Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading 'The Anatomy of Melancholy'

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M e l a nc holy, M e dic i n e a n d R e l igion i n E a r ly Mode r n E ngl a n d

The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, is one of the ­greatest works of early modern English prose writing, yet it has received little substantial literary criticism in recent years. This study situates Robert Burton’s complex work within three related contexts: religious, medical and literary/rhetorical. Analysing Burton’s claim that his text should have curative effects on his melancholic readership, it examines the authorial construction of the reading process in the context of other early modern writing, both canonical and non-canonical, providing a new approach towards the ­emerging field of the history of reading. Lund responds to Burton’s assertion that melancholy is an affliction of body and soul which requires both a spiritual and a corporal cure, exploring the theological complexion of Burton’s writing in relation to English religious discourse of the early seventeenth century, and the status of his work as a medical text. m a r y a n n l u n d is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Leicester. She has research interests in early modern prose, religion and medicine, and is the editor of volume 12 of The Complete Sermons of John Donne.

M e l a ncholy, M e dici n e a n d R e l igion i n E a r ly Mode r n E ngl a n d Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy M a ry A n n Lu n d

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521190503 © Mary Ann Lund 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN-13

978-0-511-67334-4

eBook (EBL)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-19050-3

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my parents, Clare and John

Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations A Note on Citation

page ix xi xii

Introduction  Zisca’s Drum: Reading and Cure Melancholy: subject and form The reader in history

1

9 13

Chapter 1 Imagining Readings

24

Chapter 2  The Cure of Despair: Reading the End of The Anatomy of Melancholy

51

Gilded pills ‘Whosoever thou art’? Nashe and Montaigne on reading

27 33 45

Burton and his English sources Burton and Hemmingius Burton, predestination and the English Church

Chapter 3   Printed Therapeutics: The Anatomy of Melancholy and Early Modern Medical Writing Latin medical writing Vernacular medical writing The Anatomy as medical text Literary therapeutics ‘Exercise rectified’

Chapter 4  The Whole Physician

52 60 67

77

78 86 92 96 104

112

Spiritual physic Religious melancholy Burton’s flexible text Reading remedies

114 118 125 132

vii

viii

Contents

Chapter 5  Speaking out of Experience

138

Chapter 6  The Structure of Melancholy: From Cause to Cure

167

Conclusion Bibliography Index

196 204 221

‘Experto crede ROBERTO’ ‘Going down themselves into the deep’ The melancholy Democritus Curative Christian satire? The origins of melancholy Against beneficial melancholy Cause and cure, law and gospel A self-help book?

139 146 152 158 168 175 180 188

Acknowledgements

My work on this book began at St Peter’s College, Oxford, and was completed at Mansfield College, Oxford; both places have provided me with a very happy working environment, and many kind colleagues whom I would like to thank warmly. I am grateful for funding in earlier stages of this project from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the English Faculty of the University of Oxford. I have been assisted innumerable times by staff at various libraries, and particular thanks are due to librarians at the Bodleian (especially Duke Humfrey’s), Brasenose College, Christ Church and Lincoln College, Oxford. I am indebted to my doctoral supervisor, Robin Robbins, for his advice, knowledge and his scholarly example, and to my examiners, A. D. Nuttall and Stephen Clucas, for their rigorous readings of my work and their many useful suggestions for improvement. Numerous people have helped me as I worked on this book, from advice about specific queries to enjoyable discussions and general encouragement: I would like to thank particularly J. B. Bamborough, Neville Brown, Eric Carlson, Mary Clapinson, Leif Dixon, T. F. Earle, Peter McCullough, Dominic Oliver, M. A. Screech, Eric Southworth, Philip West and Abigail Williams. Noël Sugimura and Kathryn Murphy both bravely read drafts of this book, and helped me with it tremendously: thanks to both for their generous and astute comments, and for their friendship. I am grateful to Sarah Stanton at Cambridge University Press for all her guidance, and to her colleagues, especially Rebecca Jones. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the two anonymous readers who took such care in their assessment of this book, and whose suggestions have improved it in countless ways. Chapter 2 is a revised version of ‘Reading and the Cure of Despair in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, Studies in Philology 105 (2008), 533–58. Chapter  4 is a revised version of ‘Robert Burton the Spiritual Physician: Religion and Medicine in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, Review of English Studies 57 (2006), 665–83. I am grateful to both journals for ix

x

Acknowledgements

permission to reproduce material from these articles. I would also like to thank the Principal and Fellows of Brasenose College, University of Oxford, and the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, for permission to quote manuscript marginalia from their copies of the Anatomy. This book is dedicated to my parents, who have supported my endlessly continuing education with interest, patience, wise advice and love. My friends have sustained and cheered me, making my time working on this project all the happier. Finally and above all, Gareth Wood has shared all this from the beginning, supported me with love and real understanding, and endured much wittering on the subject of Burton and a great deal else: my sincerest thanks.

Abbreviations

ODNB   – Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (www.oxforddnb.com) OED   – Oxford English Dictionary (www.oed.com) P&P  – Past & Present PQ  – Philological Quarterly RES  – Review of English Studies (new series) RQ  – Renaissance Quarterly

xi

A Note on Citation

All quotations from the Anatomy, unless otherwise stated, are from the following edition: The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000). References to the text of the Anatomy are incorporated parenthetically in the text, by volume and page number. This edition is described throughout as the Oxford edition; all other material from it (appendices, textual notes, etc.) is referred to in footnotes, by volume and page number. For ease of reading, I have incorporated translations of Latin phrases in square brackets immediately after the Latin. Translations are taken from the commentary (vols. IV–VI) in the above edition, unless indicated otherwise. The Anatomy is divided into Partitions, Sections, Members and Subsections. I capitalise these terms when referring to them to indicate that they are formal structuring devices. When referring to early modern authors’ names, I follow the forms Burton typically uses (as listed in the ‘Biobibliography’ of the Oxford edition, vol. VI) but also give vernacular alternatives in the first full citation, e.g. Montanus (Giambattista da Monte). In all quotations from early modern texts, the letters u/v and i/j are standardised. All quotations from the Bible are from the King James Version, unless indicated otherwise.

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I n t roduc t ion

Zisca’s Drum: Reading and Cure

And as that great captaine Zisca would have a drumme made of his skinne when he was dead, because he thought the very noise of it would put his enimies to flight, I doubt not, but that these following lines, when they shall be recited, or hereafter read, will drive away Melancholy (though I be gone) as much as Zisca’s drumme could terrify his foes.  (I, 24)

In the preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton imagines his text as a tool to combat melancholy in fearsome fashion. Like the drum of Zisca (Jan Žižka), the famous fourteenth-century Hussite military commander, his ‘lines’ take on power when they are activated, by being spoken aloud or read silently. Burton probably found the example of Zisca in John Florio’s translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (1603), among a collection of stories about leaders whose bodies were used as talismans in battle, and his choice of this story creates an apt parallel with the act of writing. The skin stretched across the drum recalls the animal hides tightened across frames to make parchment for manuscripts. The comparison points to the status of the written word as a material object. Zisca took literally the idea that his presence would confound his enemies, wishing to make himself into an object that would retain the power he had when living. Even in his absence, he thought, the drum would continue to embody him, broadcasting his fierce reputation to his foes. In a similar form of presence-in-absence, Burton imagines his book acting as a charm to ‘drive away Melancholy’, even after the author’s death. The allusion to Zisca’s drum illuminates one facet of Burton’s complex construction of the reading process within his book, a subject which will form the focus of this study. The tone of the quoted passage, which first appears in the fourth edition (1632) of the Anatomy, is playful and even flippant: the scholarly author who insists on the effectiveness of his book dares to compare himself to the great general, who presumes that even 1

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Zisca’s Drum: Reading and Cure

the relics of his body will scare away an army. Readers have often been struck by the force of authorial personality in the Anatomy, particularly the preface ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, and here that forcefulness is presented with a sense of fun. Burton suggests that the recital or reading of his ‘lines’ will have incantatory effects against melancholy, as if they were a spell, an idea which goes beyond the normal functions of rhetoric as persuasive utterance. The early moderns, like the ancients, believed that the power of language was irrational, even magical.1 Burton does not represent his text as convincing the reader out of the excessive passions of melancholy through reason; instead, he imagines a more direct curative effect. In terms of the ancient Greek understanding of therapeutic language, he pictures his writing acting as epôdê (a charm or conjuration) rather than logos pithanos (persuasive speech or argument).2 This study is about the relationship between reading and cure in the Anatomy. It investigates Burton’s claim that his work is designed as a means to ward off the melancholy of its readers, and puts this in the context of early modern ideas about the activity of reading and its perceived effects. Melancholy was seen in the period as a disease of body and soul, and Burton’s text presents a whole range of medical, religious and philosophical therapies for this affliction. As this book will argue, he draws on various forms of writing from the popular English religious treatises on the cure of the afflicted conscience to the continental medical practica, which survey the causes, symptoms and cures of disease. In doing so, he faces the question of how general cures can be offered through the medium of the printed page to readers with varied personal circumstances. Part of his response is to focus not on their lives beyond the text but rather on their experience of reading the Anatomy, subsuming individual differences into a greater sense of essential likeness, and also treating his readers as unknown and invisible to him. His interest in the experience of reading takes his text beyond the normal scope of medical writing on disease, since it aims to perform a cure through its pages. As a university man of the early seventeenth century (he spent his career at Christ Church, Oxford), Robert Burton (1577–1640) would have Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 7, cf. pp. 8–12, 29–30. Kenneth Burke explores links between rhetoric and magic, arguing that the latter can be seen as ‘primitive rhetoric’, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 40–44. 2 See Pedro Laín Entralgo, The Therapy of the Word in Classical Literature, ed. and trans. L. J. Rather and John M. Sharp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 32, 158. 1

Zisca’s Drum: Reading and Cure

3

been well versed in the active methods of interpreting texts propounded by humanist educators and would have thus been accustomed to think of reading as a dynamic activity, not merely the passive absorption of material. From an early age, he would have learned to select extracts from the texts he read and collect them under subject-headings in a commonplace book. None of his own survives, but one assumes that he used them when he prepared his book ‘out of a confused company of notes’ (I, 17) from the hundreds of authors he consulted. We know from his surviving library that he tended to mark the margins of his books with lines and occasional notes, a practice encouraged by Erasmus as a good method of study; Burton would have expected his readers to do the same to his own text, as indeed they did.3 In the very first sentence of ‘Democritus Junior’, Burton imagines the reader being ‘very inquisitive’ (I, 1) about the author’s identity, and the design of the whole work is underpinned by the belief that readers are and should be active in their encounter with texts. By suggesting that the Anatomy may have transformative effects on the melancholic reader, Burton draws on and develops this pervasive humanist notion of reading as a lively process. In telling the story of Zisca’s drum, Burton suggests that the act of reading can have direct power in dispersing melancholy. In the very next sentence, however, he throws his bold claim into relief: Yet one Caution let mee give by the way to my present or future Reader, who is actually Melancholy, that hee read not the Symptomes or prognostickes in this following Tract, least by applying that which he reads to himselfe, aggravating, appropriating things generally spoken, to his owne person (as Melancholy men for the most part doe) hee trouble or hurt himselfe, and get in conclusion more harme than good. (I, 24)

If reading has transformative effects, here Burton shows the negative implications of that process. Instead of having magical properties to cure melancholy, now his ‘Tract’ may be harmful to the melancholic, feeding hypochondriac impulses. Burton mentions a specific Section which might exacerbate their condition, and identifies it in a footnote; he is not suggesting that melancholics should avoid reading his work as a whole.4 Erasmus, On the Method of Study, trans. Brian McGregor, in Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 24 (University of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 670. On training in active reading methods, see William H. Sherman, Used Books:  Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), esp. pp. 3–4, 47. Readers’ markings in the Anatomy will be considered in the Conclusion. 4 As Sharon Cadman Seelig wrongly suggests, Generating Texts: The Progeny of Seventeenth-Century Prose (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 109. 3

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Zisca’s Drum: Reading and Cure

They can benefit from the Partition on cures. One should not exaggerate his warning, then, but nonetheless it is significant that his therapeutic claim is complicated by the recognition that reading can have other, dangerous consequences. This book contends that Burton’s stated aim to write for the ‘common good’ (I, 23) plays an important part in the design of the book and should be taken seriously. Such a contention does not mean, however, that the Anatomy is organised around a single scheme. Terence Cave rightly warns against a critical approach to early modern texts which either ‘succumbs to the fear of unresolved problems and forces the text to yield a reassuringly univocal meaning’ or is too ‘permissive’, taking no account of historical data.5 Burton makes explicit statements about the intended healing effects of the Anatomy, but the text does not offer a simple pattern of cure, and his own challenge to his ‘Zisca’s drum’ model of reading, provided by his ensuing ‘Caution’, acknowledges exactly that. The work’s genesis was as a form of self-therapy for the author (I, 6) and it is also a product of his melancholy in a more symptomatic sense: ‘one must needs scratch where it itcheth’ (I, 7). For all Burton’s attempts to help the reader, he also chides, mocks, insults and complains to him or her, disturbing any sense of a straightforward therapeutic programme. A study of curative writing in the Anatomy must acknowledge these counter-impulses as well as Burton’s varied approaches to cure. The grand variety of the Anatomy is a characteristic that continues to keep readers interested up to the present day. It is a work of serious scholarship, reflecting a lifetime’s reading in new as well as old material. Much of it is informative rather than persuasive or polemical:  Burton documents the views and theories of all his authorities on melancholy, aiming towards comprehensive coverage rather than neat synthesis. He does not aspire to provide a ‘harmony’ of melancholic theory, in the way that harmonies of the Bible attempted to reconcile seeming discrepancies between passages in the Old and New Testaments. Nor is he writing a key to all mythologies (however much George Eliot’s Casaubon resembled Burton’s description of the melancholic scholar).6 The Anatomy is not characteristically smooth in its presentation of arguments any more than in its style. A. D. Nuttall has described it as a ‘syncresis which won’t syncretize’, a highly apt summary of a work which retains the heterogeneous Terence Cave, ‘Reading Rabelais: Variations on the Rock of Virtue’, in Patricia Parker and David Quint (eds.), Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 78–95 (91). 6 Eliot quotes from the Anatomy, I, 304 as the headnote to Chapter 5 of Middlemarch. 5

Zisca’s Drum: Reading and Cure

5

qualities of its sources and influences.7 Yet to acknowledge its roughness and occasional contradictions does not mean one must accept that the work deliberately and continually undermines itself by heaping up conflicting ideas and authorities, a critical attitude that has hampered serious study of the Anatomy over the thirty-five years since Stanley Fish labelled the book a ‘self-consuming artifact’.8 For example, when Burton discusses music as a cure for melancholy over the course of a Subsection (II, 112–16) but adds at the end that it may also cause it, being ‘most pernitious’ to ‘some light inamorato, some idle phantasticke’ (II, 116), he is not undercutting but qualifying what has gone before. Burton acknowledges that treatments such as music have ‘diverse effects’ (II, 116), depending on one’s humoral disposition, character and habits. The current study acknowledges that there are disruptions in the Anatomy – that, indeed, disruptions play an important role within it, challenging any univocal reading of the work as a whole – but resists the view made popular by Fish that contradiction and undercutting are the governing principles of Burton’s text. Another misguided critical response to the Anatomy’s multifaceted nature has been a series of attempts to fit it into an established mode or genre: it has been seen as a medical treatise or a sermon in disguise, a Menippean satire or an encyclopedia.9 These categorisations may each have much textual and contextual evidence to recommend them, but not one of them provides a fully convincing reading of the work’s shifting meanings and styles. Burton’s first biographer, Thomas Fuller, provided a more helpful – because more broad – assessment of the Anatomy than the various generic approaches of modern critics, when he commented of the work’s popularity that ‘Scarce any book of Philology in our Land hath in so short a time passed so many Impressions.’10 Fuller himself defined philology as ‘Terse and Polite Learning … being that Florid skill, containing onely the Roses of learning, without the prickles thereof,’ and as being ‘inclusive of all human liberal Studies, and preposed to Divinity, as the A. D. Nuttall, Review of The Anatomy of Melancholy: Vol.I, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair, London Review of Books, 23 November 1989 (XI: 22), 18–19 (19). 8 Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts:  The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 303–53. 9 Respectively by Sir William Osler, ‘Robert Burton: The Man, His Book, His Library’, Oxford Bibliographic Society: Proceedings and Papers 1 (1927), 163–90 (183); E. Patricia Vicari, The View from Minerva’s Tower:  Learning and Imagination in ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (University of Toronto Press, 1989), p. 144; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism:  Four Essays (Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 311; Samuel G. Wong, ‘Encyclopedism in Anatomy of Melancholy’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 22 (1998), 5–22. 10 Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662), p. 134. 7

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Porch to the Palace’.11 Fuller’s words point to the process of gathering and selection which is central to the early modern commonplace tradition and a notable feature of Burton’s ‘Cento’ (I, 11), and are also suggestive of the relationship between Burton’s writing and his religious vocation. This book aims to steer criticism of the Anatomy away from the tendency to make limiting generic categorisations, and suggests that a more illuminating approach to the work is found in a sustained attention to Burton’s treatment of the reader and the reading process. At the same time, it argues that Burton’s construction of reading should be understood in the context of early modern ideas and perceptions of reading, not misleading modern understandings of the activity. It hence views the Anatomy in the light of other works of the period – some of them key sources for Burton – which are concerned with questions of therapy, and investigates to what extent he draws on other approaches to treatment and to reading. The fields of religion and medicine receive particular emphasis in this study since Burton himself suggests the important association between them and describes himself as ‘by my profession a Divine, and by mine inclination a Physitian’ (I, 23). Moreover, he aims his text directly at the layperson afflicted with melancholy, a move that links him with contemporary vernacular writers of medical regimens and of religious guidance. Such writers, like Burton, address themselves to a non-specialist audience and, if they do not promote self-treatment, nonetheless encourage readers towards healing. There is no single and well-delineated tradition of therapeutic writing, and hence it is worth outlining here the various influences on Burton’s own version. The idea of healing words or ‘logotherapy’ is, in Pedro Laín Entralgo’s words, ‘as ancient as Western culture itself’, but from antiquity onwards has taken different forms.12 We have seen Burton playfully suggest that his work will banish melancholy in the fashion of a spell, a notion that recalls various traditions of healing through magical means. Although incantations were rejected as a legitimate treatment by most learned medical writers in the early modern period, who were resistant to performative aspects of language, they were used in folk and occult ­medical practice, and even by highly reputed physicians such as the English astrological doctor Richard Napier (1559–1634).13 Meanwhile 12 Ibid., p. 26. Laín Entralgo, Therapy of the Word, p. 32. Ian Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 232; Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam:  Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 213–16.

11

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7

Burton’s ‘Consolatory Digression’ is motivated by the belief that ‘good counsell, comfortable speeches, perswasion’ may help in ‘the cure of a discontented or troubled minde’ (II, 125). Here there is a greater role for reason in cure. Burton’s main sources in this Section are classical moral philosophers (Seneca and Plutarch feature prominently), the Bible and the Church Fathers, particularly Augustine, Chrysostom and Bernard. An acknowledged set of precedents for the digression, and for the work more widely, is consolatio writing. These works provide a pattern for Burton’s dual perception of his work’s audience because they were written, he claims, ‘as well to helpe themselves, as others’ (II, 126). Writing as self-therapy and as therapy for the reader are hence overlapping categories, although in Burton’s handling they do not always neatly coincide. He frequently brings personal preoccupations to the surface, such as the inadequate remuneration of scholars and the failures of patrons, and these at times seem to eclipse other concerns.14 In his persona as Democritean melancholic, Burton often exhibits his symptoms by oscillating between moods of aggression and submission, mocking laughter and anxious sorrow, most spectacularly at the end of ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’. At the same time, the satirical mode he adopts represents a less obvious form of therapeutic writing and draws together the many conflicting impulses I have described. According to classical and Christian theory, satire has a reformative purpose to heal the errors of its age by dissecting its corruptions and abuses, but the satirist typically overshoots himself (to use a Burtonian word, I, 110), showing his splenetic excesses and implicating himself in the satire. The satirist’s expressed desire to reform and cure comes up against the urge to vent spleen.15 Laughter is a symptom of the disorder, just as it is a well-known cure for it in the early modern period: a pill to purge melancholy. Satire is commonly concerned with mores and social institutions, and Burton follows in this tradition by relating personal melancholy to larger disruptions in the body politic. As a result he absorbs into his writing modes of political counsel and commentary, such as the utopia he imagines in the preface (I, 85–97). Angus Gowland has recently provided a thoroughgoing analysis of the political vision of the Anatomy, a task This aspect has been thoroughly explored by Douglas Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2004) pp. 116–49, and Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 246–94. 15 Dustin Griffin, ‘Venting Spleen’, Essays in Criticism 40 (1990), 124–35. 14

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that has long been overdue in Burton scholarship.16 He has ­characterised Burton’s attitude as increasingly pessimistic over the course of the six editions (1621–51), drawing attention to the negative representations of contemporary governance in various parts of the work. The digression on the misery of scholars and the ‘Consolatory Digression’ provide the author with ‘the opportunity to vent his personal discontent’ at a degenerate system of patronage and a corrupt aristocracy.17 Gowland’s persuasive reading shows another way in which Burton’s claim that his work is designed to console and help the reader is compromised at certain points in the text. The consolatio mode is used to relieve the excessive passions that moral philosophy aims to control and quell, calling into doubt Burton’s authority as a writer advising others. A full discussion of the political dimension of the Anatomy is beyond the scope of this study, which focuses on Burton’s treatment of melancholy at a personal level. However, in the second chapter I will consider certain religio-political questions which relate to the cure of spiritual affliction and despair in the last Subsection. Religious and, to a lesser extent, medical writing endorsed the benefits of reading to ameliorate physical, emotional and spiritual distress. In Burton’s time a large number of religious treatises purported to advise the patient on how to behave piously during illness and how to understand affliction in a spiritual sense, as a just punishment for one’s sins and as a trial sent by God to those he loves. They also laid out a pattern of comforts for those suffering from a wounded conscience, and these spiritual consolations proved very popular, often reaching multiple editions. The market for works of religious guidance which offered a form of therapy was clearly large. The positive effects of reading were also recognised in medical writing. Medieval and early modern regimens (guides to preserving health) advised a good mental outlook as beneficial for staving off illness, and one of the activities which they recommended was reading, which was deemed to help people to achieve an ideal state of moderate cheerfulness.18 This gives a fresh perspective on Burton’s presentation of some parts of his work as recreation, such as the ‘pleasing aspersion of love matters’ (III, 4) in the third Partition. Reading with pleasure may play a role in the prevention and cure of melancholy by cheering the mind. He draws on religious and medical ideas about curative reading in the 17 Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, pp. 205–94. Ibid., p. 266. Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 48–64.

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construction of his own work, an influence that strengthens his adopted position as a ‘spiritual physician’ to his readers. M e l a nc holy: s u bj e c t a n d f or m Burton frequently describes melancholy as a suitable subject for him to write about because of its generality: it is a disease ‘grievous’ and ‘common’, and hence he can do no ‘more generall service’ than to ‘prescribe means how to prevent and cure so universall a malady, an Epidemicall disease, that so often, so much crucifies the body and minde’ (I, 110). There is no reason to doubt the seriousness either of Burton’s assessment or of his aim to provide a service through writing. There was a widespread concern in early modern Europe that melancholy was becoming increasingly prevalent.19 Burton characterises melancholy as an infinitely varying condition, with different permutations in every case. The ‘common definition’, however, is that it is ‘a kinde of dotage without a feaver, having for his ordinary companions, feare, and sadnesse, without any apparent occasion’ (I, 162). The last clause is important, as it differentiates the pathological condition from ordinary occurrences of emotions or passions. The origin of melancholy can be an excess of the humour of the same name – black bile – or an effect of other humours when corrupt or ‘adust’ (burnt):  either all four humours, according to some medical writers, or only black bile, blood, and choler, according to Galen (I, 166–8).20 Burton follows the traditional division of the disease into melancholy of the head, hypochondrium (an area of the abdomen and the organs within it) and the whole body. Melancholy is not the same as madness since mental functions are ‘depraved’ but not altogether ‘abolished’ (I, 163), although in the preface Burton freely collapses the distinction between the two conditions as part of his rhetorical effort to demonstrate ‘that all the world is mad, that it is melancholy, dotes’ (I, 24). One might be tempted to see a separation in his treatment of melancholy between ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ and the three Partitions, regarding him as acting in a much more systematic and scientific fashion in the work proper than the preface. Such a view has some value: at the end of the preface Burton resolves ‘to say no more of such as are improperly melancholy, or metaphorically mad, lightly mad, or in disposition’ (I, 109–10) and in the first 19

See Angus Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, P&P 191 (2006), 77–120. My account is a basic one; for a thorough discussion, see Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

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Partition distinguishes between melancholy in disposition – ‘that transitory Melancholy’ (I, 136)  – and in habit  – ‘a Chronicke or continuate disease’ (I, 139) – claiming that his text is concerned with the latter only. Yet the distinction is not as clear-cut as he implies, and it becomes apparent during the rest of the work that he does not adhere totally to this selfimposed limitation of subject-matter. Much of the advice about lifestyle in the second Partition is generally designed to promote health, while the ‘Consolatory Digression’ is explicitly directed at ‘such as are happy, to bring them to a moderation’ as well as ‘such as are distressed’ (II, 125). Burton treats melancholy not only as a chronic disease but also as ‘the Character of Mortalitie’ (I, 136). Gowland has argued that melancholy was perceived to be epidemic in the early modern period partly because it was understood to be primarily an emotional condition, which ‘carried spiritual and ethical as well as medical significance, and assumed a prominent place within religious, moral-philosophical and political discourses on the passions of the soul’.21 The treatment Burton offers is therefore complex and has a broad application. He does not simply recommend medicines to alleviate or banish symptoms, but also offers what we might describe as psychological and spiritual counsel. Moral philosophy forms one important aspect of this therapy, as has been mentioned: Stoic and Epicurean writers are key sources of Burton’s writing, particularly for the Partition on cure.22 A recurrent theme of the Anatomy is that harmful passions should be moderated through the exercise of reason. The fields of religion, medicine and ethics provide Burton with a composite approach to melancholy; the overlapping nature of this approach reflects the shared ground of these disciplines during the early modern period. Burton structures his material carefully, mapping it out graphically in synoptic tables (branching diagrams or Ramist charts) to each Partition.23 The elaborate nature of this structure has been the cause of much consternation for modern readers: some have questioned whether it is deliberately designed to confuse rather than elucidate;24 others have concluded that the whole work is ‘incredibly messy’.25 We might find it Gowland, ‘The Problem’, 84. On Burton and Epicureanism, and more generally on the reception of Hellenistic ethics in the period, see Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics:  Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 23 See David Renaker, ‘Robert Burton and Ramist Method’, RQ 24 (1971), 210–20. 24 Ruth A. Fox, The Tangled Chain:  The Structure of Disorder in the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1976), pp. 22–7; Jean Robert Simon, Robert Burton (1577–1640) et ‘L’Anatomie de la Mélancolie’ (Paris: Didier, 1964), p. 422. 25 Seelig, Generating Texts, p. 110. 21

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unwieldy by modern standards, and certainly Burton seeks to include every facet of melancholic experience in his book through his divisions and s­ub-­divisions, but as J. B. Bamborough has said, ‘the direction in which Burton is moving always remains clear; the reader may well lose his way amid the plethora of authorities and examples, but Burton does not’.26 A brief summary of content is necessary since my study will not discuss the work sequentially. The Anatomy begins with a large amount of paratextual material, including a long preface, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’. The main body of the work comprises three Partitions: the first deals with causes, symptoms and prognostics of melancholy, the second with cures, and the third addresses love melancholy and religious melancholy separately, from cause to cure. Each Partition is divided further into Sections, Members and Subsections. The first and second Partitions feature long digressions: on anatomy, the nature of spirits, the force of imagination, the misery of scholars, the air, and a ‘Consolatory Digression’. The third contains no formal digressions but Burton explains that his ‘Treatise of Love Melancholy’ is a means to ‘refresh my muse a little, and my weary Readers, to expatiate in this delightsome field’ (III, 4), language which recalls his announced intention in the ‘Digression of Ayre’ to ‘freely expatiate and exercise my selfe, for my recreation a while rove’ (II, 33). Love melancholy was long classified by medical writers as a type of melancholy and Burton’s structuring of his material has precedents in their work, yet he also uses the opportunity to vary his writing style and encourage renewed interest from the reader, as he has done in earlier digressions. Burton’s discussion of ‘Religious Melancholy’ as a separate category, at the end of the work, is his most original contribution to the early modern study of melancholy, and will be examined in detail in Chapters 2 and 4. This book begins with the claim that Burton’s attention to the reader and his construction of the reading process are unparalleled in early modern English literature. It examines Burton’s claim that his work is designed to act as a ‘guilded pille’ on its readers, and the traditions and contexts which inform this idea. Burton characterises his readership as an unknown body made up of individuals with varying tastes, demands and physical complexions. The second chapter explores the consequences of Burton’s characterisation of his reader and his presentation of his text Oxford edition, ‘Introduction’, I, xxxvii. See also Angus Gowland, ‘Rhetorical Structure and Function in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, Rhetorica 19 (2001), 1–48 (21–7).

26

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in inclusive terms in the ‘Cure of Despaire’, which ends the Anatomy. The Subsection uses Calvinist religious treatises as sources but its method of offering consolation to the afflicted reader departs from these treatises’ pastoral methods. The third chapter moves from religious cures to medical ones, asking to what extent the Anatomy’s title-page claim that it anatomises melancholy ‘Medicinally’ is a helpful insight into the book. It surveys Latin and vernacular medical textbooks and orientates Burton’s text within these traditions, while revealing how he goes beyond them in detailing religious, philosophical and other cures. In particular, reading itself repeatedly eclipses other cures on offer, as a therapeutic act which can benefit people of all ages and conditions. The fourth and fifth chapters examine how Burton’s self-presentation affects his treatment of the reader. Burton portrays himself as a ‘spiritual physician’, taking on a ministering role towards the melancholic reader. Melancholy, he argues, is a disease of both body and soul, and hence requires a composite form of cure provided by a doctor and a priest. His blurring of the boundaries between medical and religious approaches marks him out from other writers on despair and melancholy. Alongside his dual role of doctor and minister, Burton presents himself as a sufferer of melancholy, claiming that he writes out of ‘fellow-feeling’. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which Burton uses his role as melancholic to direct his text towards the reader’s benefit as well as to relieve his own affliction. While the doctorminister holds the distance and authority which is needed by the healer to effect cure, the melancholic can understand the disease from personal experience, both reactions being part of what Burton describes as his ‘mixt passion’. The final chapter addresses Burton’s treatment of melancholy itself and his structuring of his work, examining some aspects of Burton’s understanding of melancholy which have escaped critical attention, in particular the relationship between the illness and sin. The second half of the chapter shows how his understanding of the human will relates to his scheme of cure. If, as Luther taught, the will is entirely without free choice and therefore one cannot change oneself for good, the notion of ‘self-help’ would seem impossible. We see how Burton finds an alternative view of the will in which humans have some capacity for change. This allows him to offer a more positive vision of cure than contemporary English religious writers do. Burton’s notion of cure through reading is a continuous one, especially since the disease is not only simply melancholy in the traditional sense, but also melancholy as sin and as ‘the Character of Mortalitie’.

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T h e r e a de r i n h i s t or y By suggesting that reading the Anatomy is curative, Burton participates in a long literary tradition which takes on particular significance in his own age. The therapeutic aim is envisaged as an illocutionary force in his writing, as he repeatedly emphasises the book’s healing and reformative properties which will work on his melancholy readership. This notion that language has a performative function, and further that this action is best elucidated by the scholar through an understanding of the immediate historical circumstances in which it participates, has proven a highly fruitful area of early modern studies in recent years, particularly in the field of political history and literature.27 The present study aims to uncover some of the ways in which Burton designs his text to act on its readers, and insists that one must investigate how early modern authors perceived their readers and the process of reading in order to understand more fully the unique intervention that Burton makes into early modern discourses on melancholy. Since the activity of reading is for Burton and his contemporaries closely bound up with a range of political, religious and cultural questions, it is essential that we do not simply apply our modern understanding of the activity to the text but instead pay close attention to the historical circumstances of reading in Burton’s time. This book hence departs from earlier critical work on writer–reader relations in The Anatomy of Melancholy. Studies by Stanley Fish, Richard Nochimson, Martin Heusser and John Miller have highlighted the importance of the reading experience in Burton’s writing but, in common with much reader-response criticism, have ignored the historical dimension of reading as an activity.28 Fish discusses effects in terms of ‘the reader’, but omits to specify who this figure is, while Wolfgang Iser’s ‘implied reader’ is similarly ahistorical. Although unnamed, they must be in the historian Robert Darnton’s mind when he comments that literary critics sometimes Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 7; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 10–11. See also J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 17–19. 28 Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts; pp. 303–53; Richard L. Nochimson, ‘Burton’s Anatomy:  The Author’s Purposes and the Reader’s Response’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 13 (1977), 265–84; Martin Heusser, The Gilded Pill:  a Study of the Reader–Writer Relationship in Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Tübingen:  Stauffenburg, 1987); John Miller, ‘Plotting a Cure: The Reader in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy’, Prose Studies 20 (1997), 42–71. See also Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 27

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‘seem to assume that seventeenth-century Englishmen read Milton and Bunyan as if they were twentieth-century college professors’.29 Fish would later develop a theory of ‘interpretive communities’ to explain how the shared assumptions and values of groups of readers at a given time determine the meanings they find in texts.30 While this theory offers a better possibility of appreciating the reading process in a more historically nuanced way, it leaves no space for an understanding of how individual freedom operates in reading. Interpretation becomes an activity predetermined by shared social codes, not the kind of autonomous activity which so many writers of Burton’s time remarked upon (and frequently claimed to fear).31 Studies which consider ‘the reader’ of early modern literature also ignore the fact that many early modern writers address their works to specific readerships, to market their works and to comment upon and shape the reading process. Some authors direct their works at a figure who is seen as ideal, ‘understanding’, ‘discerning’ or ‘judicious’. By describing the reactions of such a reader, they implicitly instruct the less-than-ideal sort in how to interpret their work correctly. These ideal figures are often seen as part of a privileged sub-group who have a closer relationship with the author. For example, Ben Jonson’s epistle ‘To the Reader’ prefacing The Alchemist (1610) begins, ‘If thou beest more, thou art an Understander, and then I trust thee.’32 In this case, the word ‘understander’ suggests both the reader who has higher knowledge and insight and the audience member who stands in the pit under the stage, who is ‘more’ than a reader as a viewer of the play in performance. The negative counterparts to ideal and understanding readers are the ignorant and fault-finding ones. These frequently feature when there is a series of addresses aimed at different groups: as John King has shown, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563) addresses various types of readers and distinguishes between ‘ “true” Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette:  Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 181. The comment on Milton suggests a reference to Fish’s earlier work, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in ‘Paradise Lost’ (London: Macmillan, 1967). 30 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 31 Fish’s ‘interpretive communities’ theory is criticised by Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 60–61. 32 Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), V, 291. Play prefaces sometimes draw attention to the circumstances of performance (or lack of it); famous examples are William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1609) and John Webster’s The White Devil (1612), which expresses hope that readers will be more ‘understanding’ than audiences were. See David M. Bergeron, Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570–1640 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 1–22. 29

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and “false” readers along doctrinal lines’.33 Similarly, John Bunyan’s Holy City (1665) contains an ‘Epistle to Four Sorts of Reader’, consisting of the godly, the learned, the captious and finally ‘the Mother of Harlots’ (Rome).34 Readers may also be defined by their age, sex, social status or profession. Jean-François Gilmont has rightly emphasised that all of these groups should be seen as the ‘public’ for a book – those to whom the work is explicitly aimed – and not necessarily its actual ‘audience’, potentially a much larger readership.35 It is common for works, especially educational ones, to be directed towards young gentlemen, yet as Louis B. Wright has shown many of these works were bought by socially aspiring readers of a lower rank, and surely authors, printers and booksellers were aware of this when specifying an audience.36 As this suggests, the target readership of a work may be a means of defining generic expectations. Works on godly living often address readers who are humble and unlearned, warning that the highly educated will find little of use in the texts (although we know that such works were popular among all classes of society). The warning aims to establish a work’s status as a practical guide, to make clear to readers that a high level of theological knowledge is not expected from them in order to benefit from it, and to define readers’ own expectations of the book’s scope. The imagined reader’s gender can also be tied to generic expectations. Certain types of book are commonly directed at female readers, especially Elizabethan romances (such as Robert Greene’s and John Lyly’s).37 The inferior literary reputation of these works and their perceived lack of seriousness and usefulness (from a humanist point of view) are hence linked to popular beliefs about women’s capacities and tastes as ­readers. Yet, as we have seen already, one must be cautious about concluding that a work is designed for certain readers because they are addressed on John N. King, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 244. 34 Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, general ed. Roger Sharrock, 13 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–94), III, ed. J. Sears McGee (1987), pp. 69, 72. 35 Jean-François Gilmont, ‘Protestant Reformations and Reading’, in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds.), A History of Reading in the West, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Bristol:  Polity Press, 1999), p. 225. 36 Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1935; repr. 1958), pp. 128–30. Examples of books for ‘young gentlemen’ include Thomas Blundeville, M. Blundvile his Exercises (London, 1594); Henry Peacham, The Art of Drawing with the Pen (London, 1606). 37 Caroline Lucas, Writing for Women: The Example of the Woman as Reader in Elizabethan Romance (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989), pp. 1–4. Suzanne W. Hall catalogues books directed at women in Chaste, Silent and Obedient:  English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (San Marino: Huntingdon Library, 1982). 33

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the title-page or in the preface. Paratexts are not always straightforward indicators of intended readership. Although Greene’s work Mamillia seems to create a primary readership through its subtitle  – ‘A mirrour or looking-glasse for the ladies of Englande’ – the main text is preceded by an epistle ‘To the Gentleman readers’ (like many other works of his).38 Likewise, Katherine Craik finds the travel writer Thomas Coryat experimenting with the imagined gender of his readership by addressing an exclusively male public with language commonly directed towards female readers of prose romance.39 As these examples show, authors recognise that men read romances too, and play with conventions about genres and readerships. Since the time of Fish’s and Iser’s theories of reader response, the emerging and interdisciplinary field of study on the history of reading has addressed the question of how reading practices in different periods can be recovered and understood. A variety of approaches has been adopted, evident in the wide-ranging and often illuminating studies which have been produced in recent years.40 The dominant method of research into early modern reading over the last decade focuses on analysing the evidence left by actual readers, a method inspired by Robert Darnton’s proposal for a collaboration between the disciplines of literary theory and the history of the book:  ‘The theory can reveal the range in potential responses to a text – that is, to the rhetorical constraints that direct reading without determining it. The history can show what readings actually took place – that is, within the limits of an imperfect body of evidence.’ 41 Robert Hume has repeated Darnton’s emphasis on empirical research by calling for a ‘historical reader-response criticism’ which seeks to determine not how readers must respond in the abstract, but ‘how readers did respond to a given text at a particular time’.42 Historians and literary Robert Greene, Mamillia (London, 1583), sig. A3r. Katharine Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 93–114. 40 See James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmore (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England:  Material Studies (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and the special issue of Critical Survey (ed. Sasha Roberts), ‘Reading in Early Modern England’, 12.9 (2000). For similar work on another period of literature, see James L. Machor (ed.), Readers in History: NineteenthCentury American Literature and the Contexts of Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 41 Darnton, Kiss of Lamourette, p. 181. 42 Robert D. Hume, ‘Texts within Contexts: Notes toward a Historical Method’, PQ 71 (1992), 69–100 (80). 38

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critics have made use of evidence such as personal accounts of reading, marginalia and book lists in order to construct a picture of real readers. Some have focused on a single person’s reading in order to provide a case study of historical reading habits,43 while others have concentrated on the varied responses of different individuals to a particular text or author.44 Broader studies have examined the evidence of reading trends during the period in relation to such issues as class, gender and literacy.45 This burgeoning field has provided much enlightening information about early modern reading practices and their differences from those of our own time, redressing the bias towards an ahistorical understanding of reading which was created by much reader-response criticism. This book is indebted to these studies of early modern reading, and it too seeks to explore the individual and broader cultural dimensions of reading in early modern England through its focus on the Anatomy. However, it differs in approach in that its main emphasis is not on actual readers’ responses to Burton’s work but instead on the author’s own construction of the reading process. It explores how Burton characterises and treats his implied reader and how he envisages the process of reading taking place, not only in the explicit addresses of the preface but throughout the work. As Walter Ong has shown, all authors create fictionalised roles for their readers, and these roles are reflective of the way reading is understood in their age. An analysis of the demands authors make of their readers and the way they direct the act of reading can therefore reveal not only more about individual writers’ literary techniques, but also more about how reading was perceived in a given period.46 Throughout my study I  compare Burton’s perspective with those of his contemporary writers, especially his sources. In doing so I wish to show how one writer both engages with the reading theories of his age and puts forward his unique The classic account of an individual reader is Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John A. Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). Studies of early modern English examples include Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, P&P 129 (1990), 30–78; William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Sharpe, Reading Revolutions (on the reading of Sir William Drake). 44 Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Anna R. Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh and His Readers in the Seventeenth Century: Speaking to the People (London: Macmillan, 1997). 45 Eugene R. Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England:  Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge University Press, 2005). 46 Walter Ong, ‘The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction’, Proceedings of the Modern Languages Association 90 (1975), 9–21. 43

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conception of the activity, and thus to suggest how his book becomes part of an ongoing dialogue on the nature of rhetoric and interpretation in the period.47 Because Burton’s book is about melancholy, and because he claims that reading it is mentally curative, the work provides a significant commentary on the links between reading and perceptions of psychological experience in the early seventeenth century. It also reveals how decisions about the structure, style and presentation of texts can be shaped by and also attempt to inform early modern ideas about reading. For example, as I will show in Chapter 2, the Anatomy’s final Subsection on the cure of religious despair imitates contemporary treatises on the afflicted conscience but departs from them in the way the reader is addressed and treated. In the process of this departure, Burton offers not only an alternative version of the relationship between author and reader but also a different understanding of the workings of spiritual comfort, as mediated through the reading process. Some books and treatises are ‘too tragicall, too much dejecting men, aggravating offences’ (III, 419) and, he later advises, should be avoided by those of an over-sensitive conscience. This complaint that certain types of Christian writing provoke fear and misery in the reader is corroborated by other accounts by readers in the period.48 Burton’s text, therefore, provides evidence of a wider pattern of concerns regarding reading, and also shows us how one writer responds to these concerns by developing a new method of ministering to his unknown reader. This book therefore aims to take Burton studies in a new direction by analysing his treatment of the reader in a historically nuanced way. At the same time, it contributes to the growing body of work on the history of reading by suggesting how one can critically examine an author’s construction of the reading process. My approach aims to address areas which current work on early modern reading has not been fully able to reach, and also to question some of the assumptions it makes. Firstly, I seek to explore the relationship between early modern authors and readers more closely. Recent studies of reading have privileged the evidence left by actual readers over what we are told about reading in texts and stressed that, whereas authors and booksellers attempt to direct texts towards certain classes of readers or insist on how they should be read, David Norbook has suggested that an approach to early modern literature through speech-act theory allows us to see texts as part of dialogue, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 11. 48 See John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination:  English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 37–8. 47

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readers themselves resist such pressure, making different and often radical interpretations of texts. Although the point is an important one, it has led to the perception that there is an opposition between authors and readers. Some histories of early modern reading have portrayed writers as controlling characters who wish to enforce a limited spectrum of interpretation upon their public and are continually anxious about how their works will be received.49 Readers, meanwhile, are characterised as being resistant to the interpretations writers attempt to force upon them and create more subversive readings of their own. However, a study of early modern paratexts shows that they are not necessarily designed to elicit a univocal response from readers. Heidi Brayman Hackel interprets them as essentially mechanisms of authorial power and control, designed to ‘narrow the interpretations available to readers’, and considers it an irony that ‘the various paratextual efforts that were made to protect the order and integrity of a book – pagination, tables, marginalia  – opened the book up, making it newly vulnerable to readers who did want to skip around’.50 I am unconvinced by this argument. Although some authors rigidly endorse a single method of interpreting their work, not all do. Moreover, if textual aids make texts ‘vulnerable’ in a way not foreseen by authors, why do authors continue to make ‘paratextual efforts’, and even make them more elaborate in revised editions? The evidence of texts suggests that many English authors are eager to make their texts navigable by readers. Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579), for example, is well known for its complex textual apparatus, much of which makes an explicit feature of the reader’s interpretative independence. The glosses to each month’s poem – by E. K., a figure separate from the author and hence critically distanced from him – glance at political and theological readings while not fully elucidating them, a tactic that keeps meanings veiled and simultaneously encourages varied methods of analysis. They play on the fact that multiple interpretations are available, as can be seen in the comment on the ‘August’ emblem that ‘The meaning hereof is very ambiguous’.51 On a different note, Sir John Harington, translator of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1591), jokes about the use readers make of paratexts for various types of reading, in a manner which suggests a lack of anxiety about this process. In his ‘Apologie of Poetrie’ he notes that readers may object to the content of Ariosto’s poem in certain places, ‘as in that of the baudy Frier, in Alcinas and Rogeros copulation, 50 See e.g. Hackel, Reading Material, p. 70. Ibid., pp. 90–91, 135–6. Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 115.

49 51

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in Anselmus his Giptian, in Richardetto his metamorphosis, in mine hosts tale of Astolfo’, and adds: alas, if this be a fault, pardon him this one fault, though I doubt too many of you (gentle readers) wil be to exorable in this point, yea me thinks I see some of your searching already for these places of the booke and you are halfe offended that I have not made some directions that you might finde out and reade them immediately.52

Harington wittily undercuts the conventional apology for offence caused to morally sensitive readers by observing what real readers are much more likely to be thinking and doing, however ‘gentle’ they might be. If readers are revealed in their true colours here, by implication the author is too, since these ‘warnings’ about specific episodes which might shock are also advertisements designed to whet their appetites. Harington breaks down the usual deferential treatment of the reader in favour of a more honest and intimate one:  readers share his joke even if they are the butt of it. He proceeds to warn his addressees to use the stories ‘as my author ment them, to breed detestation and not delectation’, but, considering what has gone before, this conventional caveat is given with some irony. Although his paratexts encourage certain interpretations, they do not enforce them, and they also allow the reader to use the text at will. Harington may not give specific ‘directions’ at this point but his index guides the reader straight to the stories of Alcina, Rogero and the others. The tendency among some critics to cast authors and readers in opposing roles is reductive, then, and it is also anachronistic. Some studies of early modern reading practices have given insufficient attention to the link in the period between composition and interpretation, yet this link is undoubtedly important. Terence Cave has described how, through the practice of imitation, reading and writing became ‘virtually identified’, while Roger Chartier, one of the founders of the new history of the book discipline, has highlighted the necessity of understanding ‘the practices of reading and writing in their reciprocal relationships’.53 More recently, Stephen Dobranski has argued for a concomitant development in the growing authorities of authors and readers in the period; rather than Sir John Harington, Ludovico Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso’ Translated into English Heroical Verse by Sir John Harington, ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 11. 53 Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text:  Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 35; Roger Chartier, ‘Afterword: Reading, Writing and Literature in the Early Modern Age’, trans. Bénédicte Morrell and Graham Holderness, Critical Survey 12 (2000), 128–42 (130). See also Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). 52

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positioning themselves in an adversarial relationship, writers ‘commonly wanted readers to collaborate in their texts – that is, to share responsibility for their texts’ meanings’.54 If one turns to Robert Burton, who owned over 1,700 books, all now carefully catalogued and nearly all held in the Bodleian and Christ Church libraries, Oxford, the poverty of viewing reading separately from writing becomes apparent.55 One could conduct a study of Burton as reader solely by examining his library holdings and marginalia, along with evidence such as the one surviving letter to his older brother William, which asks him to look out for secondhand books when he next visits London.56 However, it would be foolish to perform this task without consulting the Anatomy, a work which one critic compares to the experience of entering ‘a vast library’ with Burton as guide.57 The Anatomy shows a reader as well as a writer at work, taking quotations from books, gathering them together and using them in new and often surprising contexts. One can follow this process in action by examining Burton’s copy of a work, noting an underlining or a marginal comment, then observing how his reading transfers into composition as he uses that passage in his writing.58 Moreover, as Martin Elsky has commented, writing and reading ‘intersect’ in Burton’s text through the process of revision:  like Montaigne, Burton reads his own work and alters it for later editions, thereby making a fixed text open-ended.59 Both writers root their published texts in an original experience of reading, as we shall see in the first chapter. By examining how reading is constructed by early modern authors, one can observe how closely the activities of composition and interpretation relate in the period. The study of how authors of published writing portray the reading process offers a different perspective on reading in history, and one which can fill some of the gaps in the so-called empirical evidence of readers themselves. Yet such a study is in itself complex. If there is a range of Stephen B. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 22, 11. On depictions of the reader as collaborator see Terence Cave, ‘The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance’, in John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr (eds.), Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), pp. 149–65 (p. 149); Marian Rothstein, Reading in the Renaissance:  ‘Amadis de Gaule’ and the Lessons of Memory (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), pp. 98–114. 55 Burton’s books are catalogued by Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988). 56 The letter is transcribed and discussed by Richard L. Nochimson, ‘Robert Burton’s Authorship of Alba: A Lost Letter Recovered’, RES 21 (1970), 325–31. 57 Michael O’Connell, Robert Burton (Boston: Twayne, 1986), p. 42. 58 See Chapter 2, p. 62, for an example of this technique. 59 Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 219. 54

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problems to be encountered in the study of evidence left by readers, there are also difficulties to be confronted in the study of literary texts in connection with reading. Most obviously, as I have already noted, one must be wary of making direct connections between instructions about reading in books and historical practice. For example, ministers who insist that their books require reading sequentially and thoroughly may do so precisely because most readers tend to jump from one part of a book to another.60 Occasionally in this study – chiefly in its conclusion – I turn to the evidence left by early modern readers of Burton in order to put imagined reader responses in the perspective of actual ones. One must also be careful not to misinterpret statements about reading which are in reality commonplace as original claims by a particular author. There are a number of established prefatory topoi: the posture of humility towards the patron, the confession of a work’s errors and the claim that importunate friends rather than personal ambition forced the author to publish, the prediction of hostile reactions from over-critical, carping readers– the perennial Zoilus and Momus figures – and the invitation to judicious readers to enjoy the work, forgiving its weaknesses. However, the formulaic nature of prefaces does not mean that one should always dismiss conventional elements as mere rhetorical exercises. In her study of English prefaces during the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Debra Belt has convincingly argued that motifs related to hostile reception can be linked to a number of social, demographic and cultural changes in that period. Writers responded to a society of readers with different social backgrounds, educational training and values, ‘who scrutinized what they read with extreme care and who did not hesitate to offer divergent opinions, criticisms, and excruciatingly public judgments of it’.61 Epistles therefore reflect and participate in contemporary discussions about authority, literary value and interpretation. In studying prefaces, one must also be attentive to tone; some critics have been all too ready to detect anxiety in authors’ prefaces when writers may be being rhetorically exuberant rather than gravely earnest. Harington is one of a number of writers who tease the reader or play with prefatory convention.62 Burton addresses his ‘Gentle Reader’ (I, 1) in conventionally deferential terms at the beginning of his preface, yet almost immediately rebukes him or her for being inquisitive and asserts his independence: ‘I am a free man borne.’ For an extreme example, see Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises (London, 1603), sigs. B3r–B4 r. Debra Belt, ‘The Poetics of Hostile Reception, 1575–1610’, Criticism 33 (1991), 419–59 (443). 62 See Randall Anderson, ‘The Rhetoric of Paratext in Early Printed Books’, in John Barnard and D.  F. McKenzie (eds.), assisted by Maureen Bell, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Vol. IV, 1557–1695 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 636–44 (p. 637). 60 61

The reader in history

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The study of how early modern authors construct the reading ­process provides a fruitful way to understand more both about early modern literature and about the history of reading. Burton’s involvement of the reader in his work is his acknowledged focus and also, I would argue, his major literary achievement. Yet the method I use to study Burton’s writing is also applicable to other authors of the period. A critical reading of an author’s treatment of readers and the reading process must be historically attentive. It must examine to what extent the reader and reading are prominent within the text, and question how the author characterises that reader-figure in comparison with other writers of the day. It should observe the relationship between the author’s self-presentation and the reader’s portrayal, since the two are dynamically interlinked, and explore the reader’s role in relation to the work’s subject-matter and stated or implied aims. This method thus explores the function in a text of Aristotle’s three elements of rhetoric: speaker, audience and subject (ēthos, pathos and logos). An analysis of how these rhetorical techniques function in an early modern text can show the significance they take on and the particular uses to which they are put in that age, which in turn can reveal their role in reflecting – and influencing – reading practices.

Ch apter 1

Imagining Readings

Among early modern English prose writers, Robert Burton has an unparalleled interest in the nature of his readership, in how his text is and should be read, and in the multiple effects that the process of reading can produce. The very first sentence of ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ imagines readers who are ‘very inquisitive to know’ the identity of the author under the disguise of the pseudonym. Yet Burton is equally inquisitive about who his reader is, and this question is intimately tied up with other aspects of his writing. ‘Thou thy selfe art the subject of my Discourse’ (I, 1), he memorably declares. This chapter explores the implications of this statement, paying special attention to the Anatomy’s paratexts. It examines Burton’s presentation of his book as being intended to have curative effects, and the traditions that inform this, and shows how ethical, religious and medical approaches to therapy are brought together in his conception of the work as a gilded pill which rectifies the mind. Burton creates a rhetorical construction of the reader as an unknowable and invisible figure, deliberately emphasising his or her distance from the author and treating this as a beneficial aspect of publication. While parts of the Anatomy are targeted at specific types of reader, Burton encourages readers to profit from the work as a whole rather than select only what is immediately relevant to them. The chapter concludes by considering the nature of readerly ‘experience’ in Burton, his imitator Edmund Gregory, Thomas Nashe and Michel de Montaigne. The Anatomy of Melancholy regularly draws attention to the reader’s presence, with direct addresses to ‘thou thyselfe’ punctuating it, often at the end of Subsections. My initial claim that Burton’s interest in his reader is unparalleled in the period, however, rests on the unusually large amount of paratextual material he constructs around the three Partitions of the Anatomy, much of which is geared towards the reader and the act of reading. By the time of the sixth edition (1651), the text has accumulated an illustrated frontispiece accompanied by a verse explanation of 24

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its meaning (‘The Argument of the Frontispeice’ (sic)), a dedication to his patron, the Latin poem ‘Democritus Junior ad Librum Suum’ and an English one: ‘The Authors Abstract of Melancholy’. There follows the very long preface, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’; this was the section of the Anatomy most revised and enlarged by Burton over the nineteen years between its first publication (1621) and his death in 1640, a sign of its significance to the book as a whole. Other paratexts include a brief Latin note ‘Lectori malè feriato’ [To the idle and frivolous reader], another Latin poem comparing the weeping and laughing philosophers Heraclitus and Democritus, synoptic tables which outline the structure of each Partition in graphic form, a separate preface to the third Partition, and an index or Table.1 Many of these paratexts are added after the first edition and only one is removed  – the ‘Conclusion of the Author to the Reader’  – most of which is absorbed into the preface instead from the second edition onwards. Gérard Genette, who coined the term paratexts, describes them as materials lying on the ‘threshold’ of a written work and being used by the author ‘at the service of a better reception of the text’.2 Burton’s own employment of these various paratexts reveals not only his awareness of the act of reception, but also his repeated attempts to shape it. Even in a book as vast as the Anatomy, the paratexts are disproportionately large in volume and number and they are, moreover, notably concerned with guiding the reader: they aid navigation of the text, introduce and explain major themes (such as the varieties of melancholic experience, good and bad), present the author’s motivations for writing, address and respond to potential criticism, and construct an imagined readership. It is illuminating to compare them with another paratext-heavy monument of English prose, Coryats Crudities (1611), Thomas Coryat’s account of his European travels, not least since there are numerous similarities between the two writers:  both cultivate an eccentric authorial persona, have a fondness for copia, and use writing as a kind of substitute for the professional promotion they did not achieve (Coryat in Prince Henry’s household, Burton in Oxford and the Church of England). There is an overlap in their social circles too: both knew Sir Henry Goodyere, who wrote a commendatory verse for the Crudities and is mentioned in the Anatomy.3 A full account of the paratexts and their expansion is given in the ‘Textual Introduction’ to the Oxford edition, I, xxxvii–lx. 2 Gérard Genette, Paratexts:  Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 2. 3 Goodyere and Coryat were among the ‘Sireniacal gentlemen’ at the Mermaid Tavern; see ODNB, s.v. ‘Patrons of the Mermaid tavern (act. 1611)’. The Burton family’s estate in Lindley, 1

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Coryat’s paratexts, however, are principally designed for authorial display rather than for shaping the act of reading. The work is prefaced by fiftysix commendatory verses upon the author and his text, which fashion the figure of Coryat the intrepid, clownish and talkative traveller. Although, as Katharine Craik has shown, the work implicitly challenges conventional assumptions about the experience of reading travel literature, its more prominent concern is with constructing an image of its author.4 In Burton’s case, by contrast, paratexts much more explicitly address the experience of the text, with guides to its use such as the synoptic tables and index. It is also noteworthy that, although the Anatomy was clearly very popular, not a single commendatory verse was published with it in the six editions. It remained a solitary project, and although there are clues in the text to his identity, the author kept under the veil of a pseudonym until the end: ‘the Man in the Moone’ (I, 1). His full name was only recorded in the Conclusion to the first edition. Furthermore, the Latin dedication to George, eighth Earl of Berkeley is a brief affair, substantially unchanged in all editions, and there is no special epistle to him as dedicatee (a very common feature in early modern publications). Despite Burton’s complaints about lack of patronage in the ‘Misery of Schollers’, he makes very little effort in his paratexts to court it. The Anatomy’s paratexts focus on the experience of reading and in doing so alert the reader to Burton’s sustained attention to the act of interpretation in the main body of the text. This is not to say that his decision to take his reader as his subject precludes authorial self-display. Indeed, the original impulse for the work was, as he tells us, to relieve his own affliction: ‘I write of Melancholy, by being busie to avoid Melancholy’ (I, 6). The distinction between the curative and the symptomatic is not always clear. His ever-growing text may be a means of furthering the therapeutic aim by attempting comprehensiveness, but it is perhaps also a sign that melancholy is self-propagating and uncontainable.5 If nothing else, it shows that melancholy continued to hold the attention of readers and writers alike, the latter providing further authorities to be added to Burton’s book. The multiplicity of viewpoints in the text should be borne in mind during subsequent discussion of Burton’s curative purpose. The therapeutic claim is subject to multiple strains and counter-examples, is cast into doubt by an Leicestershire, was only 8 miles from Goodyere’s at Polesworth, and the latter estate is praised for its good situation in the Anatomy (II, 60). 4 Katharine Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 93–114. 5 See Christopher Tilmouth, ‘Burton’s ‘Turning Picture’: Argument and Anxiety in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, RES 56 (2005), 524–49.

