Calenture and ague

Use in the book

Absence of fever is part of the historical distinction between melancholy and phrenitis, while putrefied melancholic matter is said to produce a quartan fever. These statements concern different uses of melancholy, as illness and as bodily matter. The dietary warning about pork says that frequent consumption may breed quartan ague, preserving Savonarola’s expression of suspicion rather than asserting certain causation. Travellers’ calentures and fluxes illustrate the danger attributed to unfamiliar diet and fruit, in an argument that also credits habituation with reducing harm. Elsewhere hot air is blamed, though the supplied Hawkins comparison qualifies Burton’s compression. Calentures also occur in moralized catalogues of drinking’s harms and the still worse consequences alleged for lust.

The relation between fever and melancholy runs in opposing directions. Named physicians describe fever preceding melancholy, including Montanus’s young man troubled by a quartan for five years. The prognostic discussion then says that all melancholic people improve after a quartan, but immediately questions whether it frees them from melancholy, since prolonged agues are themselves counted among its causes. Improvement, complete cure and causation must remain distinct. Reported fever cures also test the status of evidence: Lemnius’s first-person account credits sudden fright, and Burton conditionally accepts Pliny’s battle anecdote. His mother’s spider amulet prompts initial ridicule, then greater confidence after reading authorities and observing apparent success in some people; he still rejects verbal charms. None of these accounts establishes a modern treatment.

Fever supplies arguments about the limits and possibilities of counsel. Telling a melancholic sufferer simply not to grieve resembles telling someone with an ague not to feel thirsty. Later, however, feverish thirst illustrates restraining an action despite appetite, and disordered taste illustrates faulty judgment; the continuation admits that self-government may fail and commends disclosure to a friend. The inability of physicians sometimes even to relieve a common fever is used against their pretensions, before Burton expressly defends medicine against misuse.

Figurative fevers need their own objects and voices. Chrysostom’s unseen ague figures grief; love, jealousy and despair receive related fever imagery. The “fever hectick” attributed to Scaliger makes a wife a persistent wasting affliction in anti-marriage rhetoric, after Burton has said that men are worse and allowed reversal of the genders. Personified Fever is different again: a divine recipient of worship in the comparison with patron saints, and a named power in the later religious catalogue.

Related entries

Phrenitis

Prognostics

Flux and lask

Diet and regimen

Helleborism

Feral: Related vocabulary beyond this volume.

