Material Metaphors for Literary Form: Robert Burton's ‘Perused’ Copy of Theatrum Urbium Italicarum (1599)

This article gives a detailed description and analysis of Robert Burton's copy of Theatrum urbium italicarum, a Venetian ‘city‐atlas’ produced in 1599 by the engraver and publisher Pietro Bertelli. Burton's copy of the book is especially noteworthy because it has had a number of the maps removed. The article uses the Theatrum in order to add fresh emphasis to Burton's understanding of cartography, and to suggest new ways in which early modern maps can be related to literary works. I begin with a survey of the renaissance ‘city‐atlas’, proceeding to locate the Theatrum within a distinctly Venetian milieu of map‐production, and showing the surprisingly various contexts in which the Venetian maps could appear. I then detail the bibliographical oddities of Burton's copy, suggesting possible reasons for the removal of the maps. I conclude by suggesting that the form and construction of the Theatrum – hastily assembled, gathered from a range of sources – can be related in productive fashions to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. I situate the Theatrum and similar works among a recent critical trend of ‘material metaphors for literary form’, considering the ways in which early modern authors thought of the structures of their works as analogous to various material objects.

also helped Burton fashion his authorial persona, both being motivated by a 'preference for detached observation'. 4The foolscap map apparently showed the world to Burton through a reversed telescope, as a faraway, negligible thing.
Chapple's argument relates Burton's use of maps to a neo-Stoic, catascopic method of approaching the world from a distance.In this article, I consider a previously overlooked book of maps owned, read, and potentially modified by Burton, in order to suggest an alternative current in his cartographic thought.The foolscap map is not listed in Nicolas Kiessling's meticulous reconstruction of Burton's personal library; however, among the many maps and map-books which were present in Burton's library is the Theatrum urbium italicarum (USTC 814230), published in Venice in 1599 by Pietro Bertelli (c.1571-c.1621). 5A compendium of urban views, showing both ancient and contemporary Italian cities from a variety of perspectives and in wildly different cartographic modes, the Theatrum is a more haphazard, disaggregated object than the maps which Chapple relates to Burton's literary approach.The idiosyncratic, copy-specific features of Burton's copy of the Theatrum -most significantly, the absence of many maps which have been roughly cut out of the book -show a reader engaging with this cartographic material in ways profoundly related to the humanist practices of textual excerption and compilation which characterise many of Burton's authorial techniques.The primary focus of this article will be the Theatrum -its genesis, circulation, and the collaborative culture of mapmaking which it so eloquently illustrates.However, I will conclude by suggesting the map's peculiar relevance to Burton; for in its assembled, quotational, and ad hoc form, the Theatrum comes to resemble certain elements of Burton's compositional style not previously seen as 'cartographic'.My aim is thus twofold: first, I will illustrate a type of mapproduction which has previously been ignored in the context of Burton's reading, suggesting further the virtues of material-textual analysis for an understanding of the literary relevance of this type of cartography.Second, I will briefly indicate how this element of cartographic culture was more in harmony with certain characteristic elements of Burton's work than has been previously suggested.I The Theatrum is an example of the early modern 'city-atlas' -a book which combined maps with accompanying descriptive texts, often depicting all major cities of a particular region. 6As Hillary Ballon and David Friedman note, these books 4 Ibid. 5Kiessling, The Library of Robert Burton, Oxford: The Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1988.§. 144.Burton's copy of the book is housed in the Bodleian Library, under the shelfmark 4° M 4 Art. 6 were particularly propitious to the mental travel by 'Mappe or Carde' which Burton enjoyed: readers -whether merchants or scholars -used the book to expand their knowledge of the world, without […] the hardships of physical travel.The views were magnets for information, and the texts […] supplemented what the pictures could communicate. 7rton himself singles out these books as a source of personal delight: 'What greater pleasure can there now bee […] To peruse those bookes of Citties, put out by Braunus, and Hogenbergius' (Anatomy II.86-7).The 'Braunus, and Hogenbergius' here are Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, whose Civitates orbis terrarum (6 vols., 1572-1617) is generally upheld as 'the most widely disseminated' early modern city-atlas, and in terms of technical accomplishment, the form's zenith. 8Braun and Hogenberg's multi-volume collection constantly expanded over more than forty years, always incorporating the newest and most accurate images of European cities that were available.
