Melancholy

Use in the book

The brief fragment about the perspicacity of the weak and the melancholy associates vulnerability with insight, but leaves its explanation unfinished. A longer note gives another relation: attention to other people cheers, while attention confined to oneself saddens. Melancholy there belongs to excessive enclosure within oneself. The second witness should not erase the perceptiveness of the first, nor should the first turn sadness into a necessary condition of intelligence. Together they give a small but useful distinction between a disposition’s possible acuity and the narrow direction of attention that can sustain its sorrow.

Places to read

1. I, p. 269, entry 5, ¶1A fragment connects melancholy with perspicacity.
2. I, p. 463, entry 9, ¶1Self-enclosure explains the particular melancholy described here.

Translation in this edition

The English translation keeps the first witness as a fragment ending in etc. In the second, occupies us with others clarifies occupe des autres; it does not mean keeping other people occupied.

Use in the book

The gray day of August 1833 offers one of the clearest positive melancholies. Nature rests after brilliant weather, the soul grows still, and distant memories become audible. Sadness here moderates experience rather than extinguishing it. At the coast, heavenly melancholies enter with the sea’s harmonies and silence the inward noise. January 1834 develops the distinction further: calm natural impressions mingle with stormy reveries to produce an ecstasy that retains awareness of sadness without being destroyed by it.

This mingling matters because pleasure and pain are not always alternatives in the notebook. A melancholy experience may be precious precisely for its capacity to hold them together. The later loss of that capacity is therefore more than a darker mood. In March 1835 Guérin remembers the evening’s former ability to deposit a soothing residue in his pain, then asks where those correspondences have gone. He now experiences only his own damaged life. The movement is from a sadness still in relation with the world to a solitude deprived of that relation. It is not a simple chronological progression, since restorative intervals repeatedly return.

Places to read

1. 14 August 1833 · ¶1Gray calm makes the voices of sweet memories perceptible.
2. 9 December 1833 · ¶4Heavenly melancholies enter with the Ocean and temporarily silence interior turbulence.
3. 20 January 1834 · ¶1The fusion of calm impressions and stormy reveries produces a desirable but still sorrowful state.
4. 24 March 1835 · ¶2The remembered evening once deposited a soothing residue alongside pain; the next paragraph declares this accord lost.

Translation in this edition

The plural “melancholies” at 9 December 1833 · ¶4 preserves Guérin’s personifying multiplicity. “Melancholy dreams” and “permanent, somewhat stormy sadness” at 20 January 1834 · ¶1 retain the distinction between a shaped disposition and its underlying sorrow.

Use in the book

The Pseudo-Aristotelian Problems supplies a later classification of outstanding thinkers within an inquiry into temperament. Empedocles heads the selected list, making him an example in a general problem rather than the subject of a case history. The notice is important for reception of exceptional intellectual ability as connected with bodily or emotional disposition. It does not diagnose the historical individual, identify symptoms, or explain the circumstances of his death. The edition’s account of a Renaissance afterlife through Ficino gives broader reception context, but that development is not demonstrated by the one quoted clause. The final Arnold excerpt likewise portrays despondency and recovery in a fictional dramatic voice; it should not be retroactively treated as confirmation of the ancient classification.

Places to read

1. A 17 (reception)Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems. Lists Empedocles among the distinguished figures in the supplied melancholic context.
2. Appendix II Arnold (reception)Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna II 402–416. Uses despondency and clearing clouds in a much later dramatic characterization.

Translation in this edition

The work is explicitly identified as Pseudo-Aristotelian. Both authorship and the editorially supplied bracketed context matter; the excerpt is not Aristotle’s direct medical assessment of Empedocles.

Use in the book

The opening frame gives René a melancholy inclination that leads him away from his wife and into the woods (p. 139). Childhood memory then offers a different valuation: bells bring religion, communal belonging, and ‘delectable melancholy’ (p. 144). The family history is not simply idyllic, since both siblings carry sadness ‘from God or from our mother’ (p. 145). That deliberately unresolved attribution places melancholy between spiritual condition and inherited temperament without settling a cause.

René’s apostrophe to the supposedly happy Indigenous people makes melancholy a temporary surplus of happiness (p. 154). This is his projection upon those passing before him, not the frame’s ethnographic knowledge of their interior lives. The shepherd’s song likewise leads him to universalize: human song is sad even when it expresses happiness, because the heart is an incomplete lyre (p. 162). Both passages expand a private disposition into an anthropology, and both must remain attributed to their speaker.

