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Born in a landed gentry family of Leicestershire, Robert Burton (Lindley, 1577 – Oxford, 1640) will follow the footsteps of his older brother, the antiquarian William Burton, moving to Oxford to pursue his humanistic education. In 1599, six years after his matriculation in Brasenose College, he is elected a “life fellow” of Christ Church, the college where he will spend most of his days in a life he describes, in a mixt of disappointment and resignation, as «silent, sedentary, solitary» (AM I, p. 17). Later, already pronounced bachelor of divinity (1614), he becomes vicar of St Thomas' Church in Oxford (1616) and rector of Seagrave in Leicestershire (1630), minor positions he understood as the consequence of the increasing distancing of the scholars towards the centres of decision. That malcontent sentiment, well expressed in his life’s project, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), is essential to understand Burton’s exploration of the congenital and adventitious manifestations of what had became a fashionable disease enabling, parallel to the encyclopaedic presentation of melancholy’s medical and philosophical dimensions, both a stringent critique of his own society and the utopian project of its reformation. In that sense, the frequent categorization of the Anatomy as a mapping of the inner landscape, in counterpointed with Bacon’s mathematization of the “external” world, may obliterate how melancholy provides a viewpoint on every scientific discipline, but also the transformative aims of the book. Beginning with the adoption of the persona of Democritus Junior, Burton indicates a deliberate retreat from the world which, in manner of the Abderian Democritus, allows incursions to the city’s harbour to «laugh heartily» at the vanities of its citizens. His growing discontent with patronage and political power, will lead him to convert his book into a public podium that allows his observation of the ways of the world, a venting of the spleen which, under the guise of satirical and ironical amusement, has a serious intent. However, the Anatomy’s self-professed intent, consolidated along its successive editions (1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, and 1651) is curative. Personal experience of the disease bestows Burton with the authority to inspect and criticize the theories on the causes, manifestations and treatments of that condition, leading the reader, his «fellow traveller», in an informative and therapeutic path. The Anatomy’s greatest therapeutic achievement consists in supplementing the natural –dietary and pharmacological- and preternatural (astral, magic and alchemic) prescriptions to the ever-expanding forms of melancholy, with the rhetorical constitution of a dialogue that proposes the identification and correction of one’s passions. It is safe to say that, along with the recognition of a particular kind of «embodied interactionism» (Radden 2017), with his phenomenology of the passions, Burton suspends the observation of melancholy that dominated medical treatises, presenting a complex form of “melancholic observation”. |
