The Anatomy of Melancholy

This, the fifth volume of the Clarendon Press edition of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, contains commentary on the text from Partition 1, Section 2, Member 4, Subsection 1 until the end of Part. 1, and on the whole of the second Partition. It thus concludes Burton's account of the causes, the symptoms, and the prognosis of melancholy, and his examination of the remedies for the disease both spiritual and medical. As before, the aim of the commentary is to aid the reader to understand Burton's meaning (to which end all the passages in Latin are translated) and to identify the sources of his many quotations from and references to other authors. The third and last volume of the commentary, and of the edition, will contains a full Bibliography of these authors and brief biographical notes on them.