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

With some exaggeration, the author of this book claims that previous scholars have characterized Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) as an encyclopedic hodge-podge, full of quaint and charming bits but lacking any focus. Angus Gowland aims to rectify this impression by showing that Burton intervened in several scholarly debates of his age and staked out a decisive personal position. Gowland shows that Burton did not merely or unreflectively report all that had been said about the diseases associated with black bile. Instead, he drew on a humanist philosophical agenda that revived Hellenistic therapies and threatened to subordinate physiological health to the claims of “moral-psychological and theological rectitude” (p. 97). At the same time, drawing on Montaigne, Burton sharply criticized the speculative tendencies of humanist thought and aimed to provide consolation of a sort he thought much needed in the late Renaissance.

Scholars have long recognized that Burton contributed serious innovations in two areas affected by the medical theory of his day: the understanding of religious “enthusiasm” and of pathological love. Both problems presented medical and moral difficulties, and Gowland astutely disentangles Burton’s complex and somewhat inconsistent responses from the easier (more medically driven) answers offered, for example, by Jacques Ferrand, whose Traité de l’essence et guérison de l’amour had appeared in 1612 (2nd edition 1623).¹

What gave Burton’s approach both its appeal and its disharmony was his valiant effort to raise moral and theological questions in a scholarly area (medicine) that had developed in professional seclusion from theological critiques. For Burton, the fall of humankind into sin had corrupted the will and consequently certain of the passions along with it, leading to envy, hatred, sloth, and tristitia, and finally to melancholy disorders. This emphasis makes it imperative that Gowland clarify Burton’s specific theological positions, and the chapter on “Melancholy and Divinity” (chap. 3) stakes out the current options and places Burton in the middle of Jacobean and Caroline controversies. Burton was a vituperative opponent of Puritan excess, as he saw it, for the “peculiar sects” (p. 162) of his day all too often substituted their own private “mad” or “giddy” (p. 171) judgments of scripture in place of well-founded orthodoxy. But Burton was not merely an apologist for a middle road between Rome and Geneva, for his skepticism made claims to Truth in a fallen world problematic. So he adopted what Peter Lake² has called a position of “avant-garde conformism,” an orientation that might well have led him into the political circle of William Laud, if only Burton had been willing to bow and scrape, to play the courtier. For Burton, however, such personally corrupting behavior had become all too common, and he spent a good part of the Anatomy trying to revive and sustain an Erasmian or utopian disdain for the temptations and distractions of the court. Indeed, Gowland turns effectively to the problems of the terminally diseased polity and to Burton’s utopian suggestions for escape. Again and again, medical language and medical thinking allowed Burton powerfully to diagnose the political problems of his day, but, then as now, diagnosis did not imply that there was any remedy at hand.

One of the sources of Burton’s own melancholy, indeed, was his recognition that the humanistic learning to which he was devoted had lost almost all of its force and relevance in the political world of his day. Gowland presents in chapter 5 a brilliant analysis of Burton’s utopian thinking and of the strong temptation to withdraw merely into a scholarly seclusion, where a sort of freedom was still possible. Here again, Gowland succeeds in rooting Burton’s thinking not in the vast ocean of medico-moral reflection on madness and melancholy but in the specific problems of the late Renaissance and the politics...