immund and immundicity and immure and amyraldus and robert burton and anatomy of melancholy

So we continue with more "imm" words. Let's begin with one many people know, immure, which carries a clear picture with it. The Century gives two definitions for the verb: (1) to surround with walls; fortify; protect or (2) to shut up or confine. The OED has many more shades of meaning, but these shades need not be learned in detail because they all express the concept of enclosure behind walls or protection. An example of immure as protect or fortify comes from the 17th century preacher Jeremy Taylor: "..things of highest use, were also, in all societies of men, of greatest honour, and immured by reverence..." The more usual use of the term today is definition (2), however. From Shakespeare (Love's Labor's Lost) : "I mean, setting thee at liberty, enfreedoming thy person; thou wert immured, restrained, captivated, bound." Immure is also a great term to express psychological depth or psychic distress: "Immured in her pain, Mary did not see Jesus..." "Continual defeat causes us to immure our hopes along with our tears."

When I was reading through Shakespeare's plays in 2003-2004, however, I ran across the use of immure as a noun. Sure enough, the quotation from the Prologue of Troilus & Cressida is mentioned by both the Century and OED. "Troy, within whose strong immures/ The ravish'd Helen, Menelaus' queen,/ With wanton Paris sleeps." I remember when I ran across this passage from T & C that I stopped for a moment and realized that the history of development of English consisted not only in the development of new terms (email; webpage; blogging, etc.) but the telescoping of old terms that at one time had various and variable meanings. I decided at that moment that I would try to "blow up the balloon" of language that has been deflated by the ravages (or probably the neglect) of time, and recover the words in their ancient splendor. Let's use not only the two verb definitions of immure--to fortify and to enclose--but also the noun form--a wall.

Immund

Immund is an adjective meaning "unclean; impure; filthy; foul." In giving you the following quotation, I not only want to refer to the use of the term but then digress to the source from which I draw. From Robert Burton's 1621 edition of the Anatomy of Melancholy: "Through their own nastinesse and sluttishnesse, and immund sordid manner of life..." I decided to do some research on this 17th century work, and found, to my delight, that it had been reissued in the 1990s by Clarendon Press, in six very expensive volumes, even though it is now out of print. Stephen Jay Gould called it "the greatest literary work every written on the theory of the humors." In his life of Johnson, Boswell wrote: "Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, he said, was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise." And, "sheer size should not put the modern reader off one of the most astonishing books ever written...From his phenomenal erudition, Burton fashioned a book that says everything there is to say about melancholia, then tries to say everything there is to say about everything else." More modern reviewers have been less kind to Burton, calling his work an example of extreme pedantry or contrived writing. And, apparently the edition, in all of its six-volume splendor, is hard to use. Nevertheless, it sure makes me want to take a peek, and I just learned that my school is one of the few places in the Pacific Northwest to have all six volumes. I wonder if they have ever been checked out...

Back to immund, before getting carried away too far. As with immantle, immund may be used postpositively and in poetic contexts. From 1861: "Where birds immund find shelter dank." But then, from 1875: "Great were the cleansings, the white-washings..in many an immund old town and ill-odoured village." Immundicity means, as expected, "uncleanness, impurity; filthiness." Whenever you introduce abstractions into language (and uncleanness is an abstraction from unclean or filthy), however, you tend to invite in the theologians, even if you want to bar the door to them. Indeed a 1660 translation of Amyraldus' Treatise concerning Religion (Amyraldus/Amyraut was a 17th century theologian attacked both by the Reformed for not being Reformed enough and the Arminians for being too Reformed. You really have to dive into the obscure world of 17th century Dutch theology to understand why. I would much rather plunge into 17th century Dutch painting. Anyone want to go swimming with me on that?) has: "Exempt from the contagion of their immundicity" and the Century has a quotation from Montague's Devoute Essays where he talks about someone who could "recover the right savour and gust of purity by the same degree he is cleansed from the other immunidicity." Immundity is a synonymn for immundicity.

I think that is enough for one day.

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