The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy
Robert Burton in Context

An investigation of the theory of melancholy and its applications in the Renaissance.

Angus Gowland (Author)

9781107403017, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 August 2011

358 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.48 kg

Review of the hardback: '… Angus Gowland's new study demonstrates that there is still room in the field for fresh and stimulating work. … Incisive and well-researched, Gowland's study offers readers a comprehensive and original examination of one of early modern England's most interesting thinkers.' Cahiers Elisabethains

Angus Gowland investigates the theory of melancholy and its many applications in the Renaissance by means of a wide-ranging contextual analysis of Robert Burton's encyclopaedic Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621). Approaching the Anatomy as the culmination of early modern medical, philosophical and spiritual inquiry about melancholy, Gowland examines the ways in which Burton exploited the moral psychology central to the Renaissance understanding of the condition to construct a critical vision of his intellectual and political environment. In the first sustained analysis of the evolving relationship of the Anatomy (in the various versions issued between 1621 and 1651) to late Renaissance humanist learning and early seventeenth-century England and Europe, Gowland corrects the prevailing view of the work as an unreflective digest of other authors' opinions, and reveals the Anatomy's character as a polemical literary engagement with the live intellectual, religious and political issues of its day.

Acknowledgements
Conventions
Introduction
1. The medical theory of melancholy
2. Dissecting medical learning
3. Melancholy and divinity
4. The melancholy body politic
5. Utopia, consolation, and withdrawal
Conclusion: Robert Burton's melancholy
Bibliographies.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD], History [HB]