SOURCE: Sawday, Jonathan. “Shapeless Elegance: Robert Burton's Anatomy of Knowledge.” In English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, edited by Neil Rhodes, pp. 173-202. Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Sawday describes The Anatomy of Melancholy as the foundation of a theory of knowledge that never fully developed, particularly after the formation of The Royal Society in 1660 with its markedly different approach to scientific investigation.

I. the Cathedral

Has Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy always been a historical and critical puzzle? In 1945, when Douglas Bush published his influential survey of English literature in the seventeenth century, The Anatomy of Melancholy represented the latent “intellectual confusion” of its age. Bush chose to understand Burton as a scientist manqué. So, although the Anatomy was a “traditional bedside book” which “we read for fun,” it nevertheless appeared in the chapter of English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth...