Robert Burton lived and died for his Anatomy of Melancholy – Mary Ann Lund | Aeon Essays

On January 25, 1640, Robert Burton, British writer and Anglican clergyman who wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy, died at the age of 62. From the article:

"Robert Burton lived and died for his Anatomy of Melancholy – Mary Ann Lund | Aeon Essays
Melancholy was the most pervasive and elusive of Renaissance diseases, and Robert Burton (1577-1640) its most dedicated, even obsessive, chronicler. His memorial stone on the wall of Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford is inscribed: ‘Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus Junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia’ (which I translate as ‘Known to few, unknown to fewer, here lies Democritus Junior, to whom Melancholy gave life and death’). It is characteristic of the man that his final words are both mysterious and mischievous, concealing his real identity behind the pseudonym that made him famous. For it was as Democritus Junior that Burton published his only book, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).

His choice of name declares the author to be the heir of the ancient Greek philosopher, who found the world’s follies so absurd that he could only laugh (unlike his counterpart Heraclitus, whose response was to weep). One early source tells the story of how Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, visited Democritus in his garden at Abdera. He found him dissecting animals, and asked what he was doing. Democritus replied that he was searching for the source of madness, since it afflicted the whole world. When Burton retells this anecdote, he has Democritus looking for the origins not only of madness, but of melancholy. Following in his footsteps, Democritus Junior does the same through the printed page, trying to prove along the way that ‘all the world is melancholy or mad, dotes, and every member of it’.

Melancholy gave Burton his life’s work, as well as an income from his book sales. Whether it gave him death too is harder to say. The younger son of a gentry family from rural Leicestershire, Burton studied at the local grammar schools before going to Oxford, but his undergraduate studies were interrupted for reasons unknown. His age matches the 20-year-old Robert Burton who consulted the renowned astrological physician Simon Forman in 1597 with symptoms of melancholy, and whose history was recorded in Forman’s case notes. Whether or not this was the same man, the author of what is now called the Anatomy (it was ‘Burton’s Melancholy’ in the 17th century) claimed to know the disease through personal experience.

Burton eventually completed his degree at Christ Church, and remained there for the rest of his life. He probably worked on the book for more than a decade before its appearance in print. He claims to have lived ‘a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life … penned up most part in my study’, but this is a little disingenuous. He was also a vicar, college librarian and, for a time, clerk of Oxford market; he wrote Latin drama that was performed in his college. The college’s rules forbade him to marry, but a Latin poem prefacing the Anatomy proclaims the author’s fondness for serving wenches, and he had a reputation for cheeriness. While he ‘never travelled but in map or card, in which mine unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated’, he had a special interest in geography (his older brother William wrote a history of Leicestershire).

Several stories attach themselves to Burton. One is that his pastime was to go to Folly Bridge and listen to the bargemen swearing at one another, at which he would hold his sides with laughter. The other is that he forecast the date of his own death, and made sure he was correct by hanging himself. Though unlikely to be true (and the latter story did the rounds of several astrologers’ biographies) these, like many apocryphal anecdotes, are telling of how their subject came to be perceived. They suggest something of the fractured literary persona he presented, both enlivened and afflicted by melancholy."