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The Major Works
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) was a writer of breathtaking range and learning, whose works demonstrate a warm and humorous view of human nature. Religio Medici is a fascinating, witty and intimate exploration of his views on faith and tolerance, while substantial selections from Pseudodoxia Epidemica display Browne's breadth of knowledge and omnivorous curiosity in his account of common errors in a startling array of subjects including sciences, history, literature and philosophy. Hydriotaphia or 'Urn Buriall' is an intriguing meditation on death and the desire for immortality, The Garden of Cyrus considers the mysterious order to be found in nature, and A Letter to a Friend and the aphoristic Christian Morals provide profound spiritual guidance to readers.
558 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1686
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975 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Browne
644 books128 followersSir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English polymath and author of works on various subjects, including science, medicine, religion and esoteric.
Browne's writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural world, influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian enquiry. Browne's literary works are permeated by references to Classical and Biblical sources as well as the idiosyncrasies of his own personality. Although often described as suffering from melancholia, his writings are also characterised by wit and subtle humour, while his literary style is varied, according to genre, resulting in a rich, unique prose which ranges from rough notebook observations to polished Baroque eloquence.
After graduating M.A. from Broadgates Hall, Oxford (1629), he studied medicine privately and worked as an assistant to an Oxford doctor. He then attended the Universities of Montpellier and Padua, and in 1633 he was graduated M.D. at Leiden.
Browne's medical education in Europe also earned him incorporation as M.D. from Oxford, and in 1637 he moved to Norwich, where he lived and practiced medicine until his death in 1682. While Browne seems to have had a keen intellect and was interested in many subjects, his life was outwardly uneventful, although during the Civil War he declared his support for King Charles I and received a knighthood from King Charles II in 1671.
Browne's writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural world, influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian enquiry. Browne's literary works are permeated by references to Classical and Biblical sources as well as the idiosyncrasies of his own personality. Although often described as suffering from melancholia, his writings are also characterised by wit and subtle humour, while his literary style is varied, according to genre, resulting in a rich, unique prose which ranges from rough notebook observations to polished Baroque eloquence.
After graduating M.A. from Broadgates Hall, Oxford (1629), he studied medicine privately and worked as an assistant to an Oxford doctor. He then attended the Universities of Montpellier and Padua, and in 1633 he was graduated M.D. at Leiden.
Browne's medical education in Europe also earned him incorporation as M.D. from Oxford, and in 1637 he moved to Norwich, where he lived and practiced medicine until his death in 1682. While Browne seems to have had a keen intellect and was interested in many subjects, his life was outwardly uneventful, although during the Civil War he declared his support for King Charles I and received a knighthood from King Charles II in 1671.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
June 23, 2012
That it bee, in sublime portione, the richly dressed thoughts of a bearded man of wholesome measure, cantering in idyll but sturdey pace across pages yellowed with the ancient and hallowed wisdom of an age well-marked by the grimm shadows of war and its terrible covenants. A beacone to travellers wearey and benighted by spartan counters and tabletops checkered spic-and-span, the flyckering recrudescence of cherubes and seraphim endeavoring with roseate smiles and beguiling inferences to induce thee to part with thy browe-broughtt cash; a nurturing broth from beastly pastures and sun blessed gardenes wherein the divine goodness dost abide as a fortifying, unguent naturall spirit, a munificent honeyed meade of prodigyous, meandering suppositiones that dost draw all in close to the warmly-kept hearth from where-forth it was served and keeps at baye various lycanthropes, succubi and other foull shaydes seeking sustenance from oure most earthly ichor. Sire Browne, thou supple provider of provender for straw-scraeped soulls and e'en pryck-hooded debauches, unshrived pilgrims suffering from the charcoalled residue orphaned upon the tongue by hoary tyubes of tobacco and enphizzing downpoures of inky cola bedaubed, in cloak and kiss, with aromatic cherries, thou shire-shunst sage whose trecks of substance through the shadowes of dyce-dealing death and the ossified, wrattling priories of dust-draped cobwebs can find aught but the mummified remains of star-flung youthfull ambition drawn fearfully back to such earthen entombment as prevails when the force of gravity bears all the irone weight of time's crushing, levelling, pullverizing fiste.
