The Anatomy of Melancholy

Introduction

A book that includes its reader

Robert Burton offers an unusual reason for writing a book about melancholy: he is trying to keep melancholy at bay. “I write of melancholy, by being busie to avoid melancholy,” he tells his reader. The work that follows is an occupation, an inquiry and an attempt to help others through knowledge acquired at some personal cost. “I would help others out of a fellow-feeling,” he adds. These declarations do not explain everything in The Anatomy of Melancholy, but they establish a relation that survives its many changes of subject. The writer does not occupy a place entirely outside the affliction he describes. His reader need not occupy one either.

At first the book can seem to demand an impossible preparation. There are medical authorities to distinguish, ancient poets to recognize, Latin sentences to decipher and divisions within divisions to remember. Burton makes room for almost anything: digestion and demonic temptation, disappointed scholars and jealous husbands, gardens and planetary systems, poverty and the pleasures of music. Yet its abundance also offers many ways in. A reader may arrive through a familiar feeling and stay for an unfamiliar explanation. A comic portrait may open into an account of suffering; a catalogue that seems merely extravagant may expose how difficult it is to bring human experience under a single rule.

Burton repeatedly unsettles the comfortable position of the observer. He invites us to laugh at the world's follies, then discovers those follies among scholars, writers and people very much like himself. The pronoun changes: they become we. The book's prodigious learning does not secure its speaker against vanity, frustration or error. Reading it closely means listening for these changes of position. A confident judgement may be followed by an objection, an exception or a confession. Sometimes a new authority reverses the force of the authorities that came before it. The accumulation is part of the argument, even when the argument refuses to settle.

This edition offers a close modern-English rendering beside the older text so that these movements can be followed without losing contact with Burton's words. It seeks to make the whole work accessible, including its repetitions, awkward transitions and conflicting voices. Burton's strangeness belongs to what there is to read. His familiarity does too: the pleasure of an absorbing occupation, the humiliations of dependence, the mind's return to a feared possibility, the difficulty of consoling someone whose suffering we cannot remove.

Burton and Democritus Junior

Robert Burton lived from 1577 to 1640. Born in Leicestershire, he completed his degree at Christ Church, Oxford, where he spent most of his adult life and served as librarian from 1624 until his death. The Anatomy first appeared in 1621 and grew through successive editions. A life centred on books supplied both its materials and one of its recurring subjects: what learning can give a person, and what it can cost.

The author who addresses us, however, calls himself Democritus Junior. Burton's ancient model is the philosopher whose laughter at human conduct made his neighbours suspect him of madness. In the story Burton recounts, Hippocrates comes to examine Democritus and discovers that the supposed patient understands the world's disorder better than the people who summoned a physician. The story reaches Burton through letters attributed to Hippocrates, not through a contemporary record of the encounter. Its importance here lies in the situation it supplies: the person whom society calls mad may be its most searching critic.