Skip to main content

The Folger will open at noon on Sunday, April 27th. Learn more

All 1 posts by

Mary Ann Lund

is Associate Professor in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Leicester and the author of A User’s Guide to Melancholy (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Better than laughing: Renaissance melancholy
Shakespeare and Beyond

Better than laughing: Renaissance melancholy

Posted
Author
Mary Ann Lund

The most famous book about Renaissance melancholy, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), celebrates its four hundredth anniversary this year. Though it was published five years after Shakespeare’s death, it gathers together ideas about melancholy from antiquity right through…