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And now the whole thing, it be finished. Completed. Put to pasture. Sir Thomas Fucking Browne—what a man! What a spirit! What a probing, phlegmatic, pearlescent personality. I can't help but suspect that, were I, somehow, someway, to manage the time-tossed trick of arriving home to find him sitting, still and sagely and slightly bemused upon my badly-in-need-of-a-steam-wash couch, I might collapse, gratefully and completely, upon said settee and spill forth to the becalming figure the entirety of my pathetic tale of self-woe, to which, upon my imploring cessation, he would dip that refined, sagacious head, reflect at leisure, reach forth a hearth-warm arm and clasp my shoulder in a firm, reassuring manner, smile like an old friend who understands an eternity in but a moment of measure, rise up to a standing position as an oak spreading forth from the acorn in the passing of seconds rather than decades; and then, hefting the sturdy limb that served him as perambulating prop and boon companion, swing it like the Yankee Clipper to crack me, sharply, strongly, assuredly, across the the span of my shins.
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And now the whole thing, it be finished. Completed. Put to pasture. Sir Thomas Fucking Browne—what a man! What a spirit! What a probing, phlegmatic, pearlescent personality. I can't help but suspect that, were I, somehow, someway, to manage the time-tossed trick of arriving home to find him sitting, still and sagely and slightly bemused upon my badly-in-need-of-a-steam-wash couch, I might collapse, gratefully and completely, upon said settee and spill forth to the becalming figure the entirety of my pathetic tale of self-woe, to which, upon my imploring cessation, he would dip that refined, sagacious head, reflect at leisure, reach forth a hearth-warm arm and clasp my shoulder in a firm, reassuring manner, smile like an old friend who understands an eternity in but a moment of measure, rise up to a standing position as an oak spreading forth from the acorn in the passing of seconds rather than decades; and then, hefting the sturdy limb that served him as perambulating prop and boon companion, swing it like the Yankee Clipper to crack me, sharply, strongly, assuredly, across the the span of my shins.
May 20, 2016
Don't listen to me, listen to Virginia Woolf:
From Woolf's Essay "Sir Thomas Browne", a review of the Golden Cockerel edition of the Works of Sir Thomas Browne, published in Times Literary Supplement (1923)
The 'great revival of interest in the work of Sir Thomas Browne' which the publishers discover would, one might have hoped, have justified a less limited edition and a lower price. But why fly in the face of facts? Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are of the salt of the Earth.
For the desire to read, like all the other desires which distract our unhappy souls, is capable of analysis. It may be for good books, for bad books, or for indifferent books. But it is always despotic in its demands, and when it appears, at whatever hour of day or night, we must rise and slink off at its heels, only allowing ourselves to ask, as we desert the responsibilities and privileges of active life, one very important question — Why? Why, that is, this sudden passion for Pepys or Rimbaud? Why turn the house upside down to discover Macaulay's Life and Letters? Why will nothing do except Beckford's Thoughts on Hunting? Why demand first Disraeli's novels and then Dr Bentley's biography? The answer to all these questions, were they forthcoming, would be valuable, for it is when we are thus beckoned and compelled by the force of a book's character as a whole that the reader is most capable of speaking the truth about it if he has the mind. What then is the desire that makes us turn instinctively to Sir Thomas Browne? It is the desire to be steeped in imagination. But that is only a snapshot outline of a state of mind which , even as we stand fumbling at the bookcase, can be developed a little more clearly. Locked up in Urn Burial there is a quality of imagination which distinguishes it completely from its companions — as chance has it — The Old Wives' Tale and A Man of Property. In them the imagination is always occupying itself with particular facts; in him with universal ideas. Their turn will come when we want to look a little more sharply at the passing moment; his when the passing moment is a vanity and a weariness. Then while most fiction, the nine volumes of M. Proust for example, makes us more aware of ourselves as individuals, Urn Burial is a temple which we can only enter by leaving our muddy boots on the threshold. Here it is all a question not of you and me, or him and her, but of human fate and death, of the immensity of the past, of the strangeness which surrounds us on every side. Here, as in no other English prose except the Bible the reader is not left to read alone in his armchair but is made one of a congregation. But here, too, there is a difference; for while the Bible has a gospel to impart, who can be quite sure what Sir Thomas Browne himself believed? The last chapters of Urn Burial beat up on wings of extraordinary sweep and power, yet towards what goal?
