From the book
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Robert Burton · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordPlague and pestilence can name devastating disease or an outbreak, but plague also means a calamity, torment or destructive person.
- In the Anatomy of MelancholyThe physical catastrophe is both collective and particular.
- In this editionThe modern column makes these shifts visible without abolishing the shared image: plague becomes “torment” in the poem, “scourge” in the final consolation, and plague as a verb becomes “afflict.”
- A place to readSolitude as the speaker’s personal torment.
Meaning
Plague and pestilence can name devastating disease or an outbreak, but plague also means a calamity, torment or destructive person. To plague is to afflict. Pestilent and pestiferous can describe disease-bearing or deadly conditions, yet also pernicious books, passions or relationships. Latin pestis and its forms move across the same broad field of destruction: a plague, a scourge or a ruinous agent. The local object and agent must decide the sense; a medical occurrence is not automatically an identifiable modern pathogen, and a metaphorical plague need not imply contagion.
Use in the book
The physical catastrophe is both collective and particular. Burton places plague among epidemic diseases and repeatedly joins it with war, famine and inundation as a threat to communities. In the air passage, violent or unseasonable atmospheric conditions produce epidemic disease; Cairo and Constantinople provide reported examples with enormous death totals. The numbers are transmitted claims. In the medical causal account, plague can also precede melancholy: Burton attributes that position to Galen beside other authors' examples of prolonged fever and other illnesses. This is a historical account of disease succession, not a claim that every later sadness is plague itself.
The language is inseparable from Burton's account of affliction and responsibility. Sins are said to draw “plagues & miseries” upon humanity, and the scriptural pestilence is sent as correction that its recipients refuse. When God can “plague us by his Creatures,” the creations are instruments: God is the acting power, while sun, moon, stars and weather serve as means. One must not silently make those instruments independent authors of the punishment. The plague accusation against Domitian also shows why the editor's qualification matters: the cited account describes an anticipated accusation he stopped, whereas Burton's paraphrase makes it sound delivered.
The Athens plague supplies a contrasting argumentative use. Burton reports people concluding that worship makes no difference because good and bad perish alike. It occurs among objections about providence and Scripture, not as Burton's own endorsed theological conclusion. Elsewhere the same outbreak, through Thucydides, supports a medical limitation: what benefits one patient can harm another, so there is no universal medicine. The outbreak is common to the examples; their inferences differ, one exposing an irreligious argument under discussion, the other opposing indiscriminate treatment.
Other plague stories concern knowledge and response. The supposed encounter with an infected man is expressly qualified: the man did not actually have plague. Burton introduces the ensuing death as something he has heard, in a set of claims about imagination, then relates another person allegedly made ill by the thought of plague. Those anecdotes do not establish transmission. In the treatment discussion, authorities who hush up an outbreak become an analogy for patients who delay acknowledging illness. Burton interweaves civic defence and disease, and says he cannot recall the city. Neither the city's identity nor a documented outbreak should be invented to complete his exemplum.
Plague's force as destructive agency drives the political satire. Conquerors are pestes of humanity, no less ruinous than flood or fire; the same passage condemns their public honour and deification. Litigious lawyers are an “unsensible plague,” an unnoticed public evil, and “not the parents, but the plagues” of the country. The contrast deliberately turns supposed civic protectors into civic destroyers. Anger likewise becomes a plague whose harms extend beyond the individual to towns, families and kingdoms. In none of these uses does the metaphor diagnose a biological illness in the people attacked.
The same severity can contract to one person's experience. The introductory poem calls solitude “my sole plague,” now misery rather than its earlier delight. Catullus's consuming love is a pestem which the speaker asks to have torn away; Burton follows with his own English “plague.” In the practical counsel about destructive company, he transfers a plague-flight formula to escape from people who torment a vulnerable person: leave quickly, go far, return slowly. This is an explicit analogy, not a new treatment claim about epidemic disease.
The religious superlative is intentionally expansive: superstition becomes “the most pestilent of all plagues,” supposedly wider and longer-lasting than physical calamities because its terror reaches eternal punishment. The later consolation changes perspective again: what the distressed person regards as an insupportable plague can be read as divine mercy, temporal ruin averting final ruin. These are opposed evaluative uses within theological argument, not quantities of suffering that the book has measured.
Related entries
Air, War and peace, and Commonwealth explain the physical and political settings. Hospital owns pest-houses and institutional provision. Cause distinguishes agent from instrument. Compare Epidemical, Contagion and infection, and Disease and sickness.
Explained vocabulary: Additional Terms.
Places to read
- The Author’s Summary of Melancholy, in Dialogue · paragraph 55Solitude as the speaker’s personal torment.
- Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 7Conquerors as Latin pestes, comparable to flood and fire.
- Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 9Public honour falsely bestowed on humanity’s plague.
- Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 10Destroyers and executioners called deadly plagues.
- Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 25An unnoticed civic plague in the satire on lawyers.
- In Considering Diseases: Section 1, Member 1 · paragraph 12Plague classified among epidemic diseases.
