# Burton Anatomy of Melancholy Lexicon Review Sample {#title}

Seven substantial entries with an explained vocabulary register and reading indexes

Review sample 1 · 15 October 2026

## About this sample {#about-this-sample}

These seven connected articles are the first review sample for a larger lexicon of Robert Burton’s *The Anatomy of Melancholy*. They follow the words through bodily physiology, imagination, supernatural explanations, love, jealousy and consolation. Each article explains the vocabulary, develops its use in the work, gathers its reading places, examines the supplied edition’s wording and points to related entries.

The sample is intended for feedback before the first batch of roughly one hundred entries is completed. The permanent entry IDs will remain attached to the articles through revision and eventual combination. Supporting vocabulary records and indexes are finding aids within these seven entries; they are not additional substantial articles.

This sample contains **7 articles and 191 explained supporting vocabulary records**. It selects significant meanings and arguments rather than claiming a complete occurrence concordance. Whole-source discovery has covered the supplied work; the wider inventory and later batches remain under review.

The source is the supplied annotated EPUB and parallel DOCX, based on Burton’s sixth edition of 1651. The older-English body and historical wording quoted in Burton’s marginalia are distinguished from the paired modern rendering and the Editor notes. The modern column helps clarify wording but is not an independent primary authority. Statements about comparisons made by the supplied editor remain attributed to that apparatus; no new collation of every historical witness or of Burton’s many cited authors is claimed.

Source-page labels belong to the supplied edition, not to this lexicon. Some preliminary and synopsis locations are unnumbered or use scan positions; those cases and anomalous printed labels are identified in the reading routes. The stable DJR identifiers locate the aligned source passages despite repeated pagination. Historical medical categories, reported magical effects and polemical judgments are explained in their local context, not offered as present-day diagnoses or remedies.

## Contents {#contents}

Page numbers in this contents list refer to the PDF and Word versions of this sample.

- [Melancholy](#bal-0001) · BAL-0001 · p. 3
- [Imagination](#bal-0002) · BAL-0002 · p. 11
- [Spirits](#bal-0003) · BAL-0003 · p. 19
- [Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · BAL-0004 · p. 27
- [Charms](#bal-0005) · BAL-0005 · p. 34
- [Philters](#bal-0006) · BAL-0006 · p. 40
- [Jealousy](#bal-0007) · BAL-0007 · p. 45
- [Explained vocabulary](#vocabulary) · p. 56
- [Argument and source map](#argument-map) · p. 83
- [Passage index](#passage-index) · p. 84
- [Thematic index](#thematic-index) · p. 88
- [Original form index](#original-form-index) · p. 89
- [Modern English lookup](#english-lookup) · p. 94

## Melancholy {#bal-0001}

Entry BAL-0001 · Sample revision 1



### The word

**Melancholy** names both a bodily substance and several conditions associated with it. In the anatomical account it is one of the four humours: black bile, described as cold, dry, thick and sour. In an appropriate constitution it has a useful office. In the account of illness, excessive, altered or wrongly situated melancholy can disturb the body and the faculties of the mind. The adjective **melancholy** can therefore describe a humour, a temperament, a person, a symptom or an established disease. The noun also names a passing state of sadness, displeasure or absorbing reflection. These senses belong to Burton’s historical physiology and moral vocabulary; they cannot all be replaced by a single present-day diagnosis.

Burton explains the name through the Greek **Μελαγχολία**, which he connects with the printed **Μελαιναχόλη**, “black Choler.” The Latin **atra bilis** likewise means black bile. His English verbs give the word an experiential range: **melancholizing** is something from which he claims to have learned, while **to melancholize** can mean indulging in an initially pleasurable solitary fantasy. **Adventitious** melancholy is acquired rather than simply the normal humour; **adust** describes humoral material altered by excessive heat. The classification of acquired melancholy is disputed, however, and some accounts locate the disturbance in spirits rather than in a quantity of bodily humour. (DJR-002-13; DJR-003-11; DJR-023-33; DJR-027-03, 32–35; DJR-038-07.)

### In the work

#### The writer’s experience and the world’s disorder

The book begins by connecting anatomical inquiry with self-help. Burton’s Democritus dissects animals to find the seat and origin of **atra bilis**, hoping to cure himself and teach others prevention. Democritus Junior then gives his own reading and writing a comparable purpose. His melancholy is provisionally a mistress, an Egeria or an evil genius; writing attempts to turn the cause of his affliction into its antidote. “I mine by melancholizing” sets felt experience beside the knowledge other writers obtain from books. The claim is personal and rhetorical, but it also explains why the book repeatedly asks what its knowledge might do for a sufferer. (DJR-002-13; DJR-003-07–11.)

The address to the reader expands illness into a moral account of a disordered world. At one point Burton deliberately collects the word’s proper and improper, literal and metaphorical uses, for pleasure or pain, into a single indictment supported by scriptural language. (DJR-007-08.) Lust, envy, anger and ambition tear people apart; those who readily seek help for a bodily injury fail to recognize the disorders of their minds. “One in disposition, another in habit; one is melancholy, another mad” brings different degrees and kinds into a common indictment. Burton nevertheless marks a change of scope near the address’s end: he will leave those who are “improperly melancholy, or metaphorically mad” and examine melancholy as an established condition or ordinary disease, philosophically and medically. The universal folly of the satire supplies a frame for the medical work, rather than a finding that every person has the same disease. (DJR-011-18–19; DJR-019-15–19.)

#### A disposition that can become a habit

The formal distinction is between melancholy **in disposition** and **in habit**. A disposition comes and goes with sorrow, sickness, need, fear, care or displeasure. Burton calls this use equivocal and improper in relation to the settled disease he intends to study, but does not make the experience unreal. In this broad sense melancholy is “the character of Mortality”: even wisdom, success and piety do not secure an uninterrupted life of happiness. (DJR-023-01–13.)

The distinction also describes a possible development. Repeated disturbances, neglected or indulged, can become a settled state. Burton explains the difference in susceptibility through both bodily temperament and the soul’s capacity to resist: what is a “flea-biting” to one person becomes intolerable to another. Passion can alter complexion, digestion, sleep, spirits, heart and the regions beneath the ribs. The established illness is called **morbus sonticus, or Chronicus**, a serious or chronic disease, fixed rather than merely passing, and difficult to remove because it has grown over time. A **habit** here is an enduring condition, not simply a repeated voluntary action. Later accounts of intermittent attacks and hidden suffering complicate any attempt to distinguish disease by outward appearance alone. (DJR-023-14–19; DJR-061-08–12.)

Solitude supplies an especially clear narrative of this transition. At first the person “melancholizes” delightfully, building castles in the air and acting imagined parts. The pleasure gradually displaces ordinary business and makes interruption unwelcome. Once this pattern is established, a distressing object can turn the same inward absorption towards fear, suspicion and weariness of life. Burton expressly reserves a place for profitable meditation and properly used solitude. His objection is to their excessive, disabling form, not to every instance of contemplation. (DJR-038-06–12.)

The verb also names shame-driven withdrawal after public humiliation. People cast down by defeat, failure in a speech or an exposed deed may “melancholize in corners” and hide from company. Here the action is painful brooding after disgrace, extending the verb beyond the earlier pleasurable fantasy. (DJR-040-29–31.)

#### The useful humour and the diseased material

The normal humour has a positive physiological function. Burton calls melancholy a “bridle” to the hotter humours, blood and choler, and says that it nourishes the bones. Its existence is therefore not itself the disease. In the later discussion of the material cause, the humour may offend by quantity or quality, by its location, or by its mixture with other humours. Too much natural melancholy can produce illness without having first been burnt. **Adustion** supplies another explanation: excessive heat alters natural humoral material and can produce a more violent disorder. The cold-and-dry description of normal melancholy consequently does not settle the qualities of every diseased mixture. (DJR-023-27–34; DJR-027-30–42.)

Burton keeps the disagreement visible. Some writers deny that melancholy can arise from phlegm; others admit it, though rarely. The resulting phlegmatic kind is disparagingly called **Asininam melancholiam**, “asinine melancholy,” and associated with dullness, sleepiness and slow behaviour. The later symptom description adds weeping, fondness for waters and fishing, and dreams of drowning. These are attributed historical correspondences between a proposed material cause and a pattern of symptoms. The subtype’s name is not a neutral modern classification. (DJR-027-36–38; DJR-060-15–18.)

A further dispute cuts across this humoral account. Montanus and Arculanus distinguish material and immaterial melancholy; Hercules de Saxonia locates the latter in disordered spirits, without the humoral matter invoked by other explanations. Burton also records Paracelsus’s rejection of the four-humour division itself. **Adventitious**, **acquisite**, **unnatural** and **artificial** cluster in this contested discussion; they should not be made into one perfectly consistent taxonomy spanning every authority. Later, when Montaltus argues that acquired melancholy arises from hot and dry causes, Burton allows the conclusion for the unnatural form tending towards madness, while retaining a colder natural form producing milder derangement. (DJR-027-32–35, 46; DJR-057-12–15.)

#### Definition, fear and sorrow

The common definition makes melancholy a kind of **dotage** without fever, ordinarily accompanied by fear and sadness without apparent occasion. In this setting dotage means impairment of a principal mental faculty, especially imagination or reason. The absence of fever distinguishes the category from frenzy; fear and sorrow distinguish it from the more violent madness described nearby. Burton reports objections to this definition and immediately qualifies its strongest-looking claim: fear and sorrow accompany **most**, not all, melancholy. Some sufferers laugh, take pleasure in their condition or exhibit unusual boldness. (DJR-022-19–21; DJR-027-04–12.)

The symptom chapter repeats and expands that correction. Burton first states the inherited rule, then likens its overconfident repetition to hounds following a false cry. He records people who are sad without fear, fearful without sadness, both, or neither. Inspired persons, certain poets, lovers and people imagining themselves kings supply counterinstances in the authorities he cites. His own conclusion is “not alwayes sad and fearfull, but usually so.” The blood-associated variety can be merry, witty and attracted to music or imagined theatrical performances; Brunsellius’s prolonged laughter, however, weakens him and leaves him worse. Pleasant experience is therefore neither excluded from melancholy nor sufficient proof of health. (DJR-058-23–27; DJR-060-19–22.)

Nor does “without a cause” mean that suffering has no cause at all. The immediate-cause discussion explains how an internal bodily disturbance may make objects terrifying without an adequate external danger. Burton asks the healthy reader to take the resulting distress seriously: someone standing above a deep drop could not simply choose not to fear, and the melancholic person likewise carries an inward cause. His conclusion is that exhortation alone may accomplish little while the bodily causes remain. In the symptom catalogue, outward discretion can coexist with severe private distress, or sound judgment in most affairs with a particular persistent error. (DJR-058-47–51; DJR-061-08–09; DJR-063-18–26.)

#### Parts, faculties and disputed kinds

The question “Where is melancholy?” has several levels. Most authorities place the principal affected part in the brain, but the heart’s role in fear and sorrow produces an objection. Burton’s account allows mutual suffering among organs, comparing the body to a clock whose whole mechanism is disturbed when one wheel fails. A brain may be affected through its own disorder or **by consent**, through another part’s sympathetic influence. Disagreement also concerns the faculty impaired. Burton settles provisionally on imagination first and reason afterwards as the condition becomes established, while preserving the competing view that reasoning is impaired indirectly through imagination. (DJR-027-14–23.)

For the working arrangement of his first two partitions, he adopts three principal kinds: **head melancholy**, proceeding from the brain’s own fault; melancholy arising through the **whole body**, whose general temperament is melancholic; and **hypochondriacal**, or **windy melancholy**, arising from abdominal organs, especially liver, spleen or mesentery. “Hypochondriacal” has its anatomical force here, referring to the region beneath the ribs. Other schemes distinguish continuous from intermittent disease, material from immaterial causes, stages of development, or particular conditions associated with the womb, love and religious experience. Burton treats some writers’ indefinitely many “species” as indefinitely varied symptoms instead. (DJR-027-43–53.)

The threefold scheme is a means of arranging inquiry, not a promise of cleanly separated cases. Burton describes physicians disagreeing over the same patient, cases belonging to two or three kinds, and uncertainty whether a supposed melancholy is another disease altogether. He compares pure types with pure constitutions of government: clear in contemplation, usually mixed in practice. The subsequent catalogue of degrees and geometrical ratios, including **melancholicus ad octo**, “melancholic to the eighth degree,” makes the same practical point about variation. Burton says that even all these proportions are insufficient to express it. (DJR-027-54–61; DJR-061-10.)

The inward-causes chapter makes the traffic between body and mind explicitly reciprocal. Mental disturbance changes bodily temperament; bodily distemper in turn troubles the soul through organs, humours and spirits. Burton cannot easily decide which harms the other more. His images of an untuned lute, a torch dependent on its material and wine taking a flavour from its cask explain why bodily condition matters to mental activity. This account also has an ethical consequence: melancholy following bodily infirmities deserves particular compassion because its cause is less avoidable. (DJR-056-39–59.)

#### Wit, love and religion

Melancholy’s association with intellectual excellence is another disputed claim, not an equation of illness and genius. Burton rehearses incompatible explanations through natural humour, burnt humour and mixtures with blood. Fracastorius’s settlement is explicitly selective: melancholic people can have excellent wits, **but not all**; excessive heat produces fury, excessive cold dullness and fear, while a temperate state favours excellence. The discussion belongs beside the account of learning’s risks and the bodily conditions of sustained thought. (DJR-060-22; DJR-064-04–08.)

Burton reserves love melancholy and religious melancholy for the third partition even when earlier classifications include them under head melancholy. Religious melancholy is itself disputed as symptom, cause or distinct species; education and previous inclinations help determine its contents. His division also includes religious **defect**, alongside excessive devotion, and thus extends beyond sorrow produced by belief. The labels “monstrous melancholy” and “poysoned melancholy,” attributed to Melanchthon for atheism or impiety, belong to this religious polemic. (DJR-161-30.) Yet the religious discussion positively values properly used fasting and contemplation. At DJR-156-10 ecstasy is a foretaste of future happiness, union with God, “a divine melancholy,” before its abuse is called madness and a cause or symptom of religious melancholy. The favourable sense is part of the argument, not a term to discard because it interrupts the medical category. (DJR-027-50–53; DJR-151-21–24; DJR-156-03–13; DJR-161-28.)

The final discussion of despair preserves another distinction: temporary loss of hope can afflict even the best of God’s children and is not equivalent to final reprobation. In the response to blasphemous thoughts, melancholy, disturbed imagination and bodily humours enter an explanation designed to separate unwanted suggestions from a settled consenting will. The theological and bodily accounts cooperate in this reassurance. (DJR-163-39–40; DJR-167-27–35.)

#### Cure, relief and prevention

The word **cure** belongs to an argument with changing expectations. The prognosis stages a disagreement between “incurable” inveterate melancholy and the milder judgment “hardly cured.” Paracelsus’s claim that every disease is curable is set beside his own exception for hereditary disease; Montanus allows physicians to ease the condition but denies complete cure and warns of relapse. Burton’s image of gold remaining in a statue’s crevices explains the lingering remnants. The second partition nevertheless opens with hope: even violent and inveterate melancholy may be helped, or at least mitigated. Burton’s announced method follows the causes, moving from general care to particular kinds. Diet or manner of living, medicines and surgery supply the ordinary threefold arrangement; prayer and ordinary medical means are to be used together. (DJR-065-06–12; DJR-067-34–35; DJR-068-02–06; DJR-070-03–09.)

Consolation also changes the valuation of melancholy’s features. Burton turns suspicion towards wariness, solitude towards contemplation, and fear and sorrow towards sobriety. “Our dame melancholy” can restrain harmful conduct. The passage is an attempt to find comforts within distress, including intervals of relief and preserved judgment, rather than a retraction of the suffering described earlier. (DJR-098-24–37.)

Its restrictions matter as much as its remedy lists. Burton distinguishes an allegedly effective magical cure from a lawful one. He warns patients against copying a prescription out of a book, since what benefits one person may harm another, and tells an already melancholic reader not to read the symptom catalogue if self-application would worsen the condition. Even music can relieve sorrow while aggravating an amorous preoccupation from which the illness began. The friends’ chapter gives the verb another use: an unoccupied imagination will work upon itself and “melancholize,” sinking into fear or suspicion. Appropriate occupation and company are intended to interrupt that self-directed action. (DJR-084-03–05.) The closing advice returns to causes, trusted friends, physicians and divines, and suitable recreation, before the concise injunction “Be not solitary, be not idle.” These are the work’s historically situated counsels, not instructions to reproduce its medical treatments today. (DJR-058-42–46; DJR-067-36–51; DJR-069-38–42; DJR-085-23–26; DJR-169-26–32.)

### Places to Read

These selected passages follow the supplied edition’s reading order. Page numbers below are printed source labels unless explicitly described otherwise.

- **Democritus Junior to the Reader, pp. 4–6; DJR-002-13; DJR-003-07–11.** Black bile, the anatomical model, melancholy as mistress or evil genius, writing as attempted remedy, and knowledge gained by “melancholizing.”
- **Reader address, pp. 18, 39 and 76; DJR-007-08; DJR-011-18–19; DJR-019-15–19.** The moral diagnosis of the world and the explicit turn from figurative madness to melancholy as a settled medical subject.
- **1.1.1.4–5, pp. 8–13; DJR-022-19–24, 38–39; DJR-023-01–19.** Relations to frenzy and madness; passing disposition, universal mortal trouble, differing susceptibility, and the growth of habit.
- **1.1.2.2, pp. 14–15; DJR-023-27–36.** The normal humours and melancholy’s useful office; spirits as a distinct part of the physiological account.
- **1.1.3.1–2, pp. 31–33; DJR-027-03–29.** The name, competing definitions, fear and sorrow with explicit exceptions, the affected organs and faculties, and qualifications concerning the people affected.
- **1.1.3.3–4, pp. 33–37; DJR-027-30–61.** Natural and acquired material, adustion, the proposed immaterial kind, disputed classifications, the three working species, and mixed cases.
- **Solitariness, pp. 88–89; DJR-038-06–12.** Pleasurable “melancholizing,” its possible development into disabling preoccupation, and the reservation for beneficial contemplation.
- **Shame and disgrace, p. 99 [supplied]; DJR-040-29–31.** “Melancholize in corners” describes brooding and withdrawal after humiliation. The bracketed locator marks the opening supplied by the edition.
- **Inward causes, pp. 172–175; DJR-056-39–59; DJR-057-01–15.** Reciprocal bodily and mental action; internal organs; the distinction between a hot acquired disorder and colder natural melancholy.
- **Symptoms of the mind, pp. 180–183; DJR-058-21–27, 42–51.** Fear and sorrow are usual rather than universal; symptom-reading can aggravate self-application, while ordinary good judgment can survive beside particular distress.
- **Humoral and individual variation, pp. 191–192, 194–195; DJR-060-14–23; DJR-061-02–12.** Asinine melancholy, sanguine mirth, reported inspiration, education and inclination, hidden suffering, and the deliberately insufficient scale of degrees and ratios.
- **Immediate causes of symptoms, pp. 205–208; DJR-063-18–26; DJR-064-01–11.** Natural internal causes, darkened spirits, limits of bare exhortation, and the qualified association between melancholy and excellent wit.
- **Prognosis and opening of the cure, pp. 212–213 and printed p. 216; DJR-065-06–12; DJR-067-34–35.** Chronic difficulty and recurrence are followed by renewed hope for cure or substantial relief. The printed pagination jumps here.
- **Lawfulness and medical care, printed pp. 216–220 (scan pp. 327–328), then pp. 220–222 and 229–231; DJR-067-36–51; DJR-068-02–06; DJR-069-38–42; DJR-070-03–09.** Alleged efficacy differs from permission; prayer accompanies medicine; remedies require particular judgment and are not to be copied indiscriminately.
- **Help from friends, pp. 294–295; DJR-084-03–05.** Imagination’s self-directed “melancholizing” is answered by company, activity, attention to the individual grievance and reassurance.
- **Music, p. 301; DJR-085-23–26.** Pleasing melancholy and relief from sorrow contrast with the aggravation of an existing amorous fixation.
- **Consolation against melancholy itself, pp. 361–362; DJR-098-24–37.** “Dame melancholy” can restrain misconduct; consolatory reversals place existing symptoms in a more favourable light.
- **Religious melancholy, pp. 632–633; DJR-151-21–24.** Symptom, cause and species remain contested; previous religious inclinations shape the experience.
- **Religious practice and its abuse, pp. 655–657; DJR-156-03–13.** Moderation, good contemplation and positively valued “divine melancholy” precede the account of excess and delusion.
- **Religious defect and despair, pp. 683, 694, 711–713; DJR-161-28, 30; DJR-163-39–40; DJR-167-27–35.** The category includes deficiency; temporary despair is distinguished from final despair, and involuntary thoughts from settled consent.
- **Conclusion, pp. 722–723; DJR-169-26–32.** Remove the particular aggravating cause, obtain appropriate help, and resist disabling solitude and idleness.
- **Unnumbered Table and closing notice; DJR-172-013.** Burton’s index gathers equivocations, definition, matter, kinds, causes, symptoms, wit and visions. Its printed numbers are historical index references, not new pagination for this lexicon.

### In this edition

The modern column normally retains **melancholy**, allowing its changing sense to be explained rather than replacing it with one diagnostic name. At DJR-002-13 **atra bilis** becomes “black bile”; at DJR-027-03 **black Choler** receives the same rendering. The Greek forms printed in the older-English column are part of Burton’s etymological explanation, not additional words supplied by the modern translator.

**Melancholizing** is retained in Burton’s claim to experience (DJR-003-11), whereas **so to melancholize** becomes “to indulge in melancholy like this” in the account of pleasurable fantasy (DJR-038-07). At DJR-084-04 **melancholize** becomes “sink into melancholy,” with the restless imagination as the continuing grammatical subject. In the shame passage, **melancholize in corners** becomes “brood in corners” (DJR-040-30). The different renderings follow the local action. **Adventitious Melancholy** becomes “acquired melancholy” in the hot-and-dry argument (DJR-057-14), and **Asininam melancholiam** becomes “Asinine melancholy” (DJR-060-16). The latter remains a disparaging historical label; the modern rendering does not authorize its use as a current assessment of a person.

At DJR-061-10 **melancholicus ad octo** becomes “melancholic to the eighth degree.” The paragraph’s conclusion that all the proportions are insufficient prevents this phrase from being mistaken for a fixed diagnostic scale. In the Table, **mel. equivocations** becomes “the different meanings of melancholy” (DJR-172-013). Its abbreviated headings and source-page numbers preserve a historical finding aid; a faulty or ambiguous index number is not silently certified merely because the topic can be found elsewhere.

The distinction between disposition and habit is likewise contextual. The modern text renders the enduring condition through “habit,” “established” or “settled” wording. A passage may still describe an established disposition in ordinary English; it must be read with the sentence’s account of duration and development. The present article uses the supplied older-English text as its lexical evidence and checks the modern wording at those particular passages, without claiming a new collation of the historical copies or of the many authorities Burton cites.

### See also

**Imagination** ([BAL-0002](#bal-0002)), for the affected faculty and the force of self-application; **Spirits** ([BAL-0003](#bal-0003)), for bodily mediation and supernatural explanations; **Witchcraft** ([BAL-0004](#bal-0004)), for supposed causation and feared bewitchment; **Charms** ([BAL-0005](#bal-0005)) and **Philters** ([BAL-0006](#bal-0006)), for disputed or prohibited remedies; **Jealousy** ([BAL-0007](#bal-0007)), for a particular passion and its relation to melancholy.

Further entries planned for later batches: Adust; Humour; Habit and disposition; Madness; Hypochondria; Consent and essence; Fear; Sorrow; Solitude; Study; Ecstasy; Enthusiasm; Religious melancholy; Despair; Cure.

## Imagination {#bal-0002}

Entry BAL-0002 · Sample revision 1



### The word

**Imagination** is a power of apprehending, retaining, recalling and making representations. Burton calls it **“Phantasie, or Imagination”** and says that some call it **“Æstimative, or Cogitative”**: an estimative or thinking faculty. In this account it is an internal sense, situated between the reception of sensory information and the exercise of reason. It handles things absent as well as present, and can compose forms that no external object has supplied in that combination. Its ordinary work therefore includes perception, recollection, comparison and invention, rather than just fanciful error or artistic creativity. (DJR-025-04, 17–20.)

The related vocabulary names both the faculty and its products. A **“strong conceit or apprehension”** is a powerful conception or impression, not necessarily vanity or fear; the **“species of objects”** are the forms through which objects are represented to the mind. **“læsa Imaginatio”** and **“imaginatio læsa”** mean impaired imagination. In a medical account, **“corrupt imagination”** or **“crased phantasie”** similarly describes a faculty functioning badly, rather than simply a mind occupied with immoral material. Burton can also condemn the moral or religious content of an imagining, but that is a further judgment requiring its own context. (DJR-039-03, 08, 21; DJR-115-60, 62; DJR-169-01.)

### In the work

#### Receiving, keeping and making forms

Burton introduces imagination in an anatomy intended to make the later medical discussion intelligible. The sensitive soul apprehends the forms of things present or absent and retains them as wax retains a seal's impression. The five outward senses are concerned with present external objects; the inward senses can work with what is past, absent or expected. Common sense coordinates and judges the information brought by sight, hearing and the other senses. Imagination examines those forms more fully, keeps them longer, recalls them and makes new ones. Memory is the recording officer that stores what the senses have brought and supplies it when imagination or reason calls. These functions overlap, but Burton does not simply give three names to the same operation. (DJR-025-03–05, 17–20.)

This is an embodied account. The anatomical discussion places imagination and thought in the middle ventricle; the later definition calls its organ the **“middle cell of the Brain”**. A cell here is a chamber or cavity. Memory has a posterior seat, while the spirits received and refined in the brain serve sensation and movement. Burton reports these assignments as the positions of the writers he is summarizing. A later causal passage places imagination in the foremost part of the brain. The difference should remain visible rather than being repaired into one perfectly consistent anatomical map. (DJR-024-18–19; DJR-025-18, 20; DJR-039-02.)

Imagination also provides material for rational understanding. The active understanding abstracts intelligible forms from imagination, judges whether what imagination has received from sense is true or false, and entrusts the result to the passive understanding. The fact that material requires judgment does not mean it is invariably false. Imagination is part of the route by which knowledge becomes possible. Its creative activity is equally explicit: Burton points to poets' fictions and painters' **“Anticks,”** grotesque figures or fanciful designs, naming Ovid's house of Sleep and Psyche's palace in Apuleius. Later he appeals to painters, practitioners of mechanical arts and mathematicians when describing the constructions of waking fancy. These examples sit beside delusive castles in the air, but the whole capacity for making images cannot be reduced to illness. (DJR-026-27–29; DJR-025-19; DJR-039-13.)

#### A faculty that moves the body

Imagination is not merely an inward picture gallery. In the account of movement, Burton distinguishes the **end**, the object pursued or avoided, from the **efficient cause**, the source that sets action going. A dog catches a hare for the sake of the hare as its object; imagination moves appetite, appetite activates the moving faculty, and bodily spirits mediate the command to the organs. In humans reason, or imagination subordinate to it, is the efficient cause; in other animals imagination has no higher governing faculty in this particular scheme. Nerves, muscles and tendons transmit the movement to the limb. This chain distinguishes the directing faculty from the bodily instruments through which it acts. (DJR-025-19, 30–32.)

