Mistress

Use in the book

The medical definition attributed to Avicenna makes the “Mistris” the object of unremitting attention to beauty, gesture and manners; Savonarola adds eager desire to obtain or enjoy her. The preceding passage explains the physicians’ terminology, while the next reports a disputed definition involving confidence or hope of attainment. The noun identifies the beloved, not the diagnostic category and not the couple’s legal status.

The unassigned couplet about “a mistress yet to come” presents desire before its object is known. Its sequel matters: Burton distinguishes natural and chaste love from the burning, disordered passion he is examining. The servant metaphor is more explicit when Castiglione’s lover submits his thoughts and acts to his mistress’s wishes, with Xenophon’s Cyrus supplying the image of bonds stronger than iron. Cicero’s adjacent question asks whether a man commanded by a woman is free. That body passage says woman, not mistress; its relevance is the argument about mastery of the passions. Conversely, Bacon’s three ages make a wife the young man’s mistress, the middle-aged man’s companion and the old man’s nurse.

Authority need not be erotic. The chaplain’s “Lady Mistress” is the lady of the household on which his livelihood depends. In Aristaenetus’s story an enslaved maid addresses her violent mistress, arguing that ownership of her body cannot command her soul’s attachment. A different authority belongs to poverty, called “the mistress of philosophy” in a consolatory praise of its lessons. The original margin’s “Mistress Dorothy Burton” is simply a respectful identification of Burton’s mother. His subsequent reservations about one of her remedies do not alter the title’s meaning.

At the work’s opening, the author tentatively calls the illness “my Mistris melancholy”, setting that relationship beside a counselling nymph and an evil spirit. The question expresses a troubled intimacy with the condition that drives him to write and study medicine. It makes the erotic and authoritative resonances available without turning melancholy into a literal woman.

Related entries

Heroical love: The reported definitions of lovesickness in which the beloved is named.

Dowry and jointure: Marriage arrangements and property should not be inferred from mistress alone.

Quean and slut: The different sexual stigma in quean and the rendering mistress in the Heloise passage.

Liberty and servitude: Household authority, servitude and the lover’s claimed loss of freedom.

Appetite: Desire and its objects.

Dotage: Excessive attachment and its satirical description.

Places to read

1. Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 7Writing as relief supplies the autobiographical context.
2. Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 8Melancholy tentatively personified as mistress, counsellor or harmful spirit.
3. Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 9Continuation: medical reading is linked to the author’s own affliction.
4. Subsection 15 Love of Learning or Excessive Study With a Digression on the Misery of Scholars and Why the Muses Are Melancholy · paragraph 15Lady Mistress means the lady of the household supporting the chaplain.
5. Subsection 15 Love of Learning or Excessive Study With a Digression on the Misery of Scholars and Why the Muses Are Melancholy · paragraph 16Continuation: adapted Juvenal depicts expulsion of the dependent.
6. Member 3 Against Poverty and Want and Other Such Adversities · paragraph 33Context: unrecognised benefits of poverty.
7. Member 3 Against Poverty and Want and Other Such Adversities · paragraph 34Mistress means teacher in the praise of poverty; original marginal parallels remain distinct.
8. Member 3 Against Poverty and Want and Other Such Adversities · paragraph 35Continuation voices and challenges poverty’s social shame.
9. Subsection 5 Alteratives and Cordials That Strengthen the Body, Disperse the Remaining Matter and Improve the Temperament · paragraph 30Original marginal note names Mistress Dorothy Burton.
10. Subsection 5 Alteratives and Cordials That Strengthen the Body, Disperse the Remaining Matter and Improve the Temperament · paragraph 31Continuation: Burton first doubts, then reconsiders her spider amulet.
11. Subsection 2 How Love Tyrannizes Over Human Beings. Love, or Heroical Melancholy: Its Definition and the Part Affected · paragraph 48Context: the physicians’ naming of heroic or noble love; the continuation’s page number 446 is misprinted 246.
12. Subsection 2 How Love Tyrannizes Over Human Beings. Love, or Heroical Melancholy: Its Definition and the Part Affected · paragraph 49The mistress in the Avicennian definition; the marginal notes identify page number 446 as misprinted 246.
13. Subsection 2 How Love Tyrannizes Over Human Beings. Love, or Heroical Melancholy: Its Definition and the Part Affected · paragraph 50Continuation: a further definition and its commentator’s objection.
14. Member 2. Subsection 2. Other Causes of Love Melancholy: Sight; Beauty of the Face, Eyes and Other Parts; and How It Pierces Us · paragraph 13Magnetic attraction introduces the lyric.
15. Member 2. Subsection 2. Other Causes of Love Melancholy: Sight; Beauty of the Face, Eyes and Other Parts; and How It Pierces Us · paragraph 14Unassigned couplet about a beloved still unknown.
16. Member 2. Subsection 2. Other Causes of Love Melancholy: Sight; Beauty of the Face, Eyes and Other Parts; and How It Pierces Us · paragraph 15Continuation distinguishes chaste love from disordered erotic passion.
17. Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind Good and Bad Signs and So Forth · paragraph 1The lover as his mistress’s servant; Castiglione and Xenophon supply distinct authorities.
18. Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind Good and Bad Signs and So Forth · paragraph 2Contextual phrase: Cicero’s woman who rules the lover; no mistress-token in the body.
19. Subsection 5 The Last and Best Cure for Love Melancholy Is to Let Lovers Have Their Desire · paragraph 1The enslaved maid’s address to her household mistress and claim to inward freedom.
20. Subsection 5 The Last and Best Cure for Love Melancholy Is to Let Lovers Have Their Desire · paragraph 59A wife is a young man’s mistress in Burton’s adaptation of Bacon.

