SOURCE: Hodges, Devon L. “Anatomy as Reason and Madness.” In Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy, pp. 107-23. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Hodges considers The Anatomy of Melancholy to be a treatise poised between humanism and rationalism, focusing on how the work countenances the coexistence of madness and reason in seventeenth-century thought—a condition rejected by the eighteenth-century quest for “objective knowledge.”

Compared with Bacon's dynamic, scientific project to inaugurate a new order of things, Burton's great lumpy Anatomy of Melancholy looks particularly hesitant and unfocused. And because of this, Burton's work serves as a reminder that the institution of “analytico-referential” discourse did not end all questions about the proper way to get at the truth. The Anatomy of Melancholy is narrated by an “I” that worries about its madness rather than by a persona confident of its powers—and this “I” is madly ambivalent...