Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)

1. Democritus Junior : discerning care -- 2. Heroic hypochondria and the sympathetic delusions of melancholy -- 3. Exhilarating the spirits : study as cure for scholarly melancholy -- 4. "Exonerating" melancholy. Press Copy: Few English books are as widely known, underread, and underappreciated as Robert Burtons 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 Burtons 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. (http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&isbn=9781472417015&lang=cy-GB) http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?p... Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses, though her analyses deal mainly with modern literary works. This collection of essays examines the vast extent to which rhetorical figures related to sickness and health-metaphor, simile, pun, analogy, symbol, personification, allegory, oxymoron, and metonymy-inform medieval and early modern literature, religion, science, and medicine in England and its surrounding European context. In keeping with the critical trend over the past decade to foreground the matter of the body and the emotions, these essays track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health - physical, emotional, and spiritual. The contributors to this collection approach their intriguing subjects from a wide range of timely, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including the philosophy of language, semiotics, and linguistics; ecology; women's and gender studies; religion; and the history of medicine. The essays focus on works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others; the genres of epic, lyric, satire, drama, and the sermon; and cultural history artifacts such as medieval anatomies, the arithmetic of plague bills of mortality, meteorology, and medical guides for healthy regimens. One of the major documents of modern European civilization, Robert Burton's astounding compendium, a survey of melancholy in all its myriad forms, has invited nothing but superlatives since its publication in the seventeenth century. Lewellyn Powys called it "the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose-writing," while the celebrated surgeon William Osler declared it the greatest of medical treatises. And Dr. Johnson, Boswell reports, said it was the only book that he rose early in the morning to read with pleasure. In this surprisingly compact and elegant new edition, Burton's spectacular verbal labyrinth is sure to delight, instruct, and divert today's readers as much as it has those of the past four centuries. This work is cited in Books for College Libraries, 3d ed. It is one of the major documents of modern European civilization, a survey not only of melancholy in all its myriad forms, but also of humanity's endless efforts to assuage it. First published in 1621, the book was an immediate popular success. The New York Review Books edition was edited by Holbrook Jackson in 1932. This new edition contains a new introduction by William Gass, director of the International Writer's Center. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR In This Study, Stephanie Shirilan Unearths And Contextualizes The Celebration Of The Powers Of The Melancholic Imagination In Burton’s Anatomy Of Melancholy, Thus Rescuing It From The Overly Literal Readings Of Contemporary Historicism. Situating Burton’s Recognition Of Cognitive And Spiritual Impressionability In Its Physiological And Theological Contexts, Shirilan Identifies Overlooked Echoes Of His Advice That Melancholic Readers Cure Themselves By Unsealing Their Minds And Hearts. Introduction1 Democritus Junior: Discerning Care2 Heroic Hypochondria and the Sympathetic Delusions of Melancholy3 Exhilirating the Spirits: Study as Cure for Scholarly Melancholy4 "Exonerating" MelancholyEpilogue: Loving Burton, or Burton for Amateurs