The same connection explains how an emotion may affect digestion, sensation and bodily constitution. An object reaches imagination through outward sense or memory. Imagination misconceives or magnifies it and communicates it to the heart; spirits move between brain and heart, and the heart draws on bodily humours in pursuing or avoiding the apparent good or evil. The response varies with the intensity of the apprehension and the prior disposition of the humours. Passion can draw spirits away from other functions, so that someone looks without noticing or hears without attending. Burton's claim that impaired imagination is the first source of troubles **“in this kinde”** belongs to this particular account of emotional disturbance. It does not abolish the bodily causes that can themselves damage imagination. (DJR-039-01–04.)

Burton presses the faculty's importance by adopting Arnoldus's claim that melancholy should be attributed far more to imagination than to bodily distemper. Yet the surrounding discussion repeatedly describes reciprocal action: defective organs and altered humours disturb imagination; disturbed imagination moves spirits and humours and produces further bodily effects. At the close of the digression he calls it the **“medium deferens”** of the passions, their conveying medium. The passions work through it, with effects proportioned both to its heightened or relaxed activity and to the body's disposition. It is therefore neither an immaterial explanation detached from physiology nor a claim that the sufferer can stop the whole process by an act of choice. (DJR-039-03–09, 34.)

#### Sleep, waking invention and the appearance of an assailant

During sleep the external senses and common sense are suspended, while imagination is free to make strange combinations. Burton's phrase about imagination being free also adds its commander, reason; he leaves an awkward tension between “alone” and this addition. He recognizes natural, divine and demonic kinds of dream, and relates variations to humours, diet, actions and objects. The bodily explanation of sleep describes vapours obstructing the passages of the spirits until the obstruction disperses. (DJR-025-21–22.)

In the imagination digression, this framework explains the sleeper who believes an old woman is riding and crushing him. The names **“Incubus, or Witch-ridden”** express the oppressive experience and its supposed assailant. Burton says that in this case nothing is causing the trouble except bad humours disturbing imagination. The explanation of sleepwalking is similarly sequential: vapours move imagination, imagination moves appetite, appetite moves animal spirits, and the body walks as though awake. The experience of a figure or the performance of an action does not, by itself, establish the presence of the being imagined. (DJR-039-10–11.)

The next passage takes a different position. Accounts of journeys to the other world, apparitions, revelations and witches' travels are referred, through Weyer, Vanini and others, to imagination **and the devil's illusions**. In the marginal account attributed to Weyer, the devil governs the women's imaginations while their bodies remain insensible. This is a theory of deceptive experience that retains demonic agency. It must not be made identical with the wholly humoral account of the witch-ridden sleeper just before it. Burton's chapters preserve several explanatory possibilities and disputes rather than a single general rejection of the supernatural. (DJR-039-12.)

#### From pleasurable invention to a fixed world

The power to retain and amplify representations helps explain why imagination is especially dangerous in melancholy. Its objects remain before the mind, enlarged by continual meditation, until in some people real bodily effects follow. The prolonged thought itself may at first be delightful. In the discussion of voluntary solitude, the person acts many roles in an inward theatre, builds castles in the air and loses the wish to interrupt these pleasurable occupations. Ordinary business is neglected. Once the habit is established, a distressing object can change the scene: the same persistent activity now supplies fear and sorrow. Burton gives the pleasure, the gradual loss of freedom and the later change their separate places in the account. (DJR-038-06–11; DJR-039-08.)

The dispute about which mental faculty is injured makes a further distinction. Some authorities put the defect in imagination alone. Others ask why reason does not correct a person's conviction of being a shellfish or being damned, if reason is entirely sound. Burton's stated settlement is that the disorder begins in imagination and may reach reason as it becomes established or prolonged; another formulation calls the damage to belief and reasoning a secondary consequence of imagination's defect. He returns to this sequence in erotic melancholy, qualifying the involvement of both faculties by the violence or long establishment of the condition. It is important to preserve the proposed sequence and qualification rather than to make every act of imagination an impairment of reason. (DJR-027-20–23; DJR-115-60–63.)

Erotic examples show representation crossing the boundary between absence and apparent presence. A description or letter can convey the beauty of someone never seen: the imagination receives its material through language as well as eyesight. In the symptoms of love, the **“Astrolabe of phantasie”** measures every feature and dimension of the beloved so intensely that the lover may finally think he sees and embraces her. The astrolabe is a measuring instrument; here it figures the meticulous survey and retention of her image. Ixion embracing a cloud instead of Juno supplies the discrepancy between apparent possession and the object actually present. The later Lucretian quotation about **“simulachra”**, images of the absent beloved, gives a related account of continuing remembrance. Its philosophical image-language and the surrounding love examples should remain distinguishable. (DJR-117-05–08; DJR-128-35–38; DJR-130-47–49.)

#### Real effects and reported marvels

The force-of-imagination chapter deliberately puts ordinary reactions beside extraordinary reports. Blushing, trembling, sweating, fainting and dizziness belong to the same broad inquiry as illnesses allegedly brought on by a physician's words or a diviner's prediction. In Cotta's two stories, a physician conjectures sciatica in a woman who did not have it, and merely names cramp to another; their apprehension of the words is then credited with producing the suffering. Burton also reports cures through favourable expectation. A **conceit** in these examples is a belief or powerful mental impression, and its alleged bodily efficacy is different from the truth of what is believed. (DJR-039-18–26.)

His answer to readers who laugh at such stories is the plank experiment: the same surface can be walked on confidently at ground level but provoke trembling when placed high above the ground. In the later explanation of symptoms, an imagined reader objects that the person on the height has a genuine external danger. Burton replies that the melancholy sufferer also has a cause, though an inward one, carried about as inseparably as a shadow. Advice alone can do little while the bodily causes persist. The example does more than defend the abstract power of images: it opposes ridicule and the assumption that serious distress can simply be willed away. (DJR-039-25–26; DJR-063-24–26.)

Maternal impressions extend the proposed action of an image into another developing body. Burton invokes Jacob's speckled rods, Persinna's explanation in Heliodorus for her child's complexion, the Greek husband's pictures of beautiful people, and accounts of pregnant women's cravings or frightening impressions marking their children. These are scriptural interpretation, romance, reported anecdote and historical physiological theory, not equivalent kinds of evidence. The point in Burton is that a form pictured in the mother's mind is supposedly impressed upon the child. Explaining that belief does not authenticate the mechanism or make a mother's thoughts responsible for a child's bodily features. (DJR-033-16; DJR-039-15–18.)

The discussion of spells and weapon salve turns from objects used in cures to the confidence attached to them. Burton attributes to Pomponazzi the claim that strong conception and opinion set humours, spirits and blood in motion and thereby remove the cause of an illness from an affected part. The patient's trust similarly explains why an unlearned practitioner may achieve a more striking result than a learned physician. This is an argument within Burton's physiology and his account of belief; the list of purported cures does not independently prove that the treatments worked. A significant textual disagreement between disbelief in the body and credulity in the margin is retained below. (DJR-039-27–29.)

#### Proteus, another person's spirits, and reason's rudder

The comparison with **“Proteus, or a Cameleon”** makes imagination mutable and commanding. The Ficino quotation in the margin is decisive about the comparison's subject: imagination is like Proteus or a chameleon, sometimes affecting its own body and another's. The next examples move through apparently communicable sore eyes, yawning, a provoked bodily urge and the unpleasant scraping of plates or files. These heterogeneous observations introduce a larger claim about influence between people. (DJR-039-30.)

At the next step Burton asks about a corpse bleeding before its murderer and about children supposedly bewitched by witches or old women. The opinion he attributes to a list of writers is that **one party's** forceful imagination moves and alters **the other's** spirits. The imagined agent and the affected recipient are distinct. Reducing the passage to the recipient being frightened by their own imagination would change the claim. Burton then reports still larger supposed powers: affecting remote people, moving bodies, and raising storms. Avicenna, al-Kindi, Paracelsus and others are the named authorities for those extensions. (DJR-039-31–32.)

Burton's own concluding image calls imagination **“astrum hominis,”** the human being's star, and the rudder of our ship. A star suggests governing influence; a rudder directs a vessel. Reason ought to steer, but can be overborne by imagination and allow the whole ship to be overturned. The conclusion brings the extraordinary reports back to the question already present in the elementary anatomy: how a necessary faculty can cease to serve its proper governor. It does not turn every marvel quoted in support of imagination's force into a separately verified event. (DJR-039-32–34.)

#### Reassurance, religious thought and the limits of reduction

The later symptom discussion gives inward causes for sights and sounds that seem external. Burton uses the brain as a concave mirror, the altered appearance of things through coloured glass, intoxication, weak sight and objects imperfectly seen in the dark. Imagination is involved in different ways: forming an appearance, interpreting an uncertain object, and cooperating with impaired organs. His literary example has Orestes believe the Furies are attacking while Electra tells him he does not see what he thinks he sees. The account is Burton's explanatory use of the dramatic scene, not proof that the drama itself endorses his physiology. (DJR-063-18; DJR-064-16–25.)

Treatment likewise addresses both the images and the circumstances in which they persist. Burton recommends diverting fixed thoughts, providing suitable occupation and company, offering reassurance, and supplying a friend's help when the sufferer cannot resist alone. Hope and counsel may work on the same imaginative route by which fear brought distress. His more theatrical examples include a lead cap that makes a king feel the head he believes missing and a secretly introduced snake that appears to confirm a supposed cure. These are reported contrivances in his historical therapeutic argument. The examples should be read alongside the admission that deeply established imaginings and continuing bodily causes may defeat simple persuasion. (DJR-083-03; DJR-084-02–07, 24–27, 33–35; DJR-063-26.)

Religious passages retain further distinctions. Burton can describe people who reason coherently in other matters but have an impaired imagination on one religious subject, comparing them to comets that are round except where they blaze. He also allows beneficial contemplation and ecstasy: a taste of future happiness, a divine melancholy and a spiritual wing raising the soul towards God, before distinguishing abuse that becomes religious melancholy. That express concession prevents the wider catalogue of fasting, visions and delusions from being summarized as a declaration that all religious ecstasy is pathological. (DJR-156-07–12; DJR-160-27–28.)

In consoling people troubled by blasphemous thoughts, the presence of an image or thought is separated from willing consent. Burton connects such experiences with bodily disturbance and, in his theological explanation, demonic suggestions; he insists that thoughts the sufferer abhors and resists do not express a settled will. Even partial assent followed by rejection is distinguished from a confirmed disposition. At the end of the work he again permits an inward bodily cause for terrifying appearances, while immediately allowing demonic agency and mixed remedies. The ordinary faculty, its impaired operation, the content presented to it and responsibility for that content remain different questions. (DJR-167-26–34; DJR-169-01–04.)

### Places to Read

The following are selected significant passages in the supplied edition's reading order, not a concordance of every occurrence. Source-page numbers belong to Burton's source text; DJR identifiers retrieve the aligned passages.

- **The inward anatomy:** pp. 19, 21–25; DJR-024-18–19; DJR-025-03–05, 17–22, 30–32. Ventricles and spirits; the wax-and-seal representation; common sense, imagination and memory; productive invention; sleep; the distinction between an action's end and efficient cause
- **Imagination and understanding:** p. 28; DJR-026-27–29. Active understanding receives and judges the material abstracted from imagination
- **Which faculty is affected?** pp. 32–33; DJR-027-20–23. Rival accounts and Burton's qualified sequence from imagination to reason
- **Maternal impressions before the main digression:** p. 64; DJR-033-16. Fear, cravings and images allegedly affecting an infant
- **Pleasurable solitude becoming habitual:** pp. 88–89; DJR-038-06–11. Inward role-playing, neglected occupations and the change from delight to distress
- **The passions' bodily route:** pp. 92–93; DJR-039-01–06. Sense or memory, imagination, heart, spirits and humours; the strong claim about imagination's causal importance
- **The force-of-imagination digression:** pp. 93–96; DJR-039-07–34. Read the whole subsection for its progression. Retention and amplification are at 08–09; nightmare oppression and sleepwalking at 10–11; visions and witches' journeys at 12; waking inventions and fear at 13–14; maternal and transformative marvels at 15–20; harmful and helpful expectations at 21–26; charms and trust at 27–29; Proteus and interpersonal influence at 30–32; the reading list and conveying-medium conclusion at 33–34
- **An inward cause is still a cause:** pp. 205–206; DJR-063-18–26, especially 24–26. Burton's explanatory aim, competing bodily accounts, the plank objection and his answer to ridicule
- **Apparent external objects:** pp. 209–210; DJR-064-16–25. Images in eyes or brain, mirror and coloured-glass comparisons, Orestes and Electra, weak sight and mistaken interpretation
- **Reassurance and contrivance:** pp. 289, 294–295, 297–298; DJR-083-03; DJR-084-02–07, 24–27, 33–35. Redirecting thought, a helper's role, the qualification about established imaginings, and reported treatments using hope, conversation or a staged experience
- **Erotic imagination and reason:** edition source pp. 446–447, with the apparatus identifying the first as printed 246; DJR-115-56–63, especially 60–63. Rival bodily seats and the qualified impairment of both faculties
- **Beauty through report and reading:** p. 452; DJR-117-05–08. A beloved need not first be seen; words can supply the representation
- **The astrolabe and the absent beloved:** p. 514; DJR-128-35–38. Intense measuring and recollection becoming apparent presence
- **Images remaining in absence:** p. 528; DJR-130-47–49. The Lucretian images and name within a catalogue of erotic remembrance
- **Ecstasy before its abuse:** pp. 656–657; DJR-156-07–12, especially 10. Fasting and visions, with the explicit favourable account of contemplation and divine melancholy
- **A circumscribed impairment:** p. 677; DJR-160-27–28. The comet comparison amid Burton's religious polemic
- **Unwanted thoughts and consent:** pp. 711–712; DJR-167-26–34. Imagination, humours, demonic attribution and the distinction between occurrence, resistance and settled will
- **The closing account of frightening appearances:** pp. 720–721; DJR-169-01–04. Possible inward causes, followed by a supernatural possibility and the appeal to mixed remedies

### In this edition

The modern rendering uses **imagination** for “Phantasie” at DJR-025-04, and **fancy, or imagination** for the paired names at DJR-025-18. It renders “læsa Imaginatio” as **impaired imagination** at DJR-039-03, “corrupt imagination” as **an impaired imagination** at DJR-115-60, “our phantasies” as **our imaginations** at DJR-167-27, and “crased phantasie” as **disordered imagination** at DJR-169-01. These choices preserve the older faculty vocabulary while distinguishing a medical impairment from the moral judgments made in other contexts. “Species of sensible things” becomes **sensory forms of things** at DJR-025-03; “species of objects” becomes **mental images of objects** at DJR-039-08. Neither expression concerns biological classification.

Three local qualifications particularly affect interpretation. First, the **middle chamber** assigned to imagination at DJR-025-18 and the **front part** named at DJR-039-02 are both retained. Second, at DJR-039-05 Burton's Latin quotation contains **“ferè,”** almost, and is followed by his English comparative restatement. The modern column translates the Latin's “almost the whole cause” and then preserves Burton's separate “far more” formulation; these should not be flattened into an unqualified statement that imagination is the only cause. Third, the Latin in the Ficino margin at DJR-039-30, note N02803, expressly makes imagination the Proteus/chameleon comparator. Its English translation in that note is editorial prose explaining the quoted Latin, not another sentence written by Burton.

At DJR-039-28 the body prints **“wicked incredulity”**, which the modern column renders **wicked disbelief**. The Weyer quotation in the margin, N02798, instead has **“impia credulitate”**, impious credulity or ready belief. The two readings disagree. The supplied Editor note N02799 reports the same disagreement in another 1651 copy, but that report neither establishes the origin of the discrepancy nor licenses silently changing the body to credulity. This article has checked the supplied body, modern rendering and apparatus; it has not freshly collated those historical copies or Weyer's text.

Burton's references are likewise evidence of what he invokes, not a guarantee that every attribution is exact. His sequence brings together natural philosophy, medical anecdotes, scripture, romance, poetry, reported wonders and theological argument. The present article explains the significant uses represented here without claiming a complete occurrence concordance or independent verification of every external authority.

### See also

- **Melancholy ([BAL-0001](#bal-0001)):** disposition, illness and the disputed faculties affected
- **Spirits ([BAL-0003](#bal-0003)):** the bodily agents through which imagination is said to act
- **Witchcraft ([BAL-0004](#bal-0004)):** imagined assaults, deception and claims about supernatural agency
- **Charms ([BAL-0005](#bal-0005)):** belief, trust and the attributed efficacy of remedies
- **Jealousy ([BAL-0007](#bal-0007)):** the amplification of signs and the relation of suspicion to action
- **Planned for a later batch:** Apprehension; Cerebral chambers; Common sense; Conceit; Ecstasy; Faculty; Incubus; Maternal impressions; Memory and recollection; Reason; Religious melancholy; Simulacra; Species in perception. These continue particular distinctions and examples rather than naming interchangeable faculties

## Spirits {#bal-0003}

Entry BAL-0003 · Sample revision 1



### The word

**Spirit** and **spirits** have several active senses in Burton. In physiology, a spirit is an extremely subtle vapour derived from blood and employed by the soul. **Natural**, **vital** and **animal spirits** perform different bodily offices. **Animal** here concerns sensation and movement in an ensouled living body; it does not restrict these spirits to nonhuman creatures. In the supernatural discussion, spirits are beings such as angels and devils, endowed with knowledge and agency. The distinction is between kinds and functions within the historical account: the devils themselves are said to have been created by God as angels. (DJR-023-35–36; DJR-028-25–28.)

The same vocabulary can name a person’s courage, temper, mind or inward life. **Martiall spirits** means military vigour; a **divine spirit** can be an eloquent or exceptionally charitable person. **The Spirit** in the account of regeneration names divine aid, whereas a **private spirit** can be an alleged personal inspiration whose authority Burton disputes. Related Latin **genius** and **dæmon** may denote an attendant spirit, but genius can also enter a personification: Burton calls his melancholy **malus genius**, an evil spirit. These uses cannot be resolved simply by treating every occurrence as either a ghost or a bodily fluid. (DJR-003-08; DJR-026-38; DJR-046-18; DJR-110-27; DJR-112-21; DJR-160-19–21.)

A further physical sense appears when the finer **spirits** of wine evaporate in an analogy explaining a humour’s alteration. **Spirit of Roses** means an essence of roses in the extravagant bath promised to Celia by Jonson’s fictional seducer Volpone; the passage illustrates deceptive promises of luxury, not a demonstrated remedy. Latin **spiritus** can also mean breath or life: under a tyrant, “life itself” depends upon the conqueror’s will. These local uses help explain the word’s range without making all its applications instances of one substance. (DJR-013-13; DJR-027-39; DJR-125-19–23.)

### In the work

#### The soul’s instruments

The anatomical digression defines spirit as “the instrument of the soule, to perform all his actions.” The soul is the acting principle; spirits are its instruments. Burton then records other formulations: some make spirit the common bond or medium between body and soul, while Paracelsus calls it a fourth soul in its own right. Melanchthon places the spirits’ origin in the heart and says that they acquire another nature after conveyance to the brain. These are distinct accounts gathered into a short exposition, rather than a single uncontested definition. (DJR-023-35.)

The next paragraph gives the threefold scheme. **Natural spirits** are generated in the liver and distributed by the veins for natural bodily functions. **Vital spirits** are made in the heart from the natural spirits and conveyed by the arteries; their operation sustains life. **Animal spirits** are formed from the vital, brought to the brain and distributed through nerves, giving subordinate parts sensation and movement. The opening lists “Brain, Heart, Liver” beside “Natural, Vital, Animal,” but the subsequent sentences supply the actual correspondences: liver–natural, heart–vital, brain–animal. Reading the two initial lists as parallel columns would reverse two of them. (DJR-023-36.)

The surrounding anatomy follows the same routes through organs and vessels. Nerves convey animal spirits; arteries convey vital spirits; veins carry blood and natural spirits. The brain’s cavities receive and refine spirits arriving from the heart, and its posterior cavity conveys animal spirits towards the spinal marrow. In this account, **subtle** means fine enough to serve these bodily operations. It need not mean supernatural or ingenious. (DJR-023-42–46; DJR-024-14–19.)

Spirits also explain transitions between activity and inactivity. Sleep is described through the interruption of their passage by vapours; when the obstruction is spent, they resume their usual duties and the senses wake. Voluntary movement has a more elaborate order: reason or imagination apprehends an object, appetite is moved, the moving faculty commands an organ through spirit, and nerves and muscles move the member. The desired object is the end; reason or its subordinate imagination is assigned the efficient role. Spirits convey and execute that movement. Their place in the causal sequence should not be mistaken for independent decision or for the soul’s entire activity. (DJR-025-21–22, 30–32; DJR-026-22.)

#### Disturbance, temperament and imagination

This physiology makes spirits central to the bodily conditions of melancholy. In the account of ill-timed exercise, raw and undigested material is carried into the veins, putrefies and “confounds the animal spirits.” The surrounding argument distinguishes beneficial exercise from excessive, violent or badly timed exercise. In the treatment of overmuch study, weakened bodies and dulled spirits shade into diminished courage: books supposedly consume the Greeks’ “vigor, and martiall spirits.” The first example is a reported physiological process; the second uses bodily depletion and military vigour together in an anti-scholarly argument. (DJR-037-16–18; DJR-046-16–19.)

Not every explanation requires a diseased quantity of humour. Hercules de Saxonia’s **immaterial melancholy** is placed in the spirits alone, through disorders of heat, cold, dryness or moisture. Elsewhere his account of fright emphasizes the spirits’ agitation, contraction and expansion, explicitly excluding a distemper of humours. The symptom chapter again contrasts his spirits-based explanation with accounts of the four humours undergoing adustion. “Immaterial” is the term of this particular controversy. It must not silently be converted either into a modern psychological diagnosis or into a claim that the patient is inhabited by an incorporeal demon. The passage is discussing the immediate causes of bodily and mental symptoms. (DJR-027-32–35, 46, 57; DJR-051-03–05; DJR-060-14–15.)

The inward-causes chapter treats humours and spirits together as media through which the material body affects the immaterial soul. Their condition can impede the activity of the organs through which the soul works. Burton’s comparison with an untuned lute stresses interdependence: disorder in one part unsettles the rest. Conversely, mental passions change bodily temperature and movement. In the cure, “Imagination enforceth spirits,” spirits compel the nerves, and nerves the limbs. This reciprocal account gives physiological content to emotional disturbance without making the bodily spirits the person’s directing soul. (DJR-056-41–53; DJR-083-31.)

#### Darkness, visions and the reasons for fear

In the explanation of symptoms, **darkened spirits** help account for fear and sorrow. Galen’s model, as Burton presents it, makes the brain and its objects appear dark and threatening through fumes arising from black humours. The explanation is contested: Fracastorius argues for cold rather than internal darkness, and Burton objects to the consequences of that proposal; other authorities attack or defend the Galenic account. The resulting darkness is a proposed internal cause, not simply a decorative synonym for sadness. Burton uses it to explain why ordering a sufferer not to fear can be as ineffective as ordering a wounded person not to feel pain. (DJR-063-18–26.)

The same sequence explains some apparent visions from bodily vapours, impaired sight, sleeplessness or a corrupted imagination. Agitated spirits and humours are said to wander through the brain and produce appearances before the eyes. Misperception, optical devices and deliberate imposture offer further explanations. A person can think he hears spirits because a performer disguises or projects a voice. Burton nevertheless retains a reservation that the Devil may sometimes exploit a disordered person’s condition. His local reassurance through “naturall and inward causes” and his continued belief in some demonic activity must both remain visible. (DJR-063-18; DJR-064-16–30.)

#### Created spirits and their disputed powers

The digression on supernatural spirits begins by acknowledging obscurity and disagreement. Burton reports denial of spirits, competing philosophical names and accounts of their origin, then gives the Christian story of Lucifer and his associates as angels created by God and fallen through pride. The lexical distinction between classical **dæmones** and Christian devils matters: the Platonists, he says, use the name for spirits whether good or bad. Guardians and departed souls enter reported schemes that Burton does not endorse uniformly. **Genii** are good or bad guardians; in the terminology he assigns to the Stoics, **Heroes** and **Lares** name good spirits, **Lemures** and **Larvæ** bad ones. In particular he rejects the account that angels and devils are simply the souls of departed people. (DJR-028-20–33.)

He then surveys claims that spirits possess airy bodies, suffer pain, take nourishment, die, assume shapes or move bodies. Bodin’s argument even makes their proper shape round. Burton subsequently says that these paradoxes have been confuted, and distinguishes deceiving the eyes from producing an actual bodily transformation. Yet this rejection is followed by extensive powers he is willing to grant: superior knowledge, conjecture about future events, exploitation of natural properties, deception of the senses and the causing or curing of diseases. His limits include divine permission, the sublunary elements rather than control of the heavens, and the inability to know the secrets of a person’s heart. “Can probably conjecture” is not the same as unbounded knowledge of the future. (DJR-028-34–43; DJR-029-12–19, 43–45.)

Several classifications follow. A ninefold account attributed to schoolmen and divines groups evil spirits by office, from false gods and lying oracles to tempters and accusers. Psellus is said to make six kinds, but Burton’s introductory enumeration names only five: fiery, aerial, terrestrial, watery and subterranean. A later paragraph supplies an unnamed “last” group at the earth’s centre, tormenting the damned. The sequence is an uneven enumeration rather than a clean six-item list. Individual examples bring in fairies, household workers, wandering pucks, mine spirits and supposed ghosts. The categories overlap and their witnesses disagree. For instance, rings in fields are attributed to fairies by some and to natural causes by others; apparent dead people may be explained as impersonations. These are variations within the survey, not a uniform census of observed beings. (DJR-029-26–50; DJR-030-01–43.)

Burton’s stance is sometimes more positive than a neutral compilation: he agrees with Bodin that aerial devils cause storms more often than the meteorologists allow. Elsewhere qualifications such as “if we may believe” hold a particular traveller’s story at a distance. He also rejects the grand claim that familiar spirits determine nearly every human success, office and event, while maintaining that devils can harm bodies and minds by God’s permission. The article’s distinction between a reported claim and Burton’s assertion therefore has to be made locally. (DJR-030-03–05, 30–37; DJR-031-01–11.)

#### Supernatural action through bodily instruments

The two main senses meet when Burton asks how a devil might cause melancholy. Rogers’s “spirituall body” is said to struggle with **our spirits**. Biarmannus’s explanation begins with imagination but moves it through humours. The apparent claim that the Devil alone causes the disease is then restricted by **non sine interventu humoris**, “not without the humour”: altered black choler supplies the immediate bodily cause. Further reports describe a demon exploiting a temperament already inclined to deception, or mingling with melancholy humours. Burton leaves undecided whether the mode is obsession, possession or something else. (DJR-031-13–21.)

These passages do not identify a demon with an animal spirit. They propose that one kind of agent can work upon or through the other kind of medium. The later witchcraft subsection extends this model to human instruments, while the cure separates the question whether a supernatural cure can occur from whether it may lawfully be sought. Knowledge of natural substances can be credited to a demon without making consultation of a magician acceptable. (DJR-031-30–37, 54–55; DJR-067-40–51.)

Love reopens a controversy already encountered in the spirit survey. Burton introduces alleged intercourse with spirits conditionally, gives denials, then contrary witnesses. Later he explicitly subscribes to Lactantius’s account and concludes that the collected testimony makes such intercourse likely, although his examples also allow the alternative of deceitful priests. This is a change in the local argument, not a reason to erase the earlier doubts or to turn the stories into established events. (DJR-113-51–53; DJR-114-07–14.)