Amélie’s melancholy later acquires a specific explanation in her hidden passion. The shift matters: melancholy can conceal an object as well as accompany desire that has not found one. In the 1802 theoretical paragraphs, meanwhile, monastic life produces prodigious melancholy, which makes feelings uncertain and is regenerated by their objectless expenditure. This circular account is richer than a simple causal sequence in which vague desire mechanically produces sadness. The Preface’s omission of it limits the later extract’s explanatory range without erasing its availability in the edition.

Places to read

1. p. 139Un penchant mélancolique — The frame associates the disposition with withdrawal before René interprets it himself.
2. p. 144la délectable mélancolie des souvenirs de ma première enfance — The adjective makes remembered sadness a positive, sensuous sweetness.
3. p. 154mélancolie qui s'engendre de l'excès du bonheur — René attributes passing melancholy to lives he idealizes as happy and simple.
4. p. 162le chant naturel de l'homme est triste — His response to one shepherd’s song becomes a claim about human expression generally.
5. Appendix I no. 1Une prodigieuse mélancolie fut le fruit de cette vie monastique — The earlier theoretical account locates melancholy within Christian cultural history.

Translation in this edition

At p. 148 the supplied 1802 reading ‘philosophie mélancolique’ is replaced by ‘dégoût de la terre’. The change sharpens the wording toward aversion, but does not make every other melancholy passage wholly negative. ‘Melancholy’ in the English retains a historical emotional register rather than specifying a present-day diagnosis.

Use in the book

Fusées XVI gives melancholy an illustrious place beside beauty. The imagined woman's face can bear traces of pleasure already exhausted or of desire continually frustrated. Both are attractive within the speaker's definition, which indicates that he values the unresolved story and emotional depth more than any one biographical cause. Yet he interrupts himself to ask whether his mind is a bewitched mirror; the value may reveal his own governing preoccupation.

Fusées XXII's lovers supply a less detached use. Their night of melancholy and charity joins tears, bodily sweetness and uncertain hope. The past is neither repaired nor merely contemplated as a beautiful wound. Each seeks the pardon that each also gives. Melancholy becomes shareable without becoming a sentimental assurance that the future will turn out well.

At the end of Fusées XXII, however, the deep years yield disillusionment and bitterness, while the imagined future storm promises nothing new. The same retrospective depth can support mutual tenderness or exhausted separation. Mon cœur mis à nu CXII calls for a taste for work to cure melancholy along with illness and poverty. This is an urgent self-directed maxim, not a medically reliable cure and not proof that aesthetic melancholy has suddenly become meaningless. It shows the difference between finding sadness expressive and finding it livable.

Places to read

1. Fusées XVIla Mélancolie en est pour ainsi dire l’illustre compagne — Melancholy receives aesthetic prestige in the speaker’s qualified personal definition.
2. Fusées XVIde mélancolie, de lassitude, même de satiété — Neighbouring terms keep emotional exhaustion from becoming one undifferentiated state.
3. Fusées XXIIcette nuit de mélancolie et de charité — Shared sadness participates in a scene of reciprocal tenderness.
4. Mon cœur mis à nu CXIIde la maladie et de la mélancolie — A later imperative places melancholy among conditions the writer wishes to overcome.

Translation in this edition

The 2026 version usually retains ‘melancholy’, while distinguishing ‘sadness’, ‘weariness’, ‘satiety’ and ‘misfortune’. Those choices matter because translating all of them as unhappiness would flatten Fusées XVI's exploratory accumulation. The capitalized ‘Melancholy’ near its end preserves the personifying comparison with an illustrious companion. In Fusées XXII the lowercase word remains part of an experienced night rather than becoming an allegorical visitor.

Use in the book

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Yet the religious discussion positively values properly used fasting and contemplation. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Related entries

Imagination, for the affected faculty and the force of self-application; Spirits, for bodily mediation and supernatural explanations; Witchcraft, for supposed causation and feared bewitchment; Charms and Philters, for disputed or prohibited remedies; Jealousy, for a particular passion and its relation to melancholy.

Related articles and topics: Adust; Humour; Habit and disposition; Madness; Hypochondria; Consent and essence; Fear; Sorrow; Solitude; Study; Ecstasy; Enthusiasm; Religious melancholy; Despair; Cure.

