The year 2005 marked the quarter centenary of Sir Thomas Browne's birth with two major conferences, the genesis of the annual Thomas Browne seminar, and a general reemergence of academic interest in the works of the seventeenth-century English physician. Despite his widespread influences on early modern scientific and religious inquiry, Browne's “works have been for some time been largely relegated by the academy to the category of literary curiosity” (1). Reid Barbour and Claire Preston's edited collection of articles creates a Browne for all times, attempting to discover Browne's intellectual, scientific, historical, and philosophical antecedents but also to place him in the larger cultural contexts of his contemporaries and even finding Brownean influences in modern works.
Despite the diverse approaches to Browne encompassed in this study, the essays have strong commonalities. The essays most often focus on Browne's three most canonical works: Religio Medici (1643), Pseudodoxica Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors (1646), and Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall (1658). Many of the essays in the collection emphasize and reassert the well-known characteristics of Browne's writing, such as his distinctive rhetorical flourishes, his intellectual curiosity, and his metaphysical wit. The essays also remind us that for Browne, philosophy, religion, and science cannot be clearly differentiated, and because of that, it is difficult to situate Browne as adhering to any specific belief system.
Several of the essays focus on the quaint and peculiar in Browne's life and works. Kathryn Murphy considers Browne's obsessive study of quincuncial symbols in nature, Plato, and cosmogony, and Brent Nelson reveals the Brownes’ familial collection of curious oddities. These essays, taken alone, may attest to Browne's dismissal as literary curiosity, but they also display his encyclopedic interests, his attention to the minute, his sense of intellectual community, and his constant pursuit of truth and knowledge.
A number of the essays concern the rhetorical and literary conventions of Browne's writings and his autobiographical approach to his works. Sharon Cadmin Seelis identifies the unmistakable stylistic conventions of Browne's writings, whether juvenilia or mature works, personal or published: his Latinate syntax, his wit, his skeptical inquiry, and his epistemophilia. Brooke Conti closely examines the revisions Browne made in Religio Medici, from the earliest manuscripts to the published editions, to document Browne's slowly diminishing proclamations of religious anxiety as his work becomes less autobiographical and more of a general treatise on religion and science. Claire Preston reads Browne's Letter to a Friend as containing the literary conventions of both the medical consilium and the hortatory sententia and as addressing the dual audiences of the deceased's family and a general learned readership. The style of Browne's Pseudodoxica, according to William N. West, encourages a conversation between varied authors on diverse topics.
This view of Browne as an engaging scholar who encouraged a timely community of critical and open-minded thinking is a common theme explored in several of the essays. Browne was not a hermitical scientist but was active in varied intellectual communities. His beliefs seem to promote tolerance and acceptance of others’ political and religious views at a tumultuous time in English history. Brent Nelson catalogs Browne's sons’ continental educational tours supported by Browne's fame and the “social networks of courts, universities, and the marketplace” (97). Karen L. Edwards documents Browne's depiction of pygmies as responding to and engaging with the “royalist defeat in the mid-1660s” (104). Deborah Shuger defines the slippery term “Laudianism” as it often applied to Browne, in order to explore several responses to Browne's Religio Medici by other “lay intelligentsia of Caroline England” and to create a heterogeneous study of the religious variances at this time (46). Victoria Silver places Browne as a discriminate and skeptical witness of the Lowestoft witch trials. Kevin Killeen situates Browne's writings on problematic religious iconography as important to the midcentury iconoclasm debate, and Achsah Guibbory establishes Browne as demonstrating “unusual tolerance” concerning the Jewish readmission question (222).
Browne was not only a man of his time but also a man out of time. He was an antiquarian and historian as much as he was a physician or philosopher. His knowledge of ancient sources—classical, biblical, and worldly—influences all of his writings, whether he is actively complying with or refuting those texts. Graham Perry studies Browne's maturing interests in antiquities and the material past from his juvenile writings to his greater works. Kevin Killeen's essay relates Browne's textual fidelity in critiquing artistic representations of biblical scenes, and Reid Barbour notes Browne's study of preserved medieval corpses in Toulouse as influencing his dissertation on the smallpox epidemic of the 1630s. Jonathan F. S. Post contrasts Browne's lively, individualized, and vivid studies of monuments and peoples associated with Norwich Cathedral with the more staid catalogs found in John Weaver's Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631). Browne deftly made the past tenable and visible, even as he used the past to meditate on the future and the unknowable.
The final essays of the book also focus on Browne as a timeless scholar as his influences are clearly seen in two twentieth-century writers’ works: the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) and the German-English W. G. Sebald (1944–2001). Roy Rosenstein writes of Browne's influence on Borges's career, especially as translator, and the conflation between the two writers that occurs during Borges's translation of Urne-Buriall. Peter N. Miller notes the inherent themes of antiquarianism, reconstruction, loss, and melancholy that emerge in Sebald's Rings of Saturn, which “begins and ends with Thomas Browne” (326).
This collection is a nice introduction to Browne's works and ideas and even serves as a general introduction to seventeenth-century religious, political, and scientific musings. These essays reaffirm what those familiar with Browne's works already know: he was one of the most learned, curious, and influential writers of his time, and his works, whether scientific, historical, personal, or theological, employ beautiful Baroque phrasing and complex metaphysical images. What the collection ultimately calls for is a Brownean interdisciplinary and collegial approach to early modern studies; we would all be better scholars if we were only a tiny bit as curious, skeptical, broad-minded, and accepting of others in our own pursuit of knowledge as Browne was.