Decidedly that is the voice of a strange preacher, of a man filled with doubts and subtleties and suddenly swept away by surprising imaginations. But it is not for the asperities of dogma that we go to Sir Thomas Browne. The words quoted above will revive the old amazement. It is as if from the street we stepped into a cathedral where the organ goes plunging and soaring and indulging in vast and elephantine gambols of awful yet grotesque sublimity. The sound booms and quivers and dies away. But splendour of sound is only one of his attributes. There is, too, his power of bringing the remote and incongruous astonishingly together. A piece of an old boat is cheek by jowl with the funeral pyre of Patroclus. Vast inquiries sweeping in immense circles of ambiguity and doubt are clenched by short sentences rapped out with solemn authority. "Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us." The great names of antiquity march in astonishing procession; flowers and trees, spices and gems load the pages with all kinds of colour and substance. The whole is kept fresh by a perpetual movement of rhythm which gives each sentence its relation to the next and yet is of huge and cumulative effect. A bold and prodigious appetite for the drums and tramplings of language is balanced by the most exquisite sense of mysterious affinities between ghosts and roses. But these dissections are futile enough, and indeed by drawing attention to the technical side of Sir Thomas's art do him some disservice. In books as in people, graces and charms are delightful for the moment but become insipid unless they are felt to be part of some general energy or quality of character. To grasp that is to know them well, but to dally with charms and graces, to appraise them more and more exquisitely, is to be always at the first stage of acquaintance, superficial, polite, and ultimately bored. It is easy to detach the fine passages from their context, but in Urn Burial this character, this quality of the whole, though it expresses itself with all the charm of all the Muses, is yet of a very exalted kind. It is a difficult book to read, it is a book not always to be read with pleasure, and those who get most from it are the well-born souls.
But then, unfortunately, we are not all made entirely of salt. We cannot breathe in these exalted regions for long. We have to admit that we have bodies as well as minds, and the books which cater for both and let one relieve the fatigues of the other are the books that have the longest lease of life. The soul may be exalted in Urn Burial; the body is refreshed in Religio Medici. There we can take our ease and trifle and laugh. There we can indulge in the delicious amusement of feeling, like some psychological spider, from phrase to phrase over the mind and person of Sir Thomas Browne. For the first to talk of himself broaches the subject with immense gusto. I am charitable; I am brave; I am averse from nothing; I am full of feeling for others; I am merciless upon myself; I know six languages, the names of all the constellations, and most of the plants of my country. "For my conversation, it is like the sun's, with all men, and with a friendly aspect to good and bad." ... We smile in the midst of the solemnities of Urn Burial when he remarks, "Afflictions induce callosities". The smile broadens to laughter as we mouth out the splendid pomposities, the astonishing conjectures, of Religio Medici. Yet it is from the crest of some grotesque flight of fancy that he launches himself upon one of those sentences which yawn like a chasm cut in the earth at our feet. "We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us." For the imagination which has gone such strange journeys among the dead is still exalted when it swings its lantern over the obscurities of the soul. He is in the dark to all the world; he has longed for death; there is a hell within him; who knows whether we may not be asleep in this world, and the conceits of life be but dreams? Steeped in such glooms, his imagination falls with a peculiar tenderness upon the common facts of human life. He turns it gradually upon the flowers and insects and grasses at his feet, so as to disturb nothing in the mysterious processes of their existence. There is a halo of wonder round everything that he sees. He that considers the thicket in the head of a teazle "in the house of the solitary maggot may find the Seraglio of Solomon". The tavern music, the Ave Mary bell, the broken urn that the workman has dug out of the field plunge him into the depths of wonder and lead him, as he stands fixed in amazement, to extraordinary flights of speculation as to what we are, where we go, and the meaning of all things. To read Sir Thomas Browne again is always to be filled with astonishment, to remember the surprises, the despondencies, the unlimited curiosities of youth.