Places to read

1. Democritus Junior to the ReaderBlack bile, the anatomical model, melancholy as mistress or evil genius, writing as attempted remedy, and knowledge gained by “melancholizing.”
2. Reader addressThe moral diagnosis of the world and the explicit turn from figurative madness to melancholy as a settled medical subject.
3. 1.1.1.4–5Relations to frenzy and madness; passing disposition, universal mortal trouble, differing susceptibility, and the growth of habit.
4. 1.1.2.2The normal humours and melancholy’s useful office; spirits as a distinct part of the physiological account.
5. 1.1.3.1–2The name, competing definitions, fear and sorrow with explicit exceptions, the affected organs and faculties, and qualifications concerning the people affected.
6. 1.1.3.3–4Natural and acquired material, adustion, the proposed immaterial kind, disputed classifications, the three working species, and mixed cases.
7. SolitarinessPleasurable “melancholizing,” its possible development into disabling preoccupation, and the reservation for beneficial contemplation.
8. Shame and disgrace“Melancholize in corners” describes brooding and withdrawal after humiliation. The opening is supplied from another historical copy, as identified in the edition.
9. Inward causesReciprocal bodily and mental action; internal organs; the distinction between a hot acquired disorder and colder natural melancholy.
10. Symptoms of the mindFear and sorrow are usual rather than universal; symptom-reading can aggravate self-application, while ordinary good judgment can survive beside particular distress.
11. Humoral and individual variationAsinine melancholy, sanguine mirth, reported inspiration, education and inclination, hidden suffering, and the deliberately insufficient scale of degrees and ratios.
12. Immediate causes of symptomsNatural internal causes, darkened spirits, limits of bare exhortation, and the qualified association between melancholy and excellent wit.
13. Prognosis and opening of the cure, andChronic difficulty and recurrence are followed by renewed hope for cure or substantial relief.
14. Lawfulness and medical care, thenAlleged efficacy differs from permission; prayer accompanies medicine; remedies require particular judgment and are not to be copied indiscriminately.
15. Help from friendsImagination’s self-directed “melancholizing” is answered by company, activity, attention to the individual grievance and reassurance.
16. MusicPleasing melancholy and relief from sorrow contrast with the aggravation of an existing amorous fixation.
17. Consolation against melancholy itself“Dame melancholy” can restrain misconduct; consolatory reversals place existing symptoms in a more favourable light.
18. Religious melancholySymptom, cause and species remain contested; previous religious inclinations shape the experience.
19. Religious practice and its abuseModeration, good contemplation and positively valued “divine melancholy” precede the account of excess and delusion.
20. Religious defect and despairThe category includes deficiency; temporary despair is distinguished from final despair, and involuntary thoughts from settled consent.
21. ConclusionRemove the particular aggravating cause, obtain appropriate help, and resist disabling solitude and idleness.
22. Unnumbered Table and closing noticeBurton’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 the passage atra bilis becomes “black bile”; 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, whereas so to melancholize becomes “to indulge in melancholy like this” in the account of pleasurable fantasy. At the passage 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”. The different renderings follow the local action. Adventitious Melancholy becomes “acquired melancholy” in the hot-and-dry argument, and Asininam melancholiam becomes “Asinine melancholy”. The latter remains a disparaging historical label; the modern rendering does not authorize its use as a current assessment of a person.

At the passage 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”. 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.

acquisite / acquired melancholy

Printed “acquisite” (English).

Acquired rather than simply the normal bodily humour

Source: original body

Source wording: The immateriall or adventitious, acquisite, redundant, unnatural, artificial: which Hercules de Saxonia will have reside in the spirits alone, and to proceed from an hot, cold, dry, moist distemperature, which without matter, alter the Brain and functions of it. Paracelsus wholly rejects and derides this division of four humors and complexions, but our Galenists generally approve of it, subscribing to this opinion of Montanus.

adust

Printed “adust” (English).

Burnt or scorched by excessive heat, here qualifying choler

Source: original body

Source wording: If natural melancholy abound in the body, which is cold & dry, so that it be more than the Body is wel able to bear, it must needs be distempered, saith Faventinus, & diseased: & so the other, if it be depraved, whether it arise from that other Melancholy of Choler adust, or from Blood, produceth the like effects, and is, as Montaltus contends, if it come by adustion of humors, most part hot and dry.

adustion

Printed “adustion” (English).

The supposed burning or scorching alteration of humours

Source: original body

Source wording: If natural melancholy abound in the body, which is cold & dry, so that it be more than the Body is wel able to bear, it must needs be distempered, saith Faventinus, & diseased: & so the other, if it be depraved, whether it arise from that other Melancholy of Choler adust, or from Blood, produceth the like effects, and is, as Montaltus contends, if it come by adustion of humors, most part hot and dry.

adventitious melancholy · adventitious Melancholy → acquired melancholy

Printed “adventitious Melancholy” (English).

