Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses Robert Burton's theatricality as a technique for delivering and disguising both social critique and direct physic. Burton's cento transforms melancholy from disease into a kind of spiritual privilege that draws on impressionability of the melancholic imagination. The interpretation of Burtonian copia, and of Burton's oft-repeated tag 'tis all one' as 'tis all nought', is a prevailing one in recent studies of the Anatomy and this book hopes to counter. One of the principal arguments of the book is that Burton casts the amplitude of the melancholic imagination as magnanimity against what he seemed to regard as the pusillanimity of popular Christian Neostoicism. The promotion of the melancholic imagination in the Florentine Renaissance had greater debts to the semi-ennobled condition of melancholy in patristic and medieval Christianity than the Burkhardtian narrative has made explicit.