The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Second Partition often works by adjustment rather than by a universal prescription. Music may relieve sorrow, but it can also intensify amorous fixation. Reading and retirement may provide pleasure, while excessive study and isolation may injure the person who seeks refuge in them. The preliminary “Abstract of Melancholy” already stages a comparable instability, alternating the pleasures and miseries of melancholy in its recurring refrains. Such reversals make repetition informative. When an activity appears once as a cause and elsewhere as a remedy, the question is what has changed: the person, the circumstances, the degree or the use.

The book's organization therefore supports several kinds of reading. Its divisions help the reader return to a subject; its extended prose asks for enough patience to hear a case answered or qualified. Reading only an isolated maxim risks missing the objection that follows. Reading every catalogue at the same speed may obscure the larger movement. Burton provides an orderly table and an unruly experience of following it. The useful habit is to keep the outline available while allowing a particular passage to establish its own pace.

Learning, quotation and changing voices

Burton's authors crowd the page. Scripture, ancient poetry, philosophy, medical writing, histories and travellers' reports enter into arguments that also admit proverbs, jokes and remembered conversation. These materials do not all carry the same evidential weight. A verse may express an emotional truth; an anecdote may furnish a warning; a physician may supply an explanation or a case; a theological authority may establish the terms of an objection. The name in a margin tells us something about Burton's presentation of authority. It does not, on its own, tell us that the story is verified or that he consulted the named work directly.

He is explicit about the art of borrowing. In the preface, images of bees, food and digestion describe the transformation of material taken from others. What he gathers acquires another form through selection and arrangement. His defence can also become comedy: the industrious compiler shares in the literary appetites he mocks. The extensive treatment of self-love and the desire for fame gives this comedy a further edge. A writer who exposes the wish to survive in one's books is himself producing a book of formidable size.

Readers will encounter places where Burton's English version and the preceding Latin do not say precisely the same thing. Both belong to his presentation. A gloss can sharpen, soften or redirect a quotation; a sequence can turn an authority towards a new purpose. The modern rendering accordingly retains both stages rather than merging them into one apparently seamless statement. That can produce a deliberate echo in English. The echo records Burton's rhetorical action, and sometimes makes an important difference easier to see.

The same attentiveness is needed when a speaker objects. In the consolations for poverty, the sufferer challenges the adequacy of comforting words offered by people who have enough. In the treatment of despair, a distressed voice presses doubts against the answer just given. Burton can sound impatient, then solicitous; he can minimize a wound and then describe it with force. We should not flatten these exchanges into a single continuous declaration. An objection that he intends to answer may nevertheless retain its power, especially when it names a material want that verbal consolation cannot supply.

Nor does recognizing performance dissolve judgement. Some contradictions are productive; others expose limits in an argument or prejudice in a source. Burton can question a report, accept another with little apparent resistance, or preserve competing claims. The notes in this edition distinguish the act of transcribing his reference from independently locating the passage and from establishing what that passage proves. Where an identification remains uncertain, the uncertainty belongs in view. Clearer English should make it easier to evaluate the argument, not lend it an authority it did not previously possess.

Society, love and religion

The Anatomy repeatedly takes suffering beyond the individual body. Disappointment has institutions around it: households, universities, churches, courts and markets. Burton's portraits of poverty and dependence ask who has the means to live, who receives honour, and whose labour serves someone else's comfort. His attacks on avarice and prodigality connect mental disquiet with possessions and expenditure. The social reach of the book does not make him consistently egalitarian. Rank qualifies his permissions, and his schemes for national improvement can endorse domination. His account of the political body can criticize injustice while treating conquest and colonial settlement as instruments of improvement.