SOURCE: Colie, Rosalie L. “Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the Structure of Paradox.” In Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox, pp. 430-60. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.

In the essay below, Colie argues that The Anatomy of Melancholy is deliberately paradoxical in many ways, including its contradictory subject matter, its conflicting genres, and its juxtaposition of opposites. Burton's “fragmenting of the categories of phenomena” in this manner, and his “identification of cause, symptom, and cure,” she maintains, universalizes melancholy “into the whole condition of humanity.”

Who can but pity the mercifull intention of those hands that doe destroy themselves?

Browne, Religio Medici, I. 53

Jonathan Swift is the culprit responsible for the vulgar error that Burton's Anatomy is an amorphous literary creation, an infinite digression upon an infinity of subjects. Actually, the paradox can be defended, not only that the book is composed of very carefully constructed...