SOURCE: Chapple, Anne S. “Robert Burton's Geography of Melancholy.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 33, No. 1 (1993): 99-130.

[In the following essay, Chapple examines how Burton's interest in the burgeoning field of cartography influenced The Anatomy of Melancholy, primarily focusing on the “foolscap” world map described in the preface.]

Observing map collectors in 1570, Dr. John Dee wrote, “Some, to beautify their Halls, Parlors, Chambers, Galeries, Studies, or Libraries … liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth, Maps, Charts, and Geographicall Globes.”¹ Dee was writing at a time when only the wealthy could afford to own maps, curious artifacts that resemble works of art more than they do the mathematically precise productions of our own time. But despite their relative scarcity and prohibitive cost, maps became increasingly accessible in university settings; to some extent, maps were even accessible to the general public. Thomas Blundeville's 1589 treatise, A Briefe Description of Universal Mappes and Cardes and of Their Use, dedicated to Francis Windam, a judge in the Court of Common Pleas, gives clear evidence that the public had been exposed to maps and showed an eager interest in them. In an address “To the Reader” that begins his treatise, Blundeville documents the rising popularity of the beautifully crafted maps and charts that were appearing with increasing frequency toward the end of the century: “I daylie see many that delight to looke on Mappes, and can point to England, France, Germanie, and to the East and West Indies, and to divers other places therein described.” He argues a need to “instruct” those who “looke on Mappes … but yet for want of skill in Geography, they knowe not with what maner of lines they are traced, nor what those lines do signifie, nor yet the true use of Mappes in deed.”²

The proliferation of maps and charts during the late 1500s and early 1600s affected many Renaissance writers of note. This was the period in history when Robert Burton, renowned author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), began to anatomize the melancholic “diseases” that plagued the men of his day. Burton was embarking on his exploration of melancholia at a time when the image of the world on maps was changing with unprecedented rapidity under the pressure of new geographical discoveries; the surprising connections between these two pursuits for Burton is fruitful ground for exploration.³ That Robert Burton made a pioneering attempt to anatomize the causes and effects of melancholy is well known, but that he was well acquainted with contemporary literature on cartography and geography has only recently been documented.⁴ Burton's familiarity with the exquisite new maps of the world that were printed in such unprecedented numbers during his lifetime is conspicuously evident in his Anatomy of Melancholy, but the impact of the one on the other has gone virtually unrecognized. I will argue that mapping and charting enterprises had a profound influence on both the shape and content of The Anatomy of Melancholy. Like Georg Braun, Burton was “drawne by a naturall love of Pictures and Mappes, Prospective and Chorographical delights”; we can imagine that, “when at Oxford,” he “used to love to visit the bookseller's shops, there to lye gaping on maps.”⁵ In fact, he was one of the serious collectors of his day.

When we ask ourselves how the world might have looked to Burton and his contemporaries, living in an era of such astronomical growth, we arrive at some surprising answers. Because the exciting new geographic discoveries were assimilated into the culture through a filter of traditional beliefs in the vanity of human existence, the brave New World that was being mapped out in ever sharper outlines simply did not appear to Renaissance observers the way it might to us today. It would be inaccurate to claim that the world presented itself to Burton and his peers as a panorama of unalloyed hope and possibility. In Burton's writing we feel the spirit of adventure that characterized the age, a delight in the growth and change around him; but mapped images of the world might just as often represent a geography of melancholy. In spite of the exciting new images of the world that were increasingly available, Burton's taste ran to conservative cartographical literature. The maps that caught and held his interest tended to represent the world in terms of traditional values and beliefs. One such map in particular played a large part in shaping the prefatory chapter to The Anatomy of Melancholy, entitled “Democritus Jr. to the Reader”; this was the anonymous foolscap world map commonly attributed to Epichthonius Cosmopolites. Other examples include the anthropomorphic geographical literature of the Greeks. Burton's treatment of these maps gives us new insights into the Preface, in which Burton develops the persona that he will maintain throughout his vast work. I will argue that Burton's use of cartographical literature helps us to understand his own world view and to grasp the broader meaning and significance—quite different from our own—that specific maps could have both for him and for his contemporaries.

To Burton's way of thinking, his exploration of the “melancholy humour” in all its various and sundry forms in The Anatomy of Melancholy was an undertaking that paralleled the efforts made by some of the greatest explorers and adventurers of his time. In the Preface, Burton states that he “doubt[s] not but that in the end [the reader] wil say with [him], that to anatomize this humour aright, through all the Members of this our Microcosmos, is as great a taske, as to … finde out the Quadrature of a Circle, the Creekes and Sounds of the North-East, or North-West passages, & all out as good a discoverie, as that hungry Spaniards [Ferdinando de Quir, Anno 1612] of Terra Australis Incognita.”⁶ He justifies his undertaking with yet another cartographical analogy: “in undertaking this taske, I hope I shall commit no great errour or indecorum, if all be considered aright, I can vindicate my selfe with Georgius Braunus, and Hieronymus Hemingius, those two learned Divines; who (to borrow a line or two of mine elder Brother) drawne by a naturall love, the one of Pictures and Mappes, Prospectives and Corographicall delights, writ that ample Theater of Citties; the other to the study of Genealogies, penned Theatrum Genealogicum” (1:22).⁷ The fact that he compares his monumental task to the intricacies of mapping, and justifies it in those terms, is significant. The parallel he is drawing between the two endeavors is essentially metaphorical—both are acts of discovery and courage—but it is also more than that. The two activities are analogous in the sense that, for Burton, mapping and anatomizing both are carried out from a superior vantage point and both imply a similar global perspective on the world.

In keeping with the cartographical theme that runs through the Preface, the metaphors Burton uses to describe the reader's perusal of his “treatise” are also drawn from travel and exploration. To read his work, he promises the reader, will be like taking a journey through a varied landscape: “And if thou vouchsafe to read this Treatise, it shall seeme no otherwise to thee, then the way to an ordinary Traveller, sometimes faire, sometimes foule; here champion, there inclosed; barren in one place, better soyle in another: by Woods, Groves, Hills, Dales, Plaines, & c. I shall lead thee per ardua montium, & lubrica vallium, & roscida cespitum, & glebosa camporum, through variety of objects, that which thou shalt like and surely dislike” (1:18). He invites his reader to adopt a global perspective like his own on the journey through the bewildering landscape he has laid out.

Burton employs an almost identical perspective as a unifying device later in his work, in a Member of the Second Partition of The Anatomy entitled “Ayre Rectified. With a Digression of the Ayre” (2:33-67). In this Member, he uses the aerial vantage point of “a long-winged Hawke” (2:33) in flight to explore the wonders of the world: “As a long-winged Hawke when hee is first whistled off the fist, mounts aloft, and for his pleasure fetcheth many a circuit in the Ayre, still soaring higher and higher, till hee bee come to his full pitch; and in the end … comes downe amaine … so will I, having now come at last into these ample fields of Ayre, wherein I may freely expatiate and exercise my selfe, for my recreation a while rove, wander round about the world, mount aloft to those aethereall orbes and celestiall spheres, and so descend to my former elements againe” (2:33). Many of these marvels are geographical; Burton amasses data on lunar geography, astronomy, the natural wonders of the world, curiosities reported in travel accounts, etc. He states that he wishes to confirm the reports he has heard: “I will first see whether that relation of the Frier of Oxford be true, concerning those Northerne parts under the Pole … whether there be such 4. Euripes, and a great rocke of Loadstones, which may cause the needle in the compasse still to bend that way” (2:33).

Burton's aerial adventures are located in the Second Partition of the book which is devoted to the cure of melancholy. As that is true, Burton seems to be implying that a change of perspective is good for the soul. This part of The Anatomy would seem to support E. Patricia Vicari's thesis: “geographical learning—indeed, any knowledge of the natural world—is not pursued for its own sake but for its usefulness in curing melancholy.”⁸ I would add, however, that geography also had a great symbolic weight and significance for Burton.

