One of the many charms of retirement (and of having grown children) is to be able to read at last long books that have sat forlornly on one’s shelf for years. Except for a rare and luxurious two weeks in Barbados years ago when I was able to read Spenser’s huge but wonderful poem “The Faerie Queene” all the way through, such charms are almost entirely new to me. Thus, three months ago I decided to read Robert Burton’s massive “The Anatomy of Melancholy” straight through, having casually plundered it from time to time for many years. Insofar as it’s possible to be joyful about having just read so much about melancholy, I can say quietly that I finished this wonderful and thoroughly delightful book today. Those appreciative readers of the past—from Anthony Wood to Thomas Herring, to Dr. Johnson, to Laurence Sterne, to Keats and after — were right. This is a superbly entertaining book.

Wharton put it this way when he discovered how much Milton had derived from Burton: “The writer’s books, his pedantry sparkling with rude wit and shapeless elegance, miscellaneous matter, intermixture of agreeable tales and illustrations, and perhaps, above all, the singularities of his feelings cloathed in an uncommon quaintness of style, have contributed to render it, even to modern readers, a valuable repository of amusement and information.”

Looking out on his little part of the world from the comforts of his study in Christ Church, Oxford, in 1620, Burton diagnosed an epidemic of melancholy. This was, he thought, “a disease so frequent … in these our daies, so often happening … in our miserable times, as few there are that feele not the smart of it.” Because it was such a ubiquitous disease, he said he knew “not wherein to do a more generall service, and spend my time better, then to prescribe means how to prevent and cure so universall a malady, an Epidemicall disease, that so often, so much crucifies the body and minde.”

Several things were coming together in that second decade of the 17th century that contributed to such a general state of melancholy: skeptical philosophy and the beginnings of modern science were giving rise to a universal doubt about former theological and cosmological certainties; a major consequence of the Reformation was to leave each person responsible for the fate of their own soul; the general availability of printed books promoted the authority — and the responsibility — of the individual reader for what he needed to know; the great institutions of the church, the state and the university were in the throes of reform; and the exhilaration of Renaissance freedom and experimentation was giving way to the burden of building everything anew.

Furthermore, Burton realized, melancholy was not just infecting those outside his window; he was contaminated as well. So what he proposed to do was to transform his book on the subject into an antidote for the condition itself. As Angus Gowland puts it in his fine, new companion to Burton, the author determined that he would present his book’s contents “as an investigation, not of the author’s own melancholy, but rather of the diverse forms of melancholy in the world surrounding him. It is this sustained involvement with the condition of the contemporary environment which allows us to speak of Burton’s vision of the world as melancholy, and which distinguishes his treatise from both the conventional medical writings of the era and the self-exploratory project of Montaigne.”

Burton’s is a self-therapeutic procedure that is “not homeopathic introversion but allopathic diversion, which he hoped would ‘ease’ his own melancholy. By constructing an elaborate vision of the melancholic world, he was giving in to his compulsion to ‘scratch where it itcheth’ but avoiding the temptation to ‘melancholize’ upon himself.”

n Michael Payne writes and lectures about literature and critical theory. He lives in Lewisburg and can be reached at payne@bucknell.edu.