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We know a large amount about Burton’s particular sources, and also some things about his influence but surprisingly little about the passage from one to the other. However, sustained discussion of that transformation has been lacking. Burton communicated but also applied, and thereby transformed, his materials. Burton’s standpoint was not neutral and was far from being objective: the Anatomy presented the view of Europe and European knowledge from an Oxford College in the early decades of the seventeenth century, and furthered a number of distinctive intellectual, religious and political agendas. But whilst it may be a generally accurate summary, there are many reasons to wonder whether it is wise to treat the Anatomy as a more or less transparent window on to an intellectual world that was in reality extraordinarily complex and febrile. The accuracy of Burton’s summary of Renaissance thinking about melancholy has been more asserted than properly proved in modern scholarship, and often it is simply assumed. In English literary studies at least, the question of exactly what Burton was up to when he wrote the book is still relatively open 2.ĢBut there is also another problem posed by the Anatomy for the historian of melancholy that is not generally recognised. It is a profoundly ‘literary’ work, and especially since the provocative reading of Stanley Fish in his Self-Consuming Artifacts of 1972 1, those studying Burton have become increasingly aware, and perhaps even paranoid, about a work that is sometimes not always what it seems on first reading, being shot through with an array of deviously ironic and openly satirical devices. In the first place, as is often acknowledged, the Anatomy is itself far from being a straightforward encyclopedia. At the same time, however, the centrality of Burton’s book poses problems for anyone attempting to write the intellectual and cultural history of the idea of melancholy. It is now almost universally acknowledged that the Anatomy gives us an extraordinarily detailed, and generally accurate, summary of the dominant ideas and ways of thinking about melancholy in the late Renaissance, as well as a great deal of relevant material from the Latin and Arabic Middle Ages, and Greek and Roman antiquity. 2 For more discussion of the relationship between literary and intellectual-historical interpretation (.)ġ It is hardly an overstatement to say that everyone who has seriously studied the history of melancholy in early modern Europe has read and extracted material from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621.1 Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: (.).