A popular Burton is possible. Mary Ann Lund's A User's Guide to Melancholy gives Robert Burton's Anatomy a contemporary clarity that will make it a companion to his classic for years to come. Lund's introduction shows the relationship of this project to her earlier monograph on Burton. There, her thesis, supported by deep archival research, showed that Burton intended his text to be read therapeutically. In this slim volume, Lund makes it possible for a modern audience to read him this way again. Her wealth of historical acumen is not shown as an antiquarian exercise, but to better make Burton our contemporary we must share in his time as much as he illuminates ours. The book's three divisions (Causes, Symptoms, and Cures) mirror Burton's categories without replicating his text's recursive complications. The Anatomy's maziness had led an earlier generation of Burton scholars—Ruth Fox and Stanley Fish, notably—to emphasize the work's structure over its rich content. Lund's Anatomy is no mere tangled chain or self-consuming artifact, but a richly varied witness to a condition both historical and human, at once foreign and familiar.

Each chapter employs a similar strategy: Lund takes one or two of Burton's many anecdotes and limns them with historical detail. We learn from the treatment of the Earl of Montfort's hypochondriacal melancholy—he was required to abstain from pork and fish, drink white wine, and leave the intrigues of the royal court—that melancholy was a disorder of the body and mind. The case of Katherine Gualter, whose diabolical vomits produced a bizarre catalogue of objects including “pigeon dung” and “parchment . . . inscribed with mysterious markings’’ (68), shows how melancholy's demoniacal and natural causes involved both natural and spiritual cures. Despair, melancholy's worst symptom, is examined through the story of Francis Spira. Fearing the Inquisition, he recanted his Protestant faith, and then recanted his recantation. In the wake of this, he heard God's judgment and despaired of his immortal soul, despite his friends’ attempts to convince him this was a melancholic delusion. This is not only a poignant case, but a story whose wide European circulation illustrates how melancholy was wielded as an ideological weapon in the European wars of religion. Medical and religious ideas were the warp and woof of melancholy's garment, but Lund's focus on individual cases preserves the complicated contexture it took on with each donning of the habit.

This strategy also happily resists the separation of early modern melancholy into a medical condition and cultural phenomenon. Cervantes's story El licenciado vidriera, or “Doctor Glass-Case,” is shown to be an allusion to the commonplace melancholic delusion that one's body is made of glass. But it also shows how a melancholic's social alienation could position them as a dispenser of unworldly wisdom. Medical accounts of hereos or love-melancholy are complicated by the literary—and literal—imagination. Lund compares accounts of the male lover's voluble fantasies of his beloved with the Petrarchan blazon, “where a woman is poetically praised through a detailed description of her body downwards” (129). The love-melancholic's pining fantasies show he (and here, it is “he”) has “absorbed these poetic stereotypes into his own imaginative processes” (129). This dynamic movement between medical and literary discourse is also true of the Anatomy itself: though its “main sources of information are medical texts,’’ it is a “literary work interested in the realm of the imagination” (188). How could it be otherwise? Melancholy is, after all, a disorder of overpowering imagination.

A User's Guide to Melancholy is just that: like Burton's Anatomy, it is a digest in the best sense. This does not mean it has no argument. For instance, the book's conclusion moves to unseat a long-established scholarly topos: Renaissance melancholy is divided between a genial interpretation, derived from Ficino, and a pathological disease, derived from Galenic medicine. Lund doesn't directly attack this thesis, but she notes that Burton's prefatory “Abstract of Melancholy” rhymes both jolly and folly with melancholy without contradiction. Specialists may not find new matter here, but they will find old matter renewed. We emerge from Lund's guidance with a fresh sense of melancholy's use: not as a saccharine, ruff-frocked mopiness, but a practice of understanding the Protean variety of our imaginative passions in their long histories.