Acquired melancholy in Montaltus’s hot and dry causal argument

Source: original body

Source wording: And so much the rather, because that, as Galen holds, all spices inflame the bloud, solitarinesse, waking, agues, study, meditation, all which heat: and therefore he concludes that this distemperature causing adventitious Melancholy, is not cold and dry, but hot and dry.

adventitious melancholy · adventitious → adventitious

Printed “adventitious” (English).

Acquired or supervening in the reported immaterial-melancholy classification

Source: original body

Source wording: The immateriall or adventitious, acquisite, redundant, unnatural, artificial: which Hercules de Saxonia will have reside in the spirits alone, and to proceed from an hot, cold, dry, moist distemperature, which without matter, alter the Brain and functions of it. Paracelsus wholly rejects and derides this division of four humors and complexions, but our Galenists generally approve of it, subscribing to this opinion of Montanus.

artificial melancholy

Printed “artificial” (English).

Produced or acquired, in contrast with the natural humoral condition

Source: original body

Source wording: The immateriall or adventitious, acquisite, redundant, unnatural, artificial: which Hercules de Saxonia will have reside in the spirits alone, and to proceed from an hot, cold, dry, moist distemperature, which without matter, alter the Brain and functions of it. Paracelsus wholly rejects and derides this division of four humors and complexions, but our Galenists generally approve of it, subscribing to this opinion of Montanus.

atra bilis

Printed “atra bilis” (Latin).

Citation key, Printed form, Original wording: atra bilis

Latin black bile, the material sought in dissection

Source: original body

Source wording: The subject of his book was melancholy and madnes, about him lay the carcasses of many several beasts, newly by him cut up and anatomized, not that he did contemn Gods creatures, as he told Hippocrates, but to finde out the seat of this atra bilis, or melancholy, whence it proceeds, and how it was engendred in mens bodies, to the intent he might the better cure it in himself, by his writings and observations teach others how to prevent and avoid it.

Modern rendering: black bile

Layer: paired modern body

black choler

Printed “black Choler” (English).

Printed form, Original wording: black Choler

Material cause from which the disease is named

Source: original body

Source wording: The Name is imposed from the matter, and Disease denominated from the material cause: as Bruel observes, Μελαγχολία, quasi Μελαιναχόλη, from black Choler. And whether it be a cause or an effect, a Disease, or symptome, let Donatus Altomarus, and Salvianus decide, I will not contend about it. It hath severall Descriptions, Notations, and Definitions.

Modern rendering: black bile

Layer: paired modern body

Qualification: 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.

by consent

Printed “by consent” (English).

The brain affected secondarily through sympathy with another part

Source: original body

Source wording: Some difference I finde amongst Writers, about the principal part affected in this disease, whether it be the Brain, or Heart, or some other Member. Most are of opinion that it is the Brain: for being a kinde of Dotage, it cannot otherwise be, but that the Brain must be affected, as a similar part, be it by consent or essence, not in his ventricles, or any obstructions in them, for then it would be an Apoplexie, or Epilepsie, as Laurentius well observes,

by essence

Printed “essence” (English).

Affection originating in the part itself, opposed to secondary affection by consent

Source: original body

Source wording: Some difference I finde amongst Writers, about the principal part affected in this disease, whether it be the Brain, or Heart, or some other Member. Most are of opinion that it is the Brain: for being a kinde of Dotage, it cannot otherwise be, but that the Brain must be affected, as a similar part, be it by consent or essence, not in his ventricles, or any obstructions in them, for then it would be an Apoplexie, or Epilepsie, as Laurentius well observes,

cure / relief

Printed “throughly cured” (English).

Completely freed of the disease, distinguished from substantial relief

Source: original body

Source wording: These are those ordinary cautions, which I should think fit to be noted, and he that shall keep them, as Montanus saith, shall surely be much eased, if not throughly cured.

dame melancholy

Printed “dame melancholy” (English).

Personified restraint upon misconduct within consolation

Source: original body

Source wording: If we be honest, ’twas poverty made us so: if we melancholy men be not as bad as he that is worst, ’tis our dame melancholy kept us so:

Original wording: our dame melancholy

Modern rendering: our lady Melancholy

Layer: paired modern body

Qualification: The possessive our belongs to the wider source phrase, not to dame alone.

Defect

Printed “in defect” (English). Citation key: defect.

Printed form, Source wording: in defect

From a deficiency of religion, opposed to the religious excess treated before this subsection. The heading uses Burton’s polemical classification.

Source: original body

Modern rendering: from Deficiency

Layer: paired modern body

divine melancholy

Printed “a divine melancholy” (English).

