The Anatomy of Melancholy remains one of the most under-read and under-appreciated classics of Late-Renaissance English prose. This dissertation aims to redress this by suggesting that Burton's seemingly incoherent redaction of humanist learning is rather more theatrical than has been generally acknowledged. I argue that Burton stylistically mimes his subject, performing himself as the melancholy centonist in order to offer profound social critique and powerful sympathetic medicine. I offer a reading of the Anatomy as a deft rhetorical performance that imitates and celebrates the body's ability to transmit somatic experience via the powers of the imagination, or through what I am calling "mimetic sympathy." Whereas recent critics have interpreted Burton's copious style as the anxious defense of a mind and body under threat, I show that the body articulated (and disarticulated) in the Anatomy is one whose health depends on porous and fluid commerce with an equally mutable world. I suggest that Burton promotes melancholy by surreptitiously undermining traditional sources and turning to Epicurean strands of natural philosophy to support an ethics of melancholic impressionability. In reclaiming Burtonian copia as a source of pleasure as opposed to anxiety, the dissertation calls for wider reconsideration of the ways in which physiological impressionability and the powers of the imagination are represented in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century literature.

Chapter One places Burton's rhetorical performance in the context of the mask through which it is delivered. I argue that Burton's paradigmatic self-contradiction in the persona of Democritus Junior performs the idea of the self as delightfully inconsistent and therefore consonant with the Epicurean cosmology that subtends his book. Chapter Two suggests that the hypochondriacal imagination serves both as a meditative emblem (that Burton offers the reader to allopathically combat melancholic withdrawal) and as an emblem for the writing of natural history. Chapter Three considers the Anatomy as Burton's own demonstration of a "study cure." I illustrate how Burton revises debates over the relationship between melancholia and genius, and the physiological roles of the imagination, to offer a view of study as a cure, not cause, of scholarly melancholia. Chapter Four offers an account of the Burtonian sublime by tracing the image of the breath suspended through Burton's digressions on air, love, and jealousy. I demonstrate how Burton ties lofty meditations on geological ventilation in the "Digression of Air" to arguments for the necessity of physiological release and the loosening of social codes elsewhere in the Anatomy. Burton rhetorically mimes this "airing out" by exposing internal contradictions in and between the authorities he cites, offering the reader an alternative ethos wherein license is both good medicine as well as an expression of generosity and grace.