Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was an English author of a number of works that disclose his wide learning in various fields of learning including Medicine , religion, science and the esoteric. His works are characterised by erudite learning, and a rich, unusual prose style which alternates between grandiloquence and rough note-book jottings.
A consummate literary craftsman Browne produced writings varied in genre, quality and style which diplay his Christian faith, humanity and tolerance in an often intolerant age. His writings reveal him to be an enigmatic personality who breaks into subtle humour as much as melancholia .
Browne's important if paradoxical place in intellectual history has been described as-
- An instance of a scientific reason, lit up by mysticism, in the Church of England.
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2 1671 Knighthood 3 Literary works 4 Literary influence 5 External links |
Browne was educated at Pembroke College, Oxford and received his B.A. degree in 1626 and a medical doctorate from the University of Leiden in 1633. He settled in Norwich, where he practiced medicine.
Browne's first well-known work bore the Latin title Religio Medici (The Religion of a Physician). This work was circulated in manuscript among his friends, and it caused Browne some surprise and embarrassment when an unauthorised edition appeared in 1642, since the work contained a number of religious speculations that might be considered unorthodox. An authorised text with some of the controversial matter removed appeared in 1643. The expurgation did not end the controversy; in 1645, Alexander Ross attacked Religio Medici in his Medicus Medicatus (The Doctor, Doctored) and in fact the book was placed upon the Papal index of forbidden reading for Catholics in the same year.
In 1646, Browne published Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very many Received Tenets, and commonly Presumed Truths, whose title refers to the prevalence of false beliefs and "vulgar errors." It is a sceptical collection that deals with a number of legends circulating at the time, which it treats in a paradoxical and witty manner. The book is scientifically significant because its arguments were some of the first to cast doubt on the widely-believed hypothesis of spontaneous generation or abiogenesis.
In 1658 Browne published together two Discourses which are intimately related to each other, the first being Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial or a Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk, occasioned by the discovery of some Bronze Age burials in earthenware vessels found in Norfolk. This occasions a lengthy meditation on the funerary customs of the world and the fleetingness of earthly fame and reputation.
Hydriotaphia's (Urn-Burial) 'binary' companion Discourse is The Garden of Cyrus, or, The Quincunciall Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, and Mystically Considered, whose slight subject is the quincunx, the arrangement of five units like the five-spot in dice, which Browne asserts was the way Cyrus's garden was planted. This in turn provokes a long and learned discourse that finds quincunxes all over Creation.
Although invariably referred to as Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich the medical doctor Thomas Browne was neither born in Norwich nor acquired the title Sir until late in life. In 1671 King Charles II, accompanied by the Royal Court, visited Norwich. The courtier John Evelyn, who had occasionally corresponded with Browne, took good use of the Royal visit to call upon 'the learned doctor' of European fame and wrote of his visit-
Today Sir Thomas Browne remains a much misunderstood and little-read author. His paradoxical place in the history of ideas results from the fact that he was as much a scientist as a devout Christian and as much a promoter of the new inductive science as an adherent of ancient esoteric learning. This is reflected in the vast catalogue of over 1,500 books in the Library of Sir Thomas Browne.
Browne's stylistic influence can be traced from the writings of Doctor Johnson to the nineteenth century when he was admired by Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the novelist Herman Melville who, heavily influenced by his style, considered him to be 'a cracked archangel'.
In modern times references to Browne can be found in diverse works including-the writings of the American natural historian and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, the theosophist Madame Blavatsky, Eveyln Underhill and the Scottish psychologist R. D. Laing, who opens his The Politics of Experience with a quotation by Browne.
The following quotation taken from a 1923 book review by Virginia Woolf appears on the front page of the website of the major works of Browne. http://www.penelope.uchicago.edu.
Biography and writings
1671 Knighthood
At some point during his visit to Norwich King Charles II visited Browne's home and attended father and son busy dissecting a dolphin ( perhaps a porpoise?) caught upstream on the river Wensum. A Banquet was held in the Civic Hall St. Andrews for the Royal visit. Obliged by his Royal visit to honour a notable local the name of the Mayor of Norwich was proposed to the King for knighthood. The Mayor, however, declined this honour and suggested the name of Browne instead. With his propensity for blushing upon the least cause, the Royalist supporter may well have been crimson-faced upon kneeling to be knighted. Thus, technically speaking, Thomas Browne was only Sir Thomas from 1671 until his death eleven years later in 1682. (It's recorded that the dolphin was duly cooked and sent as steak-cutlets to Newmarket where the King continued upon his Royal tour, visiting the thorough-bred horse-racing town).Literary works
Literary influence
There are several factors which have contributed to Browne's obscurity- the complexity of his ornate and labyrinthine thought and prose- along with his many allusions to obscure authorities are however the primary factors which have resulted in much reliance upon received information upon him.
In the twentieth century the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges is the single-most author who most admired Browne and the complexity of his thought. Borges once confessed-External links