#### Sight, attraction and relief

In the chapter on imagination, spirits are proposed as the means through which one person might affect another. Burton’s examples include yawning, sore eyes and alleged bewitchment; the explanation attributed to Weyer, Paracelsus, Cardan and others makes a forceful imagination alter the other person’s spirits. The claim about action beyond one’s own body is stronger than the familiar account of imagination moving one’s own limbs. (DJR-039-29–34.)

The love discussion gives this idea a detailed visual mechanism. Varius says that the purer spirits are infected through exchanged looks. An account attributed to Ficino makes eye-beams carry a vapour generated in the heart, join one lover’s spirits to another’s, and infect the recipient’s blood. Burton notices the objection from those who explain vision by reception into the eye rather than rays sent out of it. The following question about a blind person’s capacity to love is answered by distinguishing natural or chaste love from the particular erotic passion being examined. Thus the proposed transmission is part of a contested account of fascination, not a universal definition of love or an incidental use of “spirit” for a demon. (DJR-120-01–18.)

Cures likewise work on spirits in different ways. Clear air is said to cheer them; music affects both vital and animal spirits, and Scaliger explains its effect through the spirits around the heart responding to vibrating air. An alternative explanation makes the mind itself harmonious. The biblical example of David driving evil spirits from Saul employs the supernatural sense within this same discussion, but does not change the meaning of “vital and animal spirits” in the physiological explanation. Burton also restricts music’s benefit where it feeds an existing amorous disorder. (DJR-077-15; DJR-085-03–10, 16, 23–26.)

Causal differences can alter medical prescriptions. Hercules de Saxonia refuses bloodletting in the immaterial melancholy attributed especially to a cold disorder of spirits; Laurentius approves it on other authorities. The contrast shows that “spirits” can identify the disputed target of treatment as well as the means of perception and passion. These are positions within historical medicine, not treatment recommendations. (DJR-103-23–25.)

#### Human and divine spirit

Burton’s human **spirits** range from military courage to ordinary disposition and exceptional ability. The orator called “a divine spirit” has a grace of expression that draws others towards him. The charitable people called “divine spirits” embody genuine generosity within a passage otherwise concerned with hypocrisy. The phrase therefore need not be a claim to supernatural revelation. Similarly, melancholy as an evil **genius**, and disputes as spirits conjured up that nobody can lay, personify an affliction or an intellectual quarrel. (DJR-003-08; DJR-006-14; DJR-046-18; DJR-110-27; DJR-112-21.)

Divine action has its own affirmative place. The account of the will says that in spiritual matters it requires regeneration and the leading of “the Spirit”; the quotation from Psalm 51 asks to be sustained by God’s “free spirit.” Moderate fasting is also praised for fostering true zeal and “a divine spirit.” Burton then approves sobriety, contemplation and ecstasy as a foretaste of happiness and union with God, “a divine melancholy,” before condemning their abuse. This positive sequence prevents the later attack on “private spirits,” sectarian revelations and excessive religious practices from being treated as a rejection of every spiritual gift or contemplative experience. (DJR-026-37–38; DJR-028-15; DJR-156-03–13; DJR-160-19–21.)

The comfort against despair brings several senses together with particular precision. The “most divine spirits” are devout people who have nevertheless suffered unwanted thoughts. “The divel he is a spirit” names a supernatural agent said to mingle with **our spirits**, the bodily media he disturbs alongside heart, brain and humours. The account also admits thoughts proceeding from the sufferers themselves. Its practical distinction concerns consent: the person who rejects and abhors a suggestion has not simply made its content the act of a settled will. Burton even allows for partial assent afterwards repudiated. His advice is not to intensify distress through an anxious struggle with every suggestion. Here the overlapping vocabularies of spirit serve an argument about involuntary suffering and responsibility. (DJR-167-27–35.)

### Places to Read

These selected places follow the supplied edition’s reading order. Page numbers are printed source labels unless expressly identified otherwise.

- **Reader address, pp. 5, 15 and 48; DJR-003-08; DJR-006-14; DJR-013-13.** Melancholy as an evil genius, intellectual disputes as unmanageable conjured spirits, and Latin spiritus meaning breath or life under tyranny.
- **1.1.2.2–4, pp. 15–19; DJR-023-35–36, 42–46; DJR-024-14–19.** The definition, three bodily kinds, correct organ correspondences, vessels and brain cavities. The whole of DJR-023-36 is essential.
- **The soul and its faculties, pp. 24–25, 27 and 29; DJR-025-21–22, 30–32; DJR-026-22, 37–38.** Sleep, movement, the soul’s instrumental activity, and the distinct theological use of “the Spirit.”
- **Melancholy’s material and immaterial accounts, pp. 33–36; DJR-027-32–40, 46, 57.** The spirits-only theory; the spirits of wine in an analogy; different explanations of kinds and symptoms.
- **Divine causation and nature of spirits, pp. 38–41; DJR-028-12–15, 20–48.** Divine instruments, the Psalm’s “free spirit,” created and fallen angels, classical terminology and disputed bodily properties.
- **The spirit digression, pp. 42–51; DJR-029-01–50; DJR-030-01–48.** Reported beings and classifications, apparent transformations, limits of knowledge and action, natural counterexplanations, qualified stories and Burton’s own assertions.
- **Power and bodily causation, pp. 51–54; DJR-031-01–29.** Rejected universal governance, permitted harm, imagination and humour as media, and the undecided mode of possession or obsession.
- **Witches as instruments, pp. 54–57; DJR-031-30–37, 54–55.** Apparent command of spirits and the denial of intrinsic power to ceremonial words and signs.
- **Exercise and imagination, pp. 84–85 and 96; DJR-037-16–18; DJR-039-29–34.** Disrupted animal spirits and the stronger claim that imagination can alter another person’s spirits.
- **Study and fright, pp. 127 and 146; DJR-046-16–19; DJR-051-03–05.** Bodily depletion and martial courage; the spirits’ agitation as a cause distinguished from humoral distemper.
- **Inward causes and symptoms, pp. 172–173, 191, 205–211; DJR-056-41–53; DJR-060-14–15; DJR-063-18–26; DJR-064-16–30.** Bodily–mental interaction, spirits-only alternatives, internal darkness, optical appearances and imitation spirit voices.
- **Lawfulness of cures, pp. 220–221; DJR-067-40–51.** Alleged demonic medical skill and the separate prohibition on seeking such help.
- **Air, imagination and music, pp. 262–263, 292, 299–301; DJR-077-15; DJR-083-31; DJR-085-03–10, 16, 23–26.** Physiological refreshment, the chain from imagination to limbs, musical theories, the different sense in Saul’s evil spirits and the limits of music as remedy.
- **Particular treatment, pp. 384–385; DJR-103-23–25.** Disagreement about bloodletting when the supposed disorder is in spirits rather than humoral matter.
- **Eloquence and charity, pp. 422 and 431; DJR-110-27; DJR-112-21.** “Divine spirit” as praise of a human speaker or a genuinely charitable person.
- **Love’s extent, pp. 437–440; DJR-113-51–53; DJR-114-07–14.** Conditional claims, denials and Burton’s later qualified acceptance of intercourse with spirits.
- **Visual fascination, pp. 467–468; DJR-120-01–18.** Spirits, eye-beams, blood and the accounts attributed to Varius and Ficino; objections about vision and blind love; restriction to the erotic passion under examination.
- **False promises of luxury, pp. 495–496; DJR-125-19–23.** “Spirit of Roses” is a material essence in Burton’s quotation of Volpone’s seductive promise; its speaker and extravagant setting distinguish it from a factual therapeutic claim.
- **Religious experience and claims, pp. 655–657 and 676–677; DJR-156-03–13; DJR-160-19–21.** Positive divine spirit and contemplation before abuse; “private spirit” as disputed personal authority.
- **Comfort against despair, pp. 711–713; DJR-167-27–35.** Devout human spirits, the Devil as a spirit, bodily spirits, alternative origins of suggestions, and the distinction between unwanted thoughts and settled consent.
- **Unnumbered Table and closing notice; DJR-172-187.** “Spirits in the body what” directs readers to the anatomical discussion; the printed numbers 14 and 15 remain historical index locators.

### In this edition

The technical phrase **animal spirits** remains “animal spirits” in the exercise passage (DJR-037-17). The modern anatomical paragraph spells out the three kinds and their routes, but this expansion does not remove the need to follow the original paragraph’s explicit organ assignments. At DJR-023-35 **most subtile vapour** becomes “extremely fine vapour” and **the instrument of the soule** becomes “the soul’s instrument.” These equivalents preserve fineness and instrumental agency rather than turning spirit into an autonomous soul.

In the study passage, **dulls the spirits** becomes “dulls their spirits,” while **martiall spirits** becomes the singular “martial spirit” (DJR-046-18). This is a change of idiom that clarifies the courage sense. In the wine analogy, **purer spirits** becomes “finer spirits” (DJR-027-39); in the fascination account, **the purer spirits** remains “the purer spirits” (DJR-120-05). In Volpone’s promised bath, **Spirit of Roses** becomes “Essence of roses” (DJR-125-21). Wine, bodily perception and a fragrant essence supply different local referents.

**dæmones** becomes “daimones” in the explanation that classical usage includes both good and bad spirits (DJR-028-25). **boni and mali Genii** becomes “good and evil guardian spirits” (DJR-028-31), while **malus genius** becomes “evil spirit” in Burton’s self-personification (DJR-003-08). These choices preserve a lexical distinction that indiscriminate translation as “devils” would obscure. They do not certify the separate traditions as one doctrine.

In the final comfort, **the most divine spirits** becomes “the most godly souls” (DJR-167-27), but **the divel he is a spirit** and **our spirits** retain their respective supernatural and physiological wording in the next paragraph. In Psalm 51, **free spirit** becomes “generous spirit” (DJR-028-15). These are local phrase alignments, not evidence that spirit and soul are interchangeable everywhere. The supplied text and apparatus have been consulted; the historical works cited by Burton have not each been independently collated for this article.

### See also

**Melancholy** ([BAL-0001](#bal-0001)), for humour, matter, disease and the disputed immaterial kind; **Imagination** ([BAL-0002](#bal-0002)), for movement, images and claims about influence upon another person; **Witchcraft** ([BAL-0004](#bal-0004)), for human instruments and apparent command; **Charms** ([BAL-0005](#bal-0005)) and **Philters** ([BAL-0006](#bal-0006)), for the relation between substances, formulas and attributed agency; **Jealousy** ([BAL-0007](#bal-0007)), for fear, suspicion and their bodily explanations.

Further entries planned for later batches: Soul; Animal and vegetal; Humour; Vapours; Daemon and genius; Demonic apparitions; Obsession and possession; Incubus; Fascination; Enthusiasm; Ecstasy; Music; Despair; Hypochondria.

## Witchcraft {#bal-0004}

Entry BAL-0004 · Sample revision 1



### The word

Witchcraft names a supposed human traffic with supernatural powers, especially the power to harm, deceive, alter affections, or cause and cure disease. Burton’s vocabulary includes **Witches**, **Magicians**, **Conjurers**, **Inchanters**, and **Charmers**. These names overlap, but one distinction matters particularly in his account: conjurers and magicians appear to command spirits, while witches are commanded by them. The appearance of command is essential. A spirit that pretends to obey is not thereby mastered by the person who summons it.

The associated words also carry other kinds of explanation. **White-witches** are practitioners reputed to heal or counteract harmful magic. **Witch-ridden** names the sleeper’s experience of being pressed or ridden by an apparent assailant. **Bewitched** can be figurative: writers captivated by fame are “Bewitched with this desire of fame.” The family also names feared bewitchment, the captivating influence of beauty, and a hostile label applied to a woman. **Witchers**, an alternative plural in the treatment of despair, occurs within the sufferer’s self-accusation. The kind of claim must therefore be established from the passage, rather than inferred from the presence of a magical word.

### In the work

#### Instruments and apparent masters

Burton gives witches and magicians a dedicated subsection among the causes of melancholy. Its opening follows a discussion of what the Devil can do by himself and turns to what he can do through human “instruments.” Yet these instruments are not passive objects. Burton quotes Erastus’s claim that witches provoke harms the demon would otherwise not have committed, and presents revenge and desire as motives. In this argument, the human practitioner incites and the demon performs. The provocative comparison that the instruments may be worse than their master, “if it be possible,” concerns malice and instigation, not a claim that they possess greater supernatural power. (DJR-031-30–32.)

Burton then acknowledges opposition. Some deny witches altogether; others deny their harmful capacity. He places Weyer, Scot and several other writers under this broad heading, before setting against them what he calls the majority of lawyers, theologians, physicians and philosophers. His compressed list should not be expanded into an identical doctrine held by every named writer. The two denials are already different positions. The classical verse about laughing at magic terrors and nocturnal ghosts supplies a satirical gesture, while the subsequent catalogue supplies the contrary authorities. (DJR-031-33–35.)

Within the account he proceeds to give, the distinction between magicians and witches turns on service. Conjurers command “in shew at least.” The quoted explanation says that demons allow themselves to seem compelled by exorcisms and conjurations in order to keep their practitioners in impiety. Witches, by contrast, belong to the class that is commanded. Burton commends King James’s account here, then names further kinds without defining a complete system of mutually exclusive professions. His central explanation makes apparent magical mastery itself an instrument of deception. (DJR-031-36–37.)

#### The catalogue and its limits

The ensuing catalogue ranges from storms and compelled love to illness, impaired fertility, airborne journeys, changelings, protection in combat, and changes of appearance. Particular stories have particular forms of support. The enchanted cap of a Swedish king is a received northern story; Scheretzius’s flying-goat account is presented as his confident report of interviews and confessions. Burton’s citations and assertions show how he assembles his case. They do not turn these accounts into independently established events. (DJR-031-38–46.)

He also interrupts the catalogue with limits. Following Lipsius and Bodin, he denies ordinary magicians access to certain kinds of money, documents, judicial decisions and royal counsels. Bodin’s distinction between lesser and higher spirits reserves some effects to the latter. Burton then entertains, with “peradventure,” extraordinary figures who might seem to escape ordinary limits, only to call such impostors rare or nonexistent and describe their eventual abandonment by the Devil. “The vulgar sort” cannot perform these exceptional feats. The sequence is more qualified than an unbroken declaration that witches can do anything. (DJR-031-47–51.)

The argument returns to the book’s medical subject with the claim that practitioners can cause or cure diseases, including melancholy. Burton invokes Paracelsus’s reported experience of people “bewitched into melancholy,” Daneau’s testimony, a young man said to have lost his reason after eating a witch’s cakes, and a consultation in which an illness was judged partly magical and partly natural. The last distinction is especially revealing: magical and bodily explanations need not exclude one another within this historical account. The earlier discussion has already allowed a demon to act through a humour, making black bile the immediate bodily cause. (DJR-031-16–20, 51–54.)

The subsection closes with a decisive qualification about the means. Spells, charms, characters and unintelligible formulas have no power in themselves; the Devil uses them to deceive his followers and keep them loyal. This is a claim about where the power lies, not a withdrawal of the preceding belief in demonic action. Its grammar names the ceremonial words and signs. It should not be silently enlarged into a claim that every substance in the earlier catalogue is physiologically inert. Love potions receive further, disputed explanations elsewhere. (DJR-031-54–55.)

#### Melancholy as an explanation of witchcraft

The discussion of old age soon changes the direction of explanation. Instead of asking how witches produce melancholy in others, Burton reports a theory in which melancholy helps explain what supposed witches believe about themselves. He associates the condition especially with old women who are poor, solitary and held in low esteem. Weyer, Porta, Molitor and others are then said to attribute everything witches supposedly do to imagination and melancholy. The circumstances named here matter: age, isolation, poverty and social contempt enter the account alongside bodily humour. (DJR-032-30–31.)

The disputed feats include harming cattle, flight, transformation, bodily transport, meetings and intercourse with the Devil. Sleep-inducing potions, natural causes and the Devil’s cunning appear together in the proposed explanation. Weyer’s formulation, as Burton gives it, is sharp: the women think they are witches and can do harm, but do not. The opponents do not deny that witches can be melancholy. They deny that corrupted imagination *alone* explains the deception and effects. The disagreement concerns the sufficiency of an explanation, not a simple choice between melancholy and the supernatural. (DJR-032-32–34.)

The later chapter on imagination develops more than one possibility. The “witch-ridden” sleeper supposes an old woman is sitting heavily on the body; Burton instead locates the disturbance in humours troubling imagination. Tales of witches’ journeys are attributed by the cited writers to imagination and the Devil’s illusions, with the marginal account leaving their bodies insensible. But another passage asks how one person’s forceful imagination might alter another person’s spirits, invoking bewitched children among its examples. Imagining an event and supposedly affecting another body through imagination are different claims, even though both belong to this chapter. (DJR-039-10–12, 30–34.)

#### Feared bewitchment and natural explanation

Elsewhere, bewitchment is what the sufferer fears rather than the cause Burton accepts. One person fears all old women as witches and treats nearby people and animals as **malificiated**, or affected by witchcraft. Others suspect enemies and even their closest friends of bewitching, possessing or poisoning them. In the account of women’s symptoms, **forespoken** means cursed or bewitched. These descriptions present beliefs within a condition of distress; they do not establish the guilt of the people suspected. (DJR-058-31, 41; DJR-063-04–05.)

Burton then proposes reassurance through explanation. In his judgment, people should be shown that these symptoms arise from “naturall and inward causes,” rather than devils, bewitchment or abandonment by God. Knowing the causes may help them avoid the effects or at least endure them more patiently. He subsequently explains some supposed apparitions through poor sight, fear, lack of sleep and inadequate diet, and commends Scot for exposing sleight of hand. The writer listed among opponents in the witchcraft controversy can thus become a useful authority in this local account. Burton’s explanation of these symptoms does not amount to a withdrawal of every demonic cause discussed elsewhere. (DJR-063-18; DJR-064-25–27.)

#### Healing and permission

At the opening of the second partition, the question becomes practical and theological. Reports of village cunning people and “white-witches” offer relief from bodily and mental infirmities. Burton rehearses claims for such cures and the Devil’s medical knowledge, then explicitly grants the premise for the next question: assuming these cures can be effected, is it lawful to seek them? He also says that God permits such effects. Divine permission for an event does not settle the separate question of whether the patient may lawfully seek the practitioner’s help. (DJR-067-40–46.)

The argument attributed to Paracelsus makes relief decisive: why should a person rescued from a ditch care whether the rescuer is friend or enemy? Burton answers this position through contrary authorities and the prohibition on doing evil for a good result. His conclusion refuses the cure on religious grounds even if the physical benefit is granted. The word *white* therefore marks a reputedly beneficial practice, not Burton’s moral permission to consult its practitioner. This is his historical theological judgment, not guidance about present-day medical care. (DJR-067-47–51.)

The same distinction returns in the love-melancholy cures. Burton first labels potions, bindings, signs and charms unlawful, records authorities who say a magically caused condition requires a magical remedy, and then reiterates that the practice is not permitted. In the jealousy discussion he again reports proposed potions, spells and charms for enforcing fidelity, before calling such devices mostly impious and absurd. Listing a remedy and recommending it are distinct acts in his writing. (DJR-139-48–50; DJR-149-53.)

#### Other settings

Love gives witchcraft language another range. Beauty itself becomes “a witch, a charm.” Burton introduces explanations of how beauty bewitches “as some hold,” then affirms the poet’s description of love’s power to change us. Heliodorus is reported to argue that “love is witch-craft”; Ficino supplies an account of attraction through repeated mutual gazing; Varius describes the influence of one eye upon another’s bodily spirits. These passages connect the language of captivity to proposed physical means of influence. (DJR-117-28; DJR-120-01–05.)

A different account follows in the subsection on philters. When Olympia sees the woman said to have enchanted Philip, she recognizes beauty, upbringing and accomplishments as the true charms. A literary speaker then boasts of kissing and embracing as her only philter, while the next passage reports Erastus’s statement that witches claim the power to compel love and hatred. The sequence gives different explanations of attraction, not a uniform assertion of an external witch’s intervention. (DJR-126-02–05.)

**Witch** can also be an insult. In the contrast between an admirer and an unsympathetic observer, the observer calls the woman “witch, divill, hag,” while the lover calls her an idol, angel and goddess. The passage displays opposed judgments of the same person rather than establishing that she practises magic. (DJR-129-66.)

The related controversy over intercourse with spirits is likewise a debate: Burton begins conditionally, “if those stories be true,” before giving denials and contrary testimonies. (DJR-113-51–53.)

Witchcraft language is not confined to the dedicated subsection. Boissard’s account of bewitchment-induced sleeplessness precedes Burton’s turn to ordinary causes such as heat, dryness and anxiety. In religious melancholy, witches and Apollo’s prophetic women enter a polemical challenge to supposed ancient predictions of Christ. That challenge concerns the authenticity and source of the claimed revelations; it is not a denial that people claim inspiration. Nor does it erase the preceding positive account of contemplation and “divine melancholy.” These local changes of subject and stance prevent a single formula from explaining every occurrence. (DJR-082-30–31; DJR-156-10–16.)

The final treatment of despair gives the vocabulary another argumentative role. “Witchers and Conjurers” appear within an imagined self-accusation: the sufferer thinks that he has given his soul to the Devil by “compact, band, and obligation,” a pact or binding undertaking. The reply turns to unwanted thoughts, resistance and consent. Burton distinguishes thoughts forced upon a sufferer from a settled will, and even allows for partial assent that is afterwards rejected. He also offers the assurance of pardon where sin has occurred, under the stated condition of repentance. The accusation belongs to the case being answered, not an established judgment that the sufferer has practised witchcraft. (DJR-167-15–17, 26–38.)

### Places to Read

The following places are ordered as they occur in the supplied edition. Page numbers are the source’s printed labels; the stable DJR passage IDs distinguish repeated pagination.

- **Democritus Junior to the Reader, p. 6; DJR-004-02.** Figurative bewitchment by the desire for fame. The object of captivity is ambition, not a stated act of sorcery.
- **Democritus Junior to the Reader, p. 15; DJR-006-14.** Controversialists have conjured up more spirits than they know how to lay. This is a related figurative use of magical practice for intellectual contention.
- **The nature and operation of spirits, pp. 52–53; DJR-031-16–21.** Demonic action is explained through bodily humours. Burton leaves the precise mode, “obsession, or possession, or otherwise,” undetermined.
- **Of Witches and Magicians, how they cause Melancholy, pp. 54–57; DJR-031-30–55.** The central sequence: human instruments, opposed authorities, apparent command and service, the catalogue of powers, its limits, disease reports, and the final denial of intrinsic power to spells and signs.
- **Natural causes and old age, pp. 60–61; DJR-032-30–34.** Melancholy and imagination explain alleged witchly feats in one reported account. Its opponents reject imagination alone as sufficient.
- **The power of imagination, pp. 93–94 and 96; DJR-039-10–12, 30–34.** Separate the witch-ridden sleeper, imagined journeys with demonic deception, and the proposed action of one person’s imagination upon another’s spirits.
- **Symptoms of melancholy, pp. 181–182; DJR-058-31, 41.** Fear of witches, surrounding people and animals deemed bewitched, and suspicion of enemies or close friends are reported as the sufferer’s beliefs.
- **Symptoms in women and their immediate causes, pp. 203, 205; DJR-063-04–05, 18.** *Forespoken* means cursed or bewitched; the later explanation substitutes natural internal causes for feared bewitchment and divine abandonment.
- **Causes of apparent visions, pp. 210–211; DJR-064-25–27.** Sight, fear, sleep loss, fasting and contrived appearances enter the explanation; Scot is commended for exposing sleight of hand.
- **Lawful and unlawful means of cure, pp. 220–221; DJR-067-40–51.** Beneficial magic, white witches, and the distinction between a cure’s alleged possibility and the permissibility of seeking it.
- **Sleep and waking, p. 287; DJR-082-30–31.** Reported magical sleeplessness is followed by ordinary bodily and emotional causes.
- **The range of love, pp. 437–438; DJR-113-51–53.** Conditional claims and opposed authorities concerning intercourse with spirits; a continuation for the Incubus and Spirits entries.
- **Beauty’s power, p. 454; DJR-117-28.** Beauty is a lodestone, witch and charm: a series of images for its attractive force.
- **Visual fascination, p. 467; DJR-120-01–05.** Love as witchcraft is connected with attributed theories of mutual gazing and bodily spirits.
- **Philters and other unlawful means, pp. 500–501; DJR-126-02–05.** Beauty and accomplishment explain Philip’s supposed enchantment; literary boasting and witches’ claims follow as distinct kinds of evidence.
- **The lover’s distorted judgment, pp. 521–522; DJR-129-66.** *Witch* as a hostile label in an observer’s speech, opposed to the admirer’s praise.
- **Remedies for love melancholy, p. 572; DJR-139-48–50.** Magical means are catalogued within an explicit prohibition; the marginal loss of sexual potency is a distinct claim from the body’s discussion of love.
- **Prevention of jealousy, p. 624; DJR-149-53.** Potions, spells and charms proposed by others to enforce fidelity are rejected as mostly impious and absurd.
- **Religious melancholy, pp. 656–657; DJR-156-10–16.** Beneficial contemplation, abused ecstasy, demonic prompting and disputed prophetic claims are distinguished across the sequence.

- **Comfort against despair, pp. 710–713; DJR-167-15–17, 26–38.** The sufferer’s alleged pact is followed by distinctions between involuntary thoughts, partial assent later rejected, settled consent and pardon.

### In this edition

The original and modern columns preserve different layers of evidence. “Witches” remains “witches,” while the surrounding modern explanation clarifies such expressions as “in shew at least” as “at least in appearance.” “White-witches” remains visibly qualified by the reported name. “Witch-ridden” is retained beside *incubus* so that the later explanation can show how the sufferer’s belief differs from Burton’s account of its cause.

In the symptoms passages, “malificiated” becomes “bewitched” and “forespoken” becomes “cursed or bewitched.” In the despair passage, “Witchers” becomes “witches” and “band” becomes “bond.” These clarifications do not remove the framing verbs of fear, thought and reply that identify whose belief is being reported.

One important reading is provisional. At DJR-031-37 the original prints **ex parte**, literally “in part.” The modern column reads an implicit or explicit **pact**, following the editor’s suggested repair to *ex pacto*. The interpretation suits the described relationship of service, but *ex pacto* must not be quoted as the wording printed in this source.

Another distinction concerns attribution. At DJR-031-55 Burton names “Libanius”; the supplied editor identifies the related passage in Libavius’s work on bleeding corpses and describes Burton’s alterations. That identification belongs to this edition’s apparatus. The lexicon has checked the supplied passage and note, without claiming a new collation of Libavius or of every work in Burton’s extensive lists.

The modern rendering is useful for resolving historical vocabulary, but it is not a second independent witness to the truth of the reported events. In particular, clearer English does not change a quotation, confession, conjecture or attributed theory into Burton’s unqualified conclusion.

### See also

**Melancholy** ([BAL-0001](#bal-0001)), for humour, disease and disputed causes; **Imagination** ([BAL-0002](#bal-0002)), for internal images and proposed effects on other bodies; **Spirits** ([BAL-0003](#bal-0003)), for bodily spirits, demons and the limits of agency; **Charms** ([BAL-0005](#bal-0005)), for formulas, signs and their supposed efficacy; **Philters** ([BAL-0006](#bal-0006)), for love potions and competing causal accounts; **Jealousy** ([BAL-0007](#bal-0007)), for the rejection of magical fidelity remedies.

