A Users Guide To Melancholy Mary Ann Lund

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 A U S E R ’ S G U I D E TO M E L A N C H O LY

A User’s Guide to Melancholy takes Robert Burton’s encyclopaedic

masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy (frst published in 1621)
as a guide to one of the most perplexing, elusive, attractive, and
afficting diseases of the Renaissance. Burton’s Anatomy is p
­ erhaps
the largest, strangest, and most unwieldy self-help book ever
written. Engaging with the rich cultural and literary framework
of melancholy, this book traces its causes, symptoms, and cures
through Burton’s writing. Each chapter starts with a case study of
melancholy – from the man who was afraid to urinate in case he
drowned his town to the girl who purged a live eel – as a way into
exploring the many facets of this mental affiction. A User’s Guide
to Melancholy presents in an accessible and illustrated format the
colourful variety of Renaissance melancholy, and contributes
to contemporary discussions about well-being by revealing the
earlier history of mental health conditions.

mary ann lund is Associate Professor in Renaissance English

Literature at the University of Leicester. She is the author of
Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading
‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
which was shortlisted for The Council for College and University
English Book Prize. She has contributed to the BBC Radio 4
series In Our Time on The Anatomy of Melancholy (2011), The Glass
Delusion (2015), and A History of Delusions (2018). She was an Arts
and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow (2015–17)
and edited The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne: Vol.
12 (2018).

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 A USER’S
G U I D E TO
M E L A N C H O LY
MARY ANN LUND
University of Leicester

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 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
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www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108838849
doi: 10.1017/9781108978996
© Mary Ann Lund 2021
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2021
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
names: Lund, Mary Ann, 1978–author.
title: A user’s guide to melancholy / Mary Ann Lund.
description: Cambridge ; New York, ny : Cambridge University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: lccn 2020050617 | isbn 9781108838849 (hardback) | isbn
9781108972444 (paperback) | isbn 9781108978996 (ebook)
subjects: mesh: Burton, Robert, 1577–1640. Anatomy of melancholy. |
Depressive Disorder | Depression | Medicine in Literature | History,
Medieval
classification: lcc rc537 | nlm wm 171.5 | ddc 616.85/27–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050617
isbn 978-1-108-83884-9 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 p
­ ublication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.

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 For Joseph and Hannah

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 C o n te n ts

List of Figures page viii

Acknowledgementsxii
Abbreviations and Note on the Text xiii

Introduction 1

Part 1 Causes
1 Sorrow and Fear 21
2 Body and Mind 45
3 The Supernatural 67

Part 2 Symptoms
4 Delusions 89
5 Love and Sex 111
6 Despair 135

Part 3 Cures
7 The Non-Naturals 155
8 Medicine and Surgery 177
9 Lifting the Spirits 201

Robert Burton, ‘The Author’s Abstract of

Melancholy’ 223
Conclusion: The Two Faces of Melancholy 227

Endnotes235
Further Reading 248
Index251
vii

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 F i gures

0.1 Frontispiece to The Anatomy of Melancholy

(1628). Credit: Wellcome Collection.
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). page 5
0.2 Democritus Laughs. Anonymous, after Jan
van der Bruggen (1661–1726). Credit:
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 9
0.3 Synopsis of the Second Partition of The
Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Credit:
Folger Shakespeare Library. Attribution
ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). 14
1.1 Face of a frightened soldier (left); the human
face in an animal state of fear (right). Etching
by B. Picart, 1713, after Charles Le Brun
(1619–90). Credit: Wellcome Collection.
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). 25
1.2 Melancholy. Anonymous, after Parmigianino
(1524–90). Credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 33
1.3 Prometheus bound to a rock, his liver eaten
by an eagle. Engraving by C. Cort (1566).
Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0). 39
1.4 Niobe and her Daughter. Etching by F. Perrier,
1638. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution
4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). 42

viii

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 List of Figures

2.1 The venous and arterial system of the human

body with internal organs and detail fgures
of the generative system. Engraving (1568).
Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0). 44
2.2 Phlegmaticus. Engraving by Raphael Sadler
(1583). Credit: Folger Shakespeare Library.
Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International
(CC BY-SA 4.0). 58
3.1 Robin Good-Fellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry
Jests. Full of Honest Mirth, And Is a Fit Medicine
For Melancholy (1639). Credit: Folger
Shakespeare Library. Attribution ShareAlike
4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). 75
3.2 An artist painting a woman with a hand mirror
and the devil; representing the faculty of the
imagination. Engraving (seventeenth century).
Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0). 66
4.1 A hooded physician examining a urine
specimen, brought to him by an elderly
woman. Woodcut by Jost Amman (1568).
Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0). 88
4.2 A Surgery Where All Fantasy and Follies Are
Purged and Good Qualities Are Prescribed. Line
engraving by M. Greuter (c. 1600). Credit:
Wellcome Collection. Attribution
4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). 103

ix

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 List of Figures

5.1 Jacques Ferrand, Erotomania (1640). Credit:

Folger Shakespeare Library. Attribution
ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). 110
5.2 The Foure Complexions: Melancholy. Engraving
attrib. William Marshall (1662). Credit: Folger
Shakespeare Library. Attribution ShareAlike
4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). 113
5.3 Melancholy. Johannes Wierix, after Albrecht
Dürer (1602). Credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 115
6.1 Fresco in the National Museum of Naples,
depicting the sacrifce of Iphigenia. Alinari
(c. 1875 – c. 1900). Credit: Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam. 134
6.2 Melancholic Temperament. Harmen Jansz
Muller, after Maarten van Heemskerck (1566).
Credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 137
7.1 Hare (Lepus europaeus). Anselmus Boëtius de
Boodt (1596–1610). Credit: Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam. 161
7.2 Interior of the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
David Loggan (1675). Credit: Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam. 173
8.1 A Christmas rose (Helleborus niger), a poppy
(Papaver species), and borage (Borago
offcinalis): fowering stems. Etching by
N. Robert (c. 1660), after himself. Credit:
Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0). 185
8.2 Hortus Botanicus of the University of Leiden.
Willem Isaacsz. van Swanenburg, after Jan
Cornelisz. van ’t Woudt (1610). Credit:
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 190

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 List of Figures

8.3 A surgeon instructing a younger surgeon

how to bleed a male patient’s foot; a woman
is comforting the patient. Engraving (1586).
Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0). 195
9.1 Democritus Lost in Meditation. Salvator Rosa
(1662). Credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 204
9.2 David Plays His Harp before King Saul.
Adriaen Collaert, after Jan van der Straet,
1587–91. Credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 212
10.1 Graeme Rose, Gerard Bell, Craig Stephens,
and Rochi Rampal in The Anatomy of
Melancholy, dir. James Yarker (Stan’s Cafe,
2013). Credit: Graeme Braidwood. 228

xi

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 AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

I would like to thank Emily Hockley at Cambridge

University Press for encouraging me to write this book and
for being a warm and supportive editor; Rachel Blaifeder,
Emma Goff-Leggett, Bethany Johnson, Aloysias Saint
Thomas and their teams for their hard work to bring this
book to life; Damian Love for his excellent copy-­editing;
Bethlem Museum of the Mind and the UK Defence
Academy in Shrivenham for inviting me to speak about
melancholy, and the audiences for enthusiastic and stim-
ulating discussions afterwards; James Yarker and Stan’s
Cafe for performing the Anatomy and helping me to
think about it in new ways; Victoria Shepherd for inspir-
ing radio programmes about delusions; my colleagues
and students at the University of Leicester; friends and
neighbours; my family, especially my parents, Clare and
John; and most of all, Gareth, Joseph, and Hannah, with
love and gratitude for mirth and merry company.

xii

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 A B B R E V I AT I O N S A N D N OT E
ON THE TEXT

Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from the Anatomy

are taken from Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy,
ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York Review Books, 2001).
This one-volume edition starts the page numbering
again with each ‘Partition’, of which there are three (the
frst one also includes Burton’s long preface, ‘Democritus
Junior to the Reader’). My references take the form of
the Partition number in roman numerals followed by the
page number, e.g. ‘ii.200’ is Partition 2, p. 200. I use the
abbreviation ‘Burton, Anatomy’ where necessary.
Burton conventionally uses Latinised names when
referring to his sources, e.g. ‘Montanus’. I refer to them
by their vernacular names, e.g. ‘Giambattista da Monte’,
and give the Latin name (if it is signifcantly different)
and, where known, dates in parentheses. These details are
taken from the ‘Biobibliographical Index’ found in vol. vi
of The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner,
Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair; commentary
by J. B. Bamborough with Martin Dodsworth, 6 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000). This edition is
referred to throughout as Anatomy, ed. Faulkner et al.
Bible quotations are taken from the King James Version
(unless otherwise stated) and are taken from The Bible in
English Database (Chadwick-Healey, 1996).
I have modernised the spelling and lightly modernised
punctuation of all quotations from Renaissance texts.

xiii

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 Introduction

They will act, conceive all extremes, contrarieties, and contradic-

tions, and that in infnite varieties … Scarce two of two thousand
that concur in the same symptoms. The tower of Babel never
yielded such confusion of tongues, as the chaos of melancholy doth
variety of symptoms. There is in all melancholy similitudo dissimilis,
like men’s faces, a disagreeing likeness still; and as in a river we
swim in the same place, though not in the same numerical water;
as the same instrument affords several lessons, so the same disease
yields diversity of symptoms.
(Burton, Anatomy, i.397)

In recent years, the question of how varieties of mental

distress should be categorised has been the subject of sig-
nifcant debate. Should a wide range of conditions such as
bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and major depression be
treated as discrete disorders? One of the major authorities
on the subject, the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, does
exactly that. Or should they be recognised instead as over-
lapping conditions, with mental health problems being
seen as existing on a spectrum with ‘normal’ experience?
The boundaries between different formal categories can
be paper-thin, and many people who suffer from mental
distress have a mixture of complaints and symptoms. The
British Psychological Society has suggested that a better
approach than applying different diagnostic labels would
be to work ‘from the bottom up’, paying attention to indi-
viduals’ specifc experiences, problems, and symptoms.1

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 Introduction

Medical writers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

Europe might have recognised some of the issues at stake
in this debate, since they frequently acknowledged how
diverse and varied problems of the mind could be. As
Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, puts
it, there is a ‘disagreeing likeness’ between them. Yet he
and his contemporaries would have had far fewer diff-
culties with what to call them, since they used one name
above all to describe a very wide spectrum of experience:
melancholy. Renaissance melancholy certainly includes
the kind of sadness and mournful pensiveness we might
mean when we use the word today. But it also encom-
passes delusions, anxiety, griefs, phobias, and a whole
range of allied physical symptoms such as trapped wind,
migraines, and skin rashes. Melancholics might be spot-
ted by their outward behaviour: their tendency to seek
out solitude and to sit lost in their own thoughts and fan-
tasies, or to act in bizarre ways (say, laughing for hours
at a single joke, or believing that they are made of glass).
Then again, they may appear entirely normal but, like
Hamlet, have ‘that within which passeth show’.2
The subject of this book is a condition of mental dis-
tress with ancient origins. The word ‘melancholy’ derives
from the Greek for the humour black bile (μελαν- dark,
+ χολή bile), and it was discussed by the Father of Medicine,
Hippocrates. Yet it reached its highest prominence during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period when
melancholy came to be perceived as a European epidemic
and when physicians and philosophers devoted many vol-
umes to examining its causes, symptoms, and cures.3 At
the same time, it became a source of fascination to art-
ists and literary writers, as a condition that both inspired

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 Introduction

creative genius and threatened to tip them into madness.

The pseudo-Aristotelian Problems had posed the ques-
tion: ‘Why is it that all those men who have become
extraordinary in philosophy, politics, poetry or the arts
are obviously melancholic, and some to such an extent
that they are seized by the illnesses that come from black
bile?’ That association between melancholy, creativity,
and intellectual prowess, expanded upon by Marsilio
Ficino in his De Vita (1498), cast a dark glamour over the
condition which appealed to self-fashioning young aris-
tocrats of the sixteenth century.4
The common defnition of melancholy in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries is as ‘a kind of dotage with-
out a fever, having for his ordinary companions fear, and
sadness, without any apparent occasion’ (i.169–70). But
in the lived experience of individual sufferers, the dis-
ease easily escapes the bounds of this defnition. Men,
women, and even children were diagnosed with the con-
dition, and although it was more commonly found among
the rich – as might be expected, since they could afford
to pay for the services of physicians – it was not exclu-
sive to one class, race, sex, or profession. One of Burton’s
sources tells of a baker in the Italian city of Ferrara who
succumbed to melancholy and became convinced that he
was made of butter, to the extent that he dared not go near
his oven or sit in the sun in case he melted. Monarchs fell
prey to the disease, among them King Charles VI and
King Louis XI of France. Melancholy might lead a suf-
ferer towards irretrievable despair; then again, it might
make him believe he was a shellfsh.
A User’s Guide to Melancholy explores this most slip-
pery of conditions through the stories of individuals who

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 Introduction

suffered from it, and through the structures by which

Renaissance medicine understood its causes, symptoms,
and cures. To be a melancholic is to be subject to a Protean
disorder, characterised as much by its ‘infnite varieties’
as by what two cases might have in common. It is dan-
gerous, perhaps even leading the patient towards suicide.
Yet it is Siren-like and alluring, promising the pleasurable
life of solitude, leisure, and contemplation before it traps
its victim into an inescapable cycle of loneliness and self-­
destructive thought patterns.
Through an examination of Renaissance melancholy,
this book also explores Robert Burton’s encyclopaedic
masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy, frst published
four hundred years ago in 1621 and perhaps the larg-
est, strangest, and most unwieldy self-help book ever
written (Figure 0.1). It is A User’s Guide both because it
aims to navigate the complexities and quirks of Burton’s
book, and because the Anatomy is itself designed to be
used by – and to help – those who suffer from melan-
choly. Burton was an Oxford academic and his book is
interested in documenting the attitudes and responses
to melancholic disorder taken by physicians, philoso-
phers, theologians, and poets over two millennia from
ancient Greece to seventeenth-century Europe. But his
approach is also distinctly practical, tracing the contours
of the disease for the beneft of people afficted by it, and
including therapeutic measures that his readers can put
into practice. One of the therapies is the act of reading
itself: an activity that diverts, occupies, and consoles a
grieving mind.

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 Introduction

figu r e 0.1 Frontispiece to The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628).

