Robert Burton’s Rhetoric

“Wells eloquently makes the case for Burton’s Anatomy as a key text that helps us rethink rhetoric in a number of ways: as an arbiter of narrative form, as a vehicle for cross-disciplinary learning, even as a model for education that has powerful implications today. In a time when knowledgeable activity amidst uncertainty is more important than ever, this kind of scholarly work on rhetoric feels deeply necessary, as we need to know much more about how we got here, and what to do now.”

—Daniel M. Gross, author of Uncomfortable Situations: Emotion Between Science and the Humanities

“The title page of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) promises to dissect its subject ‘philosophically, medicinally, historically’—and as if that were not enough, Burton regales readers with theology, astrology, philology, and much more besides.”

—D. M. Moore Choice

“Wells’s book has something of the mobile quality she finds in Burton’s, in the shifts through different areas of knowledge. For readers with an interest in the history of science, her chapter on early modern medicine is of particular interest: her survey through forms of medical writing from the case histories printed in observationes to regimen manuals on health is deft and thoughtful. Likewise, she does valuable work in reflecting on Robert Burton’s own library (much of which still exists in Oxford) and how his reader’s marks indicate his ranging curiosity.”

—Mary Ann Lund Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society

Susan Wells is Professor of English Emerita at Temple University. She is the author of Sweet Reason: Rhetoric and the Discourses of Modernity; Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine; and “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and the Work of Writing.