On Melancholy

Journey through the subject of melancholia in an easily accessible volume touching on topics from love and sex to religion and geography Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy  is one of the great but unclassifiable prose works in English literature: diverting, delightfully rambling, and filled with recondite learning and peculiar facts and speculations. Burton, frustrated at the stagnant, disorderly society in which he found himself, became convinced that the problems of England lay in it