| Front | Robert Burton |
|---|---|
| Back | 1577-1640 author of the Anatomy of Melancholy 1621 Robert Burton (8 February 1577 – 25 January 1640) was an English scholar at Oxford University, best known for the classic The Anatomy of Melancholy. He was also the incumbent of St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford, and of Seagrave in Leicestershire. Burton's Melancholy focuses sharply on the self; unlike Bacon, Burton assumes that knowledge of psychology, not natural science, is humankind's greatest need. His enormous treatise is considered "delightful" by critics; it examines in encyclopaedic detail the ubiquitous Jacobean malady, melancholy, supposedly caused by an excess of "black bile", according to the humour theory fashionable at the time.[2] Melancholy was responsible, according to Burton and others, for the wild passions and despairs of lovers, the agonies and ecstasies of religious devotees, the frenzies of madmen, and the studious abstraction exemplified by scholars such as Shakespeare or Milton. He wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy largely to write himself out of being a lifelong sufferer from depression. As he described his condition in the preface "Democritus Junior to the Reader," for I had gravidum cor, foetum caput [a heavy heart, hatchling in my head], a kind of imposthume in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of. |
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