Diagram and Discourse in the Anatomy of Melancholy (original) (raw)
This article examines the methodological, epistemological, aesthetic, and affective tensions between the promise of diagrammatic representation and the practice of discursive expression in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621, first edition). It closely interprets the Anatomy’s tabular logic and analytic claims per se and in conjunction with Burton’s inductive, imaginative prose. While the discursive gathering of copious particulars aims to cure and to console, by ‘rectification’ and ‘recreation’ respectively, the synoptic tables introducing the book’s three partitions represent the ambiguous promise of human scientia, thus becoming yet another cause of melancholy. Compared with other early modern instances of tabular and encyclopedic reason, and interpreted in light of recent scholarship on the diagram, Burton’s tables play a critical, subtle role not only in the Anatomy’s invention and arrangement of topics, but also on the local level where the struggle for meaning and the experience of affect occurs.
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The Review of English Studies, 2019
The critical edition of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, published by the Clarendon Press between 1989 and 2000, provided an invaluable resource for Burton scholars in the form of a generally reliable reading text and extensive critical apparatus, including three volumes of commentary devoted to tracing Burton's sources, identifying historical persons, events and geographical locations mentioned in the text, and explicating obscure allusions and technical terminology. Since its publication, however, there has been little attention paid to the contents of the Clarendon commentary, which contains many lacunae and entries that invite alteration. This is particularly regrettable, because Burton aimed the Anatomy partly at scholarly readers who were expected to read his cento in a similar way to a modern literary commentator, primarily by identifying its sources and allusions, and interpreting their deployment and manipulation in the text. This article seeks to supplement the Clarendon commentary by extending and revising its treatment of bibliographical sources, persons, geographical locations, and textual explanation. In doing so, it exemplifies a mode of reading that Burton expected for his book. It concludes by considering the implications for our understanding of the intended readership of the Anatomy.
Exhilarating the Spirits: Burtonian Study as a Cure for Scholarly Melancholy
This article examines the value that Burton not only attributes to study as a cure for melancholy but also induces by prescription. Burton’s seemingly superficial style of survey in The Anatomy of Melancholy models an alternative to those grave and ruminating modes of inquiry that Burton deems to be dangerous for the melancholically inclined, instead offering his reader a program for the allegrification of the spirits through the evocation of therapeutic wonder. I argue that Burton dispenses his study cure by appealing directly to the transformative powers of the imagination as they were understood by Renaissance Neoplatonists and rhetorical theorists whose influences are traced in part 1. Part 2 attends to the complex ironies of Burton’s juxtaposed accounts of the institutional causes of scholarly melancholy and the restorative effects of delightful study. Part 3 explores the ways that Burton’s descriptions of the inexhaustible variety of wonder to be found in studies yet to come and authors yet to be studied induce a sense of futurity and community that militates against the comorbid experiences of alienation and despair to which the melancholic scholar is prone.
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