Favourably valued contemplation and ecstatic spiritual ascent before its abuse

Source: original body

Source wording: Such symptomes are common to those that fast long, are solitary, given to contemplation, over much solitariness and meditation. Not that these things (as I said of fasting) are to be discommended of themselves, but very behovefull in some cases and good: sobriety and contemplation joyn our souls to God, as that heathen Porphyrie can tell us. Extasis is a taste of future happiness, by which we are united unto God, a divine melancholy, a spirituall wing Bonaventure terms it, to lift us up to heaven: But as it is abused, a meer dotage, madness, a cause and symptome of Religious Melancholy.

dotage

Printed “Dotage” (English).

Impairment of a principal mental faculty, such as imagination or reason

Source: original body

Source wording: We properly call that Dotage, as Laurentius interprets it, when some one principal facultie of the minde, as imagination, or reason is corrupted, as all melancholy persons have. It is without a fever, because the humor is most part cold and dry, contrary to putrefaction.

ecstasy

Printed “Extasis” (English).

Ecstatic contemplative union, positively valued here before its abuse

Source: original body

Source wording: Such symptomes are common to those that fast long, are solitary, given to contemplation, over much solitariness and meditation. Not that these things (as I said of fasting) are to be discommended of themselves, but very behovefull in some cases and good: sobriety and contemplation joyn our souls to God, as that heathen Porphyrie can tell us. Extasis is a taste of future happiness, by which we are united unto God, a divine melancholy, a spirituall wing Bonaventure terms it, to lift us up to heaven: But as it is abused, a meer dotage, madness, a cause and symptome of Religious Melancholy.

genius · malus genius → evil spirit · Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 8

Printed “malus genius” (Latin).

Printed form, Original wording: malus genius

Personified melancholy as a malign attendant spirit

Source: original body

Source wording: Besides I might not well refrain, for ubi dolor, ibi digitus, one must needs scratch where it itches. I was not a little offended with this maladie, shall I say my Mistris melancholy, my Ægeria, or my malus genius, & for that cause as he that is stung with a scorpion, I would expel clavum clavo, comfort one sorrow with another, idlenes with idlenes, ut ex viperâ Theriacum, make an Antidote out of that which was the prime cause of my disease.

Modern rendering: evil spirit

Layer: paired modern body

habit / melancholy in habit · Habit → an established condition

Printed “Habit” (English).

Established condition contrasted with a passing state

Source: original body

Source wording: Melancholy, the subject of our present Discourse, is either in Disposition, or Habit. In Disposition, is that transitory Melancholy which goes and comes upon every smal occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the minde, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any wayes opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal & improper sense, we cal him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sowre, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased.

habit / melancholy in habit · habit → an established condition

Printed “habit” (English).

A fixed, enduring disease that has grown over time

Source: original body

Source wording: But all these Melancholy fits, howsoever pleasing at first, or displeasing, violent & tyrannizing over those whom they seize on for the time; yet these fits I say, or men affected, are but improperly so called, because they continue not, but come and go, as by some objects they are moved. This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is an habit, morbus sonticus, or Chronicus, a Chronick or continuate disease, a setled humor, as Aurelianus, and others call it, not errant, but fixed; and as it was long increasing, so now being (pleasant, or painful) grown to an habit, it will hardly be removed.

head melancholy

Printed “Head melancholy” (English).

Kind proceeding from the brain’s own fault

Source: original body

Source wording: The most received division is into three kindes. The first proceeds from the sole fault of the Brain, and is called Head melancholy: the second sympathetically proceeds from the whole body, when the whole temperature is Melancholy: The third ariseth from the Bowels, Liver, Spleen, or Membrane, called Mesenterium named Hypocondriacal, or windy Melancholy, which Laurentius subdivides into three parts, from those three Members, Hepatick, Splenatick, Meseraick.

hypochondriacal melancholy

Printed “Hypocondriacal, or windy Melancholy” (English).

Kind associated with abdominal organs and their action upon the brain

Source: original body

Source wording: The most received division is into three kindes. The first proceeds from the sole fault of the Brain, and is called Head melancholy: the second sympathetically proceeds from the whole body, when the whole temperature is Melancholy: The third ariseth from the Bowels, Liver, Spleen, or Membrane, called Mesenterium named Hypocondriacal, or windy Melancholy, which Laurentius subdivides into three parts, from those three Members, Hepatick, Splenatick, Meseraick.

immaterial melancholy · immateriall → Immaterial melancholy · Subsection 3. The Material of Melancholy · paragraph 33

Printed “immateriall” (English).