The global perspective that Burton had to offer the reader was an exceptionally well-informed one. We are fortunate to know exactly what cartographical literature Burton read, because he documented his browsing through the work of many of the more important mapmakers of his day in the passage entitled “Exercise Rectified of Body and Minde” in The Anatomy of Melancholy.⁹ The following quotation from that chapter details the extent of his familiarity with both foreign and domestic maps:

Me thinkes it would well please any man to look upon a Geographicall Map, suavi animum delectatione allicere, ob incredibilem rerum varietatem & jucunditatem, & ad pleniorem sui cognitionem excitare, Chorographicall, Topographicall delineations, to behold, as it were, all the remote Provinces, Townes, Citties of the World, and never to goe forth of the limits of his study, to measure by the Scale and Compasse, their extent, distance, examine their site. Charles the great as Platina writes, had three faire silver tables, in one of which superficies was a large map of Constantinople, in the second Rome neatly engraved, in the third an exquisite description of the whole world, and much delight he tooke in them. What greater pleasure can there now bee, then to view those elaborate Maps, of Ortelius, Mercator, Hondius, & c. To peruse those bookes of Citties, put out by Braunus, and Hogenbergius? To read those exquisite descriptions of Maginus, Munster, Herrera, Laet, Merula, Boterus, Leander Albertus, Camden, Leo Afer, Adricomius, Nic. Gerbelius, & c.? Those famous expeditions of Christoph. Columbus, Americus Vesputius, Marcus Polus the Venetian, Lod. Vertomannus, Aloysius Cadamustus, & c.? Those acurate diaries of Portugals, Hollanders, of Bartison, Oliver a Nort & c. Hacluits voyages, Pet. Martyres decades, Benzo, Lerius, Linschotens relations, those Hodaeporicons of Jod. a Meggen, Brocard the Monke, Bredenbachius, Jo. Dublinius, Sands, & c., to Jerusalem, AEgypt, and other remote places of the world: those pleasant Itineraries of Paulus Hentznerus, Jodocus Sincerus, Dux Polonus, & c. to read Bellonius observations, P. Gillius his survaies; Those parts of America, set out, and curiously cut in Pictures by Fratres a Bry.

(2:86-87)

These are interesting observations, coming from a man who himself was “never to go forth of the limits of his study,” who, from 1599 until his death forty years later in 1640, lived a lonely life in his bachelor quarters at Christ Church, Oxford.¹⁰ By his own admission, he “liv'd a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life, mihi & musis, in the University as long almost as Xenocrates in Athens, ad senectam fere, to learne wisdome as he did” (1:3). “I never travelled,” Burton admits, “but in Mappe or Card, in which my unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated, as having ever beene especially delighted with the study of Cosmography” (1:4). We discover somewhat surprisingly, then, that Burton's interest in maps was not a consequence of first-hand experience of the world, nor did it imply a love of the world. E. Patricia Vicari has argued that Burton actually denounced “the study of geography and even travel as vain curiosity and weariness of the flesh.”¹¹ She cites Burton's opinion in this context: a person “travels into Europe, Africke, Asia, searcheth every Creeke, Sea, Citty, Mountaine, Gulfe, to what end? See one Promontory (said Socrates of old), one Mountaine, one Sea, one River, and see all” (1:364). Elsewhere in The Anatomy Burton indicates his belief that only an irrational restlessness makes men want to travel: “The world it selfe to some men is a prison, our narrow seas as so many ditches, and when they have compassed the Globe of the earth, they would faine goe see what's done in the Moone” (2:173-74).

We will have to look elsewhere to understand the appeal that maps had for Burton, then. I think we come closer to the truth when we observe that maps provided Burton with a convenient overview of the world, a vantage point from which to view the world at a comfortable remove, from a height, as it were, as an aloof and superior observer. Another way to interpret his interest is to observe that maps provided Burton with a vicarious way of traveling. More precisly, Burton's love of maps demonstrates his preference for the perspective that maps offered him. In essence, maps facilitated Burton's renunciation of the actual world in favor of a less immediate engagement with it. In his pose as Democritus Jr., he says as much: “I live still a Collegiat Student, as Democritus in his Garden, and lead a Monastique life, ipse mihi Theatrum, sequestered from those tumults and trobles of the world, Et tanquam in specula positus (as he [Hensius] said), and in some high place above you all, like Stoicus Sapiens, omnia saecula, praeterita presentiaque videns, uno velut intuitu, I heare and see what is done abroad, how others run, ride, turmoile, & macerate themselves in Court and Countrey, far from those wrangling Law suits, aulae vanitatem, fori ambitionem, ridere mecum soleo: I laugh at all” (1:4).¹² Like laughing Democritus, the melancholy philosopher of Abdera with whom Burton identified, he seems convinced of the incurable folly of mankind. His desire to observe from “some high place,” I think, was related to the darkness of his vision of the human condition and to the unparalleled pessimism of his world view. But his preference for detached observation did not imply a personal passivity toward the world. Apparently it was not enough to live quietly with his beliefs in relative obscurity. He had a pressing need to persuade his readers to adopt his viewpoint; his efforts to “prove” to the reader the implacable folly of all men in all times and places, as well as to “prove” the urgent need for a “cure,” is the burden of “Democritus Jr. to the Reader.”

Let us take some time to examine his efforts along these lines. One of his “chiefe motives” in the Preface is to establish, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the “generalitie of the Disease,” and this he proceeds to do with great energy (1:23). He makes his case as would a lawyer assembling evidence to establish guilt; he uses the amassed evidence to “proove my former speeches” (1:36). Burton builds a convincing case, for he proceeds to “anatomize this humour aright, through all the Members of this our Microcosmos,” and not only in his own society, but in ancient societies as well (1:23). So far as I can tell, no one—ancient or modern, living or dead—escapes Burton's censure, not even himself. To prove “That men are so mis-affected, melancholy, mad, giddy-headed,” he presents the reader with “the testimony of Solomon, Eccl.2.12. And I turned to behold wisdome, madnesse and folly, & c.,” but then subjects him to the same censure, since Solomon himself admits that he is “more foolish then any man, & [has] not the understanding of a man in me, Prov. 30.2.” (1:25-26).

Another witness called to testify in support of Burton's viewpoint is Socrates, who, after taking “great paines to finde out a wise man,” finally concluded that “all men were fools” (1:31). But then “Socrates, whom though that Oracle of Apollo confirmed to be the wisest man then living … whom 2,000 yeeres have admired, of whom some will as soone speake evill as of Christ,” was in reality, by differing accounts, “an illiterate Idiot,” “a pot companion,” “an opinative Asse, a Caviller, a kind of Pedant,” etc. (1:29). In fact, according to Burton, all of the great thinkers of ancient times, “even all those great Philosophers, the world hath ever had in admiration, whose Workes we doe so much esteeme, that gave Precepts of wisdome to others” (1:27), including Socrates, Aristotle, Longinus, are, as “Lactantius in his booke of Wisdome, proves them to be … Dizards, Fooles, Asses, mad-men, so full of absurd and ridiculous tenents and braine-sicke positions, that to his thinking never any old woman or sicke person doted worse” (1:28-29). St. Paul corroborates Burton's view that “The hearts of the sons of men are evill, & madnes is in their hearts while they live, Eccl.9.3” (1:25-26). But then St. Paul himself is no more exempt from Burton's proposition than Solomon was, since Paul “accuseth himselfe in like sort,” saying “I speake foolishly” (1:26). “Our Artists and Philosophers … are a kind of mad men” and of course “Lovers are mad” (1:103). “Most women are fooles, consilium faeminis invalidum” (1:103). “Covetous men amongst others, are most madde” (1:105).

In short, Burton asks the reader, “who is not a Foole, Melancholy, Mad?—Qui nil molitur inepte, who is not brain-sick? Folly, Melancholy, Madnesse, are but one disease, Delirium is a common name to all” (1:25). Folly characterizes all human action: “All our actions, as Pliny told Trajan, up-braid us of folly, our whole course of life is but matter of laughter: wee are not soberly wise, and the world it selfe, which ought at least to be wise by reason of its antiquity, as Hugo de Prato Florido will have it, semper stultizat, is every day more foolish then other, the more it is whipped the worse it is, and as a child will still be crowned with roses and flowres. We are apish in it, asini bipedes, and every place is full inversorum Apuleiorum, of metamorphised and two-legged Asses, inversorum Silenorum, childish, pueri instar bimuli, tremula patris dormientis in ulna” (1:30). It is his considered opinion that “we are ad unum omnes all mad, semel insanivimus omnes, not once, but always so … young and old, all dote … no difference betwixt us and children, saving that … they play with babies of clouts and such toyes, we sport with greater bables” (1:31). Given such sweeping claims, it is perhaps not surprising that Burton's work has earned him a prominent place in the history of “malcontent” literature.¹³ I can think of no better illustration of Samuel Johnson's observation that the melancholy man hears the sad song of the nightingale than Burton's extraordinary receptivity to messages about the folly and madness of all human beings.

But it would be a mistake to assume that Burton is assembling his vast catalogue of fools and mad-men out of some perverse desire to overwhelm the reader with despair. He is establishing the scope of the problem that he has chosen to treat, setting the stage for his “anatomy” of the disease, and for the “cures” he has to offer to the reader. As I mentioned earlier, Vicari has argued that Burton pursues geographical learning not for its own sake but precisely for its usefulness in curing melancholy.¹⁴ But I think it is more accurate to claim, especially as regards the Preface to The Anatomy, that Burton employs geography and cartography as “proof” of his assertion that men are incurably foolish. The maps which had special appeal for him served as emblems of man's folly, writ large. In themselves, they have no curative function; rather they serve to underscore Burton's own pessimistic world view.

