The Anatomy of Melancholy

A new Penguin Classics edition of Burton''s masterpiece - ostensibly a guidebook to melancholia or depression, in reality an all-encompassing examination of the human condition.

The Anatomy of Melancholy is the vast and only work by Robert Burton, the 17th-century English priest and scholar. It ''opens and cuts up'' the condition of melancholy, or depression as we know it today, and in doing so explores a dizzying range of additional topics, including goblins, beauty, the geography of America, digestion, the passions, alcohol and kissing. Burton believed that reading was a cure for melancholy, and so the book itself - one of the most unique and uncategorisable works of all time - can be seen as a tonic for the very condition it describes.