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 Introduction

Democritus Junior, Robert Burton

When Robert Burton published The Anatomy of
Melancholy, he did so, not under his own name, but under
the guise of ‘Democritus Junior’. In his opening words to
the reader, he makes much of his pseudonym, imagining
that the reader will be curious to know who he really is:
Gentle reader, I presume thou wilt be very inquisitive to know
what antic or personate actor this is, that so insolently intrudes
upon this common theatre, to the world’s view, arrogating
another man’s name; whence he is, why he doth it, and what he
hath to say; although, as he said, Primum si noluero, non respon-
debo, quis coacturus est? I am a free man born, and may choose
whether I will tell; who can compel me? if I be urged, I will
as readily reply as that Egyptian in Plutarch, when a curious
fellow would needs know what he had in his basket, Quum vides
velatam, quid inquiris in rem absconditam? It was therefore cov-
ered, because he should not know what was in it. Seek not after
that which is hid; if the contents please thee, “and be for thy
use, suppose the Man in the Moon, or whom thou wilt to be
the author”; I would not willingly be known. (i.16)

The extract shows us several important aspects of the

way Burton writes. The frst thing we might notice is
that he speaks to the reader directly – an unexpected
technique to fnd in a medical textbook, at least by our
modern standards. Though Burton sounds scholarly, his
language is also conversational; we can imagine him say-
ing these words like a character speaking a monologue
on stage. He himself, of course, introduces the idea that
he is a performer in ‘this common theatre’, the world.
Though his subject is melancholy, Burton is so interested
in his reader that he tells us, ‘thou thyself art the subject

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 Introduction

of my discourse’ (i.16). This is more than simply a man-

ual about a disease; or rather, it is about a disease that
also encompasses the many facets of human experience.
Though habitual melancholy – the kind that sticks – is a
chronic condition that has causes, symptoms, and cures,
in a broader sense, melancholy is something that afficts
us all: it is ‘the character of mortality’ (i.144).
Another thing we might notice in this extract is how
often Burton intersperses his own words with those of
other people, often in Latin (though he tends to follow
them up with a translation). While this was a common
technique in writing of the time, even so, Burton quotes
more than most of his contemporaries. The biographer
Anthony Wood notes that he was famous for this habit:
‘no man in his time did surpass him for his ready and
dexterous interlarding his common discourses among
them with verses from the poets, or sentences from clas-
sic authors’.5 Not only using another man’s name, he
also uses other men’s words. As he declares – typically
using a quotation from someone else – ‘I have only this of
Macrobius to say for myself, Omne meum, nihil meum, ’tis
all mine, and none mine’ (i.24).
And, as the passage shows all too well, Burton is a
playful, elusive writer. He is teasing and provocative,
sometimes ingratiating (‘Gentle reader’), then at the next
moment defant (‘who can compel me?’). He writes about
a slippery disease in a slippery way – and about a condition
of sorrow with exuberance. He revels in paradox and con-
tradiction, often gathering different authorities on mel-
ancholy who disagree, setting them against one another.
Though his opening paragraph sounds like a monologue,
his writing style also often sounds like dialogue – and, on

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 Introduction

occasion, a near-cacophanous debate of competing voices

and opinions. What Burton’s own opinion on a given
point is, is not always easy to tell. The fact that he speaks
from behind the persona of Democritus Junior makes the
task even harder – and Burton deliberately frustrates our
curiosity about who he is or what he thinks.
Why does the writer of The Anatomy of Melancholy
choose to play the role of Democritus Junior? His name
declares the author to be the heir of the ancient Greek
philosopher. One early source tells the story of how
the people of Abdera asked Hippocrates, the father of
Western medicine, to visit Democritus because they
were concerned that their local philosopher had gone
mad. Hippocrates found him in his garden surrounded
by the corpses of animals and asked him what he was
doing. Democritus replied that he was dissecting them
in order to search for the source of madness, since he had
observed that folly afficted the whole world. Hippocrates
could only agree, and told the citizens of Abdera that
Democritus was not mad at all, but rather was the wisest
of men.
When Burton retells this anecdote, he has Democritus
looking for the origins not only of madness, but of mel-
ancholy. In so doing, he broadens the spectrum of men-
tal distress which was within the scope of Democritus’
enquiry, and by extension his own. Following in his foot-
steps, Democritus Junior does the same task through the
printed page, trying to prove along the way that ‘all the
world is mad, that it is melancholy’ (i.39): hence why his
book is anatomising melancholy.
There is a further reason for the pseudonym. De­mo­
critus was known as the laughing philosopher, who found

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 Introduction

the world’s follies so absurd that he could only laugh at

them, unlike his counterpart Heraclitus, whose response
to the madness and misery of human lives was to weep
(Figure 0.2). In Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (1511), Folly herself
tells her audience that these days there are so many new
forms of madness that ‘a thousand Democrituses wouldn’t
be enough to laugh at them, and we’d always have to call
in one Democritus more’.6 Following in Folly’s footsteps,
Burton becomes the newest Democritus of his age, satir-
ically mocking the foolishness of the world.

figu r e 0.2 Democritus Laughs. Anonymous, after Jan van der

Bruggen (1661–1726).

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 Introduction

This might seem a surprising aim for someone whose

task is also to cure mental distress. But Burton sees the two
as interlinked. The grief of mind suffered by individuals
is a symptom of wider malaise: war and violence, religious
superstition, corrupt magistrates and politicians, unjust
laws, people motivated only by greed and ambition. ‘Would
this, think you’, he says as he surveys the recent history of
massacres and genocide, ‘have enforced our Democritus to
laughter, or rather made him turn his tune, alter his tone,
and weep with Heraclitus?’ (i.59). Anatomising melancholy
is a moral and political project, one that demands a ‘mixed
passion’ where he sometimes laughs, sometimes angrily
rails, sometimes laments and sympathises with the human
misery that breeds melancholy (i.19, 59).
And what of Robert Burton (1577–1640), the man
behind the pseudonym? Burton tells his reader that, like
Democritus, ‘I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary,
private life … penned up most part in my study’ (i.17).
That study was in Oxford, where he spent all of his adult
life.7 He was born in rural Leicestershire, the younger
son of a gentry family. After studying at the local gram-
mar schools he went to Brasenose College, Oxford, but
his undergraduate studies were interrupted for reasons
unknown. His age matches the twenty-year-old Robert
Burton who consulted the renowned astrological physi-
cian Simon Forman in 1597 with symptoms of melan-
choly, and whose history was recorded in Forman’s case
notes. Whether or not this was the same man, we cannot
be sure. Nevertheless, the author of what is now called
the Anatomy (it was known as ‘Burton’s Melancholy’ in
the seventeenth century) claimed to know the disease
through personal experience.

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 Introduction

Burton eventually completed his degree at Christ

Church, Oxford, where he spent the rest of his life as a
Student (or college Fellow). He probably worked on the
Anatomy for more than a decade before it was frst pub-
lished in 1621. Not only did he search for source mat-
erial – and therapy – in the Oxford libraries where he
lived and worked, but he also built up his own collection
of 1,700 books, eventually bequeathed to the Bodleian
Library and Christ Church, and most of which can still
be found there today. His handwritten notes bear the
traces of his preoccupations as both a reader and a writer:
words such as ‘Causes’, ‘Symptoms’, and ‘Cures’ are writ-
ten in the margins of the medical textbooks he owned.8
Perhaps he was looking for self-treatment when he
wrote these words, but he was also designing the structure
of his book. He tells his reader that he has written it ‘as a
good housewife out of divers feeces weaves one piece of
cloth’, fnding source material in all of his reading. ‘I have
laboriously collected this cento out of divers authors’, he
says, a cento being both a patchwork and an ancient style
of poetry made entirely out of quotations from other
authors. One of the best known is a fourth-century poem
in praise of Christ, composed from lines of Virgil by
Faltonia Betitia Proba. Burton places himself in a tradi-
tion of writing with female associations: it is a humble,
industrious task, in which ‘the method only is mine own’
(i.24–5), a far cry from the more ambitious claims to tex-
tual authority made by some of his contemporaries.
Despite his claims of staying confned to his study,
biographical evidence shows that he lived a fairly active
life. Like many academic scholars of his age he was also a
clergyman. He was vicar of St Thomas’, Oxford (a college

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 Introduction

living) from 1616 onwards, and from 1632 he was also

rector of Seagrave in his home county of Leicestershire.
The patron who presented him to this parish was
George, eighth Baron Berkeley, who had studied at
Christ Church and to whom Burton had dedicated The
Anatomy of Melancholy. No doubt the living was a reward,
but Burton appears to have treated his positions as more
than simply income generators: he discharged his pas-
toral responsibilities at St Thomas’ himself and, though
he had a curate at Seagrave, he visited the parish in the
summer months.
At Christ Church he was college librarian and he
also held the post of clerk of Oxford market for several
years. He wrote Latin drama that was performed in his
college. The college’s rules forbade him to marry, but a
Latin poem prefacing the Anatomy proclaims the author’s
fondness for serving wenches, and he had a reputation
for cheeriness. While he ‘never travelled but in map or
card, in which mine unconfned thoughts have freely
expatiated’ (i.18), he had a special interest in geography
and surveying (his older brother William wrote a history
of Leicestershire).
Describing himself in the Anatomy, he freely admits to
having ‘an unconstant, unsettled mind’. He expands on
this with disarming self-deprecation:
This roving humour … I have ever had, and like a ranging
spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees, leaving his game, I
have followed all, saving that which I should … I have read
many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I
have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries,
with small proft for want of art, order, memory, judgment.
(i.17–18).

