Robert Burton's sources on enthusiasm and melancholy: from a medical tradition to religious controversy.

Abstract

Historians of English literature and culture in the seventeenth century have traced in some detail the Anglican tradition from Burton to Swift which interpreted religious enthusiasm in medical terms, as a manifestation of melancholy.’ No systematic attempt has been made up till now to examine the intellectual sources of this interpretation or to set the English tradition in a broader European context. Whereas the English background to Burton’s famous Anatomy of Melancholy has been the subject of several important studies,’ historians are usually content just to allude to the numerous (more than a thousand by one account) European sources which Burton has used.’ Yet, the transition of this link between enthusiasm and melancholy from the medical treatises to religious polemics is of great historical significance. References to divination, prophecy and enthusiasm as symptoms of the melancholic person had limited social and ideological impact in the context of traditional medical manuals. They served primarily as indications helping the physician to diagnose cases of melancholy at an early stage. Transferred to the realm of religious controversy, the connection between melancholy and enthusiasm became a very sharp polemical tool. Moreover, it signified a change in the nature of religious debate itself with far-reaching consequences. When so-called ‘enthusiasts’ and other critics of the established Church who allegedly claimed direct divine inspiration” were refuted not only by reference to theological arguments (the indispensability of scripture, the apostolic tradition, or even human reason), but on the basis of medical and psychological arguments, the debate, in a sense, was partly ‘secularised’ and the ideological foundation of the social order itself became more secular.” Furthermore, the physiological and psychological analysis of enthusiasm, prophecy and ‘false’ inspiration could easily be applied to Christian inspiration in general, as the deists and other critics of Christianity were to prove in the eighteenth century.