"Naught so sweet as melancholy": A Gustatory Anatomy of Melancholy

This chapter investigates the linguistic conceptualization of the sense of Taste in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. To do so, I conducted a corpus analysis in a digital version of the text, by means of key word concordances of the Basic Taste Terms in English, their morphological derivates, and other relevant terms in the semantic domain of Taste (Bitter, Bland, Disgust, Distaste, Salty, Savour, Sharp, Sour, Spicy, Sweet, Tart, Taste, Unsavoury, Yucky, Yummy). Results are consistent in suggesting a high usage of Taste terms in Burton's work, with Sweet being the most used. Their figurative (mainly metaphorical) meaning is motivated by embodied responses, and it is used to conceptualize the value of Melancholy: Sour, but also Sweet. While the Sourness of Melancholy had already been described by Galen, Burton adds a personal Taste to this state: sweetness, to conceptualize the pleasure of the modern intellectual in being Sad and Pensive.