In Our Time - The Anatomy of Melancholy

Episode Date: May 12, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Robert Burton's masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy.In 1621 the priest and scholar Robert Burton published a book quite unlike any other. The Anatomy of Melancholy brings together almost two thousand years of scholarship, from Ancient Greek philosophy to seventeenth-century medicine. Melancholy, a condition believed to be caused by an imbalance of the body's four humours, was characterised by despondency, depression and inactivity. Burton himself suffered from it, and resolved to compile an authoritative work of scholarship on the malady, drawing on all relevant sources.Despite its subject matter the Anatomy is an entertaining work, described by Samuel Johnson as the only book 'that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.' It also offers a fascinating insight into seventeenth-century medical theory, and influenced many generations of playwrights and poets.With:Julie SandersProfessor of English Literature and Drama at the University of NottinghamMary Ann LundLecturer in English at the University of LeicesterErin SullivanLecturer and Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Samuel Johnson, the compiler of his mighty English dictionary, suffered terribly from depression. Quote, I inherited a vile melancholy from my father, he said, which made me mad all my life.

Reading offered Dr. Johnson some respite, and one book in particular helped lift his gloom, Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy was, said by Dr. Johnson, the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise. It was first published in 1621. The Anatomy of Melancholy is a huge and entertaining work

devoted to the causes and treatment of melancholy, a malady which preoccupied many writers of that period. Part medical treaties, part literary anthology, he draws on sources ranging from classical authors to the latest medical authorities, reflecting Burton's astonishingly broad reading. The book captivated contemporary readers and its influence later writers including Milton, Keats and Beckett.

It's still in print. With me to discuss the anatomy of melancholy are Julie Sanders, Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham, Marianne Lund, lecturer in English at the University of Leicester, and Erin Sullivan, lecturer and fellow at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham. Julie Sanders, in some ways this is one of the most unusual books in the English language. Can you give us some idea of its compendious nature?

Well, the anatomy of melancholy has been variously described as an encyclopedia, as a commonplace book, as a mine of quotations, as a medical manual, as a self-help book, and indeed, as one of the messiest books ever written, which I think gives us some idea of the sheer diversity of approach and topic that Burton brings to his subject. I mean, as its title suggests an anatomy, it's an opening up, a dissecting of what Robert Burton regarded as, an epidemic of melancholy in his own time. And he comes at this subject by invoking, as you've already said, medical, religious, philosophical and ethical and literary and poetic authorities to try and perform that anatomizing, that analysis. And he also works by what's often described as a quotational method. So this book is full of long citations and interpretations of writing from the ancients, through the medevals, through Italian Renaissance humanists, and all of that is helping to kind of exemplify, but also sometimes to digress, to go around the houses and come back to the point again.

It's rich and it's vibrant and it is indeed messy. It resists closure, I think, in all kinds of ways, this book. Can you give us some idea of Burton? Robert Burton was born in 1577 to a Leicestershire gentry family, but what we know most about him is in his adult life as an Oxford Don. He was a student and then a scholar of divinity attached to the colleges of Braithnos and then Christchurch. In Oxford. And he is also working in the library during that time, which I think is very interesting,

gives us a very interesting context, I think, for this voracious appetite for books and for learning, which is so evident in the anatomy of melancholy. He's involved in academic drama. drama written in Latin, possibly a play in 1605, performed before King James 6th and 1st. Meaning probably he wrote it. Yes, that's right. Quite a lot of Oxford and Cambridge academics would have dabbled in academic drama at this time. In 1615 to 17, he writes a play called Philosophaster, which we can see it's set in a thinly disguised.

Oxford University has characters who are clerics and scholars and kind of prefigures some of the more satirical attacks on. contemporary society that we can find in the anatomy of melancholy. He stayed at Christchurch, most of his own life, Christchurcher, and he worked in a library. Did he, you said he was from a family of gender, did he have a private income, or was the college able to pay him sufficient to live on? From 1616 onwards, he's also attached to a rural vicarage, so he's a practicing divine in that sense as well. But it's very much as the scholar penned up in his study is the phrase that he uses, that he presents himself in the anatomy of melancholy. and that's how we come to understand him. There are some lost years, interestingly, in the 1590s,

between 1593 and 1599, he seems to temporarily suspend his studies. And it's possible that he's the Robert Burton, who turns up in London, in the notebooks of the physician Simon Foreman, this man arrives suffering from a mix of psychological and physical ailments and is diagnosed with melancholy by Foreman, certainly the age of the patient fits.