Perhaps the most frequently noted feature of the Civitates, and one which casts light on a similar aspect of Bertelli's Theatrum urbium italicarum, is the variety of cartographic styles which it exhibits.One taxonomy of the styles on show in the Civitates lists 'town plans, profiles, bird's-eye views, landscapes, and even battle views' as a sample of the book's formal plenitude. 9his variety was caused principally by the need for the editors to source their primary data from a network of merchants, artists and tradesmen across Europe, all of whom contributed drawings and plans of the various cities they had access to.The limited capacity for communication within the network of contributors meant that formal regularity was next to impossible.It was also a product of disciplinary differences.Jessica Robey has described a selection of figures who contributed designs to the project, and they range from various anonymous professional surveyors, to renowned figures of early modern art such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder. 10A basic feature of the city-atlas was this representational diversity; since the form 'depended on accident, the vagaries of correspondence, of information and map collection' for its production, it was necessarily 'conceived as an open work that could be amended and enlarged, as new city views and details emerged'.As a collaborative and potentially inexhaustible project, the Civitates underscores the impossibility for any collection of maps to be truly the product of a single, olympian perspective.Unlike the foolscap map, the city-atlas did not exhibit stoic detachment from the world, rather it showed itself as the product of 'open' collaboration, commerce, and worldly engagement. 12Returning us to the epistemological questions which Chapple raised, Robey argues that 'the range of methods used to portray the city in the Civitates provide a wealth of interpretive systems by which one can "read" the world, transforming visual experience into refined knowledge'. 13Robey's foregrounding of methodical plurality and a 'wealth' of possible interpretations offers a new model of cartography's role as a 'symbol' for Burton and other readers, stressing epistemological diversity and the availability of a range of routes through the views on offer.Variety and heterogeneity in the Civitates and in other similar works are fundamental principles of their textual and iconographic organization.Further, by inquiring into the material reasons for and products of this fundamental variousness, we recover a publication culture not dissimilar to the latehumanist culture of information-exchange in which Burton participated.

II
In the stylistic variety of its images, the Theatrum urbium italicarum seems to match or even to overgo the Civitates.As well as the forms listed above, the Theatrum contains further cartographic styles such as a side elevation of Tivoli (Theatrum fol.88v), and a mythological view of Taranto (fol.92v), in which the city itself is dwarfed by a large illustration of Neptune driving a chariot pulled by dolphins in the 'Mar Piccolo' around which Taranto was built. 14The apparent incoherence of the forms contained in the book, which is complemented by the periodically missing pages, seems to have originated from the Theatrum's appearance within a geographically concentrated, but intensely complex network of engravers and publishers in sixteenth-century Venice.The broader category of the Italian city-atlas was a form so pervasive that it has been suggested that its examples constitute a sub-genre of their own, identifiable by the polystylistic variety of their maps. 15Within this sub-genre are the Venetian atlases, which are especially noteworthy not only for their various content, but also for the fact that the 12 For more on early modern cartography and neo-stoic, 'contemplative' attitudes of contempt for the world, see Lucia Nuti, 'The World Map as an Emblem: Abraham Ortelius and the Stoic Contemplation', Imago Mundi 55 (2003): 38-55. 13Robey, The City Witnessed, 2. 14 Bertelli, Theatrum.All further citations will appear in the main text: I have used the foliation from Burton's copy of the Theatrum, which differs in significant fashions from 'perfect' copies of the work.engraved plates for the maps themselves were often shared between publishers, appearing in many different books with no apparent acknowledgement of the initial engraver or printer. 16Jessica Maier, in one of the few studies to explicitly consider Bertelli's Theatrum, has argued that this culture of map-sharing renders it 'nearly impossible to determine authorship and even basic chronology among the [maps contained in the] Venetian books' -the maps in the Theatrum were probably already in circulation well before 1599, and their earliest extant appearances are not necessarily their points of origin. 17The problem of establishing reliable narratives of the Venetian city-atlas's genesis is exacerbated by the sheer volume of engraved plates in circulation at the time: David Woodward has estimated that in Venice alone during the 1560s, there were between five and six hundred unique copperplates engraved with maps in active use, a great many of which were employed in the so-called 'composite atlases'. 18rigins are less important than repetitions, variations and iterations in the Venetian books -they are inextricable from the interconnected bustle of urban commerce which produced them.They witness a complex publishing culture, rather than the monoscopic worldviews of individual cartographers.Bertelli himself (whose only geographical book is the Theatrum, and is best known for producing detailed engravings of extravagant costumes) seems to have been a relative of the much more renowned Ferrando (c.1525-?) and Donato Bertelli (c.1558-1623), serial engravers and publishers of maps, whose city atlases are considered outstanding examples of the Venetian style. 19It could be that Bertelli acquired some of the plates for his maps from his relatives who were more connected in geographical circles: on the Theatrum's title page Bertelli styles himself a 'collector' (t.p.), and in its dedication he calls the work a 'compendium' (sig.a2v), thus situating himself in the cartographer's position as, in Ayesha Ramachandran's words, 'a synapse, gathering, consolidating, and relaying visions of the world'. 20urthermore, in stressing the cartographer's role as a collector of information, Bertelli's authorial position comes to resemble Burton's when describing his own compilatory method: 'The method onely is myne owne, I must usurpe that of Wecker è Terentio, nihil dictum quod non dictum priùs, methodus sola artificem ostendit, we can say nothing but what hath beene said, the composition and method is ours onely, and shewes a Schollar' (Anatomy, 16 R.V. Tooley has shown that Venetian publishers, having secured the plate for a given map-engraving, at some times 'would use a map without alteration, at others they procured the copperplate, erased the original imprint, and substituted their own'.I.11).Both author and cartographer are refigured as compositor: Burton parades his virtuosity as a compiler of the thought of others with his quotation of a quotation, 'usurping' Johannes Jacob Wecker's (1528-86) own reference in his Medicae syntaxes (Basel, 1561) to Terence's Eunuchus (2nd Century B.C.), thereby exemplifying the productive unoriginality which is everywhere in his text.Bertelli the 'collector's' version of this quotational, compendious logic is on show all through the Theatrum -in the idiosyncratic and various cartouches, heraldic symbols, and cartographic styles which show the work of other map-makers, even as by their juxtaposition between the covers of the Theatrum, they 'shew' Bertelli as a 'Scholler'.
