An interest in the bizarre helps keep melancholy at bay

If you crush the right testicle of a wolf and administer it in oil or rose water it will induce a loathing for sex. The Turks have a drink called coffee (for they use no wine). The Chinese have no nobility, or only those philosophers and doctors who have raised themselves by their worth. If you allowed a human being 25 square feet each, the Earth could bear 148,456,800,000,000 people. The Persian kings trained sparrows to hunt butterflies, inspired by hunting with hawks. Speaking of sparrows, the reason they are so short-lived is because of their salacity, which is very frequent. Once a nun ate a lettuce without saying grace or making the sign of the cross over it and was instantly possessed by devils; the same thing happened to an ordinary girl who ate an unhallowed pomegranate in Bononia. There are hobgoblins in Lipari who mend old irons. Interesting.

Robert Burton’s immense and extra-ordinary The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of the principal monuments of 17th-century prose. It is, on the face of it, an investigation into the causes and varieties of melancholy, and its cures. Burton means much more by melancholy than just depression or sadness; the scholarly disposition, love and desire, obsession, religious devotion and real insanity enter into his subject. There is, too, his speculation about other illnesses, and the divine or diabolical forces imposing melancholy on the unwary. When you add his exploration of the activities which might fend off melancholy, among them different food and drink, exercise and sociability, the work’s subject divides and proliferates, and might never come to an end.

It never did come to an end. Burton, born 1577, was the son of Leicestershire gentry, who went to Oxford at 16. Aged 22, he was made a life fellow of Christ Church and remained there.