The Anatomy of Melancholy, we might observe, was at least as much an attempt to cure Burton himself as it was an attempt to cure the ills of the world around him. As he admits early in the Preface:

When I first tooke this taske in hand … this I aymed at, … to ease my minde by writing, for I had … a kind of Imposthume in my head, which I was very desirous to be unladen of, and could imagine no fitter evacuation then this. Besides I might not well refraine, for ubi dolor, ibi digitus, one must needs scratch where it itcheth. I was not a little offended with this maladie, shall I say my Mistris Melancholy, my AEgeria, or my malus Genius, & for that cause as he that is stung with a Scorpion, I would expell clavum clavo, comfort one sorrow with another, idlenes with idlenes, … make an Antidote out of that which was the prime cause of my disease.

(1:7)

Burton's attention turns to cure on many occasions in the Preface, though he often seems to despair of finding any. “From the highest to the lowest, have need of Physicke,” Burton writes in his address to the reader (1:25). The ancient Greek remedy for insanity, a plant known as “hellebore,” is the cure he mentions most often; he uses it ironically as a metaphor for cure in general. A subsequent footnote in Burton's Anatomy enlightens us further about hellebore: “Several towns in Greece were named Anticyra, and all were famed for their black hellebore, a plant which was used by physicians to ‘purge the head.’ To say ‘Go to Anticyra’ was a way of saying ‘You are mad.’”¹⁵ The ancient Greek geographer Strabo gave his own exposition on Anticyra and the several kinds of hellebore that were said to grow there; Strabo's Geography was probably the locus classicus from which Burton got his information.¹⁶

Burton's many references to hellebore in the Preface are ironic comments on the pressing need for a cure for the pervasive madness and melancholy of his age. For instance, hellebore appears in the context of contemporary pilgrimages where it is given pride of place. Given that “most men are mad,” Burton writes, “they had as much need to goe a pilgrimage to the Anticyrae (as in Strabo's time they did) as in our daies they run to Compostella, our Lady of Sichem, or Lauretta, to seeke for helpe; that it is like to be as prosperous a voyage as that of Guiana, and that there is much more need of Hellebor then of Tobacco” (1:25). Burton's subtle and ironic treatment of overseas travel here adds support to my assertion that Burton was a rather conservative thinker. He seems convinced of the folly of such ventures.¹⁷ His ironic reference to “Anticyrae” is interesting, too, because it links hellebore to the time of the Greek geographer Strabo (about 63 B.C.-20 A.D.). Hellebore was clearly not a common remedy for madness when Burton was writing; it was used primarily in ancient Greece. Again, Burton was drawing on Greek sources for his central metaphors. The link between Strabo and hellebore will be important for deciphering the maps that Burton examined, especially the foolscap map.

Time and again Burton reveals his preference for dismissive judgments on human life, pronounced from a removed and superior vantage point, as in the following anecdote from Lucian:

Charon in Lucian, as he wittily faignes, was conducted by Mercury to such a place, where he might see all the World at once, after hee had sufficiently viewed and looked about, Mercury would needs knowe of him what he had observed: He told him, that hee saw a vast multitude and a promiscuous, their habitations like Mole-hills, the men as Emmets, hee could discerne Citties like so many Hives of Bees, wherein every Bee had a sting, and they did nought else but sting one another, some domineering like Hornets, bigger then the rest, some like filching Wasps, others as Drones. Over their heads were hovering a confused company of perturbations, Hope, Feare, Anger, Avarice, Ignorance, & c. and a multitude of diseases hanging, which they still pulled on their pates. Some were brawling, some fighting, riding, running, sollicite ambientes, callide litigantes, for toyes, & trifles, and such momentanie things. Their Townes and Provinces meere factions, rich against poore, poore against rich, Nobles against Artificers, they against Nobles, and so the rest. In conclusion hee condemned them all, for Mad-men, Fooles, Idiots, Asses. O stulti, quaenam haec est amentia? O Fooles, O Mad-Men he exclaimes, insana studia, insani labores, & c. Mad endeavours, mad actions, mad, mad, mad. O seclum insipiens & infacetum a giddy-headed age. Heraclitus the Philosopher, out of a serious meditation of mens lives, fell a weeping, and with continuall teares bewailed their miserie, madnesse, and folly.

(1:32)

The “place, where he might see all the World at once” offered Charon a vantage point much like that which maps made available to Burton. And, once again, the distanced perspective is employed to confirm Burton's thesis: all the world is full of fools and mad-men. Heraclitus appears in his prose here to voice Burton's own sentiment.

To summarize, then, the world of the Preface is a world full of fools and madmen with a pressing need for a cure. This idea finds visual representation in several places in the Preface—specifically in the form of maps. Burton's geography replicates his melancholy beliefs about mankind, perhaps inevitably, given the depth of his pessimism. The privileged vantage point that maps offered to Burton, and even the maps themselves, served to confirm Burton's convictions about the folly of men and the vanity of human wishes. Far from opening the world to him in new ways, the maps that caught Burton's attention served to reinvigorate an existing world view and to reinforce traditional values and beliefs.

In a short passage that precedes his reference to the foolscap map and to the anthropomorphic geography of the Greeks, Burton establishes the distanced perspective from which he will “prove” the melancholy nature of human affairs. This passage repays our careful scrutiny with its richness of allusion and implication, and the insight it gives us into the prefatory chapter, “Democritus Jr. to the Reader”:

Of the necessitie and generalitie of this [that the world is full of melancholy, madness, disease, corruption, etc.] which I have said, if any man doubt, I shall desire him to make a briefe survey of the world, as Cyprian advised Donat, supposing himselfe to be transported to the top of some high Mountaine, and thence to behold the tumults & chances of this wavering world, he cannot chuse but either laugh at, or pitty it. S. Hierome out of a strong imagination, being in the Wildernesse, conceived with himselfe, that he then saw them dauncing in Rome, and if thou shalt either conceive, or climbe to see, thou shalt soone perceive that all the world is mad.

(1:24)

The choice that Cyprian offers to Donatus—having climbed to some superior vantage point from which to view the world—is either to laugh at or to pity the world. This scene is strongly reminiscent of the pose that Burton adopts early in the Preface, where from “some high place” above the rest of the world he “laughs at all” the tumult of the world. But the above lines require further explication for clarity. The choice of laughter or pity that Cyprian offers to Donatus is the key to the process of associative thinking that leads Burton into his treatment of the foolscap map. For, the spokesmen for the foolscap map—Democritus of Abdera and Heraclitus—offer the reader the same choice of attitudes toward the world: Democritus laughs at it, and Heraclitus pities it. These are, of course, Burton's attitudes as well.

I have said that, far from opening the world to Burton in new ways, the maps that seem to have captured his attention were those that reinforced his withdrawal from the world at the same time that they reinvigorated an existing world view. One map in particular, among the many maps that caught Burton's eye, serves to bring this fact into high relief, and it is this map that we will focus our attention on here. Perhaps the most peculiar of all of the maps that Burton examined—one that seems to have appealed strongly to his melancholy imagination—is the “foolscap map” of the world that Burton attributes to “Epichthonius Cosmopolites.” The map underscores, in a particularly vivid and memorable fashion, Burton's own judgment on the vanity of human effort. It was this map that helped him to integrate all of the elements of his own world view. Further, it helped him by providing a vivid image of the persona he had adopted from Democritus.

The reference to this map comes early in the prefatory chapter to The Anatomy. The relevant passage begins: “thou shalt soone perceive that all the world is mad, that it is melancholy, dotes: that it is (which Epichthonius Cosmopolites expressed not many yeeres since in a Map) made like a Fooles head (with that Motto, Caput Helleboro dignum) a crased head, cavea stultorum, a Fooles paradise, or as Apollonius, a common prison of Gulles, Cheaters, Flatterers, & c. & needs to be reformed” (1:24; see Appendix). These lines are embedded in a much longer passage to be examined.¹⁸

Burton is referring here to a curious map of the world framed by a jester's cap.¹⁹ The “foolscap map,” as it is known among cartographers, measures 360 mm x 480 mm and is printed from a finely executed copper-plate engraving. The map was published separately and anonymously, with no information as to the date or place of publication on it. It is believed to have been published in Antwerp, ca. 1590. The geographical details on the small, oval map that takes the place of the fool's face identify it as a copy of one of Ortelius's latest plates; we can date the map with some certainty as being post-1587, since “the prominent south-[west] bulge to the coastline of South America appearing on nearly all maps before this date has been corrected.”²⁰ While much of our information remains sketchy, we do possess some hard facts about the map. It was based on an earlier foolscap world map by the French mapmaker Jean de Gourmont, which was published in Paris ca. 1575. The earlier foolscap map was made from a woodcut and is somewhat smaller than the later copper engraving; the actual map of the world on the woodcut is a small oval similarly framed within the hood of a jester's cap, where the face would ordinarily be. As on the anonymous copper engraving, the map on de Gourmont's woodcut is derived from a world map by Ortelius—but in this case it is Ortelius's earlier world map of 1570.²¹

