Mad world: Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy

Abstract

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.