The Anatomy of Melancholy

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Robert Burton’s masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy.In 1621 the priest and scholar Robert Burton published a book quite unlike any other. The Anatomy of Melancholy brings together almost two thousand years of scholarship, from Ancient Greek philosophy to seventeenth-century medicine. Melancholy, a condition believed to be caused by an imbalance of the body’s four humours, was characterised by despondency, depression and inactivity. Burton himself suffered from it, and resolved to compile an authoritative work of scholarship on the malady, drawing on all relevant sources.Despite its subject matter the Anatomy is an entertaining work, described by Samuel Johnson as the only book ‘that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.’ It also offers a fascinating insight into seventeenth-century medical theory, and influenced many generations of playwrights and poets.

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Guests

• Julie Sanders 5 episodes
  Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham
• Mary Ann Lund 2 episodes
  Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester
• Erin Sullivan 2 episodes
  Lecturer and Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham

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Programme ID: b010y30m

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010y30m

Auto-category: 820.9 (English literature—history and criticism)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, Samuel Johnson, the compiler of his mighty English dictionary, suffered terribly from depression.