Skip to main content

Holiday Hours: The Folger is closing at 4:30pm on Dec 24 and Dec 31. We are closed all day on Dec 25 and Jan 1.

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…