1976/04/01 by Barbara H. Traister · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #History of Medicine Studies #Genius #Biography #Literature #Philosophy #Psychoanalysis #Art #Psychology
paper · doi:10.2307/2859991
openalex publication_date 1976/04/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/25
I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy… . I was not a little offended with this malady, shall I say my mistress Melancholy, my Egeria, or my malus genius [evil genius]? and for that cause, … make an antidote out of that which was the prime cause of my disease.Such teasingly self-referential passages as that quoted above have long led scholars to speculate as to the real physical and mental condition of Robert Burton. Did he suffer, as he claimed, the ravages of melancholy, or was he as a scholar simply assuming the fashionable scholars’ disease as a peg upon which to hang his encyclopedic treatise? Much of this uncertainty arises from gaps in our knowledge of Burton's biography.