From Woolf's Essay "Sir Thomas Browne", a review of the Golden Cockerel edition of the Works of Sir Thomas Browne, published in Times Literary Supplement (1923)
The 'great revival of interest in the work of Sir Thomas Browne' which the publishers discover would, one might have hoped, have justified a less limited edition and a lower price. But why fly in the face of facts? Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are of the salt of the Earth.
For the desire to read, like all the other desires which distract our unhappy souls, is capable of analysis. It may be for good books, for bad books, or for indifferent books. But it is always despotic in its demands, and when it appears, at whatever hour of day or night, we must rise and slink off at its heels, only allowing ourselves to ask, as we desert the responsibilities and privileges of active life, one very important question — Why? Why, that is, this sudden passion for Pepys or Rimbaud? Why turn the house upside down to discover Macaulay's Life and Letters? Why will nothing do except Beckford's Thoughts on Hunting? Why demand first Disraeli's novels and then Dr Bentley's biography? The answer to all these questions, were they forthcoming, would be valuable, for it is when we are thus beckoned and compelled by the force of a book's character as a whole that the reader is most capable of speaking the truth about it if he has the mind. What then is the desire that makes us turn instinctively to Sir Thomas Browne? It is the desire to be steeped in imagination. But that is only a snapshot outline of a state of mind which , even as we stand fumbling at the bookcase, can be developed a little more clearly. Locked up in Urn Burial there is a quality of imagination which distinguishes it completely from its companions — as chance has it — The Old Wives' Tale and A Man of Property. In them the imagination is always occupying itself with particular facts; in him with universal ideas. Their turn will come when we want to look a little more sharply at the passing moment; his when the passing moment is a vanity and a weariness. Then while most fiction, the nine volumes of M. Proust for example, makes us more aware of ourselves as individuals, Urn Burial is a temple which we can only enter by leaving our muddy boots on the threshold. Here it is all a question not of you and me, or him and her, but of human fate and death, of the immensity of the past, of the strangeness which surrounds us on every side. Here, as in no other English prose except the Bible the reader is not left to read alone in his armchair but is made one of a congregation. But here, too, there is a difference; for while the Bible has a gospel to impart, who can be quite sure what Sir Thomas Browne himself believed? The last chapters of Urn Burial beat up on wings of extraordinary sweep and power, yet towards what goal?
But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. ... Darknesse and light divide the course of time, and oblivion snares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us.... The Ægyptian Mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummie is become Merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsoms.
Decidedly that is the voice of a strange preacher, of a man filled with doubts and subtleties and suddenly swept away by surprising imaginations. But it is not for the asperities of dogma that we go to Sir Thomas Browne. The words quoted above will revive the old amazement. It is as if from the street we stepped into a cathedral where the organ goes plunging and soaring and indulging in vast and elephantine gambols of awful yet grotesque sublimity. The sound booms and quivers and dies away. But splendour of sound is only one of his attributes. There is, too, his power of bringing the remote and incongruous astonishingly together. A piece of an old boat is cheek by jowl with the funeral pyre of Patroclus. Vast inquiries sweeping in immense circles of ambiguity and doubt are clenched by short sentences rapped out with solemn authority. "Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us." The great names of antiquity march in astonishing procession; flowers and trees, spices and gems load the pages with all kinds of colour and substance. The whole is kept fresh by a perpetual movement of rhythm which gives each sentence its relation to the next and yet is of huge and cumulative effect. A bold and prodigious appetite for the drums and tramplings of language is balanced by the most exquisite sense of mysterious affinities between ghosts and roses. But these dissections are futile enough, and indeed by drawing attention to the technical side of Sir Thomas's art do him some disservice. In books as in people, graces and charms are delightful for the moment but become insipid unless they are felt to be part of some general energy or quality of character. To grasp that is to know them well, but to dally with charms and graces, to appraise them more and more exquisitely, is to be always at the first stage of acquaintance, superficial, polite, and ultimately bored. It is easy to detach the fine passages from their context, but in Urn Burial this character, this quality of the whole, though it expresses itself with all the charm of all the Muses, is yet of a very exalted kind. It is a difficult book to read, it is a book not always to be read with pleasure, and those who get most from it are the well-born souls.
