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library catalog
LIB. CAT. NO. BURT1621
Excerpts from The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)
by Robert Burton
Assorted passages from Burton’s extraordinary Anatomy of Melancholy that deal explicitly with the psychological effects of scholarship and a habitual practice of arts and sciences are provided here in HTML format. Burton’s comments are relevant to core she-philosopher.com themes, and are referred to in some of the IN BRIEF topics (on the psychology of mapping, Sor Juana’s “philosophies of the kitchen,” the Gay She-Philosopher), ISSUES papers, and GALLERY exhibits (on Kircher’s Ars Magna Sciendi and on the portraiture of Melancholy).
Numerous writers commented on the pleasures of scientific inquiry throughout the early modern period — e.g., Walter Charleton speaks of “certain Truths ... that ariseth from the comprehension of the most perfect and laborious Demonstration in Geometry” as “delightful” to the mind in a 1654 letter to Margaret Cavendish — but no one described the psychological benefits of nature study in quite the same detail as Robert Burton (1577–1640).
Burton was described by Anthony à Wood in his Athenæ Oxonienses as “an exact Mathematician, a curious calculator of Nativities, a general read Scholar, a thro’-paced Philologist, and one that understood the surveying of Lands well.” In his well-rounded practice of the arts & sciences, Burton was not exceptional, despite his stated concern in The Anatomy of Melancholy that such practices were not as widespread among the gentle classes as he believed necessary for personal and national well-being. Within certain circles, the gentleman-designer flourished. A generation or two before Burton, one Mark Ridley (1560–1624)
... studied physic at Cambridge, and long afterwards recalled how in his university days he had delighted in making dials which not only showed the hour but the entry of the sun into the signs of the zodiac. This hobby was a typical introduction to the mathematical arts. Ridley was a student during the period when the philosophy of the mathematician Ramus was much discussed at the university, and subsequently spent five years in Russia as physician to the Czar, on his return holding office at the College of Physicians. Among his close friends were Edward Wright, then making astronomical observations with Sir Christopher Heydon, and Dr Gilbert, whose work on the lodestone and magnetic needle Ridley followed up. He published a description of his own experiments, paying particular attention to instruments and to methods of determining the magnetic variation at sea. Like most of his circle Ridley was a Copernican, and met William Harlow’s arguments against the earth’s rotation by reference to the recent discovery of Jupiter’s satellites by the “truncke- spectacle” (or telescope), and to new views about the immense distance of the stars which prevented the expected observation of stellar parallax.
(E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical
Practicioners of Tudor and Stuart England)
And Oliver Lawson Dick, a modern editor of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, gives a good summary statement of the virtuosi contemporary with and following Burton:
Soldiers, sailors, courtiers, clerics, all devoted themselves to this intoxicating study [mathematics], and many a young man was, like Henry Gellibrand, “good for little a great while, till at last it happened accidentally, that he heard a Geometrie Lecture. He was so taken with it, that immediately he fell to studying it, and quickly made great progresse in it. The fine Diall over Trinity Colledge Library is of his owne doeing.” This “dialling,” however, was so comparatively easy and other tricks so impressive and so common, that Thomas Hobbes felt obliged to issue a warning: “Not every one that brings from beyond seas a new Gin, or other jaunty devise, is therefore a Philosopher,” he said, “for if you reckon that way, not only Apothecaries and Gardiners, but many other sorts of Work-men will put-in for, and get the Prize.” Unabashed, however, some of Aubrey’s friends persisted in their unorthodox ways, like Seth Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, who “when he was President of Trinity College, Oxon, did draw his Geometricall Schemes with black, red, yellow, green and blew inke to avoid the perplexity of A, B, C, etc.”, and William Oughtred, who achieved undying fame with his invention of the multiplication sign, which, he said, “came into my head, as if infused by a Divine Genius.” And the controversies that raged over “Arithmeticall Problemes” reached such a pitch of emotion (particularly when Hobbes thought that he had squared the circle and Dr. Wallis knew that he had not) that poor Aubrey was driven to the conclusion: “sure their Mercuries are in [graphic image of a square] or opposition. Ludolph van Keulen,” who had been “first, by Profession, a Fencing-Master; but becomeing deafe, betooke himselfe to the studie of the Mathematiques wherin he became famous and wrote a learned booke in 4to of the Proportion of the Diameter of a Circle to the Peripherie,” carried the obsession even further, for “on his Monument (according to his last Will) is engraved the Proportion abovesayd.”
