Burton, Robert

Burton, Robert, 1577–1640, English clergyman and scholar, b. Leicestershire, educated at Oxford. He served as librarian at Christ Church, Oxford, all his life; in addition he was vicar of St. Thomas, Oxford, and later was rector of Seagrave, Leicestershire. A bachelor, he led an uneventful, scholarly life. His famous work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, appeared in 1621 under the pen name Democritus Junior. Enlarged and revised several times before his death, this treatise originally set out to explore the causes and effects of melancholy, but it eventually covered many areas in the life of man, including science, history, and political and social reform. The work is divided into three main portions: The first defines and describes various kinds of melancholy; the second puts forward various cures; and the third analyzes love melancholy and religious melancholy. Burton's prose style is informal, anecdotal, and thoroughly idiosyncratic, and he includes quotations from a wide range of literature—the Bible, the classics, the Elizabethan authors.

Bibliography

See M. O'Connell, Robert Burton (1986).

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Burton, Robert

(1577–1640) British scholar and writer. He spent most of his life as a vicar at Oxford. His great Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) describes the kinds, causes, symptoms, and cures of melancholy in a lively, elegant, and sometimes humorous style; a mine of classical erudition and curious information, it is an index to the philosophical and psychological ideas of its time. His Latin comedy Philosophaster (1606) is a vivacious exposure of charlatanism.