Further entries planned for later batches: Fascination, Incubus, Characters, Ligation and ligature, and Enthusiasm.

## Charms {#bal-0005}

Entry BAL-0005 · Sample revision 1



### The word

**Charms**, **Charmes**, and **charme** name means credited with an extraordinary power to influence, protect, injure or heal. Their immediate company often clarifies their sense: spells, spoken words, incantations, written signs, images, knots and amulets. A charm may thus belong to a verbal or ritual practice rather than denote a particular medicinal substance. Burton does not supply one rigid distinction between all the items in these overlapping lists.

The word also moves outside literal magical practice. A friend’s counsel can be a charm that eases grief, while travel **charms** the senses by delighting them with variety. Scripture, divine mercy and repentance supply further positive uses in religious consolation. A woman’s beauty, upbringing and accomplishments can be called the “true charms” that attracted a lover. At the end of the work, Christ’s name is called the “best and only charme” against diabolical illusions, after elaborate exorcisms have been rejected. These are important changes of use. The word alone does not determine either the proposed mechanism or Burton’s judgment of it.

### In the work

#### What is doing the work

The witchcraft subsection first lists the means through which practitioners are said to act: charms, images, metal signs made under chosen constellations, knots, amulets, words and love potions. It then denies intrinsic power to the spells, charms, characters and unintelligible words. The Devil uses these means to deceive practitioners and keep them faithful to his service. Within this explanation, the attributed result and the practitioner’s account of its cause are separated. Something might occur while the charm receives a credit that belongs, in Burton’s demonological account, to a different agent. (DJR-031-54–55.)

Combat supplies a protective use. Burton says that participants in ancient single combats were searched for “Magical charmes,” then describes the alleged ability to make people “stick frees,” proof against stabbing or shooting. The connection is between carrying a supposed protection and gaining an unfair advantage in combat. These claims belong to the supernatural-powers catalogue, before its later qualifications about efficacy. (DJR-031-44–45.)

The same distinction appears in the love-charm debate. Burton reports that Erastus, Weyer and others grant that the supposed effects may occur, but attribute them to the Devil himself rather than charms, incantations or potions. This position differs from the stronger denial attributed earlier to Crato and some theologians, who reject the Devil’s ability to produce the effect in question. A denial of the charm’s own power is not automatically a denial of every supernatural event. (DJR-126-02, 13–14.)

#### Imagination and bodily change

In the discussion of imagination, Burton again describes illnesses supposedly relieved by spells, words, symbols and charms, alongside the disputed weapon salve. His next sentence locates the power in “a strong conceit and opinion alone.” The explanation attributed to Pomponazzi is bodily as well as mental: imagination moves humours, spirits and blood, which remove the cause of the malady from the affected part. *Conceit* means a conception or powerful belief here; *virtue* means efficacy or power. Neither word should be read merely as a moral judgment. (DJR-039-27–28.)

The continuation makes the patient’s confidence central. An empiric or simple surgeon may achieve more striking results than a learned physician because the patient trusts him. Burton brings together authorities who give conviction a powerful role in treatment. This helps explain why a charm can appear in a report of relief while its inherent efficacy is denied. It is a historical account expressed through humours and spirits, not a demonstration that the listed practices cure the named conditions, nor a fully developed modern theory of placebo effects. (DJR-039-29.)

This passage also contains a textual disagreement that matters to its argument. The English body says people are harmed by wicked **incredulity**, or disbelief. The marginal Weyer quotation instead has **credulitate**, credulity or ready belief. The latter makes harm and relief effects of belief; the former states a different relation. The edition preserves both. A smooth summary must not silently make the English say what the Latin says. (DJR-039-28.)

#### An amulet is not automatically a verbal charm

Burton’s later treatment of amulets complicates any simple rejection of everything carried or worn as a remedy. He first describes finding his mother’s spider amulet absurd. Reading authorities and seeing it apparently answer to experience in some people lead him to a more favourable opinion. His explanation seeks an antipathy, a hidden opposition in nature, between the supposed remedy and the ailment. The sequence records a change of judgment, not an unqualified endorsement of every amulet. (DJR-105-29–31.)

Immediately afterwards he rejects medicines consisting of words, characters, spells and charms. They can do no good, he says, except through strong conviction or the Devil’s contrivance. Thus the neighbouring paragraphs distinguish a proposed hidden natural power in a material object from efficacy assigned to a formula or sign. *Exploded* in the original means rejected or discredited. Reading it as a physical explosion would destroy the point of his verdict. (DJR-105-32.)

This distinction should not be converted into a perfectly uniform taxonomy for the whole book. Earlier catalogues place amulets beside charms in a question about diabolical cures. Burton arranges a disputed field of practices and explanations, and the local argument determines which distinction is active. The comparison is most useful when its limits remain visible.

#### Whether it works and whether it is allowed

The second partition begins its treatment of cures by asking two questions. Can the disease be cured through the listed magical means? If it can, is it lawful to use them? The list includes cabalistic words, charms, signs, images, amulets, bindings, potions and incantations. Burton reports opposing answers about their power, with long catalogues of authorities that are not always consistent with his placement of the same writers elsewhere. (DJR-067-33–44.)

He then grants the possibility for the sake of the practical question. Paracelsus is represented as arguing that relief matters more than whether the rescuer is friend or enemy. Other writers allow a practice if it serves the patient’s health. Burton rejects this permission: in his theological argument, a desired benefit does not justify an unlawful means. The rejection is not dependent on proving that no benefit ever occurred. It belongs to his account of religious duty, rather than present-day clinical guidance. (DJR-067-45–51.)

Other passages show why the same reading discipline is needed in shorter lists. In the account of hydrophobia, “some use charmes” reports a country practice, after which Burton directs readers to reputable physicians. In the cures for love melancholy, charms appear among means expressly called unlawful, and their prohibition is repeated after the authorities are rehearsed. In the prevention of jealousy, recipes intended to secure fidelity are called mostly pagan, impious and absurd. Mere inclusion in a medical chapter does not settle Burton’s recommendation. (DJR-022-34; DJR-139-48–50; DJR-149-53.)

#### Counsel and occupation as charms

“A friends counsel is a charm”: the word also describes relief through a discreet, trustworthy and loving listener. Burton compares counsel to mandrake wine lulling cares to sleep and to kind words softening a hardened heart. Sharing the trouble enables another person to offer wisdom, persuasion or practical help that the sufferer could not readily supply alone. The drug image conveys the soothing effect claimed for conversation; it does not turn the conversation into a literal potion. (DJR-083-32–34.)

The following treatment of persuasion develops the comparison. Gentle speech, wisely administered, eases grief as medicines ease bodily diseases. It is “incantationis instar,” like an incantation, and the true *nepenthe*, the grief-banishing remedy of Homer, which the cited interpreters explain as speech suited to the occasion. A friend's words or letters can do what the mythical instruments of Helen, Medea, Venus and Circe are said to do. The timing and wisdom of the speech matter: the praise of eloquence should not be detached from these conditions. (DJR-084-20–25.)

Travel provides a related verbal use. Peregrination “charms our senses” through its pleasant variety of sights and company. Here *charms* means delights or captivates, within an argument for changing the objects that occupy a melancholy mind. In the discussion of reading, Origen is cited for calling Scripture “a Charme”; the margin compares the expulsion of evil through reading to the expulsion of poison through an incantation. Burton then recommends both secular and religious reading as purposeful occupation. The figurative vocabulary belongs to a wider account of how attention, speech and company may bring relief. (DJR-077-24–26; DJR-081-36–38.)

#### Attraction and religious protection

The phrase “true charms” can replace a magical explanation with ordinary attraction. When Olympia sees the girl said to have bewitched King Philip, she identifies her beauty, upbringing and accomplishments as the effective attractions. Drayton’s lover similarly values one sound from his beloved’s lips above all potions, exorcisms and charms. These passages retain the language of extraordinary power while relocating its force in a person’s qualities or speech. They are not a new recipe for a literal charm. (DJR-126-02–03.)

In the consolation against despair, divine mercy is “a charm for the Divel” among images of a balm, a universal remedy and an antidote. Repentance is then “a charm for our miseries,” a protective amulet and an attracting lodestone. The objects of these expressions are mercy and repentance, not prepared magical things. Burton uses the familiar imagery of protection and medicine to explain his religious counsel. (DJR-166-28–30, 43–45.)

The closing religious argument gives the word another positive use. Burton calls elaborate exorcisms a “counterfeit charme” and, through Lemnius, opposes their costumes, chosen times, grand language, signs and formulas to the simple invocation of Christ’s name. “His Name alone” is then the “best and only charme” against such diabolical illusions. The exclusiveness belongs to that stated protection. The following counsel, attributed to Augustine, directs the sufferer to God through faith working by love. Athanasius is then cited for prescribing the opening of Psalm 67 as a “present charme,” meaning an immediately effective protection. Burton follows this with his own preference for turning to God in hope, prayer and trust. The passage reuses a disputed word for trusted religious reliance; it does not reverse the earlier explanation of every material or verbal practice. (DJR-169-19–25.)

### Places to Read

These selected places follow the order of the supplied edition. Page numbers are its printed source labels, and DJR IDs identify the exact aligned passages.

- **The catalogue of diseases, p. 10; DJR-022-34.** Charms appear among reported country treatments for hydrophobia, followed by a preference for approved physicians.
- **Protective magic in combat, pp. 55–56; DJR-031-44–45.** The search for magical charms before single combat precedes a claim about immunity from wounds.
- **Witches and magicians, pp. 56–57; DJR-031-54–55.** Read the list of supposed means together with the following denial that the named spells, charms, signs and words have power in themselves.
- **The power of imagination, pp. 95–96; DJR-039-27–29.** Reported cures, the motion of humours and spirits, patient confidence, and the body–margin disagreement over disbelief and credulity.
- **Unlawful cures rejected, pp. 216 and 220–221; DJR-067-33–51.** Possibility and permission are separate questions. The source’s pagination jumps here; it has not been regularized to a continuous sequence.
- **Travel and varied occupation, p. 264; DJR-077-24–26.** Travel charms the senses through variety; the verb names delight and captivating attention.
- **Reading as occupation, p. 283; DJR-081-36–38.** Scripture as an apothecary’s shop and, through Origen, a charm; meditation and purposeful study carry the argument forward.
- **Sharing distress with a friend, pp. 292–293; DJR-083-32–34.** Counsel as a soothing charm, with images of relieving a burden and softening a hardened heart.
- **Persuasion and timely speech, pp. 292 [296]–297; DJR-084-20–25.** Gentle speech wisely administered, nepenthe interpreted as appropriate conversation, and the charm of a dear friend. The unusual printed page label is retained.
- **Amulets and related remedies, pp. 394–395; DJR-105-29–32.** Burton’s revised opinion of the spider amulet is followed by his rejection of words and signs as intrinsically effective medicine.
- **Philters and other unlawful means, pp. 500–502; DJR-126-01–07, 13–14.** “True charms” of beauty and character, literary comparisons, reported powers, and the account assigning agency directly to the Devil.
- **Cures for love melancholy, p. 572; DJR-139-48–50.** The prohibition frames the catalogue of magical remedies and is explicitly repeated.
- **Prevention of jealousy, p. 624; DJR-149-53.** Proposed fidelity potions, spells and charms receive a qualified but emphatic rejection.
- **Consolation against despair, pp. 707–708; DJR-166-28–30, 43–45.** Divine mercy and repentance are called charms within a network of medical and protective images.
- **The closing remedies for religious melancholy, p. 722; DJR-169-19–25.** Counterfeit ritual charms, Christ’s name as protection against diabolical illusions, the psalm called a present charm, and the final preference for trust in God.

### In this edition

The modern rendering commonly retains *charms*, while clarifying the surrounding terms: **Characters** becomes “written symbols” or “inscribed signs,” and **strong conceipt** becomes “powerful conviction.” These phrase-level choices identify the local meaning. They do not supply an independent confirmation of the claimed cure.

At DJR-039-28, “incredulity” remains “disbelief” in the modern body, while the Latin margin’s *credulitate* is translated as “credulity.” The supplied editor reports checking the same disagreement in a second 1651 copy. This lexicon preserves that reported comparison without claiming a new examination of those copies or of Weyer’s own text.

At DJR-084-21, “opportunity of speech” becomes “speech suited to the occasion.” The accompanying Latin *incantationis instar* means “like an incantation”: the comparison does not identify every act of counsel as a magical ritual. At DJR-169-24, “present charme” becomes “immediately effective charm.” Psalm 67 uses the Septuagint and Vulgate numbering; it corresponds to Psalm 68 in the King James Bible, as the supplied note explains.

At DJR-169-19 and 22, “counterfeit charme” becomes “counterfeit charm,” and “best and only charme” becomes “best and only charm.” Retaining the noun in both places allows the reader to see Burton’s deliberate contrast between rejected ritual and the protection he commends.

### See also

**Imagination** ([BAL-0002](#bal-0002)), for conviction, bodily motion and disputed causal accounts; **Spirits** ([BAL-0003](#bal-0003)), for bodily intermediaries and demonic agents; **Witchcraft** ([BAL-0004](#bal-0004)), for practitioners, apparent command and service; **Philters** ([BAL-0006](#bal-0006)), for potions and the figurative force of attraction; **Jealousy** ([BAL-0007](#bal-0007)), for remedies intended to enforce fidelity.

Further entries planned for later batches: Amulet, Characters, Conceit, Confidence, Ligation and ligature, Occult, Nepenthe, Persuasion, Friendship, and Virtue.

## Philters {#bal-0006}

Entry BAL-0006 · Sample revision 1



### The word

A **philter** is a love potion: a preparation intended or believed to arouse, compel or redirect affection. Burton’s printed forms include **philters**, **Philter**, the Latin singular **Philtrum**, and Latin plural **Philtra**. His accounts sometimes extend the supposed effect to hatred, increased sexual capacity, or the preservation of sexual fidelity. The word identifies what a preparation is meant to do; it does not establish that it works.

Burton also uses the name figuratively. Flattery becomes a potion for winning a powerful patron’s favour, while love itself becomes the most potent *philtrum* in the opposed account of genuine affection. Beauty, education, kisses and embraces are called philters when an ordinary human attraction replaces the alleged magical explanation. His wider catalogues also group potions with amulets, images, signs and incantations. Consequently, a story placed under the topic of philters need not describe a drink at all.

### In the work

#### Altered affections and disturbed minds

In the witchcraft subsection, philters are credited with turning friends into enemies and enemies into friends and with enforcing love. Burton places them within an account of human practitioners acting through the Devil. Later in the same subsection, a Bohemian baron’s melancholy is attributed to a philter he has taken. The body says that the listed means generally make their recipients melancholy; the Monavius quotation in the margin makes the stronger claim that all philters, however different, share that effect. The difference between the body’s generalization and the margin’s universal statement should remain visible. (DJR-031-41, 54.)

The result feared here is not always the successful production of love. A philter may be suspected as the cause of mental disturbance. Burton elsewhere lists philters among miscellaneous causes of such states, alongside sun exposure, a blow to the head and other reported causes. The catalogue does not make all these causes the same kind, or give them one mechanism. (DJR-056-32.)

The merchant at Nördlingen provides a particularly useful counterexample to reading a suspicion as a diagnosis. He believes his money has been stolen and cannot be persuaded otherwise. His friends suspect that he has been given a *Philtrum*. The physician, however, finds constipation alone to be the cause, treats it and reports a rapid recovery. Burton places the case in his discussion of retention and evacuation, where it illustrates a bodily explanation. A summary ending with the friends’ suspicion would reverse the point of the story. The case is reported through Burton’s medical sources, not independently diagnosed by this lexicon. (DJR-036-05–08.)

A further use concerns capacity for sexual activity rather than the choice of a beloved. In his discussion of moderation, Burton includes philters and stimulating foods among the means used to increase that capacity. The surrounding argument insists that neither extreme is good and that the appropriate middle differs with constitution and strength. The catalogue therefore does not prescribe a universal stimulant or confuse sexual vigour with enforced affection. (DJR-072-09–11.)

#### Potions in social life

The metaphorical philter need not concern sexual love. In the general discussion of love’s objects, flatterers use agreeable speech and apparent friendliness to insinuate themselves into the favour of great men. These are “such like philters”: social inducements that win confidence, honours and office. Burton’s account is hostile because the affection is obtained through counterfeit worth. The potion image helps explain the patron’s misplaced attachment and the damage that follows in public life. (DJR-110-21–23.)

The next paragraph returns to literal disputed means. Burton notes disagreement over whether love and hatred can be compelled through philters or characters, stones or amulets, or astrologically chosen times, and promises to discuss the matter later. The movement from metaphor to controversy is explicit. Figurative use does not settle his judgment about literal magic. (DJR-110-24.)

The continuation gives the figure a positive counterpart. Genuine honourable love has virtue, wisdom, integrity and real worth as its object; Burton says this love cannot deceive or be compelled. “Love it self is the most potent philtrum”: affection and inward worth supply what the flattering pretence merely counterfeits. The accompanying maxim, “to be loved, be lovable,” turns the search for an irresistible preparation toward the person’s own character. The same word can expose a deceitful inducement and praise an affection that resists compulsion. (DJR-110-25–26.)

#### The disputed siege engines of love

The dedicated discussion calls philters, amulets, spells, charms and images the last “battering engins” of courtship. The image continues a campaign of attempted persuasion and procurement: when other means fail, the pursuer seeks help from the Devil. Burton labels the means unlawful at the outset, but his subsequent inquiry also asks what, if anything, they can accomplish and how. (DJR-126-01.)

One account displaces magic with attraction. Crato and some theologians are said to deny the Devil’s power in this matter and to recognize no fascination beyond that proceeding through the eyes. In the anecdote that follows, Queen Olympia meets the woman said to have bewitched King Philip. Her beauty, good upbringing and accomplishments are the real philters. Drayton’s lover then praises a sound from his beloved’s lips above the supposed preparations, while Lucretia in Aretino boasts that her only philter was kissing and embracing. The latter is a character’s literary boast, not Burton’s personal experience. These examples let the magical term name familiar powers of attraction. (DJR-126-02–04.)

Burton next assembles reports offered for literal magical power. Witches claim the ability to force love and hatred; cited stories describe madness, seduction and ruin. The account of Charlemagne’s enchanted ring moves his passionate attachment from a woman to her corpse, then to a bishop, and finally to a place. Its object is a ring, not a potion, and its place in the chapter shows how broadly the topic gathers supposed means of redirecting desire. Other examples are explicitly accusations, including the charge that Apuleius bewitched the wealthy Pudentilla into marriage. Accusation, legend and claimed medical observation are different kinds of testimony, even when Burton places them in one catalogue. (DJR-126-05–12.)

Another position grants the effects but disputes the agency. Erastus, Weyer and others are said to allow that such things may be done, while insisting that the Devil acts directly: the effects are not produced by charms, incantations or philters themselves. This is not Crato’s earlier denial that the Devil can do the thing at all. Burton’s connecting “But” introduces a disagreement over the causal explanation of the preceding examples. (DJR-126-13–14.)

A further group assigns the feats entirely to natural causes. Its examples belong to early chemical and occult theories of sympathy, including preparations of blood and a long catalogue of supposed materials. *Natural* here is a historical explanatory category. It does not mean that the proposed mechanism or efficacy has been established by modern science. The argument must also be kept attached to the writers whose views Burton reports. (DJR-126-15–16.)

The subsection ends with comparisons to the waters of Salmacis and Aachen and to Venus’s enchanted girdle. The girdle’s contents mingle caresses, sweetness, persuasion, cunning and enchantment. Burton says the preceding remedies have “happily” as much power: *happily* here means perhaps. The comparison with poetic and mythical attractions invites caution about the catalogue, but it is not a clear, universal declaration that every preceding report is false. The passage leaves different explanations and kinds of evidence in view. (DJR-126-17–19.)

#### Cures and fidelity

Philters return among proposed cures for love melancholy, after persuasion and other remedies have failed. Burton first calls the magical means unlawful. He then reports the argument that a condition caused through incantation must be relieved in the same manner, using the image of Achilles’ spear causing and curing a wound. His following statement reiterates that the practice is not permitted, though often attempted. This sequence reports a proposed treatment without granting permission to use it. The marginal claim about extinguished virility is related to, but distinct from, the body’s account of love. (DJR-139-48–50.)

The jealousy section gives the intended effect a further turn: philters, spells and charms are proposed to keep spouses faithful. Burton reproduces an incomplete recipe and directs readers to collections containing more, only to call these devices mostly pagan, impious, irreligious, absurd and ridiculous. Here the sought result is exclusive fidelity rather than the creation of a new affair. The local wording “most part” should not disappear, even though the judgment is emphatically hostile. The historical recipe is evidence of a belief and a controversy, not practical advice or proof of efficacy. (DJR-149-53.)

### Places to Read

The selected passages follow the order of the supplied edition. Page numbers are its printed labels; DJR IDs give stable passage locations.

- **Witches and magicians, p. 55; DJR-031-41.** Philters allegedly change friendship into hostility and compel love.
- **Witches and magicians, pp. 56–57; DJR-031-54–55.** A reported philter-induced melancholy, the body’s “generally” and the margin’s *Omnia Philtra*, followed by the separate denial of power to spells and signs.
- **Retention and evacuation, p. 78; DJR-036-05–08, especially 07.** Friends suspect a *Philtrum*, but the physician explains the merchant’s condition through constipation and reports relief after treatment.
- **Miscellaneous causes, pp. 171–172; DJR-056-32.** Philters appear in a list of different alleged causes of disturbed states.
- **Lawful and unlawful cures, p. 216; DJR-067-36.** Philters form one part of the broader question about magical treatment and its permissibility. For the argument’s conclusion, continue through DJR-067-45–51, p. 221.
- **Moderation in sexual activity, p. 240; DJR-072-09–11, especially 10.** Philters as reputed aids to sexual capacity, within a discussion that makes moderation depend on constitution and strength.
- **Love and its objects, pp. 421–422; DJR-110-21–26.** Flattery as a social philter, the question of literal magical compulsion, and love itself as the most powerful *philtrum*, directed toward real rather than counterfeit worth.
- **Dress and display, p. 476; DJR-121-32.** Cleopatra’s philters appear among her words, beauty and attire; the modern rendering uses “love-charms” in this catalogue of attractions.
- **Philters and other unlawful means, pp. 500–503; DJR-126-01–19.** Read the full movement through ordinary attraction, reported magic, direct demonic agency, natural-cause theories and the concluding mythical comparisons.
- **Cures for love melancholy, p. 572; DJR-139-48–50.** The catalogue of magical cures remains framed by a prohibition.
- **Prevention of jealousy, p. 624; DJR-149-53.** Philters intended to enforce fidelity are reported and mostly condemned as impious and absurd.

### In this edition

The modern column renders **philters** at DJR-031-41 as “love potions,” the singular **Philtrum** at DJR-036-07 as “love potion,” and “such like philters” at DJR-110-23 as “similar love potions.” The number and construction matter, as does the speaker. In the merchant’s case the suspected potion belongs to the friends’ abandoned explanation; in the flatterers’ passage it remains a metaphor. At DJR-121-32, Cleopatra’s **philters**, listed with sweet speech, beauty and dress, become “love-charms.” This contextual rendering leaves room for the wider attraction vocabulary rather than insisting that every use denotes a drink. In Olympia’s response, human qualities expressly replace the alleged potion as the cause of attraction.

The modern rendering also preserves the source’s compression. Burton’s story attributed to Jerome says that a young man used a philter to make a girl mad with love. The supplied editor identifies the corresponding Hilarion episode as one involving buried magical inscriptions, rather than a drink. Likewise, the note distinguishes the drug-related loss of reason in the Lucullus report from Burton’s compressed statement about death, and identifies the Lucretius tradition with Jerome’s continuation of Eusebius. These are apparatus qualifications, not silently substituted versions of Burton’s text. Their external witnesses have not been newly collated for this entry.

At DJR-126-13 the modern column usefully makes the argumentative object explicit: Erastus and Weyer “oppose this explanation,” while granting the alleged events. At DJR-126-19 it renders **happily** as “perhaps.” Both choices help preserve a difference that can disappear in a summary: accepting a reported effect does not determine its cause, and a tentative comparison does not become a settled conclusion.

### See also

**Melancholy** ([BAL-0001](#bal-0001)), for a potion’s alleged harmful aftermath and competing bodily causes; **Imagination** ([BAL-0002](#bal-0002)), for belief, perception and disputed effects; **Spirits** ([BAL-0003](#bal-0003)), for claims of direct demonic agency; **Witchcraft** ([BAL-0004](#bal-0004)), for human practitioners and their attributed powers; **Charms** ([BAL-0005](#bal-0005)), for formulas, signs and questions of efficacy; **Jealousy** ([BAL-0007](#bal-0007)), for magical fidelity remedies.

Further entries planned for later batches: Flattery, Fascination, Characters, Amulet, Sympathy, Occult, and Virtue. The former article titled Philter is continued and expanded here under the permanent ID BAL-0006.

## Jealousy {#bal-0007}

Entry BAL-0007 · Sample revision 1



### The word

**“Jealousie”** names suspicion that the person one loves may love another, an eager wish to possess the beloved exclusively, or fear that someone else will share that love. Burton's opening definition includes a beloved of either sex: “lest he or she should be enamoured of another”. Its connected elements are love, an imagined or actual rival, fear of loss, and a claim to exclusive enjoyment. It is not simply another name for envy, although envy enters the definitions he cites. (DJR-144-09–10.)

The word also has what the heading calls **“Æquivocations”**: different or extended senses. Parents and guardians are jealous over those in their care because they fear harm or disgrace; rulers fear competitors, successors and the diminution of authority; Paul's godly jealousy for the Corinthian church and the biblical description of a jealous God express solicitous care by metaphor. Burton then narrows his subject to the jealousy that admits no rival in love, and finally to married men's jealousy concerning their wives. The wider range is important even though the dedicated section chiefly pursues the last of these. (DJR-144-04, 11–19, 38, 47, 56.)

**“corrivals”** are competing lovers. A **“bastard-branch”** is an irregular offshoot: Burton's image for jealousy as a kind of love melancholy. **“suspition”** means suspicion, and **“suspect”** can be the noun suspicion; **“causlesse”** means without grounds. These terms do not decide in advance whether the suspected betrayal occurred. The jealous person's reasoning and conduct, the beloved's conduct, and the evidence for an accusation must be distinguished. (DJR-144-07, 47; DJR-147-05; DJR-148-04.)

### In the work

#### A cause, a symptom and a proposed species

Burton begins by refusing to let one existing classification exhaust the subject. Medical writers have treated jealousy as a cause of melancholy; others as a symptom, since melancholy people are particularly exposed to it. He proposes treating it as a species apart because of its range, intensity and importance. This is an organizational and explanatory decision within his historical account. It does not cancel the causal and symptomatic relations: the causes subsection later says both that melancholy people are apt to become jealous and that jealous people are apt to become melancholy. (DJR-144-05–08; DJR-145-19.)

The rest of the book supplies those other perspectives. The First Partition includes jealousy among passions that can consume the spirits and cause melancholy when excessive, and among the general symptoms of suspicious, irritable apprehension. There it includes reading a joke as an insult or taking another person's conversation personally, rather than only fearing sexual betrayal. The Third Partition's outline assigns heroic love chiefly to the period before marriage and jealousy to the period after it. Burton's fuller introduction calls these the common or usual positions of the two, while still discussing unmarried rivals. A common arrangement is not an assertion that marriage automatically produces jealousy or that jealousy cannot precede it. (DJR-040-03; DJR-059-14–15; DJR-107-06, 16–20; DJR-115-25; DJR-144-07, 47–56.)

