ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the subtle but striking differences between Robert Burton's lyrical presentation of the delusions of melancholy and the presentations in it find of these classic cases in late Renaissance medical and spiritual hygiene books. It suggests that, for Burton, these figures and their fantasies of sympathetic mimesis attest to the positively transformative powers of the imagination. But beyond this recognition of their purpose for Burton, the chapter seeks to understand the appeal of these figures for early modern spiritual hygienists and physicians. The chapter argues that the discourse surrounding the melancholic's mimetic delusions illuminates key tensions within the period's contradictory pathologies of melancholy as both the excess and deficit of impressionability and resolve, compassion and imperviousness, and, finally, faith and despair. A curious exchange in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling makes reference, in quick succession, to Lipsius, Ovid, and the extraordinary list of melancholic delusions with which the chapter principally concerned.
