“The glass, the school, the book”: The Anatomy of Melancholy and the Early Stuart University of Oxford

For Robert Burton, as a librarian, bibliophile, and academic, the library was almost literally his life, at least in his own assessment. In the engagingly motley index that follows The Anatomy of Melancholy, the entry he wrote for himself—“Burton, Robert”—instructs the reader that on this subject they may also see the entry “Libraries.” The changes the University of Oxford underwent during the Stuart reign, while Burton was there writing and rewriting his encyclopedic work, were dramatically reflected by the growth of the university’s libraries, especially by the Bodleian, founded the year before James Stuart ascended to the throne in 1603. The small “chained library” of the university’s clerical medieval past was transformed during the early modern period into not only one of the most famous repositories of knowledge in Europe but also into a major node of exchange between university and court, with the university relying on the court for benefactions and the court relying on the university to provide educated servants to the state, as well as to reproduce Royalist ideology.

Burton’s own sequestration to libraries is one he sometimes compares in The Anatomy of Melancholy to a positive kind of imprisonment, one that functions more to keep the world out than to keep him in, and one he imagines in terms of liberty as much as limitation, a paradoxical argument predicated on a valuing of intellectual freedom over other forms of mobility, whether physical, social, or economic—an argument that is ingenuous to varying degrees as the book unfolds Burton’s frustration with his own lack of preferment. But this assertion of the value of intellectual over practical liberty as well as his frustration with his own practical situation combine to make a sustained critique of Oxford’s changing character. The commitment to intellectual freedom, and the concomitant rejection of the use of scholarship as a means to achieve advancement within the university or court, is one of his book’s main statements, and Burton’s own fraught relationship with some noble and politically ambitious students whom he probably served as a tutor is reflected by the shifting comments on patronage and ambition he makes throughout his book. His lamentation about the reason “why the Muses are Melancholy” is answered with the proposed cure of intellectual breadth—a breadth that characterized his own library, one of the most important and heterogeneous collections ever contributed to the Bodleian Library.

Due to Burton’s own position within the system he criticized, and his reliance on that system for any advancement of his own, his critique remains largely subtextual, expressed as much in the book’s form as in his occasional invectives against the institution’s specific ills. Indeed, the school’s secularization and growing service to the practical politics of the Stuart court ensured that Oxford’s seditious currents would remain contemplative rather than active like those of its rebellious sister Cambridge, which forfeited the crown’s support with its more overt puritan and parliamentary leanings. Kenneth Fincham has shown that as Oxford became more intertwined with the court, benefactions from the Crown were exchanged for institutional loyalty (179). These benefactions included endowments to the university’s famous library, and Bodleian historian Ian Philip notes that Archbishop Laud made the largest contribution of books in the library’s history (39). Another major contributor in Bodleian history was of course Burton, whose bequeathal of his personal library transformed the library’s collection of English literature (Philip 33). Burton’s own collection represents books that Bodley himself would have rejected; the annotations made in these books by Burton are in direct contrast with such intellectual hierarchism, the same valuation of breadth so clearly present in The Anatomy of Melancholy (Philip 33). This value is in conflict not only with Bodley’s own guidelines for his library but also with some of the changes in the purposes of education which Burton laments at length in the section of The Anatomy of Melancholy called “Miseries of Schollers, or why the Muses are Melancholy,” an invective describing...