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the early modern period, referring to the technique of making bitter medicines more palatable by coating them, and one might regard Burton’s use of the image as merely conventional.8 The image has a conveniently two-way literary meaning:  a writer can claim that pleasurable material is a mere cover for the true profit within, but at the same time use this justification in order to provide a licence for enjoyment. However, in Burton’s handling the image has a further dimension. The pill image goes beyond the conventional rehearsal of Horatian poetic theory because it also aims to heal. This is particularly apt given the strong medical slant to the Anatomy: ‘Medicinal Physicke’ as cure has made up the penultimate Section of the second Partition (II, 208–37), and here, at the beginning of the third, Burton shifts from literal to metaphorical drugs, suggesting that reading will ‘medicinally worke’ on the reader in an equivalent manner. Burton thus associates his work’s therapeutic aim through reading with the medical dimension of the text. The gilded pill image and its like have a long history, one which shows how the notion of reading as a curative process has been understood in a literary, philosophical and theological sense. It is worth outlining first the associations between medicine, philosophy and language which inform the image. The presentation of philosophy as a healing art akin to medical treatment is an ancient one, particularly associated with Hellenistic ethics. Burton may have known that his literary namesake, Democritus, was the first to develop the analogy between philosophy and medicine at length; in any case, he would have encountered it as a pervasive metaphor in much philosophical writing which he used as sources, particularly Stoic.9 Medicine and rhetoric also have deep and long-standing connections.10 The locus classicus is Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates argues that good rhetoric should behave like good medicine. In order to be fully and truly effective, both arts should be fitted to the circumstances of particular individuals, not applied as blanket rules. Yet rhetoricians and ­doctors should also both address the nature of their subjects, ‘in one that of the body and in the other that of the soul’, in order to understand and treat them. Just as Hippocrates taught that one should know what bodies are like in general in order to bring health to Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), P325. 9 See Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire:  Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994), Chapter 1; pp. 51, 316. See below, Chapter 3, p. 93, for further discussion of the association between medicine and philosophy. 10 These are explored extensively by Stephen Pender, ‘Between Medicine and Rhetoric’, Early Science and Medicine 10 (2005), 36–64. 8

Gilded pills

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sick individuals, so one must know all the types of soul there are in order to use speech to ­influence the soul.11 This connection between the general and the particular aspects of medicine and rhetoric is a crucial question in Burton’s treatment of melancholy and his approach to his readership, as we will later see. Aristotle also makes a number of comparisons between the two arts. In his Rhetoric, he explains that rhetoric’s function is ‘not to persuade but to see the available means of persuasion in each case’, just as medicine’s function is not ‘to create health but to promote this as much as possible’, according to the nature of the individual case (even patients who cannot recover their health can be treated, he notes).12 Both linguistic powers and medical ones involve a summoning of the resources that are appropriate to be applied in each situation. It is also important to emphasise that the ancient association between rhetoric and medicine is not merely one of parallel arts, one of which is applied to the body and the other to the soul. The passions of the mind were physiologically rooted and the subject of much medical analysis (they would become a popular topic for treatises in the seventeenth century, such as Thomas Walkington’s The Optick Glasse of Humors (1601) and Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde (1601)). Classical and early modern rhetoricians taught that rousing the passions was an essential means of persuasion: by inciting an audience to feel pity, fear or anger – often by displaying these emotions oneself – the orator could change their minds and opinions.13 Burton’s hope that his lines will ‘rectifie the minde’ is intimately involved with his project to rectify the melancholic body, and his attention to the passions and their role in illness and cure is indebted to rhetorical theory as well as to medicine. Turning to the specific precedents for Burton’s image of curative writing, the most prominent classical model is found in Lucretius’ long philosophical poem De Rerum Natura (written in the first century bc): as with children, when physicians try to administer rank wormwood, they first touch the rims about the cups with the sweet yellow fluid of honey, that Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 270B–271A (pp. 547–51); for further comparisons between medicine and rhetoric, see Plato, Gorgias, 464–5. See also Pedro Laín Entralgo, The Therapy of the Word in Classical Literature, ed. and trans. L. J. Rather and John M. Sharp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 108–38. 12 Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 35. 13 See Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Book 6; Pender, ‘Between Medicine and Rhetoric’, 41; Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds:  Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), Chapter 2. 11

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unthinking childhood be deluded as far as the lips, and meanwhile may drink up the bitter juice of wormwood, and though beguiled be not betrayed, but rather by such means be restored and regain health, so now do I.14

The particular significance of Lucretius’ medical image is its application to writing: the text he offers to his addressee Memmius is intended to heal. By comparison, Seneca the Younger makes a similar but less emphatic and less literary claim in his moral epistles, written a century later. There are, he explains to his addressee, ‘certain wholesome counsels, which may be compared to prescriptions of useful drugs; these I am putting into writing’.15 It should be noted that here the pieces of advice are already medicinal: it is not the act of writing which makes them so. Lucretius’ claim goes further than Seneca’s because the cure he offers is a textual one: his poetry is designed to correct and heal Memmius’ mind of its errors. Burton draws on Stoic and Epicurean ideas of philosophy as therapy in his work, particularly his writing on cure of the ­passions and perturbations of the mind. These models of medicinal writing feed into Burton’s conception of his work’s aim, although a significant ­difference is that he does not imagine a single addressee (the full significance of this point will be discussed in the next chapter). Yet his sense that he is writing for a large number of unknown readers and must cater to all their tastes and needs may bear a debt to Seneca, who insisted that philosophical teaching should be designed for all, not only a few.16 Classical ideals of medicinal rhetoric were adopted and transformed by Christian writers for their own uses. There is, of course, a Biblical grounding for the idea of healing words. Proverbs tells us that ‘Pleasant words are as an honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones’ (Proverbs 16.24), and in the New Testament Christ’s healing miracles are not only accompanied by but rendered through his words; their performative power is recognised by the centurion whose servant is sick, and who asks Jesus to ‘speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed’ (Matt. 8.8; also Luke 7.7). Of the early Christian writers it is Augustine whose ideas about rhetorical power and its effects on the emotions are most influential, particularly the fourth book of De Doctrina Christiana, which provides another significant source of Burton’s image. There Augustine explains that eloquence is a powerful tool to ­communicate wisdom: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin Ferguson Smith (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 79. 15 Seneca, Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gummere, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), I, 37. 16 Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, p. 331. 14

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We often have to take bitter medicines, and we must always avoid sweet things that are dangerous: but what better than sweet things that give health, or medicines that are sweet? The more we are attracted by sweetness, the easier it is for medicine to do its healing work.17

Augustine’s view of Christian eloquence forms an important model for Burton’s construction of his text as a gilded pill which provides pleasure and cure simultaneously. The Augustinian precedent for Burton’s theory of writing is hinted at in the Latin phrase Burton uses to describe his intention to profit more than please: ‘non tam ut populo placerem, quam ut populum juvarem’ (III, 5). The commentators in the Oxford edition do not give a source (nor does Burton), but the phrase appears to be an indirect allusion to a passage in the Confessions, in which Augustine relates a story from his youth when he once encountered a beggar, happy and jesting, on the streets of Milan. Although he was himself unhappy, he realised that, perversely, he would rather remain his miserable, ambitious self than be the happy beggar. The key phrase is a comment which describes the young Augustine’s waste of his talents at oratory:  ‘sed placere inde quaerebam hominibus, non ut eos docerem, sed tantum ut placerem’ (my emphasis) [I sought to please men with it; not to teach them, but only to please them].18 Burton clearly knows this passage well, as he quotes the whole story about the beggar in his consolation against poverty and want (II, 148). I would argue that his phrase about profiting the people rather than simply pleasing them is a deliberate reversal of Augustine’s words about his younger self. Of course, Augustine would later discover that his rhetorical education could be used to profit and not merely to please, and would propound this ideal of Christian eloquence in De Doctrina. Burton’s statement about the aims and effects of his writing thus subtly indicates his debt to three powerful models: the poet Horace, the moral philosopher Lucretius and the Christian teacher Augustine. Literary, ethical and theological aspects of curative writing are interwoven throughout the Anatomy, and brought together in the image of the gilded pill. The image draws out the complex qualities of movere which are the legacy of classical and early Christian rhetorical theory, and which he inherits and appropriates. There is an ethical sense in the phrase ‘rectif[ying] the minde’, which suggests the reformative powers asserted by ancient moral philosophy, and there are also the medicinal properties Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 105. Augustine, The Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 6.6.9 (I, 63); English translation from The Confessions, trans. Philip Burton (London: Everyman, 2001), p. 117.

17 18

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associated specifically with language, which are established in ancient works of philosophy and rhetoric, in the Bible and in patristic writing. More broadly, Burton participates in the tradition which sees the third function of rhetoric, movere [to move], as a means of effecting change in the passions and emotions. From the writings of Aristotle through the classical rhetorical manuals and Augustine to early modern theorists, it was suggested that the grand style was a form of rhetoric which should seize or conquer the audience with its emotional force. Movere was thus seen not merely as persuasion through the presentation of appropriate topoi, but as a psychological process which worked on the mind and (for Augustine) the will of the individual.19 For Burton, likewise, writing can affect the mind positively and almost unconsciously through the process of reception and absorption, ideally with healing consequences. One further strand of associations is suggested by Burton’s image of his book’s function, and is worth mentioning as a coda to this discussion of movere. Early modern jestbooks, romances and stories advertised themselves in medicinal terms as cures for melancholy. The title-page of Robert Greene’s Arbasto (1584) offered ‘pleasaunte conceytes to purge Melancholy’ to gentlemen readers, while collections of jests and wonders were promoted as pills, preservatives and purgatives against the disease.20 Samuel Rowlands’ work Democritus, Or Doctor Merry-man his Medicine, Against Melancholy Humors (1607) may even have partly inspired Burton’s pseudonymous persona.21 These works present laughter and ‘pleasantness’ as therapy for the melancholic, countering his or her tendencies towards gloomy introspection. Burton’s work has few resemblances to the generally brief and often ribald pamphlets which claim to ward off melancholy, but his defence of the ‘light’ subject-matter of love recalls these works. His sources for ‘Love Melancholy’ include romances and comic tales, and his own library included many ephemeral works of the kind Thomas Bodley refused to have in his library. At a broader level, the Anatomy is not (as a few have claimed) a vast academic joke but it certainly has Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric:  The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 6–7, 21, 28–9, 46. See also Brian Vickers, ‘ “The Power of Persuasion”: Images of the Orator, Elyot to Shakespeare’, in James J. Murphy (ed.), Renaissance Eloquence:  Studies in the Theories and Practices of Renaissance Rhetoric (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1983), pp. 411–35. 20 e.g. Anon, A Pil to Purge Melancholie (London, 1599); Andrew Boorde, The First and Best Part of Scogins Jests … Being a Preservative against Melancholy (London, 1626); Nicholas Breton, Wonders Worth the Hearing. Which … May Serve both to Purge Melancholy from the Minde, & Grosse Humours from the Body (London, 1602); W. C., Gent, The First Part of the Renowned Historie of Fragosa King of Aragon … Right Pleasant for the Aged to Drive away Melancholy Thoughts (London, 1618). 21 Burton owned some of Rowlands’ works, Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988), items 1366–9. 19

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comic moments, entertaining stories, and a sense of playfulness: ‘veritas odium parit [truth begets hatred], as he said, verjuce and oatmeale is good for a Parret’ (I, 84) the Christ Church scholar remarks in sententious fashion. The playfulness running alongside his serious aim bears witness to Burton’s Erasmian humanist pedigree: Erasmus comments in his De Utilitate Colloquiorum that ‘I’m not sure anything is learned better than what is learned as a game’, and himself applies the image of a physician giving medicine to this idea of profit through pleasure.22 Burton’s curative claim, as expressed in the preface to the third Partition, made an impression on one early reader. In a poem to a lady, ‘Upon Mr. Burton’s Melancholy’, Burton’s fellow-collegian at Christ Church, Henry King (later Bishop of Chichester, and a friend of John Donne) presents the text in terms of its therapeutic qualities: If in this Glasse of Humours you doe find The Passions or Diseases of your Mind; Here without paine you safely may endure Though not to suffer, yet to Read your Cure:23

King views the Anatomy as having an analgesic effect (‘without paine’) on the mind as well as a healing one, and identifies the passions of the mind as its principal theme. The phrase ‘Read your Cure’ contains a double meaning. The addressee of King’s poem may find a remedy within the pages of the book, as one might in a medical manual. Yet she may also find that reading itself forms the cure. King implies that the text provides a remedy for the diseases of the mind, at least once it becomes activated by the reader’s own participation. The phrase also registers the personalised way in which this textual healing operates: the woman he addresses is encouraged to read ‘your Cure’ (my emphasis), not simply a cure. The therapeutic function implied by the gilded pill image, then, was recognised by at least one of the Anatomy’s early readers. ‘ W ho s oe v e r t hou a r t ’? I have suggested that Burton participates in a long tradition of therapeutic language, but whom and what does he aim to cure? The gilded pill Desiderius Erasmus, Colloquies (Collected Works of Erasmus Vol. 40), trans. Craig R. Thompson (University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 1098, 1097. 23 ‘To the same Lady Upon Mr. Burton’s Melancholy’, The Poems of Bishop Henry King, ed. Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 154. King’s father was Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, where Burton spent his entire adult life. King himself studied there from 1609 to 1611 and became a canon of the cathedral in 1624. 22

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image packages the text as medicine for its readers, yet the preface to the whole work also makes clear that it was composed with the author’s self-help in mind. As we have seen, in ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ Burton declares that the act of writing is a means of avoiding his melancholy, and he further suggests that it is the mere exercise of this ‘playing labor’ (I, 7) which is curative: as he will later mention both in the second Partition and at the very end of the work, keeping oneself from idleness is a key way to combat melancholy. In describing this task of writing and its intended effects in the preface, his arguments become increasingly complex. At first, writing is presented as being ‘busied in toyes’ (I, 7), merely a means of keeping him occupied. Then, however, he suggests that his initial motivation was ‘to ease my minde by writing’ and he ‘could imagine no fitter evacuation then this’. Writing about melancholy is not merely any task, but one particularly suited to the soothing of a troubled mind. Moreoever, it becomes a treatment of like with like as it ‘make[s] an Antidote out of that which was the prime cause of my disease’ (I, 7), an idea which recalls the Paracelsian notion of homoeopathic treatments, in which a poison may act as both cause and cure of the same disease.24 The activities of writing and reading are closely bound up for Burton, and it seems that much of what has been curative springs from his research, since he explains that the process of educating himself about melancholy by reading medical books has helped him. Burton then places himself in a line of writers who have composed De Consolatione works – Cicero, Cardan – to comfort themselves in grief, another set of literary precedents for the notion of the therapeutic text. One might add to this list Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, which Burton frequently cites in the main body of the text. This paragraph in ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ describing his reasons for writing ends with a notable shift of emphasis. So far Burton has presented himself as the melancholic sufferer who writes for his own relief, but finally he turns his perspective outwards. Like the lady with leprosy who used her wealth to build a hospital for lepers, he says, ‘I will spend my time and knowledge, which are my greatest fortunes, for the common good of all’ (I, 8). The full implications of Burton’s portrayal of himself as the melancholic expert on melancholy will be discussed in a later chapter; here it is important to recognise how his presentation of his task and his reasons for it develops in a centrifugal fashion. The motivation to write 24

See Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd edn (Basel: Karger, 1982), pp. 145–7.

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for oneself moves outward into writing for others. The latter purpose does not eclipse or negate the former, but instead functions as its culmination. Does Burton really mean that he writes for the common good of all, however? The claim to universal utility is found in a number of publications which give advice and guidance, and one has cause to be sceptical of it. Paul Slack has noted that vernacular Tudor medical books typically claimed that they were designed for everyone, even the poor, and suggests that these were ‘pious hopes or calculated advertisements’, not realistic assessments of actual readership.25 There are simple economic reasons for doubting Burton’s own claim. His work began life as a quarto but was published in folio from the second edition onwards, and hence its price would have been prohibitive for many readers.26 The Anatomy’s consolations against poverty would have been directly applicable to few except the literate who had fallen upon hard times, and perhaps especially impoverished scholars who might, like Erasmus, buy books before clothes.27 His treatment of such aspects of melancholy may be indicative of an attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the disease rather than a genuine urge to help all, although his direct addresses to the reader show at least that he maintains the posture of writing for the ‘common good’ throughout the book. Michael MacDonald has observed that melancholy was seen to be a companion of gentility, and Burton’s book would have appealed to the anxious members of the nobility and gentry who flocked to the door of the physician Richard Napier.28 His reader is also usually (but not always) assumed to be male. His ‘Cure of Love Melancholy’ includes a famously extended diatribe against women, hardly mitigated by his conclusion that one can ‘alter the name, reade him for her, and ’tis all one in effect’ (III,  229). Yet he does list a few therapeutic activities specifically Paul Slack, ‘Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: The Uses of the Vernacular Medical Literature in Tudor England’, in Charles Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 237–73 (p. 237). 26 The price of the Anatomy would have depended on the edition, and there is little information about how much it cost to buy. One early reader, Thomas Widdowes (perhaps the father of Giles Widdowes (1588/9–1645), whose name also appears in the copy), marked an acquisition price of 11s. for his copy of the 1638 edition: English Faculty Library, Oxford, shelfmark YJ37.1 [Ana], frontispiece recto. Using Francis R. Johnson’s calculation of average retail prices per sheet in the period (‘Notes on English Retail Book-prices, 1550–1640’, The Library, 5th series, 5 (1950), 83–112 (90)), one can estimate an approximate price of 5s. for the first edition of the Anatomy (1621), rising to 13s. 1d. for the fifth (1638). Burton himself bought many of his books second-hand; Kiessling, Library of Robert Burton, pp. xxviii–ix. 27 See Erasmus’ letter to Jacob Batt in The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1 to 141, 1484 to 1500 (Collected Works of Erasmus Vol. I), trans. R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson (University of Toronto Press, 1974), p. 252. 28 Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam:  Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 153–4. 25

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for women in ‘Exercise rectified’ (II, 95), and devotes a Subsection to the symptoms of ‘Maides, Nunnes, and Widowes Melancholy’ (I, 414–18); furthermore, examples of female melancholics feature throughout the text.29 While Burton’s expressed desire to help all may be unrealistic, it functions as a key rhetorical device in his approach to cure. Whatever Burton expected of his actual readership, his treatment of his imagined reader shows a commitment towards a sense of inclusiveness. Time and again the reader is addressed as ‘whosoever thou art’ (e.g. I, 380; III, 427); this deliberate refusal to define who the reader is keeps all melancholics within the bounds of the book and the scope of cure. Burton does not begin by specifying an appropriate type of reader for his text, unlike some who aim their books at readers of a particular age-group, sex or social class. Burton’s characterisation of the reader as anyone and everyone is, in its own way, just as much of a fantasy as other writers’ addresses to specific groups. Yet its rhetorical value is to encompass all kinds of readers, whatever their status. The notion of an inclusive readership is implanted early on in the Anatomy and particularly brought to prominence in one paratext:  the Latin poem ‘Democritus Junior ad Librum Suum’ [Democritus Junior to his book], added in the fourth edition. Its inclusion suggests the growing interest of the author in his readership and in how his work is received, and shows Burton deliberately shifting away from a posture of authorial anxiety about readers’ freedom of interpretation to one of welcome to all of his readers. The consequences of this decision, shown in the poem but evident in earlier editions, indicate his distinctive attitude to the act of reading. The poem follows the tradition of an author’s valediction to his book, of which the pre-eminent English examples are found in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. Burton’s version is a long envoi which develops an elaborate fiction of the personified book as the author addresses it. He envisages different groups of people who might read it and instructs the book on how to react to each group. For example, a nobleman or soldier should be allowed to read the text right through as there is much in it that will please him, but, he reminds the book, some of its pages are more appropriate for a virginal woman to read than others (I, lxvi). The address to the book here functions as an indirect appeal to the discrimination of the educated reader (educated, because he or she reads Latin), playing on the notion that the personified  On women and melancholy see further below, Chapter 3, pp. 91–2.

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book has control to open or close itself. The ‘cordatus, facilis, lectorque ­benignus’ (I, lxvii) [sagacious, easy-going and benevolent reader] is allowed to read the whole work and may become wiser for it, but, should a ‘Rhetor ineptus’ [fatuous teacher of rhetoric] come looking for a refined, polished style, ‘Claude citus librum’ [shut the book quickly].30 Moreover, the book should attack any fault-finding critics – ‘Ringe, freme, & noli tum pandere’ [snarl and growl, and refuse to open]’ (I, lxviii) – and chase away the ignorant and uncouth. From being ascribed a passive role, the book becomes more and more active in Burton’s imagined response to bad readers. The device of telling his book how to behave towards various readers, instead of addressing them directly, is unusual, but the attitudes expressed are reasonably conventional: it is common to find writers of this period complaining of injudicious readers, and pre-empting harsh criticism with their own attacks on Zoilus and Momus figures.31 However, a more surprising element of the poem is its late change of direction. Instead of distinguishing his various readers by their tastes or degree of competence, he finally treats them as one group: Sed nec pelle tamen, læto omnes accipe vultu, Quos, quas, vel quales, inde vel unde viros. Gratus erit quicunque venit, gratissimus hospes Quisquis erit, facilis difficilisque mihi. (I, lxviii) [Do not, however, drive away, but welcome everyone with happy mien, men, women, of whatever condition, people from here or there – whoever comes shall be welcome, a most honoured guest be he who he may, whether favourable or unfavourable to me.]

Instead of pretending that he can limit access to his book, Burton welcomes all categories of readers inclusively. The gesture is to a certain extent ironised by the use of Latin:  only the well-educated reader will be aware that he or she is a ‘gratissimus hospes’. Nonetheless, the final lines can be taken more broadly as a sign of the authorial approach to be taken in the main body of the (English) text. Burton does not abandon the fiction of control over his book’s reception, yet he acknowledges the reality of a disparate and possibly critical readership. Although he may be partly making a virtue of necessity here, and although (as we shall see in the next chapter) occasionally Burton does seem to attempt to restrict The grammar of this line is odd since the imperative verb ‘claude’ is a command directed at the book, which is also the object of the verb. 31 See R. B. Gill, ‘The Renaissance Conventions of Envy’, Medievalia et Humanistica 9 (1979), 215–30; Debra Belt, ‘The Poetics of Hostile Reception, 1575–1610’, Criticism 33 (1991), 419–59. 30

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access to his book, this sense of an inclusive readership is one of the major ­characteristics of the Anatomy. The poem welcomes all readers while acknowledging their differences of character, age, sex, location and critical response. At times during ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ Burton is dismissive of such differences, an attitude that is linked to his satiric viewpoint. Individuals might have different desires and vices which distinguish them, but all are equal fools: all the world is of this humour (vulgus) and thou thy selfe art de vulgo, one of the Commonalty; and he, and he, and so are all the rest; and therefore, as Phocian concludes, to bee approved in nought you say or doe, meere Idiots and Asses: begin then where you will, goe backward or forward, choose out of the whole packe, winke and choose, you shall finde them all alike, never a barrell better herring. (I, 65–6)

This view of humans as being ‘all alike’ exposes them  – the reader included – to attack. Yet it is also put to more positive use, in a manner which undermines the author’s position as satiric spectator. Burton confronts the perceived problem that all are mad or at least ‘torn in pieces by our passions’ but none will admit it, and ‘Every man thinkes with himselfe Egomet videor mihi sanus, I am well, I am wise, and laughes at others’ (I, 56). In claiming that there are no exceptions to the rule and in treating his readers as ‘all alike’, Burton is at least partly concerned with their welfare, since the recognition that one is just as foolish, immoderate and (in short) melancholic as others is the beginning of cure, he implies. The tones of the Christian moralist converge with that of the satirist in Burton’s characterisation of the reader in these terms. Readers may be imagined as all alike and they may be welcomed to the text ‘Quos, quas, vel quales, inde vel unde viros’ [Men, women, of whatever condition, people from here or there]. Yet the Anatomy is also underpinned by the theory that melancholy is a disease of infinite variety, and that each case is hence different. The medical systems handed down by Hippocrates and Galen taught that individuals are disposed towards certain humoral types and that each instance of disease is hence affected by the individual constitution, as well as by numerous external variables such as the seasons and the quality of the air. Melancholy, a disease which affects body and mind and can be produced by any number of different causes, is particularly liable to endless permutations. Even as he attempts to chart the symptoms of the mind, Burton admits that there are ‘scarce two of two thousand, that concurre in the same symptomes’ (I, 395). In a literary sense too, each reader is different:  the Latin poem notes that

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those who may pick up the Anatomy all have varied tastes, critical standpoints and moral sensibilities, so that what is suitable for one may not be for another. This theme is continued in the preface, as the anxiety about interpretation which is dismissed at the end of the poem reasserts itself: Our writings are as so many Dishes, our Readers Guests; our Bookes like beautie, that which one admires another rejects; so are wee approved as mens fancies are inclined. (I, 13)32 Some [come] as Bees for Hony, some as Spiders to gather poyson; What shall I doe in this case? As a Dutch Host, if you come to an Inne in Germany, & dislike your fare, diet, lodging, &c. replied in a surly tone, aliud tibi quæras diversorium, if you like not this, get you to another Inne; I resolve, if you like not my writing, goe read something else. (I, 14)

Burton makes use of traditional humanist images of reading which assert the role of the interpreter as active and discriminating:  bees and spiders are well-known symbols of good and bad interpreters, while the ­digestion image is extended here to include the author as host and the reader as demanding guest.33 Thomas Nashe tries something similar in Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599), casting himself as an innkeeper at ‘the signe of the redde Herring’, who invites the reader to taste this ‘dainty dish’, and before dinner offers to ‘leade you a sound walke round about Yarmouth’ in order to whet the reader’s appetite.34 In Burton’s handling the image is decidedly less good-natured, suggesting an anxiety about the diversity of readers’ tastes. The question which hangs over Burton’s discussion of readers is ‘How shall I hope to expresse my selfe to each mans humour & conceipt, or to give satisfaction to all?’ (I, 14). His response is not to offer a number of dishes for the reader’s choosing. Instead, he takes the role of the grumpy and intransigent ‘Dutch Host’, who tells the complaining guest in defiant tones that ‘if you like not this, get you to another Inne; I resolve, if you like not my writing, goe read something else’ (I, 14). This ‘fixed menu’ method has its advantages, however, as suggested by a second major image of the reading experience, evoked soon after: if thou vouchsafe to read this Treatise, it shall seeme no otherwise to thee, then the way to an ordinary Traveller, sometimes faire, sometimes foule; here champion, there inclosed; barren in one place, better soyle in another:  by Woods, The passage is borrowed, unacknowledged, by Richard Younge in the preface to A Counter­ poyson: Or, Soverain Antidote against all Griefe (London, 1641), sig. A2r, another sign that early readers found Burton’s attention to the act of reading a notable aspect of his book. 33 These images are discussed in G. W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, RQ 33 (1980), 1–33. 34 The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, rev. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), III, 159. 32

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Groves, Hills, Dales, Plaines, &c. I shall lead thee per ardua montium, & lubrica vallium, & roscida cespitum, & glebosa camporum [over steep mountains, through hazardous valleys, dewy lawns, and ploughed fields], through variety of objects, that which thou shalt like and surely dislike. (I, 18)

This comparison to a journey is another traditional image of reading, and in Burton’s handling it suggests not only closeness between the author and the reader (in contrast to an earlier statement where he pictures himself ‘in some high place above you all’ (I, 4)) but also shared experience and authorial involvement in the reading process. The focus has shifted from the diverse readership of the meal image to the diverse terrain of the book itself. Although the reader still exercises choice over whether to read the book, if he or she does so it is to assume the role of fellow-traveller. The reader cannot select the ‘faire’ landscape’ and neglect the ‘foule’, but must follow the author’s lead through all. Thus he or she will experience ‘variety of objects, that which thou shalt like and surely dislike’. The passage answers Burton’s own question about how he can ‘give satisfaction to all’. Instead of inviting readers to choose from the text in order to satisfy their diverse tastes, he implants this notion of diversity within the text itself and encourages the reader to experience all of it. Burton plays ideas of essential sameness and difference against one another in his treatment of the reading process. ‘There is in all melancholy similitudo dissimilis, like mens faces, a disagreeing likenesse still’ (I, 395–6), and he recognises that melancholic experience and reading experience are alike in this respect. As a consequence, the ‘disagreeing likenesse’ among melancholic readers is accounted for in Burton’s treatment of cures. Although at times he treats readers as ‘all alike’, he also addresses the types of melancholy experienced by certain groups. The melancholy of scholars, lovers, and nuns, maids and widows is treated separately, as well as melancholy in the head, hypochondrium or the whole body. Douglas Trevor has noted that Burton ‘considered and reconsidered whose eyes might have wandered at what junctures of his work, tailoring the features and discourses of his book so as to account for different kinds of readers and perspectives’.35 Sometimes this ‘tailoring’ is a means of countering the hostile reactions which he imagines in some readers, but at others it is used to target his advice more effectively. The oscillation I have observed between ideas of general sameness and individual difference is partly related to competing medical perspectives on melancholy. As we will see in Chapter 3, Hippocratic medicine   Trevor, Poetics of Melancholy, p. 141.

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encouraged physicians to observe the specifics of an individual case and treat the patient in response to those particular symptoms, while Galenic medicine advocated a more methodical approach starting from general principles and working down to the individual. Yet the ‘disagreeing likeness’ of melancholy and of reading also evokes broader philosophical questions about the whole nature of experience and its associated meanings.36 According to the Aristotelian tradition which still dominated the schools in Burton’s lifetime, ‘experience’ was seen as a universal statement of what typically occurs in the ordinary course of nature. In other words, it was not ‘how something had happened’ on a specific occasion but ‘how things happen’, as agreed by general observation and particularly by written authority.37 This framework of thought would remain highly influential, but in the course of the seventeenth century would be challenged by a new scientific discourse which would formulate experience not as a universal statement of the way things are, but as a series of individual historical instances. For Francis Bacon, and later for the fellows of the Royal Society, this understanding of experience would provide a radically new means of making knowledge. For them, examples of experience which fell outside the established universal order of nature were no longer to be dismissed as deviations or monstrosities, as they were by Aristotle, but might instead dismantle the very validity of those assumed generalities. Where does Burton stand within this broad picture? Clearly, Aristotelian thought has a tremendous influence on the Anatomy as an intellectual project, but I would argue that his treatment of experience indicates some movement away from the Aristotelian formulation. It is true that he frequently uses the word ‘experience’ to appeal to the shared knowledge and understanding of his readers: the phrase ‘common experience’ occurs again and again (e.g. I, 130, 204, 248, 316), and is often used to second the evidence of Burton’s written authorities. As Peter Dear puts it, for Aristotle ‘the nature of experience depended on its embeddedness in the community; the world was constructed through communal eyes,’ and Burton at times assumes general assent among his readers, or at least in the republic of learning, to prove a point.38 However, this ‘common experience’ can also be evoked to subvert any notion of universal consensus or to contradict the evidence of written authorities; in ‘Bad Diet a The following brief account summarises Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience:  The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 11–31. See also his Revolutionizing the Sciences:  European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 131–48. 37 Dear, Discipline and Experience, p. 4. 38 Ibid., p. 23. 36

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Cause’ he mentions that Gomesius, Codronchus and Lemnius commend salt in the diet, but adds that ‘yet common experience findes Salt, and salt meats, to be great procurers of this disease’ (I, 217). Another important repeated usage of ‘experience’ is in a much more personal sense, applied to the observations of individuals, particularly medical writers. A typical example from the ‘Bad Diet’ Subsection is the Dutch physician Forestus (Pieter van Foreest, 1522–97) on the subject of fish-eating:  he mentions that Carthusian friars whose main food is fish are more subject to melancholy than others, ‘and that hee found by experience, being sometimes their Physitian ordinary at Delph in Holland’ (I, 215). Burton gleans the experiences of dozens of medical professionals from their case histories of melancholics, and his citation of them is used to provide a different kind of evidence from the established, generalising experience of Aristotelian philosophy. This does not make Burton a Baconian or a forerunner of new science (although he read Bacon, his references to his writing in the Anatomy are chiefly to the Essays). Characteristically, Burton does not propose a radically new attitude to knowledge, but blends different approaches and does not acknowledge their differences. His attention to Hippocratic medical sources, which place emphasis on the observation of particular cases, creates an implicit conflict with the Aristotelian universalising and normative version of experience. This multiple and not altogether harmonious perspective on experience suits Burton’s attitude to reading. As interpreters and as melancholics, his readers have a vast diversity of approaches and responses to his work, and we have seen how the text acknowledges this fact while encouraging them to read not merely for their own purposes. In melancholy, any universal statements of experience are complicated or even overturned by the thousands of individual, messy manifestations of the disease, but Burton recognises the importance of moving beyond the specifics of the particular case. Hence he encourages readers to look not simply for their own experiences, but also for those of others. A seemingly straightforward example is his claim that he has written about jealousy so ‘that he that is or hath beene Jealous, may see his errour as in a glasse; he that is not, may learne to detest, avoid it himselfe, and dispossesse others that are in any wise affected with it’ (III, 273). Thus both those who are afflicted by a particular form of melancholy and those who are not can benefit from the reading of it. Joan Webber has observed this process of bringing readers together in action at the level of Burton’s syntax, too. His use of parallel examples, for instance, makes his sentences ‘as inclusive as possible, offering the reader every opportunity to find in it his own experience, and to

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broaden his own experience by taking all this into himself, just as Burton has done’.39 Webber’s comment draws attention to the role that experience plays in Burton’s conception of the reading process, and in his attempts to use it for therapeutic effect. Within ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ and the main body of the text, the author suggests that readers should bear their particular circumstances in mind when learning about causes, symptoms and cures. We have seen (in the Introduction) that he warns his ‘present or future Reader, who is actually Melancholy’ (I, 24) not to read the symptoms or prognostics Sections since they may exacerbate the condition. His caution sounded, however, he adds that ‘The rest I doubt not they may securely read, and to their benefit’ (I, 24). The comment would seem to encourage the reader to select a way of proceeding through the book based on his or her condition. It is worth noting that Burton highlights the ‘benefit’ to those who are not ‘actually Melancholy’ of reading about it, another example of how he distinguishes between readers but also encourages them to learn from experiences not their own. Just as those who are not jealous in love may benefit from reading about it, those who are not melancholic may profit from the Sections about symptoms and prognostics. At the same time, Burton’s warning shows how complicated it is to distinguish between different types of reader. One might doubt his confident assertion that those who are not melancholy may ‘securely read’ Sections which the author considers to be dangerous. After all, the pervading message of ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, and one that is asserted in the paragraph after his warning about not reading certain parts of the book, is that ‘all the world is mad, that it is melancholy, dotes’ (I, 24). In this case, one might distinguish between those currently suffering from melancholy in habit – i.e. as a serious illness, ‘a Chronicke or continuate disease’ (I, 139)  – and the more general sense of melancholy as ‘the Character of Mortalitie’ (I, 136). The phrase ‘actually Melancholy’ suggests the narrower medical conception of disease. Yet this explanation does not erase the shock value of what Burton is suggesting: that certain parts of his work might be damaging for an afflicted imagination. Those who do categorise themselves as being among ‘the rest’ might therefore question their ability to read ‘securely’. Returning to the other example, jealousy, Burton’s distinction between those who are jealous and those who are not seems straightforward, except for the phrase ‘he that is or 39

Joan Webber, The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 102.

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hath beene Jealous’ (III, 273, my emphasis). Few readers would fall into the category of ‘he that is not’ jealous, if anyone who has ever experienced jealousy is counted in the other category. Burton may target different kinds of readers and appeal to their particular experiences but his language also troubles the distinctions between them in a subtle manner. Although the Anatomy is steeped in humoral theory, Burton does not use it to treat individuals as part of a limited number of pre-set groups, but instead registers the fluidity between different types of human experience and encourages his readers to recognise this in their self-examination. Burton highlights the varied experiences and attitudes of his readership and at the same time treats them as interconnected, even seeing his readers as ‘all alike’. One response he noticeably does not make to the issue of readerly diversity, however, is to instruct his readers to pick and choose from what they read and ignore those aspects which are not relevant or of interest. This would seem like an obvious manoeuvre for a writer concerned about the individual tastes and requirements of readers, and it is one used by an imitator of Burton, Edmund Gregory, in his work An Historical Anatomy of Christian Melancholy (1646). Gregory prefaces his work with a set of ‘Directions to the Reader’. As a writer who consciously follows Burton (or at least takes advantage of his work’s commercial success), it is telling that Gregory has a similar concern with how readers will experience and benefit from his text; clearly, the reader-centred nature of Burton’s rhetoric in his paratexts was recognised by his early readers. Gregory remarks that since that what I have written is not the Experience of all men, but of some (for who is able to finde out the secresie of but one heart, much more of all hearts?) let it not, I pray, by any means offend you, if you chance to meet with that thing which concurs not with the Experience and Motion of your own soul; for I intend nothing herein as a positive Doctrine or an absolute Rule; if any thing be generally true in all or most men, be it so; if not in those things which are strange to our soul, let Discretion be your better Direction.40

Gregory is content to acknowledge that his advice can only be of limited use, and leaves his reader to discriminate between that which is relevant and that which is not. His parenthesised question encapsulates both the problem of attempting to help and console an unknown reader and, for Burton, its solution. The implied answer to Gregory’s question is that no one can ‘finde out the secresie of but one heart’, or at least, no human: he is echoing Psalm 44.21, which says that only God ‘knoweth the secrets of Edmund Gregory, An Historical Anatomy of Christian Melancholy (London, 1646), sigs. A3v–A4 r.

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the heart’. Gregory thus instructs his readers to ignore ­sections of his work which do not reflect their own ‘Experience’, but also asks them to submit their ‘Experimental Observations’ so that he can expand his work in a later edition.41 Burton, by contrast, does not invite the reader to read his or her experience into the text as a means of selecting relevant material. Instead he makes the fact that reader and author are unknown to one another part of the experience of the text, with therapy offered to all through the process of reading. The work acts as a kind of ‘­anti-confessional’ in that it rejects the fantasy of personal contact between writer and reader in favour of complete anonymity. There are theological consequences to this decision, which will be considered in the next chapter. N a s h e a n d Mon ta ig n e on r e a di ng Gregory focuses on the ‘Experience’ of his reader as something extrinsic to his text. In Burton’s Anatomy, however, experience is implanted firmly within it. In the final section of this chapter I will examine the ­function of readerly experience in two earlier prose writers, Thomas Nashe (1567–?1601) and Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell (1592) has many resemblances to Burton’s writing: in the oral quality of its prose style, the sudden shifts between satiric attack and homily, the denunciations of vice at a national and individual level, the attacks on bad patrons (swiftly followed by recantation), the discussion of spirits, the influence of Menippean satire, the interspersal of anecdotes both ancient and modern, and in the frequent addresses to the reader throughout the work.42 The main body of the text involves a dialogue between Pierce and the Knight of the Post (the spirit agent of the devil), but in the final pages the narrator breaks off the story and announces, Gentle Reader, tandem aliquando I am at leasure to talke to thee. I dare say thou hast cald me a hundred times dolt for this senseles discourse:  it is no matter, thou dost but as I have doone by a number in my dayes.43

The pre-empting of imagined criticism here is found in numerous other texts of the period, but the way Nashe deftly shifts perspective is an Ibid., sig. A5r. On Menippean satire see P. H. Holland, ‘Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Menippean Satire, Humanist and English’, unpublished PhD thesis, University College London (1979). On Nashe’s prose style, see Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 18–36, 50–55. Nashe himself used the anatomy metaphor for writing in his early work, The Anatomie of Absurditie (London, 1589). 43 Works of Nashe, I, 239. 41

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original touch. He brushes insults aside by claiming that he has criticised others in just the same way, as a reader himself. Instead of retaliating against readers, then, he joins with them against the writers of ‘goose gyblets or stinking garbadge’  – the worthy targets of readers’ scorn  – and thereby deflects criticism from his own text. He proceeds to answer potential objections about his work’s title and content, before interrupting himself: Deus bone, what a vaine am I fallen into? what, an Epistle to the Readers in the end of thy booke? Out uppon thee for an arrent blocke, where learndst thou that wit? O sir, holde your peace: a fellon never comes to his answere before the offence be committed. Wherfore, if I in the beginning of my Book should have come off with a long Apologie to excuse my selfe, it were all one as if a theefe, going to steale a horse, should devise by the waie as he went, what to speake when he came at the gallows. Here is a crosse waie, and I thinke it good heere to part.44

Nashe upsets the conventional structure of his text by addressing the reader at its end rather than its beginning. It is a tactic John Donne almost copies in Pseudo-Martyr (1610), commenting in his prefatory ­epistle that he was planning to address the reader only after the main work, since ‘I thought not that any man might well and properly be called a Reader, till he were come to the end of the Booke.’ 45 This understanding of the reader as experiencer of the text is close to Montaigne’s, as we shall see. Nashe gives his reader a voice, transforming the one-sided author’s epistle into an imagined conversation. The dialogue, a technique he uses frequently in his writing, here adds to the sense of the reader as companion and sharer in the text. Nashe’s ‘fellon’ image is worth pausing over. The comparison between the author and a horse-thief, an appropriately roguish figure for Nashe’s persona, seems to set the reader up in an adversarial relationship with him: if the writer is the criminal and the text itself is the crime, the reader hence stands for a representative of the law, or at least the law-abiding citizen who would hear his speech ‘at the gallows’. The next sentence, however, throws this first interpretation into disarray. Since the reader and the author are to part at a ‘crosse waie’, they are being imagined on a journey together, and since the author has just compared himself to a thief on ‘the waie’ to steal a horse, implicitly the reader is being allied with the author as a sharer in his criminal activity. The author and the experienced reader (that is, the reader who has persevered to the end of Ibid., I, 240–41.

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  John Donne, Pseudo-Martyr (London, 1610), sig. ¶r.

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the work) become co-conspirators through the text, perhaps unexpectedly for the reader, who has not been forewarned by a prefatory epistle. As with the earlier passage where he responds to imagined criticism of his work, here Nashe breaks down any sense of an adversarial relationship between him and his readers. Whereas before he has stepped out of the role of author to portray himself as a fellow-consumer of texts, in the final moment of his address he pulls the reader in line with him as a collaborator in the experience of the work, or rather a criminal sidekick. Burton’s depiction of the reader as an ‘ordinary Traveller’ whom he leads across diverse terrain has something in common with Nashe’s implied and implicated reader. The notion of the experience of a text is a central concern of a writer who is more significant in relation to the Anatomy:  the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Although of an earlier generation than Nashe and Burton, his Essais were first translated into English in 1603 by John Florio; while not a contemporary, then, Montaigne can be considered an immediate and influential forerunner of Burton, who would have known the writer through Florio’s translation (he could not read French).46 Burton refers to him eight times in the Anatomy (only once via another author), and these references, from throughout the Essais, appear from the first edition onwards. Montaigne’s writing can thus be plausibly regarded as an influence on the design of the Anatomy from its beginning, an influence evident not only in explicit references but also in thematic and stylistic similarities. In particular, both writers give a prominent place in their works to the act of reading. As an author who is particularly conscious of the way texts are approached by the reader – both himself as reader, and those who read his work – Montaigne provides an impetus for Burton’s approach to writing, although with some significant differences. Montaigne addresses the reader directly in a short preface to his Essais. He claims from the outset that they are not for public ­consumption  – ‘I have set myself no other end but a private family one’ – while he specifically denies catering to the reader’s needs and interests:  ‘I have not 46

Burton may have had a personal connection with the translator John Florio: William Vaughan’s The Golden Fleece features a dialogue between the author (‘Orpheus Junior’, in imitation of Burton), Florio and Democritus Junior  – identified as author of The Anatomy of Melancholy  – about their failure to receive preferment at the court of Apollo at Parnassus. While Burton’s persona may appear because he writes on this subject in the Anatomy, it is possible that Burton, Vaughan and Florio knew one another (Vaughan and Florio collaborated on a translation in the same year, and Frances Yates has suggested that Burton may have been involved in it too). William Vaughan, The Golden Fleece (London, 1626), part 1, pp. 23–7; Frances A. Yates, John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Octagon, 1968), pp. 308–9.

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been concerned to serve you.’47 The focus of the Essais is not on the reader but the author, who declares that ‘I myself am the subject of my book’ (Florio’s version is ‘Thus gentle Reader my selfe am the ground-worke of my booke’).48 Burton’s own statement of intent – ‘Thou thy selfe art the subject of my Discourse’ (I, 1) – may be a deliberate reversal of Montaigne’s strategy. While Montaigne looks inwards to the individual self, Burton looks outwards to those readers whom he cannot see but whose experiences he hopes to represent. Terence Cave finds in Montaigne an ‘oscillation between strategies of obstruction and exclusion on the one hand and the theme of desire for an ideally sympathetic reader on the other’.49 There are similar oscillations towards the reader in Burton, and it is likely that he imitates the French writer at least in one of his strategies of obstruction. Montaigne’s declaration that he is the ­subject of his book is followed by the comment that (in Florio’s version) ‘It is then no reason thou shouldest employ thy time about so frivolous and vaine a subject’; Burton remarks in similar language that ‘’Tis not worth the reading, I yeeld it, I desire thee not to loose time in perusing so vaine a subject’ (I, 12). However, Burton departs from Montaigne in his alternative strategy towards the reader. While Montaigne seeks friendship with an idealised figure (a figure like his dead friend Estienne de la Boëtie), Burton abandons the notion of a reader like himself in favour of offering unlimited access for all types of readers. Montaigne denies in his preface that he is concerned with his readers, but the essays themselves suggest that this denial is not quite accurate. Although he resists the notion that his writing can benefit others, Montaigne is aware of the reader’s presence and frequently addresses him or her directly. In his essay ‘On Books’ he describes some of his compositional techniques and explains that at times he deliberately omits the author’s name as a means of catching out those people who hastily criticise everything they read, especially works by modern authors: ‘I want them to flick Plutarch’s nose in mistake for mine and to scald themselves by insulting the Seneca in me.’50 In anticipating potentially hostile responses, Montaigne does not urge his readers to submit to the authority of the Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (London:  Penguin, 1991), p. lix. I use this modern translation for the purposes of accuracy, but with occasional reference to Florio’s translation. 48 The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London, 1603), sig. [A6]v. 49 Terence Cave, ‘The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance’, in John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr (eds.), Mimesis:  From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), p. 157. 50 Montaigne, Complete Essays, p. 458. 47

Nashe and Montaigne on reading

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text and accept passively all that they read, but instead prompts them to sharpen their interpretative skills. Warning them of his intention to trick overcritical types, Montaigne encourages his readers to be more observant of the borrowings in his text and sensitive to the way his text is woven together from different discourses. Meanwhile, his attitude to the hostile reader is not so much strongly adversarial as playful. If that reader poses any kind of threat, it is only on a small scale and his or her attacks will reach the wrong target. In ‘On Books’ Montaigne also shows himself as reader, describing the way he approaches texts. At the end of the essay he gives some examples of the notes he makes at the end of a book he has read, which record ‘the general judgement I drew from it, in order to show me again at least the general idea and impression I had conceived of its author when reading it’. The notes act as an aid for his memory (which he frequently mentions is weak) and a summary of works he only intends to read once. In transcribing these notes for the reader, he completes the circle of the essay, which moves from writing (specifically, the composition of the Essais) to reading, and finally to writing. His assessments of two works about recent European history (by Guicciardini and du Bellay) show the judicious reader in action, weighing up the authors’ virtues and vices and being attentive to their structuring of material, their style and their presentation of the facts. They provide an example of the process of active, wise interpretation. Although Montaigne, in his prefatory epistle, does not prescribe to the reader how to approach his work, he does provide a kind of training in good reading through the experience of the text itself. Cathleen Bauschatz has argued persuasively that Montaigne takes Renaissance reading theory in a new direction by deliberately undermining the notion of literary didacticism to provide a stronger and more active role for the reader of the Essais. Instead of instructing the reader, the Essais bring the reader towards knowledge of the author, and at the same time encourage self-scrutiny as the reader responds to what he or she reads.51 This argument is helpful in our understanding of Burton too. Although he is more wedded to the idea of didacticism in writing than Montaigne – he does, after all, depict himself as the Oxford scholar who writes as an expert on melancholy – Burton also treats reading as a process that both he and his audience can engage in for their own therapeutic Cathleen M. Bauschatz, ‘Montaigne’s Conception of Reading in the Context of Renaissance Poetics and Modern Criticism’, in Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text:  Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 264–91 (pp. 274, 265, 278–83).

51

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purposes. The melancholic is encouraged to alleviate his or her ­condition by acquiring knowledge about it and by occupying himself or herself in the text. Montaigne’s method of directing the process of reading shows that such shaping is not necessarily achieved through attempts to restrict and control interpretation. Like Nashe and Burton, Montaigne explicitly identifies his role as writer with himself as a reader, and writes from a belief in the autonomy and active nature of reading. An analysis of Montaigne demonstrates that the tendency to cast early modern authors as anxious and controlling characters who wish to narrow down interpretation, and early modern readers as dangerously subversive of that aim, can be misleading and reductive. Terence Cave has argued that in the sixteenth century there is ‘a major shift in the status of the reader:  reading becomes, in various senses, a much more prominent activity’.52 Montaigne’s writing plays a key role in this shift, and Burton’s work shows its results. Burton takes the perception of reading as an active process further as he links it with the notion of reading as therapy. He not only acknowledges that his readers are unknown and have diverse habits, but positively exploits those facts as an integral part of his consolatory discourse. Another significant aspect of his treatment of readers is that he does not construct an ideal reader in his work. He may inscribe a reader as the focus of attack or consolation, as a tool for dialectic argument or as a part in a dramatic scene, but outside of ‘Democritus Junior ad Librum Suum’ he rarely appeals to or imagines a reader who is a model interpreter of his work. Such a tactic would not generally make a reader put a book down, but it does create an awareness of the disparity between one’s own approach to it and the shadowy ‘ideal’ one, running in parallel, which is imagined by the author. While it may be immediately dismissed as disingenuous or merely conventional, it nonetheless suggests a sense of exclusivity which Burton is careful to avoid. Unlike Montaigne’s Essais, which Cave aptly describes as being ‘Like an entry in the personal columns of a modern newspaper … a text in search of exactly the right reader’, the Anatomy is underpinned by an acceptance that there is no such thing as a completely right reader.53 Burton characterises his readers as essentially unknown and indefinable – ‘whosoever thou art’ – and this inclusive treatment is key to his approach to textual cure. Cave, ‘Mimesis of Reading’, p. 149.

52

53

Ibid., p. 158.

Ch apter 2

The Cure of Despair: Reading the End of The Anatomy of Melancholy

Burton portrays his readership as unknowable and diverse. While this depiction highlights the distance between the author and his readers, at the same time it brings to the text a sense of inclusion: no standards of an ideal reader are presented and no assumptions are made about who the reader should be. What are the effects on the text as a whole of this portrayal of the reader as invisible? As I will show in this chapter, the manner in which an early modern author imagines readers can have a significant bearing on the way that other aspects of the text are handled, such as its politics or theology. Burton’s position on questions of religion in the Anatomy is inseparable from the reader-centred rhetoric which he employs to propound it. While recent historical work has done much to refine our understanding of Burton’s thought in its context, it is important not to lose sight of the praxis-centred mode of the text as one seeks to understand his ideas. I do not wish to imply that the work is a straightforward manual or handbook, but rather to stress that the knowledge, ideas, and arguments within it are presented in the framework of the relationship between writer and reader, and should be understood as such. It is distorting to consider the ideas and theories in Burton’s writing in isolation from his style, because it is through his construction of the reading process that Burton articulates his perspective on theology and medicine, among other topics, especially in his discourse on cure. From the moment on the first page of the Anatomy when he declares the reader the subject of his discourse onwards, the substance of his work is intimately connected with the manner in which he presents it to that reader. The final Subsection of the Anatomy, on the cure of religious despair, reveals the close connection between the author’s portrayal of the reader, his curative purpose and his theological outlook; it will form the focal point of this chapter. Burton radically altered this Subsection between the first (1621) and the second (1624) edition. He expanded it to approximately twenty times its original length, and removed altogether the 51

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satirical ‘Conclusion of the Author to the Reader’ which ended the first edition, thereby giving the ‘Cure of Despaire’ the final word. As I will argue, these and other revisions show Burton’s response to the English Calvinist tradition of consolatory writing on despair, and more broadly his reaction to debates over English religious orthodoxy during the 1620s and 1630s. The Anatomy provides in its final Subsection an alternative, theologically and stylistically, to existing modes of religious discourse on despair. Changes over the course of the editions reveal Burton’s resistance to the Calvinist stress on ‘particularity’ and a softening in his attitude towards Arminianism, while his use of the Danish Lutheran theologian Hemmingius as a key authority indicates his departure from the Calvinist understanding of predestination. Yet Burton’s theological position is not straightforward or clear. By providing a new form of spiritual consolation which is a hybrid of different theological approaches, he is careful to avoid entering current polemical disputes. The ‘Cure of Despaire’ is characteristic both of Burton’s inclusive attitude to his readership and of his conception of his ministerial task. Bu r t on a n d h i s E ng l i s h s ou rc e s In the expanded version of the Subsection, Burton explains why he has added a long consolatory discourse after the list of recommended authors on the subject, which originally ended it: But because these mens workes are not to all parties at hand, so parable at all times, I will for the benefit and ease of such as are afflicted, at the request of some friends, recollect out of their voluminous Treatises, some few such comfortable speeches, exhortations, arguments, advise, tending to this subject, & out of Gods word. (III, 425)

J. B. Bamborough rightly argues that the revisions indicate a greater seriousness on Burton’s part, and ‘align the Anatomy more clearly with the tradition of “consolation books” ’.1 What has been overlooked in critical discussions of this Subsection, however, is that there is another ending implanted within the new text, shortly after the original one. Burton writes: Presupposing first that which Beza, Greenham, Perkins, Bolton, give in charge, the parties to whom counsell is given be sufficiently prepared, humbled for their sinnes, fit for comfort, confessed, tried how they are more or lesse afflicted, how they stand affected, or capable of good advise, before any remedies be   J. B. Bamborough, ‘Burton and Hemingius’, RES 34 (1983), 441–5 (442).

