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In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century's Most Inquiring Mind
The extraordinary life and ideas of one of the greatest—and most neglected—minds in history.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure like Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind.
Mixing botany, etymology, medicine, and literary history, Aldersey-Williams journeys in his hero's footsteps to introduce us to witches, zealots, natural wonders, and fabulous creatures of Browne's time and ours. We meet Browne the master prose stylist, responsible for introducing hundreds of words into English, including electricity, hallucination, and suicide. Aldersey-Williams reveals how Browne’s preoccupations—how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs, what to make of order in nature, how to unite science and religion—are relevant today.
In Search of Sir Thomas Browne is more than just a biography—it is a cabinet of wonders and an argument that Browne, standing at the very gates of modern science, remains an inquiring mind for our own time. As Stephen Greenblatt has written, Browne is "unnervingly one of our most adventurous contemporaries."
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure like Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind.
Mixing botany, etymology, medicine, and literary history, Aldersey-Williams journeys in his hero's footsteps to introduce us to witches, zealots, natural wonders, and fabulous creatures of Browne's time and ours. We meet Browne the master prose stylist, responsible for introducing hundreds of words into English, including electricity, hallucination, and suicide. Aldersey-Williams reveals how Browne’s preoccupations—how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs, what to make of order in nature, how to unite science and religion—are relevant today.
In Search of Sir Thomas Browne is more than just a biography—it is a cabinet of wonders and an argument that Browne, standing at the very gates of modern science, remains an inquiring mind for our own time. As Stephen Greenblatt has written, Browne is "unnervingly one of our most adventurous contemporaries."
352 pages, Hardcover
Published June 15, 2015
16 people are currently reading
496 people want to read
About the author
Hugh Aldersey-Williams
22 books84 followersI was born in London in 1959, the same year C.P. Snow gave his infamous ‘two cultures’ lecture about the apparently eternal divide in Britain between the arts and sciences. Perhaps this is where it all begins. Forced to choose one or the other at school and university, I chose the latter, gaining an MA in natural sciences from Cambridge.
By graduation, I was aware of a latent interest in the arts, particularly in architecture and design, and was seeking ways to satisfy all these urges in something resembling a career. Journalism seemed the obvious answer, and after a string of increasingly disastrous editorial positions on technical magazines, I went freelance in 1986 and was able at last to write about what really interested me in newspapers and magazines in all these fields.
Having an American mother and an English father makes me, as it says on jars of honey, ‘the produce of more than one country’, and has left me with a curiosity about matters of national identity. Living in the United States gave me the opportunity to write my first book, using my semi-detachment from the culture to identify a renaissance in contemporary American design. Its success led to a larger-scale examination of design and national cultures as well as a number other design books and a five-year stint as design critic of the New Statesman.
Now, the science was losing out. Over-compensating perhaps, I wrote an entire book about a single molecule—albeit an exceptionally novel and beautiful one, called buckminsterfullerene. Here at last science and design began to merge. My projects since then have continued to explore science, design, architecture, national identity and other themes in books and exhibitions.
I am a member of the Society of Authors and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. I live in Norfolk and London with my wife Moira, son Sam, and two Maine coon cats.
By graduation, I was aware of a latent interest in the arts, particularly in architecture and design, and was seeking ways to satisfy all these urges in something resembling a career. Journalism seemed the obvious answer, and after a string of increasingly disastrous editorial positions on technical magazines, I went freelance in 1986 and was able at last to write about what really interested me in newspapers and magazines in all these fields.
Having an American mother and an English father makes me, as it says on jars of honey, ‘the produce of more than one country’, and has left me with a curiosity about matters of national identity. Living in the United States gave me the opportunity to write my first book, using my semi-detachment from the culture to identify a renaissance in contemporary American design. Its success led to a larger-scale examination of design and national cultures as well as a number other design books and a five-year stint as design critic of the New Statesman.
Now, the science was losing out. Over-compensating perhaps, I wrote an entire book about a single molecule—albeit an exceptionally novel and beautiful one, called buckminsterfullerene. Here at last science and design began to merge. My projects since then have continued to explore science, design, architecture, national identity and other themes in books and exhibitions.
I am a member of the Society of Authors and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. I live in Norfolk and London with my wife Moira, son Sam, and two Maine coon cats.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
November 2, 2016
The author's "conversation" with Sir Thomas Browne cost this a star.
June 28, 2015
I found this a weird book. I noticed on Amazon that the book has another title, in England I assume. It is "The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century" and this is a lot truer to Aldersey-William's odd project. I guess he's trying to make Browne "relevant" to us but I don't see why he has to or should. I found his constant trips to today and to his own life just annoying. There's more to relevance than "how he applies to today's experience gardening" (etc.) anyway. Frankly, I didn't care that Aldersey-Williams hates gardening. I would have liked more Browne and less Aldersey-Williams.
