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Robert Burton: Melancholy in Early Modern European Society
Potoček, Jan ; Marek, Jakub (advisor) ; Kunca, Tomáš (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to provide a close reading and a philosophical and anthropological interpretation of Burton's understanding of the concept of melancholy (as well as the concept of the human being and the world) as it is presented in his work The Anatomy of Melancholy. The primary objective will be gradually to respond to the following questions: How did Burton perceive the concept of melancholy? How did he make use of it within his notion of the melancholic world? Based on this, his vision of a remedy to the melancholic disease afflicting the whole world, together with the form of this treatment presented in The Anatomy of Melancholy will be thereafter shown and explained. This task will be preceded by an analysis situated on the edge between the history of ideas and intellectual history, cultural history, and philosophical anthropology with a small overlap with the history of mentalities. This analysis will firstly reveal the diversity and rich history of the concept of melancholy and, subsequently, open up the intellectual milieu and ideas which form the basis of Burton's notion of the problem of the melancholic world and its treatment. This thesis, especially in its final part, will rely on a contextual reading of The Anatomy of Melancholy. In order to acquire an overall...
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The Concept of Humoral Theory as the Means of William Shakespeare's Artistic Expression
Hrabaňová, Olga ; Dykast, Roman (advisor) ; Dadejík, Ondřej (referee)
(in English) The aim of this thesis is to present humoral theory as the means of William Shakespeare's artistic expression and to show that he created his dramatic characters on the basis of its knowledge. Humoral theory is presented here first in the context of ancient philosophy as a concept which has a key impact on human's temperament, and this concept is afterwards examined on the basis of period books in the scope of Renaissance aesthetics, philosophy and medicine. The essential texts for this study are De triplici vita by Marsilio Ficino and The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. This thesis traces the way by which the theory spread from Italy to England, it examines its impact on period poetics and a possible means by which Shakespeare could have got to know it. In the second part the thesis analyses four specific characters from Shakespeare's plays and it shows how their temperaments correspond to the period concept of humoral theory. The period concept of humoral theory, which is in its base psychological, is therefore transferred to the area of aesthetics as a distinctive concept of the period theory of drama, which is shown in Shakespeare's emphasis on typological contrast in his dramatic characters
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