1

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applyed: To such therefore as are so throughly searched and examined, I addresse this ­following discourse. (III, 425)

This is the first time that Burton demands anything as a prerequisite for reading his book and the first time that he tells the reader, in not so many words, to put the book down and seek an experience outside it. Of course, he has recommended other works to read as well as his own in previous sections, along with activities to try and medicines to take, but this has not hitherto interrupted the flow of the book. Here, however, certain readers are implicitly instructed to give up the book after 706 pages of reading, and only 17 pages before the end, while only those who are ‘sufficiently prepared’ may continue.2 This process of becoming ‘fit for comfort’, according to Burton’s authorities, is usually effected through a face-to-face meeting with a minister. According to the Cambridge theologian William Perkins (1558–1602)  – the best-known and most influential of Burton’s English sources  – the afflicted person’s spiritual state must be examined in order to find out whether he or she is humble for sins committed; if not, the minister must strive to make him or her so through ‘a friendly, and Christian talke or conference’. The minister can only convey the promise of God’s mercies to ‘the minde of him, that hath confessed his sinnes, and is truly humbled for them’.3 Burton, then, seems to demand that all his readers must first visit ministers, and that only a select few can continue reading. This apparent demand is surprising since, however violent Burton’s attacks on the reader can at times be, he rarely attempts to exclude or obstruct the reader from reading. As we have seen, in the Latin poem ‘Democritus Junior ad Librum suum’ he extends a welcome to everyone ‘Quos, quas, vel quales, inde vel unde viros’ (I, lxviii) [men, women, of whatever condition, people from here or there]. And yet in the final pages Burton seems to reverse the decision and allow only the type of reader who is prepared and ‘fit for comfort’ to continue to the real end. Does the new ending indicate a volte-face on Burton’s part, as he attempts to limit his readership? In order to answer this question and understand the significance of what I will call Burton’s ‘false ending’, one must examine his sources on the cure of despair. Although he draws on Calvinist writers such as William Perkins, his resistance to their pastoral methods is evident in the way he uses their writings. The false I use the pagination of the sixth edition; The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1651). William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge, 1606), pp. 92, 93. Perkins’ works reached seventy-six editions in his lifetime, and many more after his death; R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, rev. edn (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1997), p. 53.

2 3

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ending inserted in the second edition ostensibly follows their method, but, I would contend, acts instead as a form of protective device. It seems to bring Burton in line with other Calvinist writing on despair, from which position he then subtly departs.4 He is anything but a strict follower of Calvinist pastoral conventions. Where Robert Bolton (1572–1631), author of the Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences (1631), labours for over 400 pages to stress the importance of the sufferer being humbled through the law before being comforted through the gospel, Robert Burton passes over the subject in one subordinate clause (in the sentence beginning ‘Presupposing’).5 Burton also altogether ignores the stress on ‘particularity’  – on the minister judging in each case whether the sufferer is prepared for comfort – made by all of the English sources he lists. As has been seen, William Perkins places great emphasis on this ‘humbling’ process in his Cases of Conscience. He warns of the potentially disastrous effect of missing out this stage, that often ‘men not throughly humbled, beeing comforted either too soone, or too much, doe afterward become the worst of all’.6 While Burton uses Perkins as a source for the ‘Cure of Despaire’, he differs not only in method but also in his approach to the reader. Perkins writes about those suffering from an afflicted conscience, but his work is directed at least partly towards the minister whose task it is to lead the sufferer towards cure. Ian Breward rightly locates the significance of Perkins’ writings in their presentation of a ‘pastoral ideal which appealed to the rapidly rising numbers of undergraduates entering the ministry’ and in the ‘practical advice’ they offer to ministers.7 The Cases of Conscience were, as the title-page advertises, ‘Taught and delivered by M. W. Perkins in his Holy-day Lectures’, which would have been at Cambridge. Hence they were most probably designed for an audience of students, many of whom would soon take orders. Pastoral duty is at the heart of the Cases:  the onus is on the minister to judge when the time is right to convey comfort, and when this comfort should, essentially, be ‘alaied with some mixture of the Law’.8 Following casuistical tradition, Perkins stresses the individuality of each case, and hence the For a detailed analysis of Burton’s churchmanship, particularly his anti-Calvinism, see Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 139–204. 5 Robert Bolton, Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences (London, 1631). 6 Perkins, Cases of Conscience, pp. 103–4. 7 Ian Breward, Introduction to The Work of William Perkins (Appleford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), p. 23. 8 Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 103. 4

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responsibility of the minister to decide the length of each stage of cure, advising him on how to achieve this.9 Burton’s main addressee is not the minister but the afflicted reader, who is encouraged to find his or her cure within the book itself. One could argue that the lapses from direct address to use of the third-person singular and plural show an inconsistency of purpose on Burton’s part. Burton certainly sounds like Perkins in his occasional references to ‘the party affected’ (III, 445), in which the sufferer becomes marginalised from the main discourse. Nonetheless, the oscillation between ‘I’, ‘thou’, ‘he’, and ‘they’ is characteristic of the whole book, not just this Subsection. While in all probability Burton is influenced by Perkins’ mode of reference to ‘the partie’ and incorporates it into his own discourse, this is symptomatic of the way Burton absorbs all his authorities and sources in his discourse. Burton’s Subsection on cure of despair contains probably the most sustained and straightforwardly exhortatory passages of the whole work. This is evident in the comparative lack of digression (only the discussion of predestination prompts him ‘But to my former taske’ (III, 439)) and in the device of dialogue between reader and writer. Each time the author reaches the end of an argument against despairing, he vocalises a new objection (often beginning with a phrase such as ‘Thou exceptest’ (III, 441)), before reinforcing the argument for hope. This technique is of course not unique to Burton:  most of his sources also employ dialogue to a greater or lesser extent.10 In Burton’s handling, his answers to the unseen, afflicted reader are insistent, as when answering the sufferer’s fears that he or she is forsaken of God: ‘I cannot hope, pray, repent, &c. How often shall I say it, thou maist performe all these duties, Christian offices, & be restored in good time’ (III, 441). This technique resembles Perkins’ advice to the minister to apply God’s promise ‘by a kind of reasoning’.11 Burton allows the sufferer’s voice to be heard too in order to respond to fears and doubts. Perkins elaborates on what his ‘kind of reasoning’ entails. The first part of the reasoning sequence, he explains, is ‘taken from Gods word; On Perkins’ importance to English casuistical tradition, see James F. Keenan, ‘William Perkins (1558–1602) and the Birth of British Casuistry’, in James F. Keenan and Thomas A. Shannon (eds.), The Context of Casuistry (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995), pp. 105–30. 10 e.g. Nicholas Hemmingius, Antidotum Adversus Pestem Desperationis (Rostock, 1599), sig. A12r; The Works of … Richard Greenham (London, 1599), p. 272; Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy (London, 1586), p. 233. 11 Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 102. 9

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the second from the testimonie of the distressed conscience; & the conclusion is the applying of the promise’. An example of this reasoning is then given, marked in the margin with the words ‘Major’, ‘Minor’ and ‘Conclusio’, the parts of a syllogism.12 The notion of applying a ‘practical syllogism’, as Perkins elsewhere calls it, in order to find out whether one is saved or damned underpins what R. T. Kendall labels the ‘experimental predestinarian’ belief of Perkins and his followers, which in its turn is derived from Theodore Beza. According to this doctrine, one can prove and hence be assured that one is elect through experimental knowledge, the conscience reflecting on the words of the Bible (the ‘major’) in comparison with the testimony of itself (the ‘minor’) and reaching a conclusion which is the assurance of election.13 This belief is the core of Perkins’ teaching. The problem with Burton’s discourse, from the perspective of Perkins’ methodology, is that there is no ‘testimonie of the distressed conscience’ to be had. I have argued that Burton allows the reader to have objections, but in fact he is only imagining what they may be. However much he may have attempted to force obedience in readers, he cannot know what they are really thinking. Even more importantly, he has no idea about their spiritual states. While the writer might take on the role of minister and healer, he is flawed in that capacity, according to Perkins’ system, because he cannot judge the individual’s needs. At the heart of this problem is the fact that Burton attempts to administer comfort to readers while not knowing whether there are any ‘marks of election’ in them. While he uses Perkins as a source, his departure from the Puritan writer reveals the comparative inclusiveness of Burton’s text. Through the way Burton comforts his invisible, unknowable reader, we can see how he differs from Perkins in his theology of grace. One could argue that Burton’s method of consolation derives not from choice but stylistic necessity. In employing direct address towards the reader-as-sufferer, one might object, he is forced to acknowledge that the reader is unknown. Yet if one compares Burton’s treatment of his reader with that of another source, Timothy Bright (1549/50–1615), one can see that Burton’s strategy of stylistic and theological inclusiveness is a deliberately planned feature of his text. As has been shown, Perkins’ ‘practical syllogism’ works to comfort the afflicted person at an individual level. This syllogism collapses in the Anatomy because Burton (unlike Perkins) addresses the sufferer directly and cannot inquire into his or her spiritual  Ibid., pp. 102–3.

12

  Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism, pp. 8, 56–7, 70–71.

13

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state. However, Bright also addresses the sufferer directly, but manages to remain close to the theological outlook of Perkins. In his Treatise of Melancholy (1586) Bright devotes two chapters to explaining how the affliction of conscience for sin occurs, and consoling the sufferer. However, the sufferer is not, at least principally, the general reader. In the ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ Bright explains that his treatise is written to a supposed friend M. not ignorant of good letters, that the discourse might be more familiar then if it had been carried other direction it otherwise would bee. Change the letter, and it is indifferent to whom soever standeth in need, or shal make use therof.

The treatise is written by means of reply to a fictional letter from M. ‘full of heavines, and uncomfortable plaintes’.14 Yet it is not quite true that one can simply change the letter so that the treatise is directed to anyone. Although ‘M.’ might stand for a generic ‘Melancholicus’ figure, Bright offers comfort to him against despair, based on his own supposed knowledge of his friend’s character. Time and again at the most crucial points of persuasion in the chapters on affliction of conscience, the author employs this pretence of a real, individual case in order to sidestep exactly the problem I have identified in Burton’s discourse. His chapter on consolation begins by exhorting the addressee: ‘I pray you (deare brother) consider Gods mercies of old, and the former experience of his favour, and those holy testimonies of election which you have in times past made plentifully shew of.’15 Throughout the discourse this argument of his ‘former testimonies of election’ recurs, providing evidence that he is saved. The sense that Bright’s words to his addressee have only a limited application to the general reader is especially apparent when he tackles the difficult subject of sin against the Holy Ghost: touching that sinne, wherefore no prayer is to be made, (because it witnesseth, and sealeth up reprobation to the offender in this life) I will by comparing your course of life, and your present demeanour with that sinne, manifestly lay open your case to be farre other then reprobate … Now let us enter into the consideration, whether you have sinned against the holie Ghost or not: which if you have in deede done (as peradventure your humour would leade you) where is the renouncing of Gods religion, which you have hitherto professed and presently do hartely embrace? Where is that malice, which prosecuteth this mischiefe? What persecution have you in word or deede raised against the truth?16   Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, sigs. *iij.r, *iiij.r. 16 Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., pp. 204, 205–6.

14 15

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Bright’s questions assume a negative answer from M. but make no allowances for the responses of other readers. While it seems likely that very few readers would have drawn their sword against the truth or published volumes against sound doctrine (Bright’s next questions), the thrust of the argument is that the sufferer is capable of grace because the writer knows he is. By contrast to Bright, Burton never assumes any moral virtue in his reader. Instead he goes to the other extreme, crediting his unknown addressee with an impressive variety of the worst possible sins. After a passage comforting the sufferer who desires repentance, in which arguments are derived from Perkins’ list of signs of grace (including loving God’s children and grieving for hardness of heart), he continues, All this is true thou repliest, but yet it concernes not thee, ’tis verified in ordinary offenders, in common sinnes, but thine are of an higher straine, even against the Holy Ghost himselfe, irremissible sinnes, sinnes of the first magnitude, written with a penne of iron, engraven with the point of a diamond. Thou art worse then a Pagan, Infidell, Jew or Turke, for thou art an apostate and more, thou hast voluntarily blaspheamed, renounced God and all Religion, thou art worse then Judas himselfe, or they that crucified Christ:  for they did offend out of ignorance, but thou hast thought in thine heart there is no God. Thou hast given thy soule to the divell, as Witches and Conjurers doe, explicitè and implicitè, by compact, band, and obligation (a desperate, a fearfull case) to satisfie thy lust, or to be revenged of thine enemies … Thou never madst any conscience of lying, swearing, bearing false witnesse, murder, adultery, bribery, oppression, theft, drunkennesse, idolatrie. (III, 431)

He proceeds to vocalise these blasphemous thoughts in a passage which is considerably enlarged in the 1628 and 1632 editions. Burton clearly relishes the chance to imagine and represent the worst extremes of human behaviour, and yet can still offer the consolation that ‘no man living is free from such thoughts in part, or at some times’ (III, 433). Burton follows Perkins in ascribing blasphemy either to the suggestions of the devil or to oneself, if the thoughts are ‘moderate, not so violent and monstruous, not so frequent’. Perkins states that blasphemous thoughts cannot come ordinarily from the hart of any, save of those alone, that are of reprobate mindes. But the parties that are thus distressed, are honest, civill, and such as professe the Gospell, at least in shew; yea sometime they befall such, as are the true members of Christ. Therefore it is manifest, that they come from without, even from the Devill casting them into the minde, and not from within a mans owne selfe.17 17

  Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 164.

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While Burton agrees with Perkins that in this latter case the sufferer is not sinning, he does not mention the case of those who think blasphemous thoughts themselves. He merely describes such thoughts as ‘moderate’ by comparison, and returns to a discussion of the devil. In so doing, Burton avoids condemning anyone to reprobation. His treatment of blasphemy characteristically departs from the strict Calvinism of Perkins and Bright by refusing to pinpoint the line between election and reprobation.18 Burton, as we have seen, does not follow the examples of Perkins’ and Bright’s treatises in his approach to the reader. Unlike Bright, who addresses an individual who we are told already manifests the signs of election, Burton accepts the far greater challenge of comforting any and every reader. He therefore casts as wide a net as possible, imagining a worst case of sinful, hard-hearted humanity as a means of reaching every reader’s own situation. It is true that Burton enjoys portraying extreme and exotic cases just as much in the ‘Cure of Despaire’ as in the more light-hearted passages of the first Partition, where we are told, for example, of melancholics who believe they have swallowed eels or frogs (I, 412). It is certainly more entertaining to read about a blaspheming, adulterous murderer who has made a pact with the devil than Bright’s dull M., who has never been ‘of notorious marke of iniquitie, much lesse a blasphemer of that holie name, and a renouncer, with contumelie of the holie profession’.19 At the same time, by representing the worst extreme of sinfulness Burton manages both to bring relief (as well as amusement) to the reader whose sins are more moderate, and to ensure that no one is left out on the grounds of guilt. It is less important to speculate on whether Burton believed that a drunken, homicidal devil-worshipper would read his book than to realise that he considered it important to cover the possibility that he or she might. Against the tactic of excluding certain readers in the Anatomy’s false ending, therefore, there runs a contrary pattern of complete inclusiveness. While Burton is never bold enough to tell us that we will undoubtedly be saved, the recurring message of this final Subsection is ‘Hope the best’ (III, 442). This message overwhelms and to a certain extent cancels out the negativity of the false ending. It is fair to say that few will stop reading a book because the writer tells them to, and Burton is surely aware that By contrast, Nicholas Tyacke describes Burton as an orthodox Calvinist, ‘Science and Religion at Oxford before the Civil War’, in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds.), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 73–93 (p. 76). 19 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, pp. 207–8. 18

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natural human curiosity will prevail, especially when the reader is only a few pages away from the end of a very long work. Hence his implicit instruction to the unprepared reader to stop reading cannot be taken ­seriously. Rather, it springs from a desire to protect the author against criticism. The Perkins tradition of consolation relies for its effectiveness on a concomitant theology of election whose rigidity cannot be compromised. Perkins adheres to a Bezan, supralapsarian theory of double predestination, in other words that God predestined certain individuals to election and others to damnation before the creation of the world, and for no reason other than his own will. Perkins’ consolatory discourse can only be understood in relation to this theology. In using Perkins’ and similar ­treatises as models for his own version, Burton would be aware of their widespread popularity and of the danger of distorting their message. The false ending brings the Anatomy in line with conventional Calvinist discourses on spiritual affliction, from which point he then has more freedom to depart, as I will now show. In doing so, it shields the author from attack on the grounds that he is unfit to administer a cure to the distressed soul. The false ending has something in common rhetorically with the ‘palinodes’ David Renaker finds in the Anatomy; like them, it is a form of ‘protective device’ against criticism.20 Bu r t on a n d H e m m i ng i us In seeking an alternative mode of spiritual consolation, Burton makes use of a source which indicates his departure from the rhetoric and theology of the Calvinist treatises. Throughout the Subsection, he borrows extensively from the 1599 work Antidotum Adversus Pestem Desperationis by the Danish Lutheran Hemmingius (Niels Hemmingsen, 1513–1600), whose theological approach to despair differs sharply from the Calvinist writers Burton uses. Burton’s debt to Hemmingius was first recognised by J. B. Bamborough in 1983, and more recently Angus Gowland has pointed to the significance of this choice of source as a sign of Burton’s anti-Calvinist tendencies.21 Yet the nature and extent of Burton’s borrowings from Hemmingius, and their implications for his consolatory mode in the Subsection, demand further attention. Bamborough notes that, as well as many explicit quotations from his work, ‘a considerable proportion’ of the new and patristic matter incorporated from the Anatomy’s David Renaker, ‘Robert Burton’s Palinodes’, Studies in Philology 76 (1979), 162–81 (163).  Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, p. 182.

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second edition onwards is from Hemmingius.22 In the second edition there are three substantial references to Hemmingius: the first, beginning Burton’s discussion, is an outline of Hemmingius’ two main antidotes to despair, the second is on the subject of the sin against the Holy Ghost, and the third is a footnote on the sufferings of those afflicted with despair. Additionally, a large number of Burton’s Bible references are borrowed from the Antidotum, along with some quotations from Fulgentius and Augustine. In particular, the three passages of Augustine at the end of the first edition of the Anatomy are all from Hemmingius, the last of which, retained at the end of all editions, is also the final word of Hemmingius’ discourse.23 In fact there is even more evidence of the work’s influence on the Anatomy than Bamborough notes. Another substantial borrowing occurs during Burton’s discussion of those who fear God’s wrath. While his quotation of Hemmingius’ description of symptoms is acknowledged in a footnote, the subsequent consolation is adapted silently from another part of the Antidotum. Hemmingius’ version, The judgement of God, which injures some more, some less in this life, although they may be equal, if you bear in mind their sins, should not so much be examined as adored: for he has causes for his just judgement. Two things should be observed in this judgement of God: justice, and mercy,24

becomes in Burton To such persons [who fear God’s wrath] I oppose Gods mercy and his justice, Judicia dei occulta non injusta, his secret counsell and just judgement, by which he spares some, and sore afflicts others againe in this life; his judgement is to be adored, trembled at, not to be searched or enquired after by mortall men, he hath reasons reserved to himselfe, which our frailty cannot apprehend. He may punish all if he will, and that justly for sinne. (III, 439)

Burton translates Hemmingius directly but interpolates extra phrases  – ‘trembled at’, ‘by mortall men’, ‘which our frailty cannot apprehend’  – which transform Hemmingius’ more straightforward prose style into Burtonian copiousness, and enhance the consolatory mode, contrasting human incomprehension and weakness with an overarching divine purpose. The next few sentences are also largely borrowed from Hemmingius, including the quoted Bible verses.25 23 Bamborough, ‘Burton and Hemingius’, 443. Ibid., 444, 445. Hemmingius, Antidotum, sigs. C5r–v. Burton’s copy of the Antidotum is in the Bodleian Library, shelfmark 8o G 142(2) Th. All translations from Hemmingius are my own. 25 Hemmingius, Antidotum, sig. C6r corresponds with ll.34–8 in Burton. 22

24

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Burton’s copy of the Antidotum gives us a few clues as to how he used a source in the composition of the Anatomy. His Antidotum is heavily marked with marginal lines which we can safely conclude are made by Burton himself:  they are characteristic of his style of annotation, and many of the marked sentences are quoted in the Anatomy. In particular, the quotation from St Augustine ending Hemmingius’ treatise and borrowed for the same purpose by Burton is underscored in the Antidotum. As he writes an acquisition date of 1601 on the title page, I am not claiming that Burton made all his annotations while writing the Anatomy. However, there is evidence that at least Burton returned to the book to make use of the annotations when writing his own text. An intriguing example is a note made within Hemmingius’ treatise, which seems to be in Burton’s hand. The note is partly indecipherable, and possibly incomplete as a result of cropping, but the word ’Chrisostom[us]’ can be clearly made out. Hemmingius quotes Fulgentius’ words ‘Proinde bonitas invicti non vincitur, & infiniti misericordia non finitur’. The sentence has been highlighted by a diagonal line in the margin, and the note is written below this, in the bottom left-hand corner of the page.26 As Bamborough recognises, Burton’s quotations of Fulgentius are borrowed from Hemmingius, which is the case with this phrase, quoted in English with the Latin in a footnote: ‘Gods invincible goodnesse cannot be over come by sinne, his infinite mercy cannot be terminated by any, the multitude of his mercy is equivalent to his magnitude’ (III, 427). Intriguingly, Burton continues with the words ‘Heare Chrysostome’ followed by a similar quotation on God’s infinite mercy. Burton’s reading of Fulgentius in Hemmingius, at some point between 1601 and 1624, clearly suggested words he had read in Chrysostom, an association which reappeared in the Anatomy.27 With little evidence available about how Burton organised his reading and hence his writing, a minor point such as this is useful in understanding how Burton linked texts while reading and gathered them together in his own writing. Bamborough is right to describe the Antidotum as ‘a not very obvious source’ for an Englishman such as Burton to use.28 Hemmingius was a Danish theologian who studied under Melanchthon and was probably best known in England for debating with King James on predestination Hemmingius, Antidotum, sig. B2v. On the scholarly habit of cross-referencing in marginalia, see William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), p. 71. 28 Bamborough, ‘Burton and Hemingius’, 443. 26 27

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during the latter’s visit to Denmark in the 1590s.29 His own position on this subject is made clear in his treatise De Universali Gratia, appended to the Antidotum. He is a precursor of the more celebrated Jacobus Arminius, whose views on predestination caused huge controversy in the early seventeenth century. The crux of Hemmingius’ argument is expressed repeatedly in his treatise:  ‘For all who believe have the ­promise of adoption in Christ Jesus’; ‘Therefore everyone who believes is a child of God, elect and heir to the heavenly inheritance, all unbelievers rejected.’30 This is very much in line with Arminius’ modification of the reformed doctrine of predestination. As R. T. Kendall notes, it is in the order of the decrees that the Arminian and reformed schools differ: ‘Arminius ties election (though based on foreseen faith) to man’s will to believe; the experimental predestinarians make the will to believe the proof one is elect.’31 Hemmingius, like Arminius, places emphasis on belief as the basis for salvation. This is in opposition to the dominant Calvinist orthodoxy espoused by Perkins among others in England, at least up to the 1620s, which teaches that faith is a sign of election rather than a cause of it.32 The strong influence of Hemmingius contradicts John Stachniewski’s claim that the writers Burton draws on in the ‘Cure of Despaire’ are ‘doctrinally unanimous’, and hence also undermines his argument that Burton is somehow forced into his spiritual counsellor role by ‘orthodox modes of expression, over which Calvinist-puritan divines seem to have held a monopoly’.33 The juxtaposition of Hemmingius and Perkins is a particularly striking one. We could account for this as an example of humanist reading habits, where quotations are taken from authors and inserted under the matic headings in a commonplace book in order to be reproduced later in one’s own writing, regardless of the author’s original Dansk Biographisk Leksikon, 16 vols. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1979–84), s.v. ‘Hemmingsen, Niels’. 30 Hemmingius, Antidotum, sigs. D5 v, D7 v. 31 Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism, p. 143. 32 While I refer to Calvinism as being dominant in England, I follow Peter Lake in stressing that this does not imply that the English Church was Calvinist throughout. Indeed, as David Como has more recently argued, the ‘Calvinist consensus’ in England was ‘neither simplistic nor monolithic’ and may well have been defined negatively, by isolating doctrine deemed to be suspect, rather than positively. Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635’, P&P 114 (1987), 32–76 (33–4); David Como, ‘Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 64–87 (p. 66). 33 John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 233, 225. 29

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meaning and standpoint. Indeed, it is often the case in the Anatomy that two writers with opposing views are quoted together and made to agree. However, two points argue against this being the case here. Firstly, Burton is highly aware of the sensitivity of the subject of predestination and stops himself from discussing the issue too much, for fear of breaking the law. As he paraphrases, referring to the seventeenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Charles I’s declaration of 1628 prohibits ‘all curious search, to print or preach, or draw the Article aside by our owne sence and Comments, upon paine of Ecclesiasticall censure’ (III, 439), and this is not the first royal attempt to restrict debate (as I will discuss later). One cannot quote selectively from Hemmingius and Perkins to make them agree: the point of their difference is too prominent to allow that to pass unnoticed. Perkins’ treatise De Prædestinationis Modo et Ordine (1598) provoked Arminius to reply publishing his own beliefs, thereby establishing Perkins as leader of the English Calvinist, anti-Arminian cause. Hemmingius would have been known to Perkins, as he was associated with the opposing side of the debate on predestination in late-sixteenthcentury Cambridge. Peter Baro championed his teaching on universal grace there, and wrote to Hemmingius himself in 1596 complaining of how teaching on that subject had recently been restricted.34 According to Nicholas Tyacke, ‘during the late sixteenth century [Hemmingius] became something of an international spokesman for all those opposed to Calvinism’; his work was well known in the University of Oxford, the environment in which Burton lived.35 Any contemporary reader who followed the controversy would remark on the conjunction of names and find it significant. Secondly, it is not true to say that Burton uses only the consolatory sections of Hemmingius’ writing and strips them of the latter’s radical theological position. He has certainly not ignored it in his copy of Hemmingius, where there are marginal lines highlighting the two sentences I have already quoted on faith as cause of election. Burton not only uses the Antidotum as a source of extra material  – apt Bible verses, quotations from the Church Fathers, subject headings  – to bulk out the Subsection on cure of despair, but also absorbs some of Hemmingius’ theology within it, a process which is tied to his commitment to creating a fully inclusive readership. The most sizeable passage derived from Hemmingius occurs not far from the beginning of H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 1958), pp. 386–8. 35 Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 59. Burton was a Student (a Fellow) of Christ Church, and vicar of St Thomas’, Oxford. 34

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the Subsection (approximately III, 426, line 16 to III, 427, line 17). The ­paragraph opens with a near-direct translation from the Antidotum: The maine matter which terrifies and torments most that are troubled in minde, is the enormity of their offences, the intolerable burden of their sins, Gods heavy wrath, & displeasure so deeply apprehended, that they account themselves reprobates, quite forsaken of God, already damned, past all hope of grace, uncapable of mercy, diaboli mancipia, slaves of sinne, and their offences so great they cannot be forgiven. (III, 426)36

In response to this affliction Burton administers comfort with a large number of Bible verses and quotations from Augustine and Fulgentius, most of which are borrowed from Hemmingius’ treatise. What is remarkable here is Burton’s commentary on some of these verses. Burton states of God that ‘His promises are made indefinite to all beleevers, generally spoken to all touching remission of sins that are truely penitent, grieved for their offences, and desire to be reconciled’ (III, 426). Burton believes strongly in the importance of thorough repentance and grief for sin, a belief which is also emphasised in his Calvinist sources, such as Perkins. However, this statement also reveals how far Burton is from their theological standpoint. Arguing against universal grace, Perkins asserts that the promises of the Gospel, are limited with the condition of Faith, and Repentance, not beeing universall to all, but made onely to such persons, as repent and beleeve:  therefore they are indefinite in regard of whole mankind, and to beleevers onely they are universall.37

Perkins’ ‘indefinite’ is very different from Burton’s use of the word. The former uses the word negatively and by contrast to ‘universall’, to denote the fact that God’s promises are not available to the reprobate. Burton’s use of the word is more positive, especially as it is coupled with the notion that the promises are ‘generally spoken’. It appears, indeed, that Burton wished to stress this positive slant. In the editions of 1624 and 1632 the word ‘finite’ had appeared. In all subsequent editions ‘indefinite’ is used. While the two are not exact opposites, the first word implies that there are bounds or limits to God’s promises while the latter suggests that they are unlimited, as well as indeterminate.38 In other words, Burton subtly modifies his text to make it more positive and inclusive, motivating the reader to hope, rather than suggesting a boundary between the elect, who are offered God’s promises, and the reprobate, who are not. 37 Cf. Hemmingius, Antidotum, sig. A11r. Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 94. OED, s.v. ‘Finite’, A. 2.a.; s.v. ‘Indefinite’, 1, 2.

36 38

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Another significant set of borrowings from Hemmingius occurs in the long passage on fear of reprobation. Again Burton translates directly from the Antidotum: Many are called, but few are chosen, Mat. 20. 16 and 22. 14. with such like places of Scripture misinterpreted strike them with horror, they doubt presently whether they be of this number or no, Gods eternall decree of predestination, absolute reprobation, & such fatall tables they forme to their owne ruine, and impinge upon this rocke of despaire. (III, 434)39

Perkins’ own ‘table’  – ‘A survey, or Table declaring the order of the causes of Salvation and Damnation’  – is one example of the popular practice of making lists of characteristics of the elect and reprobate, and Hemmingius (followed by Burton) shows their danger in leading to or intensifying despair.40 Burton bases his consolation against this substantially on Hemmingius’ reply to the sufferer’s notion that only particular individuals are saved, and that he or she cannot be: for the certainty of Election and salvation on the other side, see Gods good will toward men, heare how generally his grace is proposed to him and him, and them, each man in particular, and to all. 1 Tim. 2. 4. God will that all men be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth. ’Tis an universall promise … Now there cannot be contradictory wills in God, he will have all saved, and not all, how can this stand together? be secure then, beleeve, trust in him, hope well, and bee saved. (III, 435–6)

This is a more explicit statement of Burton’s belief than the passage above:  instead of being just ‘indefinite’, God’s promise is ‘universall’. Hence Burton is in direct opposition to Perkins’ orthodox Calvinist belief that God’s promises are ‘not … universall to all’. Furthermore, Burton emphasises that grace is both ‘general’ and ‘particular’ to all, pre-empting and rejecting the typical Calvinist gloss that God wills the general salvation of humankind, but offers it only to the class of the elect, not to each person in the world. William Perkins follows Beza in asserting that Christ’s atonement is limited to the elect.41 David Renaker describes this passage in Burton as ‘pure Arminianism’, but its model is pre-Arminian.42 The direct borrowing of Hemmingius’ argument in the last sentences of the passage, that there cannot be contradictory wills in God and that See Hemmingius, Antidotum, sig. Cr. The table is found in William Perkins, A Golden Chaine (London, 1591), and reproduced in Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, pp. 164–5. 41 Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism, pp. 29, 57. 42 Renaker, ‘Burton’s Palinodes’, 177. 39

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therefore he wills all to be saved, aligns Burton with Hemmingius’ theology and shows, at least at this point, his rejection of orthodox Calvinism. Bu r t on, pr e de s t i n at ion a n d t h e E ng l i s h C h u rc h An immediate objection to this argument arises in Burton’s ensuing discussion of predestination:  how can Burton borrow from the theology of Hemmingius and then explicitly reject Arminianism in favour of the teaching of ‘our Church’ (III, 438)? An analysis of Burton’s presentation of arguments on the predestinarian question reveals how complex the issue is, both for Burton and for the Church of England at the time. I believe it also shows how the tendency to create a ‘simplistic polarity between Arminian and Calvinist’ and to ‘visualize doctrinal positions in terms of opposed camps’ (as criticised by Julian Davies) is unhelpfully reductive, denying the existence of what Peter White has described as a spectrum of opinions on the subject.43 The issue of predestination was highly charged in England during the 1620s, culminating in a royal proclamation in 1626 banning debate of the disputed points of predestinarian doctrine. This was reinforced in 1628 by a declaration, subsequently prefixed to the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1633 (and paraphrased by Burton, as quoted above), which especially targeted members of the universities, warning that, if they attempted to dispute interpretation of an Article publicly or ‘preach or print any thing either way’, they would be liable to censure by Church and State.44 Even before the 1620s, however, the predestinarian question was live, especially in Burton’s immediate surroundings at Oxford.45 At an international level, the Synod of Dort, held in 1618, brought delegates from across Protestant Europe to dispute and officially refute the Remonstrant (that is, Dutch Arminian) case. While the position of the English delegates at the Synod is a matter of debate, it is certain that England did not, as other Protestant nations did, adopt the five points finally asserted Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism 1625–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 95; Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic:  Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 11. On despair and the predestination debate in the Anatomy see also Renaker, ‘Burton’s Palinodes’, 164–80, and, for a discussion that takes into account more recent historical scholarship on the English Church of the 1620–30s and Burton’s place within it, Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, pp. 185–90. 44 The Book of Common Prayer, intro. Diarmaid MacCulloch (London: Everyman, 1999), p. 550. 45 Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, p. 72; see also Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, pp. 151–4. 43

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by the counter-Remonstrant party as the official teaching of the English Church.46 This would among other things have defined the meaning of the seventeenth Article more fully and made clear the Church’s view on such issues as limited atonement and double predestination. The teaching of the English Church on the subject of predestination, then, was not fully determined, and both the proclamation and the declaration sought to restrict new interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Charles’ statements, however, were taken by some to be a deliberate attempt to suppress Calvinist teaching and promote Arminianism. This has led to the view that such was indeed the case in England during the 1620s and 1630s. The notion that there was a ‘rise of Arminianism’ in the 1620s after the accession of Charles I, as posited by Nicholas Tyacke and Dewey D. Wallace, has been challenged by historians who emphasise that there was not so much a binary opposition between Calvinists and Arminians as a variety of opinions between the two, and that Calvinists flourished under Charles, even during the years of Personal Rule.47 Discussing these years, Peter White stresses that Arminianism, ‘whether narrowly defined as a doctrine of predestination, or more widely used to mean popery, had sharply depreciated since 1628 as polemical currency’.48 This mirrors the expansion of the final Subsection of the Anatomy. While the most substantial addition is from the abrupt ending in 1621 to thirteen more folio sides of consolation in 1624, extra sentences and larger sections of text appear in 1628 and 1632. One of the most significant, which will be examined later, is the interpolation in 1632 of a long explanation of heretical alternatives to strict Calvinism (III, 438). However, there are no major expansions in the 1638 and 1651 versions. While this reflects figures for the more general growth of the Anatomy, it is also evidence of Burton responding to a current debate which becomes less potent later in the 1630s.49 At the same time, it is worth remembering that a controversy such as this would be longer-running in the universities than in court or Parliament.50 See Lake, ‘Calvinism’, pp. 51–60; W. B. Patterson, James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 260–92. 47 Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists; Dewey D. Wallace Jr, Puritans and Predestination:  Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 79; White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, p. 291; Julian Davies, Caroline Captivity, pp. 88, 98. 48 White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, p. 308. 49 See the statistical analysis of the text’s growth in the Textual Introduction to the Oxford edition, I, xxxviii. 50 On Oxford, predestination and the 1628 declaration, see Julian Davies, Caroline Captivity, p. 120; Kenneth Fincham, ‘Oxford and the Early Stuart Polity’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. 4:  Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 179–210 (p. 207). 46

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Burton’s preamble to his discussion of predestination again shows the hybrid nature of his theological discourse. After the long section based on Hemmingius (quoted above), Burton switches to the vocabulary of English Calvinism in a shorter passage echoing phrases from the Cases: how shall I beleeve or discerne my security from carnall presumption? my faith is weake and faint, I want those signes, and fruits of sanctification, sorrow for sinne, thirsting for grace, groanings of the spirit, love of Christians as Christians, avoiding occasion of sinne, endeavour of new obedience, charity, love of God, perseverance. Though these signes be languishing in thee, and not seated in thine Heart, thou must not therefore be dejected or terrified, the effects of the faith and spirit are not yet so fully felt in thee, conclude not therefore thou art a Reprobate, or doubt of thine Election, because the Elect themselves are without them, before their Conversion. Thou maist in the Lords good time be converted. (III, 436)

Burton’s language in most of this passage shows us to be in classic Perkins territory. The ‘signes, and fruits’ are borrowed from Perkins’ list of marks of election, which can be used to comfort the distressed soul who will not be convinced otherwise that he or she is elect. They are the signs ‘wherby a sonne of God may be discerned from a child of the devill’.51 The switch from the language of Hemmingius to that of Perkins is very noticeable: whereas in the former mode Burton can dispense a deliberately generalised form of comfort – ‘be secure then, beleeve, trust in him, hope well, and bee saved’ – here he shifts to a Calvinist stress on particularity. Once again, Burton cannot know whether his anonymous reader exhibits these marks of election or not, and so the comfort he offers would appear to be limited. However, as soon as he adopts the Perkins model of comfort, he distorts it with the final phrase quoted above: ‘Thou maist in the Lords good time be converted’ (my emphasis). Burton’s use of the word ‘may’ in this Subsection is symptomatic of his approach to spiritual cure. Stanley Fish first brought critical attention to this stylistic feature, concluding that Burton’s ‘mays’ ‘admit the very possibility that is the source of all despairing thoughts’ and that therefore ‘Burton weakens the personal application of the scriptural promise, reinforcing rather than mitigating the symptoms of the disease he is supposedly curing.’52 The word ‘may’ is ambiguous, as Fish’s reading recognises, yet when one considers Burton’s use of it in the light of the theology of strict predestinarianism, one can see a more positive, hopeful meaning to Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 82. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 345.

51

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it. Behind Calvinist despair is a sense of certainty that one is reprobate, a certainty reinforced by the ‘fatall tables’ of Perkins and others, which divide the saved from the damned before the creation of the world. In the notorious case of Francis Spira’s death, which haunted the imagination of many Protestants, John Bunyan included, Spira refuses to accept the comfort of learned ministers that there is hope for him of salvation. He tells them that ‘hee was reprobate from the begynnynge’, a fact of which he is sure because ‘thys hope, thys fayth, is the gyfte of God. And thys one thynge wante I’.53 He is unable to doubt his conviction of his own damnation, and hence to accept the possibility of election. This reaction is the negative counterpart to the doctrine of assurance, that the elect person ‘ought to be certaine of his salvation, and not to doubt of it, with the Papist’.54 Burton himself seems to endorse the doctrine of assurance when he comments later on that ‘wee must be certaine of our salvation’ (III, 438). However, this remark is made at a point when, as we shall see, Burton represents the teachings of ‘our Church’ in a way which makes his own commitment to those teachings doubtful. I would suggest that Burton is resistant to the doctrine of assurance, and that this resistance is shown in subtleties of language such as his use of the word ‘may’. His refusal to particularise his reader and his pastoral concerns are intimately linked. This concern that the doctrine of assurance could be damaging to the individual believer’s welfare was increasingly heard in the decades following Burton’s death, especially in works on the afflicted conscience. Thomas Fuller described assurance as ‘a false, and dangerous doctrine’ because it was ‘not a part of every true faith, but onely an effect of some strong faiths, and that also not alwayes, but at some times’.55 Richard Baxter argued that few experienced it, and instructed his reader not to be ‘alwaies in disquiet when you want Assurance’.56 Earlier in the paragraph from which my last extract was taken (III, 436), Burton notes that the question ‘How shall they be assured of their salvation, by what signes?’ (III, 434) tortures the spiritually afflicted. His method of curing despair is to create an alternative to the culture A Notable a[nd] Marvailous Epistle of the Famous Doctor, Mathewe Gribalde, trans. Edward Aglionby (Worcester [?], 1550), sigs. B.iii.v, C.iii.r. Burton owned a Latin edition of four accounts of Spira’s death, Gribaldus’ included; Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988), item 1518. On contemporary reactions to the account, see Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, pp. 37–9. 54 Nathanael Cole, The Godly Mans Assurance:  Or a Christians Certain Resolution of his Owne Salvation (1615), p. 2. 55 Thomas Fuller, The Cause and Cure of a Wounded Conscience (London, 1647), p. 73. 56 Richard Baxter, The Right Method for a Settled Peace of Conscience and Spiritual Comfort (London, 1653), p. 158. 53

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of seeking signs of election. There is a difference between exhorting the reader to ‘be secure then’, ‘doubt [not] of thine Election’, as Burton does, and requiring assurance of salvation as a mark of being elect. Interestingly, most popular religious writers do not equate being secure with being assured; the former word generally denotes the dangerous state which Burton describes as ‘carnall presumption’ (III, 436). Perhaps he deliberately gets the Calvinist vocabulary wrong as an indication of his lack of sympathy with the practice of seeking signs. Another mark of his resistance to the doctrine of assurance is his encouragement to the reader to ‘hope well’, repeated later as ‘Hope the best’ (III, 442). Hope generally receives much less attention than faith and charity in English religious writing of the period: in a 1612 collection of three treatises on the theological virtues, for example, the treatise on faith spans 280 pages and that on hope only 15, with 60 devoted to charity.57 Hope and faith are seen to be closely bound together, the difference being that hope looks to ‘things to come’ rather than things present, and concerns the promise of heaven.58 According to Burton’s Calvinist contemporaries, hope alone is not enough for assurance. In Arthur Dent’s hugely popular tract The Plaine Mans Path-Way to Heaven (first published 1601), the ignorant Asunetus is corrected by Theologus, a divine, for holding an opinion very similar to Burton’s: Asune. I will never beleeve, that any man can certainely know in this world, whether he shall bee saved, or damned; but all men must hope well, and be of a good beliefe.   Theol. Nay: we must goe further then hope well. We may not venture our salvation upon uncertaine hopes. As, if a man should hope it would be a faire day to morrow: but hee cannot certainely tell. No, no. We must in this case, being of such infinite importance as it is, grow to some certainety, and full resolution.59

The doctrine of assurance, as this example perfectly illustrates, insists on a sense not simply of hope, but of certainty. Those who can observe the signs of election in themselves therefore can be assured of their salvation.60 Fish’s comment that doubt is the source of despairing thoughts is of course relevant to this doctrine, but for the more complex reason that feeling doubt is in itself evidence that one is not regenerate. By contrast, Jean de L’Espine, The Foundation of Christian Religion, trans. S. Veghelman (London, 1612). Ibid., p. 282; Urbanus Rhegius, A Necessary Instruction of Christian Faith and Hope, trans. John Foxe (London, 1579), sig. [A4]r (the preface, by Foxe). 59 Arthur Dent, The Plaine Mans Path-Way to Heaven, 9th edn (London, 1607), pp. 237–8. 60 On certainty and faith see Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 287–96. 57 58

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Burton’s language reveals how doubt need not be a source of despair. His statement, ‘Thou maist in the Lords good time be converted’, aims to reassure the reader by opening up the possibility for change, and therefore offering hope. Through his repeated emphasis on hope in the Subsection, Burton treats the virtue not simply as the promise of ‘things to come’ but also as an activity to be conducted in the present, an exercise to counteract despair. In Mary Fenton’s words, hope is ‘the antidote of stasis’, and the energetic quality of hoping well fits in with Burton’s wider contention that the best therapy for melancholy is to keep active.61 Since the task of discerning one’s spiritual state through signs leads to doubt and fear, Burton’s discussion leads naturally into a consideration of alternative beliefs about predestination. He begins with the Arminians, who have ‘revived that plausible doctrine of universall grace, which many Fathers, our late Lutherans and moderne Papists doe still maintaine, that we have free-will of our selves, and that Grace is common to all that will beleeve’ (III, 436). He then describes ‘lesse orthodoxall’ views, such as the theory that a greater part of the world is saved than damned, the beliefs of Julian the Apostate, and the heresies of Origen, Pelagius, and finally the Socinians. The whole section is enlarged by a third between 1624 and 1638, as Burton adds more detail and extra arguments. This fact is all the more surprising when one sees how Burton rejects them all in a sentence: ‘But these absurd paradoxes are exploded by our Church, we teach otherwise.’ Why does Burton expand the preceding passage and allow more space to the alternative arguments, if they are only ‘absurd paradoxes’? His love of extra detail and his habit of incorporating whatever he has recently read may be partly responsible. However, there is still the feeling of a lack of balance between what he is supposedly refuting and what he claims to endorse. The following passage is also expanded by Burton over the years: That this vocation, predestination, election, reprobation, non ex corruptâ massâ, prævisa fide [not out of the corrupt mass [of mankind], faith having been foreseen], as our Arminians, or ex prævisis operibus [for works foreseen], as our Papists, non ex præteritione [not because of passing over], but Gods absolute decree, ante mundum creatum, (as many of our Church holde) was from the beginning, before the foundation of the world was laid, or homo conditus (or from Adams fall, as others will, homo lapsus objectum est reprobationis [it is fallen man who is the object of reprobation]) with perseverantiam sanctorum [the perseverance Mary C. Fenton, Milton’s Places of Hope: Spiritual and Political Connections of Hope with Land (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 31.

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of the saints], we must be certaine of our salvation, we may fall but not finally, which our Arminians will not admit. (III, 438)62

The expansions (see note 62), while adding more detail, also cloud the reader’s understanding of what exactly it is that ‘we [the English Church] teach’. By contrast, the additions to the previous section articulate the heresies more clearly, as when Socinian ideas are vocalised (added 1628): For how can he bee mercifull that shall condemne any creature to eternall unspeakable punishment, for one small temporary fault, all posterity, so many myriades, for one and an other mans offence, quid meruistis oves [what have you done, you sheep [to merit death]]? (III, 438)

Burton allows the reader to follow and to a certain extent identify with heretical thoughts, and yet his statement of the true beliefs of the Church is confusing, full of the specialised Latin vocabulary of theologians, and grammatically muddled. Moreover, as David Renaker notes, this definition of the Church’s teaching becomes more extreme and narrow as a result of the expansions.63 By adding the word ‘reprobation’ after ‘election’ (as he does in the third edition, of 1628) Burton is claiming that most of the Church believe in double predestination, that God predestined reprobates to hell as well as the elect to heaven. Article XVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles only mentions single predestination: that God has decreed ‘to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour’.64 Significantly, Burton changes ‘most of our Church’ to ‘many’ from 1638 onwards,65 accepting that it is not the majority view, but he still retains the sense. In fact, when a little later he elaborates on predestination, he abandons the notion of double predestination: According to his immutable, eternall, just decree and counsell of saving men and Angels, God calls all, and would have all to be saved according to the efficacy of his vocation: all are invited, but only the elect apprehended, the rest that are unbeleeving, impenitent, whom God in his just judgement leaves to be punished for their sinnes, are in a reprobate sense; yet we must not determine who are such, condemne our selves or others, because we have an universall invitation, The main expansions are in the 1628 edition, where the passages ‘reprobation, … holde)’ and ‘(or … reprobationis)’ are inserted. For commentary on the theological politics of this passage, cf. Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, pp. 185–90. 63 Renaker, ‘Burton’s Palinodes’, 179. 64 The Book of Common Prayer, p. 557. 65 As noted by Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, p. 242. 62

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all are commanded to beleeve, and we know not how soone or late before our end we may be receaved. (III, 438–9)

The notion of God ‘leaving’ the impenitent seems very close to that doctrine of passing over or preterition which Burton has just claimed is false (see above, ‘non ex præteritione’). Hence while Burton claims that double predestination is correct doctrine, he then espouses a much less rigid theory of single predestination. Furthermore, the notion that God extends a ‘universall invitation’ is not in line with the strict Calvinist teaching that, because God’s decree was eternal, Christ died only for the elect, not for all of mankind.66 The fact that Burton specifies the invitation to be a command to believe and comments that it is the ‘unbeleeving, impenitent’ who are reprobate suggests again the theology of Hemmingius. The second of the five points asserted by the Remonstrants at the Synod of Dort was that Christ died for all men, but that only believers have remission of sin. The second Article of Dort, in refutation, asserted the doctrine of limited atonement.67 Why does Burton make claims for the Church which he then contradicts? Firstly, the controversy over Arminianism certainly makes him anxious. Although he is prepared to quote Hemmingius approvingly, even on the subject of God’s universal promise, he takes care to distance himself from accusations of Arminianism by attacking the party. One can, however, detect a softening in Burton’s attitude. One small but significant piece of evidence for this is the emendation of his own index entry ‘Arminians censured’ to ‘Arminians Tenents’ (III, 448) in editions from 1632 onwards. Such a change, only obvious to the reader of the modern Oxford edition, suggests that Burton’s movement away from a position of hostility is deliberately discreet. Secondly, Burton highlights two specific aspects of Arminian belief in this passage as points of disagreement: the notion that predestination occurs ‘ex corruptâ massâ’ rather than before the foundation of the world and the refusal to accept that ‘we may fall but not finally’. The first of these is not a specifically Arminian belief: sublapsarian Calvinists claim that election occurs only after Adam’s sin. Burton is in accord with the Lutheran Hemmingius, who argues that God ‘elected us before laying the foundations of the world’.68 As for the second, it seems that Burton does Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism, pp. 29, 57. The Encyclopedia of the Lutheran Church, ed. by Julius Bodensieck, 3 vols. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1965), I, 104; The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F.L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, 3rd edn (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 502. 68 Hemmingius, Antidotum, sig. D10r. 66 67

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object to the notion that an elect person can finally fall (which is part of Arminian theology); however, he does not espouse Calvinism wholeheartedly either.69 In many ways Burton concurs with Hemmingius in his emphasis on the positive nature of election and his beliefs in God’s universal promise to mankind and in predestination occurring before the creation. Burton’s ideas on predestination are an eclectic mixture, something he shares with many English clergymen and theologians of his day. Furthermore, as Angus Gowland rightly argues, Burton deliberately distances himself from dogmatic commitment regarding the controversy, although there are signs in the text that he was drawn to a moderate antiCalvinist understanding of grace.70 While it would be unwise to jump to conclusions about his theological standpoint based on the contents of his library, the fact that he owned the works of Arminius and two by the Remonstrant Nicolaus Vedelius, one of which is co-written with Simon Episcopius, leader of the Remonstrants at Dort, shows a keen interest in alternative versions of the predestination question.71 Ultimately, Burton’s focus is on remembering the ‘universall invitation’, not on allowing one’s belief to encourage condemnation of oneself or others. It is impossible to reach an entirely definitive statement of Robert Burton’s beliefs about grace and predestination based on the evidence of ‘Cure of Despaire’ and perhaps Burton himself would not have been able to do so. Nonetheless, the evidence I have examined refutes John Stachniewski’s claim that Burton’s writing is ‘actuated not by a coherent intellectual position but by congeries of unargued-for prejudices’.72 Burton’s use of Hemmingius and his careful negotiation of his English sources show that his method of spiritual comfort is supported by a theological stance which departs from English Calvinism and is more closely related to a strand of sixteenth-century Lutheranism derived from Hemmingius (who was in turn influenced by his teacher, Philipp Melanchthon, another important source for Burton). Finally, I would emphasise that Burton’s stance on the predestination controversy is subsidiary to his pastoral concern. The fact that the reader William Prynne refers to ‘Master Henry Burton [sic] of Christ-Church in Oxford, in his Melancholie’ as one of over a hundred ‘Writers of our Church’ who argue that the elect cannot fall finally. Although Prynne is undoubtedly correct in ascribing this view to Burton (and cites this passage), he clearly does not know Burton’s work well. Burton, as I have shown, is not the enthusiastic spokesman for Calvinism that Prynne makes him out to be; The Church of Englands Old Antithesis to New Arminianisme (London, 1629), p. 116. 70 Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, p. 190. 71 Kiessling, Library of Robert Burton, items 56, 1651, 1652. 72 Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, p. 252. 69

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is unknown to the author does not prevent the author from ­offering ­comfort and God’s universal invitation to believe; as such, Burton’s theology is of key importance in the Anatomy. It allows him to follow the pattern of readerly inclusiveness which runs throughout the work and to offer hope of salvation without knowing who the reader is. Burton’s mode of writing, combined with those inclinations towards anti-­Calvinism which I have found, aims to counteract the effects of other types of reading and listening. He fears that some sermons and lectures can induce religious melancholy rather than curing it, as can religious tracts of all varieties, which are ‘too tragicall, too much dejecting men, aggravating offences’ (III, 416). His final warning in the book is that such a sufferer ‘read no more such tracts or subjects, heare no more such fearfull tones’ (III, 445). This concern about the harmful effects of works which deject and aggravate offences may have been widely felt, and English publications which purported to offer ‘Cures’ for spiritual affliction and the wounded conscience were very popular during Burton’s lifetime.73 His own conception of a text that provides therapy through its pages bears a debt to these works but fundamentally differs in its attitude to the reader and its methods of persuasion. His treatment of the reader replicates his belief in God’s universal invitation to faith. The Anatomy can be seen as creating an alternative, stylistically and theologically, to existing modes of religious discourse in order to cater to the needs of the unknown, suffering reader. 73

For further discussion of this subject see Mary Ann Lund, ‘Bunyan and the Tradition of “Pastoral” Writing in Early Modern England’, Bunyan Studies 12 (2006/2007), 6–21.

Ch apter 3

Printed Therapeutics: The Anatomy of Melancholy and Early Modern Medical Writing

In ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ Robert Burton describes melancholy as ‘this Medicinall subject’ (I, 21) and justifies why he, as a divine, should choose to write about it. In the previous chapter I examined the spiritual aspects of melancholy with which Burton chose to end his work, arguing that he presents there an alternative to existing, Calvinist modes of therapeutic discourse. In this chapter I will consider The Anatomy’s status as a medical text, and the implications this has for his presentation of his text in curative terms. Although much has been written about Burton and medicine, the question of how he handles medical therapy through the pages of a book has not been addressed.1 Ancient and early modern medical works in Latin and English provide a precedent for Burton’s division and handling of his subject-matter and influence the structure of his text, as well as acting as major sources. As I will argue, the Anatomy provides an important meeting point between Latin and vernacular medical publications, being both a scholarly endeavour which repeatedly acknowledges its debt to major continental physicians, and a work written in English by a non-professional for lay readers, which gives advice about the preservation of health as well as the cure of disease. While it is helpful and illuminating to view the Anatomy from a medical perspective, it is also necessary to show where the work departs from medical sources and goes further than them in the examination of melancholy and its treatments. The latter part of this chapter will argue that Burton’s literary therapeutics  – the curative experience which he Sir William Osler celebrated the Anatomy as ‘a medical treatise, the greatest indeed written by a layman’, ‘Robert Burton: The Man, His Book, His Library’, Oxford Bibliographic Society: Proceedings and Papers 1 (1927), 163–90 (183). Other significant work on the medical dimension of the Anatomy includes Stanley W. Jackson, ‘Robert Burton and Psychological Healing’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 44 (1989), 160–78; Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 33–138.