Madness

Places to read

1. Subsection 4. Mental Impairment, Frenzy, Madness, Hydrophobia, Lycanthropy, St… · paragraphs 18–20Fever distinguishes phrenitis amid competing classifications of mental disturbance.
2. Member 3 Subsection 1. The Definition of Melancholy Its Name and Distinctions · paragraphs 9–11Absence of fever helps distinguish the defined melancholy from phrenitis and melancholy occurring in pestilential fever.
3. Subsection 3. The Material of Melancholy · paragraphs 41–43Putrefaction of melancholic matter is offered as a cause of quartan fever.
4. Subsection 1 Bad Diet as a Cause. Substance. The Quality of Foods · paragraphs 37–39The fever is the grammatical subject of a suspected generation from eating pork.
5. Subsection 3 Habit in Diet, Pleasure, Appetite and Necessity How They Cause Or… · paragraphs 51–53Travellers adopting unfamiliar food are said to suffer burning fevers and bowel fluxes; fruit is blamed in the report.
6. Subsection 5 Bad Air as a Cause of Melancholy · paragraphs 35–37Burning fevers appear among illnesses attributed to excessive heat in Cape Verde.
7. Subsection 4. Sorrow as a Cause of Melancholy · paragraphs 8–10Grief figured as unseen fever in the attributed Chrysostom description.
8. Member 5 Subsection 1 Immediate, Internal, Antecedent and Proximate Causes… · paragraphs 54–58The humour is supposed to remain in the blood after fever or another malignant illness. Montanus’s young patient is reported melancholy after a prolonged recurrent fever.
9. Member 3 Immediate Cause of the Preceding Symptoms · paragraph 25 through Member 3 Immediate Cause of the Preceding Symptoms · paragraph 1Thirst in fever illustrates why simply commanding a sufferer to stop grieving is insufficient.
10. Section 4 Member 1 Prognosis of Melancholy · paragraphs 7–9An initial universal improvement claim is immediately followed by doubt that the fever cures melancholy.
11. Member 3. Whether It Is Lawful to Seek the Saints' Help in This Disease · paragraphs 24–26A temple dedicated to Fever appears in a polemical comparison between ancient deities and saints assigned to illnesses.
12. Member 6 Subsection 1 Disturbances of the Mind Corrected Through The… · paragraphs 29–32Feverish thirst exemplifies an appetite whose action the moving faculty may restrain. Altered taste in fever illustrates the difference between a perceived object and disordered judgment.
13. Subsection 2 Help From Friends Through Counsel and Comfort Gentle and Harsh… · paragraphs 30–33Unexpected attack by enemies is reported to relieve a recurrent fever, illustrating one disturbance countering another. Fabius’s recovery in battle supplies a second reported example.
14. Subsection 4 Cheerfulness, Merry Company, and Pleasing Sights as Remedies · paragraphs 30–32The word names fevers among the supposed consequences of excessive drinking.
15. Member 1 Subsection 1 Medical Treatment by Medicines · paragraphs 18–23Fever exemplifies the limits of physicians’ judgment and relief. Burton answers the attack on physicians by distinguishing medicine’s use from abuse.
16. Subsection 5 Alteratives and Cordials That Strengthen the Body, Disperse The… · paragraphs 28–32Burton’s change of mind about a fever amulet, followed by his rejection of verbal charms.
17. Subsection 2 How Love Tyrannizes Over Human Beings. Love, or Heroical… · paragraphs 22–24Violent fevers serve as the standard exceeded by the diseases attributed to lust.
18. Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind… · paragraphs 54–56Fever joins contradictory sensations and diseases in the lover’s figurative catalogue.
19. By Counsel and Persuasion, the Foulness of the Deed, the Faults of Men And… · paragraphs 13–15The comparison presents marriage as an enduring affliction in the counsel directed against love.
20. Jealousy: Its Different Meanings, Name, Definition, Extent and Various Kinds… · paragraphs 56–58Marital jealousy is portrayed as unremitting feverish torment.
21. General Symptoms: Love of Their Own Sect; Hatred of All Other Religions… · paragraphs 38–40Fever is named among personified divine powers.
22. Symptoms of Despair: Fear, Sorrow, Suspicion, Anxiety, Horror of Conscience… · paragraphs 25–27Despair is presented as intensely consuming spiritual distress.

In this edition

The rendering preserves “quartan ague”, expands “quartane” to “quartan fever”, and gives “Calentures” as “burning fevers”. The same family becomes simply fevers; its force is raging fevers within a phrase also naming pestilential fevers. These choices retain local emphasis without assigning a single modern disease identity.

The phrase “an ague not appearing” becomes an unseen fever, whereas “fever hectick” becomes a wasting fever. The body’s feverless definition and its claims about fevers preceding or relieving melancholy remain in view together. The source’s recurrence terminology is explained, not silently replaced with a modern diagnosis.

ague

Printed “ague” (English; lemma).

Fever, not necessarily a recurrent fever.

Here: Absence of fever helps distinguish the defined melancholy from phrenitis and melancholy occurring in pestilential fever.

Context: Burton says all add this distinction here; it is a local historical definition, not a claim that fever and melancholy never coexist.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: [without an ague]

Modern rendering: “without fever”

Word and construction: Ague contributes fever; without supplies the absence central to the definition.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “ague” (English; lemma).

Citation key: ague.

Here: The humour is supposed to remain in the blood after fever or another malignant illness.

Context: Burton attributes this account to named physicians; preceding disease affects organs and thereby the mind.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: after an ague

Modern rendering: after a fever

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “ague” (English; lemma).

Citation key: ague.

Here: Thirst in fever illustrates why simply commanding a sufferer to stop grieving is insufficient.

Context: Burton says advice can do little good unless causes are addressed, not that all advice is useless.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: him that is sick of an ague, not to be adry

Modern rendering: someone suffering from an ague not to be thirsty

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “ague” (English; lemma).

Citation key: ague.

Here: Feverish thirst exemplifies an appetite whose action the moving faculty may restrain.

Context: This is Burton’s historical account of reason and bodily action, not present-day advice to withhold fluids; the continuation allows that a sufferer may be unable to self-govern.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: In an ague the appetite would drink

Modern rendering: In a fever, appetite wants to drink

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “ague” (English; lemma).

Citation key: ague.

Here: Altered taste in fever illustrates the difference between a perceived object and disordered judgment.

