Angus Gowland

University College London, History, Faculty Member

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Papers by Angus Gowland

‘As Hunters find their Game by the Trace’: Reading to Discover in The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Review of English Studies, Jun 1, 2019

The critical edition of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, published by the Clarendon Press b... more The critical edition of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, published by the Clarendon Press between 1989 and 2000, provided an invaluable resource for Burton scholars in the form of a generally reliable reading text and extensive critical apparatus, including three volumes of commentary devoted to tracing Burton's sources, identifying historical persons, events and geographical locations mentioned in the text, and explicating obscure allusions and technical terminology. Since its publication, however, there has been little attention paid to the contents of the Clarendon commentary, which contains many lacunae and entries that invite alteration. This is particularly regrettable, because Burton aimed the Anatomy partly at scholarly readers who were expected to read his cento in a similar way to a modern literary commentator, primarily by identifying its sources and allusions, and interpreting their deployment and manipulation in the text. This article seeks to supplement the Clarendon commentary by extending and revising its treatment of bibliographical sources, persons, geographical locations, and textual explanation. In doing so, it exemplifies a mode of reading that Burton expected for his book. It concludes by considering the implications for our understanding of the intended readership of the Anatomy.

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Soul, Mind, and Passions in Early Modern Europe: Introduction

Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, 2021

‘As Hunters find their Game by the Trace’: Reading to Discover in The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Review of English Studies, 2018

The critical edition of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, published by the Clarendon Press b... more The critical edition of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, published by the Clarendon Press between 1989 and 2000, provided an invaluable resource for Burton scholars in the form of a generally reliable reading text and extensive critical apparatus, including three volumes of commentary devoted to tracing Burton’s sources, identifying historical persons, events and geographical locations mentioned in the text, and explicating obscure allusions and technical terminology. Since its publication, however, there has been little attention paid to the contents of the Clarendon commentary, which contains many lacunae and entries that invite alteration. This is particularly regrettable, because Burton aimed the Anatomy partly at scholarly readers who were expected to read his cento in a similar way to a modern literary commentator, primarily by identifying its sources and allusions, and interpreting their deployment and manipulation in the text. This article seeks to supplement the Clarendon commentary by extending and revising its treatment of bibliographical sources, persons, geographical locations, and textual explanation. In doing so, it exemplifies a mode of reading that Burton expected for his book. It concludes by considering the implications for our understanding of the intended readership of the Anatomy.

Consolations for Melancholy in Renaissance Humanism

Societate si politica, 2012

This essay explores the role of melancholy within the consolatory literature of Renaissance human... more This essay explores the role of melancholy within the consolatory literature of Renaissance humanism. It begins (sections I-II) with a summary of the themes and methods of humanist consolationes and their classical models, with particular attention to their moral psychology, and addresses their relationship with scripture and Christian spiritual literature. It then turns to the position of melancholy within humanist consolations (sections III-VI). It is shown that whilst in many cases moralists and spiritual writers were reluctant invade the territory of the physicians by analysing or treating a fundamentally somatic condition, discussions of the accidentia animi in Galenic medicine provided the conceptual environment within which a moral-consolatory therapy for melancholy could be formulated and applied. Here the role of the imagination was crucial: as the primarily affected part in the disease, it was the faculty of the soul that was primarily responsible for melancholic passions, but also the faculty that presented the physician and moralist with the opportunity to dispel or alleviate those passions. Hence, the imagination was at the centre of a moral psychology of melancholy. The final sections of the essay (V-VI) show that the fullest implementation of this approach to the treatment of melancholy was in Robert Burton's 'Consolatory Digression' in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which both synthesises the various moral, spiritual and psychological elements of the humanist consolatory tradition, and contains a number of idiosyncratic and paradoxical features.

format_quoteBurton's 'Consolatory Digression' integrates moral-consolatory discourse and medical theory, providing substantial therapeutic guidance for melancholy treatment.format_quote

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Burton's Anatomy and the Intellectual Traditions of Melancholy

Babel, 2012

This article discusses the ways in which Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) inherited a... more This article discusses the ways in which Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) inherited and transformed the various European traditions of thinking about melancholy. It divides these traditions into four categories—medical, natural-philosophical, moral-philosophical, and theological—and surveys their conceptual contents from antiquity to the late Renaissance. Whilst the Anatomy summarises these traditions, it also modified them in notable ways, fusing medical and moral theory, but also extending the reach of medicine into the religious domain. Paradoxically, however, Burton’s medicalisation of the moral and theological traditions of melancholy gave them a conceptual coherence which they had previously lacked, and contributed to their persistence beyond the seventeenth century.

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