Editing Moby-Dick (section)

===Renaissance humanism===
During the composition of ''Moby-Dick'' Melville also read Renaissance Humanists such as [[Thomas Browne]], [[Robert Burton]], and Rabelais. [[Hershel Parker]] notes that Melville adopted not only their poetic and conversational prose styles, but also their skeptical attitudes towards religion.<ref>{{cite book |last=Parker |first=Hershel |title=Melville's Reading and Moby-Dick |date=2018 |publisher=Norton |pages=507–509}}</ref> Browne's statement "I love to lose my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an ''ob altitudo''"<ref>{{cite book |last=Browne |first=Thomas |title=The Major Works |publisher=Penguin |page=69}}</ref> mirrors both in ethos and poetics Ishmael's "I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it."<ref>{{cite book |last=Melville |first=Herman |title=Moby-Dick |publisher=Norton |page=20 |edition=3}}</ref>

Ishmael also mirrors the epistemological uncertainty of Renaissance humanists. For example, Browne argues that "where there is an obscurity too deepe for our reason ...[reason] becomes more humble and submissive unto the subtilties of faith ... I believe there was already a tree whose fruit our unhappy parents tasted, though in the same chapter, when God forbids it, 'tis positivley said, the plants of the field were not yet growne."<ref>{{cite book |last=Browne |first=Thomas |title=Religio Medici |publisher=Penguin |page=71}}</ref> Ishmael similarly embraces paradox when he proclaims "Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye."<ref>{{cite book |last=Melville |first=Herman |title=Moby-Dick |date=2018 |publisher=Norton |page=280 |edition=3}}</ref>

Scholars have also called attention to similarities between Melville's style and that of Robert Burton in ''[[Anatomy of Melancholy]]''. William Engel notes that Melville had Burton's book at his side, and says "this encyclopedic work will serve as a conceptual touchstone for analyzing his looking back to an earlier aesthetic practice."<ref>{{cite book |last=Engel |first=William |title=Early Modern Poetics in Melville and Poe |date=2012 |publisher=University of the South |page=12}}</ref> Additionally, Hershel Parker writes that in 1847, ''Anatomy of Melancholy'' served as Melville's "sonorous textbook on morbid psychology" and in the following year he bought a set of [[Michel de Montaigne]]'s works. In the ''Essays'' he found "a worldly wise skepticism that braced him against the superficial pieties demanded by his time". Melville then read Browne's ''[[Religio Medici]]'' which he adored, describing Browne to a friend as "a kind of 'crack'd archangel'".<ref>{{cite book |last=Parker |first=Hershel |title=Melville's Reading and Moby-Dick |date=2018 |publisher=Norton |pages=504–505}}</ref>