1620 In the epilogue to the manuscript of his great work, Robert Burton inscribed, with a terseness atypical of his usual style: ‘From my Studie in Christ Church Oxon. Decemb. 5 1620.’ The work he had finished was: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Historically, Opened and Cut up.
The contents are as sprawling and ambitiously wide-ranging as the title. Burton published a first version in 1621 that ran to 353,369 words. Three years later he published an enlarged version comprising 423,983 words. Four more editions followed. No classic text is more fluid and, until computer typesetting (as superintended by Thomas Faulkner – a scholarly life’s work), no complete Anatomy has been compiled.
The Anatomy has always posed insoluble problems for the Dewey Decimal Library Classification system. What exactly is it? It purports to be a work of psychology. But its contents are a compendium of learned knowledge and reference – an anatomy less of medicine than of the well-stored, not to say over-stuffed, Renaissance mind. Librarians usually shelve it in ‘English Literature’. Arguably it is itself the condensation of a whole library. It was, Samuel Johnson (a notorious slugabed) recorded, the only book which ever inspired him to get up early. The style – which modulates between the Ciceronian (expansive) and Senecan (epigrammatic) models – qualifies The Anatomy as a genuine, if eccentric, work of literature.
Burton describes his titular subject in the third paragraph of his first ‘Partition’, or section:
Great travail is created for all men, and an heavy yoke on the sons of Adam, from the day that they go out of their mother’s womb, unto that day they return to the mother of all things. Namely, their thoughts, and fear of their hearts, and their imagination of things they wait for, and the day of death. From him that sitteth in the glorious throne, to him that sitteth beneath in the earth and ashes; from him that is clothed in blue silk and weareth a crown, to him that is clothed in simple linen. Wrath, envy, trouble, and unquietness, and fear of death, and rigour, and strife, and such things come to both man and beast, but sevenfold to the ungodly. All this befalls him in this life, and peradventure eternal misery in the life to come.
A number of contemporary admirers have seen Burton’s world-weariness, and his fascination with what subsequent medicine labels ‘depression’, as psychotherapeutically perceptive and ahead of its time. It is not impossible to align The Anatomy with the arguments in Freud’s essay ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’. The more we know, the more comfortable our circumstances become (Burton’s condition of life as an Oxford vicar and ‘student’ – i.e. fellow – of Christ Church was eminently comfortable), the unhappier we become. There are virtually no events recorded in his long, scholarly life.
It is, however, the sheer eccentricity of The Anatomy that perennially beguiles. The prescription, for example, for the cure of ‘Love- Melancholy’ in ladies:
Those opposite meats which ought to be used are cucumbers, melons, purslane, water-lilies, rue, woodbine, ammi, lettuce, which Lemnius so much commends, lib. 2, cap. 42. and Mizaldus hort. med. to this purpose; vitex, or agnus castus before the rest, which, saith Magninus, hath a wonderful virtue in it. Those Athenian women, in their solemn feasts called Thesmopheries, were to abstain nine days from the company of men, during which time, saith Aelian, they laid a certain herb, named hanea, in their beds, which assuaged those ardent flames of love, and freed them from the torments of that violent passion. See more in Porta, Matthiolus, Crescentius lib. 5. &c., and what every herbalist almost and physician hath written, cap. de Satyriasi et Priapismo; Rhasis amongst the rest.
Preferable, perhaps, to the modern cold shower.