Introduction to the Project Gutenberg Edition.
This edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy is based on anineteenth-century edition that modernized Burton's spelling andtypographic conventions. In preparing this electronic version, it becameevident that the editor had made a variety of mistakes in thismodernization: some words were left in their original spelling (unusualwords were a particular problem), portions of book titles were mistaken forproper names, proper names were mistaken for book titles or Latin words,etc. A certain number of misprints were also introduced into the Latin. Asa result, I have re-edited the text, checking it against images of the 1638edition, and correcting all errors not present in the earlier edition. Ihave continued to follow the general editorial practice of the base textfor quotation marks, italics, etc. Rare words have been normalizedaccording to their primary spelling in the Oxford English Dictionary. WhenBurton spells a person's name in several ways, I have normalized the namesto the most common spelling, or to modern practice if well-known. In a fewcases, mistakes present in both the 1683 edition and the base text havebeen corrected. These are always minor reference errors (e.g., an incorrector missing section number in the synopses, or misnumbered footnotes).Incorrect citations to other texts (Burton seems to quote by memory andsometimes gets it wrong) have not been changed if they are wrong in botheditions. To display some symbols (astrological signs, etc.) the HTMLversion requires a browser with unicode support. Most recent browsersshould be OK.—KTH
FRONTISPIECE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION