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 Introduction

His omnivorous interests are apparent in the Anatomy,

the scope of which takes in not only medicine but moral
philosophy, religion, ancient and modern history, geog-
raphy, natural sciences, poetry, and even romantic love.
Like Shakespeare’s Autolycus, Burton was a snapper-up
of unconsidered trifes. After the frst edition appeared
in 1621, he continued to add further examples, anec-
dotes, quotations, words, and phrases to his book over
fve further editions (the sixth came out in 1651, eleven
years after his death); the book grew to over half a mil-
lion words. Melancholy as the character of mortality is
an endlessly varied, proliferating disease, and Burton’s
attempt to chart it is propelled by his curiosity – not
always in a straight line.

Structure of this Book

There are two basic forms of medieval and Renaissance
medical textbook, and the design of A User’s Guide to
Melancholy takes inspiration from them both. One is the
form that Burton chose for the Anatomy: an examina-
tion of a disease from causes through to symptoms and
cures (some, including Burton’s, also included prognos-
tics). This form provided a theoretical framework, drawn
from the medical tradition established by the frst-
century Greek physician Galen, through which illness
could be understood at a general level. Burton’s own book
is structured in a complex series of units and subunits –
Partitions, Sections, Members, Subsections – as he moves
from the general to the more specifc, as can be seen from
the branching diagrams published at the beginning of
each Partition (Figure 0.3).

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 Introduction

figu r e 0.3 Synopsis of the Second Partition of The Anatomy of

Melancholy (1621).

The other form of medical writing is the consilium: the

collection of patient case histories compiled by an indi-
vidual physician, along with the advice he gave and the

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 Introduction

treatments he prescribed. The consilium takes its lead

from Hippocratic medicine, which held that the key to
understanding a disease was to be found in the careful
observation of individual cases. While a general study
of a disease might establish broad rules and principles,
in real patient bodies it might behave in wildly differ-
ent ways and throw up a range of exceptions. As Burton
remarks, ‘the four-and-twenty letters make no more vari-
ety of words in divers languages than melancholy conceits
produce diversity of symptoms in several persons’ (i.408).
Intrinsic both to the Anatomy and to this book are
the individual stories of melancholics. Each chapter of A
User’s Guide starts with a case study from the Anatomy
or other Renaissance textbooks on melancholy: from
an Italian man who was afraid of urinating to a Flemish
girl who defecated an eel, from a Jewish Frenchman who
died of fear after he had crossed a dangerous bridge to
Burton himself, ‘Democritus Junior’, who claims that
his expertise came from his own, intimate knowledge of
‘melancholising’. These stories illuminate the rich vari-
ety of melancholic experience and also demonstrate how
mental trouble was seen to be linked to various states and
conditions of life: age and bodily temperament (including
puberty), race, religious belief, gender, sexual appetite,
profession, and personal habits.
Though A User’s Guide is arranged from cause to
cure, many facets of melancholy do not ft tidily into
one category. For example, a bad fright may be a cause
of melancholy but fear can also be a major symptom of
the condition. Listening to music is excellent therapy for
it, but in some cases it can exacerbate the condition or
trigger it in the frst place. Causes, symptoms, and cures

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 Introduction

bleed into one another, and what may be good for one
person may be disastrous for another. The frst two chap-
ters discuss the major defning features of melancholy. It
is a disease of the passions – sorrow and fear – and it is
also a bodily experience, deriving from an excess or cor-
ruption of bodily humours. In Chapter 3, we consider
the role of witchcraft, spirits, and otherworldly beings in
melancholy. While Burton gives space to spiritual infu-
ences as a possible cause, he is also careful to insist that
superstitious explanations can be attributed to phenom-
ena which are simply physical in origin.
The symptoms of melancholy are the subject of the
next three chapters. Chapter 4 centres on the wide vari-
ety of forms in which melancholic delusion manifested,
while Chapter 5 addresses the special category of love
or ‘heroic’ (erotic) melancholy and its relationship with
gender and sexual activity. In Chapter 6, we look at the
loss of hope – one of melancholy’s most dangerous symp-
toms – through an extended attention to the story of
Francis Spira, the man who died of despair after thinking
he had been damned by God.
Physicians of Burton’s time placed great emphasis on
the role of the ‘non-naturals’ in the regulation of the self,
and these introduce the subject of cures in Chapter 7:
activities such as diet and exercise were seen to infuence
one’s health and wellbeing. Chapter 8 considers the phar-
maceutical and surgical remedies for melancholy: from
herbal treatments such as hellebore to mineral talismans,
bloodletting, and trepanning. In Chapter 9, we consider
how Burton addresses healing for the perturbations of the
mind through persuasion, consolation, distraction, and
cheerfulness. Finally, we turn back to melancholy itself

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 Introduction

as a paradoxical condition, and look too at the Anatomy’s

infuence down the centuries.
A fnal note about words and names: wherever possible,
this book tries to use words that Burton and his contem-
poraries in Renaissance England would have recognised
when speaking about this disease. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, people did not have melancholy;
they were melancholic. To those who treated them, they
were patients or sufferers rather than clients. They called
the condition ‘melancholy’; the word ‘melancholia’ was
only very rarely used, and usually then only in medi-
cal texts with reference to the Latin. Melancholia now
carries a sense of ‘gloominess, a theatrical or aesthetic
indulgence in refective or maudlin emotion’ (as the OED
describes it) which is alien to the way Robert Burton
would have understood melancholy, and which is outside
the scope of this book.9
The word ‘psychology’ was frst used in English in
1654, fourteen years after Robert Burton’s death, and
only took on its modern meaning of the scientifc study
of the human mind in the eighteenth century.10 Burton
believed that the best healer for a melancholic was a
‘whole physician’ (i.37); the idea of a specialist doctor
for the mind would have been unknown to him, since
the study of the mind, body, and soul was the province
of physicians, philosophers, and theologians. Readers
have often recognised in the descriptions of historical
melancholy the hallmarks of conditions now known as
depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and PTSD. For
the most part, this book avoids drawing explicit connec-
tions with such conditions, for several reasons. Firstly, to
do so runs the risk of making reductive and potentially

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 Introduction

damaging associations for modern readers. Moreover,

retrospectively diagnosing diseases in past lives on the
basis of limited information is not only diffcult, but also
a morally questionable enterprise. It denies the cultur-
ally situated nature of past and present understandings
of the workings of mind and body. Lastly, perhaps sub-
stituting our new words for old detracts from the dignity
of those who suffered, talked about, and treated mental
disorders in the past. Oliver Sacks has said that ‘to restore
the human subject at the centre – the suffering, afficted,
fghting, human subject – we must deepen a case history
to a narrative or tale: only then do we have a “who” as
well as a “what”, a real person, a patient, in relation to
disease’. That task is often inaccessible when the records
of Renaissance melancholic case histories are brief and
when the identities of most patients are lost to us. Yet
the history of melancholy also reveals much that is, in
Sacks’ words, ‘richly human’, and deserves to be taken
on its own terms.11 This book suggests that the words
sufferers and healers of melancholy knew and used, and
the ways they expressed the contours of human suffering,
have much to teach us about their own habits of mind and
perhaps – by refection – our own.

