About the Book
This is the third and final text volume of the Clarendon edition of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. It contains `The Third Partition', `The Table', edited from 1624-1651 editions, and their textual apparatus, and an Index of Persons. Also included are three appendices: `The Conclusion of the Author to the Reader', which occurs only in the 1621 edition, a list of stop-press corrections to the 1632 edition, and the edited Synoptic Tables.
The Third Partition is made up of two grand digressions which conclude Burton's earlier arguments on the causes and cures of melancholy. In the first digression he anatomizes love melancholy, its kinds, causes and symptom, and cures. No one up to his time had dealt more elaborately, or more thoroughly, with the components of love. Certain sections, `Beauty a Cause', of `Jealousie, his Æquivocations, Name, Definition, Extent ...' are no less engaging today than when they were first written. In the second, religious melancholy, he surveys the aberrations from true religious commitment which are the cause of this melancholy. To Burton the divine, no other manifestation of melancholy was as serious as this, and his words of comfort, consolation, and encouragement, are a fitting end to his dissection of a disease that all are heir to.
Table of Contents:
The preface; loves beginning, object, definition, division; love of men, which varies as his objects, profitable, pleasant, honest; pleasant objects of love; honest objects of love; charity, composed of all three kindes, pleasant, profitable, honest; heroicall love causing melancholy; his pedegree, power, and extent; how love tyrannizeth over men; love or heroicall melancholy, his definition, part affected; causes of heroicall love, temperature, full diet, idlenesse, place, climat, etc; other causes of love melancholy, sight, beauty from the face, eyes, other parts, and how it pierceth; artificiall allurements of love, causes and provocations to lust. Gestures, cloathes, dowre, etc; importunity and opportunity of time, place, conference, discourse, singing, dancing, musicke, amorous tales, objects, kissing, familiarity, tokens, presents, bribes, promises, protestations, teares, etc; bawdes, philters, causes; symptomes or signes of love melancholy, in body, minde, good, bac, etc; prognosticks of love melancholy; cure of love melancholy, by labour, diet, physicke, fasting, etc; withstand the beginnings, avoid occasions, change his place - faire and fowle means, contrary passions, with witty inventions - to bring in another, and discommend the former; by counsell and perswasion, fouleness of the fact, mens, womens faults, miseries of marriage, events of lust, etc; philters, magicall and poeticall cures; the last and best cure of love melancholy, is, to let them have their desire; JEALOUSY. jealousie, its aequivocations, amek definition, extent, severall kindes; of princes, parents, friends. In beasts, men, before marriage, as Corrivalls, or after, as in this place; causes of jealousie. Who are most apt. Idlenesse, melancholy, impotency, long absence, beauty, wantonnesse, naught themselves. Allurements, from time, place, persons, bad usage, causes; symptomes of jealousie, feare, sorrow, suspition, strange actions, gestures, outrages, locking up, oathes, trials, laws, etc; prognosticks of jealousie, despaire, madnesse, to make away themselves and others; cure of jealousie - by avoiding occasions, not to be idle - of good counsell - to contemne it, not to watch or locke them up - to dissemble it, etc; by prevention before, or after marriage, Plato's community, marry a curtisan, philters, stewes, to marry one equall in yeares, fortunes, of a good family, education, good place, to use them well, etc. (Part contents)
Review :
`Rambling, anecdotal, full of exaggeration and digression, this volume is lit with the sympathy and humour that give Burton's writing its charm ... There is poetry and a kindness here that reaches across the centuries .
Literary Review
`He moves, more tactfully than formal rhetoric might allow, and yet with a hunter's instinct, through resonances that are themselves part of the accumulating memory of post-Reformation written and spoken English. ... he writes in commanding knowledge of ancient and modern predecessors ... and in the sharp awareness that priorities and circumstances are in process of change ... A sense of authorial pride and a sense of massive and grateful indebtedness seem
to hold together in Burton.'
Times Literary Supplement
'The three volumes comprising this portion of the Clarendon edition (two volumes of commentary are yet to come) provide the most thorough, scholarly, and useful edition of Burton's Anatomy ever produced. The editors' foresight and insight amazes, and the physical text itself is as presentable and readable as possible. No scholarly library of English-Renaissance works will want to be without this invaluable edition.'
William C. Johnson, Northern Illinois University, Sixteenth Century Journal XXV/4 (1994)
`They contain the complete text and the variant readings...the appearance of this fascinating, eccentric, and genuinely poetic work is very handsome...a responsible publication of an old author should serve both the research scholar and the common reader.'
The New York Review
`we have an authoritative edition of one of the most important, as well as compendious, works of seventeenth century literature and science...The editors and the Oxford Press deserve our thanks in bringing this giant task to completion in a readable form...for literary scholars and specialists, it can no longer be said that Burton 'awaits his editor''
Renaissance Quarterly
