A User's Guide to Melancholy takes Robert Burton's encyclopaedic masterpiece The Anatomy of Melancholy as a guide to melancholy, from cause to cure. Through case studies, it explores a Renaissance disease of the mind that inclined its sufferers towards sadness and fear but also delusion, despair, hilarity, and artistic creativity.
400 years after The Anatomy of Melancholy, this book guides readers through Renaissance medicine's disease of the mind.
'A rich and fascinating tour through the territory of melancholy in seventeenth-century England and beyond. Lund provides an expert but very readable introduction to Burton's masterpiece, and her entertaining exploration of the cultural resonances of the Anatomy's medical, psychological, and literary subject matter also prompts us to think seriously about the lasting historical legacies of those who wrote about and struggled with melancholy in the past.' Angus Gowland, Reader in Intellectual History, University College London