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 PA R T 1
C AU S E S


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 1
Sorrow and Fear


A Jew in France (saith Lodovicus Vives) came by chance over a

dangerous passage or plank that lay over a brook, in the dark,
without harm, the next day, perceiving what danger he was in, fell
down dead. Many will not believe such stories to be true, but laugh
commonly, and deride when they hear of them; but let these men
consider with themselves, as Peter Bayrus illustrates it, if they were
set to walk upon a plank on high, they would be giddy, upon which
they dare securely walk upon the ground.
(Burton, Anatomy, i.256)

When we talk about melancholy in its modern sense, we

usually understand it to mean a state of sadness, dejection,
and introspection. Fear does not enter into our defnitions
of it.1 In the Renaissance, however, to be melancholic was
to live in fear. Anxiety, terror, sudden frights, and phobias
were all seen as hallmarks of the disease, along with sor-
row. In The Anatomy of Melancholy’s English predecessor,
Timothy Bright’s Treatise of Melancholy (1586), fear rather
than sadness is the disease’s defning characteristic: it is
‘either a certain fearful disposition of the mind altered from
reason, or else an humour of the body, commonly taken to
be the only cause of reason by fear in such sort depraved’.2
In this chapter we will consider what makes sorrow and
fear the inseparable companions of melancholy and how
these two emotions can play complex roles in the work-
ings – or failings – of human minds and bodies. Burton
claims that they are like cousins or even sisters, so close

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 Causes

is their relationship with one another and with the condi-

tion he has dedicated himself to exploring. Not only the
principal causes of melancholy, they are also its defning
symptoms: he quotes Hippocrates’ claim that sorrow is
‘the mother and daughter of melancholy’, both the ori-
gin and the offspring of mental distress. These emotions
‘beget one another, and tread in a ring’ (i.259). A bereave-
ment may lead to a lasting, unshiftable sorrow. A sudden
fright may turn into a lifelong phobia.

Falling off a Log

The story Burton tells of the sixteenth-century Jewish
Frenchman not only shows how strong the imagination can
be, but also plays out an intriguing philosophical puzzle. A
man puts his life at risk by crossing over a brook by night
but, since he is unable to see, he cannot perceive the dan-
ger he is in. Instead, his perception comes after the event.
The case is an unusual one – and so probably appealed to
Burton – because normally fear is an emotion connected to
something that is is yet to happen. Aristotle describes it as a
‘sort of pain or agitation derived from the imagination of a
future destructive or painful evil’.3 But in this case, the man’s
fear is connected to an event that has already occurred.
Burton found the story in the writings of the Spanish
humanist Juán Luís Vives (1492–1540) on the soul. Vives
uses it to illustrate the notion that our imaginations func-
tion by making something present to us, whether that
something is in the past, future, or is completely non-­
existent. Darkness robbed the Frenchman of the sensory
information he needed to interpret the risk of walking
along the plank, so his imagination supplied it instead
(but only later, since he did not know what he was doing
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 Sorrow and Fear

at the time). Burton removes one interesting detail in

Vives’ original account, that the man was returning
home by night on his donkey and had drifted off to
asleep. Whereas Vives’ version has him unconscious,
Burton makes him alert but unseeing. When he revisited
the scene the next day, the man saw what he could not
have done by night, and died of shock at what might have
been. A fall from a height may have put his life at risk, but
it was imagination that killed him.
Vives’ Frenchman walked in a long line of people who
crossed dangerous bridges. Even Burton acknowledges
that there are those who will doubt whether it is true, prob-
ably knowing that ‘the man who walked along a plank’ was
a centuries-old test-case for the nature of fear. Variations
of the story exist in many forms. It may originate in the
writings of the eleventh-century Persian philosopher and
physician, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), who notes that a man can
run fast on a plank of wood when it is put across a well-trodden
path, but when it is put like a bridge over a chasm, he would hardly
be able to creep over it. This is because he pictures to himself a
fall so vividly that the natural power of the limbs accords with it.

The example was taken up by Western scholars inter-

ested in the mind’s powers over the body. In his Summa
theologiae, Thomas Aquinas follows Ibn Sina in remark-
ing that ‘because of his fear a man who sets out to walk
across a plank high above the ground will easily fall’. But
if the plank is lowered, he reasons, the man would be less
likely to stumble and fall because he would not be afraid.
‘Fear interferes with action’, he concludes.4
Closer to Burton’s time, in his ‘Apology for Raymond
Sebond’ the French essayist Michel de Montaigne

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 Causes

(1533–92) has a more extreme idea for putting a medieval

theory to practical experiment:
Take a philosopher, put him in a cage made from thin wires set
wide apart; hang him from one of the towers of Notre Dame de
Paris. It is evident to his reason that he cannot fall; yet (unless
he were trained as a steeplejack) when he looks down from that
height he is bound to be terrifed and beside himself.

We can test the limits of our reason without having to

harm any philosophers, however:
Take a beam wide enough to walk along: suspend it between
two towers: there is no philosophical wisdom, however frm,
which could make us walk along it just as we would if we were
on the ground.5

Whether or not Vives’ Frenchman really lived out

(and died from) the thought experiment that Ibn Sina,
Aquinas, and Montaigne all posed, his story contains in
miniature the twin features of the many case histories in
The Anatomy of Melancholy. On the one hand, it is curious,
extreme, and hard to believe. On the other, it is a story
with which we might identify. While retrospective fear
certainly seems like an outlandish cause of death, every-
one has experienced the physical effects of fright, such as
a racing heartbeat and feeling short of breath. We may
marvel or even laugh at these stories but – as Burton and
Montaigne remind us – we would not be able to help feel-
ing giddy if we were standing above the same precipice.

Terrors and Affrights

Sorrow and fear can cause melancholy when they are
excessive in proportion to the object, when they come

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 figu r e 1.1 Face of a frightened soldier (left); the human face in an animal state of fear (right). Etching by B. Picart, 1713,
after Charles Le Brun (1619–90).
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 Causes

on too quickly, or when they become engrained. In the

case of Vives’ Frenchman, there was not time for his fear
to become a longer-term condition because he was killed
so suddenly. The fear he might have felt gradually, as he
prepared to cross the plank, came upon him all at once
the next day. Burton is fascinated by the phenomenon of
terror, and moreover by the sheer power of the imagina-
tion to bring on extreme consequences: ‘sometimes death
itself is caused by force of phantasy’, he remarks. ‘I have
heard of one that, coming by chance in company of him
that was thought to be sick of the plague (which was not
so), fell down suddenly dead’ (i.256). But if not all cases
are instantly fatal, they can certainly have unforeseen
consequences.
Burton treats ‘Terrors and Affrights Causes of
Melancholy’ differently from other kinds of fear. This is
partly a question of degree – they are at the extreme end of
the emotional spectrum – and partly because that sever-
ity makes for sudden and acute effects on the body and
mind: ‘Of all fears they are most pernicious and violent,
and so suddenly alter the whole temperature of the body,
move the soul and spirits, strike such a deep impression,
that the parties can never be recovered, causing more
grievous and fercer melancholy’ (i.335; see Figure 1.1).
The cause might be an imminent danger, but it could just
as well be a trick of the imagination.
Such was the case of the Swiss gentlewoman and the
dead pig. Burton recounts a story from the casebooks of
the physician Felix Platter of one of his patients, a lady
from the city of Basle who happened to see a pig being
butchered. A doctor (not Platter himself) was standing
nearby and noticed how much the smell and sight of the

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 Sorrow and Fear

pig’s entrails was upsetting the woman. Not blessed with

tact, he quipped that ‘as that hog, so was she, full of flthy
excrements’. At this discovery of what the insides of her
own body looked and smelled like, she had an instant
reaction which became a long-lasting one:
she fell forthwith a-vomiting, was so mightily distempered
in mind and body, that with all his art and persuasions, for
some months after, he [Platter] could not restore her to herself
again; she could not forget it, or remove the object out of her
sight.(i.337)