His stated purpose is corrective. The jealous reader is to see an error as in a mirror; a reader not yet affected is to learn avoidance and help others. The section therefore repeats the medical architecture of causes, symptoms, prognostics and cures. But it applies that architecture to domestic relations, legal practices, political suspicion, anecdotes, poems and moral argument as well as bodily distress. (DJR-144-07–08; DJR-147-02; DJR-148-02, 15.)

#### What changes when the object changes

The opening survey shows how similar fear and watchfulness can attach to different objects. A parent's anxious waiting for an absent child need not concern sexual possession. The old man in Terence fears what may have happened to his adopted son; Aegeus fears the outcome of Theseus's expedition. Political jealousy concerns power and reputation. Burton's rulers suspect rivals and successors, punish perceived competitors and become frightened of the people they themselves frighten. In the Alexander example, killing a friend is followed by an alienation of subjects and a fear of retaliation: hostility and suspicion perpetuate each other. (DJR-144-11–18, 19–35, especially 32.)

Burton explicitly calls these extended uses outside the distinction he intends to treat. Yet they prepare its structure: care for a valued object becomes fear of losing it, and the supposed means of protecting it can become destructive. His animal examples then connect sexual exclusiveness with rivalry. Bulls defend a pasture, and a reported swan pursues a rival and then kills its own mate. Burton leaves responsibility for substantiating the swan story with its reporter before saying it may be true. The episode is a narrated example, not an observation newly verified by this lexicon. The political motto about a kingdom admitting no two rulers shows how readily the analogies move between government, property and mating. (DJR-144-38–46.)

Among unmarried lovers, shared access is precisely what the rival cannot bear. Burton explains the river-derived name of rivals through people participating in a common resource, then gives injuries, duels and broken friendships as consequences. The Propertius passage is extreme: the speaker will share possessions and even accept bodily harm from his friend, but will not tolerate him, or Jupiter himself, as a rival. The claim to exclusiveness, rather than love alone, makes these stories relevant to marital jealousy. (DJR-144-47–55.)

An earlier discussion of erotic enticements gives jealousy a further role: something deliberately produced to renew or intensify desire. Burton's Philinna kisses the rival Lamprias before Diphilus **“to whetten his love,”** to sharpen his appetite and make her favour seem harder to obtain. Burton then explicitly endorses the jealous-love maxim before relaying Ampelis's advice to Crisis: an angry, jealous lover is supposedly a true lover, whereas the assurance of possessing someone without a rival makes desire languish. Ampelis's staged preference for another man is said to bring her suitor back in submission; withholding access will make him pay generously and accept her conditions. Her aim is command over the suitor through uncertainty. This complicates the dedicated section's effort to correct the passion: jealousy can be used as an instrument by the person desired. The supplied notes also distinguish Burton's versions from Lucian: Philinna's kiss is retaliatory in the comparison reported by N09540, and N09543 notes the questioning voice that Burton's endorsement leaves out. (DJR-124-10–20, especially 14–19.)

#### Causes within the relationship and outside it

The causes range from bodily constitution and habitual occupation to actual marital conduct and accidental circumstances. Astrologers make the stars either a **cause or sign**, offering a probable conjecture from the horoscope; Burton's wording does not reduce this to an unequivocal causal assertion. Bodin's climatic explanation then associates southern heat with lust and jealousy. Burton asserts that northern peoples are less troubled and expresses surprise at Góis and Herberstein for attributing jealousy to them against other geographers. His surprise concerns the contrary reports, not a withdrawal of his own north–south claim. The ensuing comparisons of baths, dancing, visiting and mixed church seating treat similar conduct as innocent in one society and suspect in another. These are Burton's and his authorities' historical generalizations, not measured facts about national character. (DJR-145-03–13.)

His discussion of sex and temperament is similarly uneven. He first claims that women are more outrageous in jealousy and repeats a hostile catalogue of female traits, then draws back from the comparison and says that men and women are both too subject to the infirmity. Idleness combined with melancholy is offered as a particular susceptibility. Sexual incapacity, unequal age, long absence and a sense of one's own unattractiveness or inadequacy can furnish more particular occasions. A person who thinks his wife supremely beautiful assumes everyone must desire her; another, absorbed in his own defects, assumes she must prefer someone else. In both cases the move from an estimate of value to a conclusion about another person's conduct is central. (DJR-145-14–27, 57–64.)

The account also turns blame towards husbands. Harsh treatment, confinement, unnecessary absence and sexual neglect can damage the relationship and, Burton argues, help produce the conduct the husband fears. In the story built around a complaint from Apuleius, Burton adds that confinement made the wife unfaithful; the supplied note distinguishes that extension from the cited complaint itself. The scholar who continually repairs difficult passages in Festus or Pollux but neglects his wife becomes the subject of a sexual pun about another passage needing correction. These are part of Burton's case that husbands sometimes have the remedy in their own hands. His criticism of excessive indulgence does not prevent him from calling harshness the worse extreme. (DJR-145-29–41, 44–56.)

Previous misconduct offers another route: someone who has deceived another husband imagines being treated in the same way. The Tibullan speaker has taught the beloved how to deceive her guards and is caught by the skill he taught. But Burton's examples do not support the sweeping verse assertion that every jealous husband has himself committed adultery. Some suspicions have grounds, some arise without wrongdoing by either spouse, and other people's conduct can create appearances that the spouses did not intend. (DJR-146-02–07, 61–64.)

The lengthy catalogue of male infidelity gives women reasons for jealousy. Burton asks how a neglected wife is to moderate her passion when her husband courts others before her and lets another woman wear her jewels. The corresponding account of wives describes attraction to another man, contempt for a husband, deceptive protestations of fidelity and secret meetings. It also includes literary stories and hostile travel allegations, whose status should remain attached to their narrators. At the end he says both men and women can give just occasions, but most of the principal causes proceed from external accidents and circumstances even when both spouses are innocent. One example is a woman who rejects a suitor yet receives a legacy from him; her husband expels her on suspicion. The legacy is a fact within the story, but adultery is his inference. (DJR-146-08–64, especially 31, 61–64.)

Time, place, company and opportunity can intensify or diminish suspicion. Parties, dances, flattering gestures, sexual double meanings and unwanted visitors supply possible occasions; drunkenness and encouraging company are offered as occasions of actual misconduct. Burton closes the causes with a deliberately suspicious inference about a friar entering a woman's chamber by ladder at midnight. The subsection moves between real danger, hostile stereotypes, ambiguous conduct and a jealous person's amplifications. Preserving those differences is more accurate than treating the entire catalogue as either proof of infidelity or proof that all suspicion is delusion. (DJR-146-65–79.)

#### Symptoms: interpreting, watching and assaulting

Jealousy intensifies fear and sorrow already associated with melancholy. Burton adds anxiety, restless thought, pallor, wasting and neglected business. His images make it a fire and a gall that spoils life's honey. **“a pernicious curiosity”** means destructive prying: the jealous person hunts after every word and whisper, magnifies it and interprets what others do in the worst way. Wealth, a luxurious table and distinguished family connections cannot restore the lost good of peace. The symptoms are not confined to a private feeling; they become habits of interpretation and action. (DJR-147-03–06.)

The gestures are concrete: staring, frowning, rolling the eyes, threatening looks, interrupted movement, sighing, crying and angry speech. More seriously, Burton describes a sequence of slander, threats, fighting and assault, followed by an apology, kisses, embraces and promises never to repeat it, then renewed rage. The husband beats his wife's sides, drags her about and drives her out; he then entreats her to return and declares that he would not exchange her for a kingdom. Reconciliation within this sequence does not mean the violence has stopped. Burton makes its repetition explicit. (DJR-147-07–10.)

Surveillance expands to every place and relation. A smile, a compliment, a dance or a drinking salute is turned into evidence. The imagined rival may be hidden in a chest, behind a hanging or in a barrel, or may enter by a window, chimney or false key. Friends and close relations become suspects. The husband locks his wife up, recruits watchers, sets servants to watch one another, abruptly returns from necessary business or disguises himself to test her. The narrative then expressly allows a case with no danger and no cause of suspicion at all: accusation and verbal abuse continue even where the suspected conduct could not occur. (DJR-147-10–18.)

Women also watch, pursue and attack. Burton reports Joan of Spain following her husband and assaulting a suspected rival, cutting off her hair, beating and dragging her. He uses Daniel's literary Rosamond for another jealous assault and follows it with cases of enduring hatred. Yet his account changes emphasis: although he has called women especially outrageous, he now says women's power is checked while men's rage is more conspicuous and more often put into practice. The ensuing pages concern husbands' power to confine and punish wives. The difference between his rhetorical claims about intensity and his observation about opportunities to act should not disappear. (DJR-147-19–29.)

#### The household becomes a court

Burton calls confinement, guards, genital mutilation, supposed virginity tests, oaths, ordeals and harsh laws symptoms of jealousy. The enlargement is striking: an institution or procedure can embody the same suspicious demand for certainty as an individual's watchfulness. His geographical claims are often sweeping and polemical. The account of Muslim husbands, for example, expands a scriptural agricultural image into a hostile claim about arbitrary power; it should not be repeated as a verified statement of Islamic law. The relevant object of analysis here is the role those reports play in Burton's argument. (DJR-147-27–42.)

The discussion of bodily tests records disagreement rather than one settled medical verdict. Burton lists physicians who deny that the proposed signs are sufficient and others who defend them. His own language calls astrological inquiries and tests by stones or fumigations strange and absurd, and attributes their invention to a jealous brain. Reported fire ordeals and a sieve carrying water add miraculous certification to the same desire for proof. Some authorities attribute such marvels to devils, others to good angels; demanding an oath supplies still another attempted guarantee. The catalogue finally reaches forced confession by beating and killing. These practices are part of the tyranny the section describes, not reliable means of determining fidelity. (DJR-147-35–51.)

#### Prognosis with conditions

The prognostic opening predicts that jealous people **“most part, if they be not otherwise relieved”** pass from suspicion to hatred, frenzy, violence, murder and despair. Both the generalizing qualification and the condition of lacking relief matter. This is not an inevitable sequence applying to every jealous person. The Ariosto stanza likewise says that groundless and justified suspicion can both lead towards extreme distress. Whether a betrayal occurred and what the jealous passion does to someone are separate questions. (DJR-148-03–05.)

The examples distinguish accomplished violence, threats and despair. In Guainerio's anecdote the caul surrounding a newborn resembles a friar's hood; the father infers that a visiting Franciscan fathered the child and **threatens** to kill him. That episode does not say the killing occurred. Platter's merchant, by contrast, kills his wife and then throws himself from a height. Another case concerns a painter's wife, married twenty-seven years and mother of nine children, who refuses food and drink at home for fear of poisoning. Burton's account of Joan and Philip attributes deaths to jealousy, but its phrase about her ending her miseries does not itself establish suicide. The section's harm is severe without making every despairing person or every threat a completed death. (DJR-148-06–13.)

#### The argument for cure and mitigation

Burton starts treatment by staging the objection that jealousy cannot be removed once it has occupied a person, like hired soldiers holding a castle. The Ovid couplet says the jealous lover will **scarcely** be saved by Machaon's medical help; the Ariosto stanza calls the wound incurable and denies the efficacy of medicines, astrology and magic. These are not identical degrees of pessimism. Burton's **“Yet”** then announces his answer: it may be cured, or at least mitigated, if resisted early, through a contrary passion, good counsel and persuasion. Trimming the passion's nails before they grow too long figures timely intervention. (DJR-148-16–19.)

Serious occupation opposes the idleness in which fears and fancies multiply. Friends should offer counsel and help the sufferer consider the injury jealousy does to himself and his household. Burton's Joan is temporarily eased by Ximenius's conversation, although the broader story remains unhappy. That temporary benefit is consistent with mitigation; it does not have to be rewritten into a permanent recovery. (DJR-148-20–23.)

The next argument intentionally diminishes what the earlier chapters made terrifying. Burton calls the jealous wound insensible, a hurt not physically felt, and asks why suspicion should be allowed to deepen it. If the wife is innocent, the husband torments himself without cause; if she has been unfaithful, public rage may increase his misery rather than repair it. Stories of other cuckolded men and jokes about horns seek to reduce the sense of uniquely unbearable disgrace. **To dissemble** here can mean concealing one's knowledge or reaction; **to contemn** means disregarding or making light of it. The vocabulary describes Burton's proposed response to a supposed or actual betrayal, not a denial that the preceding assaults and sufferings occurred. (DJR-148-24–38.)

Burton also challenges the unequal rule by which a wandering husband demands fidelity from his wife. His imagined husband objects that his children's paternity makes the cases different; Burton answers provocatively, then asks whether the accusation is even true. A birth date, a child's resemblance, a laugh or familiar conversation does not warrant the leap made by the suspicious interpreter. A charitable mind would interpret circumstances favourably. He does not excuse a wife's wrongdoing by accusing her husband, but tells the husband to reform himself first. The passage is an exchange of objection, reply and renewed inquiry, not a single uninterrupted statement of one position. (DJR-148-39–48.)

#### Why locks cannot produce fidelity

Surveillance does not secure the mind. Argus's hundred eyes and other vigilant guardians cannot guarantee what the husband demands. The maxim attributed to Jerome says an unchaste wife cannot be kept and a chaste wife ought not to be kept; **“necessity”** is compulsory restraint, an unreliable guardian of chastity. Burton agrees that locking wives up is tyrannical and may sharpen the desire to do what is forbidden. Voluntary love, a vow, virtue and religion are offered as stronger keepers than locks, eunuchs or prisons. His examples include Penelope, Theano refusing to make her person public property, and Tigranes's wife attending only to the husband who offered to die for her. (DJR-148-48–52; DJR-149-01–15.)

Gentle treatment and persuasion are extended to both sexes: people wish to be led rather than forced. Nevertheless, the counsel includes deeply unequal accommodations, including wives supplying other women to their husbands and the ideal of patient Griselda. Burton's preference for fair means thus coexists with arrangements that preserve the husband's advantage. Jesting, discretion and toleration furnish still other strategies. A **“wittall”** is a husband who knows of and tolerates infidelity, not merely one who is deceived. Burton's particular concession to such toleration is restricted to some times, cases and people, especially where material advantage or a powerful patron is involved. The social pressure in those qualifications belongs to the meaning of the passage. (DJR-149-16–28.)

The subsection ends with patience and time. The household becomes a school or training ground of philosophy; forgetting an injury is imagined through a draught of Lethe, the mythic water of oblivion. The assertion that there is no other cure belongs to this late argument about enduring what cannot be remedied. It should be read beside, rather than substituted for, the earlier permission of timely cure or mitigation. (DJR-149-29–34; DJR-148-19.)

#### Prevention, marriage and the unresolved ending

The second cure subsection surveys proposed ways of preventing jealousy. Community of wives, alleged sexual customs, marrying someone whose infidelity would cause no surprise, self-castration and tolerated brothels are considered in a mixture of political, religious and anecdotal arguments. A place in this catalogue is not a recommendation. Burton distinguishes the civic case for toleration from his religious objection. He also explicitly rejects most of the philters, spells and charms prescribed to secure fidelity as pagan, impious, irreligious, absurd and ridiculous. **“philters”** are love potions, separately listed from spells and charms. (DJR-149-35–53.)

His preferred preventive course returns to causes and occasions: choose a partner deliberately, consider character and upbringing, and avoid disparities likely to generate discontent. The satire of an old husband with a young wife can be ferocious, and a later passage plainly applies a more permissive standard to an older man than to an older woman. But Burton expressly allows marriage in old age for mutual society, help and comfort. The permission is not an incidental detail to discard after the hostile examples: it identifies purposes of marriage other than sexual gratification and procreation. (DJR-150-01–29, especially 19, 24.)

Nor does he simply prescribe beauty or ugliness. He attacks choosing by appearance alone, then supplies an adulterous wife as a counterexample to the supposed safety of unattractiveness. Choosing solely for wealth is another error. His stated recommendation of moderation is followed by a personal preference for a beautiful wife when other conditions are equal. Moral character and upbringing remain the repeated practical tests in the argument. The marriage prescriptions are historical and class-bound; their shifts and exceptions are part of their interest. (DJR-150-30–52.)

After marriage, husbands should treat wives well, provide adequate maintenance and allow a discretion appropriate to time and place. Burton says deprivation and ill-treatment can drive women into misconduct. He then also insists upon housekeeping, silence, obedience and patience, including the story in which holding water in the mouth restrains an argument because the wife stays silent. These limitations coexist with his rejection of the philosopher who would allow a woman out only for baptism, marriage and burial. His eventual formula is **“private, not in prison”**. Domestic retirement is still prescribed, but confinement by bars and bolts is censured. (DJR-150-53–65.)

Friends are to attend to the particular people, places, times and company that disturb the jealous person, refrain from ridicule and adding grief to grief, and use persuasion or mediation. The reported Roman temples supply an image of spouses heard before impartial arbitrators and reconciled. The final sequence then moves through alleged gemstone powers, astrological compatibility, magical seals, divorce, the self-blinding story of Democritus, and a supposedly sovereign antidote Burton refuses to reveal. The withheld remedy remains unidentified. The ending combines practical counsel, reported remedies and extravagant alternatives before a prayer for deliverance; it does not provide a final universally effective technique. (DJR-151-01–15.)

### Places to Read

These selected passages follow the supplied source's reading order. The dedicated treatment is **3.3**, DJR-144-01–DJR-151-15, source pp. 591–632; its full arc is represented below.

- **A potentially causal passion:** p. 97, first occurrence at scan p. 197; DJR-040-03. Jealousy among passions that cause melancholy when excessive
- **A general symptom:** p. 185; DJR-059-14–15. Suspicious interpretation, offence taken and social watchfulness beyond sexual rivalry
- **The Third Partition outline:** unnumbered synopsis, supplied positions [403–404]; DJR-107-06, 16–20. Premarital love, marital jealousy, extended and strict senses, and the causes–symptoms–prognosis–cures map
- **The earlier love classification:** p. 444; DJR-115-25. Disordered love before and after marriage and its extension to rivals
- **Jealousy deliberately induced:** pp. 488–490, especially p. 489; DJR-124-10–20. Staged rivals, Philinna's kiss, Burton's endorsement of the maxim and Ampelis's tactics for intensifying desire and securing the suitor's submission
- **Definition and classification, 3.3.1.1:** p. 591; DJR-144-04–10. Cause, symptom and proposed species; mirror and offshoot; suspicion and exclusive desire
- **The extended senses:** pp. 591–594; DJR-144-11–38. Parents, guardians, divine and godly jealousy, rulers, honour, power and the reciprocal fears following tyranny; the Alexander example is at 32
- **Animals and competing lovers:** pp. 594–596; DJR-144-38–59. Sexual exclusiveness, the qualified swan story, rivals, the Propertius poem and the final narrowing to marital jealousy
- **Causes, 3.3.1.2:** pp. 596–598; DJR-145-03–21. Astrological cause or sign, climate, contrary geographical reports, national customs, gender claims and idleness
- **Capacity, age, treatment and absence:** pp. 598–601; DJR-145-22–56. Sexual incapacity, unequal age, confinement, over-indulgence, harshness, absence and neglect; the scholar's story is at 51–55
- **Self-estimation and projection:** pp. 601–602; DJR-145-57–64; DJR-146-01–07. Beauty, a sense of inadequacy, barrenness, previous misconduct and variable circumstances
- **Grounds given, grounds inferred:** pp. 602–607; DJR-146-08–64. Male and female misconduct, literary and travel reports, the explicit possibility of innocent spouses, the apple and the rejected suitor's legacy
- **Occasions and circumstances:** pp. 607–608; DJR-146-65–79. Opportunity, importunity, company, festivities, alcohol, places and inference
- **Symptoms, 3.3.2.1:** pp. 608–610; DJR-147-01–18. Loss of peace, destructive prying, bodily signs, assault and apology, surveillance and causeless accusation
- **Women's acts and men's power:** pp. 610–611; DJR-147-19–29. Joan's reported assault, literary Rosamond, and the transition to husbands' greater opportunity to act
- **Guards, tests, laws and ordeals:** pp. 611–613; DJR-147-29–51. Seclusion, bodily tests and disputed signs, absurd magical trials, violent laws, oaths, confession by force and killing
- **Prognostics, 3.3.3:** pp. 613–614; DJR-148-01–13. The conditional opening, groundless and grounded suspicion, threats, acts of violence and despair; the caul and friar are at 10, Platter's cases at 12
- **Cure objections and Burton's answer, 3.3.4.1:** p. 615; DJR-148-14–23. The castle, Ovid's scarcely cured, Ariosto's incurability, Burton's early cure or mitigation, occupation and consoling conversation
- **Making the injury bearable:** pp. 616–618; DJR-148-24–48. Shared misfortune, concealment, the husband's objection about paternity, criticism of his own misconduct and charitable interpretation
- **The failure of compulsory custody:** pp. 618–620; DJR-148-48–52; DJR-149-01–18. The mind's freedom, Argus, locks, virtue, voluntary fidelity and gentler treatment
- **Accommodation, toleration and time:** pp. 620–622; DJR-149-19–34. Gendered concessions, jokes, the wittall's qualified toleration, patience and the household as a school of philosophy
- **Preventives surveyed, 3.3.4.2:** pp. 622–624; DJR-149-35–53. Community, alleged customs, extreme expedients, the civic/religious distinction and rejection of most fidelity magic
- **Choosing and treating a spouse:** pp. 624–630; DJR-150-01–65. Deliberate choice, inequality and character; old-age companionship at 19; the unequal age standard at 24; the appearance-and-wealth argument at 30–43; maintenance, liberty and silence at 53–62; privacy without imprisonment at 64–65
- **Friends and the final alternatives:** pp. 630–632; DJR-150-66; DJR-151-01–15. Burton's concluding reading list, particular occasions, compassionate mediation, reported remedies, divorce, extravagant alternatives and the undisclosed antidote

### In this edition

The modern text keeps **jealousy** as the main name. At DJR-144-07, **“a bastard-branch or kinde of Love Melancholy”** becomes **an illegitimate offshoot or kind of love melancholy**. At DJR-147-04, **“a pernicious curiosity”** becomes **a destructive inquisitiveness**. These renderings preserve the classification and the harmful activity of prying rather than reducing the passage to a feeling of insecurity. The source's **“honest”** and **“honesty”** repeatedly concern sexual fidelity or chastity, while **“use their wives well”** means treat them well, not make use of them. (DJR-149-05–07; DJR-150-53.)

**“Prognosticks”** are forecasts of a condition's course; **“injurie”** in the opening forecast includes wrongdoing or violence. The modern column renders the generalization as **generally**, retains the condition **unless otherwise relieved**, and uses **groundless** in its rendering of the following Ariosto stanza. At DJR-148-17 it renders **“vix”** as **scarcely**, preserving the distinction from the next poem's absolute declaration of incurability. At DJR-148-19, **“maturely”** means promptly or in good time, not at a late stage. These small words are necessary to the sequence of objection and answer.

The outline and continuous prose should also be read together without automatic harmonization. The synopsis places animals under the extended senses of jealousy, whereas the body first excludes political and protective senses, then says that the sexually exclusive jealousy belongs to animals as well as humans. The body's further narrowing to married men is followed by extensive discussion of wives' jealousy. The framework organizes the inquiry without making every example obey an exclusive taxonomy. (DJR-107-17; DJR-144-38–56; DJR-145-14–19.)

The supplied apparatus sometimes distinguishes Burton's version from the work he cites. It says that his confinement-causes-adultery extension goes beyond the Apuleius complaint (N11470), identifies Daniel's Rosamond and Octavia as literary speakers (N11636, N11777), and notes that the physiological, historical and scriptural examples can contain altered names, numbers or applications. The body itself explicitly describes a threat against the friar, rather than an accomplished killing (DJR-148-10); N11704 explains the caul/cowl resemblance. N11709 warns against making every **desperate** state a suicidal act. These are reasons to read the precise narrative, not to collapse its anecdotes into a modern diagnostic case series.

This article has checked Burton's supplied original text throughout the jealousy section, its notes and the particular modern expressions discussed here. The notes labelled Burton contain both quoted historical material and modern editorial translations; those layers are not treated as one continuous authorial statement. No fresh collation of every classical, medical, legal or travel source is claimed. The article selects significant lexical uses and arguments, rather than promising a complete occurrence concordance or endorsing Burton's remedies and judgments.

### See also

- **Melancholy ([BAL-0001](#bal-0001)):** jealousy as possible cause, symptom and separately treated kind
- **Imagination ([BAL-0002](#bal-0002)):** retained images, amplification, apprehension and reason
- **Spirits ([BAL-0003](#bal-0003)):** the bodily account of passions and their effects
- **Charms ([BAL-0005](#bal-0005))** and **Philters ([BAL-0006](#bal-0006)):** supposed fidelity remedies and Burton's rejection of most of them
- **Planned for a later batch:** Love; Heroical love; Fear; Emulation; Epichairekakia; Corrosive; Wittal and cuckold; Suspicion; Marriage; Patience. Wittal and cuckold distinguishes being deceived from knowing toleration

## Explained vocabulary {#vocabulary}

These article-specific records explain selected printed forms and phrases. Repeated spellings are retained when their local senses or argumentative roles differ. English lookup labels are distinguished from exact source forms. The original-form and modern-English indexes lead back to these records.

### a bastard-branch or kinde of Love Melancholy {#blv-0007-17}

**Printed form:** a bastard-branch or kinde of Love Melancholy (English). An irregular offshoot or kind of love melancholy.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 591; DJR-144-07. Modern wording: “an illegitimate offshoot or kind of love melancholy”.

### a pernicious curiosity {#blv-0007-10}

**Printed form:** a pernicious curiosity (English). Destructive prying or inquisitiveness.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 608; DJR-147-04. Modern wording: “a destructive inquisitiveness”.

### acquisite / acquired melancholy {#blv-0001-33}

**Printed form:** acquisite (English). Acquired rather than simply the normal bodily humour

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 34; DJR-027-33. Modern wording: “acquired”.

### adust {#blv-0001-36}

**Printed form:** adust (English). Burnt or scorched by excessive heat, here qualifying choler

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 34; DJR-027-35. Modern wording: “burnt”.

### adustion {#blv-0001-37}

**Printed form:** adustion (English). The supposed burning or scorching alteration of humours

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 34; DJR-027-35. Modern wording: “burning”.

### adventitious melancholy {#blv-0001-16}

**Printed form:** adventitious Melancholy (English). Acquired melancholy in Montaltus’s hot and dry causal argument

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 175; DJR-057-14. Modern wording: “acquired melancholy”.

### adventitious melancholy {#blv-0001-32}

**Printed form:** adventitious (English). Acquired or supervening in the reported immaterial-melancholy classification

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 34; DJR-027-33. Modern wording: “adventitious”.

### agitatio spirituum {#blv-0003-27}

**Printed form:** ab agitatione spirituum (Latin). From the agitation of spirits, a proposed cause distinguished from humoral distemper

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 146; DJR-051-04. Modern wording: “from the agitation of the spirits”.

### alone {#blv-0002-13}

**Printed form:** alone (English). By itself or exclusively; said of imagination’s freedom in sleep, awkwardly followed by the addition of reason.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 24; DJR-025-21. Modern wording: “alone”.

