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Patricia Vicari demonstrates Burton's control over rhetorical strategies and selection of materials in one of the great prose works of the English Renaissance, The Anatomy of Melancholy. She argues that Burton's aim of curing melancholy is both pastoral and therapeutic, since melancholy is both a disease and the state of unregeneracy, but the ultimate authorial presence is that of the preacher trying to bring about conversion. One of his major strategies is to disguise that presence. Throughout much of the book attention is directed toward worldly matters and secular knowledge. The immediate authorial presence therefor is that of 'Robert the experienced,' another victim of melancholy, offering the record of his own self-cure as a main persuasive tactic. Vicari examines the kinds of knowledges that Burton exhibits to the reader in three chapters dealing with nature, God, and man. In each Vicari singles out for more detailed discussion special problems or topics that were timely or of particular interest to Burton. She locates Burton's reading and opinions within the general state of knowledge about them. Finally, she examines his presentation of this knowledge in his own book. Burton's book, Vicari argues, is neither a structured treatise nor a self-indulgent romp, but a fairly well controlled instrument of persuasion, a swollen sermon. Not all is controlled: Burton's notorious self-contradictions, for example, are often due in advertence and the pitfalls of his method of composition. His personality, too, shapes his writing, and the experience of bitterness and frustration, out of which his book was born - not to mention the ethos of charity and benignity appropriate to a preacher - sometimes unsettles his aim. But on the whole, Vicari maintains, the Anatomy is a coherent and deliberate rhetorical process, an original and appropriate adaptation of homiletic rhetoric.

Burton, Robert, --- Anatomy of melancholy (Burton, Robert)

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Literary rhetorics --- Burton, Robert

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Thematology --- English literature --- Burton, Robert

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Burton, robert (1577-1640) --- Bibliothèque

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Angus Gowland investigates the theory of melancholy and its many applications in the Renaissance by means of a wide-ranging contextual analysis of Robert Burton's encyclopaedic Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621). Approaching the Anatomy as the culmination of early modern medical, philosophical and spiritual inquiry about melancholy, Gowland examines the ways in which Burton exploited the moral psychology central to the Renaissance understanding of the condition to construct a critical vision of his intellectual and political environment. In the first sustained analysis of the evolving relationship of the Anatomy (in the various versions issued between 1621 and 1651) to late Renaissance humanist learning and early seventeenth-century England and Europe, Gowland corrects the prevailing view of the work as an unreflective digest of other authors' opinions, and reveals the Anatomy's character as a polemical literary engagement with the live intellectual, religious and political issues of its day.

Burton, Robert --- Melancholy. --- Burton, Robert, --- Dejection --- Emotions --- Depression, Mental --- Sadness --- Arts and Humanities --- History