SOURCE: Schleiner, Winfried. “Burton's Use of praeteritio in Discussing Same-Sex Relationships.” In Renaissance Discourses of Desire, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, pp. 159-78. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

In the essay below, Schleiner addresses Burton's treatment of same-sex relationships in The Anatomy of Melancholy, examining how Burton's use of the rhetorical device praeteritio might distinguish his own perspective from among his many sources.

Discourse of same-sex desire is forbidden discourse in early seventeenth-century England; in some sense it could not and, therefore, does not exist. In another sense this discourse exists, although in highly coded forms that call attention to its illicit status. I am not at present concerned with the language of persons whom we might, possibly anachronistically, call homosexuals but with the language then used to write and publish about them. To make this vast topic manageable, I will focus on Robert Burton's...