. Burton’s world was one whose disciplinary boundaries were drawn quite differently to those of today, and in which strict educational and technical specialization was perceived ambiguously. As a product both of the relatively narrow intellectual ecosystem of Oxford University and of the wider ocean of scholarship in which he swam effortlessly, Burton was part of a generation that still prized the vanishing goal of ‘general learning’. Medieval and early modern universities divided up the intellectual globe into distinct disciplines with their own separate traditions, texts and methods, and generally valued the so-called ‘higher faculties’ of medicine, law and theology above the subjects that formed part of the undergraduate BA degree, such as logic, rhetoric and natural philosophy. However, they also assumed that all of these disciplines were connected in a coherent way and that mastering all of them was both desirable and possible. The ideal ‘general scholar’ was able to range across all human learning, treating mathematics, biblical criticism, natural philosophy, divinity, medicine, rhetoric and classical literature. It might seem a sobering thought to most modern scientists, historians and medics, but in the early 17th century, to know something about everything was still a viable and intellectually respectable aim. Thus there was nothing unusual either in Robert Burton, a theologian by training and by profession, tackling the problem of melancholy, or in his perspective on the subject, which mixed medical, theological, moral and political approaches. Yet the Anatomy is both a reflection on, and an indictment of, the aspirations of ‘general learning’. The 17th century gradually saw the development of increasingly specialized scholarly disciplines with their own technical vocabularies and literatures. One effect of this gradual but profound shift was eventually to limit the extent to which scholars trained primarily in philology, Latin and Greek (what we would now call the ‘humanities’) could plausibly engage in conversations about medicine and natural philosophy. We know again from Anthony Wood that, as well as being a theologian trespassing on medical territory, Burton was also reputed to be a proficient mathematician and astronomer. Although this kind of intellectual range was typical of late 16th- and 17th-century scholars, it became much less common after around 1650. By the late 18th century, medics might still read theology, but most theologians probably pronounced less confidently about medical learning. The Anatomy is by no means the last of a vanishing species, since many other 17th-century authors engaged enthusiastically in writing big, erudite books of this type, but it does reflect a particular, and now eclipsed, moment in the interlocking histories of philosophy, science and medicine. There are many possible ways in which to understand Burton’s vast and idiosyncratic project, but much recent criticism of the Anatomy has been directed at its intellectual and cultural contexts. Historians and literary critics have generally attempted to make sense of its various medical, theological, rhetorical and ironic strands by considering them alongside the concerns of contemporaries. Mary Ann Lund’s book sits squarely within this tradition, but places particular emphasis on conceptions of reading and the reader. In this respect, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England differs from other recent work on Burton, such as Angus Gowland’s excellent book, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2006) in its starting assumption. Whereas Gowland’s book is more concerned with the philosophical underpinnings of Burton’s project and emphasizes that the ‘worlds’ that the Anatomy inhabits involve both the medical tradition and ethical and political philosophy, Lund’s focus is less philosophical. Approaching Burton as a literary scholar, rather than as a medical or intellectual historian, makes Lund alert to the strategies and techniques used in the Anatomy to dissect melancholy, and the sense in which these things matter to Burton’s overall project as much as the book’s content. Her aim is to unpick the connection between ‘reading and cure’ in Burton’s work (that is, the link between the act of reading about melancholy in the Anatomy and the complex process of purging oneself of the disease). She aims to set this relationship ‘in the context of early modern ideas about the activity of reading and its perceived effects’ (p. 2). The history of reading has become a growth area for literary scholars and historians in recent years, with a great deal of attention paid both to the mechanics of how 17th-century readers actually read, annotated and processed books, and to the assumptions that lay behind these activities. The general thrust of all this work has been that reading in the past is not a self-evident or obvious activity—it differed from our own experiences in significant and important ways. However, Lund is less interested in the mechanics of the reading process and more concerned with the strategies that Burton himself used to define and even construct his readership; her ultimate goal is to think about how reading as an activity operated in the 16th and 17th centuries. As I have suggested, isolating what is distinctive and interesting about Burton’s work from his vast patchwork of quotations and authorities is a challenging task. The relationship between the author of the Anatomy and its readers—in which Burton adopted many personae, including harsh satirist, pastoral counsellor, physician and priest—is one of the book’s central features and a promising field for this kind of enquiry. Engaging with the text of the Anatomy was literally intended to be, in Lund’s terminology, ‘reading for a cure’. Lund claims that Burton as an author was deeply interested in his readers’ response to his work, but not in defining the characteristics of an ‘ideal type’ of reader, or in making concrete assumptions about how readers would respond to the Anatomy. Rather, Lund argues, his open-ended conception of the nature of his audience was intended to maximize the potential of the Anatomy to alleviate melancholy. This made his work a strange kind of reading cure—not a prescription with predefined effects, but instead a subtle enterprise that might console and alleviate melancholic symptoms in a variety of ways. The curative effects of reading in their own right are taken seriously by Burton, Lund suggests, and this fact distinguishes him from other approaches to the problem of melancholy. Whereas texts in the medical tradition might offer analysis of melancholy or case histories, for Burton the book itself is a therapeutic intervention. Lund traces this theme of readership and reading through a variety of settings, placing the Anatomy in the context of contemporary theological literature on the ‘cure of consciences’, and among medical texts dealing with the various possible cures for melancholy. Questions of genre, and what it means to describe the Anatomy as a medical text or as a satire, are important to Lund’s argument; she points out that previous attempts to fit the Anatomy into one particular genre and define what the book is are misguided. Burton’s book is, for instance, neither a satire nor simply a vernacular work popularizing elite medical learning—it contains characteristics of both of these projects, and more besides, but cannot be reduced to any of them. Overall, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England has stimulating things to say on many aspects of the Anatomy. This is a short, elegant study of a very long, rambling book, which does a great deal to open up the world of the Anatomy. It ends with a brief coda about some of Burton’s early modern readers and what we can learn about them from the notes, marks and annotations they left in copies of the Anatomy. In a sense, this section completes the circle begun in Lund’s Introduction, since it moves from concepts of reading to real people thumbing through, and scribbling in, books. Its underlying message is a useful one—all its deftly displayed learning and the attention its author expended in thinking about his audience provoked what might seem like unexpected reactions, such as that of Richard Napier. Yet, as Lund suggests, in a sense Burton attempted to encourage this diversity himself, by presenting a work that attempted to cure without prescribing.