Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy

Abstract

Burton scholarship has always recognized that The Anatomy of Melancholy exceeds the bounds of a medical treatise, straying from its nominal aim to study a disease. The Anatomy encompasses such a vast wealth of Renaissance learning that less than a quarter of it actually deals with medicine, physiology, psychology, and psychiatry. 2 Its strong polymathic impulse explains why Paul Jordan-Smith referred to it as an "omnium gatherum," and why Northrop Frye regarded it as a prose-fiction genre characterized by an encyclopedic range of subject matter. 3 Although critics rightly question the centrality of melancholy in Burton's text, they have not yet questioned the process by which Burton approaches knowledge, simply accepting the title's announcement of an anatomical operation. Ever since Frye chose to replace the cumbersome term "Menippean satire" with a more "convenient name," critics have been inclined to consider The Anatomy as a prototype for an anatomical genre--an intellectual or an encyclopedic dissection. 4 And more recently, escalating interest in early modern medicine and cultural materialism has given new life to the old commonplace of The Anatomy as an anatomy. 5