Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art, edited by Philippe Despoix and Georges Leroux; foreword by Bill Sherman. Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019 (New Edition), 18 × 27,3 cm, xxxviii-632 p., ISBN 978-0-7735-5949-3 (cloth)

While making my leisurely way through Saturn and Melancholy during the expansive days of the current pandemic, I could not help but think regularly of the Reverend Edward Casaubon, the studious mythographer of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Casaubon, undoubtedly modelled by Eliot on the Renaissance philologist, Isaac Casaubon, is a pedantic, selfish, elderly clergyman, so taken up with his scholarly research that his marriage to the adorable, and much younger, Dorothea Brooke is predestined to abject failure. His unfinished, and unfinishable, book, The Key to All Mythologies, is intended as a monument to Christian syncretism. Casaubon’s wearisome research is as much out of date as his mannerisms. His polyglotism is certainly suspect. He may very well have been Eliot’s idealized stand in for “homo melancholicus.” She does quote Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), with its atrabilious warnings of the serious consequences of “overmuch study,” at the beginning of the chapter on the Reverend. Burton’s hilarious Philosophaster is an earlier satire on university life (the Oxford of his day) and the excesses of scholarship, elements of which found their way into The Anatomy of Melancholy. Neither the real Isaac, nor the fictional Edward, Casaubon find their way into Saturn and Melancholy. Burton, however, is represented, with Plate 112 showing the title page to his famous multi-volumed treatise. It is instructive, however, as to the serpentine nature of the topic, “in flatu serpentis” our authors would say, of how just about everything could be viewed, and almost was, through the lens of “melancholy” and its on and off again connection with the celestial “Saturn.” No obscurities are too obscure in this gargantuan effort to intertwine art history with philosophy, poetry with tragedy, medicine with astral magic, Pythagorean mystical numerology with iatromathematics, Aristotle with the Neo-Platonic Ficino, or to unearth tables of the humoral dispositions in the pseudo-Soranus and Vindician, and to associate seasonal cycles with the four temperaments, ad infinitum. We are all melancholics, if not cholerics, if not phlegmatics, if not sanguinics, or some combination thereof. As we will see, that does not necessarily mean you are a depressive, but it could mean you are a genius. The theme of melancholy is by no means moribund, for either philosophers or medical doctors, or storytellers. Multiple books on melancholy and depression were recently reviewed by Gregory Hays in the New York Review of Books, Vol. LXVIII, No. 16 (October 21, 2021), along with a new edition of Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Angus Gowland (London, Penguin Classics). Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story “Green Tea” (1871), Emanuel Swedenborg, and Winston Churchill’s “black dog” are all about that disease “melancholia.” Psychiatrists, psychics, novelists, and yes, philosophers of mind, have been rivetted throughout the ages on its powers. As Hays says of Burton “the more of the Anatomy one reads, the harder it becomes to say what its real subject is.” Saturn and Melancholy is vulnerable to the same slippage. The publication and editorial history of this monumental work is one of the more tortuous in the many sagas of twentieth century scholarship. The Afterword by Philippe Despoix, somewhat antiseptically entitled “The Long and Complex History of a Warburgian Publication Project (1913 - 1990),” sketches its initial genesis in Erwin Panofsky’s (1892 - 1968) and Fritz Saxl’s (1890 - 1948) treatment of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I in the early decades of the twentieth century, building on the earlier work of Karl Giehlow. The project was housed in the famed Warburg Library Network. This network of scholars and archivists is extensively described in Raymond Klibansky and …