The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (review)

This is an illuminating study of The Anatomy of Melancholy that, while it recognizes the eccentricities of Burton's book, succeeds brilliantly in locating the Anatomy in its cultural moment. In five carefully argued chapters, Gowland shows how Burton is bound to, though never straitened by, classical and contemporary medical commentary; how his work grows out of the European humanist tradition in all its political and theological complexity demonstrating, in the process, how Continental this vernacular masterpiece is; and how Burton responds to the changing political and religious dynamic of Stuart England, shifting and modifying his views as he adds to his neverending text — for Burton's copiousness, as Gowland reminds us, was a symptom of, and therapy for, his melancholy but as well a politically and theologically purposeful technique.

This list points to the signal accomplishment of Gowland's study: the way all these various concerns — or various Burtons: medical, classical, humanist, political, and theological — come together in the course of his argument. In a chapter on "Melancholy and Divinity," for example, we see how the Erasmian roots and Laudian sympathies of Burton, underpinned by his reading in classical philosophy and the early fathers of the church, lead him to propose (or, at least, to offer for consideration) something very like a civic religion with hints of Machiavelli and Bacon and anticipations of Hobbes and Harrington. This construction, as Gowland shows, may be inherently unstable — if only because Burton, so fluid in his style and eclectic in his interests, nearly always maintains a certain intellectual distance — but the conjunction of ideas and influences is a fascinating one and helps to open up the Anatomy in ways few studies of Burton have been able to do. The strength of this book lies in such provocative conjunctions as these; in Gowland's ability, grounded in his considerable learning and alert reading, often across the several editions of Anatomy, to show how rich the Anatomy is — not simply how it abounds in citations but how the use as well as the knowing and witty abuse of these authorities joins Burton to an array of contemporary concerns and obsessions. If melancholy is Burton's great affliction, the iconic malady of the age, it is also, Gowland proves, a vast cultural clearinghouse for the competing claims of faith and learning, politics and physick.

If there is any complaint to be made, it is that in the subtle negotiation of intellectual genealogy that marks this study, a sharper sense of the "ludic" Burton, as Gowland once or twice describes him, is sometimes lost. Readers less familiar with Anatomy will learn much from Gowland, but go away with little sense of the literary brilliance that is (for this reader at least) the very essence of the book. Gowland is aware of this aspect of Burton, but is largely content to allow that quality of the text to speak for itself in the passages he cites; merely to note Burton's ubiquitous wit and playfulness. Yet Burton's bibliophilic art more than delights us in our reading; it informs, on the deepest level, the play of ideas in Burton's cento. Burton is surely one of the chief exemplars of an early mod-ern textual jouissance — perhaps the most powerful expression of his humanist legacy — that Gowland might have pondered more deeply in analyzing the therapeutic strategies of Anatomy. But this is a small objection. If we must go else-where for a finer appreciation of the literary art of the Anatomy, there is now no better source than Gowland if we want to understand the complex of ideas that sustains it.

The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy offers a fresh intellectual history that should inspire a new kind of interest in Burton's great book: a desire to reengage his work and include it in a different, and more suggestive, company of authors and ideas...