Examples of the migratory lives of the Venetian maps, which show various species of 'usurpations' in their movement between bibliographical contexts, are readily available.A copy of Blaise de Viginière's Chroniques et Annales du Poloigne [Chronicles and Annals of Poland] (Paris, 1573), also housed in the Bodleian, has forty-two large maps of various European cities pasted onto blank sheets in the back of the book. 21These maps appear to have been printed separately, and are pasted in without any apparent sequential or geographical logic.They are all characteristically Venetian in style, and indeed many of them carry Donato Bertelli's signature, with the initials 'D.B.' often printed alongside the maps' legends.The maps seem to have little or no obvious relation to Polish history or politics, but are locally linked by their frequent depiction of military encounters.One map in particular demands specific attention in relation to the Theatrum.The map of Mirandola, printed on an unpaginated sheet in the composite book, seems to be directly linked to the map of Mirandola in Pietro Bertelli's compendium (fol.36v).Though not signed by Donato, the map in the Viginière sammelband is notably similar, in the weight of its lines and the forms of its engraved letters, to the maps definitely attributable to Pietro's brother.It is much larger than the corresponding map of Mirandola in the Theatrum, occupying a double page spread, but the positioning of the place-names, along with the geometrical shapes of the fortifications and even the number of windows in the city's larger buildings, is identical to the Theatrum's rendering of Mirandola (Figs. 1 and 2).
A relationship between the two seems almost certain, but whether this relationship involved a scaling-up or scaling-down of the original map is less clear.I do not want to suggest a causal relationship from one map to the other, but the pair's aesthetic similarity, along with the possible familial relationship between its producers, makes it highly plausible that some kind of copying was involved in the engraving process.Again, the repeatability and multi-format potentialities of the Venetian maps appear at every juncture.A map used in a compendium of Italian cities in order to extol the Italian nation could reappear, in a slightly modified but recognisably derivative (or exemplary) form, as a single map collected with other, single maps, bound at the back of a French history of Poland.The fragment of protective binding waste which appears at the back of the Viginière-Bertelli sammelband is in English.The Venetian maps, though produced by a highly localized, cartel-like group of artisans, were markedly international both in their geographical content and in their readerly communities.The wide geographical and temporal reach shown in Burton's citation of a Swiss doctor's reference to a Roman playwright is analogous to this aspect of the Venetian city-books: both were engaged in a humanist culture of learning, 'both genuinely up to date and genuinely European', in which information crossed borders whether through the medium of Latin as a lingua franca, or through the polystylistic representation of international territory in cartography and the complex circumstances of its publication. 22

III
The Theatrum attests to a worldly publishing culture in which individual maps contained in city atlases could have many different functions, travelling between publishers and repeatedly appearing in various collections of eclectic geographical images.Even the reading public had a role in their compilation and production, with many Italian city-atlases printed to order, either from the customer's personal selection, or from whichever maps happened to be in the printing-house when the order was made. 23Like Braun and Hogenberg's Civitates, the Theatrum was a markedly 'open' book -open to market forces, collaboration between publishers, and the exigencies of readers.It is no wonder, then, that one reader of Burton's copy of the Theatrum 'opened' the book with their own hands, and prescribed new itineraries for its contents with a marauding pair of scissors.