So this could be our Robert Burton. And if it is, it fits with a version of himself that he presents in the anatomy as someone who actually has experienced, has gone through processes of melancholy. Erin Sullivan, underlying Burton's book is a medical theory which by the time we come to Burton himself, it's beginning to be out of date. It's a couple of thousand years old. It's still powerful that. Can you tell us what that is?

Sure. Well, the system of medicine that's very much present in Burton's time is called the humoral system. And like you say, it's one that is very old by this point. It sort of starts in the writings of Hippocrates in ancient Greece. It gets developed in the Roman period and through the Middle Ages. And the idea is that... And particularly by Galen, the Roman philosopher and surgeon, yes.

Yes, Galen does a really good job of writing about it in a way that gets transmitted in print, which is very useful for us. And the idea is that the body... is made up of four liquids or humors called blood, flam, yellow bile, and black bile. And black bile is also called melancholy. And that these... It's melanos black and... I'm reading this, obviously. Melanos black and colia bile. Yes, exactly. So melancholy is literally black bile. And the idea of the system is that these different humors in your body are what facilitate the functioning of the organs. So things like digestion, when you put food into your body. that the humors help process it,

help take the nutrients from the food, and take them to the parts of the body that need it. So ideally with these four humors, they're all in balance. But most writers agreed that that in kind of the real world was never possible, that all people had a bit of imbalance going on. And that's what leads to, if the imbalance is too great, that's what leads to disease. And so you have these four humors,

and how were they controlled? bloodletting, which now seems ever more barbaric as a years ago, and was bloodletting the principle way you control these humans? It is a very important way, but there's other ways of controlling them that aren't quite as invasive. So when you look at medical books from Burton's period, but also earlier, there's a strong emphasis on what we would now call kind of like preventative medicine of regulating your body. So there's an emphasis on what they call the non-naturals, which are things like what

you eat, how much you sleep, how much you exercise, your environment, whether you're breathing city air or country air. And the idea of the medical system is that it's very tailored to each person's particular humoral temperament and that if you start to experience too many, some kinds of problems or illnesses that you might be able to alter your diet or you might be told to go out to the country or to socialize more to listen to certain kinds of music to try to balance the kind of the humours and spirits in your body. If it gets really excessive, then you need more invasive treatments like bloodletting. Before this, just before this time, we have the beginning, not the beginnings of, yes,

more or less the beginnings of really experimentally investigative medical harvey, following the circulation of blood. This hasn't impuged on the general public at all. Galen's here are the four humors. We've got a theory here, haven't we? An unprovable, untested theory, going to the country to take some pressure or bloodletting seems about the extent of the experimental involvement? Yeah, I think that argument can be made. I mean, one of the things that's so interesting and maybe perplexing about the human moral system

is how long-lasting it is, that like you say, it lasts for 2,000 years, almost. And I think that there was a really strong investment in the authority of the past, but also, I think, a sense that through experience, we find that some of these things are true. So hot and cold make a difference that you can change where you are.

feeling very cold, then you eat hot foods to try to clear out the flam. So there's a sort of logic to it, but like you say, it's very different from our idea of experimental medicine, and you are starting to get some challenges to the system by the time we get to Burton. And so we're in Burton. We're just a few, a few, two or three decades before the formation of the Royal Society and the experimental ethos that came in then. So he's engaging in this sense, just to re-emphasize, sorry, if it's a bit boring. know exactly where we are. He's engaging. His basis is of an old system which is going out of use although he doesn't recognize it, so his root is in the classical world. Absolutely. And

we can now see that we're kind of looking at a time when things are changing. But I think it was very much the dominant system of the time and you still get it present. Even as experimental medicine is rising, you still have discussion about humours and qualities that stay in the language for a long time to come. Marianne Lund, we've heard a bit about this condition called melancholy. Can we develop it? How did people recognise it at the time, or how did they think they recognised,

how well, more importantly, how did Burton say it was recognised? Burton describes melancholy as a compound mixed malady. So it's a disease which is both physically rooted and it's a mental disorder, and indeed a spiritual disorder too. So you have all of those strands as part of it. So he sees that mind, body and soul interrelated in that sense?