Read
May 18, 2015Sometimes, Aldersey-Williams' meditation almost captures the whimsy, wonder and strangeness of the proto-scientist and wordsmith Thomas Browne, one of the greatest prose stylists in English history; elsewhere he can feel rather more Pooterish. I was particularly maddened by the way in which he blithely asserts that science has nothing to worry about so why can't Richard Dawkins just calm down, dears - yet elsewhere is happy to harrumph, without supporting evidence, that "To be absorbed in a book is fast becoming another questionable activity". Really? I know London is atypical of the nation, let alone the world, but had not thought the Tube was quite such a haven for open deviancy as that would suggest.
Still, Browne can drive me up the wall too - Aldersey-Williams doesn't address the degree to which Religio Medici reads like trolling - and if this book sends one reader back to those fabulous original texts, then it's done more good than most people ever will.
Still, Browne can drive me up the wall too - Aldersey-Williams doesn't address the degree to which Religio Medici reads like trolling - and if this book sends one reader back to those fabulous original texts, then it's done more good than most people ever will.
July 10, 2020
I often find myself through biography.
Not IN a bio. But *through* it.
It's not just that certain people fascinate me--thus motivating me to read about their lives and times. Rather, I sometimes have a strong need to co-perform someone else's life.
This doesn't make sense at all, does it? Maybe I'm being too abstract.
The opening of this book starts with the author, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, riding his bike--following the route Thomas Browne took when returning to his Norfolk home one winter night after having spent some time in London. Along the way, he attempts to feel out the thoughts, needs and experiences of the long-dead, 17th-century scientist.
This is what I mean: I find some historical figures so moving that I need to ACTUALLY MOVE along the same paths, through the same halls, down the same meandering thought patterns in order to simultaneously discover things about their lives and my own.
This kind of participatory biography is great at times, but let's be honest, can quickly spiral into solipsism or, worse, narcissism. When the figure simply becomes a vehicle for self-diagnosis, I get seriously annoyed.
The best in the genre (is it a genre?) is Sarah Vowell. She purposefully digs into things with a faultless humor; then delivers pithy conclusions about both the historical events she's investigating and her own life/times. Likewise, though less humorous, Aldersey-Williams uses his steady, respectful and interesting hand to co-perform his subject.
At one point, the author imagines a statue of Browne descending from its plinth (a new word I learned!) to have a serious debate about the relative advantages of religion and science. As a dialogue, it feels weird at first. But then, at some point, I realize what's happening. Aldersey-Williams is so invested--so in literary love--with Browne that perhaps the most truthful way he can convey both historical and contemporary experience (history and consequences; context and implication) is to have them speak.
An homage to the dialogues of Plato, perhaps, in which through dramatic rendering, Socrates gained a voice, immortalized despite it not being entirely true. The scene was enthralling.
In the end I learned a lot about Thomas Browne and a little about the biographer. Yet, with regards to the latter, each chapter ends with him offering morals--lessons to be learned. They sometimes land; they sometimes feel meandering. But the structural concept is refreshing nonetheless.
Not IN a bio. But *through* it.
It's not just that certain people fascinate me--thus motivating me to read about their lives and times. Rather, I sometimes have a strong need to co-perform someone else's life.
This doesn't make sense at all, does it? Maybe I'm being too abstract.
The opening of this book starts with the author, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, riding his bike--following the route Thomas Browne took when returning to his Norfolk home one winter night after having spent some time in London. Along the way, he attempts to feel out the thoughts, needs and experiences of the long-dead, 17th-century scientist.
This is what I mean: I find some historical figures so moving that I need to ACTUALLY MOVE along the same paths, through the same halls, down the same meandering thought patterns in order to simultaneously discover things about their lives and my own.
This kind of participatory biography is great at times, but let's be honest, can quickly spiral into solipsism or, worse, narcissism. When the figure simply becomes a vehicle for self-diagnosis, I get seriously annoyed.
The best in the genre (is it a genre?) is Sarah Vowell. She purposefully digs into things with a faultless humor; then delivers pithy conclusions about both the historical events she's investigating and her own life/times. Likewise, though less humorous, Aldersey-Williams uses his steady, respectful and interesting hand to co-perform his subject.
At one point, the author imagines a statue of Browne descending from its plinth (a new word I learned!) to have a serious debate about the relative advantages of religion and science. As a dialogue, it feels weird at first. But then, at some point, I realize what's happening. Aldersey-Williams is so invested--so in literary love--with Browne that perhaps the most truthful way he can convey both historical and contemporary experience (history and consequences; context and implication) is to have them speak.