Printed form, Original wording: immateriall

A reported spirits-only causal scheme, not ordinary gross humoral material

Source: original body

Source wording: The immateriall or adventitious, acquisite, redundant, unnatural, artificial: which Hercules de Saxonia will have reside in the spirits alone, and to proceed from an hot, cold, dry, moist distemperature, which without matter, alter the Brain and functions of it. Paracelsus wholly rejects and derides this division of four humors and complexions, but our Galenists generally approve of it, subscribing to this opinion of Montanus.

Modern rendering: Immaterial melancholy

Layer: paired modern body

Qualification: The original substantivized adjective has an understood noun; the modern rendering makes melancholy explicit.

Supplied words: melancholy

material melancholy

Printed “materiall” (English).

Melancholy considered as one of the natural bodily humours

Source: original body

Source wording: What this humor is, or whence it proceeds, how it is ingendred in the body, neither Galen, nor any old Writer hath sufficiently discussed, as Iacchinus thinks: the Neotericks cannot agree. Montanus in his consultations, holds Melancholy to be materiall or immateriall: and so doth Arculanus: the materiall is one of the four humors before mentioned, and natural.

melancholia asinina

Printed “Asininam melancholiam” (Latin).

Printed form, Original wording: Asininam melancholiam

Disparaging name for a dull phlegmatic kind

Source: original body

Source wording: For example, if it proceed from fleagme, (which is seldome and not so frequent as the rest) it stirres up dull Symptomes, and a kinde of stupiditie, or impassionate hurt: they are sleepy, saith Savonarola, dull, slow, cold, blockish, ass-like, Asininam melancholiam, Melancthon calls it, they are much given to weeping, and delight in waters, ponds, pooles, rivers, fishing, fowling, &c. (Arnoldus breviar. 1. cap. 18.) They are pale of colour, slothfull, apt to sleep, heavie; much troubled with head-ach, continual meditation, and muttering to themselves;

Modern rendering: Asinine melancholy

Layer: paired modern body

melancholicus ad octo

Printed “melancholicus ad octo” (Latin).

Citation key, Printed form, Original wording: melancholicus ad octo

Melancholic to the eighth degree in an insufficient rhetorical scale

Source: original body

Source wording: To some it is in disposition, to another in habit; and as they write of heat and cold, we may say of this humour, one is melancholicus ad octo, a second two degrees less, a third half way. ’Tis super-particular, sesquialtera, sesquitertia, and superbipartiens tertias, quintas Melancholiæ, &c. all those Geometricall proportions are too little to expresse it.

Modern rendering: melancholic to the eighth degree

Layer: paired modern body

melancholize · melancholizing → melancholizing

Printed “melancholizing” (English).

Experiencing or engaging in melancholy as a claimed source of knowledge

Source: original body

Source wording: Concerning my self, I can peradventure affirm with Marius in Salust, that which others hear or reade of, I felt, and practised my self, they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing, Experto crede Roberto.

melancholize · so to melancholize → to indulge in melancholy like this

Printed “so to melancholize” (English).

Indulge pleasurable solitary fantasy

Source: original body

Source wording: A most incomparable delight it is so to melancholize, and build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose, and strongly imagine they represent, or that they see acted or done: Blandæ quidem ab initio, saith Lemnius, to conceive and meditate of such pleasant things, sometimes, Present, past or to come, as Rhasis speaks.

melancholize · melancholize in corners → brood in corners

Printed “melancholize in corners” (English).

Brood and withdraw from public life after shame or disgrace

Source: original body

Locator qualification: Do not remove bracketed or repeated-page qualifier.; This source group includes repeated printed 96–97 and supplied 98–99; see SUPPLIED_OPENING and SOURCE_DJR_040.

Source wording: It is as forcible a batterer as any of the rest: Many men neglect the tumults of the world, and care not for glory, and yet they are afraid of infamy, repulse, disgrace, (Tul. offic. l. 1.) they can severely contemn pleasure, bear grief indifferently, but they are quite battered and broken with reproach and obloquy: (siquidem vita & fama pari passu ambulant) and are so dejected many times for some publique injury, disgrace, as a box on the ear, by their inferior, to be overcome of their adversary, foiled in the field, to be out in a speech, some foul fact committed or disclosed, &c. that they dare not come abroad all their lives after, but melancholize in corners, and keep in holes.

melancholize · melancholize → sink into melancholy

Printed “melancholize” (English).