Altogether. very much so, and particularly in the case of melancholy. His definition of it is as an anguish of mind, which is particularly associated with fear and sorrow without a cause. So Hamlet, for instance, is a melancholy man, but of course he does have cause for being sorrowful. But does he quote Hamlet? No, he doesn't know.

Well, it's surprising, isn't it? Romeo and Juliet. Yeah. Anyway, come back in a minute. So melancholy, the disease, comes from the excess of melancholy, the humour, that's natural melancholy. So you may be just a sort of thoughtful person prone to solitude and not ill, but when melancholy in your system becomes too much, becomes excessive,

then you become diseased through it. And you may be unable to seek the company of other people, unable to do anything, rather crippled by this disease. There's also what's called unnatural melancholy, which, confusingly, is not produced by melancholy at all, but by the other humours, when they become corrupted or burnt, what's known as adust melancholy. So you can be a sanguine melancholic, which is when your blood becomes corrupted.

And that's a whole different kind of disorder. What happens then? You're cheerful. But you laugh at more or less everything. You're a cheerful melancholic. Yeah, absolutely. So you laugh perhaps a little hysterically at things. If you're a choleric melancholic, then you become, you pick fights all the time.

You get very angry with people. but also very brave. They couldn't quite decide whether you phlegmatic melancholic really worked as an idea. Galen thought not. But in those cases, you tended to seek solitary places, but near the water, because phlegm was a watery humour. So you have these two variations on melancholy. But really the common definition is that sense of mental anguish and torment.

Burton describes it as the cream of human adversity. We smile about it. You were smiling about it. We're all smiling about these definitions. and seeking the water and so on. At the time, this made sense to enough people to stick with it for centuries and to find comfort and one presumed some sort of relief in it. So he was looking around a world,

and he was identifying a thing that we know a lot about now, we call it depression or various forms of depression. And so he was talking about a reality, and the instruments you were using seem rather blunt and useless to us, but they were good for then. Absolutely, and I think humoral theory seems very simple, simplistic almost. Humeral theory. Yes, I'm humoral theory, but in fact, it renders some quite sophisticated ideas.

So, for instance, the sense of mind and body interacting, the kind of diseases that come from physical causes but manifest themselves in mental disorder. And also the other way around, that physical disorders can come from physical disorders can come from physical causes, from trouble of mind that you might, you know, come out in spots and rash, all that because there's kind of things, but it's actually from some, what we call stress, for instance, psychosomatic disorders. That struck me very much in reading the notes and preparing for this, the absolute acceptance of psychomatic disorders, that these things were connected, and that was our question, wasn't it?

Indeed. And I think it's also, it's a taking seriously mental disease. Burton says that you might as well tell a melancholy person not to be melancholy, is to tell someone who's wounded or someone who's in a fever not to feel pain or to stop their physical symptoms. You can't do it. Was there at the time almost a cult of melancholy? We're talking about 1621 when he published his first book.

It was the one book he wrote, he wrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it, and the final sixth edition was published after his death in 1651. But was he addressing not only a widespread, something that was recognised widely, but also something which was a cult. And if so, tell us about the cult. There is a cult of melancholy by this time. And it goes back to antiquity.

In fact, there is a set of problems that was thought at the time to have been by Aristotle, which said, why is it that people who are outstanding in philosophy, in the arts and poetry, tend to be melancholic? That gets taken up in the late 15th century by Ficino, who really elaborates on this idea of artists being melancholic. So in the 16th century, it's very attractive to picture yourself as melancholic. and indeed portraits this time. Courtees are painted reclining by a riverside under a tree.

Wearing black melancholy is definitely a pose that people found attractive. So I think Burton's sails were certainly helped by the fact that melancholy was so vogueish. Was it bogus because of Aristotle's suggestion and it might be linked with genius? Yes, very much so, yes. and particularly for Chino's sort of building on that. And of course, you know, things like Dura's melancholia as well, the famous engraving of female melancholy. So it becomes an important theme in art as well.