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envisages through the act of reading  – comes to eclipse other forms of healing in certain sections of the work. Repeatedly, when Burton extols the health benefits of various activities, it transpires that he is presenting them as they are experienced through the written word. The pleasure of texts is at the heart of the ‘Cure of Melancholy’ Partition, and one of its great benefits, Burton suggests, is that reading can be enjoyed by many (unlike treatments which must be carefully prescribed to specific individuals only). This is not to suggest, however, that Burton presents a straightforward and single programme of cures for his readers, nor that the various elements of his work do not intersect. Indeed, although this chapter addresses the medical dimension of the Anatomy apart, it should be recognised that the boundaries between disciplines – medicine, divinity, philosophy  – are fluid in the early modern period and that, while Burton’s approaches to melancholy are multiple, they are by no means separate. The next chapter will explore the specific relationship between medicine and religion in his work. In order to examine more precisely how Burton handles his ‘Medicinall subject’, one must first understand the traditions of medical writing in which he participates. The account which begins this chapter is not designed as a general survey of early modern medical theory and practice but rather as a discussion of the genres of medical writing related to health and the treatment of disease. It investigates how writers provide instruction or advice to their readers, whether physicians or lay people, and particularly how therapeutic aspects are handled on the page. The presentation of cures within Burton’s medical sources forms a significant stimulus for his own curative writing, and also raises important questions about the relationship between generalised advice in books and the treatment of individual cases. L at i n m e dic a l w r i t i ng Early modern works on health and the treatment of illness are generally divided into two categories: learned Latin works and popular vernacular ones. It is unwise to regard these two categories as discrete or working in opposition to one another, since most of them stood on the same Galenic foundations, and many ideas and beliefs were common to both. Yet a distinction can be observed in writing on the subject between Latin and vernacular texts: it is not simply language that separates these categories of text, but also status, purpose, intended readership and handling of subject-matter. While the continental Latin works were only available to

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the highly educated and were designed as textbooks for medical students and professionals, providing a full theoretical framework for each disease discussed, the English books were accessible to a wider audience, were often aimed at lay people (although physicians did consult them too), and were more occupied with listing treatments than with examining the root causes of disease. Burton’s work  – described by him as a ‘Maceronicon’ (I, 11), a mixture of English and Latin – provides an important point of cross-over between the two traditions. International Latin medical publications in the early modern period encompassed a variety of genres, including editions of and commentaries on classical texts (particularly by Hippocrates and Galen), lecture series, pedagogical manuals, polemics and scholarly works.2 The Latin works which Burton consulted for his book are mainly of two main forms, both related to the practice of medicine:  general manuals (practica) and particular case histories. The practica genre is the central reference text of learned medicine, and is concerned with general descriptions of disease. An early modern practica might begin by explaining the author’s method, establishing his medical credentials by declaring his authorities (with Galen chief among them), and attacking opponents. The main body of the work would then describe diseases in head-to-toe order, a pre-set format handed down from the Middle Ages. Melancholy is generally treated as a disease of the head, although most writers agree that there are three species, belonging to the head, body and hypochondrium (the upper abdomen and the organs within it such as the liver, spleen and gall bladder). Diseases which affect the body universally, such as fevers, are treated together. Each disease is described in terms of its nature, causes, signs and symptoms, prognostics and treatments. The comprehensive nature of the practica corresponds to its use:  these books were, as Andrew Wear has shown, ‘used as primers for medical students and handbooks or “vade mecums” for the practising physician’.3 Yet they were not read only by the medical establishment. Although he never studied medicine formally, Burton owned a number of practica, including Guainerius’ Practica of 1517, Altomarus’ De Medendis of 1560 and Platerus’ Praxeos of 1602, and quoted from many more in the Anatomy.4 Ian Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 46–7, 55–8. 3 Andrew Wear, ‘Explorations in Renaissance Writings on the Practice of Medicine’, in A. Wear, R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie (eds.), The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 118–45 (p. 119). 4 Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988), items 720, 31, 1248. 2

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The other main genre of Latin writing on illness which Burton uses is the collection of individual cases, generally entitled consilia or observationes.5 These two are not strictly the same. The consilium is a piece of ‘professional advice written down in response to an individual request for counsel’ about a case, and normally describes a patient’s symptoms, diagnoses the illness and recommends a cure.6 The observatio, meanwhile, is a doctor’s narrative of a case from start to finish and includes the patient’s symptoms, the treatments used and the outcome, whether it is recovery or (in a few cases) death.7 Both of these genres show the physician in action and, unlike the practica, focus on the circumstances of particular cases. A patient’s sex, age, humoral state and (often) social status are noted since the doctor takes these into account when designing a personalised course of treatment. In Burton’s library are the consilia of Crato and Mercurialis and the observationes of Valleriola, all of which feature cases of melancholics. Crato’s, for example, records a case of hypochondriac melancholy in a noblewoman, while Valleriola’s contains a long account about a patient driven melancholic through lovesickness.8 Burton uses these writings sometimes for the authors’ general comments about melancholy, sometimes for their stories. Case histories are used as examples to illustrate a point rather than individual instances of a physician’s clinical practice, as they often were in their original format. Undoubtedly Burton also draws on them for their entertainment value, since case histories of melancholics often make good reading, especially when they are exotic or bizarre. One brief passage on how several combinations of humours can cause melancholy is much enlivened by the mention of people who thought they were a giant or a dwarf, a cockerel or a nightingale, or made of glass or butter (I, 402). Considered as a whole, Burton’s text is more closely related to the practica tradition than to the collection of cases since, although it concerns one condition only (albeit a very broadly conceived one), it is based on a systematic examination of that condition in all its aspects, not on accounts On the history and development of written medical histories see Nancy G. Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 195–213. 6 Nancy G. Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and his Pupils:  Two Generations of Italian Medical Learning (Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 270; for more on consilia, see pp. 270–302. 7 Brian Nance, ‘Wondrous Experience as Text:  Valleriola and the Observationes Medicinales’, in Elizabeth Lane Furdell (ed.), Textual Healing:  Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Medicine (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 101–18 (p. 116). 8 Kiessling, Library of Robert Burton, items 405, 1053, 1647; Joannes Crato, Consiliorum et Epistolarum Medicinalium Liber, ed. Laurentius Scholzius (Frankfurt, 1591), pp. 155–6; Franciscus Valleriola, Observationum Medicinalium Lib. VI. (Lyons, 1588), Lib. II, pp. 185–219. 5

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of bedside treatment. As a physician by ‘inclination’ (I, 23) only, Burton lacked clinical experience and drew on the writings of others for cases. Burton’s debt to the practica tradition has not been fully recognised. His structural method and the complex division of his subject-matter – illustrated by the synoptic tables which precede each Partition of the text – have been taken as a sign of his encyclopaedism or of his use of the tools of Ramism, but they also show the influence of international medical writing.9 By the 1570s, medical publications across the continent featured dichotomous tables as a means of presenting information.10 Galenic medicine was particularly conducive to the use of tree diagrams, since Galen taught that knowledge of diseases should be reached through a methodical process of division, by classifying species of disease in their varieties and distinguishing them from others.11 Writers who followed the Galenic methodical approach often used tables to show the movement from the general to the specific in the left-to-right branching across the page.12 Burton’s graphic representation of his subject-matter in each Partition thus exemplifies Galenic patterns of thought. Structurally, the Anatomy is a greatly expanded version of the discussions of individual diseases in the practica, which, as I have mentioned, move from cause to symptom to prognostic to cure. Burton handles the order of cures in the same order as the practica, beginning with diet or hygiene, then pharmacy, and finally surgical treatments (the three divisions of therapeutic medicine).13 Much critical ink has been spilt on why Burton discusses love ­melancholy apart in the third Partition, after the general analysis of melan­choly from cause to cure in the first and second Partitions. Ruth Fox suggests that the third Partition opposes the ‘logical order’ of the first two and is illustrative of Burton’s ‘perverse mathematics’.14 Yet an understanding of his medical precedents shows that this structural decision is not as original or strange as Christopher Grose describes the Anatomy as intended to be an encyclopaedic project, for which the Ramist tables provide evidence, ‘Theatrum Libri:  Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and the Failure of Encyclopedic Form’, in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 80–96 (p. 84); David Renaker, ‘Robert Burton and Ramist Method’, RQ 24 (1971), 210–20. 10 Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, p. 63. 11 Jerome J. Bylebyl, ‘Teaching Methodus Medendi in the Renaissance’, in Fridolf Kudlein and Richard J. Durling (eds.), Galen’s Method of Healing:  Proceedings of the 1982 Galen Symposium (Leiden: Brill, 1991), pp. 157–89 (p. 175). 12 Wear, ‘Explorations’, p. 138. 13 See Anatomy II, 18; his precedents are Wecker, Crato and Guainerius. See also Heiki Mikkeli, Hygiene in the Early Modern Medical Tradition (Helsinki: Annales Academiæ Scientarum Fernicæ, 1999), p. 20. 14 Ruth A. Fox, The Tangled Chain:  The Structure of Disorder in the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 122, 127. 9

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it might appear. In the preface to the third Partition he claims that ‘almost every Physitian’ has written on the subject ‘apart, and in their workes’ (III, 2). A glance at his sources bears this statement out. The Practica (1517) of the Italian physician Guainerius (Antonio Guainerio, d.1440), which Burton owned, includes a sixteen-chapter treatise on melancholy and the final three chapters are devoted exclusively to the causes, signs and prognostics, and cures of heroic (that is, love) melancholy. The work hence provides a precedent for Burton’s handling of love melancholy in a separate Partition. Burton’s marginal notes in his copy of Guainerius – words and phrases such as ‘pars affecta’, ‘causas’, ‘symptomata’ – indicate that he read the work with an eye to the design of the Anatomy.15 The French physician Laurentius (André du Laurens, 1558–1609) also treats heroic melancholy in separate chapters in his (vernacular) treatise of melancholy.16 Burton undoubtedly pursues his subject in far more depth than the practica writers (who are examining all kinds of diseases) and he goes much further in examining questions, only briefly mentioned by them, about the roles of moral philosophy, religion and art in therapy, for instance. Nonetheless, it is important to recognise how greatly the Latin practica influence the structure and content of his work. To an early modern reader with a medical education, the Anatomy’s title-page claim that it treats melancholy ‘medicinally’ would be evident in the book’s design. The format and approach of the Latin medical works raise the question of how therapy can be presented on the printed page. This question is significant for our understanding of the Anatomy: as I will argue later in the chapter, Burton goes beyond the scope of his medical sources by seeing his text as providing therapy within its pages, yet this curative ambition is by no means an uncomplicated one. As I have suggested, the chief difference between the genres of learned medical writing is that practica handle disease from a generalised perspective while consilia and observationes recount individual cases. We might see this difference as reflective of the approaches to treatment offered by Hippocratic and Galenic ­medicine, varied in emphasis but by no means contradictory.17 Antonius Guainerius, Practica, cu[m] Additionib[us] … Joannis Falconis (Lyons, 1517), fols. 37 v, 38r, 38v, 39r (Kiessling, Library of Robert Burton, item 720, shelfmark Bod 4o G 15 Med). Cf. Burton’s copy of Richard Greenham’s works, discussed in Chapter 4, p. 115. 16 Andreas Laurentius, Discours de la Conservation de la Veuë:  Des Maladies Melancholiques:  Des Catarrhes, & de la Vieillesse (Paris, 1597), translated (by Richard Surphlet) as A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight: Of Melancholike Diseases; Of Rheumes, and of Old Age (London, 1599), Chapters 10 and 11. 17 These are necessarily very brief sketches of Hippocratic and Galenic medical traditions as they were understood in Burton’s time. For full accounts see Wesley D. Smith, The Hippocratic 15

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Hippocrates was venerated as an ideal example of the practising physician. The medical tradition which developed from the Hippocratic corpus stressed the importance of the physician’s personal observation and experience and the particular circumstances of the individual case as the basis for treatment. These aspects were fundamental to the Empiricists, one of three major medical sects in antiquity, who taught that clinical experience, not theory, should guide a physician’s approach to his cases. Hippocrates himself recorded some of his case histories in his Epidemics, which gave details of individual patients and their treatments (it should be noted that Galen did too, in his On Prognostics).18 Published case histories showed the early modern Hippocratic physician in action at the bedside and provided examples of the many ways in which diseases could manifest themselves in individual patients. The Observationes of Valleriola (François Valleriola, d.1580), for example, describe the clinical practice of a Montpellier-trained physician (Montpellier was an important centre of Hippocratic teaching) and at the same time, as Brian Nance has argued, stress the usefulness of skills of observation in treatment of patients.19 Galenic medicine also took account of the particular circumstances of each case; Galen himself was sympathetic to the Empiricist school of treatment but found its total reliance on experience and observation unreliable. His own approach owed more to the Dogmatist sect, who argued that one should investigate health and disease from its causes and work towards treatment from theoretical premises.20 Galen’s Methodus Medendi, a text which was highly influential on medical teaching during the sixteenth century, taught that the physician should follow a general therapeutic method which could be applied to each individual instance.21 I have implied that the practica writers were solidly Galenic, yet there is a tension inherent in this genre regarding Galenic therapeutic method and the relationship between general and specific versions of illness. As Jerome Bylebyl has persuasively argued, the format of the practica manuals was antithetical to the approach to treatment taught by Galen because it gave no place to the essentially methodical basis which must Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979); Owsei Temkin, Galenism:  Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973). 18 Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror, p. 201. 19 Nance, ‘Wondrous Experience’, p. 117. 20 Temkin, Galenism, pp. 15–16. The third sect was the Methodists, who taught that a few simple rules, quickly learned, were the basis of all medical treatment. A useful introduction to classical medical theory is given in the first chapter of Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (University of Chicago Press, 1990). 21 Bylebyl, ‘Teaching Methodus Medendi’, p. 163.

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underlie individual cases. Instead, it enumerated diseases, listing causes, s­ ymptoms, prognostications and cures without regard either to the logical method which the doctor should employ or to individual circumstances which affect diseases and hence treatments, such as the patient’s humoral balance and the quality of the air.22 Although many sixteenth-century practica writers proclaimed their Galenic pedigree, few registered the discrepancy between the format of their works and Galen’s strictly methodical approach to healing. One important challenge to this general trend was the rigorously Galenic Paduan physician Montanus (Giambattista da Monte, 1488–1551), who insisted that universal method was the essential foundation of clinical practice. Physicians, he taught, should understand the essences and causes of diseases, and this could only be achieved through a process of division and classification, and through considerations of specific signs. Therefore medical writers should not simply list remedies for diseases. One of Montanus’ own alternatives was the ‘curatio particularis’: ‘a hypothetical case history in which he would stipulate a patient with a certain set of symptoms, then show how the diagnosis should be made from these, how the indications should be taken, and finally how they should be fulfilled’.23 It is illuminating to view Burton in the light of this issue of therapeutic method since his work has such an unusual approach to the relationship between the universal and the particular. I have already discussed the way Burton depicts his reader as an invisible, unknowable figure, ‘whosoever thou art’, a depiction that might suggest a denial that individual circumstances are a factor in the cure of melancholy. Indeed, in the ‘Cure of Despaire’ Subsection that ends the work, Burton, as I have argued, deliberately steps away from a Calvinist emphasis on ‘particularity’, instead offering the hope of salvation to all irrespective of their individual circumstances. His theology and his Galenism might hence be seen to clash. Later I will suggest some ways in which therapy through reading becomes a way of circumventing the difficulties of applying general cures to specific people. Here, though, it is worth assessing the specifically medical perspective in the Anatomy on the relationship between universals and particulars. Burton is certainly well acquainted with the strict Galenism of Montanus, using his work as a source along with that of Montanus’ student, Johann Crato (1519–85). Yet he quotes Montanus alongside all Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., p. 177. This is a much simplified summary of Bylebyl’s excellent account, pp. 173–89.

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sorts of other sixteenth-century writers of practica, without conveying any sense of a methodological conflict between them. This is quite typical of Burton, who heaps authorities of differing viewpoints together and at times shows little interest in engaging in or even acknowledging the disputes between them. On the one hand, Burton’s use of synoptic tables and his interest in division show, as I have argued, the influence of Galenic modes of thought.24 On the other, the process of division is not rigorously followed, so that the specific distinguishing features of melancholy and its limits are not fully established. Burton’s resistance to a totalising system of division can be seen in the third Member of the first Partition, which is made up of four Subsections: ‘Definition of Melancholy, Name, Difference’, ‘Of the part affected. Affection. Parties Affected’, ‘Of the Matter of Melancholy’ and ‘Of the Species or Kindes of Melancholy’ (I, 162–71). The Member appears to be following good Galenic method, yet Burton establishes very little within it. Instead, he quotes his authorities one against another without resolving them in favour of one viewpoint. For example, on the topic of the matter of melancholy he explains that, according to Galen, melancholy can be engendered of black bile, blood, choler, but not phlegm, an opinion followed by Valesius, Menardus, Fuchsius, Montaltus and Montanus. Yet Hercules de Saxonia, Cardan, Guianerius, Laurentius, Melanchthon and Wecker agree that phlegm can produce melancholy. Weighty authorities are on both sides. Burton seems to incline towards the latter view but does not explicitly endorse it, failing to clarify for the reader how melancholy is precisely to be understood in the book. Christopher Tilmouth argues that Burton pays ‘scrupulous, theorized attention’ to such subjects as the definition and species of melancholy, a sign that he follows Montanus’ method.25 I am not convinced that Burton is so rigorously scientific. Often in these four Subsections Burton presents various learned medical opinions but does not intervene in the debate to ascertain clearly, from his perspective, what melancholy is or is not. Despite the titles of each Subsection, he seems little interested in establishing clearly the divisions of the disease. He concludes of ‘the Species or Kinds of Melancholy’ that such divisions are meaningless beyond the page: What Phisitians say of distinct Species in their bookes, it much matters not, since that in their Patients bodies they are commonly mixt. In such obscurity This is noted by Christopher Tilmouth, ‘Burton’s “Turning Picture”: Argument and Anxiety in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, RES 56 (2005), 524–49 (533–34). 25 Ibid., 533. 24

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therefore, variety and confused mixture, of Symptomes, causes: how difficult a thing is it to treat of severall kindes apart; to make any certainty or distinction among so many casualties, distractions, when seldome two men shall be like affected per omnia? (I, 171)

The title of the Subsection would seem to suggest that the species and kinds of melancholy will be ascertained, but its conclusion denies that possibility. The ‘Of …’ format of the title bears a greater resemblance here to Montaigne’s or Bacon’s essays than to medical manuals, since Burton explores his subject from different angles but does not attempt to reconcile them fully. His words are to a certain extent consonant with Galenic method in that he recognises the extent to which individual circumstances play a part in the manifestation of a disease. He has already cited a number of instances from case histories of patients afflicted with mixed illnesses. However, coming at the end of a Member which is about the definition and division of melancholy, the passage quoted above seems like a deliberate step away from method as Burton comments that ‘it much matters not’ how species are distinguished from one another. His remark highlights a general flaw in the way that books present disease – a disparity between medical writing and clinical practice – yet he himself is only writing about melancholy, not practising on individual patients. Repeatedly in the Anatomy he acknowledges that there are myriad differences to be found among melancholics and that medical treatment should be geared to the individual. He recognises that the printed book, whose readers are necessarily unknown, cannot cater to all individual circumstances and provide the personalised therapeutics of bedside care. Nonetheless, he lists all kinds of cures for melancholy in a way that a strict Galenist such as Montanus would not consider acceptable. By weaving a literary therapeutics into his work through the activity of reading, Burton adds a further dimension to the issue of general and particular, as we will later see. V e r n ac u l a r m e dic a l w r i t i ng I have so far aligned the Anatomy with learned, continental medical writing, and see this tradition as underlying Burton’s presentation of his work and his understanding of melancholy as a disease. Angus Gowland convincingly argues that the Anatomy ‘constituted a significant achievement in Renaissance medical writing and publishing’ because it made European Latinate knowledge ‘available in the English vernacular in a

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form that did not sacrifice its intellectual credibility’.26 This last clause is crucial:  although Burton sometimes states that he summarises his authorities for the benefit of readers who do not have access to the originals, he is not providing digested or epitomised versions of his sources to convey knowledge in diluted form, as some vernacular works do.27 It is also notable that he makes very few references to other English medical works:  there is only a single citation in a footnote of Sir Thomas Elyot (?1499–1546) and Thomas Cogan (?1545–1607), for instance, authors of the hugely popular works The Castel of Helth (1539) and The Haven of Health (1584) respectively.28 Timothy Bright’s Treatise of Melancholy (1586) receives more references, but still relatively few compared to the Latin medical works (it is not cited at all in the second Partition, on cure). Nonetheless, the Anatomy has some important associations with vernacular medical writing. English writing on health takes a number of different forms, but the most popular category of published text  – and one which bears a relation to Burton’s work  – is the explanatory textbook and regimen.29 Regimens outline the ways in which people might preserve themselves from sickness, principally through the regulation of the six non-­ naturals (properties which are not part of the body but which affect one’s humoral balance and hence health):  air, exercise, sleeping and waking, diet, retention and evacuation, and the passions of the mind. The field of regimens is preventative medicine (hygiene or dietetics), although the dividing line between this and curative medicine was often blurred in the period, since the non-naturals were concerned with both parts.30 Unlike the Latin works I have discussed, these works are principally aimed at lay people; their background is Galenic but they devote little space to theoretical aspects of medicine, instead concentrating on giving practical advice.31 They do, however, often summarise the basics of physiology: the first book of Elyot’s Castel of Helth, for example, gives lists and tables of the complexions, humours and members of the human body. As well Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, p. 96. See e.g. II, 239. On the dilution of medical knowledge in books see Andrew Wear, ‘The Popularization of Medicine in Early Modern England’, in Roy Porter (ed.), The Popularization of Medicine, 1650–1850 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 17–41 (p. 19). 28 Anatomy, I, 212 note c. 29 Paul Slack, ‘Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: The Uses of the Vernacular Medical Literature in Tudor England’, in Charles Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 237–73 (p. 243). 30 31 Mikkeli, Hygiene, p. 45. Ibid., p. 73. 26 27

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as explaining to the reader the terms of the book, they have an explicit moral aim in educating him or her, since knowledge of one’s body was seen as a religious duty.32 The English regimen writers have a significant connection to Burton in that many are not medical professionals. As the work of Margaret Pelling has uncovered, medical treatment in early modern England was by no means the sole province of practitioners licensed by the Royal College of Physicians: the sick were accustomed to seek help from a range of individuals, including friends and relatives, the parish priest, apothecaries, barber-surgeons, local wise men and women, and herbalists.33 One of the most highly renowned healers of Burton’s day, particularly of mental disorders, was Richard Napier (1559–1634), an ordained minister with no medical qualifications, who practised astrology and held conferences with the Archangel Raphael.34 Paul Slack has calculated that only one third of Tudor textbooks, regimens and remedy collections were written by established physicians; others were lawyers, clergymen and professional writers.35 Sir Thomas Elyot, for example, draws ­attention to his own nonmedical background by countering criticism that writing ‘in phisik  … besemeth not a knight’, and praises the nobility of the art.36 When Burton anticipates the criticism that ‘I being a Divine, have medled with Physicke’ (I,  20) he is perhaps thinking partly of some monastic predecessors. Andrew Boorde (c.1490–1549), author of the very popular Compendyous Regyment of a Dyetary of Helth (1542) and Breviary of Helthe (1547), was a trained physician but began life as a Carthusian monk, while Thomas Moulton, writer of the much-reprinted This is the Myrour or Glasse of Helth (1531?), was a Dominican Friar.37 To the regimen writers, the preservation of health and regulation of the non-naturals are not the province of doctors alone. Indeed, the prevention of illness might mean that a ­doctor’s visit is avoided. The regimens also claim to equip a patient in the event Thomas Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors (London, 1601), Chapter 1, ‘Of selfe knowledge’. Cf Anatomy I, 139–40. 33 Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot:  Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1998) and Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London:  Patronage, Physicians and Irregular Practitioners 1550–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003); Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 21–8. 34 Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam:  Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 13–32. 35 Slack, ‘Mirrors of Health’, pp. 252–4. 36 Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helth Corrected and in Some Places Augmented (London, 1541), sig. A.ii.r. 37 See ODNB, s.v. ‘Andrew Boorde’, ‘Thomas Moulton’. 32

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of sickness, allowing him or her to help the physician in diagnosis.38 As the original title to Elyot’s treatise puts it, the work is designed so that ‘every manne may knowe the state of his owne body, the preservation of helth, and how to instructe welle his physytion in syckenes that he be not deceyved’.39 Another major point of intersection between Burton’s writing and these vernacular medical works is their self-consciousness about the use of English. Burton claims that it was ‘not mine intent to prostitute my Muse in English … but to have exposed this more contract in Latin, If I could have got it printed’ (I, 16). He could not, however. Whether or not we take this comment seriously, we should recognise that justifications or excuses for the use of English are very common in early modern medical books.40 Burton is deliberately following a tradition of vernacular medical publication while at the same time aligning himself with the professional physicians who publish only in Latin. Burton does not wish to divulge ‘secreta Minervae’ (I, 16), whereas writers like Elyot pride themselves on their openness, suggesting that medicine is wrongly kept inaccessible through the use of the classical languages. Had the ancient writers been as keen as modern physicians are to hide medicine from lay people, Elyot argues, ‘they wolde have devysed somme particuler language, with a strange syphre or fourme of lettres, wherin they wold have written their science, which language or lettres no man shoulde have knowen that had not professyd and practised phisicke’.41 Vernacular writing makes medicine available to all literate people for their own use. Whereas some authors stress that they do not advocate self-treatment during illness, and only supply dietetic advice, the physician Philip Barrough (d.1600) goes further when he defends his use of the vernacular in The Method of Physick (1583), an English practica: I have alwayes bene of this minde, that it behoveth every man to be cunning in his own constitution, and to know so much as may serve to forestall the coming of many ordinary diseases … yea and sometime to be able to chase away a malady when it hath alreadie caught hold of the bodie.42

His reasons are firstly that ‘every man may judge best of his owne bodie’, and secondly that many die for lack of help in the absence of a physician, Slack, ‘Mirrors of Health’, p. 260. Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helth (London, ‘1534’, i.e. 1539). 40 Beier, Sufferers and Healers, p. 35; Wear, ‘Popularization’, p. 22. 41 Elyot, Castel of Helth Corrected, sig. [A.iv.]v. 42 Philip Barrough, The Method of Physick (London, 1624), sig. [A7]r. I quote from the sixth edition. 38

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when a little knowledge earlier could have halted the onset of illness. There is still a measure of caution here, noticeable in Barrough’s vocabulary: ‘chase away’ is not quite the same as ‘cure’. This illustrates a more general concern among writers of popular regimens and textbooks that readers should not take medical matters too far into their own hands and do themselves damage. The principle of medical self-help (derived from the writings of the first-century Roman physician Celsus and developed in medieval regimens) is that healthy people should be able to regulate themselves and know the needs of their own bodies. Elyot explains that ‘as Cornelius Celsus saith, A man that is hole and well at ease, & is at his lybertie, ought not to bynde him selfe to rules, or nede a phisition’.43 The healthy person should be his own physician (medicus sui ipsius) through self-moderation, while nature was always the best healer.44 For most English writers, however, this does not mean that the lay reader should try to supplant the place of the professional physician. Barrough’s preface, for example, begins with a long praise of the noble art of medicine throughout history, and as Paul Slack has remarked, most English works echo the establishment view that physic is complex and should not be undertaken by untrained practitioners.45 Barrough’s words illustrate another aspect of the popular English health books: their advice is generally applicable to ‘every man’. There is not the same methodological difficulty inherent in the Latin practica concerning the relationship between the universal and particular aspects of disease. It was, of course, a medical commonplace that individuals all had different humoral constitutions, and regimens sometimes respond to this by addressing themselves to specific groups of readers, limited by age, sex and profession, among other factors.46 However, popular medical writing as a whole does not display an anxiety about the translation of advice from page to patient. Books claim that they are useful for all, and readers are responsible for selecting what is appropriate for them. At the end of a number of chapters on diet, Thomas Elyot comments that ‘although I have written a generall diet for every age, yet nethelesse it must be remembred, that somme chyldren and yong men, eyther by debilitie of nature, or by some accidentall cause, as syckenes, or moche studye, happen to gather humours fleumatik or melancoly in the places of digestion’.47 In that case, Elyot, Castel of Helth Corrected, fol. 45r. Mikkeli, Hygiene, p. 93. For a historical examination of the medical self-help tradition, see Evelyne Aziza-Shuster, Le Médecin de Soi-Même (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris, 1972), esp. pp. 22–44. 45 Slack, ‘Mirrors of Health’, p. 257. 46 47 Mikkeli, Hygiene, p. 71. Elyot, Castel of Helth Corrected, fol. 39v. 43

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he advises that they use a diet designed for old men. Elyot makes some recommendations relating to specific circumstances, but his remark also shows that this is by no means the norm. He is typical in keeping his advice at a general level, for every age and both sexes (he gives no specific dietary advice for women, for instance). Popular remedy collections usually pay less attention to the circumstances of individual patients, simply listing recipes for cures to various complaints. Although Burton is careful not to exclude readers and offers his book to all (as we have seen in Chapter 1), there is in his writing a concern about the different ways each individual can be affected by disease which is not so prominent in the English regimens, and which is more reflective of learned medical thinking. Moreover, he surveys a number of specific varieties of melancholy, including that of women. Women’s melancholy was generally believed to be of a different type from men’s because of their distinct physiological make-up: the disease could originate in the womb, often arising from suppression of the menstrual cycle or sexual abstinence, and was considered rarer than male melancholy and harder to cure.48 Burton asserts early on that melancholy can affect both sexes, men more often than women, ‘yet women misaffected, are farre more violent, and grievously troubled’ (I, 165); notably, he never calls their condition hysteria, although recent commentators have claimed that early modern writers identified melancholy as a masculine condition and dubbed women with the same symptoms as hysterical.49 Burton devotes a short Subsection to ‘Symptomes of Maides, Nunnes, and Widowes Melancholy’ (I, 414–18) (interestingly, titled ‘Womens Melancholy’ in the running header), where he observes that it is a ‘peculiar Species of Melancholy’ because it has ‘one only cause proper to women alone’ (I, 414). Although his remarks on melancholy in women occupy only a small space in the book and he shies away from discussing the subject much – ‘Into what subject have I rushed? What have I to doe with Nunnes, Virgins, Widowes? I am a bacheler my selfe, and Laurentius, Discourse of the Preservation, p. 128; Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy (London, 1586), p. 271. On melancholy and hysteria, see Laurinda S. Dixon, Perilous Chastity:  Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 197–220. On female physiology see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 28–46. 49 e.g. Dixon, Perilous Chastity. On melancholy and gender see further Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 35–68; Julia Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia:  Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 243–56, which contains a number of factual errors about the Anatomy. 48

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lead a Monasticke life in a College …’ (I, 417) – he does give ­therapeutic advice specific to them in ‘Exercise Rectified’ (II, 95) and gives examples throughout, especially in the Sections on ‘Love Melancholy’, of case histories of female melancholics.50 By comparison, Timothy Bright devotes no separate chapters to female melancholy, and only occasionally gives advice specific to women; likewise Laurentius (whose French treatise on melancholy appeared in English translation), even though his work is dedicated to a woman – the Duchess of Uzès – who suffered from melancholy herself, albeit only mildly.51 Given that in the regimens ‘the health of women was largely overlooked’,52 Burton’s few mentions are significant. He is more attentive than most other prominent medical writers in English to disease as it affects the individual, not just as something to be treated in a number of pre-established ways. the

a n at o m y

a s m e dic a l t e x t

From a medical perspective, The Anatomy of Melancholy is best seen as occupying a space somewhere between the Latin and vernacular traditions of writing. Andrew Wear has commented that ‘the boundaries between [learned] and popular medicine were more permeable than they might appear at first sight’, and the Anatomy attests to this both in its variety of sources and in its structure and form. Burton uses classical sources alongside continental neoteric writing, which also influences the structure of his work. His range of references is immense, showing an awareness of recent works and controversies (such as the debate over chemical medicines) and of specialised areas such as pharmacology.53 The size of the Anatomy, its detailed and frequent citations of medical authorities, its long discussions of causes, symptoms, prognostics and cures, and its involved consideration of medicines (Burton does not simply list remedies as many collections do) mean that it cannot be regarded as a ‘popular’ medical text. However, the facts that it is written in English and by a clergyman, not a medical professional, align the work with vernacular works on health such as Elyot’s. Kaara L. Peterson gives a brief account of female melancholy in the Anatomy but does not consider Burton’s use of case histories of melancholy women, ‘Re-anatomizing Melancholy: Burton and the Logic of Humoralism’, in Elizabeth Lane Furdell (ed.), Textual Healing:  Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Medicine (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 139–67 (pp. 162–7). 51 Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, pp. 250–51, 271; Laurentius, Discourse of the Preservation, sig. A3v. 52 Wear, Knowledge and Practice, p. 164. 53 Burton’s interest in pharmacology is noted in the Oxford edition, V, 269. On chemical medicine see e.g. Allen Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2nd edn (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002), esp. Chapters 3 and 4. 50

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To what extent is it helpful to think of Burton’s work as a medical text at all? Certainly, medicine forms a major constituent ingredient of the book. Galenic theories of the human body and its humoral composition touch every aspect of the Anatomy, and its medical dimension is evident in everything from the account of Democritus’ dissections of animals in the preface  – which inspired the work’s title  – to the final Subsection on ‘Cure of Despaire by Physicke, Good Counsell, Comforts, &c.’ (III, 424). Moreover, many aspects which seem to modern readers to be unrelated to medicine are nonetheless important parts of early modern medical writing. In the second Partition, for example, Burton surveys cures of melancholy arising from music, merry company, enjoyable surroundings, and activities such as walking and dancing. Although these might seem to fall outside the scope of the physician, all of these remedies are mentioned in the Latin practica, which devote considerable space to the cures related to one’s way of life or the six non-naturals. Religious therapies too might seem to be unconnected to medicine yet there is a close relationship between them in the early modern period (which will be explored fully in the next chapter). Cures taken out of moral philosophy are also encouraged by both learned and popular medical writers, especially for illnesses arising from the sixth non-natural: the passions of the mind. Elyot, for example, recommends ‘the counsell of a man wyse and well lerned in morall philosophye’.54 The disciplines of medicine and philosophy were closely related, with the latter providing the ‘praecognita’ of medical theories such as the humours, and many medical writers came from faculties of philosophy.55 Galen himself claimed that ‘the best physician is also a philosopher’, and there was a widely quoted tag to the effect that medicine takes up where philosophy leaves off.56 The view that philosophy was necessary for medicine was further authorised by Plutarch in his Moralia, while the Italian doctor Argenterius (Giovanni Argenterio, 1513–72) went so far as to argue that the relationship between the two was so close that it was impossible to demarcate one from the other.57 Some physicians proclaimed their joint heritage by describing themselves as ‘medicus, atque philosophus’ on the title-pages of their writings.58 In ‘Perturbations of the Mind Rectified’ Burton explains that quietening the mind is a chief cure of melancholy, and his authorities for his argument are a mixture of philosophers and physicians:  Seneca, Aristotle, Plato, Galen, Rhasis, Crato Elyot, Castel of Helth Corrected, fol. 62v. Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, pp. 49, 80–84. 56 57 Cited in Wear, Knowledge and Practice, p. 131. Mikkeli, Hygiene, pp. 27–8, 36. 58 Donatus Altomarus, De Medendis Humani Corporis Malis: Ars Medica (Lyons, 1560); Hieronymus Montaltus, De Homine Sano, Libri III (Frankfurt, 1591). 54 55

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and Montaltus, among others (II, 99–100). On a similar theme  – help from friends as cure – medicine, philosophy and religion meet in Burton’s recommendation of ‘good words’, a cure prompted by Plato’s words in Charmides on the need to treat body and soul together. He quotes Galen’s dietetics manual De Sanitate Tuenda, that many ‘have beene cured by good counsell and perswasion alone’, then a verse from Proverbs, then a consolatory work by Plutarch, all on the benefits of good speech (II, 109). Burton’s combination of medical, religious and ethical therapies has a precedent in the recommendations of learned physicians. However, the limitations of seeing the Anatomy simply as a medical text are obvious. A chief way in which Burton goes beyond the boundaries of medical writing is in the extended nature of his focus on other forms of therapy. Whereas medical writers recommend treatments based on moral philosophy, they rarely supply them themselves in their books. Many early modern physicians would agree with Burton that ‘good counsell, comfortable speeches, perswasion, how necessarily they are required to the cure of a discontented or troubled minde, how present a remedy they yeeld, and many times a sole sufficient cure of themselves’ (II, 125). However, they would not go on to ‘collect and gleane a few remedies, and comfortable speeches’ to that purpose, as Burton does in his long ‘Consolatory Digression’. The De Consolatione (1544) of the Italian physician Cardan (Girolamo Cardano, 1501–76) is an exception and is cited by Burton as a model, yet even this is a separate work, not part of a longer medical treatise (and Cardan wrote many works on non-medical subjects).59 Similarly, there are medical precedents for his discussion of love melancholy in Guainerius’ Practica and other works, as well as closer to home: in 1620 the subject of a medical disputation at Oxford was ‘an amor sit morbus?’ [whether love is an illness].60 Yet Burton’s approach is a distinctly literary one. The medical notion of love sickness becomes an excuse for a change of tone, a refreshing of himself and his readers in ‘this delightsome field’ (III, 4). Physicians give way to poets, dramatists and romance writers in his store of quotations and anecdotes. I have suggested that medicine, religion and philosophy overlap in the early modern period, but a good indication of when Burton moves fully Cardan is an important model for Burton as a medical writer with a strong literary self­presentation; see J. B. Bamborough, ‘Burton and Cardan’, in John Carey (ed.), English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in Honour of her Seventieth Birthday (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 180–93. 60 H. M. Sinclair, ‘Oxford Medicine’, in Allen G. Debus (ed.), Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England:  A Symposium Held at UCLA in Honor of C. D. O’Malley (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1974), pp. 371–91 (p. 372). 59

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out of one domain into another is when quotations and references from that domain disappear. Christopher Tilmouth has rightly drawn attention to the prominence of the Galenic six non-naturals in the Anatomy and argued that this indicates ‘Burton’s preoccupation with the sphere of self-governance’, and that the work as a whole has an ‘overwhelmingly ethical trajectory’.61 I would note that the shift from medical to ethical discourses becomes almost complete at some points. At the beginning of ‘Perturbations of the Mind Rectified’ a number of philosophers and physicians are cited together in support of the view that it is important to heal the mind. Yet once this has been established in this first paragraph, the references to physicians become far fewer and quotations from Stoic writers come to the fore, urging the melancholic to ‘Rule thy selfe then with reason’ (II, 103). Another point at which the medical basis of the six non-naturals becomes less prominent is in ‘Exercise Rectified’, where the pleasures of sports are not merely mentioned but described. As so often, medical authorities are cited at the beginning: here Rhasis, Guainerius, Montaltus, Jason Pratensis, Crato, Galen and others (II, 68–9). Yet these yield to full and even technical discussions of hawking and fishing, for example, and the pleasures thereof. I have dwelt on this aspect of Burton’s quotations because it is important to recognise how different areas of discourse feed into one another in his prose. It is inaccurate to say that Burton simply mixes different modes of writing through the process of quotation. Rather, certain types are brought to prominence, then recede as they are replaced by other forms of writing. At one stage Burton’s prose is thick with quotation from medical authorities; soon after, the words of poets and philosophers fill their place. Burton is undoubtedly at his most ‘medical’ in Sections four and five of the second Partition  – on medicinal physic and on the particular cures of the three types of melancholy – which are full of recipes for purges, alteratives and cordials. His discourse has a more varied texture in the rest of the Partition, however. The fact that Burton begins many Subsections on cure by citing medical authorities suggests that medical literature is a prime organising influence for him. Yet the quotations also show how much further Burton goes than his medical sources. Where they may simply refer to the pleasures of exercise, Burton performs them. His praise of ‘a petty progresse, a merry journey’ conjures up its pleasures: ‘To walke amongst Orchards, Gardens, Bowres, Mounts and Arbors, artificiall ­wildernesses, greene thickets, Arches, Groves, Lawnes, Rivulets,   Tilmouth, ‘Burton’s “Turning Picture” ’, 531, 530.

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Fountaines & such like pleasant places’ (II, 72). Reading the Anatomy in the context of medical writing illuminates Burton’s structuring principles and many of his themes and arguments. To consider the work first and foremost as a medical text, however, would be to flatten out its varied texture, its shifts from one mode of writing to another, and moreover to misunderstand the precise nature of its handling of therapy. L i t e r a r y t h e r a peu t ic s The Anatomy of Melancholy is concerned with melancholy in all its stages from cause to cure, but unlike the Latin textbooks it also offers a kind of self-help to the reader. Even when he seems most theoretically minded, in the Subsection on species or kinds of melancholy, Burton makes a claim for the praxis-orientated nature of his work. The three species of melancholy are the subject of my present discourse, which I will anatomize, and treat of, through all their causes, symptomes, cures, together, and apart; that every man that is in any measure affected with this malady, may knowe how to examine it in himselfe, and apply remedies unto it. (I, 169–70)

This is ‘every man his own doctor’ with a difference:  Burton presents the whole structure of his work as necessary for the reader to self-treat, and is not interested in simply dispatching remedies. Burton’s claim is an ambitious and uncompromising one since it demands that the reader go through a lengthy process of education in order to help himself or herself, following Hippocratic and Galenic principles by learning about the nature of melancholy in general as well as his or her own individual instance of the disease. The weighty folio of the Anatomy bears little resemblance to those brief and accessible guides in black-letter type, such as the muchpublished Regimen Sanitatis Salerni, which offered basic rules on health and remedies appropriate for the lay person.62 For all the claims of utility he makes, Burton does not design his book as an instrument in the restoration of one’s health. It is too long, too elaborately structured, too full of digressions and too absorbing to be an effective and straightforward how-to guide. Yet Burton’s text has a curative purpose intrinsic to itself, to the act of reading. This is a highly complex aspect of the work, and Burton himself 62

The Salernitan regimen, an anonymous and tremendously popular medieval regimen in verse form, was published in numerous editions including Regimen Sanitatis Salerni, trans. Thomas Paynel (London, 1528) and The English Mans Docter (London, 1607).

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recognises that it may not be fully successful. He acknowledges that reading can be damaging as well as therapeutic, as we have seen earlier in his warning to melancholics against the ‘Symptomes or prognostickes’ Section (I, 24). A chief reason for this danger is the role that imagination plays in the reading process. According to Aristotelian faculty psychology, the imagination is one of the three inward senses (the others are common sense and memory) which, along with the five outward senses, comprise the sensible soul (see I, 152–3). It receives the impressions or species perceived by the common sense, and also invents new ones of its own making. As Burton puts it, ‘In Melancholy men this faculty is most Powerfull and strong, and often hurts, producing many monstruous and prodigious things’ (I, 152); the imagination is responsible for major symptoms since it dominates the minds of those of a melancholic disposition and is more corrupt, not being properly governed by reason.63 He devotes a whole Subsection (1.2.3.2) to the imagination’s remarkable capacity to cause illnesses, birth deformities and even deaths, citing tales of people who imagined that they were ‘heavy, light, transparent, great, and little, senselesse and dead’ (I, 252), who succumbed to sciatica only after being misdiagnosed with the disease, and who died of fright after seeing the flimsy bridge that they had safely crossed the previous night (I, 253). If a sickness can be provoked merely by the power of suggestion, a full description of its symptoms may well exacerbate it in a sufferer. Yet he also notes that the imagination can have therapeutic effects – ‘As some are so molested by Phantasie; so some againe by Fancy alone, and a good conceit, are as easily recovered’ (I, 253) – a typical example of the doublesided nature of cause and cure in Burton’s text. Although he rejects the occult power of ‘Spells, Words, Characters, and Charmes’ (I, 253), along with the Paracelsian weapon-salve, he is ready to admit that they may cure through ‘a strong conceit and opinion alone’ (I, 254). Since the process of reading involves the imagination, it is potentially both damaging and healing.64 In the preface Burton warns that it might be harmful for melancholics to read ‘Part. 1. Sect. 3’, but it is notable that he does not repeat his warning until well into the second Subsection of that Section. There he meditates on the suggestibility of the melancholic mind, comparing 63

See MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 179–81. For discussion of the perceived physical effects of reading in the mid-seventeenth century, see Adrian Johns, ‘The Physiology of Reading and the Anatomy of Enthusiasm’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 136–70.

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it to the remark made by the Swiss physician Platerus (Felix Platter, 1536–1614) about the well-known phenomenon of young doctors who convince themselves they are suffering from the diseases they are studying. Burton continues, ‘I would advise him, that is actually melancholy, not to read this Tract of Symptomes, lest he disquiet or make himselfe for a time worse, and more melancholy then he was before’ (I, 387). This advice would seem to be rather belated, given that Burton has already given ample fuel to the actual melancholic’s over-active imagination; at this point he is halfway through a discussion of symptoms of the mind and has described melancholics’ fear of devils, death and monsters. The warning may not be wholehearted and may even be deliberately provocative: how many readers would put down a book mid-paragraph because the author has told them to? Burton recognises that reading is a powerfully absorbing activity and an uncontrollable one which may have multiple effects, not all of them desirable. He imagines the reading of his work as part of a curative process but also suggests that the activity does not necessarily have a single and positive effect. This does not undermine what I would argue is the fundamental seriousness of Burton’s claim to help the reader, however. Tensions between therapeutic and dangerous reading are not continuously in evidence; occasional remarks about reading as potentially disquieting or unhealthy are not enough to destroy his presentation of reading as a healing activity, although they do present a challenge to it. Before discussing in more depth Burton’s handling of cures, it is worth considering what ‘cure’ means in early modern terms. One might assume that cure means restoration to health after an illness. According to Galenic physiology, however, complete health was virtually impossible since it required perfect balance of the humours, and any of the non-naturals could alter one’s humoral complexion from day to day.65 Of the three types of the Galenic body – healthy, neutral and sick – the ­second was the normal state, the first being more a theoretical construction than a real possibility for most people. As John Donne put it in The First Anniversarie:  ‘There is no health; Physitians say that we / At best, enjoy, but a neutralitee.’66 Therefore, as Ian Maclean has remarked, ‘to expel illness is not synonymous with introducing health’.67 Arthur Mikkeli, Hygiene, pp. 41–2; Wear, Knowledge and Practice, p. 167. John Donne, Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides, rev. Robin Hamilton (London: Dent, 1994), p. 251; cf. his sermon on Psalm 38.3, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), II, 80. 67 Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, p. 257. 65

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Franklin has observed that in early modern medical discourse the word ‘cure’ denoted a range of meanings, including a method of treatment (as in the phrase ‘taking the cure’), the relief of symptoms, and even sheer survival of an acute illness, as well as the modern sense of full recovery.68 This insight is a significant aid to our understanding of the Anatomy because Burton presents melancholy as a condition which is not, in all cases, entirely superable. Certain people are inclined to it from birth or education, and cannot escape their humoral predisposition. Moreover, in its broader sense melancholy is ‘the Character of Mortalitie’ from which ‘No man can secure himselfe’ (I,  136–7); interestingly, in this phrase Burton changes ‘secure’ to ‘cure’ in the sixth edition, strengthening the notion that melancholy is in some senses inescapable and permanent. The second Partition is devoted to the ‘Cure of Melancholy’, and we might see this as being synonymous with ‘treatments for melancholy’. Burton begins the Partition by noting that inveterate melancholy may seem to be ‘hard to bee cured, accompanying them to their graves most part’, yet it may nonetheless be helped or at least ‘mitigated and much eased ’ (II, 1) (quoting a consilium of Montanus). ‘Nil desperandum’, he adds. Burton is ­generally hopeful about the possibility of recovery, but his cure Partition is also about the alleviation of melancholy. Cure is also loosely used by Burton to encompass the prevention of melancholy. The final motto of the work – ‘SPERATE MISERI, CAVETE FAELICES’ [hope, you who are unhappy; be cautious, you who are happy] (III, 446) – suggests the broad scope of the book, aimed not only at sufferers but also at those who are seemingly not afflicted with melancholy. Such an approach is reflective of early modern medical tradition. Therapeutics and hygiene were separate branches of medicine (along with physiology, pathology and semiotics) but, as I have mentioned already, the distinction between these two fields was commonly blurred because the regulation of the non-naturals was both the mainstay of preventative medicine and the primary part of curative medicine.69 As Burton puts it, ‘I may say to most melancholy men, as the Fox said to the Wesell, that could not get out of the garner, Macra casum repetus, quam macra subisti [when you are thin again, get out through the hole by which you got in Alfred White Franklin, ‘Clinical Medicine’, in Allen G. Debus (ed.), Medicine in SeventeenthCentury England: A Symposium Held at UCLA in Honor of C. D. O’Malley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 113–45 (pp. 118–19). See also Pelling, The Common Lot, p. 246. 69 Mikkeli, Hygiene, p. 45. On the five-fold division in sixteenth-century medicine see Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, p. 29. 68

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when you were thin before], the six non-naturall things caused it, and they must cure it’ (II, 19). He continues: Which howsoever I treat of, as proper to the Meridian of melancholy, yet neverthelesse, that which is here said, with him in Tully though writ especially for the good of his freinds at Tarentum and Sicily, yet it will generally serve most other diseases, and helpe them likewise, if it be observed. (II, 19–20)

Burton presents his text as being useful in the cure of other diseases, and its attention to the non-naturals places it in the context of the regimen books too, which aim to prevent illness. It is telling that he cites as a comparison Cicero, who addresses his De Finibus to Brutus but is happy for the world to read what he writes.70 Burton’s claim of therapeutic purpose and his own technique of imagining his reader in inclusive terms meet in this analogy between medical usefulness and literary audience. This connection between reading and bodily illness and its cure is made early on in the Anatomy. In his ‘Digression of Anatomy’ Burton urges his readers to acquire knowledge of their bodies and souls: And what can be more ignominious and filthie (as Melanchthon wel inveighes) then for a man not to knowe the structure and composition of his owne body, especially since the knowledge of it, tends so much to the preservation of his health, and information of his manners. (I, 139–40)

The source for this idea is Melanchthon’s De Anima, an important authority for Burton particularly for its combination of medical and theological approaches.71 Burton cites Melanchthon’s original Latin in a footnote: ‘Turpe enim est homini ignorare sui corporis (ut ita dicam) ædificium, præsertim cum ad valetudinem & mores hæc cognitio plurimùm conducat’ (I, 140 note z). The significant part of Burton’s translation is his rendering of Melanchthon’s ‘ædificium’ (building) as ‘structure and composition’. In his handling the body is imagined not as a solid edifice but as a work of rhetoric, formally ordered and composed. The idea is not original to Burton: Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia, which Burton knew, includes chapters in praise of anatomy (mostly based on the French physician Andreas Laurentius), where Crooke argues that it is necessary to know ‘the frame and composition of the Body’ in order to understand the soul.72 Indeed, Stephen Pender has recently argued for the rhetorical grounding of anatomy, pointing out that it was not just a physical Cicero, De Finibus, 1.3.7. See below, Chapter 6; Anatomy, IV, 183; Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, p. 99. 72 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia:  A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615), p. 12. Burton refers to Crooke’s text in a footnote, I, 144. 70 71

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act but ‘a genre or a mode of redescription’ and that many would have been acquainted with anatomy through reading texts, not watching public dissections.73 Whether or not Burton himself saw the dissections at the University of Oxford, presided over by his acquaintance Thomas Clayton, in the Anatomy he presents physiology in terms of his reading. Burton’s book, we are reminded, is itself an ‘Anatomy’, a textual examination of melancholy which mirrors the dissection of the body for medical purposes. His translation of Melanchthon, and Pender’s observation, suggest that anatomising in words need not be a reflection and imitation of the physical act of dissection, but rather may precede it. Burton views the human body through the medium of the book and invites his readers to do the same. He introduces his description of the body’s insides by again citing Melanchthon: ‘But you that are Readers in the meane time, Suppose you were now brought into some sacred Temple …’ (I, 144). Anatomy is a process of imagination and interpretation. By bringing the experience of the text to the centre, Burton must confront certain problems. Reading might open the secrets of the body, but each body is different and no book can fully reflect the infinite variations of humoral complexion and of a disease in which ‘scarce two of two thousand … concurre in the same symptomes’ (I, 395). The Latin medical books have difficulty in relating general rules to individual cases, and Burton is probably more aware than most of this tension because reading and study play a larger part in his therapeutics than they do in his medical sources. The notion of self-help – especially through books – is a recurrent theme of the cure Partition and is seen from various perspectives. Near the beginning of the Partition, he gives a conventional warning about the dangers of using books alone: Last of all, it is required that the Patient be not too bold to practise upon himselfe, without an approved Physitians consent, or to try conclusions, if he read a receipt in a booke; for so, many grossely mistake, and doe themselves more harme then good. That which is conducing to one man, in one case, at the same time, is opposite to another. (II, 16)

He marshals medical authorities in support of this, including Valleriola, warning that ‘without exquisite knowledge, to worke out of bookes is most dangerous:  how unsavory a thing it is to beleeve writers, and to take upon trust’ (II, 17), and he adds a rare personal anecdote about a friend who self-prescribed hellebore out of a book and was stopped just before 73

Stephen Pender, Review of Richard Sugg, Murder After Death, Times Literary Supplement, 2 November 2007 (5457), 32.

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accidentally taking an overdose. Burton’s warning about the dangers of books is a commonplace of both continental and English medical works and upholds the importance of the medical profession. In later Subsections on pharmacology he repeats these sentiments, omitting to provide recipes for compound purges ‘least I should give occasion thereby to some ignorant Reader to practise on himselfe, without the consent of a good Physitian’ (II, 236). He does, however, allow that some of his readers will know how to prepare medicines properly, and refers them to Latin medical texts which do give recipes (II, 229). His concern about misuse of books is specifically related to pharmacy, again a common idea: many medical works stress the dangers of lay people using such potent drugs as hellebore and antimony. Dietetic treatments allow far more scope for self-help, and Burton follows the tradition of the regimens in concluding that ‘our owne experience is the best Physician, that diet which is most propitious to one, is often pernitious to another, such is the variety of palats, humors, and temperatures, let every man observe and be a law unto himselfe’ (II, 27). Although this is conventional in medical texts, I would suggest that the idea is also appealing to Burton as a literary conceit. His words are reminiscent of his remarks in the preface concerning individual tastes: ‘Our writings are as so many Dishes, our Readers Guests; our Bookes like beautie, that which one admires another rejects; so are wee approved as mens fancies are inclined’ (I, 17). The notion that each reader regards a book differently tallies with the precept that each person has different dietary needs and tastes. This parallel between medicine and literature might seem a little broad, but there is a surprising moment deep within the pharmacy Section when it is drawn much more closely. Burton summarises a heated, centuries-old debate over whether compound medicines are useful and effective or expensive, dangerous and unnecessary. He concludes of these remedies that they are as so many words or phrases, Quæ nunc sunt in honore vocabula si volet usus [those terms of speech which are now in repute [will fall out of use], if that is decreed by usage]: Ebbe and flow with the season, and as wits vary so they may be infinitely varied. Quisque suum placitum quo capiatur habet, [every man has his own opinion with which he is pleased] Every man as he likes, so many men so many mindes, and yet all tending to good purpose, though not the same way. (II, 225)

Burton compares fashions in medicines with vogues for particular expressions via a quotation from Horace’s Ars Poetica, then extends this idea to

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associate individual literary taste with developments in pharmaceutical treatment. He echoes Terence’s famous tag ‘Quot homines tot sententiae’: ‘so many men so many minds’. This strikes an odd note in a discussion that has been so far purely based on medical authorities. Literary taste and the prescription of drugs are hardly the same thing. Although ‘every man’ may refer to physicians who hold varied points of view on the worth of compounds, there is a disturbing suggestion that decisions about appropriate medicines are similar to personal whims about reading. Whereas earlier the body and its illnesses are interpreted through the text, here ideas of literary interpretation and the text eclipse (albeit briefly) his medical subject-matter. This is not the first time that such an eclipse takes place in the Anatomy. In the second Partition on cures we see textual experience superseding other forms time and again. An early instance is when Burton discusses the health benefits of good waters. He gives examples of places well known for the purity of their water, all of which are foreign and moreover inaccessible: Turkey, India, Persia and China. The examples may illustrate his discussion but they are useful as recommendations only for the most intrepid of English travellers. He then considers the artificial means by which fresh water is brought into cities: ‘It is a wonder to read of those stupend Aqueducts, and infinite cost hath been bestowed in Rome of old, Constantinople, Carthage, Alexandria, such populous citties, to conveigh good and wholesome waters:  read Frontinus, Lipsius de admir. Plinius lib.3. cap. 11. Strabo in his Geogr.’ (II, 22). Dietetic considerations are abandoned as Burton turns to his books. One might argue that Burton is interested in water technology for comparative political purposes; it was a standard tenet in early modern political thought that one should study the examples of other countries, ancient and modern, in order to improve one’s own. Yet this interpretation does not chime with the tone of Burton’s words: ‘It is a wonder to read …’ (my emphasis). The health benefits of pure water give way to the pleasures of reading. When Burton moves on from nourishment to air, reading takes an even more prominent role. In the ‘Digression of Ayre’ (II, 33–58), he takes an imaginary flight like a ‘long-winged Hawke’ (II, 33) to discover the mysteries of the earth and heavens, but the flight is also a journey through his library. His questions about natural and supernatural world phenomena are prompted by his books, and texts are not simply the starting-point for his investigation. As the digression continues, the frame of the imaginary journey recedes and Burton simply lays out one scholarly debate after another: whether there are infinite worlds, whether the earth goes round the sun, what is the

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nature of God. Every question is accompanied by references to authors and their works. The ‘Digression of Ayre’ thus becomes a form of release through texts for Burton from the rigid confines of the cause–symptom–prognostics– cure structure of the medical practica. At the same time, it provides a therapeutic release (of a scholarly kind) for his readers. Anne Cotterill has drawn attention to the importance of digression in seventeenth-century literature and pointed to Burton and Montaigne as ‘highly self-conscious models of digressive writing’.74 The digression – a formal element of rhetoric, as recognised in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (4.3)  – provided a space for liberty and licence, for play and pleasure, and for authorial self-definition as well as political and social commentary.75 In Burton’s handling, digressions form a part of his self-portrayal, as the frustrated, marginalised scholar sympathetic to the ‘Misery of Schollers’, and of his reader-centred rhetoric, being carefully woven into their textual experience to provide a change of tone and style (as Bridget Lyons has observed, Burton’s digressions are far more functional and closely integrated into the work’s formal plan than their title indicates).76 While the ‘Digression of Ayre’ emphasises the author’s own pleasure – it is ‘for my recreation’ (II, 33)  – others are explicitly geared towards the reader’s benefit. ‘Of the Force of Imagination’ is not titled a digression but is classed as one in the synoptic table (I, 119), and introduced as one in the Subsection before it. There Burton comments that the ‘manner of Digression, however some dislike as frivolous and impertinent, yet I am of Beroaldus his opinion, Such Digressions doe mightely delight and refresh a weary Reader, they are like sauce to a bad stomacke, and I doe therefore most willingly use them’ (I, 249–50). The pleasure of digressive writing is yoked to its healthgiving potential for the reader; like a sauce that calms the stomach, the text soothes the reader’s troubled mind. ‘E x e rc i s e r e c t i f i e d’ We have seen how reading supplants the place of other forms of cure in the Anatomy, and this idea is most emphatically suggested in the long Anne Cotterill, Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 6. 75 Ibid., pp. 1–47. 76 Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy:  Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 126. On the experience of marginality in digressions, see Cotterill, Digressive Voices, p. 2. 74

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Member on ‘Exercise rectified of body and mind’, in the second Partition. While in the ‘Digression of Ayre’ the fantasy of cosmic travel is conducted through books, here real travel becomes an adventure in reading.77 After surveying various forms of physical exercise, Burton declares that ‘the most pleasant of all outward pastimes is … to make a petty progresse, a merry journy now and then’ (II, 72). At first, he seems to be extolling the pleasures of actual travel and mentions famous spectacles of modern architecture and horticulture: Hee that should be admitted on a sudden to the sight of such a Palace as that of Escuriall in Spaine, or to that which the Moores built at Granada, Fountenblewe in France, the Turkes gardens in his Seraglio … the Popes Belvedere in Rome … could not choose, though hee were never so ill apaid, but be much recreated for the time; or many of our Noblemens gardens at home. (II, 73)

It is notable that most of the examples Burton gives are of places to which few Englishmen could be ‘admitted on a sudden’:  Spain, Rome and Turkey were off-limits to most English travellers. One suspects that while Burton is presenting the recreation of real travel, he is also describing the pleasures of reading about wonders. The final clause reads like an afterthought, a return to the more parochial entertainments of travel within England. One could argue that Burton’s mention of exotic and inaccessible places is a sign that he is not interested in relating cures of melancholy that will be helpful to his readership, but instead aims to collect the cures and recreations used by people in all ages and countries. This argument blunts the edge of Burton’s claim that he writes to benefit his reader. It has some value:  not all the cures for melancholy he describes are therefore to be prescribed (cutting off one’s genitals as a cure for jealousy is, I hope, a case in point, III, 318). However, I would argue that in ‘Exercise Rectified’ Burton deliberately presents cures which are literally unachievable, but which reveal instead the therapeutic pleasures of reading. For example, he considers that it will ‘laxare animos, refresh the soule of man’ (II, 74) to witness beautiful spectacles: What so pleasant as to see some Pageant or sight goe by, as at Coronations, Weddings, and such like solemnities, to see an Embassadour or a Prince met, receaved, entertained with Masks, shewes, fireworkes, &c. To see two Kings Where I stress the therapeutic connotations of reading in this Member, Liliana BarczykBarakonska argues (to my mind unconvincingly) that the act of reading becomes an act of erasure of the world outside the library; ‘ “Never to Go Forth of the Limits”: Space and Melancholy in Robert Burton’s Library Project’, Journal of European Studies 33 (2003), 213–26.

