Robert Burton
Pushkin Press
14 July 2026
368
eBook - PDF
Non-Fiction
ARC via NetGalley
Dryness, paleness, waking, sighing, despair, frenzy, love's repercussions can be dire indeed. Perhaps that is why Robert Burton devoted the largest part of his pioneering 17th-century psychological work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, to this supreme passion. Edited to offer the modern reader easier access to this classic text, this abridged version preserves all the fantastic variety of the original, as Burton knits together stories and quotations drawn from millennia of European literature in order to understand love's causes, consequences, and cures.
We encounter gods and goddesses, ancient kings and queens, lascivious monks and pure-hearted shepherds, marriages happy and unhappy, allurements natural and unnatural, and, most importantly, many cures for love-melancholy, from the obvious to the arcane. Intricate yet commonsensical, learned yet earthy, and twinkling throughout with ironic warmth, Burton's masterpiece speaks to the deepest concerns of the human heart as well today as it did four centuries ago.
The Anatomy of Love was interesting in a way but was also a very dry read. For me the most interesting thing about the work was the use of literary allusions. If you are looking for a compendium of quotes on love from Ancient Rome and Greece to the Renaissance/Early Modern period, this is the book for you. Burton spends entire paragraphs moving from one literary reference to the next. All that is fascinating to an extent, but when it comes to actual content, he doesn't have much to say for himself -- he's too busy quoting others. Gathering his personal thoughts alone, this book could have been under 50 pages. I note, too, that this is an abridged version, edited for modern readers, so I dread to think how much more verbose the original text is! While at first I was ready to invest myself, I ended up having to really slog through to reach the end, and even found myself skimming some sections. In conclusion, for scholars with a deep interest in the topic, or those attracted by all the literary references, this is doubtless a good version of the text to pick up for instant accessibility. However, for the casual reader, I fear it will struggle to hold attention. I am giving it 3 stars. I think it's wonderful to have the opportunity to read older texts like these which one might not otherwise come across, so I applaud Pushkin Press for bringing them to light, but in this case, this book is really not going to be for everyone.
I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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