But Burton really doesn't go in for that much. He says that, of course, it is attractive at first, but takes it seriously. He quoted unusually for a scholar at that time, he quoted enormously from near contemporary sources. And he quoted once from Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. Curious he didn't quote. quote from Jackways or Jakes as you like it, or you mentioned Hamlet earlier from Hamlet.

Is there any reason for that? I suppose it's a, you know, what he happened to read, what was popular. We know he owned things like, I think he owned Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, for instance. He quotes Chaucer as well. And so, yeah. Julius Sons, let's go back to why he wanted to write it in the first place.

I think he's picking up on exactly what Marianne is describing. this interest, almost obsession with melancholy, but there's a personal motive as well. I mentioned earlier that he himself claims that he suffers from melancholy or has suffered from melancholy.

And you seem to have a little proof of that with Simon Foreman in the 509th. Possibly. We can't be absolutely sure, but it's a tempting conjecture. I mean, he writes in the anatomy that I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy. So the actual act of producing this huge term,

as you said, he writes this one book, but he, in sense, he writes and rewrites and overwrites this book for the rest of his life, the working it up, adding to it, expanding it, augmenting it. So there's a therapy for him in writing the book. Does he declare that himself? Yes, he does. How does he does? So by being busy to avoid medical, the actual act of writing, and he also thinks that the act of reading is, in some sense, a distraction, a curative. so that the reader by exploring melancholy, in a sense,

is attracted away from the actual experience of it. But it's one of the many sort of lush and fertile contradictions inside the book that reading helps, but you're solitary when you read, and being solitary, it doesn't help. I mean, this compendious text, one of the reasons why it's messy is because it is so full of contradictions. And I think if you keep adding to and augmenting and developing something over time,

those contradictions start to emerge. It might be why the book's lasted. He goes through a journey on the book and sort of moves away from, I think, more kind of supernatural understandings and melancholy to things that are quite pragmatic and practical around diet and exercise and reading books. And jealousy and things like that. He does. And at various points, he does say, actually, well, if you have this type of melancholy, this bit of the book might not be so good for you. Or if you've been getting a bit depressed by reading this, actually, this section will be light relief. So I think his conscience of quite a diverse readership, actually, but very much an active readership, a readership that's engaged.

with the issues, perhaps getting some benefit from it, be it preventative or curative. So the book's doing work, as it were. He's quite playful as well. They said if you're of a jealous disposition, the best thing to do is to marry a prostitute because you'll have no problems. You'll know that she's betraying you, so you can get on with him. I think he's very witty. He's quite sort of...

Do you think he's witty or he mentors? I think he's witty. I think there's lots of literary games going on as well. And I think going back to this sense that what it is to be a sort of thinker at this time is partly to play with wit. language and he's exploring language here he's he's pushing the possibilities of description and adjectives and he's pushing the possibilities of humour actually when dealing with a very serious subject he also suggests castration as a as a way to curtail desire he does and he has a

lot of things on old men who marry young women though he worries about his his right to write about marriage at all as a bachelor too there's a whole section on maids and widows where he gets very exercised by his own inability to talk about this Erin, can we go back to the work? Julie gave us some idea at the beginning. Can we just tell the listeners more about what was in this thing, which he started at 900 pages in 1621, just after his death, the final edition was published at 2,000 pages.

Yes, so as we've kind of established, it just keeps growing and growing. And it is, as Julie said, a messy text. It's got so much in it, and it can kind of seem overwhelming. But there is actually an order to it. it's divided into three big, what he calls partitions, that the first one deals with the various causes and symptoms of melancholy, the second one with the different kinds of cures. And then the third one is an in-depth look at love melancholy and religious melancholy.

And within those big sections, he's got lots and lots of little subdivisions, where it's kind of like if you imagine a very detailed outline of you've got your bullet point and then the one that goes underneath it and then underneath that one. So you've got, it kind of seems like there's all these tangents and divergence, but actually they do fit into this very carefully crafted structure. Can you give us an example? Sure. Well, so he says on his title page that he wants to historically, philosophically,

and medically open and cut up this subject. So he's dealing with that idea of anatomy as dissection and analysis. So Julie brought up the section on women's melancholy, the melancholy of maids and nuns and widows. And so that's within the first partition, which deals with the different kinds of melancholy. And, you know, he's going through all the different sorts of groups that you might have and how everyone's melancholy is different. And so with the women, he, as we've been saying, he very much draws on the kind of the works of others.