Thirty pages in total have been cut out from Burton's copy of the Theatrum, leaving page-stubs of inconsistent width in the book's gutter. 24side from the missing pages, the only marks in the book are Burton's signature and personal mark, the date of purchase (1613), and the price he paid (10 shillings), all of which are on the title page; Burton signed the book again on its final leaf (sig.2C4v).None of the descriptive Latin texts Fig. 2 The map of Mirandola from the Viginière Sammelband.The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, BB 46(2) Art., no.37 which accompany the maps have been annotated.A typical opening of the Theatrum consists of a map occupying the left hand (verso) page, with the descriptive text beginning on the right hand (recto) page.The text often goes on for a number of pages, though it is almost always the case that the text ends on a recto, leaving a complete opening on which to print map (left) and the first page of text (right). 25The rationale behind the choice of which maps to remove is almost indiscernible.There is no trace of the removed maps in the Bodleian, hence any disassembly of the book made for the sake of archival preservation, or the exhibition of single, exemplary maps, seems unlikely.In any case, the randomness of the removals and nonremovals rules out any systematic act of archivization: there are two identical maps of Palermo printed a few leaves apart (fol.8r, fol.16v); any diplomatic attempt to remove some maps with a minimum of damage to the book would dictate that one of this pair should be removed.
The second irresolvable question which the missing pages ask is one of chronology: did the cuts happen before Burton died, while the book was still in his personal collection, or after his bequest to the Bodleian, when the book was accessible to a wealth of readers?There is ample precedent for both possibilities.Recent scholarship has revealed how readers in libraries (especially in the United States) liberally removed pages from rare books, most often taking illustrations in order to sell them illicitly to rich collectors.This scholarship has spawned a series of lively biographical studies of individual 'cutters': Travis McDade has shown the huge extent to which Robert Kindred stole scientific illustrations from books in university libraries across America; Michael Blanding has produced an engrossing portrait of E. Forbes Smiley III, 'the map thief' who stole some ninety-seven maps from the Beinecke Library at Yale. 26 As Blanding's work illustrates, maps in books were particularly susceptible to this kind of post-archival modification, perhaps because of their tendency to stand somehow separately from the books which contained them, disturbing their total integrity.Imaginatively reconstructing Smiley's theft of John Smith's seventeenth-century map of New England, Blanding remarks of the placement of the map that it 'was already free in the book, its four-hundred-yearold glue long since having given way and separated from the binding'. 27he fact that maps in books are already marked as partially separate from 25 A notable example where this is not the case is the map and text for Palma, which appear on either side of fol.56. 26 the text means that later readers very often took the opportunity to make the separation permanent, subject as the maps were to various forms of 'usurpation'.Discussing the general phenomenon of stolen pages, McDade succinctly pointed out to me that 'atlases get it the worst'. 28ut this implicit separateness of maps from the books which contained them, and the consequent opportunity for 'usurpations', were not merely a product of the slow dissolution of early modern paper and glue, nor a way of thinking about maps which only manifested itself long after Burton donated his books.Indeed, a further look at the unique features of Burton's copy of the Theatrum show how maps could disturb the integrity of printed books even at the earliest stages of their production.Two openings, fols.92v-93r and fols.94v-95r, are meant to show the maps and texts for Fundi and Taranto, respectively.However, in Burton's copy, the maps have swapped places: Taranto is on fol.92v, and Fundi on fol.94v, and as such, they are paired with each other's descriptive texts.The printed foliation in the book runs in linear fashion from 92 to 94, with the sequence of numerals uninterrupted: the swap is not merely the case of a correctly-printed page swapped around during the binding process.In fact, the solution to the swap seems to lie instead at the printing stage of publication.The maps for Taranto and Fundi are both printed on a single sheet folded in quarto, helpfully designated by the printer as sheet Aa.In Burton's copy, the misplaced map of Taranto is on sig.Aa2v, and the equally misplaced Fundi on sig.Aa4v.The text for Taranto (which is erroneously part of an opening with the map of Fundi) begins on the first recto of a new sheet, sheet Bb.Since an engraved copperplate map required a roller press to print, the sheets would have been printed in two stages -once with moveable type, and once with copperplates. 29If, as seems likely, the map-printer was presented with sheet Aa after it had been printed with moveable type, then they would see the first side of the sheet with the signature mark Aa in one corner, and the text for Fundi on Aa3r in the opposite corner, though there was no actual signature mark on this page, with only the first two leaves of each sheet signed (Fig. 3).The maps for Fundi and Taranto would then have to be printed on the other two opposite quadrants of the sheet, on Aa2v and Aa4v.As such, an inattentive printer could very easily muddle the correct placements of each map, as they were to be printed on the same side of the same sheet, with the descriptive text for one of the maps on a different sheet altogether.The maps in the Theatrum were not just especially mobile between books, they were mobile within them. 30Because texts and maps were printed apart from one another by different workmen, the maps were always liable not to be fully integrated within the book's formal boundaries.As we shall shortly see, one edition of The Anatomy also suffered in the cohesion of its form due to the agential complexity of its production.But from this bibliographical oddity, which appears to be copy-specific, we can see here that the separated state of maps within the books that contained them was not only part of the later bibliographical imagination.It was physically present even at the earliest stage of production, a pervasive and transhistorical phenomenon, necessitated and instantiated by the very processes and agents of printing.
