‘As Hunters find their Game by the Trace’: Reading to Discover in The Anatomy of Melancholy (original) (raw)

Diagram and Discourse in the Anatomy of Melancholy

Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2022

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.

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.

Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy

Early Modern Literary Studies, 2017

A man poses for his portrait. Rather than striking a conventionally commanding, manly stance with legs apart, Edward, Lord Herbert (ca. 1582-1642), lies down. Reclining with his head resting on his clenched fist, he stretches his booted and spurred legs out to one side and lies with his sword and shield over him. The posture is an oddly uncomfortable one (I have tried it), as no part of his torso touches the floorfortunate, then, that he is only posing for a miniature. The artist, Isaac Oliver (ca. 1565-1617), adds surroundings: not a richly draped interior, but a verdant woodland landscape. The setting may be peaceful, but the final image is hardly so. Herbert's pose, his serious, long gaze, his stiff upper body-all conjure up the spirit of melancholy. In the foreground, a river bank drops away sharply just inches from the subject's body, hinting at the fate awaiting those afflicted with mental turmoil. Why did Herbert choose to be pictured as a melancholic? The simple answer is that, in this period, it was fashionable for English aristocrats to be so, wearing suits of solemn black or lying in shady retreat. That melancholy was seen as desirable and glamorous stemmed ultimately from the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems 30.1, which asked why artists, thinkers, and poets were so often affected by the disease of black bile. Marsilio Ficino elaborated this prompt into a full-blown neo-Platonic theory of melancholic genius, enabling the disorder to become a self-identifying marker of high status in the early modern period. These new studies of melancholy by Mattthew Bell and Stephanie Shirilan address why melancholy has been such an enduring and-for some-attractive condition. Bell's invigorating book has the more ambitious scope: it investigates the broad cultural, social, and medical contexts of the affliction from ancient Greece up to the end of the nineteenth century, covering topics including gender, nomenclature, geography, class, and nationality. Preferring the term "melancholia," as an indicator of the "European character of the disease" (p. xiii), Bell argues that the condition is fundamentally associated with a Western understanding of self-consciousness. It is not simply a product of Renaissance cultures of individualism, as