### animal spirits {#blv-0003-09}

**Printed form:** Animal spirits (English). Spirits formed from vital spirits, carried through brain and nerves for sense and movement

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 15; DJR-023-36. Modern wording: “Animal spirits”.

### animal spirits {#blv-0003-23}

**Printed form:** animal spirits (English). Bodily agents disrupted by putrefied undigested material in the exercise account

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 84–85; DJR-037-17. Modern wording: “animal spirits”.

### Anticks {#blv-0002-10}

**Printed form:** Anticks (English). Grotesque figures or fanciful designs in artistic invention.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 23–24; DJR-025-19. Modern wording: “grotesques”.

### artificial melancholy {#blv-0001-35}

**Printed form:** artificial (English). Produced or acquired, in contrast with the natural humoral condition

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 34; DJR-027-33. Modern wording: “artificially produced”.

### Astrolabe of phantasie {#blv-0002-15}

**Printed form:** Astrolabe of phantasie (English). A measuring-instrument image for the detailed imaginative survey of the beloved.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 514; DJR-128-36. Modern wording: “astrolabe of imagination”.

### astrum hominis {#blv-0002-18}

**Printed form:** astrum hominis (Latin). The human being’s star: a governing-influence image for imagination.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 96; DJR-039-32. Modern wording: “the human being’s star”.

### atra bilis {#blv-0001-01}

**Printed form:** atra bilis (Latin). Latin black bile, the material sought in dissection

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 4; DJR-002-13. Modern wording: “black bile”.

### bastard-branch {#blv-0007-06}

**Printed form:** bastard-branch (English). Irregular offshoot or kind of love melancholy.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 591; DJR-144-07. Modern wording: “illegitimate offshoot”.

### Battering engines {#blv-0006-05}

**Printed form:** battering engins (English). Siege machines, figuratively the last means used to overcome resistance in courtship: philters and related unlawful practices.

[Philters](#bal-0006) · p. 500; DJR-126-01. Modern wording: “siege engines”.

### Beauty as a witch {#blv-0004-14}

**Printed form:** witch (English). A personification of beauty’s captivating force, beside the images of a lodestone and a charm.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 454; DJR-117-28. Modern wording: “a witch”.

### Bewitched by fame {#blv-0004-08}

**Printed form:** Bewitched (English). Captivated by the desire for reputation; a figurative use within the account of ambitious writers.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 6; DJR-004-02. Modern wording: “Bewitched”.

### black choler {#blv-0001-10}

**Printed form:** black Choler (English). Material cause from which the disease is named

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 31; DJR-027-03. Modern wording: “black bile”. The modern sentence combines Burton’s Greek etymological expression and his English gloss as black bile; it does not render the two source expressions twice.

### bodily spirits {#blv-0003-43}

**Printed form:** Spirits in the body what (English). Index heading for the nature of bodily spirits

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · source label unnumbered Table and closing notice; DJR-172-187. Modern wording: “What the bodily spirits are”.

### by consent {#blv-0001-28}

**Printed form:** by consent (English). The brain affected secondarily through sympathy with another part

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 32; DJR-027-14. Modern wording: “secondarily”.

### by essence {#blv-0001-29}

**Printed form:** essence (English). Affection originating in the part itself, opposed to secondary affection by consent

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 32; DJR-027-14. Modern wording: “in itself”.

### cause or sign {#blv-0007-25}

**Printed form:** cause or sign (English). Alternative astrological causal or indicative roles, offered as probable conjecture.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 596; DJR-145-03. Modern wording: “cause or sign”.

### causlesse {#blv-0007-09}

**Printed form:** causlesse (English). Without grounds; opposed to just suspicion.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 613; DJR-148-04. Modern wording: “groundless”.

### Characters {#blv-0005-05}

**Printed form:** Characters (English). Written or inscribed signs used in a claimed magical cure.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 95–96; DJR-039-27. Modern wording: “written symbols”.

### Charm and belief {#blv-0005-01}

**Printed form:** Charms (English). A supposed means of curing or influencing. At this passage the claimed efficacy is assigned to strong conception and belief rather than an inherent power in the charm.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 96; DJR-039-28. Modern wording: “charms”.

### Charm in magical practice {#blv-0005-02}

**Printed form:** Charmes (English). A magical formula or practice, listed with signs, objects and other means. The following paragraph denies intrinsic power to the named spells and signs.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 56–57; DJR-031-54. Modern wording: “charms”.

### Charm the senses {#blv-0005-14}

**Printed form:** charms (English). Delight or captivate the senses. Travel does so through varied sights and company in this therapeutic argument.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 264; DJR-077-25. Modern wording: “charms”.

### Charmer {#blv-0004-05}

**Printed form:** Charmers (English). One who employs charms, named among the overlapping kinds of sorcerer in the subsection.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 55; DJR-031-37. Modern wording: “charmers”.

### Christ’s name as a charm {#blv-0005-03}

**Printed form:** charme (English). A positive religious use for protection against diabolical illusions; Burton calls Christ’s name the best and only charm for that stated purpose.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 722; DJR-169-22. Modern wording: “charm”.

### Cleopatra’s philters {#blv-0006-09}

**Printed form:** philters (English). Love-charms or potions, included with speech, beauty and dress among Cleopatra’s attractions.

[Philters](#bal-0006) · p. 476; DJR-121-32. Modern wording: “love-charms”.

### Compact band and obligation {#blv-0004-17}

**Printed form:** compact, band, and obligation (English). A pact or binding undertaking. Here it is part of the sufferer’s self-accusation, subsequently answered through the distinctions of unwilling thought and consent.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 710–711; DJR-167-17. Modern wording: “pact, bond and obligation”.

### conjure spirits {#blv-0003-02}

**Printed form:** spirits conjured up (English). Intellectual controversies personified as spirits difficult to quiet

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 15; DJR-006-14. Modern wording: “spirits of this kind have already been conjured up”. Aligned source phrase: “spirits conjured up already in this kinde”. The wider phrase supplies already and of this kind in the reordered modern clause.

### Conjurer {#blv-0004-03}

**Printed form:** Conjurers (English). One who summons or adjures spirits and appears to command them; the spirits’ apparent obedience serves their deception.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 55; DJR-031-36. Modern wording: “conjurers”.

### contemn {#blv-0007-27}

**Printed form:** contemn (English). Disregard or make light of the supposed or actual injury.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 616; DJR-148-25. Modern wording: “disregard”.

### corrivals {#blv-0007-05}

**Printed form:** corrivals (English). Competing lovers.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 595; DJR-144-47. Modern wording: “fellow rivals”.

### corrupt imagination {#blv-0002-07}

**Printed form:** corrupt imagination (English). A disordered image-forming faculty; not merely immoral content.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 446; DJR-115-60. Modern wording: “an impaired imagination”.

### Counsel as a charm {#blv-0005-16}

**Printed form:** charm (English). A friend’s soothing advice and assistance, compared to a sedative and developed as timely, wisely administered speech.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 293; DJR-083-33. Modern wording: “charm”.

### Counterfeit charm {#blv-0005-10}

**Printed form:** counterfeit charme (English). A sham or ineffectual ritual, Burton’s polemical judgment of the elaborate exorcisms he rejects.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 722; DJR-169-19. Modern wording: “counterfeit charm”.

### crased phantasie {#blv-0002-08}

**Printed form:** crased phantasie (English). Disordered imagination suggesting frightening shapes.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 720; DJR-169-01. Modern wording: “disordered imagination”.

### Credulitate {#blv-0005-11}

**Printed form:** credulitate (Latin). Through credulity or ready belief; the Latin ablative in Weyer’s quoted account of harm and relief. It conflicts with incredulity in the English body.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 96; DJR-039-28, note N02798. Modern wording: “credulity”.

### cure / relief {#blv-0001-43}

**Printed form:** throughly cured (English). Completely freed of the disease, distinguished from substantial relief

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 230; DJR-069-42. Modern wording: “a complete cure”.

### daemon / daimon {#blv-0003-15}

**Printed form:** dæmones (Greek word in Latinized form). Classical name encompassing both good and bad spirits in Burton’s account

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 39; DJR-028-25. Modern wording: “daimones”.

### dame melancholy {#blv-0001-21}

**Printed form:** dame melancholy (English). Personified restraint upon misconduct within consolation

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 361; DJR-098-29. Modern wording: “our lady Melancholy”. Aligned source phrase: “our dame melancholy”. The possessive our belongs to the wider source phrase, not to dame alone.

### darkened spirits {#blv-0003-29}

**Printed form:** spirits obscured (English). Spirits darkened by black humoral matter in the defended physiological account of fear

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 206; DJR-063-21. Modern wording: “obscured spirits”.

### Defect {#blv-0001-44}

**Printed form:** in defect (English). From a deficiency of religion, opposed to the religious excess treated before this subsection. The heading uses Burton’s polemical classification.

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 683; DJR-161-28. Modern wording: “from Deficiency”.

### Desperate {#blv-0007-28}

**Printed form:** desperate (English). In despair or desperation. The condition does not by itself specify a suicidal act; Burton’s distinct narratives must be read individually.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 614; DJR-148-12. Modern wording: “fell into despair”. Aligned source phrase: “became desperate”. The whole predicate became desperate is rendered fell into despair; this is an idiomatic construction, not an adjective-to-noun equivalence.

### dissemble {#blv-0007-26}

**Printed form:** dissemble (English). Conceal knowledge or reaction to alleged or actual betrayal.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 616; DJR-148-25. Modern wording: “conceal”.

### divine melancholy {#blv-0001-22}

**Printed form:** a divine melancholy (English). Favourably valued contemplation and ecstatic spiritual ascent before its abuse

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 656; DJR-156-10. Modern wording: “a divine melancholy”.

### divine spirit: devotion {#blv-0003-38}

**Printed form:** divine spirit (English). Approved spiritual disposition fostered by moderate fasting

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 655; DJR-156-04. Modern wording: “divine spirit”.

### divine spirit: devout person {#blv-0003-40}

**Printed form:** the most divine spirits (English). Devout human beings who can nevertheless experience unwanted thoughts

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 711–712; DJR-167-27. Modern wording: “the most godly souls”.

### divine spirit: human excellence {#blv-0003-33}

**Printed form:** divine spirit (English). An eloquent human being praised for attractive speech

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 422; DJR-110-27. Modern wording: “divine spirit”.

### divine spirit: human excellence {#blv-0003-34}

**Printed form:** divine spirits (English). Genuinely charitable human beings, expressly exempted from a general criticism of hypocrisy

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 431; DJR-112-21. Modern wording: “divine spirits”.

### dotage {#blv-0001-27}

**Printed form:** Dotage (English). Impairment of a principal mental faculty, such as imagination or reason

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 31–32; DJR-027-11. Modern wording: “mental derangement”.

### ecstasy {#blv-0001-39}

**Printed form:** Extasis (English). Ecstatic contemplative union, positively valued here before its abuse

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 656; DJR-156-10. Modern wording: “Ecstasy”.

### Efficient cause {#blv-0002-25}

**Printed form:** Efficient cause (English). Source initiating movement, distinct from its end.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 25; DJR-025-31. Modern wording: “efficient cause”.

### Enchanter {#blv-0004-04}

**Printed form:** Inchanters (English). A practitioner of enchantment, named among the overlapping kinds of sorcerer; this list does not define a separate exclusive class.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 55; DJR-031-37. Modern wording: “enchanters”.

### End {#blv-0002-26}

**Printed form:** End (English). The object desired or avoided, for whose sake movement occurs.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 25; DJR-025-31. Modern wording: “end”.

### evil spirits {#blv-0003-32}

**Printed form:** evill spirits (English). Supernatural evil spirits in the biblical account of Saul and David’s music

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 300; DJR-085-16. Modern wording: “evil spirits”.

### Ex parte {#blv-0004-10}

**Printed form:** ex parte (Latin). Literally “in part” in the supplied apparatus’s gloss. The printed phrase is retained; the modern column provisionally reads an implicit or explicit pact, following the suggested ex pacto.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 55; DJR-031-37. Modern wording: “implicit or explicit pact”. The printed ex parte is glossed in part in the apparatus; implicit or explicit pact is a full-context rendering incorporating the conjectural ex pacto and surrounding modifiers. This wording follows a provisional editorial emendation, not a direct translation of the printed phrase.

### Exploded {#blv-0005-07}

**Printed form:** exploded (English). Rejected or discredited. Burton applies it to medicines consisting of words, signs, spells and charms.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 395; DJR-105-32. Modern wording: “rejected”.

### ferè {#blv-0002-22}

**Printed form:** ferè (Latin). Almost; limits the Latin quotation’s causal claim.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 93; DJR-039-05. Modern wording: “almost”.

### Flattery as philters {#blv-0006-10}

**Printed form:** such like philters (English). Deceptive inducements compared to love potions, through which flatterers obtain powerful people’s favour and office.

[Philters](#bal-0006) · p. 421–422; DJR-110-23. Modern wording: “similar love potions”.

### Foremost part of the brain {#blv-0002-27}

**Printed form:** foremost part of the brain (English). The front region of the brain, assigned here as the seat of imagination. The article preserves its difference from the middle chamber named in the earlier anatomy.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 92; DJR-039-02. Modern wording: “front part of the brain”.

### Forespoken {#blv-0004-12}

**Printed form:** forespoken (English). Cursed or bewitched, as the distressed sufferers believe themselves to be.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 203; DJR-063-05. Modern wording: “cursed or bewitched”.

### free spirit {#blv-0003-13}

**Printed form:** free spirit (English). Divine sustaining or generous spirit in a quoted Psalm

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 38; DJR-028-15. Modern wording: “generous spirit”.

### genius {#blv-0001-02}

**Printed form:** malus genius (Latin). Personified melancholy as a malign attendant spirit

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 5; DJR-003-08. Modern wording: “evil spirit”.

### genius {#blv-0003-01}

**Printed form:** malus genius (Latin). Melancholy personified as a harmful or evil attendant spirit

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 5; DJR-003-08. Modern wording: “evil spirit”.

### genius / genii {#blv-0003-16}

**Printed form:** boni and mali Genii (Latin phrase with English conjunction). Good and bad guardians appointed to protect or punish people

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 40; DJR-028-31. Modern wording: “good and evil guardian spirits”.

### habit / melancholy in habit {#blv-0001-25}

**Printed form:** Habit (English). Established condition contrasted with a passing state

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 11; DJR-023-02. Modern wording: “an established condition”.

### habit / melancholy in habit {#blv-0001-26}

**Printed form:** habit (English). A fixed, enduring disease that has grown over time

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 13; DJR-023-19. Modern wording: “an established condition”.

### Happily {#blv-0006-04}

**Printed form:** happily (English). Perhaps, rather than fortunately. It qualifies the comparison between supposed remedies and mythical instruments of attraction.

[Philters](#bal-0006) · p. 502–503; DJR-126-19. Modern wording: “Perhaps”.

### head melancholy {#blv-0001-13}

**Printed form:** Head melancholy (English). Kind proceeding from the brain’s own fault

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 35; DJR-027-51. Modern wording: “head melancholy”.

### heros / heroes {#blv-0003-17}

**Printed form:** Heroes (Latinized Greek). A name of good guardian spirits in the terminology assigned to the Stoics

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 40; DJR-028-31. Modern wording: “Heroes”.

### honest {#blv-0007-18}

**Printed form:** honest (English). Sexually faithful in this marital argument.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 619; DJR-149-05. Modern wording: “faithful”.

### honesty {#blv-0007-19}

**Printed form:** honesty (English). Chastity in Burton’s English verse.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 619; DJR-149-09. Modern wording: “chastity”.

### hypochondriacal melancholy {#blv-0001-14}

**Printed form:** Hypocondriacal, or windy Melancholy (English). Kind associated with abdominal organs and their action upon the brain

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 35; DJR-027-51. Modern wording: “hypochondriacal or windy melancholy”.

### imaginatio læsa {#blv-0002-06}

**Printed form:** imaginatio læsa (Latin). Impaired imagination in the discussion of erotic melancholy.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 447; DJR-115-62. Modern wording: “an impaired imagination”.

### immaterial melancholy {#blv-0001-12}

**Printed form:** immateriall (English). A reported spirits-only causal scheme, not ordinary gross humoral material

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 34; DJR-027-33. Modern wording: “Immaterial melancholy”. The original substantivized adjective has an understood noun; the modern rendering makes melancholy explicit.

### immaterial melancholy {#blv-0003-11}

**Printed form:** immateriall (English). A disorder in spirits alone in the reported competing account

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 34; DJR-027-33. Modern wording: “Immaterial melancholy”. The original substantivized adjective has an understood noun; the modern rendering makes melancholy explicit.

### impia credulitate {#blv-0002-24}

**Printed form:** impia credulitate (Latin). Impious credulity or ready belief in the original marginal Latin.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 96; DJR-039-28, note N02798. Modern wording: “impious credulity”.

### in this kinde {#blv-0002-11}

**Printed form:** in this kinde (English). In this class or sort; a scope qualification on imagination as the source of emotional grievances.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 92; DJR-039-03. Modern wording: “of this kind”.

### Incantationis instar {#blv-0005-17}

**Printed form:** incantationis instar (Latin). Like an incantation; a Latin comparison for gentle speech wisely administered to relieve distress.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · source label 292 [296]–297; DJR-084-21. Modern wording: “like an incantation”.

### Incredulity {#blv-0005-04}

**Printed form:** incredulity (English). Disbelief. The English body attributes harm to wicked incredulity, although the Latin quotation in the margin instead says credulity.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 96; DJR-039-28. Modern wording: “disbelief”.

### Incubus, or Witch-ridden {#blv-0002-14}

**Printed form:** Incubus, or Witch-ridden (English). Nightmare oppression and the sleeper’s supposed assailant, here given a humoral explanation.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 93; DJR-039-10. Modern wording: “incubus, or “witch-ridden,””.

### injurie {#blv-0007-22}

**Printed form:** injurie (English). Wrongdoing or violence.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 613; DJR-148-03. Modern wording: “violence”.

### instrument {#blv-0003-06}

**Printed form:** the instrument of the soule (English). Spirits as instruments through which the soul performs actions

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 15; DJR-023-35. Modern wording: “the soul’s instrument”.

### Jealousie {#blv-0007-02}

**Printed form:** Jealousie (English). Suspicion of a beloved’s attachment to another or desire for exclusive enjoyment.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 591; DJR-144-09. Modern wording: “Jealousy”.

### lar / lares {#blv-0003-18}

**Printed form:** Lares (Latin). Good guardian spirits in the naming scheme Burton reports

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 40; DJR-028-31. Modern wording: “Lares”.

### larva / larvae {#blv-0003-20}

**Printed form:** Larvæ (Latin). Bad spirits in the naming scheme Burton reports

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 40; DJR-028-31. Modern wording: “Larvae”.

### lemures {#blv-0003-19}

**Printed form:** Lemures (Latin). Bad spirits in the naming scheme Burton reports

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 40; DJR-028-31. Modern wording: “Lemures”.

### lest he or she should be enamoured of another {#blv-0007-03}

**Printed form:** lest he or she should be enamoured of another (English). The definition allows a beloved of either sex; the later treatment narrows its focus.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 591; DJR-144-09. Modern wording: “lest he or she should fall in love with someone else”.

### Love as philtrum {#blv-0006-07}

**Printed form:** philtrum (Latin). Love itself as the most powerful figurative love potion, directed toward genuine virtue and worth; Burton distinguishes this love from deceit and compulsion.

[Philters](#bal-0006) · p. 422; DJR-110-25. Modern wording: “love potion”.

### Love as witchcraft {#blv-0004-16}

**Printed form:** witch-craft (English). An explanation attributed to Heliodorus, connected with attraction through eyes and other bodily openings; the surrounding accounts also invoke bodily spirits.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 467; DJR-120-04. Modern wording: “witchcraft”.

### læsa Imaginatio {#blv-0002-05}

**Printed form:** læsa Imaginatio (Latin). Impaired imagination, which misinforms the heart in this causal account.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 92; DJR-039-03. Modern wording: “impaired imagination”.

### Magical charms in combat {#blv-0005-12}

**Printed form:** Magical charmes (English). Supposed protective magic for which combatants are searched before single combat.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 55; DJR-031-44. Modern wording: “magical charms”.

### Magician {#blv-0004-02}

**Printed form:** Magicians (English). A practitioner of supernatural arts who appears to command spirits in Burton’s local division; apparent command need not be actual mastery.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 54; DJR-031-30. Modern wording: “magicians”.

### Malificiated {#blv-0004-11}

**Printed form:** malificiated (English). Affected by witchcraft or sorcery. Here the sufferer regards surrounding people and creatures as bewitched and threatening.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 181; DJR-058-31. Modern wording: “bewitched”.

### martial spirit {#blv-0003-26}

**Printed form:** martiall spirits (English). Military courage and vigour

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 127; DJR-046-18. Modern wording: “martial spirit”.

### material melancholy {#blv-0001-30}

**Printed form:** materiall (English). Melancholy considered as one of the natural bodily humours

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 33–34; DJR-027-32. Modern wording: “material”.

### maturely {#blv-0007-24}

**Printed form:** maturely (English). Promptly or in good time.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 615; DJR-148-19. Modern wording: “in good time”.

### medium deferens {#blv-0002-12}

**Printed form:** medium deferens (Latin). Conveying medium of the passions.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 96; DJR-039-34. Modern wording: “conveying medium”.

### melancholia asinina {#blv-0001-17}

**Printed form:** Asininam melancholiam (Latin). Disparaging name for a dull phlegmatic kind

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 191; DJR-060-16. Modern wording: “Asinine melancholy”.

### melancholicus ad octo {#blv-0001-18}

**Printed form:** melancholicus ad octo (Latin). Melancholic to the eighth degree in an insufficient rhetorical scale

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 195; DJR-061-10. Modern wording: “melancholic to the eighth degree”.

### melancholize {#blv-0001-03}

**Printed form:** melancholizing (English). Experiencing or engaging in melancholy as a claimed source of knowledge

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 6; DJR-003-11. Modern wording: “melancholizing”.

### melancholize {#blv-0001-15}

**Printed form:** so to melancholize (English). Indulge pleasurable solitary fantasy

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 88; DJR-038-07. Modern wording: “to indulge in melancholy like this”.

### melancholize {#blv-0001-19}

**Printed form:** melancholize in corners (English). Brood and withdraw from public life after shame or disgrace

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · source label 99 [supplied]; DJR-040-30. Modern wording: “brood in corners”.

### melancholize {#blv-0001-20}

**Printed form:** melancholize (English). The unoccupied imagination works upon itself and deepens melancholy

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 294; DJR-084-04. Modern wording: “sink into melancholy”.

### melancholy {#blv-0001-04}

**Printed form:** properly or improperly (English). Collecting strict and loose senses within moral satire

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 18; DJR-007-08. Modern wording: “strictly or loosely”.

### melancholy {#blv-0001-07}

**Printed form:** Melancholy (English). Normal cold dry black sour humour with a nutritive and balancing office

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 15; DJR-023-33. Modern wording: “Melancholy”.

### melancholy {#blv-0001-11}

**Printed form:** most Melancholy, not all (English). Restriction of fear and sorrow to most cases

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 32; DJR-027-12. Modern wording: “most melancholy, though not all”.

### melancholy {#blv-0001-24}

**Printed form:** mel. equivocations (English). Different senses gathered by the historical index

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · source label unnumbered Table and closing notice; DJR-172-013. Modern wording: “the different meanings of melancholy”.

### melancholy in disposition {#blv-0001-05}

**Printed form:** in Disposition (English). Passing affective state distinguished from established disease

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 11; DJR-023-02. Modern wording: “a passing state”.

### Mercy as a charm {#blv-0005-20}

**Printed form:** charm for the Divel (English). Divine mercy imagined as protection against the Devil, among the medical images used to console the despairing.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 707; DJR-166-29. Modern wording: “charm against the devil”.

### middle cell of the Brain {#blv-0002-09}

**Printed form:** middle cell of the Brain (English). The middle chamber assigned as the faculty’s organ.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 23; DJR-025-18. Modern wording: “brain’s middle chamber”.

### monstrous melancholy {#blv-0001-41}

**Printed form:** monstrous melancholy (English). A polemical description of atheism or impiety attributed to Melanchthon

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 683; DJR-161-30. Modern wording: “monstrous melancholy”.

### morbus sonticus / morbus chronicus {#blv-0001-06}

**Printed form:** morbus sonticus, or Chronicus (Latin with English conjunction). A serious or chronic established disease

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 13; DJR-023-19. Modern wording: “a serious or chronic illness”.

### most part, if they be not otherwise relieved {#blv-0007-11}

**Printed form:** most part, if they be not otherwise relieved (English). Generally, if not otherwise relieved; a conditional forecast, not an inevitable sequence.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 613; DJR-148-03. Modern wording: “generally, unless otherwise relieved”.

### natural melancholy {#blv-0001-31}

**Printed form:** natural (English). The normal bodily humour within the four-humour scheme

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 33–34; DJR-027-32. Modern wording: “natural”.

### natural spirits {#blv-0003-07}

**Printed form:** The Natural (English). Elliptical name of natural spirits, generated in liver and distributed through veins

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 15; DJR-023-36. Modern wording: “Natural spirits”. Natural is elliptical in the original; the modern rendering supplies spirits from the governing classification.

### necessity {#blv-0007-13}

**Printed form:** necessity (English). Imposed restraint as a supposedly unreliable keeper of fidelity.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 619; DJR-149-01. Modern wording: “necessity”.

### Nepenthe {#blv-0005-18}

**Printed form:** Nepenthe (English). A grief-banishing remedy. The cited interpreters here understand Homer’s nepenthe as timely speech rather than a plant or prepared medicine.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · source label 292 [296]–297; DJR-084-21. Modern wording: “nepenthe”.

### non sine interventu humoris {#blv-0003-22}

**Printed form:** non sine interventu humoris (Latin). Not without the intervention of humour; restriction of supposed demonic causation

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 52–53; DJR-031-16. Modern wording: “not without the intervention of a humour”.

### Opportunity of speech {#blv-0005-19}

**Printed form:** opportunity of speech (English). Speech suited to the occasion; the favourable timing and appropriateness of consoling words.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · source label 292 [296]–297; DJR-084-21. Modern wording: “speech suited to the occasion”.

### our phantasies {#blv-0002-20}

**Printed form:** our phantasies (English). Our imaginations as recipients of unwanted thoughts in Burton’s theological account.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 711–712; DJR-167-27. Modern wording: “our imaginations”.

### Phantasie {#blv-0002-19}

**Printed form:** Phantasie (English). Imagination among the three inward senses.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 22; DJR-025-04. Modern wording: “imagination”.

### Phantasie, or Imagination {#blv-0002-01}

**Printed form:** Phantasie, or Imagination (English). The internal faculty that examines, retains, recalls and invents forms.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 23; DJR-025-18. Modern wording: “Fancy, or imagination”.

### Philter {#blv-0006-01}

**Printed form:** philters (English). A love potion credited with compelling or changing affection. The present catalogue includes changes between friendship and hostility.

[Philters](#bal-0006) · p. 55; DJR-031-41. Modern wording: “love potions”.

### Philter and melancholy {#blv-0006-02}

**Printed form:** Philter (English). A love potion taken by the baron in a reported case of melancholy; the context treats such preparations as alleged causes of disturbed states.

[Philters](#bal-0006) · p. 56–57; DJR-031-54. Modern wording: “love potion”.

### philters {#blv-0007-15}

**Printed form:** philters (English). Love potions, listed separately from spells and charms.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 624; DJR-149-53. Modern wording: “love potions”.