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fight in single combat, as Porus and Alexander; Canutus & Edmund Ironside; Scanderbeg and Ferat Bassa the Turke … To behold a battle fought, like that of Crescy, or Agencourt, or Poicters … To see one of Cæsars triumphs in old Rome revived, or the like. To be present at an Interview, as that famous of Henry the 8th and Francis the first, so much renowned all over Europe … So infinitely pleasant are such shewes, to the sight of which, often times they will come hundreths of miles, give any mony for a place, and remember many yeares after with singular delight. (II, 74–5)

The first group of pleasant spectacles consists of ones which some readers may be able to witness, albeit at a distance: royal progresses and theatrical performances, for example. There is a substantial shift, however, from masques, shows and fireworks to the famous single combats of the past, and the rest of these pleasures are all beyond the possible experiences of any reader. Yet I think that Burton does nonetheless imply that his readers can be ‘refreshed’ by them (a word that we have already seen applied to the beneficial effects of reading). There is no change of tense here, although Burton’s grammar is condensed. One assumes that ‘What so pleasant as to see’ is a contracted form of ‘What is so pleasant as to see’: the sequence of verbs ‘To see’, ‘To behold’, ‘To see’, ‘To be present’ all apply to that initial phrase, and hence there is no change of meaning to ‘It would have been pleasant to see …’. The great military events of history are conjured up as present experiences. One explanation for this is that he is referring to their re-enactment on stage. A spectator of English or Roman history plays might ‘behold a battle fought’ at Agincourt, or ‘Cæsars triumphs … revived’ through dramatic representation. Likewise the final quoted sentence about ‘shows’ could imply theatrical entertainment, which people might ‘give any mony’ to see. Yet this interpretation is not altogether convincing. None of Burton’s marginal references is to drama (he does later quote from plays in ‘Love Melancholy’). The phrase ‘To see two Kings fight in single combat’ – a surprising change of direction in Burton’s discourse – does not suggest a theatrical performance, and the biographical examples which follow this passage are of people who witnessed spectacular events firsthand, not through re-enactments. The most persuasive piece of evidence that Burton is referring to the delights of reading and not of the stage – that the seeing is imaginary, not real  – is the phrase ‘To be present at an Interview’. Being present suggests a greater sense of involvement and closeness than theatrical spectating: Burton imagines the delights of witnessing these events in a kind of imaginary time-travel. If there is a literary comparison it is not to English history plays but to Menippean and

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Lucianic satires, which feature magical journeys, unusual observational standpoints and conversations among the dead. The closest relatives in English writing are Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c.1588–94), Jack Wilton’s visit to the court of Wittenberg in Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller (1594), where the scholar-magician Cornelius Agrippa conjures up figures and scenes from history, and Gulliver’s trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where he calls up the spirits of (among others) Alexander at the head of his army, Hannibal crossing the alps, and Caesar and Pompey just before battle, as well as Caesar ‘in his last great triumph’.78 The implication behind Burton’s words in this passage is that the delights of the past can be experienced through texts, as if through magic. The notion that texts can conjure such delights is made explicit soon after: The very reading of feasts, triumphs, interviewes, nuptials, Tilts, Turnaments, combats, and monomachies, is most acceptable and pleasant … The ­inspection alone of those curious Iconographies of Temples and Pallaces, as that of the Lateran Church in Albertus Durer … affect one as much by reading almost, as by sight. (II, 76)

The experiencing of spectacles past and present through texts is mentioned only at the end of Burton’s discussion of the topic, yet I would argue that this dimension of experience has been an undercurrent throughout his account. Reading  – including looking at engravings  – is almost as affecting as first-hand witness, and in the context of the Partition this means a therapeutic effect. The delights of seeing splendid things are part of a longer discussion of ‘bodily exercises’ and ‘outward pastimes’ (the next paragraph is on the rural delights of ‘May-games’ and ‘merry meetings’), but Burton has slipped into mental and inward pastimes instead, the subject of a later part of the Member. The pleasure of viewing wonders in one’s imagination hence forms a prequel to the climax of ‘Exercise Rectified’: the delights of study. Burton introduces this major subject by pointing to its utility to all:  there is no other recreation of the mind ‘so generall, so aptly to be applyed to all sorts of men, so fit & proper to expell Idlenesse and Melancholy’ (II, 84). The sentiment is from Cicero’s Pro Archia Poeta (7.16), which Burton then quotes. Typically, he adds to Cicero’s description of the benefits of study for all ages and conditions by mentioning 78

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Peter Dixon and John Chalker (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 241.

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its power to expel melancholy. This stress on the therapeutic qualities of study is also interpolated into a later quotation, this time from the Dutch humanist Daniel Heinsius, librarian at Leiden, on the joys of learning: I no sooner (saith he) come into the Library, but I bolt the doore to me excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idlenesse the mother of Ignorance, and Melancholy her selfe, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine soules, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and sweet content, that I pitty all our great ones, and rich men that know not this happinesse. (II, 89)

Burton translates Heinsius’ Latin (he quotes the original in a footnote) but slips in an extra phrase: ‘and Melancholy her selfe’. While Heinsius suggests the moral and recreational benefits of reading, Burton adds another dimension by hinting at its curative nature. Throughout his extended paean to the pleasures of study, Burton highlights the positive emotional effects of reading: Who is hee that is now wholly overcome with Idlenesse, or otherwise involved in a Labyrinth of worldly cares, troubles, and discontents, that will not bee much lightned in his minde by reading of some inticing story, true or fained … Who is not earnestly affected with a passionate speech, well penned, an elegant Poem, or some pleasant discourse [?] (II, 85)

Reading refreshes the mind and stirs the emotions. Although he also praises its moral and spiritual benefits, it is noteworthy that Burton stresses first and foremost the enjoyment of reading: words such as ‘delight’ and ‘sweet content’ are frequently applied to the activity (II, 85–6; 88). Reid Barbour has drawn attention to Burton’s enthusiasm for the curative dimension of Epicureanism’s ethics of pleasure, and this surely plays a part in his emphasis on the delightful qualities of study.79 Moreover, medieval regimens recommended reading as a therapeutic activity to promote the ideal state of moderate cheerfulness, and Burton seems to be following in this medical tradition.80 By consequence, the substance of what one studies is less important than that it provides interest and occupation. The ‘world of bookes’ (II, 85) that offers itself to the reader includes texts on horse-riding and gardening as well as metaphysics and moral philosophy. Whereas in the preface Burton bemoans the ‘vast Chaos and confusion of Bookes, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ake with reading, our fingers with turning’ (I, 11), here ‘we have thousands of Authors of all sorts, Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics:  Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), p. 65. 80 Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 48–64. 79

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many great Libraries full, well furnished, like so many dishes of meat, served out for severall palates, and he is a very blocke that is affected with none of them’ (II, 86). Very little space is given in this Subsection to the dangers of too much study, despite the fact that the first Partition includes a Subsection on ‘Love of Learning, or overmuch Study’ as a cause of melancholy, with a lengthy digression on the misery of scholars (I, 302–27). Burton does mention that study is not a cure for those whose illness proceeds from an excess of it, ‘for in such cases he addes fuell to the fire, and nothing can be more pernitious’ (II, 90). The fate of Don Quixote is also held up to warn of the dangers of reading only ‘play-bookes, Idle Poems, Jests’. These brief provisos notwithstanding, the discussion has very little to say about reading as a dangerous activity. This might seem surprising, although it is to an extent characteristic of the Anatomy, in which a number of causes of melancholy are also cures in the second Partition. Burton’s emphasis on pleasure in reading perhaps distinguishes its curative qualities from its dangers (in the first Partition, ‘overmuch Study’ poses a risk mainly to a specific group of people: professional scholars). His presentation of study as a positive therapeutic activity in nearly all cases separates him from most other writers on melancholy, who mention that assiduous study is a common cause of the condition.81 The other English writer on melancholy, Timothy Bright, begins his chapters on cure of melancholy by advising that patients should ‘above all, abandon working of your braine with studie’, and repeatedly warns of its damaging effects.82 The prominence that Burton gives to study  – and within study particularly reading  – as a therapeutic mental exercise marks him out from his sources, and is indicative of a wider pattern of interest in his work. Within the frame of medical dietetics, Burton brings literary therapeutics to the fore repeatedly, by promoting study as exercise, by describing other pleasures in terms of reading, and later in the Partition by presenting his own consolations against melancholy and particularly the passions of the mind (the sixth non-natural). It has been said that reading the Anatomy is like entering ‘a vast library’, with Burton as ‘librarian and guide to its riches’.83 By examining the work as a medical text one can see to what extent Burton makes the experience of reading central to his literary enterprise. The human body is imagined in textual terms, e.g. Guainerius, Practica, fol. 40v. Bright, Treatise of Melancholy, p. 243; see also pp. 244–5, 286. Laurentius, Discourse of the Preservation, instructs that melancholics should never be alone, p. 106. 83 Michael O’Connell, Robert Burton (Boston: Twayne, 1986), p. 42. 81

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while the individuality of the reader and the individuality of the Galenic self coalesce in Burton’s instructions on self-help and its limits. Burton’s scholarly life is an obvious reason for his forcefulness about reading. His own curative enterprise of writing to avoid melancholy includes reading as preparation for the book. But there may be a further reason. When he begins to describe the pleasures of study, he argues that no other exercise is so ‘generall, so aptly to be applyed to all sorts of men’; as Cicero puts it, ‘other pursuits belong not to all times, all ages, all conditions; but this gives stimulus to our youth and diversion to our old age; this adds a charm to success, and offers a haven of consolation to failure’.84 The medical textbooks, continental and vernacular, all come up against the difficulty of providing general prescriptions in print for individuals in infinitely varied circumstances. Yet Cicero’s remark suggests an alternative to this problem: reading is one curative activity which has a claim to general utility. Burton turns the problem of Galenism in print on its head by making reading the Anatomy itself a therapy for melancholy. The title page’s claim that the work treats melancholy ‘medicinally’ can thus be interpreted in various ways. Although it is by no means a typical medical manual, it was certainly used by some readers for its medical content. The physician Richard Napier began to use Burtonian terms in the notebooks of his consultations after 1624 (probably a sign that he had read the second edition); the Anatomy must have provided him with an enhanced understanding of and terminology for the cases of mental affliction he regularly treated.85 Furthermore, two seventeenth-century readers who compiled manuscript extracts from the Anatomy clearly had a medical interest in the book. One made detailed notes on the Subsections on diet and on the medicines recommended at the end of the second Partition, copying the latter down as recipes: clearly, these were intended for practical use.86 We know that the other, Edward Poeton, had a medical background:  he was servant to the physician Thomas Bonham and the collector of the latter’s manuscript notes for the compilation The Chyrurgians Closet (1630), and described himself there as a ‘Licentiate in Physick and Chyrurgery’.87 Like Napier, then, he probably turned to the Anatomy out of professional interest, and his extracts from the work appear in a notebook which is largely comprised of medical notes and Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta, in The Speeches of Cicero, trans. N. H. Watts (London: Heinemann, 1955), 7.16 (p. 25). 85 MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 152, 189. 86 British Library, Sloane MS 1677, fols. 80r–82r, 104 r–107 v. 87 Thomas Bonham, The Chyrurgians Closet (London, 1630), sig. a3r. 84

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recipes. He copied down selections from Burton’s medical sections, as well as lengthy quotations about physicians and physic.88 Yet neither of these readers confined their interest to these aspects of Burton’s writing alone:  both also quoted extensively from the ‘Consolatory Digression’, for example, as well as his anecdotes, sententiae, and quotations from authorities.89 Their use of the Anatomy reflects its breadth of scope, and its provision of diversion and entertainment, moral and spiritual counsel for its readers (whether morbidly melancholy or not), as well as its medical ambitions. Burton’s Anatomy provided early modern English readers with the most detailed study of the causes, symptoms, prognostics and cures of the disease of melancholy available in the vernacular, even as it gave them one of the most elaborate and self-reflexive literary works on the powers and multiple effects of reading. British Library, Sloane MS 1965, fols. 124 r, 128r–129r. Sloane MS 1677, fols. 97 v–103v; Sloane MS 1965, fols. 125 v–128r. For more on these and other early readers of Burton see the Conclusion, below.

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At the end of the first edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton ­provides his reader with a separate conclusion, the purpose of which is to ‘cut the strings of Democritus visor, to unmaske and shew him as he is’. He apologises for the work’s inadequacies, adds a general word of thanks to his friends, and signs himself ‘From my Studie in Christ-Church Oxon. Decemb 5. 1620. Robert Burton’.1 In subsequent editions this conclusion is removed, with much of the material naturally fitted into the satirical preface, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, instead. However, one important passage in this conclusion does not find a place in the text from 1624 onwards, and is hence easily overlooked. In it Burton reveals something of the genesis of the printed book, as he thanks those friends to whom I have beene beholden for their approbation, or troubled in perusing severall parts, or all of this Treatise. For I did impart it to some of our worthiest Physitians, whose approbations I had for matters of Physicke, and to some Divines, and others of better note in our University.2

The story of how the Anatomy circulated in Oxford before publication, who read it, and how they reacted (apart from plain ‘approbation’) is an intriguing and, sadly, untraceable one. What is more telling is his statement that he consulted physicians and divines. Burton’s comment reinforces his claim in the preface that he has ‘a more serious intent’ (I, 109) in writing than merely to mock the world’s folly: he aims to describe the disease of melancholy from cause to cure, and ‘to doe good’ (I, 110). In addition to showing that he wished to ensure before publication that his advice was correct, the comment highlights a feature of the text which Burton clearly considered important: its medical and religious grounding. Religious and medical aspects of the Anatomy have been considered separately in the two previous chapters; in this chapter, I will explore the   This Conclusion is printed as ‘Appendix A’ in the Oxford edition, III, 469, 473. Ibid., III, 472.

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nature of their relationship in the book. For Burton, the ‘compound mixt Malady’ (I, 23) of melancholy requires a composite approach to treatment, in which medical aspects overlap frequently with spiritual concerns. This attitude draws on a long-established tradition of viewing medicine and religion as closely associated in discipline and practice.3 From Plato onwards, the argument that the body and the soul were interrelated and therefore should be treated together was frequently made, developing a new importance in Christian medicine; as Angus Gowland has noted, the neo-Galenism of the sixteenth century particularly encouraged the combination of medical and spiritual therapies.4 In the early modern period illness was commonly seen in the context of religious belief by both patients and healers. Suffering was regarded both as the inevitable result of sin and as a sign of God’s chastisement and love:  Montaigne, for example, tells us that, when afflicted by the pain of kidney stones, he comforted himself with the thought that it showed ‘a Fatherly kindness’.5 Patients who wrote about their sufferings tended to see them in a spiritual light, while ministers and, to a lesser extent, doctors, advocated a method of cure based on a mixed approach of religious counsel and medical treatment.6 The illness of melancholy was especially subject to this mixed form of approach, both in the explanation of its causes and in the therapies provided to cure it.7 As a condition characterised chiefly by its effect on the emotions, melancholy was treated with the kind of therapies which might be seen as forerunners to modern psychology. Cures were based not only on the administering of physic, but also on treatment of the mind, moral philosophy and spiritual consolation, as well as magical and folk remedies. The case-notes of Burton’s contemporary, An excellent overview of the subject is provided by Andrew Wear, ‘Religious Beliefs and Medicine in Early Modern England’, in Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling (eds.), The Task of Healing:  Medicine, Religion and Gender in England and the Netherlands, 1450–1800 (Rotterdam: Erasmus Publishing, 1996), pp. 145–69. 4 Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy:  Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 43. 5 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (London:  Penguin, 1991), p. 1238. 6 See Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987); Andrew Wear, ‘Puritan Perceptions of Illness in Seventeenth Century England’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-industrial Society (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 55–99; and the essays in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Religio Medici:  Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996). 7 This is fully explored in the important recent study by Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). See also Angus Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, P&P 191 (2006), 77–120 (96–113). 3

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the physician Richard Napier, show how eclectic treatment for mental illnesses could be in the early seventeenth century: he prescribed purges and vomits, prayer, comforting speeches, astrological prediction, amulets, and even occasionally exorcism.8 Recent scholarship has examined closely this aspect of the theory of melancholy in early modern England, and Burton’s place within it, and it is not my intention to rehearse the same arguments.9 Instead, my interest is in how Burton makes use of his medico-religious understanding of melancholy in the dynamic context of his authorial relationship with the reader. Hence in this chapter I will explore how Burton plays the role of both physician and minister to his melancholic readership. In doing so, I wish to contend that, although the Anatomy is not obviously a religious treatise in the way that some of Burton’s sources for ‘The Cure of Despaire’ are, it does share with them a sense of pastoral responsibility towards its readership. Thus the link which I wish to stress between the Anatomy and the popular treatises on the afflicted conscience by writers such as Richard Greenham and Robert Bolton is not one of genre, but motivation. Burton may borrow from these ‘paræneticall discourses’ (III,  425) and echo their language, but his affinity with them is closest in his aim to ‘doe good’ through writing and to minister to the afflicted reader. His awareness of how print can be used to achieve this is very probably derived from them. Yet not all of his methods of ministering are the same; he differs from them, most importantly, in the way he combines medical and religious approaches to the cure of melancholy. Spi r i t ua l ph y s ic In the preface to the Anatomy, Burton makes an important and influential statement about the spiritual dimension of his writing as he responds to the imagined criticism that ‘I being a Divine, have medled with Physicke’ (I, 20).10 Initially he distinguishes between the ‘by-streame’ of melancholy and ‘the maine Channell of my studies’, divinity. However, he Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam:  Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 173–231. 9 See Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, and ‘The Problem’; Christopher Tilmouth, ‘Burton’s “Turning Picture”: Argument and Anxiety in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, RES 56 (2005), 524–49; Schmidt, Melancholy, esp. pp. 16–17, 35–7, 50–54. 10 David Irish makes an unacknowledged borrowing from Burton to explain the responsibilities of the medical profession:  ‘the Divine heals Corpus per Animam; the Physician, Animam per Corpus’, and hence ‘Every Divine is a Spiritual Physician, and every Physician ought to be a Spiritual Divine’, Levamen Infirmi (London, 1700), p. 7. 8

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soon abandons this distinction, arguing instead for the close ­relationship between the two: I can excuse my studies with Lessius the Jesuite in like case, ’tis a disease of the soule, on which I am to treat, and as much appertaining to a Divine, as to a Physitian; and who knowes not what an agreement there is betwixt these two professions? A good Divine either is or ought to be a good Physitian, a Spirituall Physitian at least, as our Saviour calls himselfe, and was indeed, Mat. 4. 23. Luke 5. 18. Luke 7. & 8. They differ but in object, the one of the Body, the other of the Soule, and use divers medicines to cure: one amends animam per corpus, the other corpus per animam, as our Regius Professor of Physicke well informed us in a learned Lecture of his not long since. One helpes the vices and passions of the Soule, Anger, Lust, Desperation, Pride, Presumption, &c. by applying that Spirituall Physicke; as the other use proper remedies in bodily diseases. Now this being a common infirmitie of Body and Soule, and such a one that hath as much need of Spirituall as a Corporall cure, I could not find a fitter taske to busie my selfe about, a more apposite Theame, so necessary, so commodious, and generally concerning all sorts of men, that should so equally participate of both, and require a whole Physitian. A Divine in this compound mixt Malady, can doe little alone, a Physitian in some kindes of Melancholy much lesse, both make an absolute cure … And ’tis proper to them both, and I hope not unbeseeming me, who am by my profession a Divine, and by mine inclination a Physitian. (I, 22–3)

Like those English ministers whose works I have discussed in Chapter 2, Burton presents his writing as practical.11 He links melancholy and divinity not theoretically but in terms of medical treatment and its equivalent, pastoral care. Burton envisages himself as a kind of ‘whole Physitian’ by combining his ministerial vocation with his interest in medicine. Although he does not quote directly from Richard Greenham here, there are strong resonances of the teaching of that founding proponent of the art of spiritual physic, who warned that ‘If a man troubled in conscience come to a Minister, it may be he wil look all to the soule and nothing to the body: if he come to a Physition, he onely considereth of the body, and neglecteth the soule.’ In his copy of Greenham’s Works, Burton has put a cross mark in the margin next to this sentence along with the (cropped) note ‘both’.12 One can see how Burton’s reading of Greenham leads him English religious writing of this period was often characterised as ‘practical’ in its emphasis: see John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes: Or, a Discourse Concerning the Gift of Preaching, 2nd edn (London, 1646), pp. 44–5; Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory: Or, a Summ of Practical Theologie, and Cases of Conscience (London, 1673), p. 922. 12 Richard Greenham, The Workes of … Richard Greenham (London, 1601), p. 137. Bodleian Library shelfmark G.5.6 Th (for full bibliographic information see Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988), item 707). 11

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to reach the conclusion that ‘both make an absolute cure’. The evidence of his copy of Greenham reinforces my claim that the English tradition of practical divinity influences Burton’s own method of ministry in the Anatomy. Burton also supports his argument with the words of someone more closely related to him: Thomas Clayton (1575–1647), Regius Professor of Physic at Oxford. Clayton, who held this post from 1612 until his death, was also reputed to be a good linguist and divine, and was Principal of Broadgates Hall from 1620, and subsequently first Master when it became Pembroke College.13 It seems that Clayton and Burton were friends, as one of Burton’s books is inscribed ‘Ex dono D. Doctoris Claiton Regii professoris in medicina’. This is hardly surprising given their similar ages, proximity (Pembroke College is opposite Christ Church) and shared interests.14 Unfortunately, little is known about Clayton’s opinions beyond Burton’s quotation here from his lecture (which the Oxford commentators identify as being a public lecture at a degree ceremony).15 He published nothing, and no manuscripts of his medical writing are known to exist. However, from the evidence of the Anatomy one can conclude that Clayton, like Burton, saw the professions of priest and doctor as not merely parallel but interlinked, as the phrases ‘animam per corpus’ and ‘corpus per animam’ suggest. Moreover, it seems likely that Clayton’s views were influential in Oxford on more than Burton alone. Among the undergraduates at Pembroke was the young Thomas Browne, who would go on to write a famous personal account of the fusion of medicine and belief, Religio Medici. Browne’s statement that ‘I cannot go to cure the body of my patient but I forget my profession, and call unto God for his soul’ perhaps bears the influence of the Master of his college, Clayton, or even of an idea that was more widely prevalent in Oxford during the 1620s.16 Burton’s precedents for the role of doctor-minister are not exclusively English and Protestant. Continental authorities for the role include Robert G. Frank Jr, ‘Medicine’, in The History of the University of Oxford Vol. IV:  SeventeenthCentury Oxford, ed. by Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 505–58 (pp. 517–18). 14 The book is John Bainbridge’s An Astronomicall Description of the Late Comet (London, 1619); Kiessling, Library of Robert Burton, item 82. 15 Oxford edition, IV, 46. 16 Sir Thomas Browne, ‘Religio Medici’, ‘Hydriotaphia’, and ‘The Garden of Cyrus’, ed. Robin Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972; repr. 2001), p. 72. Cf. Mary Ann Lund, ‘The Christian Physician: Thomas Browne and the Role of Religion in Medical Practice’, in Kathryn Murphy and Richard Todd (eds.), ‘A Man Very Well Studyed’: New Contexts for Thomas Browne (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 229–45; Jeremiah S. Finch, Sir Thomas Browne: A Doctor’s Life of Science and Faith (New York: Collier, 1961), pp. 37–46. 13

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Marsilio Ficino, who Burton claims was ‘a Priest & a Physitian at once’ (I, 22), and whose advice to ‘be merry’ (II, 122) in order to be cured Burton later cites.17 Support for Burton’s dual approach to melancholy is also found in the writings of the Flemish Jesuit Leonhard Lessius, who, as Burton’s quotation shows, touches on medical matters for spiritual purposes. This quotation in a serious context might seem surprising since earlier in the same paragraph he has referred mockingly to those Jesuits who are also ‘Chirurgians, Panders, Bawdes, and Midwives’ (I, 22). However, it is to an extent typical of Burton’s use of Catholic sources:  the same writers, even, can be cited at one point to fuel an anti-Roman invective, and at another purely as an authority. Burton’s range of precedents for mixing medicine and religion – from the neo-Platonic Italian scholar, to the Jesuit theologian, to the godly English minister – illustrate his eclectic use of his reading. The greatest model of the spiritual physician for Christians is, of course, Christ himself. Burton’s Bible references in this passage are all to healing miracles. The first reference is to Christ’s ministry in general:  ‘And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people’ (Matt. 4.23). Christ’s activities as spiritual instructor and physical healer are mentioned alongside one another, although the paratactic structure of the sentence does not draw a specific link between the two roles. However, in the second reference the relationship between the two is more direct. Burton cites the first verse (Luke 5.18) of the narrative about the man with palsy whose friends let him down through the rooftop to reach Christ. When Christ first says to the man ‘thy sins are forgiven thee’ (5. 20), the attendant scribes and Pharisees accuse him of blasphemy, to which he replies by asking them whether it is easier ‘to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Rise up and walk?’ (5. 23). Then, to show them that he has the power to forgive sins, Christ tells the man to rise, which he does, healed. The particular aptness of Burton’s use of this story is its illustration of the close but ambiguous link between spiritual and physical cure. It is because he can forgive sins, Christ claims, that the man can get up and walk. Yet, in order to show this to the scribes and Pharisees, Christ does not repeat ‘thy sins are forgiven thee’, but rather says ‘Arise, and take up thy couch’ (5. 24). Which saying is it that cures the man? The suggestion 17

As the commentators in the Oxford edition note (IV, 45), Ficino was not a doctor, although Burton was perhaps misled into believing this from a statement in De Vita.

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is that both effect it, but that physical recovery is not all that has taken place. The combination of spiritual and physical aid also implies that the causes of the man’s suffering are mixed. This notion of mixed cause and cure is emphasised in the Geneva Bible’s sidenote to the story, which states that ‘Christ, in healing him that was sicke of the palsie, sheweth the cause of all diseases, and the remedie.’18 Melancholy, as Burton sees it, is ‘a common infirmitie of Body and Soule, and such a one that hath as much need of Spirituall as a Corporall cure’. Although Burton is not alone among his contemporaries in this attitude towards disease, he is unique in the extent to which he blurs physical and spiritual elements. While divines such as Greenham acknowledge the need for ministers and physicians to work together, Burton not only combines these roles in one in his text, acting as a ‘whole Physitian’ to his readers, but also often mixes different types of cause and cure. R e l ig ious m e l a nc holy Burton’s presentation of the interrelationship between physical and spiritual affliction is exhibited, most importantly, in his invented category of ‘Religious Melancholy’, which occupies the latter part of the third Partition. He opens this Section by claiming that ‘I have no patterne to followe as in some of the rest, no man to imitate’ (III, 330). His originality is in the conjoining of the two terms. Although the categorisation of melancholy as everything from a bad case of wind to suicidal tendencies might seem vague to the modern reader, the condition did have certain boundaries. Timothy Bright emphasises these in his Treatise of Melancholy (1586), part of which he dedicates to the affliction of the wounded conscience. He draws a firm distinction between this condition and his main subject, melancholy, grounding the latter in physical causes, symptoms and cures: Here it [the afflicted conscience] first proceedeth from the mindes apprehension: there from the humour, which deluding the organicall actions, abuseth the minde, and draweth it into erronious judgement, through false testimony of the outward report. Here no medicine, no purgation, no cordiall, no triacle or balme are able to assure the aflicted soule and trembling heart, now painting [sic] under the terrors of God:  there in melancholy the vaine opened, neesing powder or bearefoote ministred, cordialls of pearle, Saphires, and rubies, with such like, recomforte the heart throwne downe, & appaled with fantasticall feare.19 Sidenote to Luke 5.17, in The Bible in English, version 1.0 (Chadwyck-Healey, 1996) [on CD Rom]. 19 Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy (London, 1586), p. 184. 18

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Bright, who, to reverse Burton’s formula, was by profession a physician and by inclination a divine (he was to become ordained in 1590 or 1591), keeps physical and spiritual elements of disease apart, even if they may occur in the same person. For example, while religious and melancholic affliction both come from the mind, only the former truly ‘first proceedeth’ from it. The latter results from a bad humoral influence which distorts the mind into ‘erronious judgement’. The examples he chooses of treatments for melancholy reinforce the physicality of the disease, by contrast to the afflicted conscience. He deliberately picks cures which seem to be directly and simply efficacious:  emotional torment can be put to an end with a draught of a mineral cure, sneezing powder, or a commonplace bloodletting. He applies this distinction practically by diagnosing the case of his addressee ‘M.’, which is ‘mixed of the melancholick humour and the terror of God’. This does not mean that the two are inseparably linked, but rather the opposite: that M.’s ‘swolne splene, with windnes and hardenes vnder the left ribbes, the hemeroydes not flowing according to their vsuall manner’ and ‘solitarinesse and exceeding sadnes’ are symptoms of melancholy and can be treated, while terror of God is caused by God alone, and can only be cured by grace.20 The two need to be separated, and so Bright devotes a chapter to showing ‘The particular difference betwixt melancholy, & the distressed conscience in the same person’.21 By contrasting Bright with Burton, one can see how far the latter departs from his main English precursor on melancholy when he invents the new category of religious melancholy. Burton unites two types of disease which Bright was at pains to keep separate.22 What is the purpose of this change of emphasis? According to some historians of mental illness, it is a polemical and secularising one. Burton has featured in historical narratives as a figure who marks a significant change in attitudes to mental health. According to Michael MacDonald, there are two distinct eras in the history of mental illness between the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, the dividing point of which was the Civil War:  after this point ‘the governing classes embraced secular interpretations of the signs of insanity and championed medical methods of curing mental disorders’, shunning ‘magical and religious techniques of psychological healing’.23 This process of secularisation began as a means of combating religious enthusiasm. As John F. Sena has put it, from the Restoration onwards contemporary medical theory was used 21 Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 187. This divergence from his sources is also recognised by Gowland, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, p. 177. 23 MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 2. 20 22

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to demonstrate that the Puritans suffered from mental and emotional disorders as a result of natural physical causes. Enthusiasts were seen as splenetic sufferers, and their erratic behavior and religious delusions were explained as the inevitable consequence of melancholic vapors.24

The diagnosis of enthusiasts as not merely theologically wayward but mentally ill was a powerful weapon for the established Church to use. At the same time, as Michael Heyd has noted, this tactic not only secularised the debate over enthusiasm, but also ‘laid the foundations for a new, more secular, basis of the social and cultural order’.25 Where Calvinist ministers used to practise spiritual physic to alleviate or cure mental suffering, by the eighteenth century mental illness became the province solely of doctors, not clerics. In this historical narrative – until recently unchallenged – John Sena’s study is particularly significant for my purposes, because he locates Burton at the mid-point between these eras. He describes the Anatomy as ‘a pivotal work in the changing conception of enthusiasm’ because in Burton’s text religious fanaticism is attributed to ‘psychological and physiological disorders, and thus could be diagnosed and treated as a disease arising from natural causes, the primary cause being melancholy’.26 This suggestion has been taken up by others, who have developed Burton’s position in the narrative. In Stanley Jackson’s history of melancholia and depression from antiquity to the present, Burton is a ‘central’ figure in the transition towards explaining enthusiasm as a disease, because of his introduction of the term ‘religious melancholy’.27 Michael MacDonald also takes note of Burton’s apparent contribution both to religious polemic and to changing attitudes towards religious therapies. Burton’s perspective is ‘staunchly anti-puritan’, while his invention of the term ‘religious melancholy’ to denote a disease suffered by ‘giddy precisians … achieved a lasting popularity among churchmen alarmed by the political effects of too much zeal’.28 The latter is certainly true: one finds the term in a number of eighteenth-century treatises, beginning with John Moore’s John F. Sena, ‘Melancholic Madness and the Puritans’, Harvard Theological Review 66 (1973), 293–309 (294). 25 Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 276–7. 26 Sena, ‘Melancholic Madness’, 298. 27 Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 329. 28 Michael MacDonald, ‘Religion, Social Change, and Psychological Healing in England, 1600–1800’, in W. J. Sheils (ed.), The Church and Healing (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 101–25 (p. 104). 24

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popular sermon Of Religious Melancholy (1692) (of which the English Short Title Catalogue lists ten editions). One might add, however, that only the title shows any influence of Burton, and therefore that claims for Burton’s significance for post-Restoration attitudes to enthusiasm may be an exaggeration. His exploration of what religious melancholy is may have been less influential than his introduction of a felicitous phrase. In the most thorough and balanced study of the subject, Michael Heyd describes ‘the use which Burton made of the medical tradition for the purpose of religious controversy’ as ‘momentous’. Burton, Heyd argues, had a strong polemical purpose in his medical analysis of certain religious behaviour, which not only helped to further his own attacks on Catholics and ­radical Puritans but also contributed to a ‘profound change in the nature of the critique of enthusiasm itself’.29 More recently, the claim that there was a shift towards secular treatments for melancholy in the seventeenth century has been questioned, and rightly so. Jeremy Schmidt has shown that, while Anglican clergy after the Restoration developed an anti-enthusiast position, this does not mean that they were ‘dismissive of the spiritual and mental trouble of their parishioners’. Indeed, he finds evidence of Anglican ministers treating religious melancholy through spiritual consolation and pastoral care ‘until at least the 1740s’.30 Angus Gowland has likewise warned against ‘the straightforward association of the increasing acceptance of medical psychology with progressive secularization in similar terms’.31 Burton’s place in historical narrative, as the polemicist whose medical diagnosis of religious melancholy starts the trend towards abandoning religious therapies, must therefore be challenged. Although his attack on enthusiasm features in his anatomy of religious melancholy in excess, which is only half of the ‘Religious Melancholy’ Section, critics have largely overlooked those other Subsections which are consolatory, rather than polemical, in tone. This decision has led not only to inaccuracies, but also to misrepresentations of Burton’s pastoral aims. Michael MacDonald, for example, numbers Burton among the theological conservatives who object to the methods of spiritual physic propounded by the Puritans and seek an alternative.32 Yet how can this be squared with the facts that Burton ­suggests that his own work is a kind of spiritual physic, and that some of his key sources on cure of despair are Puritan ministers such as Richard Greenham, William Perkins and Robert Bolton? Burton may not be a thoroughgoing 30 Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’, p. 70. Schmidt, Melancholy, pp. 85, 100. 32 Gowland, ‘The Problem’, 110. MacDonald, ‘Religion, Social Change’, p. 104.

29 31

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Calvinist, and he may oppose the excesses of ‘giddy ­precisians’ (as well as Catholics), yet it is a serious misreading of the Anatomy to suggest that Burton is opposed to religious therapies, and that the main thrust of his Section on religious melancholy is a satirical, polemical one.33 Just as it is right to see the text as having satirical elements, but a distortion to call it a Menippean satire, so it is also true that the work sometimes has a ­religiously polemical tone, but misleading to see it as a polemic. The significance of Burton’s ‘Religious Melancholy’, then, lies not simply in its polemical content, but also in the extent to which it mixes religious and medical therapeutic approaches to the illness. When he uses the term ‘religious melancholy’ he is not claiming that all religious affliction can be put down to an imbalance of the humours (indeed, as MacDonald notes, he strongly opposes the purely secular interpretations of mental disorder championed by some).34 If he did believe this, there would be no need to offer the spiritual comforts contained in the ‘Cure of Despaire’. Yet even here he fuses the religious with the medical, combining approaches and offering a variety of perspectives on each subject. His mixed method is evident in the title, ‘Cure of Despaire by Physicke, Good Counsell, Comforts, &c.’ (III, 424), and explained soon after: ‘they take a wrong course that thinke to overcome this ferall passion by sole Physicke; and they are as much out, that thinke to worke this effect by good advice alone, though both be forcible in themselves, yet vis unita fortior, they must goe hand in hand to this disease’ (III, 424). He then advises that the same medical treatments be used as in all types of melancholy, including rectifying the non-naturals – ‘diet, aire, exercise’ (III, 425) – and preventing the patient from being left solitary or idle. It is only after this that he begins the discourse of spiritual comfort and advice which ends the work. Hence even when the role of minister is most prominent in Burton, the physician is still an important presence. In this approach Burton would no doubt have won the approval of the Puritan Richard Greenham, who advised attending to the needs of body and soul. But in his explanations of the nature of spiritual affliction, Burton departs from the teachings of his English sources even as he seems to be most explicitly endorsing them: Melancholy and despaire though often, doe not alwaies concurre; there is much difference; Melancholy feares without a cause, this upon great occasion; Andrew Wear corrects MacDonald’s implication that Burton associates religious melancholy with sectarians by pointing out that the majority of Burton’s examples in this Section come from Catholic or pagan history; ‘Puritan Perceptions’, p. 57 note 10. 34 MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 205. 33

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melancholy is caused by feare and griefe, but this torment procures them and all extremity of bitternesse, much melancholy is without affliction of conscience, as Bright & Perkins illustrate by foure reasons; and yet melancholy alone againe may be sometimes a sufficient cause of this terror of conscience. (III, 412)

The influence of the older generation of spiritual physicians is clear here, particularly in the contrast between melancholy and despair, adapted from Bright and Perkins. The crucial phrase which shows Burton’s radically different attitude is the seemingly innocuous ‘and yet melancholy alone againe may be sometimes a sufficient cause of this terror of conscience’.35 Both Bright and Perkins would have been strongly opposed to Burton’s addition; in fact, in the texts Burton cites both refute the possibility that melancholy alone can afflict the conscience. I have already shown how in the ‘Cure of Despaire’ Burton uses Bright and Perkins, among others, as acknowledged models but departs from them significantly in his attitude to the reader and to divine grace. Here again this process of distortion can be seen, as Burton takes what he finds valuable from these sources but uses them to very different ends. I would not suggest, however, that this is a deliberate act of undermining their arguments: Burton is not opposed to Bright and Perkins (however much one may speculate that Bright and Perkins would have been opposed to him, had they lived) because he makes use of their guidance, even if he then departs from it. I am not attempting to argue that Burton was the only person of his age to blur the boundary between melancholy and the wounded conscience. The fact that Bright and Perkins are so insistent on the difference between them suggests that there was a tendency (in their minds, a dangerous one) to elide the distinction between the two afflictions. The evidence of Robert Yarrow’s posthumous treatise Soveraigne Comforts for a Troubled Conscience (1619) confirms that Burton was not the first person to do this. Discussing the troubled conscience, Yarrow warns that The causes of these griefes, some inconsiderately haue referred vnto melancholy: wheras indeed it is nothing else but sinne. For experience teacheth, that this is a passion happening oftentimes to those, which by the disposition of their bodies, are for the most part free from melancholy, though many times, I also grant, that melancholy passions are joyned and doe concurre with it. Was it melancholy, thinke you, that made Peter so suddenly to single out himselfe from the rabble of the high Priests seruants, and sobbing full of heauinesse, to vtter out the bitternesse of his griefe with teares?36 Although Schmidt’s assessment of Burton is generally accurate, his argument that this phrase shows Burton ‘merely following his evangelical sources’ (Melancholy, p. 51) is wrong, as an examination of those sources reveals. 36 Robert Yarrow, Soveraigne Comforts for a Troubled Conscience (London, 1619), pp. 12–13. 35

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Clearly, by the time Burton came to write the Anatomy the debate about how far medicine and religion should mix in spiritual physic was already alive.37 Although the claim among some historians of mental illness that Burton secularises treatment for polemical purposes is, I have argued, a misrepresentation, his conception of religious melancholy was nonetheless influential. One surprising and hitherto unrecognised aspect of the Anatomy’s reception is that its combined religious and medical approach to melancholy was followed by the nonconformist minister and pastoral writer Richard Baxter (1615–91), in his Preservatives against Melancholy and Overmuch Sorrow:  Or the Cure of Both by Faith and Physick.38 The similarities in attitude towards melancholy between Burton and Baxter are suggested by the title of the latter’s work. Baxter classifies melancholy alongside sorrow, by which he means in particular sorrow for sin. Furthermore, his suggestion that both can be cured ‘by faith and physick’ theologically separates him from the Puritan spiritual physicians, and places him nearer to Burton in attitude. Within the work, Baxter warns that too much sorrow for sin can be dangerous, and that therefore the sinner should enjoy forgiveness and comfort too. Sorrow can destroy faith and health, and, most damagingly, hope. Hope is ‘an applying Act’ of God’s grace to the self. ‘But Melancholy, overwhelming Sorrow and Trouble, is as great an Adversary to that Hope, as water is to fire, or snow to heat. Despair is its very pulse and breath.’39 There is no distinction made between the disease of melancholy and sorrow, which are grammatically united here by the singular verb. When sorrow for sin is ‘overmuch’, it is the same as a physical disease, and it should not be left for God alone to cure. Burton’s influence on Baxter is evident in the latter writer’s description of melancholics’ symptoms: ‘You may almost as well perswade a Man not to shake in an Ague, or not to feel when he is pained, as perswade them to cast away their self-troubling Thoughts, or not to think all the enormous confounding Thoughts as they do.’40 This is adapted from Burton’s comparison of the symptoms of melancholy with other kinds of disease, which ends, ‘you may as well bid him that is sicke of an ague, not to bee See further MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 217–31. This work was first published in Baxter’s name posthumously in 1713, although an anonymous version appeared in A Continuation of Morning-Exercise Questions and Cases of Conscience (London, 1683). There it was claimed that these exercises originated in October 1682. 39 Richard Baxter, Preservatives against Melancholy and Overmuch Sorrow: Or the Cure of Both by Faith and Physick (London, 1713), p. 11. 40 Ibid., p. 19. 37 38

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adry; or him that is wounded, not to feele paine’ (I, 420). We know that Baxter owned a copy of the Anatomy (it must be the first edition, as it is listed in his library catalogue as a quarto).41 He follows Burton more generally in the nature of his advice. For example, he warns the sufferer that ‘you must not be much alone’, and later ‘that you live not idly’, two pieces of advice which Burton reiterates up to the last page of his text.42 Near the end of his work, Baxter states that ‘Medicinal Remedies and Theological, use not to be given together by the same Hand; but in this case of perfect Complication of the Maladies of Mind and Body; I think it not unfit, if I do it not unskilfully.’43 His initial remark is a little misleading, as a number of ministers acted as medical healers in the seventeenth century, especially in rural parishes; nonetheless, it is unusual to find medical remedies in a religious treatise. He proceeds to recommend some safe medicines, including recipes, especially for the use of those who are too poor to pay a doctor.44 Like Burton, whom he has clearly used as a source, Baxter uses religious and medical advice in combination. His description of melancholy and sorrow as a case of ‘perfect Complication of the Maladies of Mind and Body’ is wholly apt for Burton’s conception of the disease, and suggests also how both writers’ approaches to the subject are ‘perfectly complicated’. As Schmidt has shown, Baxter consciously distances himself from some post-Restoration Dissenters and departs from Calvinist approaches to melancholy, even though, like Burton, he uses works with such a leaning as sources.45 Clearly, it is unwise to regard ‘Anglican’ and ‘Puritan’ attitudes towards melancholy as separate during the seventeenth century. Robert Burton draws on the consolatory literature of godly ministers such as Robert Bolton, and then is himself an influence on the nonconformist Richard Baxter. Bu r t on’s f l e x i bl e t e x t I have so far focused on the final Section, ‘Religious Melancholy’, because it is the culmination of Burton’s attempts to mix medical and religious Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘A Transcript of Richard Baxter’s Library Catalogue’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 3 (1952), 74–100 (79, item 702). 42 Baxter, Preservatives against Melancholy, pp. 71, 75. 43 Ibid., p. 82. 44 This point shows how much further Baxter, the greatest writer of pastoral texts in the seventeenth century, takes the notion of practicality than Burton. However, since only the literate can make use of his medical recipes, perhaps Baxter intends, not self-treatment, but that other ministers use the recipes to help their poor parishioners. 45 Schmidt, Melancholy, pp. 103–18. 41

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approaches. I now wish to examine how he takes on the role of the ‘whole Physitian’ to his readers throughout the work. A key way in which he achieves this is through the work’s flexibility, a characteristic which is obvious when one questions what type of text the Anatomy is. Critics have long tried to fit the Anatomy into a particular genre, arguing for example that it is ‘in essence a sermon’, as Patricia Vicari did, or a Menippean satire, according to Northrop Frye and P. H. Holland.46 Yet any kind of generic categorisation of the text is unsatisfactory: what is most interesting about the critical debate on the subject is not the conclusions each comes up with, but the failure of individual theories to prove conclusive, no matter how plausible they may all be. It is true that Burton uses particular satiric styles, and also that at times his writing has strong echoes of the sermon, a genre in which he would have had plenty of practice. The very fact that evidence can be found for such different viewpoints, however, makes it difficult to accept either. One cannot explain this problem away merely by claiming, as Vicari does, that Burton deliberately disguises his work’s homiletic aim by incorporating ‘quite other and apparently incompatible kinds of discourse’, and that this solution resolves the work’s ‘contradictions’.47 Instead of trying to categorise the Anatomy narrowly, readers should ask why the text resists categorisation, not merely in terms of genre but also of argument. Stanley Fish has accounted for the shifting nature of the Anatomy as part of a deliberate strategy to unbalance the reader. He sees Burton as undercutting every statement he makes, rendering his assertions unreliable and thereby undermining the reader’s confidence.48 Although I think that Fish exaggerates the extent to which Burton changes point of view, it is certainly fair to say that Burton not only voices different, even contradictory opinions, but also changes tone and even genre throughout the work. However, I would account for this characteristic of the text not as a negative strategy, as Fish has done, but as a positive one: the text’s flexibility is essential to Burton’s curative purpose. The best way to illustrate this argument is through the example of how Burton defines his own subject. Near the beginning of the first Partition, Burton E. Patricia Vicari, The View from Minerva’s Tower: Learning and Imagination in ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (University of Toronto Press, 1989), p. 144; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 311; P. H. Holland, ‘Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Menippean Satire, Humanist and English’, unpublished PhD thesis, University College London (1979). 47 Vicarï, View from Minerva’s Tower, p. 6. 48 Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts:  The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 303–52. 46

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distinguishes between melancholy in disposition and in habit. From the former ‘no man living is free’, and therefore ‘Melancholy in this sence is the Character of Mortalitie’ (I, 136). However, this type of melancholy is, he tells the reader, ‘improperly so called’, and by implication not the subject of his book: instead ‘This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is an Habit, morbus sonticus or Chronicus, a Chronicke or continuate disease, a setled humour’ (p.139). After a satirical preface in which he has shown the reader that ‘all the world is mad, that it is melancholy, dotes’ (I, 24), Burton confines the ensuing discourse strictly to a medical conception of his subject. Yet this apparently firm restriction does not hold, even within the first Partition. For example, among the causes of melancholy he classifies discontents, miseries and cares, concluding that ‘you may as soone separate waight from lead, heat from fire, moistnesse from water, brightnesse from the Sunne, as misery, discontent, care, calamity, danger from a man’ (I, 274). This Subsection contains some of the best writing of the Anatomy, with Burton lamenting the general misery of humankind and applying melancholy to all, thereby contradicting his earlier claim that his subject is only melancholy as chronic disease. The fact that Burton states explicitly that he will write about melancholy in a strict medical sense, then widens the term to signify general unhappiness, and even the consequence of sin, may seem to be an indication of contrary purposes. Yet instead of trying to explain away such seeming contradictions, one should examine why Burton chooses to fluctuate in his attitude towards his subject. The intersection between medical and religious approaches provides an important answer. As the ‘whole physitian’ needs to be both priest and doctor, so Burton’s text must vary in its aims, applying different forms of treatment to the melancholic reader. For example, the first cause of melancholy listed by Burton is God, under which heading he includes both classical and Christian examples. He ends the Subsection by warning that in this case ‘Physitians and Physick can doe no good, we must submit our selves under the mighty hand of God, acknowledge our offences, call to him for mercy’ (I, 174). Otherwise ‘our diseases are incurable, and wee not to be releived’. Hence at the beginning of the causes Section Burton follows the traditional view of the spiritual physician that only God can cure the conscience afflicted for sin. Later in the same Partition, however, when Burton describes the ‘Immediate Cause’ of some of the symptoms he has been anatomising, he emphasises the medical reasons for what are, seemingly, spiritual illnesses: To give some satisfaction to melancholy men, that are troubled with these Symptomes, a better meanes in my judgement cannot be taken, then to shew

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them the causes whence they proceed, not from Divels, as they suppose, or that they are bewitched or forsaken of God, heare or see, &c. as many of them thinke, but from naturall and inward causes, that so knowing them, they may better avoid the effects, or at least endure them with more patience. (I, 418)

The fact that Burton ascribes these symptoms to physical causes does not mean that he is unsympathetic towards people in such a condition. Indeed, the opposite is the case, as his intention here is clearly to help sufferers. He even attacks those who do not take sufferers’ afflictions seriously, explaining that, even though their distress has ‘naturall and inward causes’, it is no less acute: remove heat of the Liver, a cold stomack, weak spleene:  remove those adust humours and vapours arising from them, blacke bloud from the heart, all outward perturbations, take away the cause, and then bid them not grieve nor feare, or be heavy, dull, lumpish, otherwise counsell can doe little good; you may as well bid him that is sicke of an ague, not to bee adry; or him that is wounded, not to feele paine. (I, 420)

While in true spiritual disease ‘Physitians and Physick can doe no good’ (I, 174), here this attitude is inappropriate and, instead, ‘counsell can doe little good’. Burton’s approach is not inconsistent, although the criteria by which he distinguishes between cases are subtle. More important for Burton’s purpose is the fact that the reader of the Anatomy is exposed to both approaches: the spiritual and the medical. Burton achieves the task of being both minister and physician to a reader whose problems he cannot personally diagnose, through the variety of approaches he adopts, and indeed by blurring the boundaries between these approaches. I have said that, in the earlier example, Burton follows the tradition of spiritual physic in claiming that only God can heal the truly wounded conscience, but it is important to note that he is by no means imitating a treatise on cure of the afflicted conscience. It is characteristic of Burton, especially in the first Partition, to switch between Christian and pagan examples in support of his argument. Here, a series of Old Testament references to divine punishment, including David, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Saul, is followed by ‘Heathen stories’ such as the tale of how Censor Fulvius ran mad after untiling Juno’s temple to build a new one (I, 172). Although authors of sermons and religious treatises use classical illustrations and quotations occasionally, they certainly do not do so to the extent that Burton does. The only point in the work where this mixing of pagan and Christian illustrations is noticeably absent is in the ‘Cure of Despaire’ Subsection, where Burton gives full voice to the spiritual

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physician. The dramatic change of tone caused by the very limited use of classical examples there perhaps explains why modern critics have found the work’s end so perturbingly different from the rest of the work. For example, John Stachniewski finds that in this Subsection ‘Burton is quite unable to stick to his task as counsellor; after six pages his tone begins to wobble.’49 By contrast, I have argued that the ‘Cure of Despaire’ succeeds brilliantly as a piece of counsel with a strong curative function, and that what Stachniewski sees as wobbling is in reality what makes it successful. Stachniewski’s attitude to Burton is a useful point of contrast with my argument in this chapter. He claims that ‘whatever Burton’s fixed sympathies may have been … the actual writing reveals an interplay between different vocabularies and therefore value systems over which his only control is exercised through a constantly shifting tone of facetiousness, half-irony, and disavowal’.50 I credit Burton with greater skill as a writer than this, seeing his use of different vocabularies and methods of diagnosis and cure as closely controlled by him, and as part of his overall therapeutic purpose. To continue my discussion of the mixing of pagan and Christian examples, I do not believe that Burton combines the two because he is overwhelmed by his material, and that therefore his religious purpose fails. Nor would I argue, following Patricia Vicari, that the work is a religious discourse in disguise, so that classical references are used deliberately to hide the fact that Burton is really writing a sermon. Instead, Burton varies between different types of discourse because variation and flexibility are presented as the best way of helping the reader. The interspersion of ‘Heathen stories’ with Christian ones not only shows the ubiquity of melancholy in all ages, but also provides a diversion for the melancholic. Burton regulates the extent to which his text has the characteristics of a religious treatise because of his sense of himself as the ‘whole Physitian’:  it may be essential to exhort his reader to repentance, but it may also be helpful to advise a walk, fresh air or mental distraction. I have argued against the opinion that Burton’s work encourages a secularisation of mental therapies. Yet Burton’s advice to the sufferer to distract and divert the mind could be seen as a secularising move, an attempt (conscious or otherwise) to alleviate the painful symptoms brought on by too much spiritual self-scrutiny. Distraction from one’s state, it could be argued, is a dilution of the primary religious duty to examine the John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 232. 50 Ibid., pp. 224–5. 49

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conscience and seek divine forgiveness and assurance. To correct this view, which I believe to be mistaken, there are a number of necessary responses. Firstly, although Burton ‘mixes’ religious and other treatments, it would be impossible to separate them out altogether: the tones of the Christian minister are heard in many Subsections of the Anatomy which have no explicitly religious theme, surfacing especially in resounding, exhortatory conclusions. The Anatomy is not a work of theology, and Burton does not claim to be writing one – no author’s name appears on the frontispiece with an attached ‘BD’ to indicate that he was Bachelor of Divinity – yet the religious overtones are frequent and emphatic enough to form an important element of his method. Secondly, one must question what constitutes ‘spiritual physic’. One might think of a ‘pure’ religious therapy as consisting of such activities as prayer, examination of the conscience, the reading of the Bible and other edifying books and consultation with a minister. However, it would be misleading to conclude that an early modern minister would and should only endorse this form of therapy, and that to suggest any other form would constitute secularisation or a compromise of religious duty. After all, many clerics, especially in rural areas, gave medical aid to their parishioners, regarding it as part of their pastoral duty.51 We have seen how Richard Baxter gives both ‘Medicinal Remedies and Theological’ to melancholy. Moreover, he carefully attends to the health of the sufferer’s mind while disputing the view that godly despair is a necessary part of salvation. Baxter’s concern to allay psychological affliction is not an abandonment of religious therapies altogether but a challenge to the Puritan method of pastoral care, specifically its emphasis on sorrow.52 For Baxter as for Burton, melancholy demands a composite form of therapy because of its composite nature. This approach can also be found before the seventeenth century. In a letter written on 23  May 1534 to Prince Joachim von Anhalt, Martin Luther suggests that melancholy might have been the cause of the prince’s recent illness. Therefore he advises him to ‘be merry, to ride, hunt, and keep good company’ since ‘Joy and good humor, in honor and seemliness, is the best medicine for a young man, yea for all men.’53 Again, I would argue that this is not a form of secularising  – the letter also contains spiritual counsel  – but rather MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, pp. 8, 176, 222–3. Schmidt, Melancholy, pp. 83–102, offers a subtle analysis of the treatment of melancholy by Restoration Anglicans such as Simon Patrick, who, he argues, separate religious melancholy from the afflicted conscience for pastoral reasons, counterbalancing the Puritan emphasis on feeling as an indicator of spiritual health. 53 Cited and translated by Darrin M. McMahon, The Pursuit of Happiness: A History from the Greeks to the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 165. 51

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an attempt to provide a variety of approaches to the condition in order to restore health. Burton is close to Luther when he advises ‘Mirth and merry company’ (II, 116) as a cure for melancholy. Part of Burton’s curative strategy is to distract and divert the melancholic reader, in the same way that he himself claims in the preface that he writes of melancholy ‘by being busie to avoid Melancholy’ (I, 6), providing occupation and entertainment through reading the work. The Anatomy’s formal digressions, which aim to refresh the mind of the reader, build diversion into the very structure of the work. This therapy of diversion is endorsed in classical works of moral philosophy such as Seneca’s De Tranquilitate Animi and is also encouraged by early modern physicians.54 It is not, however, promoted by most of the Puritan spiritual physicians, who are suspicious of distracting the sufferer from contemplating his or her sins: Robert Bolton particularly requires that the sinner’s heart must be ‘torne in pieces with extreme, and restles anguish’ before any comfort can be applied.55 Burton, by contrast, does not endorse suffering as positive or necessary, and hence presents multiple means of alleviating it. In this he resembles the Bishop of Caithness, John Abernethy, who advises the sufferer of despair to ‘Divert thy mind to other objects.’56 This diversion represents, not a rejection of or an escape from spiritual therapies, but rather a movement away from the particular form these therapies take in writers such as Bolton: the encouragement of an intense and continuous concentration on religious feeling, particularly sorrow. To take another example, in his ‘Consolatory Digression’ Burton offers the reader a number of different forms of comfort against the deaths of friends or family. The majority are philosophical (in particular Stoical) or Christian in emphasis. However, as he draws his discussion to an end, Burton adds that ‘If our present weaknesse is such, wee cannot moderate our passions in this behalfe; we must divert them by all meanes, by doing something else, thinking of another subject’ (II, 186). A reader following Stanley Fish would no doubt interpret this comment as undermining the comfort that has been offered before, and as an example of the ‘negativity of the work’s rhetorical thrust’.57 By contrast, I would argue that Burton’s comment shows, not a lack of confidence in the efficacy of his consolation, nor a deliberate irony, but a pragmatism about human fallibility coupled with a genuine, humane impulse to relieve distress. By providing an alternative Schmidt, Melancholy, pp. 37, 43. Robert Bolton, Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences (London, 1631), p. 162. 56 John Abernethy, A Christian and Heavenly Treatise (London, 1630), p. 376. 57 Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 351. 54 55

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for those who remain unconsoled, he ensures that none of his suffering readers is left out, an inclusive attitude which is reinforced here by his use of the first person plural. R e a di ng r e m e di e s As we have seen in previous chapters, Burton recognises that the act of reading itself can have multiple functions, and therefore multiple benefits for the melancholic. To return to ‘Exercise Rectified’, we see that Burton’s endorsement of study for the troubled in mind is partly a means ‘to distract their cogitations … and divert their continuall meditations another way’ (II, 90). As an example, he tells the story of how two kings, of Aragon and Sicily, were ‘both cured by reading the history, one of Curtius, the other of Livy, when no prescribed physicke would take place’ (II, 91). He also extols the therapeutic effects of reading Seneca and Homer on the distressed mind. After this he moves on to other types of reading: If this comfort may be got by Philosophy, what shall be had from Divinity? What shall Austin, Cyprian, Gregory, Bernards divine meditations afford us? … Nay what shall the Scripture it selfe? Which is like an Apothecaries shop, wherein are all remedies for all infirmities of minde, purgatives, cordialls, alteratives, corroboratives, lenitives, &c. Every disease of the soule, saith Austin, hath a peculiar medicine in the Scripture, this onely is required, that the sicke man take the potion which God hath already tempered. (II, 91)

Reading divinity, and in particular the Bible, has a stronger effect on the mind than reading histories or even pagan philosophy. The comparison of scripture to ‘an Apothecaries shop’ suggests, unsurprisingly, that it has a more directly curative function than that achieved by other forms of reading. Nonetheless, although reading the Bible might be the best form of cure, Burton does not recommend it exclusively. In summary of his thoughts on reading, he concludes that ‘I would for these causes wish him that is melancholy, to use both humane and divine authors, voluntarily to impose some taske upon himselfe, to divert his melancholy thoughts’ (II, 92). It seems strange, especially given that Burton is a clergyman, that he ranks reading the Bible alongside any other ‘taske’ which provides mental diversion. One might even suggest that this shows a scepticism on Burton’s part about the effectiveness of spiritual cure, just as his final advice in the book – ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’ – might be read as an admission that full cure of religious despair is unlikely. However, if one

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accepts Burton’s claim that he writes ‘for the common good of all’ (I, 8), one can see his strategies in a far more positive light. Firstly, Burton recognises that divine precepts alone, even those from the Bible, will not be the most successful cure for mental distress in all cases. His advice to read ‘both humane and divine authors’ mirrors his own technique of mixing pagan and Christian sources, and more widely of varying tone and even genre. Secondly, his hope that reading will at least divert is characteristic of his view (borrowed from Seneca) that ‘better aliud agere quàm nihil, better doe to no end then nothing’ (I, 7). If reading achieves no greater relief from melancholy, at least it will distract the sufferer from it. Similarly, reading the Anatomy should at the very least accomplish this by occupying the reader. If not every reader is helped by Burton’s spiritual counsel at the end of the text, at least the final piece of advice may prove memorable. The instruction to ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’ is evidence, I would argue, not of Burton’s scepticism but of his practicality. It is more helpful to leave the reader with some sound advice to follow, even if all else has failed, than to end with a grand rhetorical climax. It is not Burton’s way, either stylistically or curatively, to do this. This link between style and therapeutic aim is an important one to stress, because I believe that a failure to understand it has led to serious misreadings of the Anatomy. In the examples I have been discussing (the consolation against grief, the advice to read ‘both humane and divine authors’, and the ending of the Anatomy) Burton has moved from more complex forms of counsel to simpler ones, from ideal methods of cure to the basic ‘aliud agere’. Stanley Fish argues that Burton continually undercuts the main substance of his arguments, as I have already mentioned. P. H. Holland differs from Fish in his approach, but similarly sees Burton adding ‘loopholes’ to his arguments, which deliberately leave the discourse open. Burton ‘represents the successive stages of the deterioration of the force of his own counsels’ in his text; in particular, Holland argues of the ‘Consolatory Digression’, ‘If these consolations console, it is because their inadequacy to banish the effects of the calamities they oppose is so apparent that it is laughable.’58 There is undoubtedly irony at work in some parts of the Anatomy, yet it is, I would argue, a strange distortion to see Burton’s method of consolation as failing. The satirical and comic elements in the ‘Consolatory Digression’, for example, can scarcely be described as dominant:  if Burton is playing the Democritean satirist of the world’s follies here, he  Holland, ‘Burton’s Anatomy’, pp. 343, 341, 346–7.