In this edition

The paired text retains “his Mistris” as “his mistress”, and “a mistress yet to come” as “a mistress still to come”. The contextual gloss must therefore supply the historical breadth that spelling modernization alone cannot show. “A woman domineers” becomes “a woman rules him”; this remains a separate phrase about rule, not an unattested mistress-token in that passage.

Other renderings disambiguate the noun directly: “his Lady Mistress” becomes “the lady of the house”, and “the mistress of philosophy” becomes “the teacher of philosophy”. The respectful title is preserved only in the original marginal identification, without a separate modern-body counterpart. The original body’s page 446 is printed 246 according to its notes; the reading route records that qualification. The supplied notes identify sources but leave several underlying editions uncollated; this article follows the supplied Burton text and apparatus.

domineer

Printed “domineers” (English; lemma).

Exercise commanding rule over someone.

Here: The phrase describes the lover’s inability to refuse commands in Cicero’s test of freedom.

Context: Burton’s report of Cicero’s question; the selected body phrase says woman, not mistress.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: a woman domineers

Modern rendering: a woman rules him

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: Domineers contributes rules; him makes its implicit male object explicit in the modern clause.

mistress · Mistris · local use 1

Printed “Mistris” (English; lemma).

The woman loved or courted.

Here: The mistress is the object of continual thought about beauty, gestures and manners in a reported medical definition of lovesickness.

Context: Burton reports Avicenna’s definition and Savonarola’s additions; the attachment does not by this noun alone establish an extramarital relation.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: his Mistris

Modern rendering: his mistress

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes the woman loved or courted.

Attestation page note: Burton’s marginal notes explicitly identify the printed-page misnumbering as 246; the typed passage locator uses corrected sequence 446.

Further local use

Printed “mistress” (English; lemma).

Here: The unassigned couplet imagines a beloved not yet identified.

Context: The lyric speaker seeks someone still unknown; Burton’s next paragraph distinguishes natural and chaste love from the disordered passion under discussion.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: a mistress yet to come

Modern rendering: a mistress still to come

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes the woman loved or sought.

Sense relation: A further local application of the same sense, with its own agency and phrase alignment.

Further local use

Printed “Mistress” (English; lemma).

Here: The lover becomes servant, drudge and prisoner of the beloved’s wishes.

Context: Burton brings Castiglione’s formulation together with Cyrus’s account in Xenophon; the servitude is a moral image of passion.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: his Mistress servant

Modern rendering: his mistress’s servant

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes the woman loved.

Sense relation: A further local application of the same sense, with its own agency and phrase alignment.

Further local use

Printed “Mistress” (English; lemma).

Here: The young husband’s wife herself is his mistress in the first of the three ages of marriage.

Context: Burton adapts Bacon’s saying; wife and mistress here refer to the same woman.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: A wife is a young mans Mistress

Modern rendering: A wife is a young man’s mistress

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes beloved woman.

Sense relation: A further local application of the same sense, with its own agency and phrase alignment.

mistress · Mistris · local use 2

Printed “Mistris” (English; lemma).

A beloved or dominating woman, here a personified affliction.

Here: Burton tests mistress as one possible relation to the disease that prompts his writing.

Context: The first-person author asks whether melancholy is mistress, counsellor or evil spirit; he does not settle on a literal lover.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: my Mistris melancholy

Modern rendering: my mistress Melancholy

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes a beloved or dominating woman, here a personified affliction.

mistress · Mistress

Printed “Mistress” (English; lemma).

A woman with authority over a household or dependant.

Here: The dependent chaplain risks displeasing the household’s lady as well as its patron.

Context: Burton’s satire of clerical dependence; punishment follows in the adapted Juvenal quotation.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: his Lady Mistress

Modern rendering: the lady of the house

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes a woman with authority over a household or dependant.

Further local use

Printed “mistris” (English; lemma).

Here: The enslaved maid distinguishes her mistress’s power over her body from control over her affection.

Context: The maid’s speech in Burton’s abridgement of Aristaenetus resists the jealous mistress’s violence.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: O mistris, fortune hath made my body your servant, but not my soul

Modern rendering: Oh, mistress, fortune has made my body your servant, but not my soul

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: Mistress names the addressed superior; the remaining clause supplies the body/soul distinction.

Sense relation: A further local application of the same sense, with its own agency and phrase alignment.

mistress

Printed “mistress” (English; lemma).

A female teacher or instructress, personified.

Here: Poverty instructs in philosophy within an encomium opposing the shame associated with need.

Context: Burton assembles praises of poverty; his marginal Augustine attribution remains unlocated in the supplied apparatus.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: the mistress of philosophy

Modern rendering: the teacher of philosophy

Alignment scope: Equal-scope phrase or construction in the supplied parallel text.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes a female teacher or instructress, personified.

Mistress as title

Printed “Mistress” (English; phrase).

A respectful title before a woman’s name.

Here: The marginal note names Burton’s mother, whom the body praises for practical healing.

Context: Burton’s original marginal identification, distinct from the narrative’s subsequent reconsideration of her amulet.

Source: original marginal quotation

Source wording and original alignment: Mistress Dorothy Burton

Alignment scope: Original marginal wording without a separately corresponding modern-body phrase.

Word and construction: The indexed form contributes a respectful title before a woman’s name.

Alignment qualification: The supplied note preserves and explains this wording; the paired modern body has no separate rendering of this marginal expression.