SOURCE: Fox, Ruth A. “This New Science.” In The Tangled Chain: The Structure of Disorder in the Anatomy of Melancholy, pp. 45-53. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

In the essay below, Fox examines the digressions from the conventional structure of the medical treatise in The Anatomy of Melancholy, proposing that the tension between the digressions and the more straightforward sections reflects an ambivalence about the reliability of knowledge.

For out of olde feldes, as men seyth, Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yere, And out of olde bokes, in good feyth, Cometh al this newe science that men lere. 

—Chaucer, The Parlement of Foules

Robert Burton's book conforms to that traditional order for the discussion of disease set forth in the title: The Anatomy of Melancholy. What it is, With all the kinds, causes, symptomes, prognostickes, & severall cures of it. In three Partitions, with their severall...