1 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 311–12; Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 303–52.

² On the early reception of the Anatomy, see Mary Ann Lund, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 196–203; Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 295–9.

³ Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 301–2; Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, 303–4; Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 430–60.

⁴ For the former approach, see, for example, Lawrence A. Babb, Sanity in Bedlam: A Study of Robert Burton’s ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Ann Arbor: Michigan State University Press, 1959); Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘Elizabethan Psychology and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 38 (1977): 373–88; Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); J. B. Bamborough, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Rhonda Blair, Thomas Faulkner, and Nicolas Kiessling, introd. and comm. J. B. Bamborough, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000). For some examples of the latter, which are far more numerous, see Jean Starobinski, ‘La Mélancolie de l’Anatomiste’, Tel Quel, 10 (1962): 21–9; Ruth A. Fox, The Tangled Chain: The Structure of Disorder in ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1976); W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press), 135–61; Devon L. Hodges, Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 107–23; Martin Heusser, The Gilded Pill: A Study of the Reader–Writer Relationship in ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1987); R. Grant Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy’, English Literary History 68, (2001): 593–613.

⁵ Henceforth, I shall be referring to the text of the Anatomy by Partition, Section, Member, and Subsection (although references to the preface [‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’] will be indicated by ‘DJR’), and then (unless specified otherwise) to the volume and page numbers in The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Blair, Faulkner, and Kiessling.

⁶ See Richard L. Nochimson, ‘Studies in the Life of Robert Burton’, Yearbook of English Studies, 4 (1974): 85–11 (98).

⁷ Kathryn Murphy, ‘Jesuits and Philosophasters: Robert Burton’s Response to the Gunpowder Plot’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 1 (2009): 109–28, where the play is presented as an attack on Roman Catholic scholasticism and Jesuitism.

⁸ See Nicolas Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988).

⁹ His claims that ‘[i]t was not mine intent to prostitute my Muse in English, or to divulge secreta Minervæ, but to have exposed this more contract in Latin’, but was forced to write in the vernacular by ‘our mercentary Stationers’, should probably be treated with suspicion, especially given his ‘chiefe motives’ in writing: ‘The generalitie of the Disease, the necessitie of the Cure, and the commodity or common good that will arise to all men by the knowledge of it’ (DJR, vol. 1, 16, 23).

¹⁰ Nevertheless, the Anatomy is described as an ‘antihumanist’ satire in Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam, 135.

¹¹ Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, 19–22, 26–8, 98–138, 178, 197–203. See also Murphy, ‘Jesuits and Philosophasters’.

¹² On medical thought in this era see Ian Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Le monde et les hommes selon les médécins de la Renaissance (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2006). For useful summaries of the contemporary intellectual environment in Europe generally, see Richard Tuck, ‘The Institutional Setting’ and Stephen Menn, ‘The Intellectual Setting’, both in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, eds., The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9–32, 33–86. On late Elizabethan England in particular, see the case-study in D. C. Andersson, Lord Henry Howard (1540–1614): An Elizabethan Life (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2009), especially the comments at 4–8.

¹³ A significant strand of recent scholarship has tended to agree with the judgement of Gardiner, ‘Elizabethan Psychology and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy’, that the intellectual framework of the Anatomy is fundamentally coherent; see, for instance, Christopher Tilmouth, ‘Burton’s “Turning Picture”: Argument and Anxiety in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, Review of English Studies, 56 (2005): 524–49. But cf., for example, the reading in Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge’.

¹⁴ See, for example, Jean Robert Simon, Robert Burton et ‘l’Anatomie de la mélancolie’ (Paris: Didier, 1964), 422; Fox, Tangled Chain, 22–7.

¹⁵ David Renaker, ‘Robert Burton and Ramist Method’, Renaissance Quarterly, 24 (1971): 210–20 (212–13); see also K. J. Höltgen, ‘Robert Burtons Anatomy of Melancholy: Struktur und Gattungsproblematik im Licht der Ramistischen Logik’, Anglia, 94 (1976): 388–403 (396, 402–3); and Jonathan Sawday, ‘Shapeless Elegance: Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Knowledge’, in Neil Rhodes, ed., English Renaissance Prose: History, Language and Politics (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaisance Texts & Studies, 1997), 173–202 (199–202). On Ramist method see Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958) and Neal Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press), 129–44.

