Search results
Robert Burton (8 February 1577 – 25 January 1640) was an English author and fellow of Oxford University, known for his encyclopedic The Anatomy of Melancholy. Born in 1577 to a comfortably well-off family of the landed gentry, Burton attended two grammar schools and matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford in 1593, age 15.
Robert Burton (born February 8, 1577, Lindley, Leicestershire, England—died January 25, 1640, Oxford) was an English scholar, writer, and Anglican clergyman whose Anatomy of Melancholy is a masterpiece of style and a valuable index to the philosophical and psychological ideas of the time.
Overview. On its surface, the book is presented as a medical textbook in which Burton applies his vast and varied learning, in the scholastic manner, to the subject of melancholia (or clinical depression).
In 1621, Robert Burton (1577-1640) wrote and published the world’s first psychiatric encyclopaedia, an exhaustive study which is the result of his life’s work. The Anatomy of Melancholy quickly became one of the most popular books of the seventeenth-century and is still an influential work in the study of mental illness and depression.
Oct 5, 2010 · Robert Burton’s tomb in Christ Church, Oxford, bears an enigmatic Latin inscription suggesting that ‘Melancholy gave life and death’ to its occupant. Historians and antiquaries have often speculated about its precise meaning.
“BURTON'S ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, a book once the favourite of the learned and the witty, and a source of surreptitious learning, though written on a regular plan, consists chiefly of quotations: the author has honestly termed it a cento.
Robert Burton's labyrinthine, beguiling, playful masterpiece is his attempt to 'anatomize and cut up' every aspect of the condition of melancholy, from which he had suffered throughout his life.