But then, unfortunately, we are not all made entirely of salt. We cannot breathe in these exalted regions for long. We have to admit that we have bodies as well as minds, and the books which cater for both and let one relieve the fatigues of the other are the books that have the longest lease of life. The soul may be exalted in Urn Burial; the body is refreshed in Religio Medici. There we can take our ease and trifle and laugh. There we can indulge in the delicious amusement of feeling, like some psychological spider, from phrase to phrase over the mind and person of Sir Thomas Browne. For the first to talk of himself broaches the subject with immense gusto. I am charitable; I am brave; I am averse from nothing; I am full of feeling for others; I am merciless upon myself; I know six languages, the names of all the constellations, and most of the plants of my country. "For my conversation, it is like the sun's, with all men, and with a friendly aspect to good and bad." ... We smile in the midst of the solemnities of Urn Burial when he remarks, "Afflictions induce callosities". The smile broadens to laughter as we mouth out the splendid pomposities, the astonishing conjectures, of Religio Medici. Yet it is from the crest of some grotesque flight of fancy that he launches himself upon one of those sentences which yawn like a chasm cut in the earth at our feet. "We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us." For the imagination which has gone such strange journeys among the dead is still exalted when it swings its lantern over the obscurities of the soul. He is in the dark to all the world; he has longed for death; there is a hell within him; who knows whether we may not be asleep in this world, and the conceits of life be but dreams? Steeped in such glooms, his imagination falls with a peculiar tenderness upon the common facts of human life. He turns it gradually upon the flowers and insects and grasses at his feet, so as to disturb nothing in the mysterious processes of their existence. There is a halo of wonder round everything that he sees. He that considers the thicket in the head of a teazle "in the house of the solitary maggot may find the Seraglio of Solomon". The tavern music, the Ave Mary bell, the broken urn that the workman has dug out of the field plunge him into the depths of wonder and lead him, as he stands fixed in amazement, to extraordinary flights of speculation as to what we are, where we go, and the meaning of all things. To read Sir Thomas Browne again is always to be filled with astonishment, to remember the surprises, the despondencies, the unlimited curiosities of youth.
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March 25, 2009No one reads Thomas Browne anymore, which is unfortunate, because his fan club includes some major literary heroes of mine... Borges, Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald, Tony Kushner... and now me. These essays are extremely weird. They express a sort of pre-Enlightenment sensibility, one that comes from a "man of learning" in an era before learning was divided up so rigorously. And nothing will make you feel more cosmically irrelevant as the last several pages of "Hydriotaphia."
January 5, 2011
Probably one of my 10 favorite books, my bible. The erudition, the winding, labyrinthine prose... but most of all, his touchingly unshakable faith in God. This last part is the reason why a lot of "smart" elites are turned off of Browne, and read him only for style. It's one of the best reasons to read Browne in this day, to me.
October 4, 2024
Not only is Browne eccentric in the most delightful way, he is one of the most eloquent writers of English prose. How can one help but admire a sentence like this? “The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.” Sublime.
February 9, 2017
This is a hard book to rate - I can see why many people find it brilliant and a source of inspiration. Personally, I just found it a little too much like hard work. If you are an aficionado of literature of this era and used to this style of writing you may well love it. I like some of the slightly bizarre topics he writes about, and I like his obvious erudition and wide ranging knowledge, some passages I loved, but I did not have the patience to really get into much of it. Hence it has taken me ages to read. This probably says as much about me as Browne - but I position this as a book for the specialist, the patient or the very keen.