¹⁶ For a more detailed discussion see Angus Gowland, ‘Rhetorical Structure and Function in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, Rhetorica, 19 (2001): 1–48 (21–7).

¹⁷ Cf. Fox, Tangled Chain, 31, interpreting the ‘wholly illogical’ elements of the index. On the relatively undeveloped character of the humanist index at this time see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 235.

¹⁸ Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy. What it is, with all the kindes, causes, symptomes, prognostickes, and severall cures of it. In three maine partitions with their severall sections, members, and subsections. Philosophically, medicinally, historically, opened and cut up. By Democritus Junior (Oxford: Henry Cripps, 1621), 72. The first edition ended with ‘The Conclusion of the Author to the Reader’ (sigs. D d d^r–D d d 3^v); this did not appear in later editions, but much of its content was subsequently relocated to the beginning of the satirical preface. Burton’s pre-emptive criticisms of hostile readers belong to a humanist tradition extending at least as far back to Erasmus’s letter to Maarten van Dorp (Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly and Letter to Maarten Van Dorp, trans. Betty Radice and ed. A. H. T. Levi [London: Penguin Classics, rev. edn. 1993] 148–60), and More’s prefatory letter to Peter Giles in Utopia (Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 6–7).

¹⁹ On the imagery of the frontispiece, see Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-page in England, 1550–1660 (London, Henley, and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 190–200; E. Patricia Vicari, The View from Minerva’s Tower: Learning and Imagination in ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 209–212; William R. Mueller, ‘Robert Burton’s Frontispiece’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 64 (1949): 1074–88.

²⁰ There has been little sustained discussion of these parergic elements in the Anatomy, but see now Lund, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion, 24–50.

²¹ See, most recently, Harold C. Hurley, The Sources and Traditions of Milton’s ‘L’ Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), chap. 3.

²² Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy [1621], sig. D d d 3^v.

²³ The second edition omitted his name entirely, but referred to his birthplace and family home in Leicestershire (2.2.3.1, vol. 2, 224), with all subsequent versions presenting his portrait and family arms on the frontispiece.

²⁴ See Jean Jehasse, ‘Démocrite et la renaissance de la critique’, Etudes seizièmistes offertes à Monsieur le Professeur V.-L. Saulnier, ed. R. Aulotte et al. (Geneva: Droz, 1980); Thomas Rütten, Demokrit—Lachender Philosoph und Sanguinischer Melancholiker: Eine pseudohippokratische Geschichte (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Cathy Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton: The Laughing Philosopher in the Early Modern Period’, in Ian Hunter, Stephen Gaukroger, and Conal Condren, eds., The Persona of the Philosopher in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 90–112. On the associations of Democritus with atomistic natural philosophy see Christoph Lüthy, ‘The Fourfold Democritus on the Stage of Early Modern Science’, Isis, 91 (2000): 443–79.

²⁵ See J. Max Patrick, ‘Robert Burton’s Utopianism’, Philological Quarterly, 27 (1948): 345–58; J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 85–104; Jean Starobinski, ‘ “Démocrite parle”: L’utopie mélancolique de Robert Burton’, Le Débat, 29 (1984): 49–72; Robert Applebaum, Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 81–7; and Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, 205–94, esp. 261–5.

²⁶ See, for instance, Jean Delumeau, ‘L’ âge d’or de la mélancolie’, L’histoire, 42 (1982): 28–37; Angus Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, Past & Present, 191 (2006): 77–120. The classic study of Renaissance medical theories of melancholy is Raymond Klibanksy, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Thomas Nelson, 1964), but see also Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991), and Noel Brann, The Debate over the Origin of Genius during the Italian Renaissance: The Theories of Supernatural Frenzy and Natural Melancholy in Accord and in Conflict on the Threshold of the Scientific Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2002).

²⁷ See Burton’s generally accurate discussion at 1.1.3.1–3, I, pp. 162–8, where it is precisely defined as a disease of the imagination, materially caused by black bile, and typically yielding the symptoms of groundless fear and sorrow.

²⁸ The view of J. B. Bamborough, expressed in his introduction to the Clarendon edition (I, xxxiii), and his commentary at IV, 51—broadly following Sir William Osler’s description of the work as ‘a medical treatise’: ‘Robert Burton: The Man, his Book, his Library’, in A Way of Life and Other Selected Writings of Sir William Osler (New York: Dover Books, 1958), 90.