### Philters for sexual capacity {#blv-0006-08}

**Printed form:** Philters (English). Preparations reputed to increase the ability to sustain sexual activity, listed with stimulating foods within an argument for moderation.

[Philters](#bal-0006) · p. 240; DJR-072-10. Modern wording: “love potions”.

### Philtra {#blv-0006-06}

**Printed form:** Philtra (Latin). Latin plural, love potions. The quoted margin says all have the effect of making recipients melancholy, a stronger quantifier than the body’s generally.

[Philters](#bal-0006) · p. 56–57; DJR-031-54, note N02212. Modern wording: “love potions”.

### Philtrum as a suspected cause {#blv-0006-03}

**Printed form:** Philtrum (Latin). Latin singular for a love potion. The merchant’s friends suspect one, but the physician’s account instead gives constipation alone as the cause.

[Philters](#bal-0006) · p. 78; DJR-036-07. Modern wording: “love potion”.

### poisoned melancholy {#blv-0001-42}

**Printed form:** poysoned melancholy (English). A polemical description of impiety, not a claim here about literal poisoning

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 683; DJR-161-30. Modern wording: “poisoned melancholy”.

### Present charm {#blv-0005-22}

**Printed form:** present charme (English). An immediately effective protection; the phrase describes a psalm opening prescribed by the authority Burton names as Athanasius.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 722; DJR-169-24. Modern wording: “immediately effective charm”.

### Printed etymological expression Μελαιναχόλη {#blv-0001-09}

**Printed form:** Μελαιναχόλη (Greek). Printed Greek expression connected by Burton with black choler

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 31; DJR-027-03. Modern wording: “black bile”. The modern sentence combines Burton’s Greek etymological expression and his English gloss as black bile; it does not render the two source expressions twice.

### private spirit {#blv-0003-39}

**Printed form:** private spirit (English). Claimed personal inspiration treated as authoritative over public or religious institutions

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 676–677; DJR-160-20. Modern wording: “private spirit”.

### private, not in prison {#blv-0007-16}

**Printed form:** private, not in prison (English). Domestic retirement distinguished expressly from imprisonment.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 630; DJR-150-64. Modern wording: “in private life, not in prison”.

### Prognosticks {#blv-0007-21}

**Printed form:** Prognosticks (English). Forecasts of jealousy’s course or outcome.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 613; DJR-148-02. Modern wording: “Prognostics”.

### Proteus, or a Cameleon {#blv-0002-17}

**Printed form:** Proteus, or a Cameleon (English). Mutable imagination; the original Latin margin establishes the comparator’s subject.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 96; DJR-039-30. Modern wording: “Proteus or a chameleon”.

### religious melancholy {#blv-0001-40}

**Printed form:** Religious Melancholy (English). Religious disorder of which abused contemplation is both cause and symptom

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 656; DJR-156-10. Modern wording: “religious melancholy”.

### Repentance as a charm {#blv-0005-21}

**Printed form:** charm for our miseries (English). Repentance imagined as relief or protection against misery, beside an amulet and an attracting lodestone.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 708; DJR-166-44. Modern wording: “charm against our miseries”.

### Scripture as a charm {#blv-0005-15}

**Printed form:** Charme (English). Scripture read as a spiritual remedy, in the account attributed to Origen and compared in the margin to an incantation driving away poison.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 283; DJR-081-37. Modern wording: “charm”.

### simulachra {#blv-0002-16}

**Printed form:** simulachra (Latin). Images or likenesses of the absent beloved; the apparatus notes the Lucretian image-film sense.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 528; DJR-130-48. Modern wording: “images”.

### species of objects {#blv-0002-04}

**Printed form:** species of objects (English). Mental representations of objects, retained and magnified.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 93; DJR-039-08. Modern wording: “mental images of objects”.

### Species of sensible things {#blv-0002-21}

**Printed form:** Species of sensible things (English). Sensory forms through which present or absent things are apprehended.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 21–22; DJR-025-03. Modern wording: “sensory forms of things”.

### Spirit: divine {#blv-0003-10}

**Printed form:** Spirit (English). Divine leading in regeneration, distinguished from natural bodily media

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 29; DJR-026-38. Modern wording: “Spirit”.

### spirit: essence {#blv-0003-37}

**Printed form:** Spirit of Roses (English). Material fragrant essence of roses in a fictional seducer’s extravagant promise

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 495; DJR-125-21. Modern wording: “Essence of roses”.

### spirit: physiological {#blv-0003-04}

**Printed form:** Spirit (English). Subtle vapour expressed from blood, functioning as the soul’s instrument

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 15; DJR-023-35. Modern wording: “Spirit”.

### spirit: supernatural {#blv-0003-14}

**Printed form:** Spirits and Devils (English). Supernatural agents whose power to cause disease is under examination

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 39; DJR-028-21. Modern wording: “spirits and devils”.

### spirit: supernatural {#blv-0003-41}

**Printed form:** the divel he is a spirit (English). The Devil as supernatural agent in a conditional account of disturbing suggestions

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 712; DJR-167-28. Modern wording: “the devil is a spirit”.

### spirits and humours {#blv-0003-28}

**Printed form:** spirits and humors (English). Bodily media whose disorder disturbs the soul

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 173; DJR-056-53. Modern wording: “spirits and humours”.

### spirits: influence between persons {#blv-0003-24}

**Printed form:** spirits of the other (English). The other person’s bodily spirits allegedly altered by a forceful imagination

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 96; DJR-039-31. Modern wording: “another’s spirits”.

### spirits: instrumental movement {#blv-0003-30}

**Printed form:** Imagination enforceth spirits (English). Imagination drives bodily spirits, which act through nerves upon limbs

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 292; DJR-083-31. Modern wording: “Imagination drives the spirits”.

### spirits: physiological {#blv-0003-42}

**Printed form:** our spirits (English). Human bodily spirits with which the Devil is said to mingle

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 712; DJR-167-28. Modern wording: “our spirits”.

### spirits: vigour {#blv-0003-25}

**Printed form:** dulls the spirits (English). Diminishes bodily and mental vigour in an anti-study argument

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 127; DJR-046-18. Modern wording: “dulls their spirits”.

### spirits: visual fascination {#blv-0003-35}

**Printed form:** the purer spirits (English). Bodily spirits allegedly infected by exchanged looks

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 467; DJR-120-05. Modern wording: “the purer spirits”.

### spirits: wine {#blv-0003-12}

**Printed form:** purer spirits (English). Finer volatile constituents of wine, in a material analogy

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 34; DJR-027-39. Modern wording: “finer spirits”.

### spiritual body {#blv-0003-21}

**Printed form:** spirituall body (English). Rogers’s expression for the Devil as an agent struggling with human bodily spirits

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 52; DJR-031-13. Modern wording: “spiritual body”.

### spiritual vapour {#blv-0003-36}

**Printed form:** spiritual vapours (English). Vapours of bodily spirits said to travel with eye-rays

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 467; DJR-120-07. Modern wording: “vapours of the spirits”.

### spiritus {#blv-0003-03}

**Printed form:** spiritus (Latin). Breath or life itself under a tyrant’s power

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 48; DJR-013-13. Modern wording: “life itself”. Aligned source phrase: “ipse spiritus”. Ipse supplies itself; spiritus alone supplies life in this context.

### Stick free {#blv-0005-13}

**Printed form:** stick frees (English). Protected against stabbing or piercing, in the catalogue’s alleged immunity to weapons.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 55–56; DJR-031-45. Modern wording: “proof against stabbing”.

### Strong conceit {#blv-0005-06}

**Printed form:** strong conceipt (English). Powerful conviction or belief, offered as one explanation of the apparent efficacy of verbal charms.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 395; DJR-105-32. Modern wording: “powerful conviction”.

### strong conceit or apprehension {#blv-0002-03}

**Printed form:** strong conceit or apprehension (English). A strong conception or impression credited with bodily effects.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 95; DJR-039-21. Modern wording: “strong idea or impression”.

### subtle / vapour {#blv-0003-05}

**Printed form:** most subtile vapour (English). Extremely fine vapour, the defining bodily character of spirit here

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 15; DJR-023-35. Modern wording: “extremely fine vapour”.

### suspect {#blv-0007-08}

**Printed form:** suspect (English). Suspicion; a noun here.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 613; DJR-148-04. Modern wording: “suspicion”.

### suspition {#blv-0007-07}

**Printed form:** suspition (English). Suspicion, without in itself deciding whether the feared event occurred.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 591; DJR-144-09. Modern wording: “suspicion”.

### to whetten his love {#blv-0007-01}

**Printed form:** to whetten his love (English). To sharpen or intensify a lover’s desire by deliberately arousing jealousy.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 489; DJR-124-14. Modern wording: “to sharpen his love”.

### True charms {#blv-0005-09}

**Printed form:** true charms (English). Beauty, upbringing and accomplishments that explain Philip’s attraction in Olympia’s response to the alleged enchantment.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 500–501; DJR-126-02. Modern wording: “real charms”.

### unnatural melancholy {#blv-0001-34}

**Printed form:** unnatural (English). Altered or diseased rather than the natural humour, within this disputed classification

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 34; DJR-027-33. Modern wording: “unnatural”.

### use their wives well {#blv-0007-20}

**Printed form:** use their wives well (English). Treat their wives well.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 629; DJR-150-53. Modern wording: “treat their wives well”.

### venenata melancholia {#blv-0001-23}

**Printed form:** venenatam melancholiam (Latin). Poisoned melancholy, a reported polemical name for impiety

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 683; DJR-161-30. Modern wording: “poisoned melancholy”.

### Virtue {#blv-0005-08}

**Printed form:** vertue (English). Power or efficacy. The statement denies that the charms have it inherently and turns to imagination and belief.

[Charms](#bal-0005) · p. 96; DJR-039-28. Modern wording: “power”.

### vital and animal spirits {#blv-0003-31}

**Printed form:** vital and animal spirits (English). Bodily spirits affected by music in the physiological account

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 299; DJR-085-04. Modern wording: “vital and animal spirits”.

### vital spirits {#blv-0003-08}

**Printed form:** Vital Spirits (English). Spirits made in the heart from natural spirits and carried through arteries to sustain life

[Spirits](#bal-0003) · p. 15; DJR-023-36. Modern wording: “Vital spirits”.

### vix {#blv-0007-23}

**Printed form:** vix (Latin). Scarcely, not an absolute denial of cure.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 615; DJR-148-17. Modern wording: “scarcely”.

### White witch {#blv-0004-06}

**Printed form:** white-witches (English). A reputed practitioner of beneficial magic or counter-magic, consulted for bodily or mental infirmities. The name does not imply Burton permits consultation.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 220; DJR-067-42. Modern wording: “white witches”.

### whole-body melancholy {#blv-0001-38}

**Printed form:** whole body (English). The source of a kind of melancholy affecting the brain through the body’s general temperament

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 35; DJR-027-51. Modern wording: “whole body”.

### wicked incredulity {#blv-0002-23}

**Printed form:** wicked incredulity (English). Wicked disbelief in the printed body, in conflict with the quoted Latin margin.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 96; DJR-039-28. Modern wording: “wicked disbelief”.

### Witch {#blv-0004-01}

**Printed form:** Witches (English). A human practitioner credited with supernatural arts. In the central account, witches serve spirits; elsewhere witch is an insult or an image for beauty’s power.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 54; DJR-031-30. Modern wording: “Witches”.

### Witch as an insult {#blv-0004-15}

**Printed form:** witch (English). A hostile label in an unsympathetic observer’s description of a woman, opposed to the lover’s praise of her.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 521–522; DJR-129-66. Modern wording: “witch”.

### Witch-ridden {#blv-0004-07}

**Printed form:** Witch-ridden (English). Oppressed in sleep as if ridden or crushed by an assailant. Burton explains this particular experience through humours disturbing imagination.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 93; DJR-039-10. Modern wording: “witch-ridden”.

### Witchcraft as a claimed cause {#blv-0004-09}

**Printed form:** witch-craft (English). Sorcery alleged to cause the condition for which a magical remedy is proposed. The cure discussion ultimately refuses permission to use it.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 572; DJR-139-49. Modern wording: “witchcraft”.

### Witchers {#blv-0004-13}

**Printed form:** Witchers (English). An alternative plural for witches. It occurs in the sufferer’s imagined accusation of having given the soul to the Devil.

[Witchcraft](#bal-0004) · p. 710–711; DJR-167-17. Modern wording: “witches”.

### wittall {#blv-0007-14}

**Printed form:** wittall (English). A husband who knows of and tolerates infidelity.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 621; DJR-149-28. Modern wording: “knowing cuckold”.

### Yet {#blv-0007-12}

**Printed form:** Yet (English). Nevertheless; transition from cure objections to Burton’s qualified answer.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 615; DJR-148-19. Modern wording: “Yet”.

### Æquivocations {#blv-0007-04}

**Printed form:** Æquivocations (English). Different senses of the word, not necessarily deception.

[Jealousy](#bal-0007) · p. 591; DJR-144-04. Modern wording: “different meanings”.

### Æstimative, or Cogitative {#blv-0002-02}

**Printed form:** Æstimative, or Cogitative (English). Names of estimative or thinking powers grouped here under imagination.

[Imagination](#bal-0002) · p. 23; DJR-025-18. Modern wording: “the estimative or cogitative faculty”.

### μελαγχολία {#blv-0001-08}

**Printed form:** Μελαγχολία (Greek). Greek name in Burton’s etymological explanation through black bile

[Melancholy](#bal-0001) · p. 31; DJR-027-03. Modern wording: “melancholia”.

## Argument and source map {#argument-map}

**The reader address** turns melancholy into a question about the writer’s experience and the disorder of the world. The medical inquiry then distinguishes figurative madness from settled disease. Begin with [Melancholy](#bal-0001).

**The First Partition anatomy and definitions** explain humours, bodily spirits, the senses and the faculties. Read [Melancholy](#bal-0001), [Imagination](#bal-0002) and [Spirits](#bal-0003) together for the distinctions between substance, instrument, faculty and illness.

**The First Partition causes and symptoms** place supernatural claims beside bodily and psychological explanations. [Witchcraft](#bal-0004) follows witches as alleged agents, feared assailants and imagined identities; [Imagination](#bal-0002) traces both delusion and proposed bodily influence.

**The Second Partition cures** separates alleged efficacy from lawfulness and develops occupation, counsel and material remedies. [Charms](#bal-0005) follows the word from disputed magic to the relief of timely speech and trusted religious practice.

**The Third Partition love and jealousy** brings attraction, compulsion, rivalry, suspicion and domestic conduct into view. [Philters](#bal-0006) distinguishes potions, claims, ordinary attraction and figurative inducements; [Jealousy](#bal-0007) follows the causes, symptoms, prognosis, cure and prevention of jealousy.

**Religious melancholy and the ending** preserve positive contemplation beside abusive excess, and distinguish unwanted thoughts from settled consent. The later routes in [Melancholy](#bal-0001), [Imagination](#bal-0002), [Spirits](#bal-0003), [Witchcraft](#bal-0004) and [Charms](#bal-0005) reach these qualifications.

## Passage index {#passage-index}

The ranges below identify source passages represented in the articles’ reading routes or exact-form records. They follow the supplied source’s order. A range is a route to an explanation, not a count of lexical occurrences.

- **DJR-002-13**, source 4: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-003-07**, source 5: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-003-08**, source 5: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-003-09–11**, source 6: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-004-02**, source 6: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-006-14**, source 15: [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-007-08**, source 18: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-011-18–19**, source 39: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-013-13**, source 48: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-019-15–19**, source 76: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-022-19–24**, source 8 to 9: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-022-34**, source 10: [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-022-38–39**, source 11: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-023-01–19**, source 11 to 13: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-023-27–34**, source 14 to 15: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-023-35–36**, source 15: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-023-42–46**, source 15–16 to 16: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-024-14–17**, source 18 to 19: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-024-18–19**, source 19: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-025-03–05**, source 21–22 to 22: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-025-17–20**, source 23 to 24: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-025-21–22**, source 24: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-025-30–32**, source 25: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-026-22**, source 27: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-026-27–29**, source 28: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-026-37–38**, source 29: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-027-03–19**, source 31 to 32: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-027-20–23**, source 32 to 33: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-027-24–31**, source 33: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-027-32–40**, source 33–34 to 34: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-027-41–45**, source 34 to 35: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-027-46**, source 35: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-027-47–56**, source 35 to 36: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-027-57**, source 36: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-027-58–61**, source 36 to 37: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-028-12–15**, source 38: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-028-20–48**, source 39 to 41: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-029-01–50**, source 41–42 to 46: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-030-01–48**, source 46 to 51: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-031-01–15**, source 51 to 52: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-031-16–21**, source 52–53 to 53: [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-031-22–29**, source 53 to 54: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-031-30–37**, source 54 to 55: [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-031-38–40**, source 55: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-031-41**, source 55: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-031-42–43**, source 55: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-031-44–45**, source 55 to 55–56: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-031-46–53**, source 56: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-031-54–55**, source 56–57 to 57: [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-032-30–34**, source 60 to 61: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-033-16**, source 64: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-036-05–08**, source 78: [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-037-16–18**, source 84 to 85: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-038-06–11**, source 88 to 89: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-038-12**, source 89: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-039-01–09**, source 92 to 93: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-039-10–12**, source 93 to 93–94: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-039-13–26**, source 94 to 95: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-039-27–28**, source 95–96 to 96: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-039-29**, source 96: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-039-30–34**, source 96: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-040-03**, source 97 [PDF197]: [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-040-29–31**, source 99 [supplied]: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-046-16–19**, source 127: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-051-03–05**, source 146: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-056-32**, source 171–172: [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-056-39–40**, source 172: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-056-41–53**, source 172 to 173: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-056-54–59**, source 173 to 174: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-057-01–15**, source 174 to 175: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-058-21–27**, source 180 to 181: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-058-31**, source 181: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-058-41**, source 182: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-058-42–51**, source 182 to 183: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-059-14–15**, source 185: [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-060-14–15**, source 191: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-060-16–23**, source 191 to 192: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-061-02–12**, source 194 to 195: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-063-04–05**, source 203: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-063-18**, source 205: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-063-19–26**, source 205 to 206: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-064-01–11**, source 206–207 to 208: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-064-16–24**, source 209 to 210: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-064-25**, source 210: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-064-26–27**, source 210 to 210–211: [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-064-28–30**, source 211: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-065-06–12**, source 212 to 213: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-067-33**, source 216; PDF327: [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-067-34–35**, source 216: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-067-36**, source 216: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-067-37–39**, source 216–220; PDF327–328 to 220: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-067-40–44**, source 220 to 220–221; PDF328–329: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-067-45–51**, source 221: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-068-02–06**, source 222: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-069-38–42**, source 229–230 to 230: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-070-03–09**, source 230 to 231: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-072-09–11**, source 240: [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-077-15**, source 262–263: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-077-24–26**, source 264: [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-081-36–38**, source 283: [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-082-30–31**, source 287: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-083-03**, source 289: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-083-31**, source 292: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-083-32–34**, source 292–293 to 293: [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-084-02**, source 294: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-084-03–05**, source 294 to 294–295: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-084-06–07**, source 295: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-084-20–23**, source 292 [296] to 297: [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-084-24–25**, source 297: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-084-26–27**, source 297: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-084-33–35**, source 298: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-085-03–10**, source 299: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-085-16**, source 300: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-085-23–26**, source 301: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-098-24–37**, source 361 to 362: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-103-23–25**, source 384 to 384–385: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-105-29–32**, source 394 to 395: [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-107-06**, source unnumbered [403] (Third Partition synopsis): [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-107-16–20**, source unnumbered [404] (Third Partition synopsis): [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-110-21–26**, source 421 to 422: [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-110-27**, source 422: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-112-21**, source 431: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-113-51–53**, source 437–438 to 438: [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-114-07–14**, source 439 to 440: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-115-25**, source 444: [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-115-56–63**, source 446 to 447: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-117-05–08**, source 452: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-117-28**, source 454: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-120-01–05**, source 467: [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-120-06–18**, source 467 to 468: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-121-32**, source 476: [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-124-10–20**, source 488 to 489–490: [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-125-19–23**, source 495 to 496: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-126-01**, source 500: [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-126-02–05**, source 500–501 to 501: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-126-06–07**, source 501: [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-126-08–12**, source 501 to 502: [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-126-13–14**, source 502: [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-126-15–19**, source 502 to 502–503: [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-128-35–38**, source 514: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-129-66**, source 521–522: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-130-47–49**, source 528: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-139-48–50**, source 572: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **DJR-144-01–59**, source 591 to 596: [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-145-01–64**, source 596 to 601: [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-146-01–79**, source 602 to 608: [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-147-01–51**, source 608 to 613: [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-148-01–52**, source 613 to 618: [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-149-01–52**, source 619 to 624: [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-149-53**, source 624: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006); [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-150-01–66**, source 624 to 630: [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-151-01–15**, source 630 to 632: [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **DJR-151-21–24**, source 632 to 633: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-156-03–06**, source 655 to 655–656: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-156-07–09**, source 656: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-156-10–12**, source 656 to 656–657: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-156-13**, source 657: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-156-14–16**, source 657: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-160-19–21**, source 676 to 677: [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **DJR-160-27–28**, source 677: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-161-28**, source 683: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-161-30**, source 683: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-163-39–40**, source 694: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-166-28–30**, source 707: [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-166-43–45**, source 708: [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-167-15–17**, source 710 to 710–711: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-167-26**, source 711: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-167-27–34**, source 711–712 to 712: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-167-35**, source 712–713: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-167-36–38**, source 713: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004)
- **DJR-169-01–04**, source 720 to 720–721: [Imagination](#bal-0002)
- **DJR-169-19–25**, source 722: [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **DJR-169-26–32**, source 722 to 723: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-172-013**, source unnumbered Table and closing notice: [Melancholy](#bal-0001)
- **DJR-172-187**, source unnumbered Table and closing notice: [Spirits](#bal-0003)

## Thematic index {#thematic-index}

- **Bodily causes and reciprocal effects**: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **Comfort counsel and relief**: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Charms](#bal-0005); [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **Consent compulsion and responsibility**: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Philters](#bal-0006); [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **Demonic agency and its limits**: [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006)
- **Divine contemplation and religious thought**: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Charms](#bal-0005)
- **Fear suspicion and apparent evidence**: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **Humours spirits and instruments**: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003)
- **Love attraction and fidelity**: [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006); [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **Magical remedies and permission**: [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006); [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **Metaphor and changing senses**: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006); [Jealousy](#bal-0007)
- **Reported views and opposed arguments**: [Melancholy](#bal-0001); [Imagination](#bal-0002); [Spirits](#bal-0003); [Witchcraft](#bal-0004); [Charms](#bal-0005); [Philters](#bal-0006); [Jealousy](#bal-0007)

## Original form index {#original-form-index}

Forms are reproduced as selected in the source, with their capitalization and spelling. Links lead to the explained records.