The mapmaker's idea of representing the human face as the earth was probably inspired by Ptolemy's Geographia. Ptolemy's unusual analogy found its way into numerous Renaissance tracts on the “correspondences” between macrocosm and microcosm. For instance, quoting Ptolemy's seminal work on maps, William Cunningham wrote in 1559, “‘Geographie … is the imitation, and description of the face, and picture of th'earth.’”²² This same conception of the face also found its way into the “high” literature of the Renaissance. For example, in Coriolanus, Twelfth Night, 2 Henry VI, “Sonnet 68,” and The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare likens the face to a map which tells something about a person.²³ For instance, in 2 Henry VI, the King tells his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, “Ah, uncle Humphrey, in thy face I see / The map of honour, truth, and loyalty” (III.i.202-203). John Donne makes repeated references to the globe in the context of microcosms, “images,” and “pictures.” He uses the word “picture” to mean “a likeness,” often applied to the face, as in the poem entitled “Here take my picture.”²⁴ Victor Morgan clarifies the meaning that the analogy had for Renaissance readers: as it was developed in the context of “the literary theory of the theophrastian character which was enjoying a revival in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries … the face was the microcosm of the person, and showed forth the dominant traits of personality, just as the map is the microcosm of a place, and conveys by signs the characteristics of the real place it epitomises.”²⁵ For Burton, too, the face could be a map of the microcosm; in any case, it was a melancholy one, as his choice of the foolscap map to exemplify his world view would imply.

But what of the mapmaker and his own world view? Burton had apparently studied the map carefully and picked up what he must have believed was the name of the engraver from the cartouche on the left-hand side of the map: “Epichthonius Cosmopolites.” This attribution was erroneous; in all probability the name refers to a mythic figure, and not to a real person. As to just who this Epichthonius Cosmopolites was, scholars can not seem to agree. His identity—if in fact he ever existed—remains a mystery, despite the efforts of several scholars to identify him. The name itself means “a citizen of the world,” according to J.B. Bamborough.²⁶ We may also translate it as “citizen of the cosmos.” Alternatively, as Rodney W. Shirley suggests, “the Greek wording may be liberally translated as ‘everyman indigenous in this world of ours.’”²⁷ Given the map's global perspective on the vanity and folly of mankind, according to Shirley, “probably no more is meant within the ambit of Burton's fanciful inferences than we all perceive the world as mad, we are the begetters of its inanities, and we are made mad by its follies. Epichthonius Cosmopolites is each one of us.”²⁸

A much stronger possibility which scholars seem not to have considered, is that Epichthonius Cosmopolites is a misspelled version of Erichthonius Cosmopolites.²⁹ If the mapmaker copied the name from a Greek text, he might have confused the Greek letter “rho” with the English letter “p,” which it resembles. The mysterious name would then refer to Erichthonius of Greek mythology, who was an “Attic hero and mythical king of Athens,” according to The Oxford Companion to English Literature.³⁰ An entry in The New Century Classical Handbook helps us to understand the relevance of this mythical character in the overall context of the map, and the meaning he might have had for Renaissance readers. Significantly, he was associated in the popular imagination with both wisdom and madness, or folly. Erichthonius was the offspring of Hephaestus and Gaia (the Earth). Struggling to ravish Athena, Hephaestus accidentally inseminated Gaia when his semen fell upon the ground. Gaia abandoned Erichthonius after giving birth to him, and Athena took the infant, who was half human and half serpent. She put the baby in a chest and asked the daughters of Cecrops, king of Athens, to guard it, giving them strict instructions not to open the chest. When the daughters' curiosity got the best of them, they opened the chest and found a child with a serpent's tail for legs; then, according to most versions of the myth, they were “maddened with fear and leaped to their deaths from the Acropolis.”³¹ The association with foolishness and madness springs from their misfortune. After the deaths of Cecrops's daughters, Athena “put Erichthonius in her aegis and reared him herself.”³² Later, when he became king of Athens, Erichthonius established the worship of Athena (wisdom) there. He himself was later worshipped at Athens in the form of a serpent.³³

Most versions of the myth relate that Athena presented Erichthonius with two drops of the blood of the Gorgon Medusa, “one of which poisoned and the other healed.”³⁴ Some say that she gave him the power to restore the dead to life with those drops of blood.³⁵ The name Erichthonius, then, was for Renaissance readers closely associated with wisdom and with the power to heal. If we are correct in assuming that Epichthonius was never anything more than a misreading of Erichthonius, it seems likely that his wisdom and his healing powers were intended to contrast strikingly with the foolishness and madness decried in virtually all of the inscriptions on the map.³⁶ Whether the “Epichthonius” of the foolscap map was simply a name given to “Everyman” who suffers from the madness and melancholy of the human condition, or a misspelled version of Erichthonius the mythical Attic hero, which seems much more likely, we know that he was not the actual engraver of the later foolscap map. The identity of the true engraver will probably never be known.

Of particular interest to us here are the various epigrammatic phrases on the head-and-shoulders figure of the jester, which lament the vanity of the world and the foolishness of those who love it. Across the top of the foolscap, on either side of the seam, run the words, “O Caput elle boro dignum,” meaning “O head requiring hellebore,” the “Motto” to which Burton alludes in the passage from the Preface. As “hellebore” [spelled “elle boro” on the foolscap map] was a natural remedy for insanity used in ancient Greece, but not in the Renaissance when the mapmaker was engraving the map, we may surmise that he took his inspiration from Greek texts. I think it is a fair guess that the mapmaker got the idea for his motto from Strabo, who wrote an exposition on the Anticyrae and the kinds of hellebore said to grow there in his Geography; Strabo makes reference to hellebore as a cure for madness. The inscription on the fool's chin reads “Stultorum infinitus est numerus” and is attributed to “Salomon.” The Latin translates as “The number of fools is infinite.” “Salomon,” of course, refers to Solomon of the Old Testament, whose beliefs about fools are voiced in a number of the Proverbs. On the ears of the cap, continuing from the first ear to the second, are inscribed the following words: “Auriculas asini … quis non habet.” The reference here is to Persius's First Satire, in which a character, also named Persius, comments, “There's not one of them who doesn't / Have ass's ears!” (line 121).³⁷ The import of his observation seems to be something like “every man is a fool.”

Printed across the brow-line of the fool's cap are the words: “Hic est mundi punctus et materia gloriae nostrae hec sedes hic honores gerimus hic excercemus imperia, hic opes cupimus hic tumultuatur humanum genus, hic instauramus bella etiam civilia, Plin.” “Plin.” here refers to Pliny, specifically Pliny the Elder, who is the author of the quoted passage, though it is roughly translated. The words take their inspiration from Book 2, Chapter 174 of Pliny's Natural History: “detrahantur hae tot portiones terrae, immo vero, ut plures tradidere, mundi puncto (neque enim aliud est terra in universo): haec est materia gloriae nostrae, haec sedes, hic honores gerimus, hic exercemus imperia, his opes cupimus, hic tumultuamur humanum genus, hic instauramus bella etiam civilia mutuisque caedibus laxiorem facimus terram!”³⁸ Horace Rackham translates this passage as follows: “subtract all these portions from the earth or rather from this pin-prick, as the majority of thinkers have taught, in the world—for in the whole universe the earth is nothing else: and this is the substance of our glory, this is its habitation, here it is that we fill positions of power and covet wealth, and throw mankind into an uproar, and launch even civil wars and slaughter one another to make the land more spacious!”³⁹

The medallions on the fool's necklace are also inscribed with quotations. One of them reads “O curas Hominum,” which translates as “O the vanity of human cares!” and takes its inspiration, once again, from the first line of Persius's First Satire, which begins “O the vanity of human cares! O what a huge vacuum man's nature admits!”⁴⁰ A second medallion reads “O, Quantum Est in Rebus Inane.” This phrase may be translated roughly as “O, how much emptiness there is in the affairs of men,” and it, too, comes from the first line of Persius's Satire. A third reads “Stultus factus est omnis homo,” or “Every man was made a fool.” A fourth reads “Universa Vanitas Onis [read “omnis”] Homo,” which may be translated as “universal vanity is every man.” These last two inscriptions are based on sentiments that are voiced in many places in the Bible, especially in Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, and the Psalms.

Other inscriptions surround the head-and-shoulders figure. The inscription on the fool's bauble, for example, reads: “Vanitas, vanitatum et omnia vanitas.” This quotation, which means “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” comes from Ecclesiastes 1:2 and 12:8. Across the top of the map runs the inscription “Nosce te ipsum,” which makes reference to the famous Greek adage, “Know thyself.”

