What Robert Burton Put Into The Anatomy of Melancholy

Robert Burton wrote four centuries ago. I came across him because an English prose class gave me a reason to read a writer I might never have looked for on my own.

Robert Burton at Oxford

Burton lived from 1577 to 1640. He spent much of his adult life at Oxford, joining Christ Church in 1599 and leaving much of his library to the Bodleian. The first edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy appeared in 1621.

The book I found in a prose class

I first read part of the book in Professor Sean Normandin’s class on English and American prose at Sungkyunkwan University. The extract made me curious about what kind of work could have a passage like that in the middle of it.

We read the original in class. Greek and Roman references were everywhere, and some material was in Latin. The abundance of images made me want to see how the same passages sounded in Korean.

A selection in Korean

The Korean volume I borrowed translated selected passages. It gave me enough to recognize how differently Burton’s mind moved across a page from the writers I usually read.

Melancholy is the announced subject. As I read, I also felt the freedom of a writer using it to bring together ideas he might never have found another excuse to set side by side.

He discusses causes and symptoms as his contemporaries understood them. Then he can find his way into an account of an ideal commonwealth. Following the turn is part of reading him.

Why he called himself Democritus Junior

Burton writes under the name Democritus Junior. The persona invokes a story about the ancient Greek philosopher studying the sources of melancholy. It gives Burton a predecessor and a voice with which to pursue the subject.

The book also has a mischievous way of describing what writers do. Burton includes himself in the accusation.

• Writers keep taking things from earlier writers, Burton says, even when the new book gives the impression that it has something original to say.

Burton turns the charge into a kind of demonstration. The book gathers centuries of other people’s ideas, including the medical tradition of the four humors.

The four humors

According to this historical theory, fluids called humors helped determine a person’s constitution and temperament. Their supposed balance was used to explain changes in health and disposition.

The four were blood, yellow bile, phlegm and black bile. Writers associated them with the elements and with different stages and conditions of life.

A dominant humor was said to produce a characteristic disposition.

• Yellow bile — a choleric or irritable disposition.
• Blood — a sanguine or lively disposition.
• Phlegm — a phlegmatic or sluggish disposition.
• Black bile — a melancholic disposition.

Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer also used language a reader can trace back to humoral theory. Knowing something about the theory helps make sense of what those writers expected their audiences to recognize.

Burton gives the theory a great deal of attention. It belongs to the history of medicine and gives us access to a set of explanations his readers would have known.

What the word melancholy once meant

The word melancholy comes through Latin from Greek words meaning black and bile. Even its name carries the mark of that older account of the body.

Burton follows the subject out into love and religion, where his categories grow wider than the ones a present-day reader might expect from the Korean title.

It is tempting to wonder how much Burton drew on his own feelings. What I could follow with more confidence was his way of thinking: an ancient story, a borrowed line and an observation about people can all find a place in the same argument.

Reading a mind at work across four centuries

We cannot ask a writer who lived four centuries ago what made him take a subject in an unexpected direction. Reading gives us some time to follow him there.

Shakespeare’s plays have found new audiences in performance and on film. Burton’s book asks for another kind of attention, often a page or an extract at a time.

I might never have read him without the class. The Korean selection made it possible to stay with a few passages that I would otherwise have left behind once the semester was over.

I came away with a sense of how one scholar in early modern England put a mind and its troubles into words. The odd company his ideas keep is what I remember.

Book details

The Anatomy of Melancholy

Author

Robert Burton

Korean selection published

December 30, 2004

ISBN-13

9788976269447

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