Description

This edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy is based on a nineteenth-century edition that modernized Burton's spelling and typographic conventions. In preparing this electronic version, it became evident that the editor had made a variety of mistakes in this modernization: some words were left in their original spelling (unusual words were a particular problem), portions of book titles were mistaken for proper names, proper names were mistaken for book titles or Latin words, etc. A certain number of misprints were also introduced into the Latin. As a result, I have re-edited the text, checking it against images of the 1638 edition, and correcting all errors not present in the earlier edition. I have continued to follow the general editorial practice of the base text for quotation marks, italics, etc. Rare words have been normalized according to their primary spelling in the Oxford English Dictionary. When Burton spells a person's name in several ways, I have normalized the names to the most common spelling, or to modern practice if well-known. In a few cases, mistakes present in both the 1683 edition and the base text have been corrected. These are always minor reference errors (e.g., an incorrect or missing section number in the synopses, or misnumbered footnotes). Incorrect citations to other texts (Burton seems to quote by memory and sometimes gets it wrong) have not been changed if they are wrong in both editions. To display some symbols (astrological signs, etc.) the HTML version requires a browser with unicode support. Most recent browsers should be OK.—KTH