James Yarker and Erin Sullivan introduce themselves and describe the purposes and structure of the conference. James explains why Stan’s Cafe decided to adapt the book. (6 Minutes)

Dr. Erin Sullivan, a lecturer at the Shakespeare Institute, researches the ways in which emotions were understood and represented in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. She regularly attends and speaks at international conferences in the fields of Shakespeare and renaissance studies, the history of emotion, and the history of psychology and psychiatry.

As part of her interest in building connections between different disciplines Erin has been working with Stan’s Cafe on their adaptation of The Anatomy of Melancholy. In this talk she discusses how medicine and mental health were thought about in Burton’s time. (42 minutes)

Professor Bernard Capp is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. His book When Gossips Meet looks at how women in early modern England used their informal networks to gain identity, information and social support in a patriachal culture that generally excluded, marginalized, or subordinated them. One of his current projects develops this strand of gender history, looking at masculinity and the expression of emotion in early modern England. In this talk he develops some of these ideas in relation to The Anatomy of Melancholy. (20 minutes)

Weak and exhausted from an expedition recording seal pups on the coast of Norfolk, Lee Hassall, a sculptor who makes performances; sculpture, drawings, installation and film work, came across more like a poet, but that may have been a temporary state. Here he presents a text developed with Dr Carl Lavery. It was accompanied by pictures, but it works very well without them. (25 minutes)

Mark Knights is Professor of History at Warwick University. His research spans early modern British history but focuses on the political culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One of Mark’s specialist areas of research is the history of early modern words and concepts, and in this talk he looked at the idea of Utopia, and what is meant by Burton and his contemporaries when they talk about The Common Good. (19 Minutes)

Dr. Mary Ann Lund is one of the worlds greatest experts on The Anatomy of Melancholy. She’s written a book about it, she’s read the whole thing several times, she can summon appropriate quotations in Latin or English without blinking, she can even tell you the differences between the various editions. Today she discusses whether the book might be used as a cure for melancholy. (17 Minutes)

Former teacher and recently ordained priest, Rev. Wendy Brown, Curate at Christ Church, Summerfield, has a background in English and education and has trained and practiced as a systemic therapist and counsellor. (13 Minutes)

Sarah Marks holds an MA in the History of Medicine and has previously worked as a Research Associate at The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. She joined us via Skype to talk about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and the ways that you could draw parallels between CBT practices and Burton’s writing. (25 Minutes)