(Oliver Lawson Dick, “The Life and
Times of John Aubrey”)
Attuned as it was to the spirit of the age, Burton’s brilliant and witty The Anatomy of Melancholy. What it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptomes, prognostickes & severall cures of it ... (Oxford, 1621) hit a real chord with contemporaries. Five different editions were printed during his lifetime, with multiple posthumous editions thereafter.
Lois Potter has rightly identified Burton as a master of intertextuality in an age when notions of language and learning as a property of the community (not just a few inspired individuals) were encoded in the printed “treasuries” and “commonplaces” and almanacs and other compilations so popular with readers. Burton’s book is certainly in this vein, but as Anthony à Wood recorded,
No Man in his time did surpass him for his ready and dextrous interlarding his common discourses among them with Verses from the Poets or Sentences from classical Authors. Which being then all the fashion in the University, made his Company more acceptable.
In the process of anatomizing what was perhaps the most fashionable disease of his age, Burton made many cogent arguments for incorporating the arts & sciences into one’s daily routine. One must judiciously develop body and mind, he wrote, in moderation:
In a word, body and mind must be exercised, not one, but both, and that in a mediocrity; otherwise it will cause a great inconvenience.
(Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. 2, 99)
Even then, there were no guarantees that one would escape the clutches of melancholy and lead a happy life. As Aubrey jotted down in one of his biographical mss.:
Memorandum. Mr. Robert Hooke of Gresham College told me that he lay in the chamber in Christ Church that was Mr. Burton’s, of whom ’tis whispered that, non obstante all his astrologie and his booke of Melancholie, he ended his dayes in that chamber by hanging him selfe.
My digital transcription is taken from the modern edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, edited and introduced by Holbrook Jackson (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).
Available as HTML text
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LIB. CAT. NO. CHAMB1728a
“Design” and “Designing” (1728, 1783–6)
by Ephraim Chambers, supplemented by Abraham Rees
A transcription of the two articles on design from the first and eighth editions of Ephraim Chambers’ popular Cyclopædia, or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences is provided here in HTML format for my colleagues in the design community.
As I have argued before, and will continue to argue, Chambers compiled his Cyclopædia at a time when design was still an integral part of the arts & sciences, largely because the divine (god and/or nature) was still conceived as the quintessential designer. Throughout the early modern period, investigation of the natural world reinforced the culture’s deep appreciation for the undergirding aesthetic of divine design, in turn prompting sustained reflection on how such wonders related to human practices. As such, the study and practice of design offered one important means of comprehending the natural world and the human being’s role within it.
Chambers’ inclusion of design terms in his Cyclopædia testifies to design’s past prominence as one of the universal arts & sciences, while at the same time binding it closely to a particular time and place. Tied to painting, industrial arts, and evolving technologies (such as the camera obscura), design back then was both like, and unlike, what we think of as design today. But Chambers’ 7 principles of good design — correctness, good taste, elegance, character, diversity, expression, and perspective — are still instructive. Also of note, Chambers points out that rules are “of less avail” in design than in other branches of the visual arts. And he advises novices to avoid relying on technologies, such as “Squares in drawing; for Fear of stinting and confining their Judgment.”
