Crased

Use in the book

What is impaired?

Three contrasting examples establish a useful distinction. Fancy is “crased” when a repeated habit of pleasant imagining becomes difficult to interrupt and then yields to fear, sorrow and anxiety. Wealthy people described as “crasie” have bodily infirmities and hidden suffering beneath their outward splendour, like painted walls rotten within. The deceased imagined “crazed and sickly” in consolation for bereavement is frail and worn out, like a tired traveller asked to restart his journey. None of these meanings should be fixed merely by resemblance to present-day “crazy.”

The related Latin phrase also occurs earlier as a cause rather than a later result of disturbance. In the account of passions, “læsa Imaginatio” misinforms the heart and disorders the spirits and humours; the body’s own disposition affects how strong and lasting the passions become. A marginal sentence attributed to Piso says that impaired imagination corrupts spirits and blood, while altered humours change mental operations. This is a connected historical explanation of mind and body, not a one-way claim that every bodily illness begins in imagination.

Burton can name both body and mind together. He criticizes ambitious marriages in which the parties are unsound in both, unwilling and ill-suited. His earlier “crased families” similarly describes collective broken health within a historical argument about inherited constitution and the marriage market. That passage’s prejudicial claims about selection and inheritance belong to Burton’s argument; the adjective alone does not authorize adopting them. A separate claim attributed to Cardan contrasts a sick child with a mentally impaired son, showing a locally mental use within the same historical field.

The most decisive extension beyond persons is “crasie” medicines. Burton questions compound preparations whose supposed perfection is undermined by later alterations or abandonment. Their unsoundness is a defect of formulation or justification, not a mental state. The next paragraphs widen the attack to rival recipes and physicians’ experiments at patients’ expense.

Imagination, testimony and competing explanations

Several episodes turn on disturbed imagining. The drinkers at Agrigentum believe their tavern is a storm-tossed ship and throw its contents into the street, supposing it the sea. Burton explicitly leaves uncertain whether wine alone or something mixed with it caused the episode. In the Orestes scene, Electra tells the frightened man that his visions are a disordered imagination; the explanation belongs to her corrective speech in Burton’s dramatic example.

The witchcraft discussion needs an equally clear speaker boundary. “Their Braines are crazed” restates the position attributed to Weyer: the alleged feats are imagined, not performed. Burton immediately lists writers who reject the sufficiency of that account. The earlier explanation still permits demonic deception, and the later opponents do not deny melancholy. It would therefore misrepresent the sequence to turn this one phrase into Burton’s final rejection of supernatural action.

Near the end, disordered imagination can suggest apparently external monsters when the brain is troubled by want of sleep or nourishment. Burton allows such natural explanations, then adds a possible demonic one. His qualifying “may” matters: the passage offers possibilities rather than one cause for every alarming experience.

Impairment and responsibility

In the practical discussion of passions, a sufferer objects that people already impaired in body and mind cannot simply follow advice to control themselves when even sages fail. Burton answers that efforts by sufferers and friends, with ordinary help, may moderate the passions; relief is expressly distinguished from complete cure. The adjective thus helps frame a serious objection to easy exhortation rather than a verdict that help is impossible.

The final religious consolation uses “crazed souls” and “a crazed phantasie” while describing unwanted thoughts. Burton combines humours and vapours with a theological account of compulsion, but the crucial moral distinction is between suffering a thought and consenting to it. The sufferer abhors and resists the thoughts. The next paragraph extends the reassurance even to some temporary assent later rejected, distinguishing it from a settled will. These are Burton’s historical explanatory and consolatory terms; the entry does not assert the supernatural cause he proposes.

Satire and rebuke

The family also works at larger and more confrontational scales. The world-map is a “crased head,” and Burton calls his era a “crased age.” These phrases support his universalizing diagnosis of folly and social disorder. The Stoic sage, allegedly immune to disturbance, can nevertheless be “sometimes crased” in the concession Burton attributes to Chrysippus. An insult may likewise be carried indirectly: Philip’s advice that Menacrates visit Anticyra implies that he is out of his mind and needs hellebore. The surrounding medicinal discussion makes the proverb intelligible without converting the anecdote into an independently established diagnosis.