He says that other people have been writing about women's melancholy, so I think I should say something about it. He brings together information from lots of different kinds of sources, contemporary and all, older. But then he also includes his own kind of spin on it, his own witty style. So like Julie says, he's sort of at one point as he's going on sort of suggesting the different ways in which women suffer from melancholy and how this might be linked to, you know, they might need to be married and basically to have a sexual partner and that will help with things. He does kind of back off and say, oh, I don't really know why I'm talking about this. In a funny way, you know, it's, he's, he's, you can read it as genuine but also as facetious,

saying, I shouldn't be dealing with these things. And then he uses it after that to go into a discussion when he gets to nuns about really a sort of, it's a critique of Catholicism and the idea of living the celibate life and how that's problematic. So he kind of uses each little section to deal with, you know, the topic at hand, but then also to use it to spin off into these really funny and engaged discussions about contemporary political and religious issues. Marianne Lund, you wanted to come in earlier. Do you want to say that?

Then I'd like to ask you something else. I was just going to point out that, of course, Burton is inheriting the tradition of Erasmus. And he... The great humanist scholar. Absolutely. And he works for the praise of folly, which is this sort of paradoxical book

where folly herself speaks and says about how ridiculous everything is. So that sense of playfulness and of humour is very much in the book throughout. Now, he calls himself Democritus Jr. And the Democritus, the Greek philosopher, was called the laughing philosopher.

Why did he want to call himself Democritus Jr? That follows on from Erasmus as well. In the praise of folly, Foley says that these days we would need not just a thousand Democrituses to laugh at the world's folly, but even one more again and again to laugh at the democratuses. So the idea is that he is taking on that role

of the laughing philosopher. However, he denies this. at the beginning. There is a long satirical preface where he talks about his motivation for writing the book, but also why he takes on this persona. He says, I'm not doing this for satirical purposes. I'm doing this because Democritus, according to legend, was interested in finding out the seat of melancholy. The story goes that the famous physician Hippocrates went to see Democritus because the people of his town of Abdura thought that Democritus had gone

mad, Democritus is in a garden and he's anatomizing animals and he says to Hippocrates that he's looking for the source of melancholy for the seat of it and Hippocrates says well why you know why do people think you're mad and and basically he laughs at worldly anxieties all the things that people are troubled with trouble with family business your children and what they're getting up to democracy still finds ridiculous and says don't know why worry about these things So at the end of the day, Hippocrates goes back to the town, the people of Abder and says, Democritus isn't mad at all.

He's the wisest man, I know. So Burton takes on this idea of the anatomist of melancholy. And although he denies that he is the satirist too, that's certainly in there as well, I was going to say Democritus is also paired with Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher, and those two attitudes to life are, in fact, ones that Burton oscillates between,

So there is a strong sense of lamenting for worldly folly as well. Julie Sannis, can you just give us one or two more ideas about the types of melancholy that he identifies? Well, he has one that we might recognise, even from Greek tragedy, like Anthropia, so where people are so racked by this mental anguish that they descend into sort of canine or wolfish behaviour. There's hydrophobia where people have actually a fear of water

rather than the attraction to water. and that seems to be some of the symptoms we might associate with rabies now. We've got the scholarly melancholy, which we've begun to touch on the effects of overmuch learning. And he comes back to that one again and again, interestingly. He's not autobiographical. I think that's partly himself there he is again, penned in his study. It's a world he very much recognises. And I think he's fearful of, though I think he's also equally aware of these poses that Mary Ann was talking about earlier,

that it's become a bit of a cult. And he's almost warning against that, Yes, that's an attractive position to take and to stand there with your folded arms looking contemplative, but actually it takes you down dangerous paths. Erin, can you, Erin Sullivan, can you tell us briefly the main authors he drew from? We've stressed trance at twice our compendious it was, how many people. But who are his main sources?

It's hard to pin down. He was such a voracious reader, as we said. He worked in the library in his college, and he also kept his own personal library. And like any good humanists in the period, he read very deeply and broadly. But like you also mentioned, he was also really interested in contemporary writers. And some people have noted that it's interesting that about three quarters of his books on history and literature were contemporary.