Context: Burton invokes Plutarch, locating the fault in taste rather than food; the next paragraph counsels disclosure to a friend if self-control fails.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: to him that is sick of an ague, all things are distastful and unpleasant

Modern rendering: To someone sick with a fever, everything tastes bad and unpleasant

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “ague” (English; lemma).

Citation key: ague.

Here: Fever exemplifies the limits of physicians’ judgment and relief.

Context: Burton’s attack is qualified by sometimes and by the later express defense of medicine against its abuse.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: a common ague sometimes stumbles them all

Modern rendering: even an ordinary fever sometimes baffles them all

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “Ague” (English; lemma).

Citation key: ague.

Here: Burton recalls his mother’s use of a spider amulet against fever.

Context: He first rejects this particular practice despite praising her other practical cures, then reports increased belief from books and some experience; the account is historical.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: so applied for an Ague by my Mother

Modern rendering: used in this way against an ague by my mother

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

calenture

Printed “Calentures” (English; lemma).

Burning or violent fevers.

Here: Travellers adopting unfamiliar food are said to suffer burning fevers and bowel fluxes; fruit is blamed in the report.

Context: Burton’s historical explanation follows a discussion of habituation and is followed by examples of habit reducing harm.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: Calentures, Fluxes

Modern rendering: burning fevers and diarrhoea

Word and construction: Calentures contributes burning fevers; Fluxes contributes the separate bowel condition diarrhoea.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “calentures” (English; lemma).

Citation key: calenture.

Here: Burning fevers appear among illnesses attributed to excessive heat in Cape Verde.

Context: Burton compresses Hawkins: the apparatus distinguishes one of the worst from the worst, and Hawkins’s cold breeze meeting sun-heated bodies from Burton’s heat-only explanation.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: fluxes, feavers, frenzies, calentures

Modern rendering: diarrhoea, fevers, frenzies and burning fevers

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “calentures” (English; lemma).

Citation key: calenture.

Here: The word names fevers among the supposed consequences of excessive drinking.

Context: Burton condemns abuse that turns a supposed aid into ruin; the preceding accusation against Paracelsus belongs to Erastus’s polemic.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: rheumes, dropsies, calentures, tremor

Modern rendering: catarrhs, dropsies, fevers, and tremors

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “calentures” (English; lemma).

Citation key: calenture.

Here: Violent fevers serve as the standard exceeded by the diseases attributed to lust.

Context: This is a moral and medical catalogue in Burton’s hostile account of lust, not established modern causation.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: worse then calentures and pestilent feavers

Modern rendering: worse than raging or pestilential fevers

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Febris

Printed “Febri” (Latin; lemma).

Fever, personified as a goddess.

Here: A temple dedicated to Fever appears in a polemical comparison between ancient deities and saints assigned to illnesses.

Context: Burton invokes Pliny and Giraldi; his assignments of saints are reported claims, not a verified universal list of practices.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: Febri fanum dicatum est

Modern rendering: a temple was dedicated to Fever

Word and construction: Febri is the dative recipient, to Fever; fanum supplies temple and dicatum est was dedicated.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “Febris” (Latin; lemma).

Citation key: Febris.

Here: Fever is named among personified divine powers.

Context: Burton’s catalogue is part of his polemical history of religions; the modern text explains the transparent name.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: Febris

Modern rendering: Febris, Fever

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

febris

Printed “febre” (Latin; lemma).

Fever.

Here: Burton asks what a spider has to do with fever, then reports a change in his judgment of the amulet.

Context: This is Burton’s first-person recollection: initial doubt, written authorities, then apparent success in some people; the next paragraph rejects verbal charms.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: Quid Aranea cum febre?

Modern rendering: What has a spider to do with a fever?

Word and construction: Febre is the ablative governed by cum, with fever; the entire elliptical question asks the relation of a spider to fever.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

febris quartana

Printed “febris quartana” (Latin; phrase).

Quartan fever.

Here: The fever is the grammatical subject of a suspected generation from eating pork.

Context: The phrase occurs in the Latin attributed to Savonarola, with a qualification of doubt that the English retains.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: ex earum usu ut dubitetur an febris quartana generetur

Modern rendering: so that one may suspect that eating it produces a quartan fever

Word and construction: Febris quartana names the suspected resulting fever; dubitetur supplies the uncertainty, while ex earum usu refers to consumption.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

fever imagery

Printed “an ague not appearing” (English; family).

