The Anatomy Of Melancholy
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: Worn/faded - no tears. Page Condition: Good. Markings: No markings. Usual shelf-wear.
First published in 1621, The Anatomy of Melancholy stands as one of the most extraordinary and encyclopaedic works in the English language — a vast, labyrinthine meditation on the nature of human suffering, written under the pseudonym Democritus Junior by the Oxford scholar Robert Burton. With a scope that ranges across medicine, philosophy, theology, astrology, and literature, the work dissects melancholy — then understood as a complex humoral condition encompassing depression, madness, and spiritual despair — with extraordinary erudition and a darkly comic sensibility. Burton chronicles the causes, symptoms, and cures of this affliction with relentless curiosity, marshalling thousands of classical and contemporary sources into a text that is as much an intellectual autobiography as it is a treatise. What makes The Anatomy of Melancholy endure across four centuries is its singular voice: discursive, self-interrupting, learned yet deeply personal, Burton's prose constantly subverts its own encyclopaedic ambitions with wit and melancholic self-awareness. The work argues, implicitly, that all of humanity is in some sense melancholic — that the condition is not an aberration but the very texture of conscious life. Scholars from Samuel Johnson to Jorge Luis Borges have counted it among the most remarkable books ever written, and its influence courses through Western literature and philosophy like an underground river. To open its pages is to be drawn into a mind of staggering breadth and vulnerability — one that refuses to let the reader surface unchanged.
Author: Robert Burton; Edited with an introduction by Holbrook Jackson
Format: Hardback
Published: 1978, J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd
Genre: Philosophy
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good. Jacket: Worn/faded - no tears. Page Condition: Good. Markings: No markings. Usual shelf-wear.
First published in 1621, The Anatomy of Melancholy stands as one of the most extraordinary and encyclopaedic works in the English language — a vast, labyrinthine meditation on the nature of human suffering, written under the pseudonym Democritus Junior by the Oxford scholar Robert Burton. With a scope that ranges across medicine, philosophy, theology, astrology, and literature, the work dissects melancholy — then understood as a complex humoral condition encompassing depression, madness, and spiritual despair — with extraordinary erudition and a darkly comic sensibility. Burton chronicles the causes, symptoms, and cures of this affliction with relentless curiosity, marshalling thousands of classical and contemporary sources into a text that is as much an intellectual autobiography as it is a treatise. What makes The Anatomy of Melancholy endure across four centuries is its singular voice: discursive, self-interrupting, learned yet deeply personal, Burton's prose constantly subverts its own encyclopaedic ambitions with wit and melancholic self-awareness. The work argues, implicitly, that all of humanity is in some sense melancholic — that the condition is not an aberration but the very texture of conscious life. Scholars from Samuel Johnson to Jorge Luis Borges have counted it among the most remarkable books ever written, and its influence courses through Western literature and philosophy like an underground river. To open its pages is to be drawn into a mind of staggering breadth and vulnerability — one that refuses to let the reader surface unchanged.