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Robert Burton and Ramist Method

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

David Renaker
David Renaker*
Affiliation:
San Francisco State College
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Extract

Readers have always found it easier to agree that Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is a good book than to agree on precisely what makes it so good or what message it is, in its laborious and complicated manner, delivering. As they stress now this aspect and now that of its fathomless richness, they seem at times hardly to be talking about the same work. For example, we are told that Burton is utterly credulous: 'For the nature of evidence (as it is called by the moderns) he cares nothing. Everything is admissible that has been written in a book.' And yet, ‘in Burton the English Renaissance grows… skeptical.' The book is ‘a medical treatise … orderly in arrangement.' Yet it is a ‘trackless jungle.’ It is a ‘formidable statement of … skepticism.' On the contrary, 'no greater adept of Platonism’ than Burton ‘ever lived'; or rather, ‘Burton was, first of all, a neo-Platonist.'6 But then, ‘he is no metaphysician.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Summer 1971 , pp. 210 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1971

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References

1 Middleton Murry, J., Countries of the Mind (London, 1931), pp. 35–36.Google Scholar

2 Ward, Aileen, ‘Keats and Burton: A Reappraisal,’ Philological Quarterly, 40 (1961), 535.Google Scholar

3 Osier, Sir William, ‘Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,’ Yale Review, 3 (1915), 252.Google Scholar

4 Baker, Herschel, The Wars of Truth (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Hughes, Merritt, ‘Burton on Spenser,’ PMLA, 41 (1926), 547.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Craig, Hardin, The Enchanted Glass (New York, 1936), p. 250.Google Scholar

7 Babb, Lawrence, Sanity in Bedlam (n.p., 1959), p. 84.Google Scholar

8 Osier, p. 252.

9 Bush, Douglas, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1962), p. 296.Google Scholar

10 Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings and Papers, vol. 1. Hereafter cited as OBS.

11 None of these is a first edition. According to Ong, Walter J., , S.J., Ramus and Talon Inventory (Cambridge, Mass., 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, the first editions of the books listed were 1559,1555, 1581, 1581, 1581, 1565, 1566.

12 OBS, 1, 233, 240, and 244. In view of the affinity between Ramus and his forerunner Rudolf Agricola, which Ong proves (Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass., 1958, pp. 92-130 and 196-213), it is interesting that Burton owned a copy of Agricola's De inventione dialectica. See OBS, I, 236.

13 The edition of Burton used in this paper will be that of A. R. Shilleto (London, 1896). The “Synopsis of the First Partition” is at I, 145 (i.e., volume 1, 145).

14 In XII Virgili Aeneidos libros tabulae (Basle, 1587).

15 Ong, Ramus, Method, p. xviii.

16 Reproduced in Ramus, Method, p. 202, and Miller, Perry, The New England Mind (New York, 1939), p. 126.Google Scholar

17 Freige, Johann Thomas, Paedagogus (Basle, 1582), p. 365 Google Scholar

18 Ong, Ramus, Method, pp. 314, 315.

19 That is, one who confines himself to the purlieu, or edge, of a forest. See OED, s.v. ‘Purlieu.'

20 This collection was made by Simon, J.-R., Robert Burton et L'Anatomie de la Melancholic (Paris, 1964)Google Scholar, who gives it at p. 425 and notes.

21 ‘The Loveres Maladye of Hereos,’ Modern Philology, 11 (1914), 541n.

22 Ong, Ramus, Method, p. 196.