Rees supplemented Chambers’ original write-up on design technologies with discussion and illustration of the popular apparatus “used by Sir Christopher Wren for the purpose of designing.” Similarly, in the related article on designing with the camera obscura (which I have reproduced elsewhere), Rees added verbal and pictorial descriptions of more varieties of camera than Chambers originally discussed, including Robert Hooke’s design of a camera lucida, over 100 years earlier. It should be pointed out that this interest in technology was not new with Rees, but in the same spirit as Chambers’ own tendency to emphasize modern mechanical inventions. Despite our tendency to lump together all early-modern technologies under a single concept — the camera obscura, the microscope, the telescope — there was in fact considerable variety in choice and use of tools, then as now, and much debate about the pros and cons attaching to each. Perspective machines, for example, were an ongoing interest of many Royal Society fellows, who had the usual difference of opinion concerning their overall design. Before Christopher Wren’s apparatus took hold, there was Prince Rupert’s perspective machine, “perfected” (as usual) by Robert Hooke over the course of two months at the end of 1663:
Royal Society Journal book entry for 11 Nov. 1663: “Mr. Hooke suggesting, that additions might be made to the invention of Prince Rupert for casting any platform into perspective, so that it might incline and recline, and be fitted to draw likewise solid bodies in perspective, and to describe all kinds of dials, was desired to bring in these additions in writing, and then to give a description, and to show the practice of the whole. In the meantime it was ordered, that the Prince’s instrument should remain simple, as it was then, without any alteration therein.”
Entry for 18 Nov. 1663: “Mr. Hooke was put in mind to bring to the next meeting his additions to Prince Rupert’s instrument of perspective, and to make a full description of it.”
Entry for 25 Nov. 1663: “Mr. Hooke brought in an account of his additions to Prince Rupert’s perspective engine; and it was ordered, that such an engine should be made for the use of the Society.”
Entry for 2 Dec. 1663: “Mr. Hooke informed the Society, that he had spoken to Mr. Thompson, to make Prince Rupert’s perspective-instrument, together with his additions.”
Entry for 23 Dec. 1663: “Mr. Hooke produced the new perspective engine of Prince Rupert’s invention, together with his own additions, to cast embossed things into perspective, as well as platforms. It was ordered, that this engine be showed to Prince Rupert; but that first two rulers of wood be put in the place of the two threads, that direct the parallelism.”
By the time Chambers compiled his information on available design tools, there was a growing audience for this kind of technological detail. Samuel Pepys, for instance, whose own home entertainment center was fully stocked with all the latest gadgetry, and who enjoyed producing and consuming most all the visual arts, records in his diary having had an influential conversation with Robert Hooke about Christopher Wren’s design apparatus. “Thence with my Lord Bruncker to Gresham College,” writes Pepys in his diary for 21 February 1666,
the first time after the sickness that I was there, and the second time any met. And hear a good lecture of Mr. Hookes about the trade of Felt making, very pretty. And anon alone with me about art of drawing pictures by Prince Roberts [i.e., Prince Rupert] rule and machine, and another of Dr. Wren’s; but he says nothing doth like Squares, or, which is the best in the world, like a darke roome — which pleased me mightily. Thence with Povy home to my house ....
It was about three years later when Pepys first saw Wren’s “instrument for perspective” while visiting the Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, on 30 April 1669. Pepys was so impressed that he immediately placed an order for one with the instrument-maker, John Brown. Despite his failing eyesight, for which Pepys was seeing “an oldish woman in a hat” (who “hath some water good for the eyes” and “did dress me, making my eyes smart most horribly, and did give me a little glass of it, which I will use and hope it will do me good”), he records being mighty pleased with his new perspective machine when it arrived on 9 May 1669:
... By and by also comes Browne the Mathematical-instrument maker, and brings me home my instrument for Perspective, made according to the description of Dr. Wren’s in the late Transactions, and he hath made it, I think, very well; and that that I believe will do the thing, and therein give me great content, but that I fear all the contents that must be received by my eyes are almost lost. So to the office and there late at business, and then home to supper and to bed.
Pepys had already bought himself a “Paralellogramm” earlier that year (in January 1669), and well before that, “a drawing pen” (in October 1660). He used such design tools in his work, and was a keen critic when it came to performance factors. As regards his paralellogramm, Pepys encountered the usual difficulties breaking in a new technology, noting in his diary on 17 January 1669 that it was “stiff” at first:
... After dinner, Mr. Spong and I to my closet, there to try my instrument Paralellogramm, which doth mighty well, to my full content; but only a little stiff, as being new. Thence, taking leave of my guests, he and I and W. Hewer to Whitehall ....