- Human Excellence, the Fall, Miseries and Infirmities; Their Causes · paragraph 13Plagues and miseries explained as consequences of sin.
- Human Excellence, the Fall, Miseries and Infirmities; Their Causes · paragraph 16Pestilence as refused correction, with the Domitian example.
- Human Excellence, the Fall, Miseries and Infirmities; Their Causes · paragraph 29Atmospheric causes and attributed outbreak totals.
- Member 3 Subsection 1. The Definition of Melancholy Its Name and Distinctions · paragraph 10Pestilential fever distinguished from the stated feverless definition of melancholy.
- Section 2 Member 1 Subsection 1 Causes of Melancholy God as a Cause · paragraph 12God afflicting through creatures used as instruments.
- Subsection 2. The Power of Imagination · paragraph 24The expressly uninfected man in the imagination anecdote.
- Subsection 9. Anger as a Cause · paragraph 36Anger compared with the most costly public plague.
- Subsection 9. Anger as a Cause · paragraph 37Pestiferous as destructive in an adapted litany.
- Member 5 Subsection 1 Immediate, Internal, Antecedent and Proximate Causes, and How the Body Acts Upon the Mind · paragraph 57Plague named as a preceding cause of melancholy.
- Subsection 2. Concerning the Patient · paragraph 28Hushing up an outbreak as an analogy for delayed acknowledgement.
- Subsection 2 Help From Friends Through Counsel and Comfort Gentle and Harsh Methods Ingenious Devices Reassurance Changes in the Way of Life and Removal of Troubling Objects and So Forth · paragraph 15The destructive company from which departure is urged.
- Subsection 2 Help From Friends Through Counsel and Comfort Gentle and Harsh Methods Ingenious Devices Reassurance Changes in the Way of Life and Removal of Troubling Objects and So Forth · paragraph 16A plague-flight formula transferred to escaping mockery.
- Subsection 5 Alteratives and Cordials That Strengthen the Body, Disperse the Remaining Matter and Improve the Temperament · paragraph 9The Athens plague and the rejection of universal medicines.
- Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind Good and Bad Signs and So Forth · paragraph 52Latin love-plague verses assigned by the editor to Catullus.
- Member 4 Subsection 1 Symptoms or Signs of Love Melancholy in Body and Mind Good and Bad Signs and So Forth · paragraph 53Burton’s separate English rendering of the plague image.
- Prevention Before or After Marriage: Plato’s Community of Wives; Marrying a Courtesan; Love Potions; Brothels; Marrying Someone Equal in Age and Fortune, From a Good Family, Well Educated and of Good Standing; Treating Wives Well; and So On · paragraph 27A ruinous match called pestilent.
- General Symptoms: Love of Their Own Sect; Hatred of All Other Religions; Obstinacy and Ill Temper; Readiness to Undergo Any Danger or Adversity for It; Martyrs; Blind Zeal and Blind Obedience; Fasts and Vows; Belief in Incredible and Impossible Things. Particular Symptoms Among Pagans, Muslims, Jews and Christians; and Among Christians, Heretics Old and New, Schismatics, Scholastic Theologians, Prophets, Enthusiasts and So On · paragraph 33Superstition as the most pestilent of plagues.
- General Symptoms: Love of Their Own Sect; Hatred of All Other Religions; Obstinacy and Ill Temper; Readiness to Undergo Any Danger or Adversity for It; Martyrs; Blind Zeal and Blind Obedience; Fasts and Vows; Belief in Incredible and Impossible Things. Particular Symptoms Among Pagans, Muslims, Jews and Christians; and Among Christians, Heretics Old and New, Schismatics, Scholastic Theologians, Prophets, Enthusiasts and So On · paragraph 34The theological claim of wider extent and duration.
- Member 2 Subsection 1 Religious Melancholy From Deficiency: Those Affected—Epicures, Atheists, Hypocrites, the Worldly and Complacent, Carnalists, All Impious People, Impenitent Sinners, and Others · paragraph 8Context: unequal fortune as an objection about providence.
- Member 2 Subsection 1 Religious Melancholy From Deficiency: Those Affected—Epicures, Atheists, Hypocrites, the Worldly and Complacent, Carnalists, All Impious People, Impenitent Sinners, and Others · paragraph 9Plague’s indiscriminate deaths interpreted by the irreligious.
- Member 2 Subsection 1 Religious Melancholy From Deficiency: Those Affected—Epicures, Atheists, Hypocrites, the Worldly and Complacent, Carnalists, All Impious People, Impenitent Sinners, and Others · paragraph 10The ensuing objections confirm the reported argumentative voice.
- Member 2 Subsection 1 Religious Melancholy From Deficiency: Those Affected—Epicures, Atheists, Hypocrites, the Worldly and Complacent, Carnalists, All Impious People, Impenitent Sinners, and Others · paragraph 48A pestilent book within reported accusations of atheism.
- Treatment of Despair Through Medicine, Good Counsel, Consolation, and So On · paragraph 27Affliction as an effective corrective.
- Treatment of Despair Through Medicine, Good Counsel, Consolation, and So On · paragraph 28An unbearable plague reinterpreted as mercy.
