Few English books are as widely known, underread, and underappreciated as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Stephanie Shirilan laments that modern scholars often treat the Anatomy as an unmediated repository of early modern views on melancholy, overlooking the fact that Burton is writing a cento - an ancient form of satire that quotes and misquotes authoritative texts in often subversive ways - and that his express intent in so doing is to offer his readers literary therapy for melancholy. This book explores the ways in which the Anatomy dispenses both direct physic and more systemic medicine by encouraging readers to think of melancholy as a privileged mental and spiritual acuity that requires cultivation and management rather than cure. Refuting the prevailing historiography of anxious early modern embodiment that cites Burton as a key witness, Shirilan submits that the Anatomy rejects contemporary Neostoic and Puritan approaches to melancholy. She reads Burton’s erraticism, opacity, and theatricality as modes of resistance against demands for constancy, transparency, and plainness in the popular literature of spiritual and moral hygiene of his day. She shows how Burton draws on rhetorical, theological, and philosophical traditions that privilege the transformative powers of the imagination in order to celebrate melancholic impressionability for its capacity to inspire and engender empathy, charity, and faith.
...MoreReview Rebecca Totaro (2016) Review of "Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy". Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period (pp. 390-392).
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Amneris Roselli;
(2020)
Male sollertibus vs male feriatis. Robert Burton e i lettori dell'Anatomy of Melancholy
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Stephanie Shirilan;
(2016)
Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy
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Thesis
Zinninger, Jane M.;
(2009)
Analysis of Melancholia: A Critical Study of Robert Burton's “The Anatomy of Melancholy”
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Giuliano Mori;
(2016)
Democritus Junior as Reader of Auctoritates: Robert Burton’s Method and The Anatomy of Melancholy
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Susan Wells;
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Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge
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Laurens, André Du;
Suciu, Radu;
(2012)
Discours des maladies mélancoliques: 1594
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Lund, Mary Ann;
(2010)
Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading “The Anatomy of Melancholy”
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María Bolaños;
(2015)
Tiempos de melancolía: Creación y desengaño en la España del Siglo de Oro
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Altbauer-Rudnik, Michal;
(2006)
Love, Madness and Social Order: Love Melancholy in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries
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Dixon, Laurinda S.;
(2013)
The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500--1700
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Murphy, Kathryn;
(2014)
Robert Burton and the Problems of Polymathy
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Peterson, Kaara L.;
(2005)
Re-Anatomizing Melancholy: Burton and the Logic of Humoralism
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Elide Casali;
(2012)
"Anatomie Astrologiche". Melotesia e pronosticazione (sec. XVI-XVII)
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Giuseppe Olmi;
Claudia Pancino;
(2012)
Anatome. Sezione, scomposizione, raffigurazione del corpo nell'età moderna
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Massimo Rinaldi;
(2012)
Perspicuitas ed evidentia nella letteratura medica e anatomica dell’età moderna
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Fabio Zampieri;
(2021)
The University of Padua Medical School from the Origins to the Early Modern Time: A Historical Overview
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Enenkel, Karl A. E.;
Kolfin, Elmer E. P.;
Smith, Paul J.;
(2007)
Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts
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Benjamin Goldberg;
(2015)
William Harvey on Anatomy and Experience
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Joaquin Fortanet;
(2015)
Anatomía de la monstruosidad: la figura del monstruo como objeto de la mirada médico-anatómica moderna
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Rafael Mandressi;
(2012)
Dividere per conoscere. La "parte" come concetto nel pensiero anatomico in Età Moderna
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