As such, it seems equally possible that the cuts made to Burton's Theatrum were a product of the early-modern impulse to 'prune and lop away' at books, as has recently been detailed by Adam Smyth and Juliet Fleming. 31ig. 3 The Structure of sheet AA from the Theatrum, with the errors of map placement in Burton's copy indicated.Signature marks in square brackets do not appear on the real sheet, and are included only as reference points.The only printed signature marks in the Theatrum are on AAr and AA2r.The book is foliated only on recto pages, hence AA2v and AA4v have no foliation Smyth remarks on the fact that the form of the early modern book often encouraged cuts before they were even made: 'since a text was often imagined as an assemblage of pieces, which might be crumbled, or shredded, into its constituent parts, the act of cutting was always at least implicit'. 32myth notices a fundamental homology between the physical construction of texts, their treatment by readers, and the latent 'excerptability' of early modern writing in general -nowhere is this more evident than in The Anatomy, which was both produced by a process of 'usurpation', and also had a reputation as 'a mine of quotations and stories which could be gathered, copied and recycled'. 33As I have argued, the case of map-books in general, and of Burton's copy of the Theatrum in particular, show the 'implicitness' of excerption in exemplary form; from printing to binding, they were certainly produced by a logic of 'assembly', and they were selfconsciously conceived as compendiums and collections.
IV Burton expressed his particular desire 'to peruse' the 'bookes of Citties' which have been under discussion.In the light of what the Theatrum reveals about the publishing and reading practices involved with these books, Burton's verb 'peruse' takes on new meaning.The most modern sense of 'peruse' implies a particularly cursory type of reading, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as 'to browse' or 'skim' (OED, v. 4c).However, alternative senses to the word existed during Burton's lifetime, which corresponded more closely to the evidence of use shown in the Theatrum.In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word could also connote an intense, focused and thorough use of a book (v.3).There was also an explicitly geographical use of the term, which meant 'to go through (a place or series of places) observantly; to examine or scrutinize in the course of travelling' (v.5a).And just as tellingly for Burton's copy of the Theatrum, a very early sense of the term meant 'to use up; to wear out through use; to exhaust', from the latin per-usus, 'used fully/thoroughly' (v. 1).Burton's use of the verb does not confine itself to one of these meanings, rather it participates in a complex set of associations, which witness the complexity of the city-books themselves.Burton's 'perusal' of the book no doubt involved the careful, methodical examination of the places depicted, as well as a comfortable, casual mode of interaction, but the state in which the book survives certainly also exhibits a kind of use that tended towards using-up.In light of this 'perusal', the Theatrum can add material evidence to a more recent strand of scholarship on The Anatomy and on early modern prose in general, illustrating how early modern cartography could represent both a global, syncretic perspective, and a local, malleable, and granular view.
An emergent strand of scholarship has been concerned with what may be termed early modern 'material metaphors for literary form'.Its focus has been on how many early modern authors, particularly those who wrote prose, imagined the form of their work as analogous to that of a range of objects taken from the material world.Stuart Farley, collecting instances of authors describing their works as 'mosaics', has given a paradigmatic statement of this strand of criticism's central thesis, inviting us 'to consider, on one hand, the form of things and, on the other, how such things might in turn serve as models or templates for literary forms'. 34Reimagining the material world as textual, and the textual object as material, this criticism describes the metaphorical richness with which early modern authors thought about literary form.Farley also gestures towards a shared critical position when he sums up what the 'mosaic form' constituted, in a passage that focuses directly on Burton's Anatomy: the textual mosaic […] represents a radically malleable and indeed mobile form, with it often being freely pieced together, expanded upon, and even disassembled according to the whims of the writer during its construction or else afterwards. 35e image given is of a provisional and incomplete textual 'assembly', constantly on the brink of change and reorganization.The form of the mosaic -composed of tessellated pieces of glass or stone, assembled to form a single image which nevertheless still shows the outlines of the individual pieces -was a contemporary image which was used to echo this discontinuous kind of textuality.Another material metaphor that has crystallized this textual dynamic in critical discourse has been that of 'rhapsody' -a word which was already both material and metaphorical in the early modern period, primarily connoting the 'sewing together' of pieces of Homeric poetry for performance, and later being applied to the piecingtogether of textile-work itself. 36Burton himself calls his text 'a Rapsody of Rags gathered together from severall Dung-hills' (I.12), and this latter phrase, 'Rapsody of Rags', approached the status of cliché in the earlyseventeenth century.Writing on the same phrase as it appears in John Donne's letters, Piers Brown sees it as emblematic of the problems faced by modern readers of such apparently atomized texts, and shows 'rhapsody's' 34  importance when understanding early modern metaphors for textual organization: 'rhapsody is conceptually useful when discussing compilation because it offers us an early modern term that bridges the gap between the haphazard miscellany and the orderly anthology'. 37In a chapter entitled 'Rhapsodies of Rags', Drew Daniel upholds The Anatomy, along with Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, as rhapsodic examples of 'the melancholy assemblage', describing 'the extended temporality of ceaseless collecting and anti-hierarchical, nonsystematic network-building which their authors engaged in'. 38To call oneself a rhapsodist, as Eric Macphail observes, was to 'enroll [one]self in the confraternity of compilers reworking discarded strands of tradition into a curious and motley fabric'. 39Again, the poise between order and dispersal; central theme and peripheral miscellanea, is a common feature gestured at by these objects-as-metaphors.