As is often the case with melancholy, what might be for

most people only a passing annoyance is, for one per-
son, the trigger for long-term illness. Burton calls these
‘our melancholy provocations’ and warns readers who
are tempted to be dismissive of them that we should not
judge by how we might respond to the same stimulus.
We cannot measure another person’s suffering by our
own reactions, ‘for that which is but a fea-biting to one,
causeth insufferable torment to another’ (i.145).
While the melancholy brought on by shock, fear, and
grief affects individuals in unpredictable ways, it can also
assault whole populations. The ‘terrors and affrights’
which Burton records include the mental trauma brought
on by cataclysmic events, the effects of which can be felt
long after they have passed. On 30 December 1504, a
terrible earthquake struck Bologna in Italy, one of many
that the city has endured over the centuries. It started at
eleven at night, forcing its citizens out into the streets.
Among them was the humanist scholar Filippo Beroaldo,
whose eye-witness account Burton uses as a source for
the Anatomy. The whole city shook, Beroaldo recalls, and

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 Causes

‘the people thought the world was at an end … such a

fearful noise it made, such a detestable smell, the inhabi-
tants were infnitely affrighted, and some ran mad’ (i.338).
While many were driven to wild distress by the terri-
fying events of that night, one or two bore more severe
mental scars. Beroaldo tells the strange story of one cit-
izen, Fulco Argelanus, ‘a bold and proper man’, who was
‘so grievously terrifed with it, that he was frst melan-
choly, after doted, at last mad, and made away himself’
(i.338). This description shows the way that mental ill-
ness was distinguished in the Renaissance, not so much
by different types, as by degrees of severity: as Argelanus’
state of mind deteriorated, he went from melancholy to
dotage to madness, each successive name describing a
more acute state. Melancholy verges into madness when
the sufferer has lost all control of his or her reason. In his
retelling of the story, Burton suppresses several details
that were in Beroaldo’s original account: that the man
frst attempted suicide by cutting his throat, and that he
fnally threw himself off a high building. A violent nat-
ural disaster leads to a violent personal tragedy, but one
that in this case is the result of delayed mental trauma
rather than immediate physical damage.
Earthquakes were notorious in the Renaissance for
their powers to endanger not just the body but also the
mind. One reason for this was the noxious vapours they
produced. During earthquakes in Japan in 1596, wit-
nesses reported both a terrible noise and a flthy smell,
and at Fushimi ‘many men were offended with headache,
many overwhelmed with sorrow and melancholy’ (i.338).
As is so often the case with melancholy, outer and inner
causes and symptoms were intertwined. The toxic fumes

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 Sorrow and Fear

affected the victims’ brains and gave them headaches,

even as the horrors being witnessed terrifed the imagi-
nations. While the effects on them were immediate, the
damage could become permanent: ‘many times, some
years following, they will tremble afresh at the remem-
brance, or conceit of such a terrible object, even all their
lives long, if mention be made of it’ (i.338).

Refrigerating Passions
Why are fear and sadness so dangerous and self-­
propagating to melancholics? The answer is partly down
to their intrinsic nature. From antiquity onwards, phil-
osophers classifed fear and sorrow as passions. Also
known in the Renaissance as affections or perturbations
of the soul, passions are similar to what we would now
call emotions, but the way that they were conceptualised
by writers of the period reveals a far more fundamentally
embodied sense of what it means for humans to feel. The
passions stand between our inner motions (our willpower
and cognition) and our outer motions (our hearing, see-
ing, etc.) and they share something with both our senses
and our reason – but not equally. After all, Renaissance
theorists note, animals as well as humans have passions,
and animals have no reasoning ability. The Jesuit writer
Thomas Wright describes human passions and senses
as like naughty servants who are disobedient to their
master, reason, and who pay far more attention to one
another, as friends in league.6 Over the centuries, there
was much debate over how many passions there were –
answers ranged between two and eleven – but the basic
set classifed by Aquinas is four: fear, sorrow, joy (or love),

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 Causes

and hope. Two of them live in the present: joy and sor-
row. Two are concerned with what is to come, which we
either wish for or want to avoid: hope and fear. All the
other passions derive from these four, among them anger,
envy, pride, jealousy, avarice, and shame.
The passions are a common cause of melancholy
because, just as the bad humours of the body can work
upon the brain and damage it, so the passions can alter
the body’s humoral balance. The consequences can be
severe: as Burton puts it, ‘the mind most effectually
works upon the body, producing by his passions and per-
turbations miraculous alterations, as melancholy, despair,
cruel diseases, and sometimes death itself’ (i.250). He
describes the actions of the passions in visceral terms:
‘giving way to these violent passions of fear, grief, shame,
revenge, hatred, malice, etc., they are torn in pieces, as
Actaeon was with his dogs, and crucify their own souls’
(i.259). Those who fall prey to the passions are victims,
but Burton’s words also hint at their personal responsi-
bility for what happens to them: they are not crucifed by
the passions, but crucify themselves.
The story of Vives’ Frenchman shows just how extreme
the actions of the passions can be, ‘producing … death
itself’, as Burton puts it. These effects were deemed to
be more severe in certain groups of people: women, for
instance. Renaissance readers would probably have found
signifcance in the fact that the Frenchman was Jewish
(Vives himself was the son of converso parents, that is,
Jews who converted to Christianity). In the Anatomy
Burton records several cases from his medical sources of
Jewish sufferers from melancholy, where their suscepti-
bility to the passions is a defning feature. The Italian

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 Sorrow and Fear

physician Giambattista da Monte (Montanus, 1488–1551)

for instance, ‘had a melancholy Jew to his patient; he
ascribes this for a principal cause … he was easily moved
to anger’ (i.270). The antisemitic slur that Jewish people
were prey to the passions – seen on stage in the ava-
rice and rage of Shakespeare’s Shylock – is written into
Renaissance medical theorising about the mind’s health.
What did it mean, precisely, to die of shock and fear?
We might assume that the Frenchman’s experience simply
brought on a heart attack. But Renaissance medicine pro-
vides a far more elaborate theory of how fear and sorrow
can affect the heart, which is the ‘seat of all affections’.
Drawing on Aristotelian ideas of perception, Burton and
others explain that, when we experience something with
our senses or remember it and our memory amplifes
it into a cause of sorrow or fear, the imagination sends
a message to the heart. Several things happen in turn.
First, the imagination’s messengers – known as the spir-
its – ‘fock from the brain to the heart, by certain secret
channels’ (i.252), to tell it how to respond to the external
threat or upset. Then the heart uses the bodily humours
to carry out its orders to the rest of the body, and thus
disrupts their normal fow. When we are frightened or
sad, the heart draws to itself melancholy, the cold and wet
humour, to ‘help it’ in trying to avoid what causes grief.
And, as Burton puts it, this ‘refrigerates the heart’ (i.260).
The body’s whole temperature changes as a result. Fear
and sorrow take heat from the body’s outside and contract
it inwards. This is why, when we are scared, we shiver as
we do when we are cold.
In itself, this process is not necessarily bad. When our
imagination interprets what we perceive correctly – say, if

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 Causes

we see an angry bull on the loose and think of it attacking

us and goring us to death – its message to the heart tells
it to avoid the danger as quickly as possible. We turn cold
as the humours and spirits within the body become dis-
rupted from their normal tasks so that they all act in the
service of fear. The bodily change is a rapid one, and it
saves our lives if we run for cover (though if we ‘freeze’, it
may well put us in worse danger). Yet Burton is emphatic
that fear and sorrow are damaging not just to the heart
but to the whole body. When the passions disturb our
bodily humours, ‘the spirits so confounded, the nour-
ishment must needs be abated, bad humours increased,
crudities and thick spirits engendered, with melancholy
blood. The other parts cannot perform their functions,
having the spirits drawn from them by vehement passion’
(i.252). Hence why fear turns our stomach and loosens
our bowels, why sorrow stops us eating and makes us
turn pale.

