ABSTRACT
Robert Burton was an English scholar, author and ordained priest within the Protestant Church of England. During his life, Burton suffered from ‘melancholy’, and wrote a three-part treatise on the subject of melancholy, how to define it, its causes and symptoms and how to treat it. His intention was to ‘to prescribe means how to prevent and cure so universall a malady, an Epidemicall disease, that so often, so much crucifies the body and mind’. The Anatomy of Melancholy is encyclopaedic in character, compiling quotations on the subject from numerous previous authors as well as paraphrasing and commenting on their theories. First published in 1621, Burton’s ‘self-help’ book was extremely popular and re-printed and revised numerous times both during his lifetime and afterwards. Perturbations and passions which trouble the phantasie, though they dwell between the confines of sense and reason, yet they rather follow sense then reason, because they are drowned in corporeall organs of sense.