Burton is a particularly popular figure in this criticism, because The Anatomy so clearly asks questions concerning its own completeness, continuity, and stability.The textual dynamic expressed by these material objects is brought into direct dialogue with the 'cutting' metaphor by Burton himself, in his poetic description of The Anatomy's engraved frontispiece: 'Ten distinct Squares heere seene apart, / Are joyn'd in one by Cutters art' (Anatomy, I.lxii).Though the 'cutter' here refers primarily to the frontispiece's engraver, the word also has metaphorical and spatial resonances.'Cutting', for Burton as for many others, implied both the removal and the re-'joyning' of matter; its simultaneous integration and dispersal -it was also more obviously significant in its relation to the more gruesome 'cutting' involved in anatomy.Here the frontispiece, a paratext that Alastair Fowler famously referred to as 'the mind of the book', self-consciously exhibits a similar cut-and-paste structure to the work it prefaces. 40The Anatomy as it has reached us today is an assembled unit produced by cuts, reorganizations, and joinery.It went through five editions during Burton's lifetime with a further sixth edition published in 1651, and each edition incorporated new material culled from the most recent sources and inserted ad hoc into the body of the text: aptly, the frontispiece and its 'cutters art' was one of these additions, with the engraving only appearing in the 1628 edition, and the poem only included from 1632. 41Likewise, a significant part does not indeed fit, nor the middle part with either the beginning or the end, on account of the frequent mistakes and omissions, whom do you blame? 46re, geographical complication becomes an index of formal complexity: the commercial need to assemble the book from material taken from a geographically scattered set of locations produced an object which, 'whatever kind of edition it is' [qualis qualis], carried the latent possibility of radical discontinuity in its bibliographical structure.We have already seen how the accumulative, disaggregated composition of Bertelli's Theatrum, caused both by the processual complexity of its assembly and its diverse geographical subject matter, caused oddities and faults in its printing: here, in Burton's work, the similarly dispersed geography of British print-culture produces an analogous effect.The 1638 edition of The Anatomy is, in this sense, a 'city-book': an assembled collection of printed matter, exhibiting an extended geographical provenance and a concomitantly ragged, rhapsodic form.
However, the figure of the map or the map-book has not entered discussions of this simultaneously formal and material aspect of The Anatomy: in fact, the metaphorical vehicle of cartography has often been used to illustrate the opposing forces of systematization, rigorous order, and thematic hierarchy which the text of the Anatomy so often resists.David Renaker argued that the synoptic charts prefacing each section of Burton's work were 'a map of the book', which the text itself resisted through a 'cellular' and uneven organization. 47Christopher Tilmouth, contrasting Burton's fundamentally consistent understanding of the condition of melancholy with his ever expansive and tumultuous literary treatment of it, writes that 'the conviction implicit in Burton's verb 'confine' is that the very practice of mapping melancholy (in all its particularities) on the abstract level will also circumscribe the disease in reality.' 48Tilmouth assumes a verbal lability between 'mapping' and 'confining' which echoes the schematizing impulse of the synoptic tables.'Mapping' thus becomes, for Tilmouth, an impossible project of comprehensiveness and comprehensibility, and an exercise simultaneously necessary and agonizing in Burton's text: 'the more Burton pursues his goal (the more copiously he opens up areas of analysis), the more mapping he discovers is still to be done.' 49n this reading of 'mapping' as emblematic of Burton's desire to 'confine' the unconfineable, we find ourselves adrift from Burton's own writing on cartography: 'I never travelled but in Mappe or Card, in which mine unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated'.As Burton's words repeatedly signal, he saw 'mapping' as a source of 'unconfined' pleasure, in which the desire for rigid rationalism or total inclusivity was notably absent.In addition to this impression of freedom and unconfined 'expatiation', Burton also correlated geographic and cartographic language with questions about the form and structure of both his book and the world -questions which did not always indicate a collocation of mapping with rational confinement.Later in the preface, he analogises his work with a seemingly discontinuous, uneven portion of geographical territory: 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 ob-jects… (Anatomy, I.18) Scholarly commentary on this extended metaphor, and its implications for how Burton envisioned the reader of his text, has focussed on whether it implies Burton's urging of a holistic, sequential experience of all his book's variety, or whether it encourages a selective, discontinuous and granular mode of textual interaction. 