This Ocean of Misery

All fears, griefs, suspicions, discontents, imbonities, insuavities
are swallowed up, and drowned in this Euripus, this Irish sea, this
ocean of misery, as so many small brooks; … I say of our melan-
choly man, he is the cream of human adversity, the quintessence,
and upshot; all other diseases whatsoever, are but fea-bitings to
­melancholy in extent: ’Tis the pith of them all.
(i.434)

In trying to describe what it feels like to be melancholic,

Burton reaches for the appropriate words to describe
the suffering. He even invents new ones: ‘imbonities’ is
his own coinage (meaning ‘unkindnesses’, ‘absences of

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 Sorrow and Fear

figu r e 1.2 Melancholy. Anonymous, after Parmigianino (1524–90).

goodness’).7 We have had those fea-bitings before, as a

comparison of other pains with melancholy’s (‘ocean’ is
another favourite Burtonian measure: in the Anatomy
there are oceans of ‘adversity’, ‘troubles’, ‘cares’, and ‘a
stupendous, vast, infnite ocean of incredible madness
and folly’, i.274, 323; iii.154, 313). That melancholy is the
quintessence of all diseases is also an acknowledgement of
how far it participates in different experiences.
Just as a wide variety of different fears can stimu-
late a case of melancholy, so can different sorrowful
contexts. One of them is the indefnable experience of

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 Causes

malaise expressed by Antonio in the opening words of

The Merchant of Venice – ‘In sooth I know not why I am
so sad’ – and in which Melancholy as a personifed fgure
is often depicted (see Figure 1.2). Yet that mysteriously
causeless sorrow is not attributable to all melancholy
cases.8 In the common defnition of melancholy cited by
Burton (and others), the disease has ‘for his ordinary com-
panions fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion’
(i.170). The emphasis should be on ‘apparent’, though: in
many cases there is an occasion responsible for producing
the passions of fear and sadness, but – if the sufferer sur-
vives their initial onslaught – the emotional experience
becomes unmoored from its original circumstances.
The initial causes of melancholic sorrow are many and,
to those who do not fully understand them, they might
appear only minor. Burton spends some time discussing the
damaging experience of being on the receiving end of cruel
words: ‘a bitter jest, a slander, a calumny pierceth deeper
than any loss, danger, bodily pain or injury whatsoever’, he
remarks, and ‘many men are undone by this means, moped,
and so dejected, that they are never to be recovered’. These
‘arrows’, as he calls them (drawing on biblical imagery),
stick in the fesh until the victim is incurably injured. This
is especially wounding for those people who already tend
towards melancholy, since they are sensitive and prone to
misconstruing other people’s meanings. If they hear some-
thing barbed or inconsiderate said of them, even in jest,
‘they aggravate, and so meditate continually of it, that it is a
perpetual corrosive, not to be removed till time wear it out’
(i.341). The corporeal language Burton uses to describe
this hurt is vivid. Even a moment of thoughtless cruelty
can leave poison beneath the skin.

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 Sorrow and Fear

More tangible, environmental causes are responsible

for the same condition. Burton expresses compassion
for those forced to live in confnement: women in Spain,
Italy, and Turkey who are forced to stay at home, for
instance, or those under long prison sentences. Likewise,
he mourns the miserable fate of the enslaved, among them
the ‘30,000 Indian slaves at Potosi, in Peru’ condemned to
a life in the mines of ‘perpetual drudgery, hunger, thirst,
and stripes, without all hope of delivery!’ (i.345). This is
far from fashionable melancholy in the Ficinian mode.
That Burton attributes ‘heart-eating melancholy’ to the
enslaved and the poor, ‘preyed upon by polling offcers
for breaking the laws, by their tyrannizing landlords, so
fayed and feeced by perpetual exactions, that … they
cannot live’ (i.352), shows the seriousness of his social
purpose. The condition he analyses is inficted not just
by individual misfortune but by structures of power.
Condemning this inhumane treatment, Burton is alert to
the mental degradation caused by a life of hardship and
persecution.
One of the things that these examples have in common
is the lack or the loss of freedom. As Burton remarks,
using a story from the physician Girolamo Cardano
(1501–76), the power of restrictions lies more in their
power to control us than in whether they make any dif-
ference to our actual behaviour:
Were we enjoined to go to such and such places, we would
not willingly go: but being barred of our liberty, this alone
torments our wandering soul that we may not go. A citizen of
ours, saith Cardan, was sixty years of age, and had never been
forth of the walls of the city of Milan; the prince hearing of
it, commanded him not to stir out: being now forbidden that

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 Causes

which all his life he had neglected, he earnestly desired, and

being denied, dolore confectus mortem, obiit, he died for grief.
(ii.173)

The pressure of physical, mental, and spiritual restric-

tions – whether self-imposed or enforced by others –
typically occasions the sorrow which is, in turn, a major
cause of melancholy, and which in the case of this man
proved fatal.
Melancholy brings to light how much difference per-
sonal perspective makes to our responses to external cir-
cumstances. When Burton consoles his reader against
loss of liberty, imprisonment, and exile, he draws atten-
tion to this very question:
We are all prisoners. What is our life but a prison? We are
all imprisoned in an island. The world itself to some men is
a prison, our narrow seas as so many ditches, and when they
have compassed the globe of the earth, they would fain go see
what is done in the moon. (ii.173)

Burton never travelled beyond the shores of Britain (or

at least so he tells us) and insular experience informs
his idea of common imprisonment. His words might
recall Hamlet, telling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
that ‘Denmark’s a prison’, and saying that he ‘could be
bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infnite
space, were it not that I have bad dreams’.9 By contrast,
the boundless curiosity to travel in an unrestricted way
is, Burton hints, not morally neutral. Those men who
have ‘compassed the globe of the earth’ and are still unsa-
tiated have the tincture of Satan, who, when God asks
him when he has come from, replies, ‘From compassing
the earth to and fro, and from walking in it’ (Job 1:7).10

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NURSERY, MARCH

1881, VOL. XXIX ***
 THE
NURSERY
 A Monthly Magazine

For Youngest Readers.

VOLUME XXIX.—No. 3.

BOSTON:
THE NURSERY PUBLISHING COMPANY,
No. 36 Bromfield Street.
1881.

Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1881, by

THE NURSERY PUBLISHING COMPANY,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
 IN PROSE.

PAGE
Telling a Story 65
Turtles 71
Feeding the Swans in Winter 72
Two Friends 74
The Swallows' Nest 76
Drawing-Lesson 81
The Faithful Sentinel 86
Bruce and Old Sheepy 88
Elfrida's Present 92
"Parley-voo" 93

IN VERSE.

PAGE
To the Snowdrop 69
Rather Bashful 72
Bird, Lamb, Baby 75
The Gentleman in Gray 78
The Little Scholars 80
The Three Dolls 82
"Right of Way" 91
Winter (with music) 96
VOL. XXIX.—NO. 3.
 TELLING A STORY.