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is not very successful in the role. In challenging those readings of the Anatomy as a negative and self-undermining text, such as Fish’s and John Stachniewski’s, I would highlight one of Burton’s rhetorical techniques which I believe has been misinterpreted by them:  his sense of an ending. As I have noted, at times in the Anatomy, particularly in the second and third Partitions, Burton ends not with a rhetorical climax but with an argument along the lines of ‘if all else fails …’. I would suggest that some modern readers have (unconsciously) found this method disquieting because it breaks with rhetorical convention. In the classical manual Rhetorica ad Herennium, the orator is advised to place the strongest arguments at the beginning and end of a speech, with the weaker ones in the middle. Quintilian suggests a few alternatives, including moving from weaker to stronger arguments, but is clear that ‘we should avoid descending from the strongest proofs to the weakest’.59 By contrast, Burton often seems to leave his weaker arguments for last. Yet if we interpret this in the context of his curative strategy, we can see why he departs from rhetorical tradition. Had Burton implanted the kind of advice I have examined above in the middle of a discussion, rather than near the end, it is unlikely that the reader would take much notice of it. For example, the advice to ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’ would form an inconspicuous part of the long list of maxims in the ‘Consolatory Digression’ (II, 204–6), whereas Burton brings it to prominence by placing it at the end of his text. His aim at these points is not to overwhelm the reader with the power of his rhetoric, but to help him or her. The fact that Burton does not end his work with a flamboyant peroratio, but with some simple words of advice, suggests that he wishes to leave his reader practically equipped rather than rhetorically won over.60 The classical manuals I have been discussing both make use of traditional martial images of the power of rhetoric. Quintilian compares the oration to Nestor’s arrangement of his army in Homer’s Iliad, while the author of Ad Herennium claims that the system of organising arguments he recommends, ‘like the arraying of soldiers in battle, can readily bring Ad C. Herennium:  De Ratione Dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium), trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), iii.x.18 (p. 189); Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, trans. D. A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), v.xii.14 (II, 305); see also vii.i.10–17 (III, 11–15). 60 Jonathan Sawday notes the absence of a peroration at the end of the Anatomy, convincingly tying it to the text’s overall sense of provisionality, enabled by the technology of print; ‘Shapeless Elegance:  Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Knowledge’, in Neil Rhodes (ed.), English Renaissance Prose: History, Language and Politics (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), pp. 173–202 (p. 178). 59

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victory’.61 This set of images conveying the force of rhetoric continues into the Renaissance: for Juan Luís Vives, oratory is ‘a kind of fight and aims at persuasion as if at victory’, with the orator as soldier.62 P. H. Holland does not see Burton reaching either ‘defeat’ or ‘victory’ conclusively, but does argue that Burton presents his counsels ‘in the form of a debate with an adversary’, the reader taking the latter role.63 Holland fails to recognise that the dialogue form does not represent a debate, but rather the relationship between doctor and patient or pastor and charge. Dialogue is widely used in texts on the afflicted conscience as a means of replicating the face-to-face pastoral meeting. Rather than aiming to win a rhetorical battle, Burton’s style of counsel is designed to comfort the reader and to make the advice given memorable. Hence it may be more appropriate to leave ‘weaker’ advice – the advice designed for the weaker sort of reader – until the end of his discourse. Burton describes his writings as being like ‘guilded pilles’ which should ‘not onely recreate, but rectifie the minde’ (III, 5). His method of rectifying the mind is a textual one: through advice, diversion and particularly consolation. As I have noted in Chapter 2, Burton rarely instructs his reader to put the book down and seek an experience outside it, even though he recommends all sorts of activities, books and medicines. Instead he uses the text itself to ‘worke upon’ (III, 5) the reader’s mind, so that the act of reading is the most important cure of all. Yet this cure is by no means a straightforward one. If the Anatomy is a pill, it is a large one to swallow. His style of writing is as copious as his subject-matter, his methods of persuasion complex and various. Burton’s text, despite its title-page’s claim to anatomise melancholy ‘Medicinally’, cannot be considered primarily as a medical manual. However much the author records medical treatments for melancholy, it is against the nature of his writing to send the reader away from the book. Of course, this is not to imply that he is at all grudging in supplying remedies:  the second half of the second Partition is full of suggestions about medicines for the relief of different ailments. Nonetheless, Quintilian, Orator’s Education, v.xii.14 (II, 305); Ad Herennium, iii.x.18 (p. 189). From On Teaching the Disciplines, in Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, ed. and trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 93. For further references to orators as warriors, see Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric:  The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 120–29; Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 42; Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 49. 63 Holland, ‘Burton’s Anatomy’, p. 341. 61

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Burton’s conception of melancholy means that he cannot prescribe ­simple, ­comprehensive treatments. He repeatedly emphasises the multiplicity of types of disease: for example, the sufferers of melancholy through discontent ‘are not so many in number, but their causes be as diverse’ (I, 271). Similarly, he introduces ‘Symptomes or Signes in the Minde’ with the comment that ‘Arculanus in 9. Rhasis ad Almansor. cap. 16. will have these Symptomes to be infinite, as indeed they are, varying according to the parties, for scarce is there one of a thousand that dotes alike, Laurentius cap. 16.’ (I, 384). The most thorough statement of this belief occurs at the end of the same Subsection: They will act, conceave all extreames, contrarieties, and contradictions, and that in infinite varieties … scarce two of two thousand, that concurre in the same symptomes; The tower of Babel never yeelded such confusion of tongues, as this Chaos of melancholy doth variety of Symptomes. There is in all melancholy similitudo dissimilis, like mens faces, a disagreeing likenesse still; And as in a River we swimme in the same place, though not in the same numericall water: as the same instrument affords severall lessons, so the same disease yeelds diversity of Symptomes. (I, 395–6)

We saw in the previous chapter how Burton compares compound medicines to ‘so many words or phrases’ which can be ‘infinitely varied’ (II, 225); here again, linguistic volatility is paralleled with medicine in the comparison between the tower of Babel and melancholy, both sources of overwhelming profusion and confusion. One is reminded of what Burton asserts at the beginning of the first Partition, that disease (like Babel’s multiple languages) is rooted in human sinfulness. Definition, diagnosis and cure would seem almost impossible, especially through the medium of the book, when melancholy is as varied as language can be. The writer’s inability to hear what his patient says, or to know the individual sufferer’s symptoms, would seem to prevent any kind of successful treatment. Hence, one might think that listing remedies and leaving the reader to treat himself or herself would be the only solution to such a problem. However, Burton does the opposite. He resists the impulse to make his text into a straightforward manual, instead involving the reader in a process of cure within the work itself. He takes upon himself the role of both minister and physician to his ‘silly weake Patient’, the suffering reader (I, 299). It is not always clear which of these roles he is playing, and this is part of his curative strategy: blurring the boundaries between religion and medicine, Burton treats problems which may arise from a variety of causes. He attempts in the Anatomy to be the ‘whole Physitian’,

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the combination of divine and physician who can make ‘an absolute cure’ for melancholy. Yet this does not represent the sum total of the elaborate authorial persona which he constructs in the course of his text. As we shall see in the next chapter, the addition of another perspective – of the melancholic who writes out of a ‘fellow-feeling’ (I, 8) – completes Burton’s varied therapeutic method.

Ch apter 5

Speaking out of Experience

In his ‘Causes of Hypocondriacall or Windie Melancholy’, Burton cites one of the major sources of the Anatomy, Philipp Melanchthon’s De Anima (1540; revised 1553), this time on the commonness of windy melancholy in men. It is easy to see the appeal of such a text – a work with a philosophical and medical slant, and written by the great Wittenberg reformer (and friend of Luther)  – to a minister of a philosophical bent who is writing about a medical condition. Yet Melanchthon’s book has a further interest for Burton. He notes that, ‘as Camerarius records in his life, Melancthon himselfe was much troubled with it, & therefore could speake out of experience’ (I, 379). Melanchthon is not only an authority for the content of Burton’s work, but is also a sufferer of melancholy. As such, his personal knowledge of the disease makes his claims about it more trustworthy. In this chapter I will explore how Burton presents himself as ‘speak[ing] out of experience’, and particularly how this relates to his curative claim. Burton constructs an image of himself as melancholic partly in order to show that, like Melanchthon, he understands his subject-matter, but this self-presentation is also developed as a means of identifying with the reader’s own case. While Burton the spiritual physician observes and diagnoses the disease, Burton the melancholic offers the benefits of his own experience. The combination of these roles provides a unique approach to textual cure. At the same time, his position as a melancholic writing to alleviate his own condition can conflict with his attitude towards his readers. The satiric aspect of the Democritus Junior persona may be geared towards moral reform but it also gives voice to sentiments which are anything but comforting. In order to uncover the role that Burton’s self-portrayal as melancholic plays, I will firstly survey the evidence for Burton’s melancholy, both within the text and outside it. I will then turn to some examples of other writers who depict themselves in a similar condition, including clerics whose own suffering or sinfulness is presented as an exemplary means of 138

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comforting the reader and establishing ministerial authority. This ­latter element provides a complement to the figure of the ‘spiritual physician’ discussed in the previous chapter. The role of the ‘suffering healer’ is certainly not as prominent as the role of spiritual physician in the religious writing of Burton’s time, yet parallels can be found; one important model for the role, as we shall see, is Christ himself. The second half of this chapter will consider the significance of the Democritus Junior persona. I will argue that the Democritus Junior role draws together various aspects of authorial self-presentation which feature, some more strongly, some less, throughout the Anatomy: the mocker of folly, the melancholic and the doctor (Burton’s Democritus, although a philosopher and not a physician, is writing a book on melancholy). Burton alters his source by claiming that Democritus wrote not just for others but also for himself, a manoeuvre that cements the relationship between his literary ancestor and himself as the writer who seeks self-purgation as well as the common good. Democritus’ legacy of scornful laughter is not one that Burton wholeheartedly embraces, though, and I will argue that Burton also follows the example of the philosopher’s weeping counterpart, Heraclitus, along with other models of how to react to earthly folly and corruption. Burton moves between positions of involvement with and detachment from his reader and his melancholic subject. Finally, I will contend that Burton’s satirical perspective shares with his religio-medical roles the aim of curing melancholy and purging ills, but that it also complicates and disrupts it. ‘E x pe r t o c r e de ROBE RTO’ In ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, Burton presents himself as a man who, like Camerarius’ Melanchthon, has achieved expertise through hard experience. This self-presentation is a cumulative effect worked out in the preface, not just a simple statement of fact. He identifies the medical condition of melancholy with the process of literary production, linking the genesis of his text to the illness’ painful symptoms. Early on, he declares that ‘I write of Melancholy, by being busie to avoid Melancholy’ (I, 6). This statement alone does not directly imply that the author is presenting himself as a melancholic – his writing may be a preventative measure – but it does introduce a sense of personal involvement with his subject-matter to which he later returns. His intention when first starting to write, he tells us, was ‘to ease my minde by writing’, since ‘I was not a little offended with this maladie, shall I say my Mistris Melancholy,

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my Ægeria, or my malus Genius’ (I, 7). Burton deliberately blurs medical and literary ideas, thereby sustaining a degree of ambiguity regarding the precise nature of his relationship with his subject. By personifying Melancholy he implies that she is a literary muse, a meaning underscored by the reference to the Roman Egeria, ‘a constant companion and inspiration’ and also the goddess of childbirth.1 A traditional metaphor for artistic creation thus becomes associated with the inescapable symptoms of a disease. Burton’s claim that he needed to ease his mind through writing because he had ‘a kind of Impostume in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of’ can also be read both as a medical symptom and as a myth of literary genesis (echoing the story of the birth of Athena from Zeus’s head); an impostume is a swelling or cyst, and the releasing of its bad humours also calls to mind the unladening process of satire. The notion of melancholy being both good and bad (‘malus Genius’), both his literary muse and his imbalanced humoral complexion, is repeated in Burton’s self-penned epitaph in Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, which implies that the fame and fortune brought by his book did not prevent melancholy from overtaking him: ‘hic iacet Democritus Junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia’ [here lies Democritus Junior, to whom Melancholy gave life and death].2 As the preface continues, the implication that he personally suffers from the ailment grows stronger. He reads medical works which he has found in libraries or which have been recommended by his ‘private friends’ in order ‘To doe my selfe good’ (I, 7). The reading in preparation for, as well as the writing of, his book has its origins in self-therapy. He compares his writing to the consolations Cardan and Cicero wrote after the loss of children, before affirming that experience of ‘melancholizing’ (I, 8) informs his book: ‘Experto crede ROBERTO’. Burton re-emphasises his own melancholy in stronger terms later in the preface, when describing further his purposes in composing the Anatomy. If he had written ‘ad ostentationem only, to shew my selfe’, he explains, he could have addressed a large number of subjects, but that at this time I was fatally driven upon this Rocke of Melancholy, and carryed away by this by-streame, which as a Rillet, is deducted from the main Channell of my studies, in which I have pleased and busied my selfe at idle houres, as a subject most necessary and commodious. (I, 20) Oxford edition, IV, 18. There is no need to lend credence to the rumour that Burton committed suicide to ensure that his death coincided with his horoscope, a story that was told of a number of famous Renaissance polymaths, including Cardan. See Oxford edition, ‘Introduction’, I, xxxvi.

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The word ‘fatally’ is key to this passage. While Burton may partly be ­implying here that he has reached his subject-matter through the workings of Fate, the adverb is clearly linked with the subsequent image: the ‘Rocke’ of melancholy on which he claims to have been driven, as in a torrential river or a shipwreck, is dangerous, even deadly. The violent, personal implications of the word ‘fatally’ undermine Richard Nochimson’s argument that in this passage ‘Burton is discussing his deliberate choice of melancholy as the subject of his book and is not at all suggesting that he himself has been melancholy’.3 While Nochimson’s attempt to separate biographical fact from fiction is laudable, in this case he ignores the forcefulness of Burton’s language. As we shall see in the next chapter, Burton frequently uses the vocabulary of pain, violence and torture in connection with the experience of melancholy. Along with the word ‘fatal’, he repeatedly uses the word ‘feral’ (as in ‘this ferall disease of melancholy’ (II, 68)), in a range of senses from ‘savage’ to, at its most extreme, ‘of a deadly nature; deadly, fatal’ (the OED cites Burton as the first example of this latter usage).4 These examples register the possibility that melancholy may become not merely torturous, but life-threatening. In the case of the passage above, Burton’s violent metaphor of being driven on a rock contrasts dramatically with the ensuing gentle image of the ‘Rillet’. The odd juxtaposition shows the difference between melancholy as lived experience and as a topic which it has ‘pleased’ the author to study. As noted earlier, the alternative meaning of ‘fatal’ is ‘by fate’, which also implies that Burton is predisposed towards melancholy through the astrological circumstances of his birth. He later notes that melancholy can be caused by the influence of the stars, although he adds that they only ‘gently incline’ (I, 199) and can be resisted. Although Nochimson is right to be cautious about interpreting the Anatomy biographically, I agree with J. B. Bamborough that we have no reason to doubt Burton’s statements about his own melancholy.5 Intriguing evidence to support the theory that he was melancholy has been found by Barbara Traister in the casebook of the astrological physician Simon Forman, which notes a series of visits, in 1597, by a twenty-year-old patient called Robert Burton. Among his symptoms was melancholy. The evidence is inconclusive, but as the age is correct it is possible that this was the same man.6 Richard L. Nochimson, ‘Studies in the Life of Robert Burton’, Yearbook of English Studies 4 (1974), 85–111 (90). 4 OED, s.v. ‘feral’, a.1, a.2. The two definitions have different etymological roots in Latin, the first deriving from ‘fera’ (wild beast) and the second from ‘fērālis’ (‘of or pertaining to funeral rites or to the dead’). 5 Oxford edition, I, xxiii. 6 Barbara H. Traister, ‘New Evidence about Burton’s Melancholy?’, RQ 29 (1976), 66–70. 3

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More important than conjecture, however, is the question of how and why Burton makes use of his own case in his writing. In order to understand the role that personal experience plays in the Anatomy, it is useful once again to observe it in the light of Montaigne’s Essais. In the first chapter I showed how Burton’s declaration ‘Thou thy selfe art the subject of my discourse’ (I, 1) echoes, in a significantly altered form, the French writer’s prefatory announcement that he himself is the subject of his writing. The authors’ comments about what brought them to write also offer a revealing comparison. In his essay ‘On the Affections of Fathers for their Children’ Montaigne tells his reader that it was ‘a melancholy humour (and therefore a humour most inimical to my natural complexion) brought on by the chagrin caused by the solitary retreat I plunged myself into a few years ago, which first put into my head this raving concern with writing’.7 Both authors suffer from a melancholy that provokes them to write, although Montaigne’s does not arise from a natural tendency towards excess of the melancholic humour; Burton, by contrast, considers himself predisposed to the condition by his birth and horoscope.8 Yet Montaigne and Burton resist making the fashionable association between melancholic madness and the talents of the great, inspired artist.9 In both cases, the melancholy that prompts literary composition is depicted as a personal affliction. Moreover, both writers describe their literary endeavours in humble terms as gatherings or centos, not as the monumental opera of a genius, and both insist that their works are not worth the reading.10 The precise relationship between the ailment and authorship is imagined slightly differently in the Essais and the Anatomy. In Burton’s version, writing acts as a form of cure or distraction for the sufferer who is ‘busie to avoid Melancholy’. He also admits that it is a part of a condition: he could ‘not well refraine, for ubi dolor, ibi digitus, one must needs scratch where it itcheth’ (I, 7). The comment suggests that his writing is Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 433. On Montaigne’s melancholy, see M. A. Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy: The Wisdom of the Essays (London: Duckworth, 1983), esp. pp. 64–6. On Burton’s melancholy and his horoscope, see J. B. Bamborough, ‘Robert Burton’s Astrological Notebook’, RES 32 (1981), 267–85 (274–8). Burton’s horoscope appears on his tomb at Christ Church Cathedral. 9 The pseudo-Aristotelian Problem XXX.I equated madness and genius, and influenced many early modern writers on the subject of melancholy and genius, including John Donne. See the latter’s seventh Paradox, ‘That a wise man is knowne by much Laughinge’; Paradoxes and Problems, ed. Helen Peters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 14–16. 10 See Montaigne, ‘To the Reader’, Complete Essays, p. lix; Anatomy, I, 12. Montaigne describes his writing as barely worthy of notice (p. 433) and as a ‘jumble’ (p. 1224); Burton characterises his as a ‘Cento’ (I, 11) and a ‘confused lumpe’ (I, 17). 7 8

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not entirely within his own control, a sense which is played out in the copious outpourings and satiric excesses of the preface. Montaigne does not portray writing as therapy but rather as a product or a symptom of his melancholy, an implication registered in M. A. Screech’s translation of ‘resverie […] d’escrire’ as ‘raving concern with writing’.11 More importantly, the perspectives each writer adopts are fundamentally different. Montaigne explains that, having nothing else to write about, ‘I offered myself to myself as theme and subject matter.’ Burton’s melancholy moves him to write for himself, but very little about himself:  we learn some biographical scraps, and the names of his friends and family in ‘Ayre Rectified’, but nothing like the wealth of detail about Montaigne’s daily life, habits and opinions in the Essais. Unlike Montaigne, Burton asserts that he also writes for and about ­others. The passage I have been examining, in which Burton presents himself as a melancholic, ends not with the self-reflection of Montaigne but with a broadening of perspective as he claims that he ‘would helpe others out of a fellow-feeling’ and write for ‘the common good of all’ (I, 8). The movement from desiring to do ‘my selfe good’ to ‘the common good’ shows how self-therapy leads to an impetus to help others. Montaigne is reluctant to make claims about the effect of reading his work: Here you have not my reading but my study: the lesson is not for others; it is for me. Yet, for all that, you should not be ungrateful to me for publishing it. What helps me may perhaps help somebody else.12

Significantly, Montaigne only added the second and third sentences of this extract in the version of the text he was preparing when he died. Although this perhaps suggests a late shift in the perspective of the Essais, Montaigne’s addition still shows a resistance to linking the reader’s experience too closely with his own, as played out through writing. Even when he does hint at the benefits of reading his work, he leaves room for doubt about its efficacy: it may only help ‘perhaps’ (the French is ‘par accident’, which suggests ‘by chance’).13 Burton occasionally uses similar arguments; in fact, he even partly quotes this passage at the beginning of his ‘Consolatory Digression’ (II, 126), although more as a modesty topos than as an argument for self-reflection. However, whereas this notion of helping the reader by writing about oneself is clearly not Montaigne’s main Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Albert Thibaudet (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 422. Montaigne, Complete Essays, p. 424. 13 Montaigne, Essais, p. 407. The French ‘par accident’ and the Latin ‘per accidens’ are the root of the phrase ‘by accident’ as in ‘by chance, fortune’: see OED, s.v. ‘accident’, n. I. 2. 11

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concern, for Burton it affirmedly is. The passage in which Burton declares his wish to help others ‘out of a fellow-feeling’ features in the first edition of 1621 and remains substantially unaltered in later editions, an indication that the idea of a melancholic helping other melancholics was an original governing principle of the work. Burton’s literary self-presentation needs to be understood in the context of his purpose towards the reader, then, since author and reader are dynamically interrelated in the Anatomy. By showing that he is a melancholic, Burton gains greater authority on his subject – ‘Experto crede ROBERTO’ – and is also able to give comfort through a sense of ‘fellowfeeling’. When considering diseases of the mind, Burton complains that ‘Every man thinkes with himselfe Egomet videor mihi sanus, I am well, I am wise, and laughes at others’ (I, 56) and this applies to the author too. He must reveal his own sickness not despite but because of his selfpresentation as physician, divine and satirist. The design of his authorial persona is also closely tied to his depiction of the melancholic as being both a victim of and personally responsible for his or her condition. For example, in the Subsection of ‘Selfe-love, Vaine-glory’ he describes the melancholic who takes flattery too much to heart as ‘my silly weake Patient’ (I, 299), a phrase which suggests that the sufferer is innocent (‘silly’ means ‘simple’) and vulnerable. The sinfulness of vanity is mitigated because it is symptomatic of an illness. Yet Burton also commonly insists that the melancholic is responsible for his or her own suffering. The same Subsection ends with a stark summation: ‘They could not moderate themselves’ (I, 301). In the ‘Consolatory Digression’ he warns that the person who fears what is unavoidable or false ‘yeelds to his passions, flings away his owne weapones, makes a cord to bind himselfe, and pulls a beame upon his owne head’ (II, 186). The melancholic is here confronted with the Hellenistic ethical assessment of human behaviour, in which individuals jeopardise the possibility of finding eudaimonia (happiness or flourishing) by giving into passions and assenting to false beliefs. The painful consequences of melancholy are the result of a loss of will-power and a failure of right reason. In ‘Perturbations of the Mind Rectified’, the significance of this dual presentation of the melancholic to Burton’s curative strategy becomes apparent. Having offered various means of comfort, he imagines the sufferer’s complaint that such advice is easily given, but difficult to take: Wee know this to be true, we are led captives by passion, appetite, wee should moderate our selves, but we are furiously carried, we cannot make use of such precepts, we are overcome, sicke, malè sani, distempered & habituated in these

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courses, we can make no resistance; you may as well bid him that is diseased, not to feele pain, as a melancholy man not to feare, not to be sad: ’tis within his blood, his braines, his whole temperature, it cannot be removed. But he may choose whether he will give way too farre unto it, he may in some sort correct himselfe. (II, 103)

Burton first emphasises the inescapability of passion and the sufferer’s powerlessness (as the passive verbs imply). His use of the first-person plural suggests the generality of such a problem, even its universality, including himself as fellow-sufferer. As a melancholic, then, he is able to speak out of experience, a fact which gives him the only acceptable weight of ­authority in the sufferer’s eyes:  ‘Wee know this to be true’ (my emphasis). What Burton is offering is not empathy but sympathy: a community of feeling with his readers, whose condition he shares. He also offers comfort to the reader by stressing the physicality of the disease. When he states that ‘’tis within his blood, his braines’, he is not being ­metaphorical. However, having shown that he takes the affliction seriously, he then moves from presenting the melancholic’s suffering as a medical problem to an ­ethical one, thus offering the possibility of ­(self-)improvement.14 Whereas in the first Partition Burton commonly uses the notion of responsibility as a means of attack – ‘thou thy selfe art the efficient cause of thine owne misery’ (I, 245) – here he shows that it is also a positive means of cure (‘he may choose’). The shift from the first-person plural to the third-person singular in this passage exemplifies how Burton combines his roles of patient and physician to help his reader throughout the work. At first he is the spokesperson for melancholics, showing his sympathy with his fellow-sufferers and demonstrating the seriousness of their complaint (in the dual sense of an utterance of a grievance, and of a bodily ailment). By then distancing himself in order to regard the sufferer more objectively, the author ceases to be a character who is ‘overcome’ by passion, and hence can give the appropriate type of advice. Burton’s approach to melancholy necessitates being both inside and outside the disease. Immediately before the passage quoted above, Burton has expressed the imagined criticism that ‘wee can easily give counsell to others, every man, as the saying is, can tame a shrew but he that hath her; si hic esses, aliter sentires, if you were in our misery, you would finde it otherwise, ’tis not so easily performed’ (II, 103). Burton’s subsequent words, beginning ‘Wee know this to be true’, seem to 14

On Burton’s ethical perspective and his preoccupation with self-governance, see Christopher Tilmouth, ‘Burton’s “Turning Picture”: Argument and Anxiety in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, RES 56 (2005), 524–49.

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be in reply to this voice, demonstrating that he is qualified to give counsel because he is ‘in our misery’. Yet, as the main problem with being subject to melancholy is the sense of being unable to ‘resist’ and help oneself, Burton must also present himself as removed from these difficulties, and thus capable of seeing that one can correct oneself. The switches between pronouns reflect the notion that the author is able to offer a cure to the afflicted reader through his simultaneous self-presentation as fellow­melancholic and spiritual physician. ‘G oi ng d ow n t h e m s e lv e s i n t o t h e de e p’ Burton’s use of this double role as a method of cure is, I would argue, part of his unique achievement in the Anatomy. As both healer and patient, he offers a form of hybrid approach to illness and treatment quite unlike that found in other textbooks on melancholy. Nonetheless, the figure of the sufferer who helps others is an ancient one. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates declares that doctors would be most skilled if they not only had come into contact with a large variety of cases but also ‘themselves had suffered all diseases and were not of very healthy constitutions’.15 Montaigne, no admirer of the physician’s art, cites this idea with approval, complaining that most doctors ‘pilot us like a man who remains seated at his table, painting seas, reefs, and harbours and, in absolute safety, pushing a model boat over them’.16 The writer who gives philosophical or spiritual counsel to others out of his own experience of affliction is also an important model for Burton. Cicero wrote a work of consolation after his daughter’s death; it was lost (although a spurious version was published in the sixteenth century, probably by Carlo Sigonio), but its idea remained influential on Burton and others. The physician Cardan (1501–76) begins his own De Consolatione with a note of regret that Cicero’s text was destroyed, conjecturing that it must have been a powerful work, ‘for as in al other matters hee declared hym selfe more then a man, so may it be thought that herein he had written most excellently:  the matter being neither common, fayned or touching others, but proceeding from his owne natural affection and extreme perturbation of mynde’.17 Burton seems to regard Cardan’s work in a similar light, noting that he ‘professeth he writ his Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953–4), III, 408 (I, 283). 16 Montaigne, ‘On Experience’, Complete Essays, p. 1225. 17 I quote from the English translation Cardanus Comforte, Translated into Englishe, trans. Thomas Bedingfield (London, 1576), fol. 1r. Cf. Jerome Cardan, De Consolatione Libri Tres (Venice, 1542), p. 3. 15

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booke De Consolatione after his Sonnes death, to comfort himselfe’ (I, 7). In fact, the text was published years before Cardan’s son was executed for the murder of his wife, and Burton has confused it with a later text.18 Cardan’s early reference to Cicero in De Consolatione may have been the source of this confusion, and it is still significant that Cardan’s work is a major influence on the Anatomy. The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (c.480–525), composed while the author was in prison and written as a dialogue between himself and Philosophy, provides a third model for writing which stems from personal sufferings:  all three are cited as authorities for the ‘Consolatory Digression’ (II, 126). Along with these three acknowledged precedents, one can look closer to home for literature which may also have influenced his conception of writing as the fruit of personal experience, offered to help others. The writers of Elizabethan prose fiction created protagonists who were near self-portraits, and whose life-stories of waywardness and failure followed by repentance were recounted to provide ‘moral edification through experience’.19 John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), for example, tells the tale of a gentleman who is young and talented but lacking in wisdom, and whose prodigality leads to his eventual downfall and disillusionment; in the sequel, Euphues and his England (1580), Lyly acknowledges that the first work was autobiographical in nature.20 Sixteenth-century verse, too, includes narratives with an autobiographical basis, of poets whose lives are marked by ‘travail’ and misfortune and whose failure to thrive is recounted in the voice of moralising experience.21 Burton draws on this literary tradition when he points to the ‘Greater preferment … I could never get’ (I, 4) and depicts himself ‘left to a solitary life, and mine owne domesticke discontents’ (I, 5). He places himself in a community of scholars whose miseries are described so vividly in the Subsection on ‘Love of Learning’ (1.2.3.15), and whose professional frustrations he can sympathise with because he knows them all too well. Although his writing has brought him some financial success and reward from his patrons (duly acknowledged in ‘Ayre Rectified’, II, 61 and 66), he also notes his failure to ‘put my selfe forward’ (I, 319) and, by consequence, his relative lack of worldly success. Like the Elizabethan court poets and professional See Oxford edition, IV, 19. Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1976), p.14, and passim. 20 Ibid., pp. 58–78. It is highly likely that Burton knew both parts of this work; he quotes from the second in III, 244. 21 Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse:  Chronicles of the Self (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 57–91. 18

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writers who use bitter personal experience as the material for their narratives, Burton offers his own life and melancholy as an aid to his readers. The use of personal experience for the benefit of others is also a developing, although not fully formed, aspect of English religious writing of this period, which (as we have seen in earlier chapters) has important affinities with the Anatomy. Michael Mascuch has drawn attention to the sections of first-person discourse in publications such as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and accounts of ‘good deaths’ in the ars moriendi tradition. The voices of ‘real experience’ (as recorded by witnesses), he argues, provided a more accessible, comforting and altogether more powerful message to readers than theological abstractions.22 Fuller autobiographical accounts are rare, although one notable exception is John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), a cycle of meditations, expostulations and prayers composed during and after the serious illness in late 1623 of the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. Donne puts his personal experience of illness to work to find spiritual meanings for himself and, through publication, others. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the role of the suffering healer plays only a small role in the genre of writing Burton drew upon for his ‘Cure of Despaire’ Subsection, the treatises on the cure of the afflicted conscience. Indeed, John Bunyan, in his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) – a work which evokes vividly the author’s ‘castings down, and raisings up’ – would remark on the absence of first-person discourse in these texts. When as a young man he sought spiritual guidance and comfort through reading, he found that ‘those who had writ in our days’ on the afflicted conscience ‘had Writ only that which others felt … without going down themselves into the deep’.23 This is not to say that ministers did not make use of their own cases to help those in spiritual distress. The Puritan Robert Bolton (whom Burton quotes in the ‘Cure of Despaire’) explains that a ‘Comforter’ who has been ‘converted from a more wicked and desperate course, then the Patient himselfe’ may be able to help the latter by telling him so. He even envisages a conversation in which the sufferer confesses that he is ‘pestilently pestered’ with evil thoughts, only for the minister to reply, ‘Not a man alive … hath had his head troubled with more hideous thoughts of such hellish nature, then I.’24 It is significant, though, that this vying to be chief of sinners Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 55–70. 23 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 2, 40. 24 Robert Bolton, Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences (London, 1631), pp. 358, 359. 22

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is only imagined:  Bolton does not reveal his own experience (although Anthony Wood reports that Bolton acquired his skill as a ‘reliever of afflicted consciences’ through ‘that manifold experience he had in himself and others’).25 This is partly reflective of the ambiguity of purpose found in many works of religious guidance, intended to be both handbooks in pastoral care for ministers and direct aids for lay people. Bolton may also regard self-revelation as useful only in the private, face-to-face setting of the pastoral interview. Discussing one’s failings and former sinfulness in a published text may be pastorally unproductive as well as unpalatable for the writer; furthermore, it is highly possible that godly writers were wary of providing their opponents with weapons to use against them.26 Despite the lack of autobiographical insight in Bolton’s work, it seems likely that the personal experience which Wood mentions was a motivating factor in the writing of his text. Another treatise on the subject  – Robert Yarrow’s posthumously published Soveraigne Comforts for a Troubled Conscience (1619) – includes a preface by Yarrow’s editor, John Maunsell, noting that the author was, and that for a good space, greatly perplexed and troubled in minde with inward afflictions, which (the Lord so disposing it) was the first occasion that mooved him to frame this Discourse: Of which his conflicts, and the pangs and torments that his poore tender heart endured therein, more sharpe and terrible unto him then death, I, and Thou good Reader, and such Others, as being in any measure distressed, as hee was, shall make use of these his labours.27

Yarrow’s authority is established through his direct experience of a wounded conscience, a suffering which is made positive as it aids others. Maunsell emphasises the usefulness of this method through a powerful comparison to Christ, quoting Hebrews 2.18: ‘as the Spirit of God makes mention of our blessed Saviour, In that hee himselfe did suffer and was tempted, hee is able to succour those that are tempted: So this our Author’.28 Christ, the model spiritual physician, is also shown to be a sufferer whose experience enables him to help others. Hence he provides a precedent for the use of one’s own example as a necessary element of ministry. Anthony Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. and rev. Philip Bliss, 3rd edn, 4 vols. (London, 1813–20), II, 515. 26 On Bolton and the polarisation between ‘godly’ and ‘ungodly’, see Peter Lake, ‘A Charitable Christian Hatred:  The Godly and their Enemies in the 1630s’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 145–83. 27 Robert Yarrow, Soveraigne Comforts for a Troubled Conscience (London, 1619), sigs. [A7]v–[A8]r. 28 Ibid., sig. [A8]r. 25

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The use of personal experience as a means of spiritual comfort would become more fully developed in writing from the mid-seventeenth century, particularly nonconformist writing. In his early work The Right Method for a Settled Peace of Conscience (1653) Richard Baxter reassures those readers who feel unable to attain assurance of their salvation (which many Calvinists taught was an important sign of election) by admitting his own fears and doubts in some detail, writing that ‘I finde that the communicating of Experiences of each others hearts and states is of great use to believers.’29 He portrays his self-revelation as part of the activity of mutual confession and exhortation among Christians, which is designed to strengthen the faith of the individual and the community. This activity was encouraged in Protestant churches as a replacement for obligatory confession to a priest.30 Interestingly, Baxter’s insistence in this work that assurance was not necessary for election caused great controversy, and led to his publishing an apology in the second edition and removing the offending passage altogether in the third.31 Perhaps Baxter’s admission of a minister’s own doubts about his salvation made his argument seem particularly inflammatory. Burton had little in common theologically with writers like Bunyan and Baxter and his work is by no means straightforward religious guidance, but it is intriguing to observe that, like these later writers, he depicts himself as the person whose own experience mirrors that of those he is comforting. In Chapter 2 I argued that Burton creates an alternative mode of pastoral comfort to conventional Calvinist forms of consolation against despair, by resisting the need to particularise the reader’s experience. His published self-presentation as a melancholic amongst melancholics again shows his divergence from Calvinist pastoral writing of the 1620s and 1630s. Perhaps, like Bunyan, Burton found unsatisfying the methods of the spiritual counsellor who ‘Writ only that which others felt’. Burton does not go so far as Bunyan by writing an autobiography; he tells the reader of his melancholy but he does not describe it in a narrative. His status as fellow-melancholic plays itself out instead in the collective voice he gives to sufferers – ‘we are overcome, sicke, malè sani’ (II, 103) – and in his declaration of personal expertise. John Maunsell described Christ as the ideal model of the suffering healer, and in his Subsection on sorrow as cause of melancholy Burton Richard Baxter, The Right Method for a Settled Peace of Conscience and Spiritual Comfort (London, 1653), pp. 162–6, 167–8. 30 John T. McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls (London: SCM Press, 1952), p. 216. 31 N. H. Keeble, Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 16, 72. 29

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also reminds the reader of Christ’s traditional role as the man of ­sorrows: ‘Christ himselfe, Vir dolorum, out of an apprehension of griefe, did sweat blood, Marke 14. His soule was heavy to the death, and no sorrow was like unto his’ (I, 258). The main Bible reference is to the account of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14.34) and he also invokes Old Testament verses which prophesy Christ’s Passion:  ‘He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’ (Isaiah 53.3) and ‘behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me’ (Lamentations 1.12). Although Burton does not use the word ‘melancholy’ directly in connection with Christ, he continues by citing an example from the physician Crato of ‘one that was so melancholy by reason of griefe’, with ‘so’ seeming to imply here ‘likewise’. Burton’s use of the word ‘apprehension’ is worth examining here, since the word carries a number of shades of meaning. One might interpret the term as denoting an intellectual function of the mind – the OED gives one definition as ‘the action of grasping with the intellect’  – in which case Burton would seem to be distancing Christ from the emotion itself, implying that he only understood sorrow rather than directly experiencing it.32 This might suggest that Burton is denying Christ’s full humanity, and seems unlikely. More plausibly, one might take ‘apprehension’ to denote ‘anticipation’ of something adverse, in this case of Christ’s trial and crucifixion.33 However, although these subsequent events are the reason for Christ’s sorrow, the sorrow itself is experienced in the present, not the future. Christ tells his companions ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death’ (Mark 14.34), and in Luke’s account he sweats blood as he prays ‘in an agony’. This sense of a current emotion is conveyed by a rarer definition of ‘apprehension’ – ‘the action of “feeling” anything emotionally; sensitiveness or sensibility to’  – which I believe is the primary meaning of the word in the above passage.34 Burton uses the word in this sense elsewhere, applying it to melancholics. For example, some lead solitary lives ‘out of a strong apprehension of some infirmity, disgrace’ (I, 242); similarly, a melancholic lover can suffer from ‘a deepe apprehension of his infirmities, deformities’ (III, 288). Christ suffers grief and sorrow directly, perhaps even with the heightened sensitivity which is characteristic of the melancholic. Burton’s word is resonant of the phrase from Isaiah, ‘acquainted with grief’, which suggests a personal knowledge of grief based on experience.35 The use of ‘apprehension’ shows that, even 33 OED, s.v. ‘apprehension’, II. 7. Ibid., II. 11. 35 Ibid., II. 6. OED, s.v. ‘acquainted’, 3.

32

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though Burton’s style is rightly characterised as copious, he can also condense a range of meanings into a single word. ‘Apprehension’ contains the different senses of Christ’s sorrow in the Garden of Gethsemane – as an intense, current emotional sensibility, as a foreseeing of future pain, as an awareness of the burden of both present and future – and also hints at the purpose behind the incarnation which the Gethsemane scene represents. At its most general level, ‘apprehension’ denotes an act of laying hold or grasping; figuratively, the incarnation is the act of God laying hold of humankind, by becoming man. Christ’s understanding of grief is not simply an intellectual one, but a full experiencing of it because he is fully human, ‘Vir dolorum’. T h e m e l a nc holy De mo c r i t us The melancholy Christ in the garden of Gethsemane might recall another figure in the Anatomy, the original Democritus who ‘lived at last in a Garden’ outside Abdera (I, 3). In Burton’s depiction, Democritus is both the melancholic and the laughing satiriser of the world’s follies. As I will argue, the combination of these aspects of Democritus throughout Burton’s preface allows him to develop an authorial standpoint of simultaneous detachment from and involvement in his subject-matter. The Democritus Junior role brings together, in an at times uneasy tension, various inflections of Burton’s writing: the urge to heal oneself and others through medical and philosophical means, and the venting of spleen which is symptomatic of Burton’s antic melancholic persona, and which is also designed to cure the world of folly. Burton devotes a large part of his preface ostensibly to explaining his motives for adopting the role of Democritus Junior. The most obvious literary precedent is Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (1511):  so many new forms of folly arise every day, Folly tells her audience, that ‘a thousand Democrituses wouldn’t be enough to laugh at them, and we’d always have to call in one Democritus more’.36 Burton quotes this (I, 37) and repeatedly returns to the idea that the mocker should be mocked. Erasmus provides a model of the Democritus who seems to be detached from worldly folly but is nonetheless implicated in it. It is to earlier writing that we 36

Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice, in Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 27 (University of Toronto Press, 1986), pp. 120–21. Burton cites this in his preface, I, 37. For a thorough analysis of Burton’s Democritus Junior role, see Chapter 4 of P. H. Holland, ‘Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Menippean Satire, Humanist and English’, unpublished PhD thesis, University College London (1979).

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must turn, though, in order to uncover fully how Burton develops the figure of the melancholy Democritus. Of Burton’s classical sources for the original character of Democritus, the most important is the sequence of letters now known to be spurious, but in Burton’s time believed to have been written by the founding father of medicine, Hippocrates. The letters form an account of how the people of Abdera ask Hippocrates to treat their famous philosopher Democritus, whom they believe has gone mad because of his frequent bouts of laughter (especially at them).37 In the seventeenth letter, the ‘Epistle to Damagetus’ (the main source of Burton’s account at I, 33–7), Hippocrates recounts how he arrives in Abdera to find the citizens weeping and lamenting Democritus’ insanity. He approaches Democritus, who is sitting alone outside the city, surrounded by the dissected carcasses of animals. The philosopher explains that he is writing a book about madness (the Greek word used is mania) and is attempting to locate the seat of it in these creatures’ bodies. A long conversation ensues, in which Democritus explains that he laughs at the world’s vanity and folly, and the inability of humans to find contentment. Upon leaving him, Hippocrates declares to the Abderites that the philosopher is not mad at all, but a man of the greatest wisdom. Burton relates this tale (here only briefly summarised) in a close paraphrase of the ‘Epistle to Damagetus’, using Fabius Calvus’ Latin translation.38 However, as P. H. Holland and Thomas Rütten have noted, Burton departs from his source at significant moments. In Burton’s version, Democritus tells Hippocrates that he is performing anatomies ‘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 better cure it in himselfe, by his writings and observations, teach others how to prevent & avoid it’ (I, 6). Burton not only changes madness to melancholy, but also interpolates the notion that Democritus aims to cure the disease in himself, not just others.39 Hence Burton to a certain extent creates his own precedent for Democritus Junior’s role of laughing philosopher and suffering doctor. The notion that the Democritus of the pseudo-Hippocratic letters is melancholy is not unique to Burton, being found in other writers of the early modern period who use the same source, although not in the original Greek text.40 Burton might Thomas Rütten, Demokrit  – Lachender Philosoph und Sanguinischer Melancholiker:  Eine Pseudohippokratische Geschichte (Leiden: Brill, 1992), p. 184. 38 As noted in the Oxford edition commentary, IV, 65. 39 Holland, ‘Burton’s Anatomy’, pp. 187, 190; Rütten, Demokrit, pp. 182–3. 40 Rütten, Demokrit, pp. 118–19. 37

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have found his precedent in the medical writer Helkiah Crooke, who describes Democritus as cutting open beasts in order to find ‘the seate of anger and melancholy’.41 The features of the story lend themselves to the early modern interpretation. For example, the setting in which Hippocrates meets Democritus, ‘in his Garden in the Suburbs all alone, sitting upon a stone under a plane Tree, without hose or shooes, with a Booke on his knees’ (I, 33), is, as Holland observes, very similar to ‘the haunt of a melancholy man’.42 Burton’s version of the melancholy philosopher follows other early modern interpretations, then, but he does seem to be unique in the extent to which he draws out this aspect of Democritus. He takes pains to show the latter repeatedly in a melancholy light. For instance, the reader is first introduced to Democritus as a ‘little wearish old man’ (I, 2); from the third edition onwards this image has already been established on the frontispiece of the Anatomy, engraved by Christof le Blon, possibly under Burton’s instruction.43 Here Democritus appears in the classic contemplative pose of Dürer’s Melencolia I, leaning his head on his hand. I use this visual example because it is also notable that Democritus, a popular subject in seventeenth-century art, is nearly always depicted solely as the laughing philosopher (in opposition to Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher).44 Salvator Rosa’s painting ‘Democritus in Meditation’ (1650), which depicts the philosopher leaning his head on his hand in melancholy pose, surrounded by the bones of animals, is a rare exception. Nonetheless, the melancholy Democritus and the more traditional laughing Democritus are not strictly opposed types. Holland argues that there is a precedent for Burton’s portrayal in Melanchthon’s De Anima, which connects ‘Democritus’ wisdom with Aristotelian melancholy’:45 When melancholy originates from the blood and is tempered with the blood, it gives rise to the insanity of the fatuously happy, just as the cheerful madness of Democritus is said to have been, who used to laugh at the foolishness of mankind and by his unruffled mind prolonged his life to the hundred-and-ninth year.46 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615), p. 12. Holland, ‘Burton’s Anatomy’, p. 192. 43 Rütten sees this as probable, Demokrit, p. 183. 44 For a history and catalogue of Heraclitus and Democritus in seventeenth-century Dutch art, see A. Blankert, ‘Heraclitus en Democritus in het bijzonder in de Nederlands kunst van de 17de eeuw’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 18 (1967), 31–124. 45 Holland, ‘Burton’s Anatomy’, p. 196. 46 Cited and translated in Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964), p. 89. 41

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This Democritus suffers from sanguine melancholy (the result of blood being burnt or ‘adust’), and is hence characterised by his cheerfulness and ‘unruffled mind’, elements which are fitting for his traditional role. Burton does not specify that Democritus’ melancholy is of the sanguine variety, though, and his own version of the laughing philosopher is not exactly cheerful. The sixteenth-century French physician Laurent Joubert’s linking of melancholy and laughter is closer to Burton: in his Traité du Ris, he alludes to the Democritus myth in his chapter ‘That some melancholics laugh, others cry’, citing Heraclitus and Democritus as examples of these two phenomena.47 Similarly to Melanchthon, Joubert’s medical explanation is that this type of laughter arises from adust (burnt) humours. Hence the laughter of Democritus  – and by extension Democritus Junior – can partly be read pathologically, according to Renaissance medical theory, as a symptom of a melancholic condition.48 This association between laughing and sickness is suggestive of the sometimes uncomfortable nature of Burton’s version of antic humour. The flashes of derision are found throughout the preface, but are most surprising when encountered in the main body of the work: ‘Now goe and bragge of thy present happinesse, whosoever thou art, brag of thy temperature, of thy good parts, insult, triumph, and boast; thou seest in what a brittle state thou art’ (I, 380, ‘Causes of Melancholy from the Whole Body’). This violent and unrestrained attack merges oddly into homily; in the very next sentence he counsels humility before God and self-knowledge. Joubert notes that ‘laughter caused by sorrow’ is a ‘laughter to which nothing pleasant belongs, which, linked with sadness, creates ridicule’.49 As James Tillman argues, Burton plays the role of ‘a man who cannot restrain his own melancholy even as he tries to cure the melancholy of others’, a stance which is typical in Roman satire of the railing satirist who is in turn satirised.50 Democritus Junior’s laughter reveals not his separation from a fallible world but rather the full extent of his involvement in it as melancholic. Burton uses the role of fellow-melancholic as a means of exploring the disease from the inside, establishing his credentials as the expert who should be trusted, and thus providing a more effective means of cure. In order to answer the question of how the two versions of Democritus – as laugher and melancholic – perform a role in Burton’s curative purpose, Laurent Joubert, Traité du Ris, Contenant son Essance, ses Causes, et Mervelheus Effais (Paris, 1579), p. 273. Translations are my own. 48 49 See Joubert, Traité du Ris, pp. 275–6. Ibid., p. 276. 50 James S. Tillman, ‘The Satirist Satirized:  Burton’s Democritus Jr.’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 10 (1977), 89–96 (92). 47

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we must examine the role of laughter and mockery as it relates to cure. By portraying himself as an heir of the laughing philosopher, Burton is aware of the precedent provided by Seneca. In his De Tranquillitate Animi, Seneca favours the approach of Democritus over that of Heraclitus, arguing that it is better to see vice as ‘ridiculous’ than ‘hateful’, and concluding that ‘it is more human to laugh at life than to lament over it’. He continues, ‘Add, too, that he deserves better of the human race also who laughs at it than he who bemoans it; for the one allows it some measure of good hope, while the other foolishly weeps over things that he despairs of seeing corrected.’51 Democritean laughter is not (as it seems to be in the pseudo-Hippocratic letters) an expression of complete rejection of the world, but rather has a positive aspect of ‘good hope’. As Edgar Wind has shown, this preference for Democritus over Heraclitus became absorbed into Christian thinking, although one might expect the attitude of the weeping philosopher to be more appropriate for Christianity.52 After all, many theologians, both patristic and early modern (although not Erasmus), asserted that Christ wept but never laughed. Yet, as M. A. Screech has shown, ‘great Renaissance authors opted firmly for Christian laughter’, and the figure of Democritus was used to represent it, not only in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly.53 Pierre de Besse underlined the link in his Le Democrite Chrestien (1615), which Burton owned in Latin translation.54 Montaigne takes up Seneca’s preference for laughter over tears in his essay ‘On Democritus and Heraclitus’, but his reasoning differs in important respects. Laughter is better, he claims, because it is more disdainful and condemns us men more than the other – and it seems to me that, according to our deserts, we can never be despised enough. Lamentation and compassion are mingled with some respect for the things we are lamenting: the things which we mock at are judged to be worthless.55

Montaigne’s position of disdain and condemnation is clearly influenced by Seneca:  the kind of laughter suggested by Seneca’s phrase ‘deridere vitam’ (‘to laugh at life’) is harsher and more scornful than the more neutral ‘ridet’ he later uses. As Montaigne would know, the Vulgate Bible uses deridere to describe the people’s mockery of Christ on the cross.56 Yet Seneca, Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore, 3 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1958), II, 272–3. Edgar Wind, The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson, rev. edn (Oxford, 1993), pp. 83–5. 53 M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 43, 7. 54 Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988), item 152. 55 56 Montaigne, Complete Essays, p. 339. Screech, Laughter, p. 27. 51

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where Seneca’s laughter allows the world hope, Montaigne’s seemingly does not. Instead, it reflects a stance of opposition to, and rejection of, humankind: ‘we can never be despised enough’. What position does Burton give Democritean laughter? At first, it seems, none at all. At the beginning of his preface Burton claims that he uses the character of Democritus ‘for that reason and only respect’ (I, 5) that the philosopher performed anatomies in order to cure madness and melancholy, in himself and others (a narrative which, as we have seen, Burton has significantly altered). Although Burton admits that he does ‘laugh and scoffe’, he insists that ‘’tis for no such respect I shroud my selfe under his name’. Despite this denial, however, the figure of Democritus as laugher becomes increasingly prominent: when Burton returns to the story of Democritus, it is to translate ‘verbatim almost’ (I, 33) the philosopher’s arguments for laughing at human folly, as recorded in the ‘Epistle to Damagetus’. Burton concludes, ‘this was the cause of his laughter: and good cause he had’ (I, 37), before launching into a ­sustained satirical attack on contemporary folly. By the end of the preface Burton’s denial that he uses his persona for satiric purposes is entirely undermined: ‘Object then and cavill what thou wilt, I ward all with Democritus buckler, his medicine shall salve it, strike where thou wilt and when:  Democritus dixit, Democritus will answere it’ (I, 111). The surprisingly juxtaposed images of the buckler and of medicine together suggest the complex nature of Democritean laughter in the Anatomy. On the one hand, the buckler suggests the hostility and sense of opposition created by laughter, although it is interesting that Burton chooses here a weapon of defence (especially given the actively aggressive tone of the passage). His words may have the effect of provoking the reader to counterattack (‘Object … and cavill’), yet such attacks can simply be rebuffed, thus continuing the opposition between writer and reader. On the other hand, Democritus’ laughter is also seen as a medicine ‘to salve it’ (my emphasis). The ensuing phrase ‘strike where thou wilt and when’ suggests that the pronoun refers to a wound inflicted on the writer by the reader:  the Democritus persona should shield the writer from criticism, but, were the ‘buckler’ to fail to intercept every attack, should also heal any injury caused. However, this explanation does not entirely solve the ambiguity of what ‘his medicine’ will salve, and how. There is also, I would argue, a suggestion that Burton uses the Democritus persona as a kind of healing medicine, which can work on the reader as well as the author. This notion of curative laughter is well established in the period. According to Juan Luís Vives (as cited by Burton), mirth ‘purgeth the blood, confirmes health, causeth a fresh, pleasing,

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and fine colour, prorogues life, whets the wit’ (II, 116). Unlike Montaigne, Burton regards Democritean laughter as a means not merely of condemning the world through hostile mockery, but also of curing it. Hence the two images, of buckler and medicine, represent a combination of Seneca’s attitude towards laughter and Montaigne’s. Burton’s choice of persona might suggest an absolute commitment towards the Democritean attitude, yet the preface shows that this is clearly not the case. Burton reveals this early on when writing about himself. Like Diogenes and Democritus, he recounts, he would ‘now and then walke abroad’, not as they did to scoffe or laugh at all, but with a mixt passion … I did sometime laugh and scoffe with Lucian, and Satyrically taxe with Menippus, lament with Heraclitus, sometimes againe I was petulanti splene cachinno [laughing with a freakish spleen], and then againe, urere bilis jecur [my liver burning with bile], I was much moved to see that abuse which I could not amend. In which passion howsoever I may sympathise with him or them, ’tis for no such respect I shroud my self under his name. (I, 5)57

This passage suggests a useful way of understanding Burton’s method in the Anatomy, and is also abundant evidence that the text is not, as some have claimed, a Menippean satire. Burton’s ‘mixt passion’ is evident on the page as he switches between different discursive modes, including railing laughter but also Heraclitean mourning. The elements of Menippean satire which Northrop Frye and P. H. Holland have found in Burton may well be present, but, as I have argued in the previous chapter, are not therefore proof of a generic structure which governs the text. While one might doubt the truthfulness of Burton’s denial here that he is using Democritus’ name because of its associations with laughter, one can also see why he makes such a statement. The Democritean role represents only one ‘passion’ among many present in the text, and hence laughter only offers a narrow perspective. C u r at i v e C h r i s t i a n s at i r e ? Burton’s description of his ‘mixt passion’ brings his satirical mode to the fore; his references are not only to Menippus but also to Lucian, Persius and Horace. Satire is not the same as Democritean laughter, although there are many links: Democritus, sitting alone in his garden and mocking The second translated phrase does not follow the version in the Oxford edition’s commentary, which omits the physiological language of the original.