Finally, we must turn our attention to the allusive references in the cartouche on the left-hand side of the map. The Latin inscription in the cartouche reads “Democritus Abderites deridebat, Heraclitus Ephesius deflebat, Epichthonius Cosmopolites deformabat.” J.B. Bamborough translates these lines as follows: “Democritus of Abdera mocked it, Heraclitus of Ephesus wept for it, Epichthonius Cosmopolites disfigured it” [private communication]. All three were voicing their attitudes toward the world figured in the fool's cap.

The world view conveyed by the inscriptions on the foolscap map, then, is a melancholy one: men are consumed with vanity and foolishness. It is a conservative vision in essence: the world may change its face, but the foolhardiness of the human condition abides. This is certainly not a new perspective on the world, especially not for Burton's contemporaries, who were familiar with Biblical admonitions about the vanity of human life. What is different about the foolscap map is that it presents those old adages in a striking new way with reference to the changing character of the world. Burton voices many of the same sentiments in “Democritus Jr. to the Reader” and even uses many of the same quotations from the same classical sources. Remarking that an attempt to catalogue all of the “ridiculous instances” of foolishness in the world around him would be like “one of Hercules labours,” he exclaims, “Quantum est in rebus inane?” (1:55). This is the same line from Persius's First Satire that we saw imprinted in one of the medallions of the fool's necklace on the map. In another context, Burton comments on the absurdity of “our Actions, Carriages, Dyet, Apparell, Customes, and Consultations” by concluding that “all are fooles” (1:57); he ends his observation with a quotation: “and they the veriest asses that hide their ears most” (1:57). The reference is either to Horace, or to Persius who quotes Horace in his First Satire. Again there is common ground between the classical allusions on the foolscap map and those in Burton's own work. Then, too, we find anti-war sentiment expressed in both places. On the map it finds expression in Pliny's ironic comment on civil war and slaughter as the “substance” of man's dubious “glory.” In The Anatomy the horror and senselessness of war are treated at length in a series of detailed examples to which Burton devotes several pages of the Preface. I cannot claim that Burton took his own thematic inspirations from the foolscap map directly, although that remains a possibility, but it is clear that the map had a great appeal for him and that it spoke to a number of his own preoccupations. Burton's own propensity for dwelling with melancholic intensity on the foolishness and vanity of men makes it apparent why this map made such an impression on him.

Given what we know about the classical inspiration for the inscriptions on the foolscap maps, we can make a case for the influence of ancient Greek geographical writings on the figure of the map itself. It is possible that the original conception of representing the world as a human head came from the works of Strabo, Pliny, or Hippocrates, all of whom habitually described a given land formation by comparing it to a familiar object, often the human body or a part of it. It seems likely that the anonymous engraver of the map got access to Greek geography through the many “rediscovered” Greek and Latin texts that began to circulate in England in the Renaissance.⁴¹

Alternatively, we can speculate that de Gourmont's original foolscap map may have been influenced by the very popular The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant. By 1575, when Jean de Gourmont is presumed to have executed his woodcut, Brant's Narrenschiff, as it was originally known, had been translated into a number of different languages and had been widely disseminated across Europe. By 1499 three separate French translations, or paraphrases, had appeared. A French abridgement (1535) and later French editions (Paris 1529; Lyons 1530) and reprints (1499; 1579) are known to have been published.⁴² The circulation of all of these French versions (and others in other languages) makes it likely that Brant's work was accessible to de Gourmont, working in Paris around 1575. Section 24 of The Ship of Fools, entitled “Of Too Much Care,” is prefaced with a woodcut depicting a fool carrying the world on his back.⁴³ The juxtaposition of the fool's head and the world, as well as the sentiments expressed in the accompanying verse, make this a likely source of inspiration for de Gourmont's foolscap map. Edwin Zeydel has located references to the Narrenschiff in Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton makes a reference to “a company of brainsicke dizards” who “may goe ride the asse, and all saile along to the Anticyrae, in the ship of fooles for company together” (1:59).

Burton's treatment of the foolscap map leads him by a process of associative thinking to consider other (Greek) anthropomorphic maps. One good reason for his mental association of the foolscap map with the Greek maps is that they are all head-and-shoulders representations of men as maps. He approaches his subject by gathering insights from the work of Nicholas Gerbelius, the Renaissance commentator. Gerbelius as well as Greek geographers Strabo, Pliny, and Hippocrates contributed significantly to Burton's geography of melancholy.⁴⁴ Gerbelius's work, which provided him with an abbreviated summary assessment of the geography of Strabo and Pliny, was the source on which Burton relied most heavily (see notes 42, 45, and 47). In the following passage Burton continues his treatment of anthropomorphic maps with an acknowledgement of his debt to Gerbelius:

Strabo, in the 9th Booke of his geography, compares Greece to the picture of a man, which comparison of his, Nic. Gerbelius in his exposition of Sophianus Map, approves; The brest lyes open from those Acroceraunian Hilles in Epirus to the Sunian Promontorie in Attica, Pagae and Magaera are the two Shoulders, that Istmos of Corinth the neck, & Peloponnesus the head. If this allusion hold, 'tis sure a mad head; Morea may be Moria [Folly]; & to speake what I thinke, the Inhabitants of moderne Greece, swarve as much from reason, & true religion at this day, as that Morea doth from the picture of a man.

(1:24)

An obvious thing to note about this description is the degree to which the microcosm (the individual inhabitants of Greece) and the macrocosm (the world, here depicted in the shape of a man) are fused in Burton's imagination; the “picture of a man” with its “mad head, Morea” is an image, writ large, of the folly of the actual inhabitants of Greece. For Burton, man is a map of the world, as much as the world is a map of man. He is embroidering here on traditional commonplaces in Greek geographical literature. One of the governing concepts in the geographic work of Hippocrates, for instance, was that the inhabitants of a particular geographic region took their character from the climatic conditions and geographical features of that region. (For example, the vaguely effeminate Scythians who live on plains chilled by ice and snow, heavy rains, and thick fog are “moist and flabby” men, who “have not the strength either to draw a bow or to throw a javeline from the shoulder” and who “have no great desire for intercourse because of the moistness of their constitution and the softness and chill of their abdomen.”⁴⁵) In like manner, Burton implies, the wayward character of his Greek contemporaries finds a sympathetic representation in the distorted shape of their homeland. That is, the “picture of a man” is as much a distortion of the true image of man as the inhabitants of Greece distort reason and true religion. There still lingers in Burton's description of “the inhabitants of modern Greece” something of the ancient Greek belief in the concrete resemblance of man to the natural landscape, something of the sympathy between man and his environment. As on the foolscap map, the world is figured in terms of the character of its inhabitants.

I think it is important that we try to understand Burton's maps not only in their Renaissance context, but in terms of their historical lineage; only by tracing them back to their original historical context can we gain a full appreciation of their meaning. However, it is a little tricky to trace the lineage of the geographical description that Burton is presenting in the above passage, which calls for closer scrutiny, because it is apt to be confusing to anyone not familiar with the works of the three geographers mentioned. Burton is under the impression that it is Strabo who originally compares Greece to the picture of a man, and that this comparison is located in Book 9 of his Geography. According to Burton, Strabo's comparison is “approved” by Nicholas Gerbelius in Gerbelius's exposition on Sophianus's map. Burton is most likely referring here to Gerbelius's 1545 expository tract on geography, In descriptionem Graeciae Sophiani, praefatio.⁴⁶ The actual comparison of Greece to the “picture” of the man, which Burton reprints in The Anatomy and credits to Strabo, reads as follows: “the brest lyes open from those Acroceraunian Hilles in Epirus, to the Sunian Promontorie in Attica, Pagae & Magaera are the two Shoulders, that Istmos of Corinth the neck, & Peloponnesus the head” (1:24). But Burton has made an error in his attribution of authorship here. The comparison of Greece “to the picture of a man” may indeed be found in Nicholas Gerbelius's In descriptionem, but the origin of the comparison is not Strabo's Geography.⁴⁷

