The Anatomy of Melancholy: Volume III

This is the third and final text volume of the Clarendon edition of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. It contains `The Third Partition', `The Table', edited from 1624-1651 editions, and their textual apparatus, and an Index of Persons. Also included are three appendices: `The Conclusion of the Author to the Reader', which occurs only in the 1621 edition, a list of stop-press corrections to the 1632 edition, and the edited Synoptic Tables. The Third Partition is made up of two grand digressions which conclude Burton's earlier arguments on the causes and cures of melancholy. In the first digression he anatomizes love melancholy, its kinds, causes and symptom, and cures. No one up to his time had dealt more elaborately, or more thoroughly, with the components of love. Certain sections, `Beauty a Cause', of `Jealousie, his Æquivocations, Name, Definition, Extent ...' are no less engaging today than when they were first written. In the second, religious melancholy, he surveys the aberrations from true religious commitment which are the cause of this melancholy. To Burton the divine, no other manifestation of melancholy was as serious as this, and his words of comfort, consolation, and encouragement, are a fitting end to his dissection of a disease that all are heir to.