REAR and cold is the winter outside; but within there is a bright
fire on the hearth. Jane and Susie, and Charles and John, and
their elder sister Ann, are all seated comfortably in front of it. And
now the children call on sister Ann to tell them a story; and this is
what she tells them:—
"When I was a girl, and wanted to hear a story, and the grown-up people
didn't feel like telling me one, they would say,—
"'I'll tell you a story about Jack O'Nory;
And now my story's begun.
I'll tell you another about Jack and his brother;
And now my story's done.'
"Now, every time this was said to me, I would think that I really should
hear the story about Jack O'Nory, or the other one about Jack and his brother.
But it was always the same; just as I thought the story was coming, I would
hear, instead, 'And now my story's done.'
"One day, when I begged for one of the stories, my aunt told me that I
couldn't hear about Jack O'Nory or his brother, because Mother Goose never
told the stories about them; that she just began, and then thought better of
it. After that I didn't ask any more; but I said to myself, 'If ever I get big, I'll
find out those stories.' And so, sure enough, I did. And I am going to tell one
of them now,—the one about Jack O'Nory himself.
"'It is a story that all came of his having a great liking for buns.
Jack lived in the next house to Mother Goose, and every morning,
if she peeped between the curtains, she was sure to see Jack
waiting on the pavement for the bun-man. You see the bun-man
went around very early, so that people could have their buns for
breakfast.
"'But one morning Jack slept too late, and, when he ran out,
the bun-man had already gone by and was almost out of sight.
Jack ran after him, but could not catch him.
"'It didn't seem to Jack a bit nice, not to
have any bun with his milk that morning; and
so all day Jack kept saying to himself, "That
bun-man won't get by the house to-morrow
morning without my knowing it, I guess!" And
this was the last thing he thought of as he took
off his shoes and stockings at night before the
fire.
"'But all his
thinking did not
seem to be of
much use; for,
before he had
slept half as long as he wanted to, he
heard the jingle of the bun-man's bell.
Up he jumped, pulled on his clothes
as fast as he could, and had got on all
except one shoe, when the bell rang
below the window. Down he ran, but
the bun-man wasn't there.
"'Jack forgot that he had on only
one shoe, and started to run after the
man. He was soon only half a square
behind him; but just then the man
turned a corner, and was out of sight. Jack turned the corner too;
but the man had walked fast and was just turning another corner.
"'Poor Jack began to think he was not going to get his bun; but
he still ran on, and turned the next corner and the next, for the
bun-man seemed to be always turning corners. Jack got very hot,
and was just beginning to cry, when, as he was turning the ninth
corner after the man, he saw him go into a house.
"'"Ah!" thought Jack, "that's the place where they make the
buns. I'll hurry in after him, and then I'll surely get my bun, and
he'll tell me the way home besides."
"'So in went Jack. But the man was not to be seen. There was
nothing to be seen except buns, all in great piles like walls, and all
 smoking hot. Jack was very warm
already, you know, and the steam from
so many hot buns made him warmer
still; but he tried not to mind it, and
walked on, looking all the time for the
bun-man.
"'He could hear his bell every little
while; but the more he tried to go
where the bell was, the more he could
not find it, Jack by this time, had gone
through so many rooms, that he did
not know how to get out: so he went
down some stairs that he saw ahead of
him, and found himself in the place
where the buns were baked.
"'There were plenty of men here, all in baker's caps; but
instead of making buns, they were pouring out milk for two rows
of little boys, who stood, each with a bib under his chin and a bun
in his hand. The strangest part of it was that the boys did not
seem to be a bit hot, while poor Jack was almost melting. Jack
thought that if he could only drink some milk, he should feel
better.
"'But just as he was about to
take his place with the rest of
the boys, they disappeared, and
instead of pouring out milk, the
men were shovelling buns out of
ovens on all sides of the room.
Now, Jack had heard his mamma
tell about the great oven that
buns were baked in, and he had
always wanted to see one: so he
ran up to the door to look in.
"'The heat drove him back,
and he turned quickly to run,
just as one of the bakers was
putting his shovel in for more buns. The baker did not notice him,
 and, the first thing Jack knew, the baker's elbow drove him bump
against the oven door. My! how he screamed!
"'Then, all of a sudden, there was
no oven to be seen, only a fire; and
his mother was coming in at the
door,—not the bun-man's door, but
his own nursery door,—saying,
"Why, Jack, not undressed yet! I
sent you to bed a half-hour ago!"
"'But she stopped suddenly, and
picked Jack up, hugging and kissing
him, and calling his father to go for the doctor. Poor Jack! what
with the hurt on his head, and his mother's crying, and the
thought of the strange bake-shop, he wondered whether he was
Jack O'Nory at all.
"'While he was wondering the doctor came, and his mother
began to tell him about Jack's hurt. "You see, doctor," she said,
"my little boy went to sleep as he was sitting very near the fire,
and fell over and cut his head against the hot andiron."
"'Then Jack knew that the bun-man, the bake-shop, and the
oven, were all a dream. He told his mamma the dream, and she
promised him three buns every day till his head was well. Then
she tucked him up in his bed, and told him not to dream of the
bun-man again.'
"So this is the story of Jack O'Nory. Some day 'I'll tell you another about
Jack and his brother, and now my story is done!'"
MRS. HENRIETTA R. ELIOT.
TO THE SNOW-DROP.
Emblem of purity, gracefully lifting
Petals of beauty 'mid wintry snows drifting;
Brave little snow-drop, so fair and so hardy,
First flower to welcome the spring chill and tardy,
—
Frost cannot wither thee, cold cannot frighten,
Patiently tarrying till skies may brighten;

Snow-piercer, cloud-gazer, wind-scorner, eye-

cheerer,
Bring to my heart thy dear message yet nearer.
When age or sorrow is darkly impending,
Snows of adversity thickly descending,
Then, springing out of them, checked by no
blasting,
Let there bloom thoughts of the life everlasting.
Coming, like snow-drops, amid our endurance,
Bringing to each weary heart the assurance,
To joy's frozen waste spring draws nigher and
nigher,
And death is the way to life higher and higher.
EPES SARGENT.
 TURTLES.

LMOST every one thinks of turtles as exceedingly slow and stupid.

Perhaps they may be rather slow, though you know who won the
race in the fable of the turtle and the hare. As for their stupidity, I
doubt whether they are so very stupid, for I once had one that
seemed to me very bright.
When I put him on the floor or ground, he would stay quite still, and draw
in his head and legs, until I turned away, or busied myself with something
else; then he would make off as fast as his little legs would carry him.
I once lost one in that way: so, now that I know their tricks, I am more
careful. But certainly that turtle must have had some sense to be able to tell
when my back was turned, or even when I was not looking.
Their habits are quite peculiar. In summer they stay in the water most of
the time, coming out only now and then to sun themselves on some log or
branch. In the winter they bury themselves in the mud, or remain in a torpid
state. When spring comes, they lay their eggs.
They live chiefly on bugs; but I have heard of one living a whole year
without any thing to eat. They are very patient, and I have seen one try for
hours to get over a wall that one would think he could never get over; and yet
he would succeed.
I have a turtle now that will have a funny story to tell his friends, if he ever
reaches his native home again. This is it: I once took him to school with me,
and left him in a box, with the cover half open, on a table in the dressing-
room. In about an hour I heard a suppressed laugh from one of the girls, and,
looking up, I saw Mr. Turtle calmly walking into school. He wanted to learn
something as well as the rest of us.
LITTLE CHICK.
RATHER BASHFUL!

Under this great

sunbonnet
Is hid a pretty face,
Belonging to a little girl
Whose name, they say,
is Grace.
She is a merry little girl,
As good as good can be;
But she is rather bashful,
As any one may see.
W.
 FEEDING THE SWANS IN WINTER.

T is a cold day in February. The icicles hang from the trees. The pond is
partly frozen over. Mary and her dog Pug have come down to take a
look at the swans.
The swans are often fed by girls and boys in the summer; but in
winter they have few visitors: so they are glad to see Mary, and waddle
up on the ice to meet her.
She feeds them with something that looks to me like a banana, and they
eat it greedily. Pug looks on fiercely, as though he did not quite approve of
their doings, and had half a mind to interfere.
 Take care, Pug: you had better keep in the background. A blow from a
swan's wing would not be good fun to a small dog. Let the swans eat their
luncheon in peace.
IDA FAY.
 TWO FRIENDS.

Jane and Ann were good

friends, but one morning
they had a quarrel. They
soon made it up. Jane put
her arms round Ann's neck,
and said, "I am sorry." Ann
gave her a kiss, and they
were friends again.
Here you see them
taking a walk. They have
on good warm coats, for
it is a very cold day. Just
see how lovingly they
clasp each other. They
are having a nice little
chat. I wonder what they
are saying.
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