An unseen fever, figuratively a consuming inward torment.

Here: The image describes grief as burning more fiercely than fire.

Context: Burton attributes the escalating description to Chrysostom’s letter to Olympias; its precise letter number and Latin remain uncollated.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: an ague not appearing, heating worse then any fire

Modern rendering: an unseen fever burning more fiercely than any fire

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “feaver” (English; family).

Citation key: fever.

Here: Fever joins contradictory sensations and diseases in the lover’s figurative catalogue.

Context: Burton’s sequence deliberately mixes bodily signs and metaphors; no single disease identity is asserted.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: for love is fire, ice, hot, cold, itch, feaver, frenzy, plurisy, what not

Modern rendering: for love is fire, ice, heat, cold, an itch, a fever, frenzy, pleurisy: what is it not?

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “fever” (English; family).

Citation key: fever.

Here: Marital jealousy is portrayed as unremitting feverish torment.

Context: Burton invokes Ariosto, but the extent and exact source of the quotation remain uncertain; preceding prose contrasts peaceful marriage.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: A fury, a continual fever

Modern rendering: a fury, a continual fever

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “feaver” (English; family).

Citation key: fever.

Here: Despair is presented as intensely consuming spiritual distress.

Context: Burton’s rhetoric here intensifies melancholy; it is not a thermometer reading or a claim excluding the later medical and pastoral cure.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: a burning feaver of the soul

Modern rendering: a burning fever of the soul

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

hectic fever

Printed “fever hectick” (English; phrase).

A persistent wasting fever, here used as a hostile analogy for a wife.

Here: The comparison presents marriage as an enduring affliction in the counsel directed against love.

Context: Burton attributes the phrase to Scaliger, after admitting men are worse and allowing the reader to reverse the genders; this is satirical anti-marriage rhetoric, not a diagnosis.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: a wife is a fever hectick

Modern rendering: A wife is a wasting fever

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

quartan ague

Printed “quartan ague” (English; phrase).

A recurrent fever whose attacks return on the fourth day by inclusive counting, approximately seventy-two hours apart.

Here: Frequent pork consumption is said possibly to produce this fever, within a warning for inactive or unsound people and delicate stomachs.

Context: Burton reports Savonarola; the Latin expresses suspicion and the English says may, not certain causation.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: frequent use of it may breed a quartan ague

Modern rendering: frequent use may produce a quartan ague

Word and construction: Quartan ague names the possible resulting fever; may marks possibility and frequent use names the proposed dietary cause.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “Quartan Ague” (English; phrase).

Citation key: quartan ague.

Here: Putrefaction of melancholic matter is offered as a cause of quartan fever.

Context: Burton presents a conditional humoral explanation, different from the definition of feverless melancholy.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: if putrified, a Quartan Ague

Modern rendering: if it putrefies, a quartan fever

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “quartan” (English; phrase).

Citation key: quartan.

Here: Montanus’s young patient is reported melancholy after a prolonged recurrent fever.

Context: The twenty-eight-year-old’s case is attributed to consultation 32; it has not been independently collated.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: after a quartan, which had molested him five years together

Modern rendering: after a quartan fever that had troubled him for five years

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “quartane” (English; phrase).

Citation key: quartan.

Here: An initial universal improvement claim is immediately followed by doubt that the fever cures melancholy.

Context: Joubert says scarcely anyone has it twice; Burton then questions cure because many physicians regard prolonged agues, including quartan, as causes.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: All melancholy are better after a quartane

Modern rendering: All melancholy people improve after a quartan fever

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “quartan ague” (English; phrase).

Citation key: quartan ague.

Here: Unexpected attack by enemies is reported to relieve a recurrent fever, illustrating one disturbance countering another.

Context: The first-person anecdote is reproduced from Lemnius, as the marginal Novi ego confirms, rather than established as Burton’s own experience. The surrounding injury proposals are historical claims.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: I knew one that was so cured of a quartan ague

Modern rendering: I knew someone whose quartan fever was cured in this way

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “quartan ague” (English; phrase).

Citation key: quartan ague.

Here: Fabius’s recovery in battle supplies a second reported example.

Context: Burton expressly qualifies it with if we may believe Pliny; Valesius’s praise is conditional on judicious use.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: was so rid of a quartan ague

Modern rendering: was freed from a quartan fever in this way

Sense relation: The same sense, with its distinct local role and qualification preserved.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.