ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book examines the reason for Burton's recent neglect, misreading, and maligning was simply that most scholars do not read the Anatomy in full or carefully enough to recognize its ironies. Numerous seventeenth-century readers and writers recognized the Anatomy's narrative and literary pleasures as evidence of the genius of the 'ingenious Robert Burton'. Discovering while dissertating on Burton just how few early modernists had read the Anatomy in full, the book examines that only a graduate fellowship or independent fortune could allow one to read Burton pleasurably. Curious to compare modern scholarly and popular responses to Burton, the book consulted the Amazon reviews for the 2001 New York Review Books Classics edition of the Anatomy.