His good friend, Mr. Spong, arranged to have the instrument fixed for him, and Pepys gives an interesting account of the collaborative nature of his design activities on 4 February 1669:
Up and at the office all the morning. At noon, home with my people to dinner; and then after dinner comes Mr. Spong to see me, and brings me my parrallogram in better order then before, and two or three drafts of the port of Brest, to my great content: and I did call Mr. Gibson to take notice of it, who is very much pleased therewith. And it seems this is not, as Mr. Sheres would the other day have persuaded me, the same as a Protractor — which doth so much the more make me value it; but of itself it is a most useful instrument. Thence out with my wife and him, and carried him to a instrument-maker’s shop in Chancery lane that was once a prentice of Greatorex’s, but the master was not within; and there he showed me a paralellogram in brass, which I like so well that I will buy, and, therefore bid it be made clean and fit for me. And so to my cousin Turner’s ....
Then, as now, people like Pepys desired to work with the best tools available.
Chambers’ two-volume Cyclopædia was itself a good example of the best commercial design practices of his day, with its two-color title page, handsome typesetting and dual-column layout, plentiful tables and diagrams, and 20 original plates (which included detailed pictorial descriptions of Algebra, Anatomy, Astronomy, Architecture, Conicks, Dialling, Fortification, Geography & Hydrography, Geometry, Hydraulics & Hydrostaticks, Mechanicks, Miscellany & Music, Natural History, Opticks, Perspective, Pneumatics, A Ship of War, Surveying, and Trigonometry). True to the age’s preference for a dialectical interplay of visual and verbal language — e.g., the renowned art critic, Roland Fréart (who Chambers cites in his Cyclopædia), described pictures as “mute Poesie” and poetry as “vocal Painting” in his 1662 Idée de la perfection de la peinture — Chambers’ Cyclopædia opened with an emblematic frontispiece (see related Gallery exhibit), which managed to communicate the essence of his encyclopedic survey in expressive visual terms. Lois Potter refers to this as “the two-way encoding of words and images,” and Baroque artists were unsurpassed masters at it, drawing on a common heritage of visual and verbal forms to advantage.
Available as HTML text, with illustrations
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LIB. CAT. NO. CHAMB1728b
“Antipodes” (1728)
by Ephraim Chambers
This HTML version of Ephraim Chambers’ early 18th-century Cyclopaedia article on the antipodes is intended to supplement she-philosopher.com’s IN BRIEF topic on this same subject. Early modern Europeans continued to be intrigued by the concept, which had been part of popular culture for centuries.
Chambers’ article on the antipodes documents his culture’s evolving interpretation of the term, and of north-south global polarities in general. In his article, the north-south relationship is presented in seemingly familiar terms of diametrical opposition, but in Chambers’ day, the geographic conceit implied a complementarity of north and south that is often missing from our more modern view of the globe.
Chambers’ conception of the antipodes is not, then, simply another example of what’s been called “the Euro-American system of dualistic reasoning and its age-old divide-and-conquer tactics” (see, e.g., Minh-ha T. Trinh’s difficult, but thoughtful and thought-provoking Woman, Native, Other). Rather, Chambers’ explanation aligns with a more universal understanding of the unity of opposites — a way of thinking akin to what we find symbolically represented in the Korean Tae Geuk graphic image, where yin and yang intertwine to produce an all-encompassing third term: circular balance.
I would argue that Chambers’ explanation of the antipodes should be read in light of the still reigning neoplatonic doctrine of the coincidence of opposites in the supreme One. This, and not some 20th-century logic of hierarchical opposition, was its undergirding theme.
In the first sentence of his article, Chambers notes that antipodes has always been “a relative Term.” Indeed, within early modern scientific circles, there was little sense of a privileged northern self who disdained his southern opposite; we find instead a fairly sophisticated understanding of the culturally-constructed and -negotiated identities of different geographies. William Cuningham had earlier explained this in his book of mathematical practice, The Cosmographical Glasse, written for a popular audience, including “the mariners of England,” and published in London in 1559. Using the dialogue format (as would Galileo and other early-modern scientists such as Robert Boyle) to reach an audience of practitioners beyond the university, Cuningham’s discussion of the antipodes is voiced by the two speakers, Philonicus (the embodiment of human “sapie[n]ce and science”) and Spoudaeus (the self-motivated and eager-to-learn pupil). Having discussed the “Ascij, or people withoute shadow” (so named by Pliny) who “dwell in the burning Zone, which ... is betwixt the two Tropikes,” Philonicus moves on to “these inhabitauntes ... called Amphiscij” because they are “double or two folde shadowed.”