The unoccupied imagination works upon itself and deepens melancholy

Source: original body

Source wording: Lugentes custodire solemus (saith Seneca) ne solitudine male utantur; we watch a sorrowfull person, lest he abuse his solitariness, and so should we do a melancholy man; set him about some business, exercise or recreation, which may divert his thoughts, and still keep him otherwise intent; for his phantasie is so restless, operative and quick, that if it be not in perpetuall action, ever employed, it will work upon it self, melancholize, and be carried away instantly, with some fear, jealousie, discontent, suspicion, some vain conceit or other.

melancholy · properly or improperly → strictly or loosely

Printed “properly or improperly” (English).

Collecting strict and loose senses within moral satire

Source: original body

Source wording: That men are so misaffected, melancholy, mad, giddy-headed, hear the testimony of Solomon, Eccl. 2. 12. And I turned to behold wisdom, madness and folly, &c. And ver. 23. All his dayes are sorrow, his travel grief, and his heart taketh no rest in the night. So that take melancholy in what sense you will, properly or improperly, in disposition or habit, for pleasure or for pain, dotage, discontent, fear, sorrow, madnes, for part, or all, truly, or metaphorically, tis all one. Laughter it self is madnes according to Solomon, and as S. Paul hath it, worldly sorrow brings death. The hearts of the sons of men are evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, Eccl. 9. 3.

melancholy · Melancholy → Melancholy

Printed “Melancholy” (English).

Normal cold dry black sour humour with a nutritive and balancing office

Source: original body

Source wording: Melancholy, cold and dry, thick, black, and sowre, begotten of the more fæculent part of nourishment, and purged from the spleen, is a bridle to the other two hot humours, Bloud and Choler, preserving them in the Bloud, and nourishing the bones. These four humors have some analogy with the four Elements, and to the four ages in man.

melancholy · most Melancholy, not all → most melancholy, though not all

Printed “most Melancholy, not all” (English).

Restriction of fear and sorrow to most cases

Source: original body

Source wording: Fear and Sorrow are the true Characters, and inseparable companions of most Melancholy, not all, as Her. de Saxonia, Tract. posthumo de Melancholia, cap. 2. well excepts; for to some it is most pleasant, as to such as laugh most part; some are bold again, and free from all manner of fear and grief, as hereafter shall be declared.

melancholy · mel. equivocations → the different meanings of melancholy

Printed “mel. equivocations” (English).

Different senses gathered by the historical index

Source: original body

Source wording: Melancholy in disposition, mel. equivocations, 11. definition, name, difference, 31 part and parties affected in melancholy, his affection, 32. matter, 34. species or kinds of mel. 35. mel. an hereditary disease, 61. meats causing it, 65,66,67. antecedent causes, particular parts, 174 symptomes of it, 178. they are passionate above measure, humours, 186. melancholy adust symptomes, 192. mixt symptomes of mel. with other diseases, 194. melanch. a cause of jealousie, 631 of despair, 695. melancholy men why witty, 207. why so apt to laugh, weep, swear, blush, ibid. why they see visions, hear strange noyses, speak untaught languages, prophesie, &c. 208,209

melancholy in disposition

Printed “in Disposition” (English).

Passing affective state distinguished from established disease

Source: original body

Source wording: Melancholy, the subject of our present Discourse, is either in Disposition, or Habit. In Disposition, is that transitory Melancholy which goes and comes upon every smal occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the minde, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any wayes opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal & improper sense, we cal him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sowre, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased.

monstrous melancholy

Printed “monstrous melancholy” (English).

A polemical description of atheism or impiety attributed to Melanchthon

Source: original body

Source wording: That grand sin of Atheisme or impietie, Melancthon cals it monstrosam melancholiam, monstrous melancholy; or venenatam melancholiam, poysoned melancholy. A company of Cyclopes or Giants, that war with the gods, as the Poets fained, Antipodes to Christians, that scoffe at all religion, at God himself, deny him and all his attributes, his wisdom, power, providence, his mercy and judgement.

morbus sonticus / morbus chronicus

Printed “morbus sonticus, or Chronicus” (Latin with English conjunction).

Printed form, Original wording: morbus sonticus, or Chronicus

A serious or chronic established disease

Source: original body

Source wording: But all these Melancholy fits, howsoever pleasing at first, or displeasing, violent & tyrannizing over those whom they seize on for the time; yet these fits I say, or men affected, are but improperly so called, because they continue not, but come and go, as by some objects they are moved. This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is an habit, morbus sonticus, or Chronicus, a Chronick or continuate disease, a setled humor, as Aurelianus, and others call it, not errant, but fixed; and as it was long increasing, so now being (pleasant, or painful) grown to an habit, it will hardly be removed.

Modern rendering: a serious or chronic illness

Layer: paired modern body

natural melancholy

Printed “natural” (English).