The likeness to which Burton refers may be traced to several references that Gerbelius makes in his In descriptionem Graeciae Sophiani, praefatio to Greece being shaped like a man. The first reference, which occurs in a subsection entitled “Attica,” reads as follows: “Locos omnes indicat pictura, praesertim Megara & Pagas: quae duae urbes in Attica sinibus, tanquam scapulae positae sunt. Isthmus collum, Peloponnesus caput & arx totius Graeciae” (p. 17). This may be translated as: “All this indicates with a picture, that Megara and Pagas especially, which are two cities within the borders of Attica, are positioned as if they were the shoulders. The Isthmus is the neck, the Peloponnesus the head and capitol of all Greece.” But it is not clear that Gerbelius is in fact attributing the authorship to Strabo here. Gerbelius has just concluded a passage on Pliny the Elder and is on the verge of beginning a new section on Book 9 of Strabo's Geography. He appears to be giving credit either to Pliny or to Strabo, but the anthropomorphic comparison in question is sandwiched between his treatment of the two authors, and no specific attribution of authorship is made. Gerbelius's vagueness here is almost surely the source of Burton's error: Gerbelius's citation is ambiguous, but Burton understood him to be crediting the comparison to Strabo. When I checked the Ninth Book of Strabo's Geography to find the original quotation, I could find no reference to Greece being shaped like a man. To my mind, Pliny is the more likely source. In Book 4, Chapter 4 of Pliny's Natural History, which covers the Isthmus of Corinth, there is a reference to a “narrow neck of land” from which the Peloponnesus “projects,” and another reference to “Morea,” which “is only attached to Greece by a narrow neck of land.”⁴⁸ Rackham points out that the noun “isthmus,” meaning a neck of land, “came to be attached as a proper name to the neck joining the Morea to Central Greece.”⁴⁹ The definition of an isthmus as a “neck” of land helps to explain why Morea resembled a human head for Pliny and the other geographers. In the section entitled “Attica” in Book 4, Chapter 7 of Pliny's work, we find a reference to the two towns Megara and Pagae, which are “situated where the Peloponnese projects, and stand on either side of the Isthmus, as it were on the shoulders of Hellas.”⁵⁰ Thus, it seems likely that Gerbelius was elaborating on Pliny's suggestions when he compared Greece “to the picture of a man.” We might reasonably speculate that the irregularly shaped Peloponnesus that is positioned as the “head” in Pliny's scheme was the basis for Burton's skeptical comment about the supposed likeness between Morea and “the picture of a man”: “'tis sure a mad head; Morea may be Moria [Folly]; & to speake what I thinke, the Inhabitants of moderne Greece swarve as much from reason, & true religion at this day, as that Morea doth from the picture of a man” (1:24).

The idea that the anthropomorphic comparison derives at least in part from Gerbelius's own extrapolation finds more support in a later subsection of the In descriptionem Graeciae Sophiani, praefatio, entitled “Hellas,” in which Gerbelius writes: “veram Greciam esse, quam in superioribus descripsimus, & veluti totius gentis corpus. Quod si cui libet in re tam amoena tamque iucunda ludere, is picturam nostram invertat: tum videbit hoc corpus, una cum Peloponneso, hominis imaginem ad pectus usque representare. Pectus referet, quicquid a Cerauniis montibus ad Sunium promontorium deducitur. Humeri, seu scapulae, sunt Pagae et Megara, collum totus Isthmus, caput Peloponnesus, quam Graeciae nonnulli appellaverunt arcem” (p. 48). His words may be translated as follows: “true Greece is … like the body of the whole people. Because if it pleases anyone to joke in a pleasant matter, he may invert our picture. Then he will see that this body together with the Peloponnesus represents the image of a man up to the chest. He would call the chest what stretches from the Ceraunian hills to the Suniam promontory. The arm bones or shoulder blades are Pagae & Megara, the neck is the whole Isthmus, the head the Peloponnesus, which some Greeks call the citadel.” This passage, too, may have been the inspiration for Burton's disbelieving comment on Sophianus's “picture of a man.” Whether it was Gerbelius or Pliny who was really responsible for this “picture of a man,” Burton's point is that “Morea” on the map in question does not very much resemble a picture of a man. The practice of comparing land masses to familiar everyday figures, often human ones, is common in Strabo's and Pliny's work, as well as in that of other classical geographers, but the supposed “pictures” often require the reader to stretch his imagination more than a little.⁵¹

It seems possible that a work entitled the Hippocratic Anthology may also have had an influence on Burton's geographic vision, though it is not specifically mentioned in the passage we've been examining. Hippocrates' thought contains images that are germane for our purposes here. In an essay entitled “The Number Seven,” that is included in the Hippocratic Anthology, we find a striking image that is reminiscent of—and clearly a variant of—those we have just examined. In this essay the earth is represented as a huge human body; the head is formed by the Peloponnesus, the spine by the Isthmus, and so on. “Each geographical part of the earth and each land corresponds to a definite part of the body; all the physical and spiritual features and way of life of the inhabitants depend on their anatomical localization.”⁵² The correspondence between body and world is stressed, and once again the relationship is “the concrete resemblance of man to the natural landscape.”⁵³ The essay presents a “grotesque” image of the body so that “the confines dividing it from the world are obscured” and “the exchange between the body and the world is constantly emphasized.”⁵⁴ Given Burton's frequent references to Hippocrates in The Anatomy, it seems well within the realm of possibility that he read Hippocrates' “The Number Seven” essay and that the images in it influenced his own writing on geography.

Having said all that, I think we are in a good position to understand the appeal that the foolscap map had for Burton. Burton was fascinated with the map because it presented a melancholy landscape, because it juxtaposed an image of folly with the pressing need for a cure [“O Caput elle = boro dignum,” or, “A head requiring hellebore”], and because the spokesmen in the cartouche inscription voiced Burton's own attitudes toward the world: “Democritus Abderites deridebat, Heraclitus Ephesius deflebat, Epichthonius Cosmopolites deformabat.” The foolscap map of Epichthonius Cosmopolites draws together many of the thematic threads that run through Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, that vast catalogue of fools and madmen. On it are learned classical references regarding the pervasive folly of men, an allusion to hellebore as a cure for “mad” heads, and a confirmation writ large in the shape of a fool's head that all the world is mad. The inscription on the fool's bauble, so like a “child's toy,” voices Burton's own motto: “Vanitas, vanitatum et omnia vanitas.” Burton returns so often to these themes that one wonders whether the map might not have been the inspiration for the whole Preface. Certainly, it helped Burton to integrate all of the elements of the persona he adopted from Democritus, and it underscores, in a particularly vivid and memorable fashion, Burton's own judgment on the vanity of human effort. In my view the foolscap map can stand as a compelling and highly appropriate symbol for the whole of the Preface. This short poem, included in a missive addressed to “To the Mischievously Idle Reader,” concludes Burton's Preface:

Weep, Heraclitus, for this wretched age,
Nought dost thou see that is not base and sad:
Laugh on, Democritus, thou laughing sage,
Nought dost thou see that is not vain and bad.
Let one delight in tears and one in laughter,
Each shall find his occasion ever after.
There needs, since mankind's now in madness hurled,
A thousand weeping, laughing sages more:
And best (such madness doth prevail) the world
Should go to Anticyra, feed on hellebore.

(Dell edn. p. 105)

As many of the central players on this closing stage also figure importantly on the foolscap map, Burton's lines might well serve as a perfect explanatory accompaniment to it.⁵⁵

ADDENDUM

For convenience I have reprinted here, in its entirety, the passage about the foolscap map in Robert Burton's Preface, “Democritus Junior to the Reader”:

Of the necessitie and generalitie of this [that the world is full of melancholy, madness, disease, corruption, etc.] which I have said, if any man doubt, I shall desire him to make a briefe survey of the world, as Cyprian advised Donat, supposing himselfe to be transported to the top of some high Mountaine, and thence to behold the tumults & chances of this wavering world, he cannot chuse but either laugh at, or pitty it. S. Hierome out of a strong imagination, being in the Wildernesse, conceived with himselfe, that he then saw them dauncing in Rome, and if thou shalt either conceive, or climbe to see, thou shalt soone perceive that all the world is mad, that it is melancholy, dotes: that it is (which Epichthonius Cosmopolites expressed not many yeeres since in a Map) made like a Fooles head (with that Motto, Caput Helleboro dignum), a crased head, cavea stultorum, a Fooles paradise, or as Apollonius, a common prison of Gulles, Cheaters, Flatterers, & c. & needs to be reformed. Strabo, in the 9th Booke of his geography, compares Greece to the picture of a man, which comparison of his, Nic. Gerbelius in his exposition of Sophianus Map, approves; The brest lyes open from those Acroceraunian Hilles in Epirus to the Sunian Promontorie in Attica, Pagae and Magaera are the two Shoulders, that Istmos of Corinth the neck, & Peloponnesus the head. If this allusion hold, 'tis sure a mad head; Morea may be Moria [Folly]; & to speake what I thinke, the Inhabitants of moderne Greece, swarve as much from reason, & true religion at this day, as that Morea doth from the picture of a man. Examine the rest in like sort, and you shall find that Kingdomes and Provinces are Melancholy, Cities and Families, all Creatures, Vegetall, Sensible, and Rationall, that all sorts, sects, ages, conditions, are out of tune, as in Cebes Table, omnes errorem bibunt, before they come into the World, they are intoxicated by Errors cup, from the highest to the lowest, have need of Physicke, and those particular Actions in Seneca, where father & son prove one another mad, may be generall; Porcius Latro shall plead against us all. For indeed who is not a Foole, Melancholy, Mad?—Qui nil molitur inepte, who is not brain-sick? Folly, Melancholy, Madnesse, are but one disease, Delirium is a common name to all. Alexander, Gordonius, Jason Pratensis, Savanarola, Guianerius, Montaltus, confound them as differing secundium magis & minus, so doth David, Psal. 75.4. I said unto the Fooles, deale not so madly, & 'twas an old Stoicall paradox, omnes stultos insanire, all fooles are mad though some madder than others. And who is not a Foole, who is free from Melancholy? Who is not touched more or lesse in habit or disposition? If in disposition, ill dispositions beget habits, if they persevere, saith Plutarch, habits either are, or turne to diseases. 'Tis the same which Tully maintains in the Second of his Tusculans, omnium insipientum animi in morbo sunt, & perturbatorum, Fooles are sick, and all that are troubled in mind, for what is sicknesse, but as Gregory Tholosanus defines it, A dissolution or perturbation of the bodily league, which health combines: And who is not sick, or ill disposed, in whom doth not passion, anger, envie, discontent, feare & sorrow raigne? Who labours not of this disease? Give me but a little leave, and you shall see by what testimonies, confessions, arguments I will evince it, that most men are mad, that they had as much need to goe a pilgrimage to the Anticyrae (as in Strabo's time they did) as in our daies they run to Compostella, our Lady of Sichem, or Lauretta, to seeke for helpe; that it is like to be as prosperous a voyage as that of Guiana, and that there is much more need of Hellebor then of Tobacco.