50Burton's syntax, both jaggedly paratactic and breathlessly continuous, illustrates how geographic imagery could suggest multiple, potentially conflicting modes of readerly experience.This was also the case for Burton's explicitly cartographic, rather than simply geographic imagery.In a later subsection on 'Discontents, Cares, Miseries', Burton uses a remarkable metaphor in his illustration of the melancholy community: 'Our villages are like mole-hills, and men as so many Emots [sc.ants], busie, busie still, going to and fro, in and out, and crossing one anothers projects, as the lines of severall Sea-cardes cut each other in a Globe or Mappe' (Anatomy, I.274).In his move from zoological and entomological language to the metaphor of mapping, Burton exhibits a precise equipoise between a holistic, aggregative mode of seeing the world (in a Globe or Mappe), and a disjunctive, individualized approach (via single 'Sea-cardes').The community at cross-purposes may be viewed as either a chaotic whole or a collection of single trajectories.His image, unsurprisingly, also had a definite material basis.Edward Wright's 1599 map of the 50 See Lund, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion, 40, which decides on the former position: 'the reader cannot select the 'faire landscape' and neglect the 'foule' […] Instead of inviting readers to choose from the text in order to satisfy their diverse tastes, he implants this notion of diversity within the text itself and encourages the reader to experience all of it'.
world, appended to Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations of the same year, had the exact structure described by Burton: it depicted the entirety of the known world, but also included the rhumb lines showing directions for sailing, which were characteristic of more localized 'Sea-cardes' and earlier portolan charts; these were the 'lines' which 'cut each other' in their various bearings.Burton's vision of mapping did not promise 'confinement', nor was it confined to a single form of understanding or composition.Maps for Burton were permissive, various, and endlessly stimulating objects, circumscribing a range of epistemological possibilities. 51

V
The aspects of early modern cartographic culture which I have exemplified using the Theatrum are inevitably linked to the placement of its maps in a book -that is, not as single, disembodied objects, but as complex artefacts subject to quotidian material-historical processes.Indeed, it is only by considering the Theatrum 'bibliographically' that the features of its production most pertinent to Burton's thought emerge.The necessity for this aspect of cartographic history has been very recently stressed in the work of Jordana Dym and Carla Lois, who argue forcefully for the persistently bibliographical quality of early modern maps, considering 'the methodological implications of examining maps in documentary context, rather than as items with an independent trajectory.' 52 By 'dethroning' the 'sovereign map', Dym and Lois highlight the emergence of new topics for cartographic analysis: when looking at a sheet map, the main interest is the information on the page.In contrast, when looking at maps as part of larger works, such as books, placement matters, both in terms of physical location and orientation and what the location communicates about the relationship between map and book content. 53 taking a bibliographical approach to map studies, geographical questions can be combined with those of textual structure, the organization of knowledge, and the analogies between material and literary form.As we have seen, Burton's references to cartography and geography illustrate that these latter questions were, for him, very often implicitly geographical ones -the Theatrum offers material evidence for why Burton may have made this 51  The history of The Anatomy's intertexts (understood in the conventional sense), and their illustration of Burton's immense, encyclopaedic learning, is well documented. 55Indeed, Angus Gowland has recently illustrated how the 'discovery' of related texts through the scholarly pursuit of individual quotations and allusions was a major aspect to Burton's vision of how his readers might 'use' The Anatomy. 56Consequently, the richly documented records of Burton's personal library have informed much of this research. 57ut in combining the cartographic and formal-material questions raised by Dym and Lois with the process of 'reading around' advocated by Eckhardt and Knight, unfamiliar and productive methods of bringing bibliographical and literary-critical approaches to bear on The Anatomy emerge.The logic of assembly, the question of a book's integrity, and the ever-present potential for dissolution and reorganization are eloquently shown by Burton's copy of a Venetian city-atlas.It is organized around a central theme, but appears as the result of open-ended bricolage, and its contents were treated as such -as separate, discrete, and mobile.In Woodward's survey of Italian atlases, he often resorts to phrases such as 'hastily assembled', and 'assembled to order', indicating the haphazard and materially complex manner in which these books came to be. 58Reading these aspects of carto-bibliographic form and composition 'around' The Anatomy establishes the Theatrum as its bibliographical companion, whose composition and structure can materially elaborate on the connection between Burton's geographical and methodical thought.Indeed, Frank Lestringant has applied the precise metaphors discussed above to early modern cartography in general, arguing that 'the map does not show a definitive state of the world, but a mosaic, assembled within a floating space, of fragmentary accounts whose chronology can be spread out over centuries'. 