The normal bodily humour within the four-humour scheme

Source: original body

Source wording: What this humor is, or whence it proceeds, how it is ingendred in the body, neither Galen, nor any old Writer hath sufficiently discussed, as Iacchinus thinks: the Neotericks cannot agree. Montanus in his consultations, holds Melancholy to be materiall or immateriall: and so doth Arculanus: the materiall is one of the four humors before mentioned, and natural.

poisoned melancholy

Printed “poysoned melancholy” (English).

A polemical description of impiety, not a claim here about literal poisoning

Source: original body

Source wording: That grand sin of Atheisme or impietie, Melancthon cals it monstrosam melancholiam, monstrous melancholy; or venenatam melancholiam, poysoned melancholy. A company of Cyclopes or Giants, that war with the gods, as the Poets fained, Antipodes to Christians, that scoffe at all religion, at God himself, deny him and all his attributes, his wisdom, power, providence, his mercy and judgement.

Printed etymological expression Μελαιναχόλη

Printed “Μελαιναχόλη” (Greek).

Printed form, Original wording: Μελαιναχόλη

Printed Greek expression connected by Burton with black choler

Source: original body

Source wording: The Name is imposed from the matter, and Disease denominated from the material cause: as Bruel observes, Μελαγχολία, quasi Μελαιναχόλη, from black Choler. And whether it be a cause or an effect, a Disease, or symptome, let Donatus Altomarus, and Salvianus decide, I will not contend about it. It hath severall Descriptions, Notations, and Definitions.

Modern rendering: black bile

Layer: paired modern body

Qualification: 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.

religious melancholy

Printed “Religious Melancholy” (English).

Religious disorder of which abused contemplation is both cause and symptom

Source: original body

Source wording: Such symptomes are common to those that fast long, are solitary, given to contemplation, over much solitariness and meditation. Not that these things (as I said of fasting) are to be discommended of themselves, but very behovefull in some cases and good: sobriety and contemplation joyn our souls to God, as that heathen Porphyrie can tell us. Extasis is a taste of future happiness, by which we are united unto God, a divine melancholy, a spirituall wing Bonaventure terms it, to lift us up to heaven: But as it is abused, a meer dotage, madness, a cause and symptome of Religious Melancholy.

unnatural melancholy

Printed “unnatural” (English).

Altered or diseased rather than the natural humour, within this disputed classification

Source: original body

Source wording: The immateriall or adventitious, acquisite, redundant, unnatural, artificial: which Hercules de Saxonia will have reside in the spirits alone, and to proceed from an hot, cold, dry, moist distemperature, which without matter, alter the Brain and functions of it. Paracelsus wholly rejects and derides this division of four humors and complexions, but our Galenists generally approve of it, subscribing to this opinion of Montanus.

venenata melancholia

Printed “venenatam melancholiam” (Latin).

Printed form, Original wording: venenatam melancholiam

Poisoned melancholy, a reported polemical name for impiety

Source: original body

Source wording: That grand sin of Atheisme or impietie, Melancthon cals it monstrosam melancholiam, monstrous melancholy; or venenatam melancholiam, poysoned melancholy. A company of Cyclopes or Giants, that war with the gods, as the Poets fained, Antipodes to Christians, that scoffe at all religion, at God himself, deny him and all his attributes, his wisdom, power, providence, his mercy and judgement.

Modern rendering: poisoned melancholy

Layer: paired modern body

whole-body melancholy

Printed “whole body” (English).

The source of a kind of melancholy affecting the brain through the body’s general temperament

Source: original body

Source wording: The most received division is into three kindes. The first proceeds from the sole fault of the Brain, and is called Head melancholy: the second sympathetically proceeds from the whole body, when the whole temperature is Melancholy: The third ariseth from the Bowels, Liver, Spleen, or Membrane, called Mesenterium named Hypocondriacal, or windy Melancholy, which Laurentius subdivides into three parts, from those three Members, Hepatick, Splenatick, Meseraick.

μελαγχολία

Printed “Μελαγχολία” (Greek).

Printed form, Original wording: Μελαγχολία

Greek name in Burton’s etymological explanation through black bile

Source: original body

Source wording: The Name is imposed from the matter, and Disease denominated from the material cause: as Bruel observes, Μελαγχολία, quasi Μελαιναχόλη, from black Choler. And whether it be a cause or an effect, a Disease, or symptome, let Donatus Altomarus, and Salvianus decide, I will not contend about it. It hath severall Descriptions, Notations, and Definitions.

Modern rendering: melancholia

Layer: paired modern body