Robert Burton and the Transformative Powers of Melancholy by Shirilan Stephanie; Crane Mary Thomas; Turner Henry S

Author:Shirilan, Stephanie; Crane, Mary Thomas; Turner, Henry S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

II. Scholarly Melancholy: The Hawk in his Mew

Our understanding of early prose reading has been so impoverished by modern reading practices that we routinely overlook the complex and sensuous character of rhetorical performance in texts we believe to have been read silently and in private.50 Scholars regard the acoustic dimensions of Burton’s prose as at best echoing or intensifying Burton’s suasory intent. However, this approach subordinates the irrational power of sound (which, like air, has been anachronistically misconstrued as empty or insubstantial) to the rational power of “substantive” argument and renders the affective register of irrational arguments inaudible to the modern ear. Burton’s seemingly contradictory statements about the pleasure of study and the misery of scholars are a case in point. His exhortations against the scholarly life are among the most vituperative passages in the Anatomy and as such are among the most frequently cited in evidence of his admonitions against study in general. Readers of these excerpted passages might consider the notion that Burton promotes study as a cure for melancholy to be absurd, but this impression mistakes Burton’s indictment of the university for a censure of intellectual curiosity. Scholarly melancholy, as Burton describes it, is caused not by mental exertion but by the disparity between the scholar’s labor and reward by recognition. The therapeutic value of a roving intellectual exercise is contrasted with the incarcerating conditions that make scholars miserable.51 Nonetheless, the close proximity between Burton’s scholarly complaints and his intellectual reverie calls attention to the way the latter emerges as an allopathic response (if only a fantastical one) to the study of divinity in early seventeenth-century Oxford.

Burton cites an arsenal of classical and Christian admonitions against intellectual vanitas, which are easily but mistakenly conflated with his complaints about the corruptions of institutional scholarship. He calls curiosity “that irksome, that tyrannising care … an itching humor or a kinde of longing to see that which is not to bee seene, to doe that which ought not to bee done; to knowe that secret, which should not be known,” and “to eat of the forbidden fruit” (1:363–4). He gives examples of the “superfluous industry about unprofitable things” that have consumed great men, leaving no field of study or labor immune to censure: “Be it in Religion, humanity, Magicke, Philosophy, policie, any action or study, ’tis a needlesse trouble, a meere torment …. What fruitles questions about the Trinity, Resurrection, Election, Predestination, Reprobation, hell fire, &c. how many shall be saved, damned? … What is most of our philosophy but a labyrinth of opinions, idle questions, propositions, Metaphysicall tearmes?” (1:364). To this long list of “superfluous” and “unprofitable” pursuits (of which theology notably reigns supreme), Burton adds the secular sciences: astrology, geography, physic, philology, and metaphysics:

For what matter is it for us to know how high the Pleiades are, how farre distant Perseus & Cassiopea from us, how deepe the Sea, &c., we are neither wiser, as he followes it, nor modester, nor better, nor richer, nor stronger for the knowledge of it ….

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