BRIGHT, Timothie (1550-1615)

Lot 163
10.12.2025 12:00UTC +00:00
Classic
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Lieu de l'événementRoyaume-Uni, London
Commissionsee on Website%
ID 1514382
Lot 163 | BRIGHT, Timothie (1550-1615)
Valeur estimée
£ 5 000 – 7 000
BRIGHT, Timothie (1550-1615)
A treatise of melancholy. London: John Windet, 1586.
Second edition of the ‘first comprehensive description of depression in English’ (Garrison-Morton), read by Shakespeare and immortalised in Hamlet. Bright distinguished two types of depression, proceeding from the mind and the body respectively. ‘Today we would say that Bright recognized the interaction of mind and body, and that his work constitutes an early essay in psychiatry and psychosomatic disease … Bright’s treatise was a direct ancestor of Burton’s Anatomy of melancholy; Burton listed Bright as one of the four authors on melancholy to precede him, and often quoted his opinions in detail’ (Norman). The influence of Bright's Treatise of Melancholy on both the language and depictions of madness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet was first identified in the 19th century; indeed, ‘some of the most famous sentences in the English language find their prototypes in Bright’ – ‘I am but mad north-north-west’ is one such example – and the Treatise ‘shines with the reflected glory of the greatest drama that the human mind has yet produced’ (Keynes, pp.9-13). The second edition is more accurately printed than Vautrollier’s of the same year, with misprints and pagination corrected. Garrison-Morton 4918 (1st edition); Keynes Bright 15; Norman 343 (1st edition); STC (2nd ed.) 3748.

Octavo (140 x 85mm). Woodcut initials (title browned and with a small repair, staining to *8v-A1, wormtrack from F5 onwards mostly confined to fore-edge margin, marginal annotations slightly cropped). 17th-century English green morocco gilt, leather spine label and old paper labels, marbled endleaves (upper board and endleaf detached, spine faded to brown, wear at edges). Provenance: Ri[chard] Newport (17th-century ownership inscription with Latin motto on title and marginal pencil commentary in English to the dedicatory letters); bibliographic references on the front free endpaper in an 18th-century English hand; old library sticker labelled ‘A/2/17’ inside upper cover; Royal Society of Medicine (ink stamp [Medical and Chirurgical Society] on title and other leaves).
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