And he's also interested in pamphlets from the period. So he draws on, certainly he talks about other doctors or medical writers who have specifically written about melancholy. So you've got Timothy Bright, who's an English doctor who publishes in the late 16th century on melancholy. Andrew D. Lawrence, a French doctor. So certainly various people who have specifically been writing about melancholy, but also certainly ancient writers like Galen, things like that, he brings in this very broad net of varied humanistic learning. He concentrates to a certain extent, Julia and Mariel,

on love melancholy and religious melancholy. It declares himself a bit incompetent in the love melancholy. department being a celibate priest. In religious melancholy he's in the middle of it at one of the fiercest times in English life where the ferocity of the religious arguments were the politics of the day. But let's talk about love melancholy first. What does it say about that? That's very interesting. As Erin said earlier, the third part, the third partition is devoted to love melancholy. And interestingly, this is the section of the anatomy where the authorities that Burton tends to do are predominantly literary and poetic. It's as if actually what he finds to

talk about in that topic is literature and he is comfortable there because again as we know if we look through what he had in his own personal library we can see that he's amassing exactly this kind of collection of Petrarchan love poetry plays that are dealing with these kinds of things. Petrarch with the idea of

falling in love, flicking you with an inconsolable passion. Yeah and Petrarch's sense that love overwhelms you, it overwhelms reasons, the passions overwhelm the reasons and therefore we act in irrational ways but from that come a set of literary tropes, literary metaphors and cliches that are very standard about burning with love, pining away.

In fact, both metaphorical, but then I think what Burton does very interesting is to take the back and make that very material. Actually, some people do stop sleeping, get sick, lose their appetite, and that that can, again, have very physical, very real manifestations. Sorry, I was just going to add that idea. I think that in Burton's work and in works of his time, there's a really interesting tension between the extent to which some of these things are metaphorical or figurative and the extent to which they're literal. Because if you do take the humoral system very seriously, then things like a burning feeling around your heart could be literally conceived as the sort of hot humors, heating it up.

Or when you feel very despondent, when melancholy takes hold, you feel cold. You know, you want a blanket around you. So there is a sort of literal reality to this. but then of course it gives kind of, it makes way for really interesting figurative description. And it's also very much based on the individual. So Burton says that scarce two of 2000 occur in the same symptoms. In love melancholy, for instance, some people might have it from not having any sex from their abstinence. For others, it can be from too much.

There's a story of a man who marries a young wife in a hot summer and ties himself out with chamberwork and becomes a bit mad as a result. in the chamber work we had sex too much sex I was looking for that yes a lot of what is a cause also becomes a symptom and also becomes a cure so sex is a cure for melancholy for some people but for others it's what causes it

as for having it both ways does keep recurring in what you say about it and what I've read about I mean it's very attractive isn't it I suppose surely you want you to come in I think I was just going to say that I think both the love melancholy and the religious melancholy which will turn to in a moment I mean a really good examples as well of how Bertin is responding to his own times. He's very much a man of his moment and so in 1621 we've got a period of kind of intellectual inquiry. We've got a whole set of

thinking around neoplatanism and trying to divide mind and body through a whole set of thinkers. And I think he challenges that in really, really interesting ways. So when he brings in the Petrarchanism, he fuses this with a kind of critique of neoplatanism, which actually as the addition grows will grow as a cult in England as well. Can we turn to religious Man and Collar. The book is published in 1621 and last one in 1651. This is a ferocious period of intellectual engagement in this country

spurred on by, or triggered by, or based on the Bible, especially the Geneva translation into English, mostly Tyndall and the King James translation into English in 1611, mostly Tyndall, enabling it to go out everywhere because it was not only a

reader's Bible, it was a preacher's Bible, so massively well informed. They could take on and challenge what was then thought by everybody to be the word of God. And the cults developed, which were predestination, from predestination to Roman Catholicism. There was a turmoil there, especially with Charles I'm the first marrying into Roman Catholicism, with all the fear that broke up and predestination, being such a literate and ferocious sect and people fleeing to America because God was leaving England, as they said. So all this is going on. He's in the middle of that, and Oxford is in the middle of that. Can you describe to us

