As a prelude: bringing melancholia to book

Abstract

Democritus Junior, the alleged author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, resembles his creator, Robert Burton, in that he is melancholy. If Burton, who must have practised the art of memory, who has been called a belated survivor of the Middle Ages, and who read too many books for his own good, was melancholy, it was probably because he lived at the time when the great research libraries were being created and when the invention of the printing press led to an extraordinary proliferation of books. Democritus Junior, Robert Burton's invention, attempts to reinvent the book which the real Democritus was writing when the pseudo-Hippocrates arrived "to visite him one day in his garden at Abdera" supposedly to cure him of his alleged madness; this book, like all of Democritus's books, has not come down to us.