Anatomy of Melancholy

A guidebook to melancholia or depression, and a masterly, all-encompassing examination of the human condition

The Anatomy of Melancholy is the vast and only work by Robert Burton, the seventeenth-century English priest and scholar. It ‘opens and cuts up’ the condition of melancholy, or depression, as we know it today, and in doing so explores a dizzying range of additional topics, including goblins, beauty, the geography of America, digestion, the passions, alcohol and kissing. Burton believed that reading was a cure for melancholy, and so the book itself – one of the most unique and uncategorizable works of all time – can be seen as a tonic for the very condition it describes.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 1376
Imprint: Penguin Classics
Publication date: 10/10/2023