Memory and Poetry > Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Robert Burton’s sprawling Anatomy of Melancholy was one of the most influential prose texts of the Renaissance. Burton, an enthusiastic reader of Spenser who quotes him often, seems to have taken some cues from Spenser’s depiction of memory as a library, describing it as a “register” (a common Renaissance term for a library catalogue) just as Spenser does.