As a comparison I found Montaigne far easier and more enjoyable, even though he was writing a century earlier. Whether this is simply because I read that in translation and Browne is in 16th century English I don't know, but suspect that is part of the issue.
As a comparison I found Montaigne far easier and more enjoyable, even though he was writing a century earlier. Whether this is simply because I read that in translation and Browne is in 16th century English I don't know, but suspect that is part of the issue.
August 27, 2012
Lovely, intricate prose. And of course "Urn Burial" is brilliant. I read this for the language--- read it because Sebald and Borges recommnded Browne, because E.R. Eddison and Jacob Bronowski quoted from Browne. Never mind the 17th-c. theological arguments. Read it for the sheer beauty of the language.
December 17, 2011
As far as I'm concerned, THE master of 17th century English prose par excellance, the rhetorical descendent of Sidney and Spenser. I just really love it. Highlights include, of course, 'Hydriotaphia' and his discourses on elephants and badgers.
July 25, 2020
This is a pretty great collection of works that is criminally overlooked. I only had heard about Browne from W.G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn". Sebald talks a lot about Browne's "Urne Burial" which is probably the crown jewel of this collection but what I didn't expect was just how good the rest of the less well known works are. "Religio Medici" was probably my favorite overall but "The Garden of Cyrus" and "Christian Morals" were very powerful as well. Browne feels a lot like Bacon except reading Bacon's prose feels like a massive chore whereas Browne's flows elegantly and naturally.
November 2, 2015
It is hard work for me to understand much of what Sir Thomas wrote and, without the internet, I'm not sure the numerous references and footnotes (many in Greek!) wouldn't have overwhelmed me.
It has been worth the effort - I enjoy being transported in time to the C17 and into the quirkily stimulating company of this brilliant, exploring mind. The beautifully ornate, individual, rhythmically intoxicating prose never stales.
It has been worth the effort - I enjoy being transported in time to the C17 and into the quirkily stimulating company of this brilliant, exploring mind. The beautifully ornate, individual, rhythmically intoxicating prose never stales.
December 10, 2021
Crazy in the way that Anatomy of Melancholy is crazy, sort of? Reminded a bit of Pliny's Natural History, an early modern Wikipedia to Pliny's ancient Wikipedia, where every line needs a few "[citation needed]" sprinkled throughout. Browne covers a variety of topics, at least, but beyond the curiosity of how he presents his mostly-factually-incorrect ideas, there's not too much actual content here.
October 7, 2022
Like the fifth and concluding act of an Elizabethan play or, more precisely, like the geometric five which is produced as a result of the combination of man and woman, Thomas Browne prophesied that America would be the seat of the fifth and final empire of human civilization. Just having read Noam Chomsky's book "Who Rules the World?" I would say Browne's prediction may easily become true.
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October 21, 2025this is like logodaedalus lol after me getting ODd on his illuminated texts since 2024
so he cribd his style from browne, William langland, stirner and groys.
he raped nick land using bardaisan
and reza with dr Johnson.
it would've been glorious to see him raping people using junger or Celine man
but I recall him mindraping a foid with Edward de vere flashcard image edit style tweets using jonson and waugh and cardanos works.
I would love to be such a poster who rapes people w veblen hudson and mostly donne like metaphysical terrorist & not neoplatonist bullshit now he gets more soy as he ages which ofc makes it difficult to champion him but still hes been glorious
would it been not glorious if he hath named himself Thomas browne groyper and kantbot doctor johnson groyper and didn't trooned out publicly what an alternative gemmy timeline bannon as cromwell et al indeed it would've been true heavensite. alas wee...... it's zogworld we live in
so he cribd his style from browne, William langland, stirner and groys.
he raped nick land using bardaisan
and reza with dr Johnson.
it would've been glorious to see him raping people using junger or Celine man
but I recall him mindraping a foid with Edward de vere flashcard image edit style tweets using jonson and waugh and cardanos works.
