Angus Gowland

Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy (eBook, PDF)

Robert Burton in Context

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Angus Gowland investigates the theory of melancholy and its many applications in the Renaissance by means of a wide-ranging contextual analysis of Robert Burton's encyclopaedic Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621). Approaching the Anatomy as the culmination of early modern medical, philosophical and spiritual inquiry about melancholy, Gowland examines the ways in which Burton exploited the moral psychology central to the Renaissance understanding of the condition to construct a critical vision of his intellectual and political environment. In the first sustained analysis of the evolving relationship of the Anatomy (in the various versions issued between 1621 and 1651) to late Renaissance humanist learning and early seventeenth-century England and Europe, Gowland corrects the prevailing view of the work as an unreflective digest of other authors' opinions, and reveals the Anatomy's character as a polemical literary engagement with the live intellectual, religious and political issues of its day.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. Oktober 2006
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780511838118
• Artikelnr.: 38205996

Autorenporträt

Angus Gowland is Lecturer in Intellectual History at University College London.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgements
Conventions
Introduction
1. The medical theory of melancholy
2. Dissecting medical learning
3. Melancholy and divinity
4. The melancholy body politic
5. Utopia, consolation, and withdrawal
Conclusion: Robert Burton's melancholy
Bibliographies.