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worldly folly, has often been taken to be the archetypal figure of the satirist.58 Moreover, Seneca’s view of laughter as allowing the world capacity for correction can be developed further into a moral theory of satire, where laughter has a reformative power. Nonetheless, satire does not consist in laughter alone. An important passage in ‘Democritus Junior’ makes this clear, as Burton imagines, ‘If Democritus were alive now and should but see’ (I, 39) the superstition, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and other madnesses of the world. The inspiration for this lengthy invective (I, 39–55) is unmentioned by the Oxford editors but is clearly Juvenal’s tenth satire, which asks of Democritus, ‘quid si vidisset’ [what if he’d seen] the vices of Rome.59 According to Burton’s version, Democritus will not be able to laugh for long when he sees the horrors of modern war: Would this, thinke you, have enforced our Democritus to laughter, or rather made him turne his tune, alter his tone, and weep with Heraclitus, or rather howle, roare, and teare his haire in commiseration, stand amazed; or as the Poets faigne, that Niobe was for griefe quite stupified and turned to a stone? (I, 45)

Not only is laughter a limited reaction, but also an unsustainable one when faced with such extremes of horror. Burton’s denunciation of the world’s madness may at times echo Democritus’ in the ‘Epistle to Damagetus’, but, like satire, it is not always comic. Burton revisits this part of the preface in the third Partition, at the beginning of the Subsection on symptoms of religious melancholy: Fleat Heraclitus an rideat Democritus? in attempting to speake of these Symptomes, shall I laugh with Democritus, or weepe with Heraclitus? they are so ridiculous and absurd on the one side, so lamentable and tragicall on the other, a mixt Sceane offers it selfe, so full of errours, & a promiscuous variety of objects, that I know not in what straine to represent it. (III, 364)

The ‘mixt passion’ of Burton’s persona is in his view the only proper reaction to a ‘mixt Sceane’ (this language may also remind the reader of the description of melancholy as a ‘compound mixt Malady’ (I, 23)). Although the choice between Democritean and Heraclitan attitudes echoes the mode of the preface, there is a significant alteration in attitude here. As Burton proceeds to list those symptoms which are so ‘ridiculous’ or ‘lamentable’, instead of imagining Democritus seeing them the author does so himself, using the repeated phrase ‘when I see’ (my emphasis) G. L. Hendrickson describes the pseudo-Hippocratic ‘Epistle to Damagetus’ as ‘a veritable mine of satirical [topoi]’, ‘Satura Tota Nostra Est’, Classical Philology 22 (1927), 46–60 (53). 59 Juvenal and Persius, trans. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 10.36 (pp. 368–9). 58

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(III, 364). The satire is about religious error and superstition, the subject with which he also began the prefatory passage, when he wished that Democritus could see ‘the superstition of our age, our Religious madnesse’ (I, 39). An important source for this satire (again not noted in the Oxford edition) is an anti-Catholic satiric poem by Joseph Hall in his collection Virgidemiarum (1598). It is another updating of Juvenal’s tenth satire: Hall imagines how Juvenal would have reacted ‘To see now Rome’ and its religious corruptions, such as the Church’s opulence, the ‘broken Nuns with new-shorne heads’, and the legends of the saints which will make Juvenal ‘laugh to death’.60 However, by the end of the poem his imagined laughter has turned to fury at the scale of the Church’s abuses. Burton’s own conclusion that even Democritus could not laugh at superstition thus suggests the influence of Hall. Virgidemiarum headed the list of satires prohibited by the Bishops’ Ban of 1599, and although it was eventually not condemned to the flames, it was confiscated. Yet one person who managed to secure a copy was Burton himself.61 The ‘Byting’ satires of Hall – ‘Begot long since of Truth and holy rage’ – provide a precedent for Burton’s own satiric mode, especially in their religious perspective. Burton would have known Hall’s later reputation as a preacher, devotional writer and prominent clergymen. Moreover, there is a continuity between Hall’s satire and clerical career: he viewed the satires, in Richard McCabe’s words, as ‘part of the long homiletic tradition’ originating in the Bible, and indeed Hall’s sermons ‘echo, reinstate, and develop the complaints of the Virgidemiarum repeatedly’.62 Burton’s satire likewise is linked to his homiletic mode. His searing condemnation of the world’s madness at times turns into a pulpit Jeremiad or is followed by a call to repentance. Yet is there a conflict between Burton’s railing stance and his curative purpose towards the reader? Surely the spiritual physician who wishes to help his patient cannot do so by attacking him. His satiric mode needs to be evaluated alongside his aim to write ‘for the common good of all’ (I, 8). As we have seen in his borrowings from Hall, Burton participates in a tradition of Christian satire in which the railing tones of Juvenal, Lucian or Horace can be heard in the voice of the preacher. By the seventeenth ­century there is a long-established precedent for the belief that satire is not [Joseph Hall], Virgidemiarum:  The Three Last Bookes of Byting Satyres (London, 1598), 6.2 (pp. 97–8). Hall calls Juvenal ‘Aquine’, since he was believed to have born in Aquinum. 61 See Kiessling, Library of Robert Burton, item 746. 62 Richard A. McCabe, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 32–3. 60

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only acceptable, but can be a thoroughly Christian activity. This tradition has its roots in the early Church, its most prominent patristic example being St Jerome, who thought of himself as a successor of Horace and Juvenal.63 Although followers of the tradition can be found in all periods, the sixteenth century witnessed a particular flourishing of Christian satirists, inspired (among other things) by a renewed interest in the Roman satirists and by the precedent set by Erasmus in The Praise of Folly. In a preface addressed to another ‘Democritus’ – Thomas More – Erasmus imagines critics complaining that his work ‘has a sarcastic bite which ill becomes Christian decorum’. In reply, he asserts that ‘the intelligent have always enjoyed freedom to exercise their wit on the common life of man’, before stressing satire’s educative function: ‘to criticize men’s lives without mentioning any names – I ask you, does this look like sarcasm, or rather warning and advice?’.64 The influence of Erasmus’ validation of religious satire, as long as it avoids personal attack and has a corrective purpose, can be felt throughout early modern writing and beyond.65 Burton consciously follows in Erasmus’ footsteps, as his choice of pseudonym indicates. Moreover, he paraphrases The Praise of Folly’s words on the criticism that his work is ‘too light and Comicall for a divine, too Satyricall for one of my profession’ (I, 110). He then claims to ‘answere with Erasmus’ by saying that it is not he but Democritus who speaks, emphasising the distance between himself and his persona. While this does not strictly tally with Erasmus’ own answer, quoted above, the latter also argues that in choosing Folly as his spokesperson, he is bound to observe the proprieties of her character. Burton goes on to stress the positive qualities of satire, citing Horace’s words that ‘one may speake in jest, and yet speake truth’ (I, 111) along with quotations from Erasmus’ letter to Martin Dorp and Proverbs 12, encouraging the guilty person to correct himself or herself. Not everyone agreed with the claims made on behalf of Christian satire. Francis Bacon, writing in the climate of the Martin Marprelate controversy of the late 1580s, when a series of anonymous pamphlets appeared which made the Church establishment the target of their biting wit, complained that ‘to turn religion into a comedy or satire; to search and rip up wounds with a laughing countenance … is a thing far from the devout David S. Wiesen, St. Jerome as a Satirist: A Study in Christian Latin Thought and Letters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 2. 64 Erasmus, Praise of Folly, pp. 83–4. 65 Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Satire’s Persuasive Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 185. 63

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reverence of a Christian, and scant beseeming the honest regard of a sober man’.66 The complaint that Christianity and satire are incompatible had long been heard, and would continue to be so.67 Yet this challenge would seem to have made little difference to those who employed the satiric mode in their writing. Other English examples of Christian satire, and particularly of satire which aims to do good, are easily found. Among the greatest is John Donne’s ‘Satyre III’, which shows in its opening lines some similarities to Burton’s multiple shifts of perspective: Kind pitty chokes my spleene; brave scorne forbids Those teares to issue which swell my eye-lids; I must not laugh, nor weepe sinnes, and be wise, Can railing then cure these worne maladies?68

The distinction between laughter and the ‘railing’ of satire is made clear, as the poet works out a satiric stance for addressing matters of religion. The poet’s (stifled) reaction to religious error closely resembles Burton’s on the same theme: ‘shall I laugh with Democritus, or weepe with Heraclitus?’ (III, 364). In deciding that ‘I must not laugh, nor weepe sinnes’, Donne is no doubt thinking of the opposition between these laughing and weeping philosophers of ancient Greece, whom in one of his Paradoxes he calls ‘the lovers of these extremes’, although he notes there that they have both also been called ‘lovers of wisdome’. In ‘Satyre III’ neither reaction is justifiable if he wishes to ‘be wise’.69 The most significant difference between Burton’s and Donne’s attitudes is that, where the former tries out a range of attitudes, oscillating between them in his ‘mixt passion’, the latter rejects weeping and laughter from the outset, distinguishing railing from either reaction. In Donne’s hands, satire may be the tool to ‘cure’ religious maladies. Donne’s satire can be seen, like Erasmus’, to have an educative function, providing both warning and guidance for the reader:  ‘O if thou dar’st, feare this.’70 Joseph Hall also stresses the moral imperative of his work at the end of Virgidemiarum, claiming that ‘the end of this paines was a Satyre, but the end of my Satyre a further good, which whether I attaine or no I know not; but let me be plaine with hope of profite’.71 His An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England, in Francis Bacon, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 3. 67 For a useful survey and balanced set of arguments, see Edward Timms, ‘The Christian Satirist: A Contradiction in Terms?’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 31 (1995), 101–16. 68 John Donne, The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 10, lines 1–4. 69 70 Paradoxes and Problems, ed. Helen Peters, p. 15. Donne, Satires, p. 11, line 15. 71 Hall, Virgidemiarum, p. 105. 66

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work targets social abuses as well as individual vice; thus the good he aims at has a publicly as well as a privately reformative aspect. Erasmus and Hall stand for Burton as exponents of a necessary, truthful satire which has a reformative, even a redemptive purpose. This notion has its roots in classical theory, but in its Christian formulation cure through satire is taken further: the moral urge to speak truth is transformed into a religious duty. One last example reveals how Burton’s mode as religious satirist operates in conjunction with his other authorial perspectives. In the preface when Burton justifies his work’s subject-matter, he transposes the Democritus–Heraclitus opposition to a Christian setting: Of the necessitie and generalitie of this which I have said, if any man doubt, I shall desire him to make a briefe survey of the world, as Cyprian adviseth Donat, supposing himselfe to bee transported to the top of some high Mountaine, and thence to behold the tumults & chances of this wavering world, he cannot chuse but either laugh at, or pitty it. (I, 24)

As with the account of Democritus, Burton has altered his source for his own purposes. In the original ‘Epistle to Donatus’, Cyprian urges his addressee to imagine himself transported to the top of a mountain and looking down on the world below. As a result, ‘Jam saeculi & ipse misereberis, tuique admonitus & plus in Deum gratus, majore laetitia quod evaseris, gratulaberis’ [You too will now pity the age, and, recalled to yourself and more grateful to God, will with greater delight give thanks that you have escaped].72 In a footnote, Burton provides the original Latin version of his quotation from Cyprian, thereby reinforcing the authority of his English translation, but adds his own phrase, ‘ jam simul aut ridebis aut misereberis’ (corresponding to ‘either laugh at, or pitty it’ in the main body of the text). There is no equivalent for ‘aut ridebis’ in the original letter. Burton shows that there is an alternative reaction to pitying the world by adapting Cyprian’s text to the traditional opposition between the weeping and laughing philosophers. Furthermore, as the Oxford editors have noted, ‘Burton’s phrase has the effect of aligning Cyprian’s letter with the Menippean tradition’.73 The device of viewing the world from a great height was common to many of the classical Menippean satires. In Lucian’s Charon, for example, which Burton cites repeatedly in ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, Hermes and Charon pile mountains on top of one another and climb to the top so that Charon can see the whole of humankind, and they both observe it with 72

Cited and translated in the Oxford edition, IV, 50.

73

Ibid., IV, 50.

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scornful laughter. Is Burton’s ‘Menippean’ version of Cyprian opposed to the spirit of the original, though? I would argue against such an assumption. If Burton’s addition of laughter seems too contemptuous, one must bear in mind that the ‘Epistle to Donatus’ was read along similar lines by contemporary commentators. One seventeenth-century edition summarised the letter with the comment that Cyprian exhorted his addressee towards observation of the world’s errors and ‘ad contemptum eius’.74 The notion of contemptus mundi may traditionally not mean more than a sense of detachment from worldliness, yet it can spill over into laughter: one thinks of the ghost of Troilus who ‘fully gan despise / This wrecched world’ as he ascended towards the stars, and ‘in hymself he lough right at the wo’ of his mourners.75 At the same time, Cyprian’s words and Burton’s ‘aut misereberis’ recall Jesus, ‘Vir dolorum’, who is shown ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ from an ‘exceeding high mountain’ when he is tempted by the devil in the wilderness (Matthew 4.8). The overcoming of these temptations marks the beginning of his ministry, and hence Jesus’ detachment from the world is necessarily linked to his involvement with and pity for it. Burton’s interpolation may align Cyprian’s letter with Menippean satire, but this does not mean that the latter mode therefore dominates Burton’s work. Not long after his quotation from Cyprian, he supports his argument for the folly of man with a large number of quotations from the Bible, giving his satire a serious, even homiletic edge: the holy Ghost that knows better how to judge, he calls them Fooles. The foole hath said in his heart, Ps. 53.1. And their waies utter their folly, Ps. 49.14. For what can be more mad, then for a little worldly pleasure to procure unto themselves eternall punishment? As Gregory and others inculcate unto us. (I, 27)

Similarly, later Burton cites Cyprian’s letter again, this time on the latter’s desire to observe vice by seeing into private places (I, 55). He quotes Cyprian alongside references to Lucian’s Charon and other Menippea, asking ‘what a deale of laughter would it have afforded’ to be able to view the extent of human folly. Yet at the beginning of the next paragraph the tone changes – ‘That which is more to be lamented’ (I, 56, my emphasis) – as Burton moves from detached observation to impassioned exhortation: S. Caecilii Cypriani … Opera, ed. Jacobus Pamelius (Cologne, 1617), lib. 2, ep. 2 (p. 5). During seventeenth-century debates on earthly decay Cyprian was frequently cited as an authority for the view that the world was in its senescence. Victor Irwin Harris, All Coherence Gone: A Study of the Seventeenth Century Controversy over Disorder and Decay in the Universe (London: Cass, 1966), pp. 184, 196. 75 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V, lines 1816–17, 1821, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al., 3rd edn (Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 584. 74

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for the diseases of the minde, wee take no notice of them: Lust harrowes us on the one side, Envy, Anger, ambition on the other. Wee are torne in pieces by our passions, as so many wild horses, one in disposition, another in habite; one is melancholy, another mad; and which of us all seekes for helpe, doth acknowledge his error, or knowes he is sicke? (I, 56)

Burton’s sudden switch to the first-person plural indicates a pose of more serious concern, as he changes from laughing at the world’s folly to stirring the individual towards self-knowledge. The vocabulary of torture (‘torne in pieces’), which Burton so frequently uses in the first Partition to indicate the suffering brought about by melancholy and, in a broader sense, sin, underlines his seriousness. By including himself among those who do not admit their mental disease, Burton comes down from the satirist’s detached position ‘in some high place above you all’ (I, 4) and registers his involvement in mankind, resuming the role of fellow-sufferer. He concludes that ‘Thus not acknowledging our owne errors, and imperfections, wee securely deride others, as if wee alone were free, and spectators of the rest’ (I, 57), the latter phrase echoing his own earlier description of himself as a ‘meere spectator’ (I, 4). He undermines his own secure position, and admits its ridiculousness – ‘So thou laughest at me, and I at thee, both at a third’ (I, 57–8) – uniting writer and reader in the final phrase. Yet he then once more separates himself, returning to his mocking role as he states that ‘I am of Democritus opinion for my part, I hold them worthy to be laughed at, a company of brainsicke dizards’ (I, 59). Erasmus’ paradox that we need a Democritus to laugh at other Democrituses forms an undercurrent to this giddying change of perspectives. Burton oscillates between positions of involvement and detachment, this varied perspective being symptomatic of the ‘mixt passion’ of the preface: the melancholic, the satirised satirist, the physician of folly. In his role as Democritus Junior Burton finds justification for the multiplicity of perspectives he adopts. As spiritual physician, he aims, like Democritus, to cure others’ melancholy; as melancholic, like his carefully crafted version of Democritus, he wishes to cure it in himself. As both, he seeks to sustain the perspective of being both within and without the disease which is necessary to help the reader towards cure. Lastly, as Democritean satirist, he rails at folly and vice in the world as a whole and in the reader individually, joining a tradition of Christian satire which always claims that it mocks in order to heal. Burton also recognises the instabilities and inconsistencies in this satiric position. We have seen how, early on in the preface, he claims to write out of a ‘mixt passion’ and aligns himself with the satiric styles of Menippus,

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Lucian, Juvenal and others. Later on, though, he claims that ‘they that laugh and contemne others … deserve to be mocked, are as giddy-headed, and lie as open as any other’ (I, 101), mentioning as examples Democritus, Menippus and Lucian, among others. The satirists  – and by implication this includes Burton himself – are part of the foolish world, despite their postures of detachment from it. In aligning Burton’s writing with Christian satiric tradition, then, one should beware of taking its reformative claims altogether at face value and thus explaining away Burton’s sharp, even violent satiric attacks. The excesses of his Democritean persona should not be domesticated or smoothed over, any more than Juvenal’s or Lucian’s should. Donne’s description of Democritus and Heraclitus as lovers of extremes can be aptly applied to Burton’s authorial persona, whose reactions are at times similarly intemperate. As I have noted, the laughter of the melancholic can be a symptom of sickness. The enjoyment of reading the Anatomy partly stems from the dizzying effect of the author’s unexpected shifts in tone and mood, from obsequious deference to railing, from homiletic seriousness to Cynical laughter. No one tone is allowed to dominate the text for too long, and moreover Burton’s sympathy for the reader is never overloaded. The various different aspects of Burton’s self-presentation merge into one another, and this fluidity is a challenge to the reader, stimulating a sensitive, agile response. Although Burton envisages his work as having therapeutic effects, he is not creating a single, narrowly defined programme of curative reading, nor one that remains stable and consistent throughout the work. His insistence that his readers are unknown to him – whosoever thou art – presupposes that each reaction will be different. If no single critical interpretation of the Anatomy can be comprehensive, this is precisely because Burton makes a certain and carefully controlled measure of instability and dissonance into a feature of his text. His multiple textual persona – as minister, doctor, patient, Democritus Junior – is designed not for static self-display but as a dynamic force with varied potential effects on the reader. Burton will not let his reader be. That, as we have seen throughout this book, is an essential element of his method of cure.

Ch apter 6

The Structure of Melancholy: From Cause to Cure

In order to ‘rectifie the minde’ (III, 5) afflicted by the varied disease of melancholy, Burton designs his work in inclusive terms, so that the reader’s anonymity becomes a positive element of successful cure, not its impediment. The melancholic may read advice particular to his or her physiological type and circumstances, but is also encouraged to read about all sorts of melancholic experience for his or her benefit. Burton himself plays the role of spiritual physician to his readers, while also showing himself to be a fellow-melancholic. As healer and sufferer, he displays his understanding of the disease from both the inside and the outside, an understanding which is essential as a therapeutic tool. The method of cure offered through the text is by no means an untroubled one, though, and the use of writing to relieve symptoms does not always harmoniously coincide with the aim to help others. In this final chapter I wish to turn from questions about the presentation of reader and author in order to examine how Burton’s handling of the attributes of melancholy relates to what has been discussed thus far in the book. I have already emphasised at length his interest in religious melancholy and the bearing this has on the text, and further questions about theological aspects of melancholy will be explored in this chapter. The long-standing connection drawn between disease and the Fall is repeated by Burton, who portrays melancholy as an inevitable consequence of human sinfulness, and at times rebukes the reader as culpable for his or her suffering. At the same time, he gives particular attention to the role of the passions in provoking the disease. Spiritual, psychological and physiological aspects of melancholy are intertwined throughout the Anatomy, with a particular emphasis on the emotions and on the unhappiness caused by melancholy. Despite the claims put forward by some critics, the author is not writing in praise of the melancholy from which he suffers, and which he aims to cure in himself and others. 167

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Having identified these causes, how does Burton move towards a cure? I will examine some ways in which ‘Cause’ and ‘Cure’ Sections relate to one another in the Anatomy, suggesting a parallel with the law and gospel structure of religious writing. I will also investigate the importance of the function of the will in Burton’s presentation of cure. Once again, the particular theological complexion of the Anatomy serves a curative function. While Burton’s use of Hemmingius allows him to offer hope to all readers against despair regardless of their spiritual states (as shown in Chapter 2), his adoption of a doctrine of the will developed by Philipp Melanchthon (Hemmingius’ teacher) allows him to dwell on the power  – albeit limited  – of humans to change themselves. By contrast, the Lutheran doctrine of the will, adopted by Calvinists, denies any agency to the individual. Hence one can observe another way in which Burton subtly distances himself from the mainstream of English theology for therapeutic purposes. The kind of self-improvement he encourages is not available to strict adherents of Luther’s theology of will. Burton’s theology is closely linked both to the way he treats his reader and to his attitude towards self-therapy in the course of his work. T h e or ig i ns of m e l a nc holy As the first Partition of the Anatomy shows, melancholy can arise from a wide variety of causes. Bad diet, one’s parents, education, too much sex or not enough, witchcraft:  all can trigger the varied condition encompassed by the term ‘melancholy’. I have concentrated on the psychological and spiritual aspects of the disease, since these are, I would argue, of the greatest interest and importance for Burton. They are for his contemporaries too. Angus Gowland has drawn attention to the early modern perception of melancholy as primarily an emotional condition with religious and ethical significance.1 Burton is a key figure in this re-orienting of melancholy towards moral philosophical and spiritual domains because of his strongly ethical perspective on melancholy, as important recent work by Gowland and Christopher Tilmouth has demonstrated.2 The passions play a prominent part in Burton’s understanding of melancholy. Burton emphasises the significance of all the six Galenic ‘non-naturals’ – diet, retention and evacuation, air, exercise, sleeping and waking, and the Angus Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, P&P 191 (2006), 77–120 (84). Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy:  Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 16, 99–100; Christopher Tilmouth, ‘Burton’s “Turning Picture”: Argument and Anxiety in The Anatomy of Melancholy’, RES 56 (2005), 524–49 (525).

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passions – in causing and curing melancholy, but devotes by far the most space to his discussion of the passions.3 Drawing on a tradition which develops from Stoic philosophy (in its Christian revised version) as well as Galenic medicine, Burton emphasises the harmful effects of excessive passions and the necessity of a therapy which corrects the mind. As we shall later see, he adopts the therapeutic techniques of classical moral philosophy, particularly Stoic writers such as Seneca, as he urges the melancholic to change his or her mental attitude. Yet he is not a thoroughgoing neo-Stoic and explicitly rejects the Stoic doctrine of apathy, that the wise person should be ‘without al manner of passions and perturbations whatsoever’ (I, 247). Burton’s ethical outlook is closer to the Aristotelian ideal of moderation and temperance of the passions.4 His ethical understanding of melancholy is overlaid by his Christian beliefs: he finds sin to be at the root of melancholic suffering, and encourages repentance as part of healing. For Burton and his contemporaries, the passions and sin are closely connected. Treatises on the subject were popular in the period, and Burton uses many of them – including works by Thomas Wright, Levinus Lemnius and Timothy Bright – as sources.5 A spiritual emphasis is often found in such treatises. Lemnius’ Touchstone of Complexions (1576) is, in the words of William Webster Newbold, ‘a hodgepodge of physiological observations interspersed with quotations from classical authors, exhortations to virtue, and warnings against vice’, the total work being ‘recognizably the product of a physician turned divine’.6 Timothy Bright, another physician who would later turn divine, also discusses both medical and religious aspects of disease, although he is careful to keep strict boundaries between the two. The Jesuit priest Thomas Wright, probably the best-known writer on the passions in the early seventeenth century, is clearly an influence on Burton. Like Burton after him, he links the passions to sin: the inordinate motions of Passions, their preventing of reason, their rebellion to virtue, are thorny briars sprung from the infected root of original sin; … The See Tilmouth, ‘Burton’s “Turning Picture” ’, 533–7. On classical ethics and their reception in the early modern period, see Jill Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge University Press 1988; repr. 1992), pp. 303–86. 5 Levinus Lemnius, A Touchstone of Complexions, trans. Thomas Newton (London, 1576); Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy (London, 1586); Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601). For a history of writing in English on the passions in the period, see the introduction to Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General, ed. William Webster Newbold (New York: Garland, 1986), pp. 17–23. 6 Ibid., p. 18. 3

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Passions likewise augment or diminish the deformity of actual sins; they blind reason, they seduce the will, and therefore are special causes of sin.7

At the same time, again like Burton, Wright stresses their physiological nature and effects. He explains that passions, which are ‘certain internal acts or operations of the soul’, are so called because ‘when these affections are stirring in our minds they alter the humours of our bodies, causing some passion or alteration in them’.8 In Wright’s handling of them, the passions represent the coupling of religious and medical approaches which is so important to Burton’s method. As I have already shown, the passions are seen as closely connected both to original and actual sin, yet it is not true to say that all the passions are therefore seen as sinful. In ‘Democritus Junior’, Burton explains that a good divine should help ‘the vices and passions of the Soule, Anger, Lust, Desperation, Pride, Presumption, &c. by applying that Spirituall Physicke’ (I, 22). Yet he also classes sorrow and fear as passions, following tradition.9 The passions are not purely negative. Thomas Wright, for instance, uses the example of Christ, who ‘no doubt was subject to these passions’, to demonstrate that they are not sinful as long as they are guided by reason. The example of Christ as an experiencer of passions is commonly invoked by writers of the period to rebut the Stoic view that all passions should be rejected.10 As we have seen in the previous chapter, Burton associates the sorrow of Christ with melancholy. In discussing the passions as cause of melancholy, he at times holds the reader responsible because he or she is sinful, yet also treats the reader as an innocent victim of them. Burton’s method of textual cure relies on these varying levels of responsibility, in which the melancholic is both captive to an illness and able to change. The role of the passions in the Anatomy has received much recent critical attention, but Burton’s treatment of sin and melancholy has been less closely analysed and hence demands further comment. He highlights the central role of sin as the source of melancholy from the beginning of the first Partition of the Anatomy, a meditation on ‘Mans Excellency, Fall, Miseries, Infirmities, The Causes of them’ (I, 121). He follows the French physician Andreas Laurentius in presenting first the original perfection of humankind, then the ruinous consequences of the Fall. Yet while Laurentius states that he will avoid the diseases of the soul, 8 Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 94. Burton explains the different divisions of the passions, including the methods of Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas, in the ‘Division of Perturbations’, I, 255–6. 10 Wright, Passions, ed. Newbold, p. 100; J. B. Bamborough, The Little World of Man (London: Longmans, Green, 1952), p. 44; Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, pp. 368–9. 7 9

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preferring to ‘leave the discourse for the learned Divines’, and proceeds to examine purely medical causes of melancholy, Burton continues to dwell on human sin, another example of how far he integrates medical and religious approaches.11 The primary cause of melancholy is original sin (I, 122), but the condition is also caused by current sin, ‘weaknesse, want of governement, our facilitie and pronenesse in yeelding to severall lusts, in giving way to every passion and perturbation of the minde’ (I, 128). His quotation of Chrysostom’s phrase, ‘Ubi peccatum, ibi procella’ [where there is sin, there is also violent passion] (I, 123) illustrates neatly how the two are related for Burton. The inability to restrain passion leads both to committing sin and to bodily illness, since we ‘overthrowe our constitutions’ (I, 128) by unbalancing the humours through intemperate behaviour. Hence melancholy represents the congruence of medicine and religion not merely in terms of Burton’s approach to cure (as physician and minister), but also in terms of causes. The association between sin, melancholy and more generally unhappiness is revealed not simply through the arguments Burton makes:  he also instils this prevailing theme in the reader’s mind through recurrent images, echoed phrases and lexical patterns. In what follows I will trace some of these stylistic features, since it is important to recognise that Burton does not merely use direct statement to develop particular arguments and topics. His rhetoric reveals itself over the course of the whole book, to bring home to the reader certain ideas about melancholy. Of course, not every reader will notice them, and I do not wish to contend that the text relies for its effects on being read sequentially from the first page to the last. Yet attentive readers who do just that will observe particular recurrences and patterns. One example of this, recognisable enough to be called a motif, is the way Burton turns the direction of his argument in order to contrast ideals with the failings of reality. To give a general summary of the motif, Burton begins by presenting an image of true human happiness, then topples it by showing the utter insufficiency of humans to reach such a standard, through their own fault. This pattern of contrasts is set at the beginning of the first Partition (and the beginning of the world) by the transformation of ‘Man, the most excellent, and noble creature of the World, … at first pure, divine, perfect, happy’ (I, 121) into ‘a cast-away, a catiffe, one of the most miserable creatures of the World’ as a result of ‘the sinne of our first parent Adam’ (I, 122). We Andreas Laurentius, A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight:  Of Melancholike Diseases; Of Rheumes, and of Old Age, trans. Richard Surphlet (London, 1599), p. 81.

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hear this rhetorical ‘fall’ again and again in the work, but in later occurrences its specific function is to remind the reader that unhappiness and corruption cannot solely be blamed on the loss of the Garden of Eden, but are also consequences of actual sin. The motif I am describing can be found at the end of the Subsection on ‘Æmulation, Hatred, Faction, Desire of Revenge Causes’: How happy might we bee, and end our time with blessed daies, and sweet content, if we could containe our selves, and as we ought to doe, put up injuries, learne humility, meekenesse, patience, forget and forgive, as in Gods word we are injoyned, compose such small controversies among our selves, moderate our passions in this kinde, and thinke better of others, as Paul would have us, then of our selves:  be of like affection one towards another, and not avenge our selves, but have peace with all men. But being that wee are so peevish and perverse, insolent and proud, so factious and seditious, so malitious and envious: we do invicem angariare [take it in turns to harass one another], maule and vexe one another, torture, disquiet, and precipitate our selves into that gulfe of woes and cares, aggravate our misery, and melancholy, heape upon us hell and eternall ­damnation. (I, 268)

Burton describes an ideal of the happy life lived in accordance with Christian principles. This ideal is achievable, he implies, and would transform not only personal but also public life. Yet violent passions prevent it. The change of direction in his argument is accompanied by a change of rhythm. The first sentence has a loose syntax and a gentle cadence created by clauses of varying lengths. By contrast, the second sentence begins with harsh plosives and uses a sequence of paired adjectives describing human vice, as Burton denounces its violent effects on others as well as on individuals themselves. He emphasises humankind’s responsibility both for destroying personal happiness and for the divine punishment of ‘hell and eternall damnation’, with the two dactyls and a trochee (the two final words make up a cursus planus) ending the Subsection on a particularly resounding note.12 These two aspects are closely linked: throughout the Anatomy Burton ties unhappiness to sin, whereas before the Fall man is ‘pure, divine, perfect, happy’ (I, 121). As the final word ‘happy’, the rhetorical climax of the list, suggests, Burton sees the loss of happiness as one of the most serious consequences of the Fall. In fact, although he does end on a note of damnation in the above quotation, warnings of the prospect of hell for the reprobate sinner are far less commonly heard in The cursus is a pattern of stress used to end a rhetorical period in a rhythmic and flowing way (the cursus planus consists of a dactyl and trochee); Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 43.

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the Anatomy than reminders about the emotional distress which humankind inflicts upon itself through sin. In a work about disease, it is fitting that Burton views sin in terms of suffering, although his attitude also has sound theological precedent in Luther’s declaration in a sermon that ‘sin is pure unhappiness, forgiveness pure happiness’.13 For Burton, sin is not only the cause of melancholy (as we have seen) but also its symptom, an example of what Christopher Tilmouth has described as the ‘necessarily self-propagating’ nature of the disease.14 The condition of melancholy is, at its broadest level of meaning, the condition of sinfulness and unhappiness. As Burton revisits this ‘unhappiness’ motif later in the work, it becomes more and more emphatic. Versions of the motif all feature a shift towards an emphasis on personal responsibility, imagery of torture, and vocabulary which is violent, even bestial. These characteristics can all be seen in part of the Subsection on discontents, cares and miseries as causes (I, 270–79). Having described the damage caused by ‘outward accidents’, Burton continues, And which is worse, as if discontents and miseries would not come fast enough upon us; homo homini dæmon [man is a devil to man], we maul, persecute, and study how to sting, gaule, and vexe one another with mutuall hatred, abuses, injuries, preying upon, and devouring, as so many ravenous birds, & as juglers, panders, bawdes, cosening one another, or raging as wolves, tigers, and divels, wee take a delight to torment one another. (I, 276)

This time Burton heaps his words in sets of three to intensify the sense of disgust and horror at human vice. The verb ‘maul’, echoing the previous quotation, has bestial overtones which are brought out explicitly in this passage in the comparison to birds, wolves and tigers. They surface again when Burton explains how ‘wee should have more ease and quietnesse then we have, lesse melancholy’ by avoiding cruel jokes and calumnies about others, ‘whereas on the contrary, we study to misuse each other, how to sting and gaule, like two fighting bores, bending all our force and wit, friends, fortunes, to crucifie one anothers soules’ (I, 341). One hears echoes of previous passages in the phrase ‘we study … how to sting and gaule’. But whereas on the one hand we ‘study’ and use ‘wit’ to injure others – a suggestion of humankind’s advanced malevolence – on the other we degenerate into wild beasts; the comparison serves to imply Quoted by Darrin M. McMahon, The Pursuit of Happiness:  A History from the Greeks to the Present (London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 166. 14 Tilmouth, ‘Burton’s “Turning Picture” ’, 537. 13

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that the faculty of reason is not being used to restrain violent impulses, as it should. This idea is a prominent theme in the Anatomy, from the first Subsection where Burton describes fallen man as ‘inferior to a beast … a monster by a stupend Metamorphosis, a fox, a dogge, a hogge, what not?’ (I, 122) (Burton’s acknowledged sources for this idea are Psalm 49.20 and a homily by Chrysostom on Genesis 2). Although Burton’s comparison of human behaviour to that of wild animals is not unique, it is emphatically expressed through the repeated use of the motif, and particularly strongly in the two cases where it concludes a Subsection. In the third Partition, the motif surfaces again during Burton’s analysis of the causes of love melancholy. A lengthy passage is devoted to praising the virtue of charity, including a large number of Bible quotations on the subject, culminating in the exclamation, ‘Angelicall soules, how blessed, how happy should we bee, so loving, how might wee triumph over the divell, and have another heaven upon earth!’ (III, 33). Once more, Burton holds up a vision of human happiness on earth, put in even stronger terms than in the first Partition: Eden can be restored, he implies. This makes the inevitable rhetorical fall even harder in the next sentence: But this we cannot doe, and which is the cause of all our woes, miseries, discontent, melancholy, want of this Charity. We doe invicem angariare, contemne, insult, vexe, torture, molest and hold one anothers nose to the grindstone hard, provoke, raile, scoffe, calumniate, challenge, hate, abuse. (III, 33)

Michael O’Connell has remarked that one of Burton’s favourite techniques is congeries, or word heaps.15 Here, we see Burton piling up more and more violent verbs, trying to push even further the language of human savagery he has employed in earlier passages. The passionate denunciation of human malice leads into one of the most brilliant passages in the Anatomy, the dramatised exchange between the rich man and his destitute kinsman, whose cries for aid are intermingled with his relative’s unrelenting onward progress: ‘Shew some pitty for Christs sake, pitty a sicke man, an old man, &c. hee cares not, ride on’ (III, 34). In the motif, Burton not only echoes vocabulary and phrases from previous versions of the motif, but makes his subject – the lack of charity – even more significant by describing it as cause of ‘all our woes, miseries, discontent, melancholy’. As so often with Burton’s lists, the last item is the most striking: despite all that has gone before, want of charity is identified as ‘the cause of … melancholy’ (my emphasis).   Michael O’Connell, Robert Burton (Boston: Twayne, 1986), p. 86.

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Ag a i ns t be n e f ic i a l m e l a nc holy Burton’s portrayal of the state of sinfulness as one of, above all, unhappiness is a notable quality of his work. This association between unhappiness and sin may be found in Luther, but it is given much less prominence in English religious writers of Burton’s time. For example, although there is an implicit admission in all literature on the cure of wounded consciences that sin brings emotional affliction on the sinner, the primary association of sin in these works is with its ultimate consequence: damnation. Burton occasionally sounds this note, yet it is by no means a dominant theme of the Anatomy. In his work, the religious and emotional aspects of melancholy are associated in a quite different way from many of his contemporaries. Moreover, many religious authors of the period argue that a state of unhappiness is an important part of the process of salvation. In the pithy phrase of Richard Sibbes (one of the more accommodating and moderate writers on the afflicted conscience), a ‘holy despaire in our selves is the ground of true hope’.16 Burton does not insist on the necessity of this, despite the precedent set by many of his acknowledged sources. He rarely presents the illness as positive for the sufferer or promotes the experience that Henry Vaughan welcomes as ‘holy / Grief and soul-curing melancholy’.17 Although writers such as Timothy Bright and Robert Yarrow emphasise the important distinction between melancholy and the afflicted conscience, some also claim that the former can be helpful for the latter process. Since melancholics are more susceptible to fear and sorrow, the argument runs, they are more likely to recognise their own sin and be humbled as a result, which is the necessary precursor to receiving God’s mercy. Robert Bolton, for example, claims that melancholics have a ‘passive advantage’ over others in conversion because they are likely ‘more easily to tremble and stoope under the mighty hand of God, and hammer of his Law’.18 This religious culture of encouraging continual and excessive sorrow for sin is not without its critics: Richard Baxter would later warn that ‘Overmuch Sorrow swalloweth up all comfortable Sense of the Infinite Goodness and Love of God, and thereby hindereth the Soul from Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reede, and Smoaking Flax (London, 1630), p. 43. Ian Green describes Sibbes as moderate, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 319. 17 ‘The Seed Growing Secretly’, The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 513. 18 Robert Bolton, Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences (London, 1631), pp. 205, 206. 16

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Loving Him.’19 There is clear evidence elsewhere in this text that Baxter had read Burton, and it is possible that the later author found Burton’s views on the subject of sorrow appealing. For nowhere in the Anatomy is sorrow promoted, and for the most part Burton dwells on the damaging effects of melancholy. This does not mean that he entirely resists the argument that suffering can be beneficial. He uses the conventional consolation that suffering is God’s chastisement for sin, and can be inflicted ‘to exercise and try our patience here in this life, to bring us home, to make us knowe God and our selves, to informe, & teach us wisdome’ (I, 124), and he invokes the standard scriptural references such as ‘God chastiseth them whom he loveth’ (II, 131) (Hebrews 12.6). In ‘On Experience’ Montaigne uses a similar argument about illness being a sign of God’s love.20 However, this is wholly different from arguing that sorrow should be actively sought out. Burton’s aim seems to be to make the best of a painful experience for the reader. Unlike strict Calvinist writers, he allows the possibility of healthiness, rather than undermining it in favour of a carefully schematised process of saving suffering. While God may use adversity as a means of improving the individual soul, even saving it, suffering is not therefore necessary to achieve this. If Burton does not abide by English Calvinist teaching on spiritual affliction, he also avoids following the tradition, classical in origin, of viewing melancholy as a desirable condition. The notion derives from the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems, which asked ‘Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic …?’; it was popularised in the Renaissance in Ficino’s De Vita (1482). The role of the suffering, melancholic genius appealed to courtiers and writers alike, and was in vogue throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart period.21 However, despite the widespread interest in this notion, Burton pays little attention to it. In ‘The Authors Abstract of Melancholy’, a poem prefacing the Anatomy which seems to have been a source for Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’, Burton presents the attractive side of the illness. The opposing views that there is ‘Naught so sweet as Melancholy’ and ‘Naught so sad as Melancholy’ are heard in alternate stanzas. Yet this does not mean Richard Baxter, Preservatives against Melancholy and Overmuch Sorrow: Or the Cure of Both by Faith and Physick (London, 1713), pp. 11–12. 20 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (London:  Penguin, 1991), p. 1238. 21 Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems 30.1, cited by J. B. Bamborough in the Oxford edition, I, xxviii. For a survey of this subject, see Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951), Chapter 8 (‘The Dignity of Melancholy’); Bamborough, Little World of Man, pp. 103–18. 19

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that Burton therefore promotes the former attitude. The basis for the ‘happy’ melancholic’s contentment is shown to be illusory and unstable, since the speaker pleases himself or herself with ‘phantasmes sweet’ and ‘pleasant toyes time to beguile’ (I, lxix, lxxi). At the end it is the voice of the prosecution, not the defence, which is heard: ‘Naught so damn’d as Melancholy’ (I, lxxi). The poem is best read, not as a dialogue about the disease between two different melancholics, but rather as a representation of the fluctuating psychological state of the sufferer at different points in the illness. Burton later describes how ‘Voluntary solitarinesse’ can seem at first ‘most pleasant’ to some, but ‘gently brings on like a Siren, a shooing-horne, or some Sphinx to this irrevocable gulfe’ of melancholy (I, 243). His language here leaves the reader in no doubt about his seriousness. Solitude draws the individual in through its alluring, mysterious nature, becomes habitual, then inescapable, at which point ‘this infernall plague of Melancholy seazeth on them, and terrifies their soules’. The prefatory poem can be taken as a warning against the custom of indulging in ‘sweet melancholy’, which can lead to emotional and even spiritual torment. In summary, although Burton recognises that melancholy can have pleasing qualities, his aim is not to promote the disease, but to explore and treat it. If his writing can be said to be linked to fashionable melancholy, it is perhaps to the extent that interest in the subject may have helped the book’s sales. There is, however, little evidence to support Rosalie Colie’s suggestion that the Anatomy is a praise of melancholy in the tradition of ‘paradoxical encomia’.22 As J. B. Bamborough remarks with fine understatement, if this was Burton’s true purpose, ‘he disguised it with great care’.23 Colie’s interpretation ignores the seriousness of Burton’s aim, stated forcefully in the text, of writing for ‘the common good of all’ (I, 8). It also ignores the texture of his language. I have argued that Burton uses a particular motif to dramatise the relationship between melancholy and sin and its emotional connotations. A related stylistic feature which he repeats in the text is a pattern of vocabulary connected with torture. This element is striking, but has barely been noticed by critics so far. Particularly remarkable is Burton’s use of the verb ‘crucify’ forty-six times (by my count), generally to signify ‘torment’ (in a physical, mental or emotional sense).24 The OED cites Burton as the first Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica:  The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 458. 23 Oxford edition, I, xxx. 24 This word search was aided by the use of Project Gutenberg’s online text of The Anatomy of Melancholy, www.gutenberg.org/etext/10800. 22

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source of this meaning of the word, and it seems likely that he was the originator of this unusual sense.25 Although one might assume a Christian provenance, in fact the word derives from the Latin ‘cruciare’, meaning to torture, and is used in its figurative sense by Terence, Horace and Cicero, among others.26 Nonetheless, Burton’s adoption of the term into English is surely designed to have Christian resonances, especially since it often denotes the pain humans inflict on themselves through sin. Theological writings, particularly the works of the Church fathers in Latin (Burton knew little Greek), are probably a source of inspiration for Burton’s use of the word: he employs it in translations from writers including Chrysostom (I, 257) and Cyprian (I, 265), as well as Bernard of Clairvaux (I, 281) and Luther (III, 414). The quotations from Cyprian and Bernard use variations on ‘cruciare’, while Luther’s ‘discruciant’ has an equivalent meaning. Burton’s translation of Chrysostom’s phrase in its Latin version ‘Crucem circumfert’ (carries around a cross) is looser, and one might also say more extreme. By adopting the word ‘crucify’ to translate these writers Burton is not only following a precedent but also building on it by finding a vernacular equivalent which maintains the specificity and power of the original. The frequency with which Burton uses ‘crucify’, and the fact that it remains there through all six editions, attest to its importance for Burton’s scheme. Melancholy is not only a metaphor for all human suffering, but is inextricably connected to sin, and hence to the cross. Burton employs the word with varying degrees of gravity. An early use in the Anatomy occurs during one of his statements of purpose: he knows of no better way of spending his time for the service of others, he tells the reader, ‘then to prescribe means how to prevent and cure so universall a malady, an Epidemicall disease, that so often, so much crucifies the body and minde’ (I, 110). The declaration reiterates his oft-stated aim of writing for the good of others. Here, the verb ‘crucify’ is applied in a straightforward way to the effects of melancholy on the sufferer: its meaning is torture, in its physical and mental sense. There is no suggestion that the melancholic is anything other than innocent victim of the disease. At the beginning of the paragraph Burton has self-consciously steered his discourse away from satirical attack on the world’s madness, claiming that he has a ‘more serious intent at this time’ (I, 109), that is, the cure of melancholy. By the end of the paragraph, his tone is one of sympathy and pity for sufferers of the disease. 25

OED, s.v. ‘crucify’, 2b. A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary, ed. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), s.v. ‘crucio, avi, atum’.

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The next occurrence of the verb ‘crucify’ is at the end of the first Subsection of the main text, on the origins of disease in the Fall. Here, responsibility for illnesses of all sorts is placed firmly on humankind, seeing that ‘Our intemperance it is, that pulls so many severall incurable diseases upon our heads’ (I, 128). He continues by claiming that ‘last of all, that which crucifies us most, is our owne folly, madnesse’. Although the verb still makes the sufferer passive, the force of the verb is to show humanity’s self-inflicted pain, a notion which is underlined by the Subsection’s conclusion that melancholy is ‘a just and deserved punishment of our sinnes’. Whereas in the previous example a parallel can be drawn between Christ – crucified despite being sinless – and the innocent victim of disease, here the verb serves only to heighten the contrast between the two. Burton’s use of ‘crucify’ is part of a wider pattern of vocabulary which is designed to bring the pain of melancholy to prominence within the text. Phrases from ‘Prognosticks of Melancholy’ describing the more serious cases include ‘torture and extremity’ (I, 431), ‘insufferable paines’, ‘torne in pieces’, ‘perpetually tormented’. The word ‘macerate’, meaning ‘to render weak, vex, worry’, is another favourite of Burton’s.27 He uses these words repeatedly and also adds more as he expands his text, a sign of their importance to his thinking. Rhonda Blair has found a striking set of revisions in the sixth edition of the Anatomy (1651): Burton inserts the word ‘agony’ eleven times in the first Partition, in all cases with the sense of ‘anguish of mind’.28 This is especially notable since Burton makes only fifteen additions altogether in the first two Partitions of this edition, and since the word is used only twice in these Partitions in previous editions. Blair suggests that Burton may have added these revisions in one sitting, or at least ‘within a space of time short enough for him to have kept the word, and idea of, “agony” in mind’.29 This very plausible conclusion indicates how important the vocabulary of mental torment is to Burton. He not only finds it necessary to convey the pain of melancholy through a recurring motif, repeated words, including a new latinism, and violent images, but even methodically adds a new word pattern to the final edition. e.g. I, 406. OED, s.v. ‘macerate’, 1b. Rhonda L. Blair, ‘Robert Burton’s “Agony”: A Pattern of Revision made for the Sixth Edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 78 (1984), 215–18 (215). 29 Ibid., 218. Blair was associate editor of the Oxford edition of the Anatomy. At the time of her article, all six editions had been collated up to the end of the second Partition. 27 28

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The study of these words leads us to another important question, concerning the structure of the work. The word ‘agony’ appears in the first Partition but not the second, while ‘crucify’ occurs far more commonly in Sections on causes, symptoms and prognostics than on cures.30 This concentration of vocabulary is not surprising: when Burton analyses the origins and nature of the disease, he stresses its tormenting effects and the role of human responsibility in bringing about mental anguish. In the Sections on cures, however, the condemnatory and lamentatory tones are mostly left behind in favour of a more positive discourse of consolation and exhortation to self-improvement. The distinction between these types of writing is by no means rigid:  consolatory passages are found among lists of symptoms, and sharp rebukes among the cures. Burton characteristically varies his style and mode of address to the reader, and disrupts the single linear progression from cause to cure, as well as interjecting digressions. Nonetheless, the different stylistic textures of cause and cure Sections are sufficiently noticeable to form a significant feature of the text. How should these differences in Burton’s rhetoric on causes and cures be understood? We have seen that the Anatomy follows the model of learned medical manuals in investigating causes, symptoms and prognostics, not just providing remedies, but departs from them in offering cures directly to the melancholic reader. Thus the writing on cures has a wider range of influences on its style and approach. Burton’s examination of disease’s origins and effects is medically orientated and predominantly factual, although shot through with emotional, spiritual and philosophical responses to the pain of melancholy. His writing on cures is far more hybrid and has a more strongly persuasive function, and there is evidence that he paid greater attention to it during the course of his revisions. The first Partition – causes, symptoms and prognostics – grew by 26 per cent between the 1621 and 1651 editions. The second Partition – cures – grew by 46 per cent over the same period.31 Throughout this study I have drawn attention to the religious dimension of Burton’s work, and I would contend that the shift in mode from the causes, symptoms and prognostics to cures should be understood in terms of Protestant rhetorical structures. As a minister, Burton would have been well schooled in the scheme of law and gospel, the basic structuring The word appears twenty times in the first Partition and five times in the second, for example. Based on the statistical analysis in the Oxford edition, I, xxxviii.