### English

- **a bastard-branch or kinde of Love Melancholy**: [a bastard-branch or kinde of Love Melancholy](#blv-0007-17) · BAL-0007
- **a divine melancholy**: [divine melancholy](#blv-0001-22) · BAL-0001
- **a pernicious curiosity**: [a pernicious curiosity](#blv-0007-10) · BAL-0007
- **acquisite**: [acquisite / acquired melancholy](#blv-0001-33) · BAL-0001
- **adust**: [adust](#blv-0001-36) · BAL-0001
- **adustion**: [adustion](#blv-0001-37) · BAL-0001
- **adventitious**: [adventitious melancholy](#blv-0001-32) · BAL-0001
- **adventitious Melancholy**: [adventitious melancholy](#blv-0001-16) · BAL-0001
- **alone**: [alone](#blv-0002-13) · BAL-0002
- **Animal spirits**: [animal spirits](#blv-0003-09) · BAL-0003
- **animal spirits**: [animal spirits](#blv-0003-23) · BAL-0003
- **Anticks**: [Anticks](#blv-0002-10) · BAL-0002
- **artificial**: [artificial melancholy](#blv-0001-35) · BAL-0001
- **Astrolabe of phantasie**: [Astrolabe of phantasie](#blv-0002-15) · BAL-0002
- **bastard-branch**: [bastard-branch](#blv-0007-06) · BAL-0007
- **battering engins**: [Battering engines](#blv-0006-05) · BAL-0006
- **Bewitched**: [Bewitched by fame](#blv-0004-08) · BAL-0004
- **black Choler**: [black choler](#blv-0001-10) · BAL-0001
- **by consent**: [by consent](#blv-0001-28) · BAL-0001
- **cause or sign**: [cause or sign](#blv-0007-25) · BAL-0007
- **causlesse**: [causlesse](#blv-0007-09) · BAL-0007
- **Characters**: [Characters](#blv-0005-05) · BAL-0005
- **charm**: [Counsel as a charm](#blv-0005-16) · BAL-0005
- **charm for our miseries**: [Repentance as a charm](#blv-0005-21) · BAL-0005
- **charm for the Divel**: [Mercy as a charm](#blv-0005-20) · BAL-0005
- **charme**: [Christ’s name as a charm](#blv-0005-03) · BAL-0005
- **Charme**: [Scripture as a charm](#blv-0005-15) · BAL-0005
- **Charmers**: [Charmer](#blv-0004-05) · BAL-0004
- **Charmes**: [Charm in magical practice](#blv-0005-02) · BAL-0005
- **Charms**: [Charm and belief](#blv-0005-01) · BAL-0005
- **charms**: [Charm the senses](#blv-0005-14) · BAL-0005
- **compact, band, and obligation**: [Compact band and obligation](#blv-0004-17) · BAL-0004
- **Conjurers**: [Conjurer](#blv-0004-03) · BAL-0004
- **contemn**: [contemn](#blv-0007-27) · BAL-0007
- **corrivals**: [corrivals](#blv-0007-05) · BAL-0007
- **corrupt imagination**: [corrupt imagination](#blv-0002-07) · BAL-0002
- **counterfeit charme**: [Counterfeit charm](#blv-0005-10) · BAL-0005
- **crased phantasie**: [crased phantasie](#blv-0002-08) · BAL-0002
- **dame melancholy**: [dame melancholy](#blv-0001-21) · BAL-0001
- **desperate**: [Desperate](#blv-0007-28) · BAL-0007
- **dissemble**: [dissemble](#blv-0007-26) · BAL-0007
- **divine spirit**: [divine spirit: human excellence](#blv-0003-33) · BAL-0003; [divine spirit: devotion](#blv-0003-38) · BAL-0003
- **divine spirits**: [divine spirit: human excellence](#blv-0003-34) · BAL-0003
- **Dotage**: [dotage](#blv-0001-27) · BAL-0001
- **dulls the spirits**: [spirits: vigour](#blv-0003-25) · BAL-0003
- **Efficient cause**: [Efficient cause](#blv-0002-25) · BAL-0002
- **End**: [End](#blv-0002-26) · BAL-0002
- **essence**: [by essence](#blv-0001-29) · BAL-0001
- **evill spirits**: [evil spirits](#blv-0003-32) · BAL-0003
- **exploded**: [Exploded](#blv-0005-07) · BAL-0005
- **Extasis**: [ecstasy](#blv-0001-39) · BAL-0001
- **foremost part of the brain**: [Foremost part of the brain](#blv-0002-27) · BAL-0002
- **forespoken**: [Forespoken](#blv-0004-12) · BAL-0004
- **free spirit**: [free spirit](#blv-0003-13) · BAL-0003
- **Habit**: [habit / melancholy in habit](#blv-0001-25) · BAL-0001
- **habit**: [habit / melancholy in habit](#blv-0001-26) · BAL-0001
- **happily**: [Happily](#blv-0006-04) · BAL-0006
- **Head melancholy**: [head melancholy](#blv-0001-13) · BAL-0001
- **honest**: [honest](#blv-0007-18) · BAL-0007
- **honesty**: [honesty](#blv-0007-19) · BAL-0007
- **Hypocondriacal, or windy Melancholy**: [hypochondriacal melancholy](#blv-0001-14) · BAL-0001
- **Imagination enforceth spirits**: [spirits: instrumental movement](#blv-0003-30) · BAL-0003
- **immateriall**: [immaterial melancholy](#blv-0001-12) · BAL-0001; [immaterial melancholy](#blv-0003-11) · BAL-0003
- **in defect**: [Defect](#blv-0001-44) · BAL-0001
- **in Disposition**: [melancholy in disposition](#blv-0001-05) · BAL-0001
- **in this kinde**: [in this kinde](#blv-0002-11) · BAL-0002
- **Inchanters**: [Enchanter](#blv-0004-04) · BAL-0004
- **incredulity**: [Incredulity](#blv-0005-04) · BAL-0005
- **Incubus, or Witch-ridden**: [Incubus, or Witch-ridden](#blv-0002-14) · BAL-0002
- **injurie**: [injurie](#blv-0007-22) · BAL-0007
- **Jealousie**: [Jealousie](#blv-0007-02) · BAL-0007
- **lest he or she should be enamoured of another**: [lest he or she should be enamoured of another](#blv-0007-03) · BAL-0007
- **Magical charmes**: [Magical charms in combat](#blv-0005-12) · BAL-0005
- **Magicians**: [Magician](#blv-0004-02) · BAL-0004
- **malificiated**: [Malificiated](#blv-0004-11) · BAL-0004
- **martiall spirits**: [martial spirit](#blv-0003-26) · BAL-0003
- **materiall**: [material melancholy](#blv-0001-30) · BAL-0001
- **maturely**: [maturely](#blv-0007-24) · BAL-0007
- **mel. equivocations**: [melancholy](#blv-0001-24) · BAL-0001
- **melancholize**: [melancholize](#blv-0001-20) · BAL-0001
- **melancholize in corners**: [melancholize](#blv-0001-19) · BAL-0001
- **melancholizing**: [melancholize](#blv-0001-03) · BAL-0001
- **Melancholy**: [melancholy](#blv-0001-07) · BAL-0001
- **middle cell of the Brain**: [middle cell of the Brain](#blv-0002-09) · BAL-0002
- **monstrous melancholy**: [monstrous melancholy](#blv-0001-41) · BAL-0001
- **most Melancholy, not all**: [melancholy](#blv-0001-11) · BAL-0001
- **most part, if they be not otherwise relieved**: [most part, if they be not otherwise relieved](#blv-0007-11) · BAL-0007
- **most subtile vapour**: [subtle / vapour](#blv-0003-05) · BAL-0003
- **natural**: [natural melancholy](#blv-0001-31) · BAL-0001
- **necessity**: [necessity](#blv-0007-13) · BAL-0007
- **Nepenthe**: [Nepenthe](#blv-0005-18) · BAL-0005
- **opportunity of speech**: [Opportunity of speech](#blv-0005-19) · BAL-0005
- **our phantasies**: [our phantasies](#blv-0002-20) · BAL-0002
- **our spirits**: [spirits: physiological](#blv-0003-42) · BAL-0003
- **Phantasie**: [Phantasie](#blv-0002-19) · BAL-0002
- **Phantasie, or Imagination**: [Phantasie, or Imagination](#blv-0002-01) · BAL-0002
- **Philter**: [Philter and melancholy](#blv-0006-02) · BAL-0006
- **philters**: [Philter](#blv-0006-01) · BAL-0006; [Cleopatra’s philters](#blv-0006-09) · BAL-0006; [philters](#blv-0007-15) · BAL-0007
- **Philters**: [Philters for sexual capacity](#blv-0006-08) · BAL-0006
- **poysoned melancholy**: [poisoned melancholy](#blv-0001-42) · BAL-0001
- **present charme**: [Present charm](#blv-0005-22) · BAL-0005
- **private spirit**: [private spirit](#blv-0003-39) · BAL-0003
- **private, not in prison**: [private, not in prison](#blv-0007-16) · BAL-0007
- **Prognosticks**: [Prognosticks](#blv-0007-21) · BAL-0007
- **properly or improperly**: [melancholy](#blv-0001-04) · BAL-0001
- **Proteus, or a Cameleon**: [Proteus, or a Cameleon](#blv-0002-17) · BAL-0002
- **purer spirits**: [spirits: wine](#blv-0003-12) · BAL-0003
- **Religious Melancholy**: [religious melancholy](#blv-0001-40) · BAL-0001
- **so to melancholize**: [melancholize](#blv-0001-15) · BAL-0001
- **species of objects**: [species of objects](#blv-0002-04) · BAL-0002
- **Species of sensible things**: [Species of sensible things](#blv-0002-21) · BAL-0002
- **Spirit**: [spirit: physiological](#blv-0003-04) · BAL-0003; [Spirit: divine](#blv-0003-10) · BAL-0003
- **Spirit of Roses**: [spirit: essence](#blv-0003-37) · BAL-0003
- **Spirits and Devils**: [spirit: supernatural](#blv-0003-14) · BAL-0003
- **spirits and humors**: [spirits and humours](#blv-0003-28) · BAL-0003
- **spirits conjured up**: [conjure spirits](#blv-0003-02) · BAL-0003
- **Spirits in the body what**: [bodily spirits](#blv-0003-43) · BAL-0003
- **spirits obscured**: [darkened spirits](#blv-0003-29) · BAL-0003
- **spirits of the other**: [spirits: influence between persons](#blv-0003-24) · BAL-0003
- **spiritual vapours**: [spiritual vapour](#blv-0003-36) · BAL-0003
- **spirituall body**: [spiritual body](#blv-0003-21) · BAL-0003
- **stick frees**: [Stick free](#blv-0005-13) · BAL-0005
- **strong conceipt**: [Strong conceit](#blv-0005-06) · BAL-0005
- **strong conceit or apprehension**: [strong conceit or apprehension](#blv-0002-03) · BAL-0002
- **such like philters**: [Flattery as philters](#blv-0006-10) · BAL-0006
- **suspect**: [suspect](#blv-0007-08) · BAL-0007
- **suspition**: [suspition](#blv-0007-07) · BAL-0007
- **the divel he is a spirit**: [spirit: supernatural](#blv-0003-41) · BAL-0003
- **the instrument of the soule**: [instrument](#blv-0003-06) · BAL-0003
- **the most divine spirits**: [divine spirit: devout person](#blv-0003-40) · BAL-0003
- **The Natural**: [natural spirits](#blv-0003-07) · BAL-0003
- **the purer spirits**: [spirits: visual fascination](#blv-0003-35) · BAL-0003
- **throughly cured**: [cure / relief](#blv-0001-43) · BAL-0001
- **to whetten his love**: [to whetten his love](#blv-0007-01) · BAL-0007
- **true charms**: [True charms](#blv-0005-09) · BAL-0005
- **unnatural**: [unnatural melancholy](#blv-0001-34) · BAL-0001
- **use their wives well**: [use their wives well](#blv-0007-20) · BAL-0007
- **vertue**: [Virtue](#blv-0005-08) · BAL-0005
- **vital and animal spirits**: [vital and animal spirits](#blv-0003-31) · BAL-0003
- **Vital Spirits**: [vital spirits](#blv-0003-08) · BAL-0003
- **white-witches**: [White witch](#blv-0004-06) · BAL-0004
- **whole body**: [whole-body melancholy](#blv-0001-38) · BAL-0001
- **wicked incredulity**: [wicked incredulity](#blv-0002-23) · BAL-0002
- **witch**: [Beauty as a witch](#blv-0004-14) · BAL-0004; [Witch as an insult](#blv-0004-15) · BAL-0004
- **witch-craft**: [Witchcraft as a claimed cause](#blv-0004-09) · BAL-0004; [Love as witchcraft](#blv-0004-16) · BAL-0004
- **Witch-ridden**: [Witch-ridden](#blv-0004-07) · BAL-0004
- **Witchers**: [Witchers](#blv-0004-13) · BAL-0004
- **Witches**: [Witch](#blv-0004-01) · BAL-0004
- **wittall**: [wittall](#blv-0007-14) · BAL-0007
- **Yet**: [Yet](#blv-0007-12) · BAL-0007
- **Æquivocations**: [Æquivocations](#blv-0007-04) · BAL-0007
- **Æstimative, or Cogitative**: [Æstimative, or Cogitative](#blv-0002-02) · BAL-0002

### Greek

- **Μελαγχολία**: [μελαγχολία](#blv-0001-08) · BAL-0001
- **Μελαιναχόλη**: [Printed etymological expression Μελαιναχόλη](#blv-0001-09) · BAL-0001

### Greek word in Latinized form

- **dæmones**: [daemon / daimon](#blv-0003-15) · BAL-0003

### Latin

- **ab agitatione spirituum**: [agitatio spirituum](#blv-0003-27) · BAL-0003
- **Asininam melancholiam**: [melancholia asinina](#blv-0001-17) · BAL-0001
- **astrum hominis**: [astrum hominis](#blv-0002-18) · BAL-0002
- **atra bilis**: [atra bilis](#blv-0001-01) · BAL-0001
- **credulitate**: [Credulitate](#blv-0005-11) · BAL-0005
- **ex parte**: [Ex parte](#blv-0004-10) · BAL-0004
- **ferè**: [ferè](#blv-0002-22) · BAL-0002
- **imaginatio læsa**: [imaginatio læsa](#blv-0002-06) · BAL-0002
- **impia credulitate**: [impia credulitate](#blv-0002-24) · BAL-0002
- **incantationis instar**: [Incantationis instar](#blv-0005-17) · BAL-0005
- **Lares**: [lar / lares](#blv-0003-18) · BAL-0003
- **Larvæ**: [larva / larvae](#blv-0003-20) · BAL-0003
- **Lemures**: [lemures](#blv-0003-19) · BAL-0003
- **læsa Imaginatio**: [læsa Imaginatio](#blv-0002-05) · BAL-0002
- **malus genius**: [genius](#blv-0001-02) · BAL-0001; [genius](#blv-0003-01) · BAL-0003
- **medium deferens**: [medium deferens](#blv-0002-12) · BAL-0002
- **melancholicus ad octo**: [melancholicus ad octo](#blv-0001-18) · BAL-0001
- **non sine interventu humoris**: [non sine interventu humoris](#blv-0003-22) · BAL-0003
- **Philtra**: [Philtra](#blv-0006-06) · BAL-0006
- **Philtrum**: [Philtrum as a suspected cause](#blv-0006-03) · BAL-0006
- **philtrum**: [Love as philtrum](#blv-0006-07) · BAL-0006
- **simulachra**: [simulachra](#blv-0002-16) · BAL-0002
- **spiritus**: [spiritus](#blv-0003-03) · BAL-0003
- **venenatam melancholiam**: [venenata melancholia](#blv-0001-23) · BAL-0001
- **vix**: [vix](#blv-0007-23) · BAL-0007

### Latin phrase with English conjunction

- **boni and mali Genii**: [genius / genii](#blv-0003-16) · BAL-0003

### Latin with English conjunction

- **morbus sonticus, or Chronicus**: [morbus sonticus / morbus chronicus](#blv-0001-06) · BAL-0001

### Latinized Greek

- **Heroes**: [heros / heroes](#blv-0003-17) · BAL-0003

## Modern English lookup {#english-lookup}

These are checked local expressions from the supplied modern rendering or its translation of historical marginal material. A contextual expression does not establish a uniform rendering throughout the work.

- **a complete cure**: [cure / relief](#blv-0001-43) · BAL-0001
- **a destructive inquisitiveness**: [a pernicious curiosity](#blv-0007-10) · BAL-0007
- **a divine melancholy**: [divine melancholy](#blv-0001-22) · BAL-0001
- **a passing state**: [melancholy in disposition](#blv-0001-05) · BAL-0001
- **a serious or chronic illness**: [morbus sonticus / morbus chronicus](#blv-0001-06) · BAL-0001
- **a witch**: [Beauty as a witch](#blv-0004-14) · BAL-0004
- **acquired**: [acquisite / acquired melancholy](#blv-0001-33) · BAL-0001
- **acquired melancholy**: [adventitious melancholy](#blv-0001-16) · BAL-0001
- **adventitious**: [adventitious melancholy](#blv-0001-32) · BAL-0001
- **almost**: [ferè](#blv-0002-22) · BAL-0002
- **alone**: [alone](#blv-0002-13) · BAL-0002
- **an established condition**: [habit / melancholy in habit](#blv-0001-25) · BAL-0001; [habit / melancholy in habit](#blv-0001-26) · BAL-0001
- **an illegitimate offshoot or kind of love melancholy**: [a bastard-branch or kinde of Love Melancholy](#blv-0007-17) · BAL-0007
- **an impaired imagination**: [imaginatio læsa](#blv-0002-06) · BAL-0002; [corrupt imagination](#blv-0002-07) · BAL-0002
- **Animal spirits**: [animal spirits](#blv-0003-09) · BAL-0003
- **animal spirits**: [animal spirits](#blv-0003-23) · BAL-0003
- **another’s spirits**: [spirits: influence between persons](#blv-0003-24) · BAL-0003
- **artificially produced**: [artificial melancholy](#blv-0001-35) · BAL-0001
- **Asinine melancholy**: [melancholia asinina](#blv-0001-17) · BAL-0001
- **astrolabe of imagination**: [Astrolabe of phantasie](#blv-0002-15) · BAL-0002
- **Bewitched**: [Bewitched by fame](#blv-0004-08) · BAL-0004
- **bewitched**: [Malificiated](#blv-0004-11) · BAL-0004
- **black bile**: [atra bilis](#blv-0001-01) · BAL-0001; [Printed etymological expression Μελαιναχόλη](#blv-0001-09) · BAL-0001; [black choler](#blv-0001-10) · BAL-0001
- **brain’s middle chamber**: [middle cell of the Brain](#blv-0002-09) · BAL-0002
- **brood in corners**: [melancholize](#blv-0001-19) · BAL-0001
- **burning**: [adustion](#blv-0001-37) · BAL-0001
- **burnt**: [adust](#blv-0001-36) · BAL-0001
- **cause or sign**: [cause or sign](#blv-0007-25) · BAL-0007
- **charm**: [Christ’s name as a charm](#blv-0005-03) · BAL-0005; [Scripture as a charm](#blv-0005-15) · BAL-0005; [Counsel as a charm](#blv-0005-16) · BAL-0005
- **charm against our miseries**: [Repentance as a charm](#blv-0005-21) · BAL-0005
- **charm against the devil**: [Mercy as a charm](#blv-0005-20) · BAL-0005
- **charmers**: [Charmer](#blv-0004-05) · BAL-0004
- **charms**: [Charm and belief](#blv-0005-01) · BAL-0005; [Charm in magical practice](#blv-0005-02) · BAL-0005; [Charm the senses](#blv-0005-14) · BAL-0005
- **chastity**: [honesty](#blv-0007-19) · BAL-0007
- **conceal**: [dissemble](#blv-0007-26) · BAL-0007
- **conjurers**: [Conjurer](#blv-0004-03) · BAL-0004
- **conveying medium**: [medium deferens](#blv-0002-12) · BAL-0002
- **counterfeit charm**: [Counterfeit charm](#blv-0005-10) · BAL-0005
- **credulity**: [Credulitate](#blv-0005-11) · BAL-0005
- **cursed or bewitched**: [Forespoken](#blv-0004-12) · BAL-0004
- **daimones**: [daemon / daimon](#blv-0003-15) · BAL-0003
- **different meanings**: [Æquivocations](#blv-0007-04) · BAL-0007
- **disbelief**: [Incredulity](#blv-0005-04) · BAL-0005
- **disordered imagination**: [crased phantasie](#blv-0002-08) · BAL-0002
- **disregard**: [contemn](#blv-0007-27) · BAL-0007
- **divine spirit**: [divine spirit: human excellence](#blv-0003-33) · BAL-0003; [divine spirit: devotion](#blv-0003-38) · BAL-0003
- **divine spirits**: [divine spirit: human excellence](#blv-0003-34) · BAL-0003
- **dulls their spirits**: [spirits: vigour](#blv-0003-25) · BAL-0003
- **Ecstasy**: [ecstasy](#blv-0001-39) · BAL-0001
- **efficient cause**: [Efficient cause](#blv-0002-25) · BAL-0002
- **enchanters**: [Enchanter](#blv-0004-04) · BAL-0004
- **end**: [End](#blv-0002-26) · BAL-0002
- **Essence of roses**: [spirit: essence](#blv-0003-37) · BAL-0003
- **evil spirit**: [genius](#blv-0001-02) · BAL-0001; [genius](#blv-0003-01) · BAL-0003
- **evil spirits**: [evil spirits](#blv-0003-32) · BAL-0003
- **extremely fine vapour**: [subtle / vapour](#blv-0003-05) · BAL-0003
- **faithful**: [honest](#blv-0007-18) · BAL-0007
- **Fancy, or imagination**: [Phantasie, or Imagination](#blv-0002-01) · BAL-0002
- **fell into despair**: [Desperate](#blv-0007-28) · BAL-0007
- **fellow rivals**: [corrivals](#blv-0007-05) · BAL-0007
- **finer spirits**: [spirits: wine](#blv-0003-12) · BAL-0003
- **from Deficiency**: [Defect](#blv-0001-44) · BAL-0001
- **from the agitation of the spirits**: [agitatio spirituum](#blv-0003-27) · BAL-0003
- **front part of the brain**: [Foremost part of the brain](#blv-0002-27) · BAL-0002
- **generally, unless otherwise relieved**: [most part, if they be not otherwise relieved](#blv-0007-11) · BAL-0007
- **generous spirit**: [free spirit](#blv-0003-13) · BAL-0003
- **good and evil guardian spirits**: [genius / genii](#blv-0003-16) · BAL-0003
- **grotesques**: [Anticks](#blv-0002-10) · BAL-0002
- **groundless**: [causlesse](#blv-0007-09) · BAL-0007
- **head melancholy**: [head melancholy](#blv-0001-13) · BAL-0001
- **Heroes**: [heros / heroes](#blv-0003-17) · BAL-0003
- **hypochondriacal or windy melancholy**: [hypochondriacal melancholy](#blv-0001-14) · BAL-0001
- **illegitimate offshoot**: [bastard-branch](#blv-0007-06) · BAL-0007
- **images**: [simulachra](#blv-0002-16) · BAL-0002
- **imagination**: [Phantasie](#blv-0002-19) · BAL-0002
- **Imagination drives the spirits**: [spirits: instrumental movement](#blv-0003-30) · BAL-0003
- **Immaterial melancholy**: [immaterial melancholy](#blv-0001-12) · BAL-0001; [immaterial melancholy](#blv-0003-11) · BAL-0003
- **immediately effective charm**: [Present charm](#blv-0005-22) · BAL-0005
- **impaired imagination**: [læsa Imaginatio](#blv-0002-05) · BAL-0002
- **impious credulity**: [impia credulitate](#blv-0002-24) · BAL-0002
- **implicit or explicit pact**: [Ex parte](#blv-0004-10) · BAL-0004
- **in good time**: [maturely](#blv-0007-24) · BAL-0007
- **in itself**: [by essence](#blv-0001-29) · BAL-0001
- **in private life, not in prison**: [private, not in prison](#blv-0007-16) · BAL-0007
- **incubus, or “witch-ridden,”**: [Incubus, or Witch-ridden](#blv-0002-14) · BAL-0002
- **Jealousy**: [Jealousie](#blv-0007-02) · BAL-0007
- **knowing cuckold**: [wittall](#blv-0007-14) · BAL-0007
- **Lares**: [lar / lares](#blv-0003-18) · BAL-0003
- **Larvae**: [larva / larvae](#blv-0003-20) · BAL-0003
- **Lemures**: [lemures](#blv-0003-19) · BAL-0003
- **lest he or she should fall in love with someone else**: [lest he or she should be enamoured of another](#blv-0007-03) · BAL-0007
- **life itself**: [spiritus](#blv-0003-03) · BAL-0003
- **like an incantation**: [Incantationis instar](#blv-0005-17) · BAL-0005
- **love potion**: [Philter and melancholy](#blv-0006-02) · BAL-0006; [Philtrum as a suspected cause](#blv-0006-03) · BAL-0006; [Love as philtrum](#blv-0006-07) · BAL-0006
- **love potions**: [Philter](#blv-0006-01) · BAL-0006; [Philtra](#blv-0006-06) · BAL-0006; [Philters for sexual capacity](#blv-0006-08) · BAL-0006; [philters](#blv-0007-15) · BAL-0007
- **love-charms**: [Cleopatra’s philters](#blv-0006-09) · BAL-0006
- **magical charms**: [Magical charms in combat](#blv-0005-12) · BAL-0005
- **magicians**: [Magician](#blv-0004-02) · BAL-0004
- **martial spirit**: [martial spirit](#blv-0003-26) · BAL-0003
- **material**: [material melancholy](#blv-0001-30) · BAL-0001
- **melancholia**: [μελαγχολία](#blv-0001-08) · BAL-0001
- **melancholic to the eighth degree**: [melancholicus ad octo](#blv-0001-18) · BAL-0001
- **melancholizing**: [melancholize](#blv-0001-03) · BAL-0001
- **Melancholy**: [melancholy](#blv-0001-07) · BAL-0001
- **mental derangement**: [dotage](#blv-0001-27) · BAL-0001
- **mental images of objects**: [species of objects](#blv-0002-04) · BAL-0002
- **monstrous melancholy**: [monstrous melancholy](#blv-0001-41) · BAL-0001
- **most melancholy, though not all**: [melancholy](#blv-0001-11) · BAL-0001
- **natural**: [natural melancholy](#blv-0001-31) · BAL-0001
- **Natural spirits**: [natural spirits](#blv-0003-07) · BAL-0003
- **necessity**: [necessity](#blv-0007-13) · BAL-0007
- **nepenthe**: [Nepenthe](#blv-0005-18) · BAL-0005
- **not without the intervention of a humour**: [non sine interventu humoris](#blv-0003-22) · BAL-0003
- **obscured spirits**: [darkened spirits](#blv-0003-29) · BAL-0003
- **of this kind**: [in this kinde](#blv-0002-11) · BAL-0002
- **our imaginations**: [our phantasies](#blv-0002-20) · BAL-0002
- **our lady Melancholy**: [dame melancholy](#blv-0001-21) · BAL-0001
- **our spirits**: [spirits: physiological](#blv-0003-42) · BAL-0003
- **pact, bond and obligation**: [Compact band and obligation](#blv-0004-17) · BAL-0004
- **Perhaps**: [Happily](#blv-0006-04) · BAL-0006
- **poisoned melancholy**: [venenata melancholia](#blv-0001-23) · BAL-0001; [poisoned melancholy](#blv-0001-42) · BAL-0001
- **power**: [Virtue](#blv-0005-08) · BAL-0005
- **powerful conviction**: [Strong conceit](#blv-0005-06) · BAL-0005
- **private spirit**: [private spirit](#blv-0003-39) · BAL-0003
- **Prognostics**: [Prognosticks](#blv-0007-21) · BAL-0007
- **proof against stabbing**: [Stick free](#blv-0005-13) · BAL-0005
- **Proteus or a chameleon**: [Proteus, or a Cameleon](#blv-0002-17) · BAL-0002
- **real charms**: [True charms](#blv-0005-09) · BAL-0005
- **rejected**: [Exploded](#blv-0005-07) · BAL-0005
- **religious melancholy**: [religious melancholy](#blv-0001-40) · BAL-0001
- **scarcely**: [vix](#blv-0007-23) · BAL-0007
- **secondarily**: [by consent](#blv-0001-28) · BAL-0001
- **sensory forms of things**: [Species of sensible things](#blv-0002-21) · BAL-0002
- **siege engines**: [Battering engines](#blv-0006-05) · BAL-0006
- **similar love potions**: [Flattery as philters](#blv-0006-10) · BAL-0006
- **sink into melancholy**: [melancholize](#blv-0001-20) · BAL-0001
- **speech suited to the occasion**: [Opportunity of speech](#blv-0005-19) · BAL-0005
- **Spirit**: [spirit: physiological](#blv-0003-04) · BAL-0003; [Spirit: divine](#blv-0003-10) · BAL-0003
- **spirits and devils**: [spirit: supernatural](#blv-0003-14) · BAL-0003
- **spirits and humours**: [spirits and humours](#blv-0003-28) · BAL-0003
- **spirits of this kind have already been conjured up**: [conjure spirits](#blv-0003-02) · BAL-0003
- **spiritual body**: [spiritual body](#blv-0003-21) · BAL-0003
- **strictly or loosely**: [melancholy](#blv-0001-04) · BAL-0001
- **strong idea or impression**: [strong conceit or apprehension](#blv-0002-03) · BAL-0002
- **suspicion**: [suspition](#blv-0007-07) · BAL-0007; [suspect](#blv-0007-08) · BAL-0007
- **the devil is a spirit**: [spirit: supernatural](#blv-0003-41) · BAL-0003
- **the different meanings of melancholy**: [melancholy](#blv-0001-24) · BAL-0001
- **the estimative or cogitative faculty**: [Æstimative, or Cogitative](#blv-0002-02) · BAL-0002
- **the human being’s star**: [astrum hominis](#blv-0002-18) · BAL-0002
- **the most godly souls**: [divine spirit: devout person](#blv-0003-40) · BAL-0003
- **the purer spirits**: [spirits: visual fascination](#blv-0003-35) · BAL-0003
- **the soul’s instrument**: [instrument](#blv-0003-06) · BAL-0003
- **to indulge in melancholy like this**: [melancholize](#blv-0001-15) · BAL-0001
- **to sharpen his love**: [to whetten his love](#blv-0007-01) · BAL-0007
- **treat their wives well**: [use their wives well](#blv-0007-20) · BAL-0007
- **unnatural**: [unnatural melancholy](#blv-0001-34) · BAL-0001
- **vapours of the spirits**: [spiritual vapour](#blv-0003-36) · BAL-0003
- **violence**: [injurie](#blv-0007-22) · BAL-0007
- **vital and animal spirits**: [vital and animal spirits](#blv-0003-31) · BAL-0003
- **Vital spirits**: [vital spirits](#blv-0003-08) · BAL-0003
- **What the bodily spirits are**: [bodily spirits](#blv-0003-43) · BAL-0003
- **white witches**: [White witch](#blv-0004-06) · BAL-0004
- **whole body**: [whole-body melancholy](#blv-0001-38) · BAL-0001
- **wicked disbelief**: [wicked incredulity](#blv-0002-23) · BAL-0002
- **witch**: [Witch as an insult](#blv-0004-15) · BAL-0004
- **witch-ridden**: [Witch-ridden](#blv-0004-07) · BAL-0004
- **witchcraft**: [Witchcraft as a claimed cause](#blv-0004-09) · BAL-0004; [Love as witchcraft](#blv-0004-16) · BAL-0004
- **Witches**: [Witch](#blv-0004-01) · BAL-0004
- **witches**: [Witchers](#blv-0004-13) · BAL-0004
- **written symbols**: [Characters](#blv-0005-05) · BAL-0005
- **Yet**: [Yet](#blv-0007-12) · BAL-0007