²⁹ See, for instance, the views in Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, 332–50; Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 430–60; and Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge’.

³⁰ The quotation is from Juvenal, Satura I.30.

³¹ Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy [1621], sigs. D d d I^r–D d d 3^v.

³² An important humanistic locus for the creative ‘digestion’ of commonplaces is found in Erasmus’s Dialogus Ciceronianus (1528): see Desiderius Erasmus, The Ciceronian: A Dialogue on the Ideal Latin Style’, trans. Betty I. Knott in Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 28: Literary and Educational Writings 6, ed. A. H. T. Levi (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 402, 442.

³³ Justus Lipsius, Politica: Six Books of Politics or Political Instruction, ed. and trans. Jan Waszink (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004), 233–9. See also Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin Books, 1991), III.12, 1197.

³⁴ Montaigne, Essays, I.25, 166; also III.12, 1196. According to Montaigne, the erudition of Lipsius’s Politica, as well as Lelio Capilupi’s Centones ex Virgilio (1555), was itself revelatory of their authors’ ‘wits’ (I.26, 166). But cf. the critical thrust of the discussion of quotation at III.12, 1196–7 and III.13, 1212. See Francis Goyet, ‘A propos de “Ces pastissages de lieux communs” (Le rôle des notes de lecture dans la genèse des Essais’), Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, 5–6 (1986): 11–26 and 7–8 (1987): 9–30.

³⁵ See the classic readings in Joan Webber, The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 80–114; and Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 113–48.

³⁶ See Gowland, ‘Rhetorical Structure and Function’, 2, 47.

³⁷ See also Burton’s reference to ‘my melancholy spaniels quest’ in the ‘Digression of Ayre’ (2.2.3.1, II, 58), indicating that here, at least, his writing is to be taken as the expression of his melancholic imagination.

³⁸ For some more or less comprehensive studies see Babb, Sanity in Bedlam; Vicari, The View from Minvera’s Tower; and Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy. There has been a recent revival of interest in the political, and religious-political, aspects of the work: see, for example, Douglas Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 116–49; Adam Kitzes, The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton (London: Routledge, 2006), 123–50; Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 47–102; and Lund, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion, 51–76.

³⁹ Here his description of the ‘wonderfull effects and power’ of this faculty remains—just—within the province of the Aristotelian psychology he has elaborated earlier in the book, although his catalogue of the ways in which the imagination is responsible for incubus, ecstatic derangement, visions, demonic illusions, lycanthropy, bewitchment, a host of vices, and even death draws upon a heterogeneous range of sources and asserts that such phenomena involve occult and supernatural forces that supervene upon the internal physiological processes typically prioritized by learned Galenists (see also 1.3.3.1, 424–7).

⁴⁰ See also the discussion at 2.2.4.1, II, 90–1.

⁴¹ Erasmus, Praise of Folly and Letter to Maarten Van Dorp, 141. At DJR, I, 111, Burton quotes from Erasmus’s letter, as well as the Horatian dictum (‘Quamvis ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?’) which immediately precedes the Lucretian passage in question.

⁴² Montaigne, Essays III.11, 1165. In the Anatomy, see especially the terminology employed in the generally sceptical ‘Digression of the Ayre’ (2.2.3.1, II, 33–58) and the conclusion to the discussion of chemical preparatives at 2.5.1.3, II, 243–4.

⁴³ As is emphasized in Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xiii, Renaissance scepticism was fundamentally psychological, rather than epistemological.

⁴⁴ See also the discussions of idleness at 1.2.2.6, 243 and the dangers of reading at 2.2.6.2, 107–8 and 3.4.2.3, 414.

⁴⁵ See Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 182–8.

⁴⁶ Brian Vickers, ed., Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), II, 238–9.

⁴⁷ Vicari, The View from Minerva’s Tower; John Miller, ‘Plotting a Cure: The Reader in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy’, Prose Studies, 20 (1997): 97–101; Lund, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion.

⁴⁸ ‘He speaks stones, and readers should beware in case he bashes their brains out with them’: Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Köln, 1533), sig. aa iir, itself an adaptation (as noted by the editor in Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. A. R. Shilleto [London and New York: George Bell & Sons, 1893]), of Plautus, Aulularia II. l–2.