Abstract

This essay considers the uses made of Renaissance love theory by the seventeenth-century English scholar Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy. It is argued that Burton’s approach is that of a ‘general scholar’, and a close examination of his sources reveal that he made use not only of the primary texts of Renaissance love theory such as the works of Marsilio Ficino and Leone Ebreo, but also the compendious works of later scholars working in medicine and law, as well as philosophy. Drawing on sources as diverse as Francesco Piccolomini’s weighty philosophical tome on civil science, Vniversa Philosophia de Moribus to a diminutive collection of Platonic commonplaces by Niccolò Liburnio, Burton’s work makes it clear that a history of the reception of Platonism in the seventeenth century needs to consider the various milieux of European general scholarship.