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device behind nearly all early modern English sermons. The Anatomy is not a sermon, but we can detect this pervasive law–gospel pattern at work within it. Luther described the movement from law to gospel as ‘the summe of all Christian doctrine’.32 The law is God’s justice, represented by the teaching of the Old Testament; God requires obedience to his commands, but sinful humans are incapable of achieving this. The gospel is God’s mercy, represented by the New Testament; God offers grace and therefore salvation to sinners through Christ’s sacrifice. Although the two are intimately related, in practical terms they are applied separately and carefully. As Luther explains, mimicking the language of Ecclesiastes 3, ‘There is a time to dye, and a time to live: there is a time to heare the law, and a time to despise ye law: there is a time to heare the Gospell, and there is a time to be ignorant of the Gospell.’33 William Perkins explains in his preaching manual The Arte of Prophecying that the law reveals ‘the disease of sinne’ but ‘affords no remedie’. The gospel, however, has ‘the efficacie of the holy Ghost adjoyned with it, by whome beeing regenerated, we have strength both to beleeve the Gospell, and to performe those things which it commandeth’.34 The imagery of sickness and healing is striking in descriptions of the law–gospel scheme. Robert Bolton, imagining the law as an injury rather than a disease, explains that the preacher’s task is ‘First to wound by the Law, and then to heale by the Gospell’.35 Burton’s writing on the causes, symptoms and prognostics of melancholy has much in common with the law mode. As we have seen, he interprets melancholy as part of humankind’s inability to conform to God’s word, to renounce sin, and in short to be happy. The motif I described earlier emphasises this inability: Burton follows his praise of charity, for example, with the phrase ‘But this we cannot doe’ (III, 33; my emphasis). The motif works to humble the reader, as hearing the law should, by showing him or her how far humans have fallen irretrievably from the ideal. The healing attribute of the gospel mode has links to Burton’s curative writing, too, but in a more complex fashion. For Luther, Perkins and Bolton, the law–gospel pattern represents the complete inability of humankind to change itself for good. For them, the human will is captive. Burton’s stress on the failures of men would seem to align him with this view. Yet what part does the will play in the Martin Luther, A Commentarie of M. Doctor Martin Luther upon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Galathians (London, 1616), fol. 59v. 33 Ibid., fol. 59v. 34 William Perkins, The Workes of … Mr. W. Perkins, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1608), II, 752. 35 Bolton, Instructions, p. 131. 32

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cure of melancholy? One must return to Burton’s discussions of human responsibility to find out. In ‘Diseases in generall’, the important initial Subsection which sets the tone for the first Partition, Burton insists on the degree to which humans are responsible for their own suffering. This is first achieved through subtle hints, then through outright statements. He considers the contribution that ‘our owne parents’ (I, 127) make to our suffering and supports this argument with a quotation from Ezekiel: ‘The fathers have eaten sower grapes, and the childrens teeth are set on edge’ (Ezekiel 18.2). As ever with Burton, one must be cautious about how he uses his sources. Here he is being particularly wily, since in context (he gives the precise Bible reference in a footnote) the saying has a wholly different meaning. In fact it is cited in Ezekiel in order to be rejected: God asks why it is used, before stating that ‘ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel’ (verse 3). The argument of the chapter is that one is individually responsible for one’s sins: ‘The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son’ (verse 20). Although there is scriptural backing for Burton’s argument (e.g. Lamentations 5.7), he chooses to cite a passage which refutes it. However, as he continues his discussion of the causes of disease, he does reach the true message of Ezekiel 18. Every man, he tells the reader, is ‘the greatest enimy unto himselfe’: ‘We study many times to undoe our selves, abusing those good gifts which God hath bestowed upon us, Health, Wealth, Strength, Wit, Learning, Art, Memory, to our own destruction, Perditio tua ex te [your ruin is from yourself]’ (I, 127). Before the Latin phrase he places a footnote reference to ‘Ezech. 18. 31’, with the implication that by turning to the cited Bible passage, the reader can find more of the same. In fact, one finds that the tone of the verse is not one of condemnation, but of exhortation:  ‘Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel?’ The attentive reader of Burton will know that the first, external reason for suffering – one’s parents – has been subtly undermined by the supporting Bible reference. The reader who has not noticed this, however, is also drawn towards this realisation by Burton, who reveals who the individual’s ‘greatest enimy’ is, and hence who is truly responsible for his or her suffering. Finally, the reference to Ezekiel 18.31 adds another dimension to the discussion, by exhorting the reader to repent. The question of how this can be achieved leads us to yet another important undercurrent of this set of Bible references. Burton quotes a chapter which is a central text in one of the most important theological

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controversies of the sixteenth century: the debate over human will. In his De Libero Arbitrio (1524), Erasmus argues that God’s words in Ezekiel 18 prove the freedom of choice, especially the final verse (‘For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye’, verse 32). If a human can ‘turn … and live’, surely therefore the will is able to act independently. Martin Luther, asserting instead the will’s captivity (De Servo Arbitrio, 1524) attacks Erasmus’ point on the grounds that he has made ‘no distinction between words of law and of promise’. The difference is one of grammar: ‘Ezekiel intimates what ought to be done, and Diatribe [Erasmus] takes it that this is being and has been done.’36 For Luther the imperative verbs of the Bible show what is required through the law, not what humans can achieve. In fact, humans are incapable of willing to ‘turn … and live’, and therefore the chapter of Ezekiel ‘actually stands in the strongest possible opposition to free choice’.37 This doctrine is reasserted in the Geneva Bible’s sidenote to verse 31, the verse which Burton cites. Through the exhortation to repent (‘Cast away …’) Ezekiel ‘sheweth that man can not forsake his wickednes till his heart be changed, which is only the worke of God’.38 This interpretation accords with Burton’s use of the verse. Although by citing it he may seem to the modern reader to be changing the course of his argument, he is remaining within the discourse of the law. The verse might offer hope to the sinner through repentance, but that repentance can only be achieved through grace. However, it would be wrong to give the impression that Burton follows Luther entirely. In the previous chapter I discussed how Burton uses the theory of the passions to suggest different levels of personal responsibility for suffering. On the one hand, he depicts humans as unable to resist their passions: ‘we are led captives’ (II, 103). On the other, he also allows a certain degree of opportunity for change:  the sufferer ‘may in some sort correct himselfe’. I argued there that Burton uses the notion of personal responsibility both as a means of attack and as a significant means of cure, a scheme which corresponds with the division of law and gospel. By now examining Burton’s view of the will more closely, it will be seen that his arguments for an individual’s power to change, albeit only ‘in some sort’, are related to this attitude towards responsibility. ‘On the Bondage of the Will’, in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, trans. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), pp. 199, 197. 37 Ibid., p. 199. For an illuminating discussion of this debate, see Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 144–83. 38 The Bible in English, version 1.0 (Chadwyck-Healey, 1996) [on CD Rom]. 36

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The Subsection in the ‘Anatomy of the Soule’ on the will contains Burton’s most explicit statements of belief on the subject. The will, Burton explains, is free in his Essence, much now depraved, obscured, and falne from his first perfection; yet in some of his operations still free, as to goe, walke, move at his pleasure, & to choose whether it will doe, or not doe, steale, or not steale. Otherwise in vaine were Lawes, Deliberations, Exhortations, Counsells, Precepts, Rewards, Promises, Threats, and Punishments: and God should be the Author of sinne. But in spirituall things we will no good. (I, 160)

A little later, he elaborates on the nature of this freedom: The actions of the Will are Velle, and Nolle, to will and nill: which two words comprehend all, and they are good or bad, accordingly as they are directed: and some of them freely performed by himselfe, although the Stoicks absolutely deny it, and will have all things inevitably done by Destiny, imposing a fatall necessity upon us, which we may not resist; yet we say that our will is free in respect of us, and things contingent, howsoever in respect of Gods indeterminate counsell, they are inevitable and necessary. (I, 160)

These passages show Burton distancing himself from a Lutheran view of the will as captive. The comparison between Stoic fatalism and strict predestinarianism was common among anti-Calvinist writers of the period, including such controversial figures as Richard Montague, and was made by Arminius himself.39 Burton’s remark that the will is ‘in some of his operations still free’, especially in relation to human law, is not to be found in the teaching of Luther. Where then can this doctrine be found? The clue is in the first italicised phrase in the first quotation, beginning ‘much now depraved’. Burton gives a footnote reference here to Melanchthon: the text is his De Anima, first published in 1540. This work is, as the Oxford editors have traced, a major source for Burton, especially in this ‘Anatomy of the Soule’.40 While it is most obviously categorised as a philosophical and medical treatise, in the tradition of Aristotle’s work of the same name, it also contains an important theological element. Put simply, De Anima expresses Melanchthon’s mature teaching on the will, a teaching which was at odds with Luther’s in important respects. In adopting this doctrine, Burton is taking a significant step away from the main current of English Calvinist theology on the will. Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics:  Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), p. 208; see also pp. 94–6. 40 Oxford edition, IV, 193. Gowland has also noted Melanchthon’s importance for Burton, Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, pp. 200–201. 39

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Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) was professor of Greek at Wittenberg from 1518. He not only taught alongside Luther, but carried on the latter’s work of religious reformation while Luther was confined in the Wartburg. Melanchthon’s Loci Communes, the first version of which appeared in 1521, was a highly influential formulation of Reformed belief, as was the Augsburg Confession (1530), for which Melanchthon was chiefly responsible, and which is still used by Lutherans today.41 His De Anima exhibits the wide range of his interests and learning, and it is hence not surprising that the work appealed to Burton. However, it is his beliefs about the human will which are of particular interest. In the period of the first edition of the Loci Communes, Melanchthon is broadly in agreement with Luther about the will’s captivity. Humans are powerless in themselves to effect anything good: in Luther’s famous image, the will is ‘like a beast of burden’, which wills and goes only where the person (i.e. God or Satan) who rides it wills; ‘nor can it choose to run to either of the two riders or to seek him out, but the riders themselves contend for the possession and control of it’.42 In later years, however, Melanchthon moved away from this idea of complete captivity, for two main reasons. Firstly, he differed from Luther over the place of the law: the latter taught that ‘The whole meaning and purpose of the law is simply to furnish knowledge, and that of nothing but sin; it is not to reveal or confer any power.’43 While this statement partly refers to the law of the Old Testament, it also applies to the function of human laws. For Melanchthon this teaching was problematical since it assumed that the law could not be ‘an ethical force or guide’.44 If the law has any purpose, there must be a certain degree of freedom in the human will. In De Anima he is clear that human government and laws, which are divinely ordained, are ‘entirely useless’ if humans cannot restrain themselves, and that therefore ‘it is clear that there is some freedom of the will in the government of external members’.45 We can hear echoes of this in Burton’s claim that laws would be in vain were the will not free ‘in some of his operations’. ‘Some’, not ‘all’: Melanchthon is keen The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, 3rd edn (Oxford University Press, 1997), s.v. ‘Melanchthon, Philipp (1497–1560)’. 42 Luther and Erasmus, p. 140. 43 Ibid., p. 190. 44 The Encyclopedia of the Lutheran Church, ed. by Julius Bodensieck, 3 vols. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1965), s.v. ‘Melanchthon’. 45 Philipp Melanchthon, Liber de Anima (Wittenberg, 1553), fol. 152r. Translations are my own. His point about human law is made more clearly and succinctly in the first edition of the work, Commentarius de Anima (Wittenberg, 1540), fol. 228r. 41

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to emphasise that without the Holy Spirit humans cannot be fully obedient to God’s commands, nor can they achieve spiritual ideals such as true fear of God, and therefore full repentance. This is in line with Burton’s phrase ‘in spirituall things we will no good’. Secondly, Melanchthon found that Luther’s doctrine of the will and predestination could lead to a sense of what he calls Stoical necessity, in which, as Clyde Manschreck has put it, ‘God was imprisoned by the causal laws of nature.’46 My second quotation from Burton is closely based on Melanchthon’s own rejection of ‘fatall necessity’. Behind both of these aspects of Melanchthon’s teaching, adopted by Burton, is an emphasis on the fact that humans, not God, are responsible for sin. Luther starkly claims that ‘God works evil in us’, not through his own fault, but ‘as he carries us along by his own activity in accordance with the nature of his omnipotence, good as he is himself he cannot help but do evil with an evil instrument’. This is the crux of Luther’s difference from Melanchthon:  where the former stresses above all God’s omnipotence, the latter wishes to emphasise human responsibility.47 He lays his position out in De Anima: ‘since … God neither desires, nor approves, nor effects sins, it is clear that they do not arise from the will of God, but from the wills of devils and humans’. This stress on responsibility is also used for more positive ends. While God’s grace is the primary cause of conversion, Melanchthon teaches that the will to a certain extent cooperates in the process, since God draws only those who are willing to be drawn. This doctrine of ‘causa concurrens’ has since also been dubbed ‘synergism’. An example in De Anima of how synergism operates more broadly is in Joseph’s action of resisting the advances of Potiphar’s wife, out of his faith and fear of God. Melanchthon tells us that in that action ‘these causes were concurrent: the word of God, the son of God illuminating the mind and giving the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit moving the will and the heart. And the will itself of Joseph.’48 Burton’s use of Melanchthon’s doctrine of the will is certainly unorthodox for the time. As Diarmaid MacCulloch has shown, ‘Calvin emphatically agreed with the “original” Luther … against Melanchthon on predestination’, despite his disagreements with the former on the Eucharist.49 As a result, through Calvin Luther’s doctrine of the will was Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine:  Loci Communes 1555, trans. and ed. Clyde L. Manschreck (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. xiii. 47 Luther and Erasmus, p. 234; Encyclopedia of the Lutheran Church, s.v. ‘Melanchthon’. 48 Melanchthon, Liber de Anima, fols. 150v, 153v–154 r. Cf. Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, s.v. ‘synergism’. 49 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation:  Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London:  Penguin, 2003), p. 351. 46

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widely absorbed in the English Church. Burton is not a thoroughgoing Calvinist, and it is intriguing to see how the alternatives he seeks to Calvinism are not those of contemporary polemic (he owned the works of Arminius, but never quotes from them in the Anatomy), but continental theologians of the sixteenth century. As was shown in Chapter 2, he makes extensive use of the writing of Hemmingius, the Danish Lutheran who was a student of Melanchthon, and whose views on predestination were derived from him. There is an attractive parallel between Burton’s literary persona and the Laudian Thomas Pierce’s comment about Hemmingius in 1657, that ‘for his learning, piety and moderation, perhaps I may call him Melancthon Junior’.50 It is difficult to detect how influential Melanchthon’s view of the will was on the English Church of Burton’s time. Dewey Wallace has shown that in the seventeenth century Melanchthon became an important figure in ‘later Anglican self-understanding’, since he symbolised ‘a moderate, ethical, ceremonious and patristic-inspired Protestantism of the sort that emerged in the Church of England among those Anglicans who opposed the more Puritan and Calvinist program’.51 In particular, his name featured among those Lutheran sources frequently appealed to by those who opposed rigid Calvinist predestinarianism: he was cited by Richard Montague in Appello Caesarem (1625) to support an argument that Lutheran and Arminian teaching on predestination was the same, while Thomas Pierce would later describe Arminius as ‘Melancthon’s convert’.52 One should exercise caution, however, in the conclusions one reaches in relation to Burton from this evidence. Montague and Pierce attempted to appropriate Melanchthon as the acceptable face of Arminianism. Yet Montague’s writing was inflammatory and by no means representative of the mainstream theology of the 1620s. Likewise Pierce’s account of the English Church, like Peter Heylyn’s (another man who identified ‘Melanchthonians’ with Arminians), cannot be taken as an accurate reflection of recent history. It was designed to perpetuate and aggrandise the image of an episcopal, ceremonial, sacramental brand of ecclesiasticism in the 1650s, to revive Laudianism in a time of its suppression and exile Cited in Dewey D. Wallace, Jr, ‘The Anglican Appeal to Lutheran Sources: Philipp Melanchthon’s Reputation in Seventeenth-Century England’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 52 (1983), 355–67 (364). 51 Wallace, ‘Anglican Appeal’, 366. 52 Ibid., 359–60, 363. On the relationship between the English Church and the Lutherans (including Melanchthon and Hemmingius) see Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed:  The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 384–95. 50

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(Pierce spent most of that period in France).53 References to Melanchthon should not be taken as straightforward indicators of Arminianism:  the German theologian was read earlier in the sixteenth century, and Peter White suggests that his influence on Edward VI’s Church ‘may have been seriously underestimated’; he finds in particular strong traces of his thought in the work of Bucer.54 It is also significant that Nicholas Tyacke makes not a single index reference to Melanchthon in his very thorough work on anti-Calvinism.55 Despite Montague, it seems likely that in the 1620s and 1630s there was not much polemical currency in invoking the name of Melanchthon, and that his importance for Laudian self-definition only developed after Burton’s death. At the same time, his works may well have been read in the universities steadily during the hundred years after their first publication, while in the first part of the seventeenth century they may have been particularly attractive to those who were resistant to certain aspects of strict Calvinism, yet were also reluctant to become involved in controversy or be branded Arminian. In using Melanchthon as his main source on the will, then, I do not believe that Burton is trying to make a polemical statement. His references to the German reformer in ‘Of the Will’ are not prominent, his name appearing only twice and then in footnotes, once simply as ‘Philippus’ (I, 159). By way of contrast, Thomas Pierce uses the name as a badge of allegiance, declaring himself a ‘Melancthonian’.56 Furthermore, Burton’s citation of De Anima rather than Melanchthon’s better-known theological writings indicates that he wishes to keep his source’s theological distinctiveness at a low profile. Nonetheless, his use of Melanchthon cannot simply be written off as another example of the eclecticism and extensive range of his reading. For it is a Melanchthonian view of the human will which dictates not only how Burton explains the will in one Subsection, but how he treats the reader and offers a cure of melancholy throughout the work. A s e l f -h e l p b o ok ? I have used this consideration of Burton’s thinking on the will as a bridge between my discussions of the law and the gospel in Anatomy because Wallace, ‘Anglican Appeal’, 361, 366. Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic:  Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 51. 55 Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 56 Cited in Wallace, ‘Anglican Appeal’, 363. 53

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it plays an important part in Burton’s own method of progression from cause to cure. In sermons, according to English Calvinist preaching theory, the crucial point in the pattern of movement from judgement (the law) to mercy (the gospel) is grace. While the preacher provides the means by which the sinner is converted, only God can effect it.57 The many published texts on the cure of the afflicted conscience also follow this pattern, and as one might expect are similarly founded on a Lutheran formulation of the will. While writers on the afflicted conscience can advise readers on the process of salvation, urge them to visit a minister and console them, they cannot provide a cure within the pages of the text. Self-help is not possible for a strict follower of Luther. As Robert Bolton warns, in the case of a wounded conscience ‘No arme of flesh, or Art of man; no earthly comfort, or created power can possibly heale or helpe’, but only ‘An Almighty hand, and infinite skill’.58 The Anatomy of Melancholy is neither a sermon nor a text on the afflicted conscience, but it does have something in common with the scheme of law and gospel in the movement from cause to cure. The turn from one to the other is hence of importance, especially considering Burton’s view of the will. At the beginning of the Partition on cure he rejects unlawful remedies such as magic, instead emphasising that, as one Subsection is entitled, ‘Lawfull Cures [are] first from God ’ (II, 5). He explains, A Jove principium [from God first], we must first beginne with prayer, and then use Physicke, not one without the other, but both together. To pray alone, and reject ordinary meanes, is to doe like him in Æsope, that when his cart was stalled, lay flat on his backe, and cryed aloud, helpe Hercules … As we must pray for health of body and minde, so wee must use our utmost indeavours to preserve and continue it. (II, 5)

Curiously, the Æsop story he cites stresses the importance of ‘ordinary meanes’, whereas the message of the rest of the Subsection is that ‘wee rely more on Physicke, and seeke oftner to Physitians, then to God himselfe’ (II, 7). It is fitting that, at the beginning of the ‘Cure of Melancholy’ (both the Partition of Burton’s work, and the process itself), the primary emphasis is on seeking God’s grace. Nonetheless, Burton also reminds us to use ‘our utmost indeavours’: human responsibility is at the heart of his writing, as of Melanchthon’s doctrine, and is turned to positive ends. The active seeking of cure is most important when the affliction is a mental one. In ‘Perturbations of the Mind Rectified’, when Burton first   See Richard Bernard, The Faithfull Shepherd (London, 1621), p. 133. Bolton, Instructions, p. 87.

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vocalises the melancholics’ complaint that ‘we are led captives by passion, appetite’, he then comments that ‘he may choose whether he will give way too farre unto it, he may in some sort correct himselfe’ (II, 103). He elaborates on this notion soon after as he exhorts his reader to ‘Rule thy selfe then with reason’: ‘we may overcome passions if wee will. Quicquid sibi imperavit animus obtinuit, as Seneca saith, nulli tam feri affectus, ut non disciplinâ perdomentur, whatsoever the Will desires, shee may command: no such cruell affections, but by discipline they may bee tamed’ (II, 103). This passage, with its quotation from Seneca’s De Ira (2.12.3), adopts a Stoic emphasis on the use of reason to restrain passion. One must remember that Stoicism, along with the other Hellenistic schools, is designed as a form of philosophic therapy, with the aim of healing the diseased soul.59 Burton’s debt to this tradition is apparent throughout the second Partition, particularly when he advocates mental self-correction in cases of emotional distress, such as the loss of liberty or loved ones, and in his insistence that ‘the minde is all’ (II, 161). In the above passage, he quotes from Seneca (in a summary) and supplies a loose translation, where it is particularly interesting that ‘animus’ becomes ‘Will’; although this is a legitimate translation, a more obvious one would be ‘mind’ or ‘reason’. Burton seems to be angling Stoicism towards Christian theology and, sure enough, he proceeds to discuss the power of the will with a quotation from a certain German reformer: As in a city (saith Melanchthon) they doe by stubborne rebellious rogues, that will not submit themselves to politicall judgement, compell them by force, so must we doe by our affections. If the heart will not lay aside those vitious motions, and the phantasie those fond Imaginations, we have another forme of government, to enforce and refraine our outward members, that they be not led by our passions. (II, 103–4)

One of the functions of the will which is free in Melanchthon’s conception is the government of ‘outward members’; in his Subsection on the will Burton refers to the freedom to ‘goe, walke, move at his pleasure’ (I, 160).60 Here, the quotation from Melanchthon shows how such a freedom can be applied to a moral situation: if one cannot persuade oneself not to give in to passion, one can at least physically restrain oneself from performing the actions necessary to fulfil it. The movement from Seneca to Melanchthon represents a change in emphasis, and not simply from pagan See Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire:  Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994). 60 See Melanchthon, Liber de Anima, fol. 153r. 59

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philosophy to Christian theology. In the passage from De Ira Seneca’s advice is uncompromising: the reason can and should have complete control over the passions, and it is only good mental discipline and endurance that is needed to accomplish this. Melanchthon ascribes much less power of restraint and control to the will, but as a result is more accommodating than Seneca (at least in this context) in allowing human weakness; one of Burton’s own objections to Stoicism is that humans are incapable of ridding themselves of passion (I, 248). A major emphasis in Melanchthon’s chapter on the freedom of will in De Anima is on ‘the weakness of human men’, who can accomplish ‘external honest actions’ but cannot be entirely obedient to God’s law, and thus need grace.61 Therefore Burton moves from a viewpoint which is demanding of the individual as agent to one which is less so, and which allows a place for divine authority. In the view of Melanchthon, adopted by Burton, the will can direct physical action but at the same time it can also hold some sway over the mind. This is especially important in the long ‘Consolatory Digression’ in the second Partition, when the cure offered can only be achieved through changing one’s mode of thinking. For example, in his consolation ‘Against Poverty and Want’, Burton exhorts the reader to ‘enjoy thy selfe at length, and that which thou hast; the minde is all, be content, thou art not poore, but rich’ (II, 161). This notion is repeated later in the same Subsection: ‘All things then being rightly examined and duly considered as they ought, there is no such cause of so generall discontent, ’tis not in the matter it selfe, but in our minde, as we moderate our passions and esteeme of things’ (II, 170). The difference between the modes of the first and second Partitions is evident here. Whereas formerly the ability to moderate oneself is emphatically denied, now it is instead positively encouraged. He even goes so far as to conclude that ‘in some sort I may truely say, prosperity and adversity are in our owne hands’ (II, 171). His qualifier ‘in some sort’, which he has used before – ‘he may in some sort correct himselfe’ – suggests the limited nature of the will’s freedom, representing a Melanchthonian check on pure Stoicism. Another modification of that belief is in the emphasis on moderation of the passions rather than their elimination; they are not, as previously, to be ‘overcome’ (II, 103). The restrained, measured rhetoric of the above quotation (as opposed to the extreme, impassioned language of some of the first Partition) sets the tone for the reader’s cure: Burton’s balanced phrases mirror the moderation of the right mind.  Ibid., fol. 150v.

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The cure for poverty and want, then, is not riches but contentment. Earlier in this chapter I showed how Burton draws parallels between melancholy, sin and unhappiness. It follows that part of the cure of melancholy is achieving happiness. In the first Partition Burton seems pessimistic about the likelihood of this, particularly in his Subsection on ‘Discontents, Cares, Miseries, &c. Causes’. Here he presents melancholy as a universal and inescapable disease. It is also a self-inflicted one, as he implies in his discussion of the human tendency to complain of one’s lot: ‘This for the most part is the humour of us all, to be discontent, miserable, and most unhappy, as wee thinke at least; and shew me him that is not so, or that ever was otherwise?’ (I, 274–5). The crucial phrase is ‘as wee thinke at least’. Here it is used as a means of attack – he has already complained of the ‘perverse nature’ of those who are ‘pleased with nothing’ (I, 274) – but in the second Partition it becomes a ground for hope. If ‘the minde is all’, then its ability to make bad out of good can also make good out of bad. The contrast between the second Partition’s consolation against poverty and this passage on causes of misery is one of tone rather than subject-matter. Here, the discourse seems to take on the negative perspective of the melancholic discontent, becoming less and less hopeful. ‘There is no content in this life’ (I, 275), he warns, and even ‘if there bee true happinesse amongst us, ’tis but for a time … a faire morning turnes to a lowring afternoone’. By contrast (perhaps a deliberately comic one), the formula is reversed in the second Partition so that the reader is reassured that ‘a louring morning may turne to a faire afternoone’ (II, 167). Hence small details in the first Partition, pessimistic as they are, prepare the ground for the second Partition, where the mind’s ability to alter perception is used for positive ends. In the second Partition Burton does not altogether reject what has been said in the first. For example, near the beginning of the ‘Consolatory Digression’ he repeats the truism found in the ‘Discontents’ Subsection that the world is subject to corruption and change, that all must live a ‘troublesome life’ (II, 129) and that everyone thinks his or her own troubles the worst. However, having acknowledged this, he moves on to considering how such discontents can be overcome. The solution is a simple one:  ‘Thou art most happy if thou couldst be content, & acknowledge thy happinesse’ (II, 130). This is a persistent theme in this part of the Anatomy, being repeated later in similar words: ‘how happy art thou if thou couldst be content’ (II, 158). The exercising of the will which is necessary to achieve happiness is represented in Burton’s odd grammar. The present indicative – ‘how happy art thou’ – implies that happiness is

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already available, while the conditional tense – ‘if thou couldst’ – shows what is required. Moreover, the use of the present indicative suggests the more positive tone of the second Partition. ‘How happy wert thou’ would be more correct, but would also suggest that happiness is less accessible, that it has been missed out on: such a construction would be more typical of the discourse of the first Partition because it has the tone of lamentation and failure. By putting the verb in the present Burton breaks down the sense that happiness is unachievably distant, and holds out a sense of hope. I have described how Burton’s rhetoric of exhortation in the cure Sections derives from a particular theological position. Although this discussion has shown the complexity of his curative method, it is also worth noting that it can also be far simpler. Often in the ‘Consolatory Digression’ he repeats the most basic instructions:  ‘Be silent then, rest satisfied’, ‘I say to thee be thou satisfied’, ‘Be content and rest satisfied’, ‘make the best of it’ (II, 130). One might be reminded by these phrases of the long list of moralising maxims in the ‘Consolatory Digression’ (II.3.7.1), which become more ridiculous as more are added on, up to the bathetic conclusion ‘Looke for more in Isocrates, Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus, &c. and for defect, consult with cheese-trenchers, and painted cloathes’ (II, 206). As a result, one might be tempted to regard those phrases quoted above in the same comic strain. However, as always in Burton, the context is all. If fifty wise precepts are quoted together, they appear to be comically meaningless. By contrast, when simple instructions are interspersed with more complex pieces of advice (as is the case with all the examples I have mentioned) their effectiveness as serious advice can instead be heightened. For example, the last instruction mentioned above (‘make the best of it’) is followed by a quotation from Cardan, a comment on the shortness of this life in comparison to eternity, complete with a quotation from Seneca, and the passage discussed earlier which begins with Hebrews’ ‘God chastiseth them whom he loveth’ (II, 131). Later on in the same page Burton summons Chrysostom, Cyprian, Jerome, Augustine, Basil and Pope Gregory to his defence. In short, Burton’s discourse is not lacking in the complexity, learnedness and wide frame of reference which normally characterises it. The simple, brief instructions scattered within this discourse are not trite (as perhaps they would be if they were heaped together) but refreshing. There is something disarming in an author like Burton telling the reader, ‘Cheare up’ (II, 167), especially when that comment is sandwiched between some Latin verse of Theocritus and another, unattributed Latin quotation from Tibullus. One cannot help but be cheered up by it.

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The Structure of Melancholy: From Cause to Cure

At the beginning of a Subsection of the ‘Consolatory Digression’ directed against such things as repulse, abuses, injuries, Burton states that ‘I may not yet conclude, thinke to appease passions, or quiet the minde till such time as I have likewise removed some other of their more eminent and ordinary causes’ (II, 190). The aim of the cure Sections is, as I have argued throughout this book, not solely to recommend remedies for the reader to apply, but to effect a cure through the text itself. Moreover, Burton’s words imply that the process of reading can remove some of the causes of melancholy. What is of particular interest in the above quotation is the notion of quieting the mind. His intention often seems to be the opposite, especially in the first Partition, where he at times attacks the reader with the full force of violent, aggressive language, in order deliberately to unsettle him or her.62 This also occurs in the ‘Consolatory Digression’, as when Burton calls the reader ‘thou discontented wretch, thou covetous niggard, thou churle, thou ambitious and swelling toad’ (II, 160). The sudden outburst not only shocks the reader but breaks up the usually patient exhortatory tone of the digression. However, the mind also has need of quieting, especially if it is tormented or ‘crucified’ by passion. I see Burton’s more simple method of exhortation as part of this aim. The very fact that phrases such as ‘rest satisfied’ (above) are repeated contributes to the purpose of calming, as does the simple grammar. His use of asyndeton gives a particularly gentle tone to his advice, as in the above example ‘Be silent then, rest satisfied’ (II, 130). This device, combined with anaphora, makes his final piece of advice in the work calming as well as memorable: ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’ (III, 445). Burton’s language opens up to his melancholic readers the possibility of recovery. Details of grammar hint that a change of mind and emotional state is achievable through the workings of the human will. Although the structure of the Anatomy from cause to cure resembles the mode of law and gospel, Burton’s rhetoric is not that of the pulpit, except on occasion. In exhorting the reader to seek happiness, his tone is personal, intimate even, although the reader is an unknown and invisible figure. The process of cure which he presents, and which I have aimed to trace in the second half of this chapter, is subtle and gradual. As a spiritual and emotional disease, melancholy cannot be cured through treatments which, once completed, need never be repeated. The advice to be not solitary and idle is a cure, but one which must be maintained: the sufferer who has recovered cannot simply return to being solitary and idle. The curative process 62

  See e.g., I, 138; I, 380.

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in which Burton engages his readers through the text is likewise designed to be continuous. Melancholy is in one sense a treatable illness. Diseases can be remedied, griefs can be consoled and moods can be lifted; The Anatomy of Melancholy not only describes these cures, but in some cases performs them. In another, however, melancholy is no less than ‘the Character of Mortalitie’ (I, 136). By consequence, if this sense is sin and unhappiness, there is no complete cure for it: ‘’tis most absurd and ridiculous, for any mortall man to looke for a perpetuall tenor of happinesse in this life’ (I, 137). Is happiness, then, beyond the bounds of The Anatomy of Melancholy? I have argued that Burton does suggest that some measure of happiness is within reach: ‘how happy art thou’. However, the experience of pure happiness is the promise of heaven, not of mortal life. Burton contemplates this future state of perfection in a remarkable meditative discourse on divine beauty, at the beginning of ‘Religious Melancholy’ (III, 332–4). ‘In this life we have but a glimpse of this beauty and happinesse’ (III, 334), he explains. Melancholy, then, is the inevitable result of seeing through a glass darkly. Yet some earthly contentment is still achievable, and Burton encourages his reader towards it. According to Darrin McMahon, the late seventeenth century saw an explosion in the publication of English works on the art of finding earthly happiness. ‘The same country that had served as a corpse for Robert Burton’s anatomy of melancholy,’ he comments, ‘may be said to have given birth to modern happiness.’63 Burton’s understanding of happiness might be different from these later writers, but perhaps we can see his legacy at work in the growing number of texts during the seventeenth century which encourage a kind of mental selfhelp. For in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton suggests that through the workings of the will and the text itself, the reader can change himself or herself – at least, ‘in some sort’. 63

  McMahon, Pursuit of Happiness, p. 195.

Conclusion

It is with a sense of deliberate provisionality that Burton ends his book. Over six editions, the text swelled to nearly one and a half times its original size, and one suspects that only the writer’s death prevented further expansion. In this respect the Anatomy resembles the growth of Montaigne’s Essais, but the comparison ends there. For while Montaigne’s emendations reflect the inconstancy of a continually changing personality, Burton’s represent the constantly varying nature of melancholy and of his unknown readership. Provisionality applies not only to the development of the book, but also to the nature of the cure the book offers. This notion is pointed to by the final Latin tag of the work, taken from Augustine via Hemmingius, which exhorts the reader to repent while of sound mind: ‘Age pænitentiam dum sanus es.’ He or she can then be free from doubts, ‘quod pænitentiam egisti eo tempore quo peccare potuisti’ [because you were penitent at a time when you might have been guilty of sin] (III, 446). Just as melancholy can be staved off by avoiding being solitary or idle, so the very action of repentance guards against sin. The parallel between melancholy and sin is drawn until the very end of the work. Burton’s final emphasis is on performance, not in the Catholic sense of doing penance to expiate for one’s sins, but rather as a means of enabling cure. Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy is a type of performance which fulfils Burton’s own advice of keeping occupied. How did Burton’s readers occupy themselves with his work? This study has provided a historically informed analysis of Burton’s involved and self-conscious treatment of reading and of the implied reader within his text, and it is fitting in the final pages to turn to some responses by actual early readers to the Anatomy, in print and manuscript. Given Burton’s emphasis on reading as an active process  – and as a means of keeping the melancholic active  – it is notable that in the seventeenth century, and after, his work had a reputation for its usefulness and adaptability, 196

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as a mine of quotations and stories which could be gathered, copied and recycled in one’s own conversation and writing. In 1668, David Lloyd commented of the Anatomy that ‘Gentlemen, that have lost time, and are put to an aftergame of learning, pick many choice things to furnish them for discourse or writing’, and Anthony Wood noted a similar response to a book which he saw as ‘so full of variety of reading’.1 Many seventeenth-century writers repeated passages from the Anatomy almost verbatim and many more imitated his style. Robert Heath, for example, borrowed heavily from the Anatomy (without acknowledgement) in his Paradoxical Assertions and Philosophical Problems (1659). He did, however, gesture to his source material when he noted that ‘Democritus was blinde, and yet (as Laertius sayes) he saw more then all Greece besides. As our Democritus junior, though blinde with one Eye, saw more then all Britain.’2 Whether or not this (otherwise unreported) biographical detail is true, Heath’s comment shows the high reputation Burton had as a writer of perspicacity and wisdom, not long after his death. As Lois Potter has shown, Burton was an important influence on Royalist writers of the mid-century, partly because of the political connotations of his pose as the melancholic mocker of worldly madness.3 This tradition of borrowing would continue into the next century: Archbishop Thomas Herring, who described Burton as ‘the pleasantest, the most learned, and the most full of sterling sense’ of authors, remarked that ‘The wits of queen Anne’s reign, and the beginning of George I.’s, were not a little beholden to him’, while Laurence Sterne followed the trend for pillaging from him in Tristram Shandy.4 The Anatomy was also used, not to provide a substitute for learning, but to prompt its readers to further reading. The astrologer John Gadbury recalled that, one night in 1650, he was reading the book in bed when he came across a reference to Burton’s having ‘Jupiter in the Sixth House’. This phrase puzzled him so much that he lay awake wondering what it meant. The experience caused him not only to seek an explanation, but eventually to pursue astrology as a profession.5 David Lloyd, Memoires of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings & Deaths … of Those … that Suffered … for the Protestant Religion (London, 1668), p. 428; Anthony Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. and rev. Philip Bliss, 3rd edn, 4 vols. (London, 1813–20), II, 652. 2 R. H., Paradoxical Assertions and Philosophical Problems (London, 1659), p. 47. 3 Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 16, 121, 124, 134, 150–51. 4 Thomas Herring, Letters from the Late Most Reverend Dr. Thomas Herring (London, 1777), pp. 149–50. Sterne’s borrowings were noticed by John Ferriar in his Illustrations of Sterne (1798); see H. J. Jackson, ‘Sterne, Burton, and Ferriar: Allusions to the Anatomy of Melancholy in Volumes Five to Nine of Tristram Shandy’, PQ 54 (1975), 457–70. 5 John Gadbury, Cardines Caeli (London, 1684), p. 59. 1

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Along with the published responses to the Anatomy, evidence of how the book was approached and used in its early years can be found in manuscript notes and in its very pages. My survey of twenty-five copies of the Anatomy housed in Oxford libraries, and of three seventeenth­century British Library manuscripts containing notes on the work, shows that the book was read extensively and from varied perspectives.6 Out of these copies, eighteen contain some form of markings in the text, including marginal annotations and a large number of readers’ marks: dashes, crosses, hash-signs, manicules, flowers, asterisks and underlinings.7 These markings, along with the ink-smudges, tallow-stains, burn-holes and grease-marks which litter the pages of these copies, are testimony to the fact that the work did not merely adorn a library shelf: it was clearly put to use. Although it is ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ which receives principal – and in some cases exclusive – comment from modern critics, the markings of early readers indicate that many of them paid attention to the work as a whole. What do these tell us? Above all, they reveal areas of particular interest to readers. The interpretation of marginal marks in books is fraught with difficulties, given that their normal function is to highlight something that the reader considered interesting or important, but not to explain why; the motivations of early readers largely remain hidden from us. Moreover, often one cannot tell whether one reader is at work or several, nor establish when a series of marks was made. Therefore the following findings remain necessarily tentative. Burton’s quotations and anecdotes from his authorities were, unsurprisingly, well liked: like the gentlemen described by David Lloyd and Anthony Wood, readers frequently highlighted and copied out easily quotable sententiae and witticisms in Latin and English from Burton and his sources, especially from his preface.8 Anecdotes, curiosities and interesting facts also caught I consulted copies of editions 1621–76 in the Bodleian, English Faculty, Brasenose College and Lincoln College libraries, Oxford; all these annotated volumes will be referred to by library location, shelfmark, and date of edition in parentheses. Signatures instead of page numbers will be used, as some editions of the Anatomy – notably that of 1638 – contain misnumberings. Although a few of these copies were deposited in Oxford during the seventeenth century, the majority are later acquisitions from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and so their markings represent the responses of a range of readers, not simply Oxford scholars. 7 On readers’ marks see William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), esp. pp. 25–52, on the history of the manicule (or pointing hand symbol). 8 e.g. Bodleian, NN 17 Th. (1624); British Library, Sloane MS 1677, fols. 73–8; Sloane MS 2521, fol. 100. Sloane 1677 is a miscellaneous collection of papers related to church affairs and medical receipts, with extensive notes on the Anatomy at the end, fols. 73–108. It is possible that later pages are missing, given that these notes are very detailed but end early in the third Partition, at the bottom of fol. 108v. Sloane 2521 is signed by Richard Cooper of St Mary Hall, Oxford (he 6

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their attention:  the pseudo-Hippocratic account of Democritus (I, 33) proved appealing to a number of readers, as did the tale of Philippus Bonus, who dressed a drunk country fellow up in rich clothing and persuaded him that he was a duke (II, 83–4), and that of the ‘fat Prebend’ sought after by twelve suitors of varying suitability, and at last given to the worthy university scholar (II, 192).9 One early reader used ink manicules to mark Subsections on the power of spirits, witches and magicians, comments about the eccentricity of the sun, a calculation of the number of people it would take to cover the earth’s surface, standing side by side, and large portions of ‘Love Melancholy’ and ‘Religious Melancholy’, but showed little interest in the theoretical and practical elements of melancholic disease.10 ‘Love Melancholy’ was also of interest to a number of readers, and the satirical writing against women proved popular, such as the infamous blazon of the deformed mistress’ features (‘a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth … beetle browed, a Witches beard’, III, 164), and the twelve arguments for marriage, followed by twelve arguments against it (III, 266–8).11 Such evidence might confirm the view of seventeenth-century commentators that the Anatomy was read for its learning, wit and interesting stories rather than for its analysis of psychological affliction. Yet some early readers clearly used the book as guidance on aspects of melancholy and its cure. As we have seen at the end of Chapter 3, two readers who made manuscript notes (in Sloane 1677 and 1965) copied down details of medicines mentioned by Burton in the second Partition; another reader noted ‘Carduus:  Benedictus’ in the margin of his copy next to the description of this herbal remedy.12 Several made markings in the medical sections as well as other parts of the book, underlining proceeded to MA in 1681) and consists of a treatise on natural philosophy, notes from Aulus Gellius and Seneca’s letters, notes from ancient authors on the Caesars and a discourse on the marriage of cousins german, as well as ‘Collections out of Democritus Junior:  or Burtons Melancholy’ (fol. 100r), all of which are taken from the preface. 9 English Faculty, YJ 37.1 [Ana] (1638), sigs. [C4]r, [Mm4]v, [Xx4]v; Bodleian, Gibson 245 (1638), sigs. [C4]r, [Xx4]v–Yyr; Bodleian, Antiq.d.E.1638.2 (1638), sig. [Mm4]v; Brasenose, UB/S.III.70 (1621), sig. [b5]r. 10 English Faculty, YJ 37.1 [Ana] (1638), e.g. sigs. [Ii4]r, Nn3v, [Iii4]v, Vvvr. The reader may have been Giles, Thomas or Robert Widdowes, who all signed the book (frontispiece recto; sig. Aaaaav), or John Austin, who noted on the title-page that he received the book from Robert in exchange for a map in December 1679. 11 British Library, Sloane MS 1965, fol. 133r; Brasenose, UB/S.III.75 (1651), sig. Ffffr; English Faculty, YJ 37.1 [Ana] (1638), sigs. Vvvr, Ffff v. By contrast, Bodleian, Gibson 245 (1638) and NN 17 Th. (1624) contain very few markings in the third Partition, compared with the rest of the text. 12 Brasenose, UB/S.III.70 (1621), sig. [Ee5]v. This reader may have been Thomas Jones, who signed his name in secretary hand on sig. [Hh8]v.

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the names of medicines or using marginal lines to highlight them.13 Then there are readers who showed a special interest in the moral and religious aspects of Burton’s writing on melancholy. Edward Poeton (the compiler of Sloane 1965) quoted extensively from all parts of the Anatomy, including Burton’s warnings to humble oneself before God, and large sections from the ‘Consolatory Digression’ and the ‘Cure of Despaire’.14 In one copy of the text, the beginning of the ‘Consolatory Digression’ was marked with a manicule, as was the long list of moralising maxims (II, 204–6) within it; in another, asterisks highlighted Burton’s consolations against misfortunes from the same Section.15 Although modern critics (this one included) see a measure of irony at work in the list of so many adages together, followed by the instruction to look for more in ‘cheese-trenchers, and painted cloathes’ (II, 206), some earlier readers seem to have taken the passage entirely seriously. A comparison of markings and notes suggests that different readers found particular aspects of the Anatomy of interest  – quotations and curiosities, medicine, religion, moral philosophy – and in some cases focused on them while ignoring other sections of the book. At the same time, no part of the book was entirely neglected by its early readers. For every reader who left the medical portions of the text, or ‘Love Melancholy’, unmarked, there was another who made frequent annotations in these sections. Some readers were attentive to the broader structure and organisation of the Anatomy: the reader in Sloane 1677 used Burton’s Subsection titles as marginal headings for notes on nearly every topic of the first two Partitions, while in two copies keywords are underlined and annotations made such as ‘Def.[inition]’, ‘Obj.’ or ‘Obiect.[ion]’ and ‘Ans.[wer]’.16 Of the readers who left their markings in copies of the Anatomy it is difficult to speculate. Although most of the ownership marks are left by men, one copy is signed ‘Margaret St Quintin, hir Book’ in a seventeenth Bodleian, Gibson 245 (1638 edition); Brasenose, UB/S.III.75 (1651). By way of contrast, Bodleian, NN 17 Th. (1624) contains frequent marks throughout the second Partition, with the exception of the medical sections where there are very few. This reader or set of readers was clearly much less interested in medicines than other forms of cure and consolation. 14 British Library, Sloane MS 1965, fols. 125r–128r, 136r-v. This MS, signed by Edward Poeton, contains extensive compilations on various medical subjects, notes on astrology and extracts from literary works. The notes on the Anatomy (fols. 122–136) fall between extracts from the wellknown Regimen Sanitatis Salerni and from William Vaughan’s The Golden Fleece (1626), a work which, as we have seen in Chapter 1, has associations with Burton. 15 Bodleian, Bliss B 406 (1651), sigs. Qq3r, Zz v; Lincoln, L.3.14 (1628), sigs. OO2v, OO3v, [Oo4]r-v; see also Bodleian, NN 50 Th. (1632), sigs. A2r, [I4]v, Yy2v. Sloane 1677 contains detailed notes on the ‘Consolatory Digression’, including a lengthy list of the maxims, fols. 97 v–103v. 16 British Library, Sloane MS 1677, fols. 79r-108v; Bodleian, Gibson 245 (1638), sig. Sv; Bodleian, Mason AA 500 (1621), sig. Ii3r. 13

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century hand.17 Nearly all of the signatures belong to people whose lives and families remain obscure. In two of the copies examined – both presented by Burton himself in 1628 to Oxford college libraries  – there is evidence of the appeal that the Anatomy must have had to the writer’s fellow-scholars:  one copy has a cluster of cross-marks in the famous Subsection on study as a cause of melancholy and the miseries of scholars (1.2.3.15), and another includes a note on Burton’s summary of himself as ‘a Collegiat Student, as Democritus in his Garden’ (I, 4) and a mark by his explanation of ‘Why Students and Lovers are so often Melancholy’ (I, 421).18 Written annotations in the copies examined are much rarer than marginal marks, but those that do survive provide further evidence of the diverse interests early readers had in the work and the active ways in which they approached Burton’s text. One seventeenth-century reader, after observing the shift from praise of ‘divine, rare, superexcellent Tobacco’ to condemnation of ‘damned Tobacco, the ruine and overthrow of body and soule’ (II, 230), concluded ‘now you are mad’, a remark that would no doubt have delighted the author.19 Another reader entered into the spirit of the work by adding to Burton’s learned references:  next to the author’s comment that ‘the very gods had bitter pangs, and frequent passions, as their owne Poets put upon them’ (I, 137) (which is accompanied by a printed note to Homer’s Iliad), the reader wrote ‘tantaene animis caelestibus irae Virg: Ænei’, an apt quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid, 1.11.20 The same copy has a few lively annotations by an early reader (or readers): one objected ‘Nay’ to Burton’s erroneous claim that ships could no longer reach the city of Exeter (I, 84); another responded to the argument that physical characteristics and temperaments are inherited from one’s parents – ‘such a mother, such a daughter’ (I, 205) – with the surprisingly violent outburst ‘both whores’.21 This copy is of particular interest since it was owned by Burton himself, and includes his list of the number of sheets in that edition (the second) and the number added to the next.22 In another copy, a seventeenth-century reader wrote on the synopsis page of the first Partition the Vulgate rendering of Romans Brasenose, UB/S.III.77 (1651), frontispiece recto. Lincoln, L.3.14 (1628), sigs. Q2v, Q3v, [Q4]v, R r; Brasenose, UB/S III.72 (1628), sigs. a2r, [Bb4]v. These copies are described in Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988), items 260, 261. 19 Brasenose, UB/S.III.70 (1621), sig. Ff4 r. The note is in secretary hand. 20 Bodleian, NN 17 Th. (1624), sig. [B4]r. The quotation can be translated as ‘is there such great anger in heavenly minds?’. 21 Ibid., sigs. g2v, Hr. 22 Described and reproduced in Kiessling, Library of Robert Burton, item 259 and Plate X. 17 18

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14.5 – ‘unusquisque abundat sensu suo’ (quoted by Burton and translated as ‘every man abounds in his owne sense’, I, 14) – and, on the first page of the first Partition, made the note ‘Absolutè Doctus’ (completely learned, expert or experienced): perhaps an assessment of the author.23 Finally, an early reader commented ‘An Elaborate booke’ on an initial page of his copy, surely referring to the Anatomy.24 The meaning of the adjective suggests the painstaking nature of Burton’s project, and the complexity of its structure; one of its definitions in the OED is ‘worked out in much detail; highly finished’, first attributed to Burton himself.25 This account of the evidence left by readers of the Anatomy suggests something of the breadth of responses to and uses of the work in the seventeenth century, as well as the varied ways in which they marked, commented on and annotated the text. Although all of these individual readers approached Burton’s text with different backgrounds, tastes, agendas and focuses of interest, none of them can be described as notably heterodox or oppositional to authorial strategies, a conclusion which, as I have argued early on in this book, modern critics have been too willing to reach, and which gives a misleading sense of how early modern composition and interpretation were related to one another. Indeed, with its gathering of anecdotes and quotations and its broad-ranging interpretation of its melancholy subject-matter, Burton’s book encourages the kinds of selection and adaptation, and the multiple responses, which these readers made to his text. An analysis of the evidence left by actual early readers has its shortcomings, as I have mentioned, and one of them is that it does not reveal why readers turned to the Anatomy. There is no trace in the evidence I have surveyed of readers who used the work to help treat their own or others’ melancholy, for instance, or who found reading it a therapeutic process. This is not to say, however, that they did not do so. In the next century, Samuel Johnson recommended the Anatomy to Boswell as a valuable form of retreat for the mind from constitutional melancholy. Although overloaded with quotation, ‘there is a great spirit and great power in what Burton says, when he writes from his own mind,’ he concluded.26 Johnson’s assessment is the nearest to my own view of the Anatomy as a curative text, as argued in these pages. Yet any extended survey of readers’ responses to Burton would no doubt uncover Brasenose, UB/S.III.70 (1621), sigs. fr, A r. Bodleian, Antiq.d.E.1638.2 (1638). The note is made in secretary hand on front flyleaf recto. 25 OED, s.v. ‘elaborate’, a. 2. 26 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–50), II, 440. 23

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a plethora of other interpretations and uses of the text. In exploring the way that Burton constructs the reading process within his text, I have shown that one of his chief characteristics as a writer is his method of drawing on a number of different genres and discourses: this flexibility is an essential part of the therapy the work offers. Burton does not inscribe a univocal, approved interpretation of his text within it; indeed, in his poem ‘Democritus Junior ad Librum Suum’ he gestures to the many different types of readers – and by extension readings – there are to his work. Although he does at times address the reader in hostile or aggressive tones, there is no sense of opposition between author and reader. The text reveals and makes a feature of Burton’s own experiences as a reader, and portrays the imagined reader as the author’s invisible companion and collaborator. The Anatomy of Melancholy thus has much to tell us about perceptions of reading in early modern England. I have offered some particular insights it gives us into the theological politics of the activity and its perceived place in the spiritual life, as well as the medical context of texts on cure. The reader’s centrality to the work is one of Burton’s most distinctive artistic achievements. By involving the reader throughout the course of his text, Burton goes further than his contemporaries in his awareness of the process of reception. In declaring that his reader is the subject of his discourse, Burton creates a unique text which encourages those who take it up not only to learn more about melancholy in its myriad varieties, but also to read their cure.

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Index

Abernethy, John 131 Altomarus (Donato Altomare) 79 Anatomy of Melancholy, The genre of 5–6, 92–6, 126 readers of 33, 110–11, 196–202 revisions of 24–5, 27, 51–3, 68, 180 structure of 10–11, 96 Argenterius (Giovanni Argenterio) 93 Aristotle 23, 29, 41–2, 93, 169 (pseudo) 176 Arminianism 52, 66, 67–76, 187 Arminius, Jacobus 63–4, 75 assurance 70–2 Augustine, St 30–1, 32, 61, 62 Bacon, Francis 41, 42, 86, 161 Baro, Peter 64 Barrough, Philip 89–90 Baxter, Richard 70, 124–5, 130, 150, 175 Bernard of Clairvaux, St 178 Bessaeus (Pierre de Besse) 156 Beza, Theodore 56, 66 Boethius 34, 147 Bolton, Robert 54, 121, 131, 148–9, 175, 181, 189 Bonham, Thomas 110 Boorde, Andrew 88 Bright, Timothy 56–9, 87, 92, 109, 118–19, 123, 169 Browne, Sir Thomas 116 Bunyan, John 15, 148, 150 Burton, Robert library of 3, 21, 62, 80 life of 2 self-presentation as melancholic 26, 34–5, 139–46 see also Democritus Junior Calvin, John 186 Calvinism 52, 53–4, 59, 60, 63–4, 67–76, 176, 184

Cardan (Girolamo Cardano) 34, 94, 140, 146–7 Celsus 90 charity 174 Charles I 64, 67–8 Chaucer, Geoffrey 36 Christ 30, 117–18, 149, 150–2, 170, 179 Chrysostom, St John 62, 171, 178 Church of England 53–6, 187 Cicero 34, 100, 107, 110, 140, 146 Clayton, Thomas 101, 116 Cogan, Thomas 87 consolatio writing 6–7, 8, 34, 52, 146–7 Coryat, Thomas 25–6 Crato, Johann 80, 84, 93 Crooke, Helkiah 100, 154 Cyprian 163–4, 178 Democritus 28, 93, 152, 158 Democritus Junior 32, 138, 139, 152, 165 Dent, Arthur 71 despair 51–76 digressions 11, 104, 131–2 Donne, John 46, 98, 148, 162 Dort, Synod of 67–8, 74 Elyot, Sir Thomas 87, 89–91, 93 Epicurianism 10, 30, 108 Erasmus, Desiderius 3, 33, 152, 156, 161, 163 De Libero Arbitrio 183, 185, 186 experience 41–5 Ficino, Marsilio 117, 176 Florio, John 1, 47 Forestus (Pieter van Foreest) 42 Foxe, John 14 Fulgentius 61, 62 Fuller, Thomas 5–6, 70

221

222

Index

Gadbury, John 197 Galen and Galenic medicine 9, 38, 41, 81, 83–6, 93, 98 Goodyere, Sir Henry 25 Greene, Robert 32 Greenham, Richard 115–16, 121, 122 Gregory, Edmund 44–5 Guainerius (Antonio Guainerio) 79, 82, 94 Hall, Joseph 160, 162–3 happiness 172–3, 192–3, 195 Harington, Sir John 19–20 Heath, Robert 197 Heinsius, Daniel 108 Hemmingius (Niels Hemmingsen) 52, 60–7, 69, 74–5, 187 Herring, Thomas 197 Hippocrates and Hippocratic medicine 38, 40, 42, 79, 83 Hippocrates (pseudo), ‘Epistle to Damagetus’ 153, 157 Homer 132 hope 71–2 Horace 27, 102 imagination 97 jealousy 42, 43 Jerome, St 161 Johnson, Samuel 202 Jonson, Ben 14 Joubert, Laurent 155 Juvenal 159, 160 King, Henry 33 Laurentius (André du Laurens) 82, 92, 170 law and gospel 180–3 Le Blon, Christof 154 Lemnius, Levinus 169 Lessius, Leonhard 117 Lloyd, David 197 Lucian 163 Lucretius 29–30 Luther, Martin 130, 173, 178, 181 De Servo Arbitrio 183 Lutheranism 189 Lyly, John 147 marginalia, see Anatomy of Melancholy, The, readers of Marlowe, Christopher 107 Maunsell, John 149 medical practitioners 88–9 medical texts 8

in Latin 78–87 in the vernacular 35, 78–9, 86–92 medicine and philosophy 28, 93 preventative (hygiene, dietetics) 87, 99–100 and religion 6, 93, 112–14 and rhetoric 28–9 and self-help 89–90, 101–2 therapeutic 87, 98–9 melancholy causes of 127–8, 168 definition of 9–10, 43, 85, 126–7 and enthusiasm 119–21 and laughter 7, 32, 154–5 as literary muse 140 love melancholy 11, 81–2 religious melancholy 118–25 sanguine melancholy 155 and scholars 147 species of 38, 79, 85–6 and women 91–2 Melanchthon, Philipp 62, 75, 100, 138, 154 on the will 184–8, 190–1 Mercurialis, Hieronymus (Girolamo Mercuriale) 80 Montague, Richard 184, 187 Montaigne, Michel de 1, 86, 113, 146, 176, 196 on Democritus and Heraclitus 156–7 melancholy of 142–4 on reading 47–50 Montaltus, Hieronymus 94 Montanus (Giambattista da Monte) 84–5, 86 moral philosophy 94–5 Moulton, Thomas 88 Napier, Richard 6, 35, 88–9, 114 Nashe, Thomas 39, 45–7, 107, 110 non-naturals, six 87, 93, 95, 168 Oxford 64, 67, 94, 112 paratexts 19–20, 22, 24–6, 27, 36 passions 29, 158, 168–70 patronage 26 Perkins, William 63–6, 69–70, 121, 123, 181 Cases of Conscience 53–6, 58–60, 65 Pierce, Thomas 187–8 Platerus (Felix Platter) 79, 98 Plato 28–9, 93–4, 146 Plutarch 93 Poeton, Edward 110–11, 200 practicae 79, 80–2, 83–4, 93 see also medical texts predestination 60, 62–75, 67–76

Index  Quintilian 134 reader, constructions of the 13–16, 17, 24, 33–50, 51–60 reading as damaging 3–4, 43, 76, 97–8 early modern perceptions of 13–23, 37 history of 16–23 and humanism 3, 39 images of 1–2, 39–40 as therapy 2, 6–9, 27–33, 50, 77–8, 96–111, 132–6, 194–5 and writing 20–1, 34 Regimen Sanitatis Salerni 96 Rhasis 93 rhetoric 18, 23, 32 Rhetorica ad Herennium 134 Rosa, Salvator 154 Rowlands, Samuel 32 satire 7, 107, 158–66 Menippean 45, 158, 163–4 Seneca (the Younger) 30, 93, 131, 132, 133, 190–1 on Democritus and Heraclitus 156, 158, 159 Sibbes, Richard 175 sin 169–76 Socinianism 72–3 Spenser, Edmund 19, 36 Spira, Francis 70

spiritual physician role 114–18 Stachniewski, John 129 Sterne, Laurence 197 Stoicism 10, 30, 95, 169, 170, 184, 190–1 study, as therapy 107–9 see also reading suffering healer role 139, 146–52 syllogism, practical 56 synergism 186 see also Melanchthon, Philipp Swift, Jonathan 107 Terence 103 torture, vocabulary of 141, 165, 177–9 Valleriola, Franciscus 80, 83, 101 Vaughan, Henry 175 Vives, Juan Luís 135, 157 Walkington, Thomas 29 will 181–93 Wood, Anthony 149, 197 Wright, Thomas 29, 169–70 writing, as therapy 7, 33–5 see also consolatio writing Yarrow, Robert 123, 149 Zisca (Jan Žižka) 1–2

223