how he reacted to that, how his book reacted to that? Well, he has this long section of religious melancholy at the end. And he says that he doesn't really have much of a president for putting it separately. So I think that's part of it by making it a category in its own right, religious melancholy. He divides it into religious melancholy in excess, which is superstition. So there's a lot about Catholic superstition, but also he encompasses other religions, Judaism and Islam. And then in defect, which is atheism. So there is a sort of positioning of the Church of England in the middle of these extremes. But at the end of the work, he writes quite a bit about despair as a cause of melancholy. And I think this is where Burton's really at his most serious. The cure of despair

is what ends this work, and he adds to it massively in the second edition. And it becomes a very straightforward consolatory section where he's really comforting people who have, who feel that they have been abandoned by God, or who have been listening to too many strict Puritan ministers and reading too many depressing treatises and think that they are destined for hell. And the message is really hope the best throughout all this that one shouldn't give in to despair. He seems to be particularly anxious about the notion,

which was a powerful notion, powerfully put forward to by Calvinists of predestination, that even before you were born, you were elected for salvation, and there was nothing you could do about it. Absolutely. Aaron Sillam. I mean, this idea is one that

It's very much debated in the period. Predestination was an official part of Church of England theology through Elizabeth's reign and into Jameses, but it is being called into question increasingly. And there's been a lot of people have tried to position Burton, try to figure out what were his allegiances because we know that he had some Catholicism

in his family, but that obviously he's a Church of England minister. And it's interesting, the extent to which he draws on different passages from certain writers, because he does, for instance, draw on the writings of William Perkins, who is a Cambridge divine, who's very much respected and is very much part of the predestinarian thinking.

So he has things like that in there, but then he also, as we were saying, you kind of have it both ways, he also critiques it in other places, and he certainly is concerned about the negative effects that this way of thinking can have on people, like Marianne was saying, that people who really adhered to predestination said that it should be a comforting doctrine

because you know, once you know that you're saved, you really know it. But he says, actually, of course, there are people who are going to think they aren't. So yet again, I mean, it's important, like he was based on the humours that he knew everybody accepted and when so on about love, mental, people were talking about it. Yet again, he's reaching out to something that's deep in the culture of the time. One of the reasons why this massive book keeps being reprinted must be because he's reaching out to what people are interested in at the time. Absolutely. He's responding to the moment,

and I think what you see is you see him working up the different editions. I think this sort of skepticism, the anti-Calvinist feelings, actually expand and augment as well, because what we're witnessing as we move into the 1630s is a time of deep religious conflict in England, mirrored across it on mainland Europe in the 30-year-war. That will lead to civil war. war and he's responding to his moment that he's trying to take on the issues that he thinks are

concerning people and that's embedded in what's being debated in oxford at that time it's a part of the humanist intellectual inquiry and he lived through the civil wars and oxford does a great centre in the civil wars there's hundreds and hundreds of pamphlets coming out all bible-based and tormented he dies just before the civil civil war but he's watching that rise of 1640 but that that sixth edition comes out in the moment but but that six edition comes out in the moment But he's there with that, that fierce rise of extremist puritism. And it's interesting that I think zealous religion is something he really unpacks as something that will affect your body, that will carry you into these states of torment.

Marianne Lund, how successful was the book in his lifetime? What was its impact? It seemed to be very successful in that it went through so many editions. It was a big folio text, so it would have been expensive. So the fact that it goes through six editions is a sign of that. Looking at copies of the anatomy from the 17th century, it's clear that people really engage with the work in the way that they underline lots of passages.

It is said that in the 17th century, people used to mine quotations and exotic stories from it to furnish their own learning, really. So it was a sort of way of passing yourself of office learned by getting sort of little Latin bon moe and the more exotic stories of melancholy. In terms of poets and playwrights, we know quite a bit. I think Milton, for instance, seems to have based Il Penseroso,

used Burton's poem about the happy and the sad melancholic. Julie's done some work on. There's a wonderful rush of plays that come out in 1629 in the wake of the third edition, which interestingly is the one which carries the beautiful title page, which draws various versions of melancholy, one of which is the love melancholic, the enamorato, with folded hands and melancholy hat,

which is how the playwright John Ford is actually described as looking, is actually performing this pose. And we get plays by Ben Johnson, the New Inn, we get Richard Brooms, the Northern Lasts, we get John Ford's The Lovers Melancholy, all in 1629 at the Blackfriars Theatre, all quoting and using chunks of Burton. And interestingly, those plays are all in his own personal library.