Burton’s “a crazed peece” in the nursing argument is a further disparaging description. It is used to challenge the assumption that a mother must always be preferable to a carefully chosen nurse. The surrounding qualification, “in some cases,” and the attack’s insulting language should both remain visible.

Related entries

Stupid; Madness; Imagination; Dotage; Conscience; Physic; Hellebore

Places to read

1. A disordered world and ageMap satire, the vulnerable sage and widespread illness
2. The witchcraft disputeWeyer’s explanation and its immediate opponents
3. Children and familiesHistorical hereditary claims and collective broken health
4. Impaired imagination as a causeThe related Latin phrase, the heart and reciprocal changes in spirits and humours
5. Choosing a nurseA polemical description within a qualified argument; exceptional pagination retained
6. The imagined shipwreckDeranged imagination with an expressly uncertain intoxicating cause
7. Fancy injured by habitual imaginingPleasure, interruption, impairment and ensuing distress
8. Electra’s corrective accountA dramatic speaker explains Orestes’s apparent sights
9. The sufferer’s objectionImpairment, difficult self-command and the possibility of relief
10. Wealth and hidden infirmitySaturn’s speech as Burton adapts Lucian
11. Frail and sicklyThe exhausted-traveller image in bereavement counsel
12. Unsound medicinesA non-personal object and criticism of compound remedies
13. Anticyra as treatment and rebukeMental disorder, the hellebore proverb and Philip’s reply
14. Ill-suited marriagesBodily and mental unsoundness alongside unwillingness
15. Unwanted thoughts and assentImpairment, compulsion and the qualification concerning a settled will
16. Inward causes of outward terrorsNatural possibilities followed by a supernatural explanation

In this edition

The contextual rendering pairs remain central: “crased” becomes “impaired” for fancy; “crasie” becomes “infirm” in the portrait of wealth; “crazed and sickly” becomes “frail and sickly” in bereavement counsel. The Latin “læsa Imaginatio” is separately translated as “the imagination is injured.” The words distinguish impairment of a faculty from bodily weakness without making the family exclusively bodily.

Other objects produce other equivalents: “crasie” compounds are “unsound,” the “crased age” is “disordered,” and the sage is “mentally unsettled.” “Their Braines are crazed” becomes “their minds are merely disordered,” a whole-clause modernization of Weyer’s reported explanation. At the end, “crazed phantasie” and “crased phantasie” both become “disordered imagination.” These are contextual renderings, not an invariant technical diagnosis.

crased / crasie / crazed · crased · local use 1

Printed “crased” (English; spelling family).

Disordered or deranged; the world is figured as a fool’s head requiring reform.

Context: Burton’s universalizing moral satire, not a diagnosis of every person.

Source: original body

Source wording: a crased head

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crased · local use 2

Printed “crased” (English; spelling family).

Mentally unsettled or impaired; a concession that the sage can lose his customary wisdom.

Context: Burton reports Chrysippus’s concession and uses it against an ideal of unlosable wisdom.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: he may be sometimes crased as well as the rest

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: the wise man may sometimes be mentally unsettled like the rest

Alignment convention

Qualification: The subject he becomes the wise man, recovering the referent from the discussion of sages. May and sometimes remain qualifications, and as well as the rest becomes like the rest.

Supplied words: wise man (makes explicit the referent of he)

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crased · local use 3

Printed “crased” (English; spelling family).

Disordered or unhealthy, transferred from individuals to the age in which they live.

Context: Burton’s characterization of widespread illness while citing Claudinus; no modern prevalence claim.

Source: original body

Source wording: this crased age of ours

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crazed · local use 1

Printed “crazed” (English; spelling family).

Impaired in mental functioning; alleged magical feats are explained as imagined.

Context: Burton reports Weyer’s position; the next paragraph names writers who reject its sufficiency.

Source: original body

Source wording: only their Braines are crazed

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crazed · local use 2

Printed “crazed” (English; spelling family).

Mentally impaired, distinguished locally from a sick child in a claim about conception.

Context: A hereditary claim attributed to Cardan, not a current medical assertion.

Source: original body

Source wording: a crazed son

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crased · local use 4

Printed “crased” (English; spelling family).