(1:24-25)

Notes

1. Cited in Raleigh A. Skelton, Decorative Printed Maps of the 15th to 18th Centuries (London and New York: Staples Press, 1952), p. 1. For further information on Dr. Dee's social observations, see John Dee, The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee, ed. James O. Halliwell (London: printed by John Bowyer Nichols and Son for the Camden Society, 1842). Please note that I have duplicated the spelling as I found it in all texts cited in this article.

2. See the prefatory page, entitled “To the Reader,” in Thomas Blundeville, A Briefe Description of Universal Mappes and Cardes and of Their Use (London: printed by Roger Ward for Thomas Cadman, 1589).

3. A parallel urge to map and chart the human body exists in the mid-to-late Renaissance; unprecedented numbers of “body maps” appeared in the medical literature as well as in the popular literature of the time. Maps of the body charting everything from the venous system to the cosmographical correspondences for the major organs were constructed with the same careful attention to detail and accuracy that foreign coastlines were. (See Michael Feher, ed., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Zone Press, 1991). While actual maps and charts of the body are not the subject of this essay, they might fruitfully be explored in the context of geographical exploration and colonial enterprise.

4. For a thorough account of Burton's interest in geography, please see E. Patricia Vicari, The View From Minerva's Tower: Learning and Imagination in “The Anatomy of Melancholy” (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1989). Professor Vicari has thoroughly catalogued Burton's geographical authorities. The book includes a useful appendix listing Burton's sources on geography. Her list is organized by period (Ancient, Medieval, Modern), type (Physical and General Geography and Cartography, Historical and Political, Urban and Political, etc.), and region (America, Europe, etc.).

5. Skelton, p. 1.

6. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, eds. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989-), 1:23 (based on the 1632 edition). All subsequent quotations from Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy have been taken from this edition, unless otherwise specified.

7. Burton's brother, William Burton, was also interested in maps. The line Robert Burton borrows from him here is taken from the Preface to William Burton, Description of Leistershire (London: printed by W. Jaggard for J. White, 1622). This information comes from an explanatory note Burton himself added to his Anatomy.

8. Vicari, p. 31.

9. A very helpful tool for Burton scholars wishing to learn more about Burton's grasp of geography and cartography is Nicolas K. Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988).

10. Albert Baugh et al., eds., A Literary History of England (New York and London: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948), pp. 597-98.

11. Vicari, p. 41.

12. Democritus, the philosopher of Abdera (ca. 460 B.C.), was a writer on geography himself, and Strabo mentions him as an influence on his own work. See Rev. H. F. Tozer, Selections from Strabo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), p. 47.

13. Baugh, pp. 597-98.

14. Vicari, p. 31.

15. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1955), p. 32n. Subsequent references to pages in the Dell edition will be noted in parenthetical references after the quoted text.

16. W. Falconer and H. C. Hamilton, trans., The Geography of Strabo, 2 vols. (London and New York: George Bell and Sons, 1892), 2:116.

17. In Marvelous Possessions Stephen Greenblatt makes the claim that the foolscap map is a representation of “travel as folly” (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), plate 10. While folly and the world are closely associated on the map, there is nothing on it to imply travel. The Latin inscriptions on the head-and-shoulders figure tell us that it is misleading to explain the map as an image of “travel” at all. It is a decorative map, not a functional one, and its vision of the world is relatively archaic compared to that of other maps being produced in the same period. Its spokesmen are ancient ones who stubbornly bespeak traditional attitudes toward the world; it served to reinvigorate an existing world view and to reinforce traditional values and beliefs. The foolscap map expresses little or nothing of the spirit of the age of exploration, despite the use of Ortelius's latest plate to represent the globe.

18. Burton was not alone in his melancholy world view, of course, nor was he alone in making use of the “world in a foolscap” metaphor. E. Patricia Vicari has discovered a very similar perspective on the world in a sermon by Thomas Adams, an Anglican, City preacher. “Stultorum plena sunt omnia,—it were no hard matter to bring all the world into the compass of a fool's cap,” wrote Adams (The Works of Thomas Adams, ed. Thomas Smith [Edinburgh and London: 1861]; quoted in Vicari, p. 33). It is unclear whether Adams was referring to a commonplace of the day or whether he had in fact seen the same map Burton had.

19. The map to which Burton refers, and its French precursor, have an unusually interesting history. For full details, see Rodney W. Shirley, The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472-1700 (London: Holland Press, 1983), pp. 157-58, 189-90. Only seven or eight copies of the copper-plate foolscap world map are now extant. The copy reproduced in Figure 1 is the only extant copy of the copper engraving in the United States. (Reference information: Foolscap map of the world [copper-plate]. Individual map, printed separately. Antwerp?: ca. 1590. This map is available at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The reference number is Navacco 2F6.) Ronald V. Tooley has suggested that the engraver of the map might have been Franz Hogenberg, since it is in the style of Hogenberg's engravings. See Ronald V. Tooley, description, “Geographical Oddities,” no. 1 of The Map Collectors' Series (London: The Map Collectors' Circle, 1964), p. 3. Hogenberg was renowned as a maker of maps of towns and cities, most notably as a co-author of Braun and Hogenberg's Civitates Orbis Terrarum. Shirley speculates that “some further link might be postulated through the recent discovery of Ortelius's fanciful map of Utopia” (Rodney W. Shirley, “Epichthonius Cosmopolites: Who Was He?” The Map Collector 18 [March 1982]: 39-40). The Utopian map is clearly related to Sir Thomas More's Utopia published in 1516, and the ancestry of the foolscap map, with its epigrams and references to the foolishness and vanities of this world, may well derive from Erasmus's parallel work In Praise of Folly published five years earlier, in 1511 (Shirley, “Epichthonius Cosmopolites: Who Was He?,” pp. 39-40). Some evidence supports this idea, since Burton mentions Erasmus at a later point in The Anatomy with the observation “Erasmus urgeth in his Moria [Folly], fools beget wise men” (Dell edn., p. 187). And, as we remember, Burton had earlier linked the “Morea” of the map of Greece with the “Moria” [Folly] of Erasmus in his treatment of the foolscap map, which he credits to “Epichthonius Cosmopolites.” For a summary of information on the foolscap maps and their history, see Shirley's article, “Epichthonius Cosmopolites,” pp. 39-40; and Rodney W. Shirley, “Letter to the Editor,” The Map Collector 15 (June 1981): 47. For details about extant copies of both the woodcut and copper-plate maps, see Shirley's Mapping of the World.