Spou. I understand your meaning. Philon. The second be those, which have the shadow continuallye, toward one coste, ether North or South. Spou. Then we be in the numbre of those, for we have oure shadow directly North.
Phi[l]. And such be those that dwel in th’opposite place of th’earth against us (& therfore called Antipodes[)]. For the sonne never comminge over their zenit, they have the shadow into the South coste perpetually declining, as we have into the Northe. Spou. This must nedes be certainly true, but yet I do much mervaile therat. Phil. What so ever is rare, and not commonly sene and hard, is ever mervelous. And the Arabians commynge into Europe, mervailed as muche to see the shadowe Northwarde, as you do to here it is declined (with the aforesaid inhabitants) toward the South cost, & therfore Lucanus speaketh of them in this sort.
Ignorum vobis (Arabes) venistis in orbem,
Umbras mirati nemorum non iri sinistras.
A Region unknowne (Arabians) you finde:
Musing that the shadow, is still North declinde.
(Cosmographical Glasse, fol. 70)
Cuningham, who praised Arab scientists (e.g., the Arabian physician, Avicenna) several times in this book as well as in his printed almanacs, included a later lesson on the antipodes, wherein Philonocus teaches:
The opposite parallele, to that goeth over the Rhodes, is described by th’Ilands Seilan, & Augama. & they are Antipodes unto Italy, which dwell in Java the lesser. The antipodes to the Lucitanians, are those in the Isle of Seila. There be also divers other places towarde the south coast, of which neither I have heard of any credible person, nor yet read: & therfore can not affirme any certeine trueth: & will omit it untill an other ceason. (Cosmographical Glasse, fol. 80–1)
Of note, the merchant adventurer, Martin Frobisher, included Cuningham’s Cosmographical Glasse in the small library (five books total) he took with him on the first English voyage in search of the Northwest Passage in 1576. The new knowledge brought back by Frobisher and his unlettered companions would soon outdate Cuningham’s book-learned geography (as he himself had anticipated), and the mariners of England would add new stories of their own to the growing body of scientific lore about the antipodes.
The final point of interest in Chambers’ article on the antipodes is its discussion of the growing controversy around Virgil of Salzburg and his “atheistical, heretical, and damnable” theories of the antipodes, as Robert Hooke had put it. Chambers describes early Christian arguments for and against the antipodes, plus cites new arguments from a 1708 French publication wherein the authors claimed that the Church “had done nothing contrary to Truth and Equity” in the matter. Their proof: Virgil “was even canonized by the same Pope,” Zachary, who was reputed to have directed that Virgil be expelled from the church for teaching “that there is another World, and other Men under the Earth.”
It’s hard to tell where Chambers himself stood in the controversy over Virgil of Salzburg. Regardless, he presents the Christian record on the antipodes as more mixed than popular myth-making around the 8th-century antipodist bishop allowed.
Available as HTML text
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LIB. CAT. NO. COWL1667
To the Royal Society (1667)
by Abraham Cowley
A transcription of the complete text of Cowley’s ode “To the Royal Society,” published as the prefatory verses to Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667), is provided in HTML format as part of the IN BRIEF topic on Abraham Cowley’s He-Philosophy and an ISSUES webessay on the visual nature of verbal expression (Cowley’s “From Words, which are but Pictures of the Thought, / ... To Things, the Minds right Object”).
Available as HTML text
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(Page 2 of Library Catalog)
LIBRARY CATALOG: Page 1 (entries A–C) | Page 2 (entries D–F) | Page 3 (entries G–J) | Page 4 (entries K–O) | Page 5 (entries P–T) | Page 6 (entries U–Z)