(15771640) British scholar and writer.
He spent most of his life as a vicar at Oxford. His great Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) describes the kinds, causes, symptoms, and cures of melancholy in a lively, elegant, and sometimes humorous style; a mine of classical erudition and curious information, it is an index to the philosophical and psychological ideas of its time. His Latin comedy Philosophaster (1606) is a vivacious exposure of charlatanism.