In this edition
The modern column makes these shifts visible without abolishing the shared image: plague becomes “torment” in the poem, “scourge” in the final consolation, and plague as a verb becomes “afflict.” Pestiferous passions become “destructive passions,” while the fever remains “pestilential.” The same family does not therefore demand the same English replacement in every setting.
The edition also distinguishes Burton's language from the authorities he recasts. The love-plague verses are Catullus, though Burton's margin says Ovid. The description of Meroe's relationship as a “pestilent match” compresses and alters Apuleius, whose checked phrase concerns a lasting, ruinous relationship. Mersenne's report of a “pestilent Book” does not establish that Burton read any particular surviving Three Impostors text. The adjective is a judgement of pernicious influence, not evidence for the bibliographical or medical facts implied by a hasty reading.
plague; Pestilence
Devastating disease or an outbreak, here the subject of a religious corrective example.
Original wording: “Pestilence he hath sent”
Modern wording: “He has sent pestilence”
The pronoun refers to God in the scriptural argument; the force is punitive or corrective disease. The term alone does not establish a present-day microbial identification.
Editorial access forms: pestilence; plague. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.
Further checked attestations: the passage: “dye of the plague”.
plague us
Afflict or punish us.
Original wording: “he can plague us by his Creatures”
Modern wording: “He can afflict us through his creations”
The subject is God and the creatures are instruments. The verb is wider than causing the specific disease called plague.
Editorial access forms: plagued; to plague. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.
pestes mortalium
Destructive agents or scourges of humanity.
Original wording: “Non minores fuere pestes mortalium”
Modern wording: “They were no less a plague to humanity”
The plural refers to Alexander and Philip in the reported Senecan judgement, which Burton extends to conquerors. Persons become the destructive plague, rather than its sufferers.
Editorial access forms: pestes; political scourges. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.
unsensible plague
An unnoticed or unperceived public evil.
Original wording: “an unsensible plague”
Modern wording: “an unnoticed plague”
The satirical object is the proliferating legal profession. Unsensible concerns failure to perceive the harm, not a plague lacking bodily sensation.
Editorial access forms: insensible plague. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.
pestilent Fever
A pestilential fever in which melancholy-like disturbance may occur.
Original wording: “a pestilent Fever”
Modern wording: “a pestilential fever”
Burton excludes this febrile case from the “without an ague” definition under examination. It is not a synonym for all melancholy.
Editorial access forms: pestilential fever. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.
pestiferous perturbations
Destructive passions or emotional disturbances.
Original wording: “pestiferous perturbations”
Modern wording: “destructive passions”
The adapted litany asks deliverance from anger and related destructive inward forces. The adjective describes harmful power rather than literal epidemic transmission.
Editorial access forms: pestiferous. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.
my sole plague
My single overriding torment.
Original wording: “’Tis my sole plague to be alone”
Modern wording: “Being alone is my one great torment”
Solitude now brings misery in the poem’s reversal. Sole means one or only here, while plague names the speaker’s affliction.
Editorial access forms: personal plague. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.
pestem
A plague or consuming affliction, here love.
Original wording: “Eripite hanc pestem perniciemque mihi”
Modern wording: “Tear this plague, this ruin, away from me”
The accusative noun is the thing the speaker asks to have removed. The editor attributes the verse to Catullus, correcting the margin’s Ovid; Burton’s English rendering follows separately.
Editorial access forms: pestis; love-plague. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.
citò, longè, tardè
Quickly, far away, slowly: departure, distance and delayed return.
Original wording: “citò, longè, tardè”
Modern wording: “quickly, far away, slowly”
This is a phrase record for the plague-flight formula, applied here to escaping malicious company. The subsequent English assigns each adverb its action.
Editorial access forms: cito longe tarde. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.
omnium pestium pestilentissima superstitio
Superstition called the most pestilent of all plagues.
Original wording: “omnium pestium pestilentissima superstitio”
Modern wording: “superstition, the most pestilent of all plagues”
Pestium is “of plagues”; pestilentissima is the superlative qualifying superstition. The comparison expresses Burton’s theological rhetoric of severity and extent.
Editorial access forms: pestium; pestilentissima. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.
pestilent (match or book)
Pernicious, ruinous or intolerably harmful.
Original wording: “a pestilent match”
Modern wording: “a pestilent match”
The phrase condemns a relationship in Burton’s argument about unequal matches. It is his compressed recasting of Apuleius, not proof that the relationship carries disease. The book example applies harmfulness to religious influence.
Editorial access forms: pestilent. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.
Further checked attestations: the passage: “that pestilent Book”.
insupportable plague
An affliction felt to be unbearable, reinterpreted as a corrective scourge.
Original wording: “such an insupportable plague”
Modern wording: “so unbearable a scourge”
The judgement belongs first to the sufferer’s perspective; Burton then gives it a consolatory religious interpretation. The two evaluations must not be collapsed.
Editorial access forms: unbearable scourge. These are lookup aids, not additional claims of printed attestation.