And for them, writes modern scholar Stephanie Shirilan, Burton’s “ecstatic study” posits wonder and the “transformative power of the imagination” as the healthy alternative to the doldrums of dry-as-dust philosophizing, airless “spiritual rumination,” and institutional stagnation. One of Burton’s main themes is the melancholy of scholars like himself. Allegorical frontispiece to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1676 ed.) via Wikimedia Commons Chief among the latter was Burton’s own: activity, in his case, studying and thinking about the condition, writing through to a solution. The result is an enormous, shambling anthology about melancholy, its causes (pretty much everything) and its cures (also voluminous). The Anatomy is a Frankenstein’s creature cobbled together from bits and pieces of knowledge from innumerable sources. Think of it as the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or a very early therapeutic how-to. Subsequent editions during his life expanded the book to over a thousand pages (1,324 pages in this new Penguin Classics edition, including notes). His life work was the monumental The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published 400 years ago this year. A malady that “begins in sorrow” must be “expelled in hilarity.”īurton spent almost his entire life at Oxford as a student and then scholar.
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