So Burton then purchases the very plays that are responding to him. He's part of this flow, this multidirectional flow, and he's picking up on the influence he has, and in turn responding to them. Erin, I mixed up the date of his death and the date of the final publication of his book, which was 10 years later in 51, but he was having an influence on the way people were thinking and talking about their religious beliefs and therefore about their political beliefs because the two are intertwined.

Do we have any evidence of that in the pamphlets and the writings in that area? Well, I think that certainly a lot of people have said that Burton's section on religious melancholy is one of the major legacies he has, certainly through the 17th century. and that this idea of excessive, zealous religion is damaging, that it fractures society. And you get people later on saying that, you know, the religion of Calvinism is the religion of melancholy and things like that. So you do have it kind of, the idea of enthusiasm, religious enthusiasm, which Burton talks about in his writing, that you see enthusiasm becoming, you know, a negative term

that gets fanned about. if someone is overly enthusiastic about religion, it draws into question the authenticity of it. It kind of positions it as a sort of madness. Marianne, what's your view of the impact it started to have? Did it have an impact from 1621 growing as a different edition came out? I think so, yes. I mean, it continues to be read into the Civil War and afterwards.

It seems that royalists found the pose of democracy's union, an attractive one, this sense of withdrawing from the world and laughing at it. So particularly after the collapse of the monarchy, the sense that one could still kind of observe the world from one remove was attractive. And then well into the late 17th century, and indeed to Queen Anne's reign, people are still stealing from it. Indeed, into the 18th century, Lawrence Stern takes a large passage from the anatomy of melancholy, passes it off as his own interest in Shandy.

In the 18th century, it's not... Paying homage of nicking. Yes, absolutely. It's not republished in this century. I think a lot of copies were floating around. And then in the romantic period, Charles Lamb takes it up. Keats, bases his poem, Lamia, on a story in Burton about a snakey chantress who manages to convince a man to marry her, and then is exposed at the marriage feast by the philosopher Apollonius that she is in fact a snake. And he has an ode to melancholy. Indeed, too, yes. So he was certainly,

influence on the romantic writers. I think Keats is a really interesting example because sometimes it's melancholy in the romantic literature is described as somehow it's moved away from Burton, but he's a reader of Burton and Keats has his own background in the medical and in that dual understanding, I think, so that you see that bittersweet compound in Keats' poetry of pleasure and pain, I think is directly coming from Burton in interesting ways

and you can look at the sort of melancholic landscapes of poems like La Belle d'Am Saint-Mercé and very significant. Byron, of course, by a rather different move, uses it as a mind for quotations to impress women in social situations, which tells you everything. Yeah, I was just going to add that I think that the idea of the contradiction is really appealing to different groups in different times. And certainly in the romantic period, like Julia was saying, that through pain we experience pleasure and vice versa. And the idea of the sublime is that, you know, beauty and awe-inspiring kind of creation is, is it once positive? end, there's something also kind of dangerous or even a bit of horror about it. So that mixture, you get writers saying things like, I can't imagine something beautiful

without a sort of undercurrent of pain. And so I think melancholy's, the bittersweet aspect of it, is really appealing in its complexity. And there's the famous remark with which I began the program of Dr. Johnson. Absolutely, that he seems to have found it therapeutic. By that stage, I think the Burton's interlarding, is Johnson's word. of quotations and lots of anecdotes and Latin. Well, Moses is not so fashionable. But Johnson says that when he speaks from his own voice,

he has a great spirit and great power to him. And that's what got him up earlier, but also that seems to have been in some way curative. Why do you think finally, and I'm afraid, sorry, briefly, Julie, has it lasted so long? Well, the late great Roy Porter described the 20th century as the age of psychiatry, and I think you get a reconfiguring of Burton

in new theories post-Froid through the World War's, ideas of depression and trauma, and Burton becomes very relevant. Just in the last few days, Burton's been cited in the press in an article about information overload and the internet, that's a new version of overmuch learning, I suppose, and the value of public libraries. And I like to think head on his hand, penned in his study,

he would have been quite pleased at that. Well, thank you very much, Julie Sanders, Marianne London, Erin Sullivan. Next week we'll be talking about Custer's Last Stand, also known as the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1877. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes

about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.