Kevin Killeen has written an elegant and perceptive study of one of seventeenth-century England's most fascinating scholars, Thomas Browne. At the core of this book is a reassessment of the scope and significance of Browne's Pseudodoxia epidemica, aptly described as ‘his vast encyclopaedia of error with its mazy series of investigations’ (p. 2), a complex text ranging across natural philosophy, biblical interpretation, picture theory and travel literature. Often characterised dismissively as a miscellany, Killeen identifies a ‘dynamics of falsehood’ operating across the text, a concern by Browne to identify and eliminate muddled exegetical understanding stemming from corrupt hermeneutic practice' (p. 7), an ambitious exercise in intellectual redemption in a post-lapsarian world. Traditionally portrayed as a detached commentator, Killeen shows how Browne's masterpiece Pseudodoxia actually ‘constitutes a conscious interaction with the cultural politics of the 1640s’ (p. 42). Killeen identifies a serious purpose, particularly evident in book i where the devil's role in promoting heresy, atheism and witchcraft is highlighted. Killeen describes Browne's devil as ‘more a market mountebank than an infernal demon’, one ‘more likely to cause a mistake in a syllogism than an outbreak of moral depravity’ (p. 38), but Browne's devil is no pantomime figure and remains central to his conception of truth. Killeen's location of Pseudodoxia within ‘the amorphous and sprawling context of seventeenth-century biblical commentary’ (p. 15) is instructive to scholars like this reviewer interested in scriptural hermeneutics who have not identified Browne's contribution to this field. Killeen's linkage of Browne's discussion of errors in pictures in Pseudodoxia epidemica with the politically fraught context of iconoclasm in 1640s England, and especially Browne's home town of Norwich, is also convincing and sheds valuable light on the nature of idolatry in mid seventeenth-century England. Historians of science should also consider Killeen's argument that one weakness in the physico-theological understanding of the early modern relation between science and religion dominant in the current historiography is that it omits the Bible in a way that seventeenth-century natural philosophers did not. Browne viewed natural philosophy and Scripture as operating in a reciprocal hermeneutic relationship, and sought to reclaim the interpretation of the Bible – ‘one of the hardest Books I have met with’ – for an elite exegetical community. Killeen concludes that Browne's biblical studies were ‘diverse, labyrinthine, pedantic, encompassing and sometimes baffling’ but very much part of ‘the vibrant culture of scriptural scholarship that constitutes the intellectual aether of the period’ (p. 107). The connection that Killeen draws between Browne's interest in matter theory and corpuscular philosophy, and his belief in witchcraft and participation as an expert witness in a witchcraft trial, is intriguing. Killeen's broader point is that there is no demarcation between science and Scripture, and that in his willingness to ‘meld the various frames in which he understands the Bible, with the various networks of natural philosophical thought’ Browne is ‘an exemplary figure of seventeenth-century thought’ (p. 184). The appellation of ‘enigmatic’, so often bestowed on Browne, can cover a multitude of sins for the lazy historian; it is to Killeen's credit that he commits none of them.