59David Turnbull has further argued that the practice of 'assemblage' in cartography laid the historical foundations not only of literary practice but also of the construction of a 'knowledge-space' in early modern science, with scientific knowledge produced by assembly, improvisation, and the bricolage of disparate material. 60e thus discover an object whose rare survival as material evidence can give descriptive and illustrative force to recent accounts of Burton's work, and exhibits productive interconnections between different avenues of early modern culture.Anthony Grafton, theorizing the humanist practice of textual compilation which Burton was heir to, has very recently encouraged us to see early modern books as self-consciously exhibiting their status as the product of material processes rather than disembodied scholarship, and uses a telling metaphor: 'one way to make a salable book in the sixteenth century, apparently, was not only to construct it using scissors and paste, but also to take care that potential buyers knew that the author had done so'. 61In the context of The Anatomy, a final example illustrates how strikingly literal this metaphor could become.In 'Democritus Junior to the Reader', Burton pauses his survey of the melancholy globe to create his own territorial fiction: I will yet to satisfie & please my selfe, make an Utopia of mine owne, a new Atlantis, a poeticall commonwealth of mine owne, in which I will freely domineere, build 58 Woodward, 'Italian Composite Atlas', 62. Citties, make Lawes, Statutes, as I list my selfe.And why may I not?(Anatomy, I.86) 62 Burton begins with a topographical and architectural survey of his imagined commonwealth, and at one point describes the kind of streets he would wish for: 'faire broad, and streight streets, houses uniforme, built of bricke and stone, like Bruges, Bruxels, Rhegium Lepidi, Berna in Switzerland, Millan, Mantua, Crema, Cambalu in Tartary described by M. Polus, or that Venetian Palma' (I.86-7).As Kiessling notes, of the five Italian cities mentioned in this urban fantasy, four are depicted in most copies of the Theatrum -Rhegium Lepidli, Mantua, Crema, and Palma (I.87 n).But they are not present in Burton's copy.Their absence is marked by page stubs, and it appears that they have fallen victim to a process of 'perusal'.Whether this physical disassembly prefigured the textual rejoining in Burton's book is undecidable.But it provides, by way of conclusion, a tantalizing point of possible contact between The Anatomy and a cartographic object which we can 'read around' Burton's literary work.
Oriel College, University of Oxford 62 For a situation of Burton's Utopia in the broader tradition of Utopian writing, see Robert Appelbaum, Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002, 81-7.
McDade, Torn from their Bindings: A Story of Art, Science, and the Pillaging of American University Libraries, Lawrence: Kansas UP, 2018; Blanding, The Map Thief, New York: Random House, 2014.My thanks to Professor McDade, and the many other Twitter users who helped me source a wealth of anecdotes and studies concerning modification-by-cutting in rare books collections.
27Blanding, The Map Thief, 19.Burton also owned a copy of Smith's book, though in his copy the glue has retained its adhesiveness, and the map remains in place.This copy is held in the Bodleian, under the shelfmark Arch.G e.41 (5*).
An exception to this critical tendency is the work of Susan Wells, who has written of 'genre maps' in the Anatomy, which are characterised by 'adjacency, overlapping, sedimentation, nesting, embedding'.Wells, 'Genres as Species and Spaces: Literary and Rhetorical Genre in The Anatomy of Melancholy', Philosophy and Rhetoric 47.2 (2014): 113-136, 123-4, 115.collocation.While Dym and Lois confine their argument primarily to maps and texts within single volumes, I propose extending their analysis to maps and text between books, using the available evidence of bookownership and collection.This approach responds to recent work by Jeffrey Todd Knight and Joshua Eckhardt in the field of book-history, work which stresses the need to 'read around' books and their authors -that is, to scrutinize books and objects in material proximity to primary texts, whether in collections, libraries, or Sammelbände.Summarizing his project, Eckhardt writes (citing Knight) that 'instead of the normal sort of intertextuality, produced by one author quoting another, [this work] focuses on an often overlooked kind of "'proximate' or 'material intertextuality,'" produced by a collector of texts, whether "in book form" or in the shape of a library.' 54 Eckhardt and Knight suggest extending the definition of intertextuality to include materially as well as intellectually proximate works.The Theatrum is a 'proximate' work to The Anatomy in both senses: its unique form echoes aspects of Burton's work which critics have long noticed, and Burton himself connected with geographical language; it was also archivally 'proximate' to Burton's work, first in his personal library, and then in the Bodleian.