Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England

Mary Ann Lund is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Leicester.

• Introduction: Zisca's drum: reading and cure; 1. Imagining readings; 2. The cure of despair: reading the end of The Anatomy of Melancholy; 3. Printed therapeutics: The Anatomy of Melancholy and early modern medical writing; 4. The whole physician; 5. Speaking out of experience; 6. The structure of melancholy: from cause to cure; Conclusion.

'There is much illuminating discussion here. Building on previous scholarship which has situated Burton's account of despair in the context of Jacobean and Caroline religious politics, Lund makes a good case for the influence of the Danish Lutheran Niels Hemmingsen, and draws interesting comparisons with less well-known contemporary English figures such as Robert Bolton and Robert Yarrow … [the book] develops and persuasively reorientates a significant strand of Burton criticism, and presents a nuanced vision of the relationship between early modern writers and their imagined readers.' English Historical Review