Anatomy of melancholy (Penguin Books)

A new Penguin Classics edition of Burton's masterpiece - ostensibly a guidebook to melancholia or depression, in reality an all-encompassing examination of the human condition.The Anatomy of Melancholy is the vast and only work żeby Robert Burton, the seventeenth-century English priest and scholar. It 'opens and cuts up' the condition of melancholy, or depression as we know it today, and in doing so explores a dizzying range of additional topics including goblins, beauty, the geography of America, digestion, the passions, alcohol and kissing. Burton believed that reading was a cure for melancholy, and so the book itself - one of the most unique and uncategorisable works of all time - can be seen as a tonic for the very condition it describes.