I would love to be such a poster who rapes people w veblen hudson and mostly donne like metaphysical terrorist & not neoplatonist bullshit now he gets more soy as he ages which ofc makes it difficult to champion him but still hes been glorious
would it been not glorious if he hath named himself Thomas browne groyper and kantbot doctor johnson groyper and didn't trooned out publicly what an alternative gemmy timeline bannon as cromwell et al indeed it would've been true heavensite. alas wee...... it's zogworld we live in
February 18, 2016
Simply the best paperback edition of the major works !
Constantine Patrides 1977 edition of the major works of Sir T.B. remains by far the best available edition of the 17th century physician-philosopher's writings. Penguin books term this edition as 'a low print edition', meaning, it's not so cheap but has been permanently available for the last 35 years. Testimony indeed to it being a slow burner.
Not only does this edition include an introduction of considerable insight and sympathy, but also C.A. Patrides in his 'Above Atlas his shoulders' essay, acknowledges Frank Huntley's 1962 critical book which emphasised the intimate relationship between the 1658 diptych discourses. Likewise C.A. Patrides has read up on his subject enough to include mention of Peter Green's 1959 speculation on the reason why passages of Browne's prose are unlike any other in the 17th c. may have been due to his occasional dipping into the medicine cabinet - Crucially C.A. Patrides acknowledges the vital role which Hermeticism, Neoplatonism and Neopythagorean thought played upon Browne's spirituality and creativity.
In addition to extensive foot-notes this 1977 edition includes generous chunks of 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica', Browne's major work of scientific journalism. It also includes BOTH of the 1658 diptych discourses in sequence to each other (in my 1658 edition the two discourses are appended to Pseudodoxia in this running sequence, first, both dedicatory epistles to each respective discourse, then Urn-Burial, then Garden of Cyrus).
This edition also includes the minor works, the medical-flavoured 'A Letter to a Friend', the tract On Dreams and Samuel Johnson's biography of Browne, itself including one of the few contemporary accounts of Browne. There's also a useful glossary of ancient names and a comprehensive bibliography.
Highly recommended edition, not least for still being the only edition which gives the reader both 1658 discourses, as intended by Browne, not just Urn-Burial, which may be the reverse of the diptych, but also the obverse of the exquisite baroque coin minted by Browne's dalian imagination and art.
Constantine Patrides 1977 edition of the major works of Sir T.B. remains by far the best available edition of the 17th century physician-philosopher's writings. Penguin books term this edition as 'a low print edition', meaning, it's not so cheap but has been permanently available for the last 35 years. Testimony indeed to it being a slow burner.
Not only does this edition include an introduction of considerable insight and sympathy, but also C.A. Patrides in his 'Above Atlas his shoulders' essay, acknowledges Frank Huntley's 1962 critical book which emphasised the intimate relationship between the 1658 diptych discourses. Likewise C.A. Patrides has read up on his subject enough to include mention of Peter Green's 1959 speculation on the reason why passages of Browne's prose are unlike any other in the 17th c. may have been due to his occasional dipping into the medicine cabinet - Crucially C.A. Patrides acknowledges the vital role which Hermeticism, Neoplatonism and Neopythagorean thought played upon Browne's spirituality and creativity.
In addition to extensive foot-notes this 1977 edition includes generous chunks of 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica', Browne's major work of scientific journalism. It also includes BOTH of the 1658 diptych discourses in sequence to each other (in my 1658 edition the two discourses are appended to Pseudodoxia in this running sequence, first, both dedicatory epistles to each respective discourse, then Urn-Burial, then Garden of Cyrus).
This edition also includes the minor works, the medical-flavoured 'A Letter to a Friend', the tract On Dreams and Samuel Johnson's biography of Browne, itself including one of the few contemporary accounts of Browne. There's also a useful glossary of ancient names and a comprehensive bibliography.
Highly recommended edition, not least for still being the only edition which gives the reader both 1658 discourses, as intended by Browne, not just Urn-Burial, which may be the reverse of the diptych, but also the obverse of the exquisite baroque coin minted by Browne's dalian imagination and art.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews