Skip to main content

Burton, Robert

Born: 8 February 1577, Lindley, Leicestershire, England

Died: 25 January 1640, Oxford, England

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Book cover Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy
  • 55 Accesses

Abstract

Robert Burton was an English clergyman and fellow of Christ Church College, Oxford. Although he was appointed vicar of St. Thomas’s Oxford in 1616 and vicar of Seagrave, Leicestershire, in 1630, he led a rather scholarly and bookish existence at the university. His significance rests solely on his treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the largest and most comprehensive treatment of the disease in English.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Burton, Robert. 1989–2000 [1632]. The anatomy of melancholy, 6 vols, ed. Rhonda L. Blair, Thomas C. Faulkner, and Nicolas K. Kiessling. Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fox, Ruth A. 1976. The tangled chain: The structure of disorder in the anatomy of melancholy. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gowland, Angus. 2006. The worlds of Renaissance melancholy: Robert Burton in context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Gowland, Angus. 2013. Robert Burton and the anatomy of melancholy. In The Oxford handbook of English prose, 1500–1640, ed. Andrew Hadfield, 646–668. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grose, Christopher. 2002. Theatrum libri: Burton’s anatomy of melancholy and the failure of encyclopedic form. In Books and readers in early modern England: Material studies material texts, ed. Jennifer Andersen, Elizabeth Sauer, and Stephen Orgel, 80–96. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kiessling, Nicolas K. 1988. The library of Robert Burton. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lund, Mary Ann. 2010. Melancholy, medicine and religion in early modern England: reading “the anatomy of melancholy.” New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • O’Connell, Michael. 1986. Robert Burton. Boston: Twayne Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Richards, Jennifer. 2013. Commonplacing and prose writing: William Baldwin and Robert Burton. In The Oxford handbook of English prose, 1500–1640, ed. Andrew Hadfield, 43–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sawday, Jonathan. 1997. Shapeless eloquence: Robert Burton’s anatomy of knowledge. In English Renaissance prose: History, language, and politics, ed. Neil Rhodes, 173–202. Tempe: Arizona State University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schmelzer, Mary Murphy. 1999. Tis all one: “The anatomy of melancholy” as belated copious discourse. New York: P. Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shirilan, Stephanie. 2015. Robert Burton and the transformative powers of melancholy. Burlington: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vicari, Eleanor Patricia. 1989. The view from Minerva’s tower: Learning and imagination in the anatomy of melancholy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, R. Grant. 2001. Disfiguring the body of knowledge: Anatomical discourse and Robert Burton’s the anatomy of melancholy. ELH 68(3): 593–613.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Grant. 2003. Resisting the psychotic library: Periphrasis and paranoia in Burton’s anatomy of melancholy. Exemplaria 15(1): 199–221.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Grant. 2012. ‘The Babel event’: Language, rhetoric, and Burton’s infinite symptom. In Rhetoric and medicine in early modern Europe, ed. Nancy S. Struever and Stephen Pender, 229–249. Burlington: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Grant Williams .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Section Editor information

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada

About this entry

Cite this entry

Williams, G. (2017). Burton, Robert. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_466-1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_466-1

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-02848-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-02848-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Religion and PhilosophyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities

Publish with us

Policies and ethics