Unsound in health; applied collectively to families said to inherit bodily and mental weakness.

Context: Burton’s historical and prejudicial argument about marriage and inheritance.

Source: original body

Source wording: crased families

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crazed · local use 3

Printed “crazed” (English; spelling family).

Mentally unsound or deranged; applied disparagingly to a person in an attack on an allegedly unsuitable mother. Peece, not crazed, supplies the person-denoting noun.

Context: Burton’s polemical argument for choosing a suitable nurse rather than assuming every mother preferable.

Source: original body

Locator qualification: Preserve sequence and printed-number distinction exactly.

Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: a crazed peece

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: a deranged creature

Alignment convention

Qualification: Crazed corresponds to deranged; peece supplies the disparaging person-denoting noun rendered creature. The full noun phrase is aligned, without importing its noun into the adjective’s definition.

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crased · local use 5

Printed “crased” (English; spelling family).

Disordered or deranged; applied to imagination in the account of drinkers who mistake a tavern for a ship in a storm.

Context: A received anecdote about intoxication or an unknown admixture; the exact cause is explicitly uncertain.

Source: original body

Source wording: their phantasie so crased

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crased · local use 6

Printed “crased” (English; spelling family).

Impaired or injured in its operation; habitual pleasurable imagining is said to become involuntary and distressing.

Context: Burton’s account of a possible development through repeated solitude and imagining.

Source: original body

Source wording: his phantasie is crased

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crased · local use 7

Printed “crased” (English; spelling family).

Disordered; applied to imagination as Electra’s explanation of Orestes’s frightening apparent sights.

Context: Electra’s corrective speech to Orestes as Burton retells a dramatic scene.

Source: original body

Source wording: it was but his crased imagination

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crased · local use 8

Printed “crased” (English; spelling family).

Already impaired or weakened in body and mind, making self-control difficult.

Context: The sufferer’s objection voiced by Burton, followed by Burton’s qualified answer that help may bring relief.

Source: original body

Source wording: we that are already crased

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crasie · local use 1

Printed “crasie” (English; spelling family).

Infirm or in poor health, within an image of rich people splendid outside but rotten within.

Context: Saturn’s answer to the poor as Burton adapts Lucian; the subject is concealed bodily and mental misery.

Source: original body

Source wording: diseased, filthy, crasie

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crazed · local use 4

Printed “crazed” (English; spelling family).

Frail, weakened or in broken bodily health.

Context: Burton’s harsh consolation for bereavement asks whether continued illness would be preferable to release from suffering.

Source: original body

Source wording: crazed and sickly

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crasie · local use 2

Printed “crasie” (English; spelling family).

Unsound or defective in composition or justification; applied to compound medicines, not their patients.

Context: Burton questions the supposed perfection of inherited formulations and repeated alterations by physicians.

Source: original body

Source wording: but crasie as the rest

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crased · local use 9

Printed “crased” (English; spelling family).

Mentally disordered, paired with delirious or irrational behaviour in accounts of hellebore treatment.

Context: Burton’s historical medicinal and proverbial account of journeys to Anticyra.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: such as were crased, or that doted

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: people who were mentally disordered or delirious

Alignment convention

Qualification: Such as were crased becomes people who were mentally disordered; or that doted becomes or delirious. The latter is the coordinated predicate and is not the meaning of crased alone.

Supplied words: people (makes explicit the persons denoted by such as)

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crased · local use 10

Printed “crased” (English; spelling family).

Out of one’s mind; a rebuke conveyed through advice to go to Anticyra.

Context: Philip’s sarcastic message to Menacrates as Burton reports it, not a diagnosis independently endorsed here.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: noting thereby that he was crased

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: He meant that Menacrates was out of his mind

Alignment convention

Qualification: Noting thereby is recast as He meant, whose subject is Philip from the preceding clause. Original he in that he was crased refers to Menacrates, whom the modern names. The larger phrase preserves Philip’s rebuke rather than making Burton an independent diagnostician.

Supplied words: He (Philip, supplied as subject of the new finite clause He meant); Menacrates (makes explicit the person referred to by the original he)

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crased · local use 11

Printed “crased” (English; spelling family).

