The Anatomy of Melancholy

The same author has another treatise on Mumia, every bit as fanciful and monstrous as the first. By its means he will cure most diseases and transfer them from a man to an animal, drawing blood from one and applying it to the other, “or divert the disease into a plant.” There is also an antidote of the kind Roger Bacon wrote about long ago in his treatise On Delaying Old Age, to make a man young again and let him live three or four hundred years. Besides these are universal remedies, martial amulets, weapon-salve, balsams, extraordinary extracts, elixirs, and similar magical and magnetic cures.

Now what could be more delightful than contemplating these things, reading about and examining such experiments? Or, if a man is more mathematically inclined, calculating or studying Napier’s Logarithms, or those tables of logarithmic sines and tangents recently published by my old college companion, good friend, and former fellow Student of Christ Church, Oxford, Mr Edmund Gunter? With addition and subtraction alone they accomplish what Regiomontanus’s tables formerly did by multiplication and division. Or he might study the elaborate practical results obtainable with Gunter’s sector, quadrant, and cross-staff.

Or let the melancholy man calculate spherical triangles, square a circle, or cast a birth horoscope. However some may condemn the last, I say with Garceus, “We shall concede this to adventurous minds”: we will allow it in some cases. Or let him compile an ephemeris, read the works of Suisset the Calculator, Scaliger’s On the Correction of Chronology and his opponent Petavius until he understands them; examine subtle Scotus and Suárez’s metaphysics, or scholastic theology—Ockham, Thomas, Entisberus, Durand, and the rest.

If these other subjects do not engage him, and his means are ample, he may go in search of the philosopher’s stone, to occupy his purse and fill his head. He may, I say, turn his mind to heraldry or antiquities; devise mottoes and emblems; compose wedding poems, epitaphs, elegies, epigrams, palindromic epigrams, anagrams, chronograms, and acrostics upon his friends’ names. Or he may write a commentary on Martianus Capella, Tertullian’s On the Mantle, the Nubian Geography, or Ælia Lælia Crispis, as many idle fellows have attempted.

And rather than do nothing, let him rearrange a verse a thousand ways with Putean, tormenting his wits in this fashion; or 2,150 times, like Rainnerius of Lüneburg in his Poetic Proteus, or as Scaliger, Chrysolithus, Cleppisius, and others have similarly done.

If such voluntary tasks—the pleasure and delight, or the difficulty, of these studies—will not divert their idle thoughts and turn their imaginations elsewhere, they must be compelled, says Christophorus à Vega: “They ought to be compelled,” book 5, chapter 14. Let some penalty attach to failure to perform a task “that falls to them as a duty”: loss of reputation or disgrace, as with our public university exercises.