    As mentioned above, the copper-plate foolscap map is based on an earlier foolscap map published in Paris ca. 1575 by Jean de Gourmont II, a French mapmaker (see Figure 2). The earlier map, a woodcut, is likewise a head-and-shoulders representation of a jester, with a small oval map replacing the face. Around the jester's head and as part of the jester's costume are allusive epigrams in French reciting the vanities of the world. Across the fool's shoulders is the forbidding motto: “Nul eureux qu'apres la mort.” De Gourmont is known to have been active between 1565 and 1585, and was responsible for the splendid woodcutting of Guillaume Postel's great world map of 1581 described under Entry 144 in Shirley's Mapping of the World. We know that de Gourmont worked for the famous Plantin in Antwerp in 1565, and was still working in 1585, close to the presumed date of the copper-plate foolscap map. “However there is no evidence that he prepared the copper-plate map … he worked almost exclusively in wood” (Shirley, “Epichthonius Cosmopolites,” p. 39). All we know for certain is that he published the woodcut foolscap map. … (Reference information: Foolscap map of the world (woodcut). Paris: Jean de Gourmont II, ca. 1575. One of the rare extant copies is housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale, in the Department of Prints, Cabinet des Estampes, Faceties et Pièces de Bouffonerie, vol. 1. T.f.1-Res.) To complicate matters further, Bagrow, a historian of cartography, has mentioned a still earlier foolscap map (ca. 1550) published by Hieronymous de Gourmont (Shirley, “Epichthonius Cosmopolites,” p. 40). It is possible that the body of Jean de Gourmont's c. 1575 woodcut is of earlier date than the map itself, in other words, that it had been published previously. It seems likely that Hieronymous was either Jean's father or a close relative; in any case, he has an interesting history as one of the first mapsellers to issue a catalogue of maps. For additional information about the de Gourmont family of mapmakers and engravers, see F. Grenacher's article, “The Universae Germaniae Descriptio Map of Jerome de Gourmont,” Imago Mundi 14 (1959): 55-63, especially 55-57. See Shirley's “Epichthonius Cosmopolites,” pp. 39-40, for full details on the problems with dates and attribution of authorship.

20. Shirley, “Epichthonius Cosmopolites,” pp. 39-40; Shirley, “Letter,” p. 47.

21. Shirley, “Epichthonius Cosmopolites,” pp. 39-40.

22. Skelton, p. 1.

23. During a confrontation between Menenius Agrippa and the two tribunes of the people in Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Menenius makes a reference to his own face as a map: “and though I must be content to bear with those that say you are reverend grave men, yet they lie deadly that tell you have good faces. If you see this in the map of my microcosm, follows it that I am known well enough too?” (II.i.59-64). In Twelfth Night, Maria says of the love-sick Malvolio, “He does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map, with the augmentation of the Indies; you have not seen such a thing as 'tis” (III.ii.78-81). (For more information on Shakespeare's “new map,” see Arthur Hind, “Hakluyt's Map of the World in Projection,” Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952], 1:178-81.) Elsewhere in Shakespeare, the head is likened to a planet; in 2 Henry VI, the queen who makes her entrance in Act IV, scene iv with Suffolk's head exclaims: “Ah, barbarous villains! hath this lovely face / Rul'd like a wandering planet over me, / And could it not enforce them to relent, / That were unworthy to behold the same?” (IV.iv.15-18). In “Sonnet 68” the face becomes a map of age: “Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn, / When beauty liv'd and died as flowers do now, / Before these bastard signs of fair were born, / Or durst inhabit on a living brow.” Victor Morgan has noted that “Shakespeare also exploited the notion of the map as a microcosm that signified a larger matter, or fundamentals of character” (Victor Morgan, “The Literary Image of Globes and Maps in Early Modern England,” English Map-Making 1550-1650, ed. Sarah Tyacke [London: The British Library, 1983], p. 53). For example, in The Rape of Lucrece Shakespeare describes the sleeping Lucrece as “Showing life's triumph in a map of death, / And death's dim look in life's mortality” (lines 402-403). In this instance, “sleep is a sign, a microcosm, which is a map, of the larger matter, death” (Morgan, p. 53). Elsewhere the face of the ravished Lucrece is also described as being like a map: “While with a joyless smile she turns away / The face, that map which deep impression bears / Of hard misfortune, carv'd [in it] with tears” (lines 1711-13). (For details on additional map imagery in Shakespeare, which I do not have space to mention here, see Morgan, pp. 46-56.) All Shakespeare quotations have been taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

24. Morgan, pp. 52-55.

25. Morgan, p. 53.

26. Shirley, “Epichthonius Cosmopolites,” pp. 39-40.

27. Shirley, “Epichthonius Cosmopolites,” p. 40.

28. Shirley, “Epichthonius Cosmopolites,” p. 40.

29. I owe this theory to Professor David Bevington of the University of Chicago [in conversation].

30. M.C. Howatson, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), p. 222.

31. Catherine B. Avery, ed., The New Century Classical Handbook (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), p. 449.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Howatson, p. 222.

35. Avery, p. 449.

36. There is another Erichthonius known to us from Homeric legend (The Iliad) “who was a son of Dardanus” who “succeeded to his father's kingdom.” Somewhat later, the kingdom came to be known as the Troad, named after Erichthonius's own son Tros (Avery, p. 449).

37. Persius, The Satires of Persius, trans. W.S. Merwin (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961), p. 61.

38. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. 1, trans. Horace Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1940), p. 309.

39. Pliny, 1:310.

40. Persius, Satires of A. Persius Flaccus, trans. John Conington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1874), pp. 8-9.

41. The inspiration for the foolscap maps as well as for other maps in the shape of human figures, like Putsch's Virgin Europe map or Munster's Europa (in post-1580 editions of the Cosmography), came from ancient Greek precedents. After the “rediscovery” of classical texts during the Renaissance, a number of Greek and Latin texts on geography circulated in England, including works by Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and Hippocrates. In addition, works by various Renaissance commentators on geography, such as Gerbel, were available. According to Professor Bunbury, “The geography of Strabo is not only the most important geographical work that has come down to us from antiquity, but it is unquestionably one of the most important ever produced by any Greek or Roman writer” (Tozer, p. 55). Strabo, this most important Greek geographer, was well known to Renaissance intellectuals. In the Middle Ages, according to Rev. Tozer, Strabo was known as “the geographer par excellence,” and he continued to enjoy popularity in the Renaissance (p. 43).

42. Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools, trans., introd., and comm. Edwin Zeydel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1944), pp. 24-31.

43. Brant, pp. 116-17.

44. Nicholas Gerbelius (also known as Nicolai Gerbe, Nicholas Gerbel, and Nicolai Gerbelij) was a sixteenth-century commentator and geographer in his own right who wrote, among other things, In descriptionem Graeciae Sophiani, praefatio, the treatment of Sophianus's map to which Burton is probably referring (Nicolai Gerbelij, In descriptionem Graeciae Sophiani, praefatio [Basel: 1545]). Subsequent references appear in the text. I believe that Burton used this document as the primary source for his information about Strabo, as well as for the comparison of Greece to “the picture of a man.” Hippocrates wrote at least one geographical essay, the lengthy “Airs, Waters, Places.” See Hippocrates, trans. W.H.S. Jones, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962).

45. Hippocrates, 1:121, 123-125.

46. Burton could also be referring to Nicolaus Gerbelius's much longer work Pro declaratione picturae siue descriptionis Graeciae Sophiani, libri septem printed in Basel in 1550, which he numbered among the volumes in his personal collection (Kiessling, p. 126). To date, I have been unable to obtain a copy of the longer Pro declaratione and therefore cannot determine which source he consulted. According to the National Union Catalog, it is available at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

47. Strabo could have been credited with making such a comparison in some other corrupt source, given the nature of many other comparisons in the Geography. The erroneous attribution may indicate good guesswork on Burton's part. Alternatively, Burton could have been working from a corrupt text. To describe the shape of particular land formations in his Geography, Strabo often compares them to familiar objects, both animate and inanimate; some examples include a leaf of a plane tree, a stag's head and horns, a millipede, etc. One obvious example from Strabo's work reads “The Peloponnesus resembles in figure the leaf of a plane tree” (Falconer, 2:5). Pliny uses the same comparison in Book 4, Chapter 4 of his Natural History. We know that Burton owned a copy of Pliny the Elder's Natural History, in Latin (Kiessling, p. 238). By comparing these geographical features to familiar objects, both Strabo and Pliny enabled their readers to visualize them. Hippocrates, too, made anthropomorphic comparisons in at least two of the essays in the Hippocratic Anthology.

48. Pliny, 2:125.

49. Pliny, 2:124.

50. Pliny, 1:135.

51. For more information about the imaging of geography, see Karl W. Butzer's “Ueber Strabo's Geography” (cited in Tozer, p. 35; no other bibliographic information available). If one stretches one's imagination a bit, it is possible to see the supposed head-and-shoulders “picture of a man” in the lower left-hand corner of the Europa map, included in post-1580 editions of Sebastian Munster's Cosmography. Presumably, the maker of the map included in Munster's book either read Pliny or the Gerbelius summary account of it.

52. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), p. 357.

53. Bakhtin, pp. 355-57.

54. Bakhtin, p. 355.

55. Many thanks to Dr. James Akerman, Dr. David Buisseret, and Dr. Robert Karrow of the Newberry Library for their advice and assistance, and to the Herman Dunlap Smith Center at the Newberry for a generous fellowship which helped to make this work possible. More thanks to Karl Longstreth and Professor Walter Mignolo of the University of Michigan for helping to make the fellowship possible. Special thanks to Professor David Bevington and Professor Richard Strier of the University of Chicago for moral support and encouragement. More thanks to Professor Janis Holm of Ohio University for the editorial expertise she generously contributed to this project.