Unsound in bodily and mental condition; part of an objection to marriages made for ambition and status.

Context: Burton’s criticism of imposed or ill-suited marriages, alongside unwillingness and aversion.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: both crased in body and minde

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: both parties are unsound in body and mind

Alignment convention

Qualification: Both crased in body and minde becomes both parties are unsound in body and mind. The original though is immediately before the extracted construction and is rendered even though; this remains a concession within a criticism of ambition-driven matches.

Supplied words: parties (identifies the people denoted by both); are (supplied copula in the elliptical concessive construction)

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crazed · local use 5

Printed “crazed” (English; spelling family).

Disordered or impaired; applied to souls described as vulnerable to thoughts imposed against their wills.

Context: Burton’s historical mixture of theological and bodily explanations, with unwillingness central to consolation.

Source: original body

Source wording: such crazed souls

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crazed · local use 6

Printed “crazed” (English; spelling family).

Impaired or disordered; applied to imagination and invoked with disturbed humours and vapours to distinguish unwanted thoughts from deliberate consent.

Context: Burton’s moral reassurance: the sufferer abhors the thoughts; the next paragraph qualifies temporary assent.

Source: original body

Source wording: a crazed phantasie

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

crased / crasie / crazed · crased · local use 12

Printed “crased” (English; spelling family).

Disordered; applied to imagination that may suggest and fabricate alarming apparent shapes.

Context: Burton allows inward bodily causes for apparently external terrors, while the continuation still allows demonic agency.

Source: original body

Source wording: our vain fear and crased phantasie

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

læsa imaginatio · læsa Imaginatio · local use 1

Printed “læsa Imaginatio” (Latin; phrase).

Printed form, Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: læsa Imaginatio

Injured or impaired imagination; the Latin phrase immediately precedes Burton’s English “his phantasie is crased.”

Context: Burton’s account of pleasurable imagining passing into entrenched distress.

Grammar: Læsa is the feminine singular nominative perfect passive participle of lædo, used adjectivally with nominative singular imaginatio. No finite form of esse is printed.

Source: original body

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: the imagination is injured

Alignment convention

Qualification: The literal phrase is injured imagination; in this context the modern supplies the and is to render the elliptical assertion the imagination is injured. Burton’s following English his phantasie is crased is a separate restatement.

Supplied words: the (English article); is (makes the Latin adjective/participle-plus-noun expression into an explicit English predication)

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

læsa imaginatio · læsa Imaginatio · local use 2

Printed “læsa Imaginatio” (Latin; phrase).

Printed form, Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: læsa Imaginatio

Injured or impaired imagination; here the proposed starting cause of disturbances in spirits and humours through misinformation communicated to the heart.

Context: Burton’s historical physiological explanation allows bodily disposition to affect the force and duration of passions; its claim concerns grievances in this kind, not every disease.

Grammar: Læsa is feminine singular nominative, agreeing with imaginatio; the phrase stands after English is.

Source: original body

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: impaired imagination

Alignment convention

Qualification: The Latin noun phrase is translated directly as impaired imagination; the English sentence already supplies is before the phrase. This differs from the supplied English copula at 061-18.

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.

læsa imaginatio · læsa Imaginatione

Printed “læsa Imaginatione” (Latin; phrase).

Injured or impaired imagination; the marginal phrase identifies a source of corruption of spirits and blood within an account that also lets changed humours alter mental operations.

Context: Original marginal claim attributed to Piso; its English translation is supplied editorial apparatus, not Burton’s original margin.

Grammar: Læsa and Imaginatione are feminine singular ablative after à. The indexed noun phrase means impaired imagination; the rest of the sentence supplies corruption and reciprocal bodily influence.

Source: original marginal wording in Burton-labelled note

Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: Spiritus & sanguis à læsa Imaginatione contaminantur, humores enim mutati actiones animi immutant, Piso.

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: Spirits and blood are corrupted by impaired imagination, for altered humours change the operations of the mind.

Alignment convention

Qualification: Whole marginal Latin sentence aligned to its editorial translation; the final bibliographical name Piso is given separately in the note, outside the quoted English sentence.

Notes: Authorities and anecdotes are reported as Burton presents them; no fresh historical-witness collation is claimed.