An homage to the dialogues of Plato, perhaps, in which through dramatic rendering, Socrates gained a voice, immortalized despite it not being entirely true. The scene was enthralling.
In the end I learned a lot about Thomas Browne and a little about the biographer. Yet, with regards to the latter, each chapter ends with him offering morals--lessons to be learned. They sometimes land; they sometimes feel meandering. But the structural concept is refreshing nonetheless.
October 29, 2019
This an enjoyable book. The first half is more interesting than the second, mainly because the author indulges increasingly in his own opinions and spends less time on comparing Sir Thomas Browne, as a thinker, with modern attitudes. For some reason, many reviews on Goodreads fault this book for not being a very good biography-- such is entirely unfair and misdirected as the author never sets out to write a chronological life of Browne. At times, the book is Sternian rather than Brownian, with some wonderful pieces of whimsy and eccentricity. Aldersey-Williams makes a good case for Browne as a forgotten worthy, as a tolerant thinker, as an inventor of language, and developer of scientific methodology. Long live Sir Thomas Browne and his maze-like sentences and architectural paragraphs!
August 18, 2015
A disappointment, I’m afraid. It’s not really a book about Browne (or even about his “adventures in the 21st century,” as the title of the British edition suggests) but a book about the author’s enthusiasm for Browne. There are a few points of interest. The author does a fair job of making the case that Browne should be remembered for his scientific curiosity as well as his prose, and the chapter on the infamous witch trial is worth reading. But overall the book is sloppily constructed and tiresome. It’s a portrait of Aldersley-Williams’s fandom more than it is a portrait of Browne in any meaningful way.
August 14, 2015
Very pontificating with no enlightenment. Tedious and self aggrandizing.
July 2, 2016
I first came across this book in an interview that the author gave in which he said about the readers of popular science: 'There’s no point in making ultra-subtle points about how science is done, you have to bang them over the head with it.' I thought this was an unfair comment and suggested I'd give his books a miss. The author pointed out this was petty, so I've taken the plunge into Sir Thomas Browne, and I'm glad I did - though it isn't a book that worked all the way through for me.
Browne was a seventeenth century man with a strong interest in science in the widest medieval sense of being 'knowledge of the world'. It's equally possible to regard him as a dilettante or someone with an enormous appetite for finding things out, who was prepared to question some of the beliefs of his day to an unusual degree.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams comes close to a kind of hero worship of the man, admiring his writing style, his thoughtfulness about the world around him, and his ability to challenge false beliefs without any of the nastiness that seems common in the approach of Richard Dawkins and others today. This is put across to us in an interesting style, which covers major areas that Browne considered, such as medicine, animals, plants and science, but also meanders pleasantly around topics, sometimes giving us Aldersey-Williams' modern attempt to follow up Browne's often faint trails, and even at one point adopting the ancient style of a conversation with the dead man.
I'll be honest, I struggle to agree with Aldersey-Williams' enthusiasm for Browne's writing, which to the modern eye seems pompous and overblown. The view you take can by identified from your reaction to a quotation that the author gives as an 'especially fine paragraph.' In it, Browne, giving proverb-like advice, is telling the reader to seize the day. But what he says is:
Since thou hast an alarum in thy Breast, which tells thee thou hast a Living Spirit in thee above two thousand times in an hour; dull not away thy Days in slothful supinity & the tediousness of doing nothing. To strenuous Minds there is an inquietude in over quietness, and no laboriousness in labour; and to tread a mile after the slow pace of a Snail, or the heavy measures of the Lazy of Brazilia, were a most tiring Pennance, and worse than a Race of some furlongs at the Olympicks.
There's no doubt Browne was not a man who liked to use five words where 20 would do, or short ones where he could go polysyllabic. (He was, indeed, a great coiner of new words, including electricity, medical and precarious.) While I can see there is something dramatic in Browne's style, and some would love it, it's not one that I can find anything but hard work to read.
The sections of the book itself were very variable. The two on animals and plants, which primarily reflected Browne's descriptions of what he met in his native Norfolk, were too much collections of descriptions and suffered accordingly, but others were far more interesting, particularly when Aldersey-Williams compares Browne's attitudes to scepticism to the modern day heavy scientific approach. The author is rightly down on the unpleasantly personal and belittling approach that Dawkins takes to adversaries, though he is also unnecessarily negative about Simon Singh, who I have never found to make his points in a heavy preaching style.
In many ways I'm all in favour of Browne's more amenable attitude, to argue without insult in a gentlemanly way, and I applaud Aldersey-Williams' support for it. (Not one, I suspect, that would have been popular with Newton.) I think the author goes too far towards the 'it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere' point of view, but there is not doubt that we would encourage more people to take a positive view of science and scientists if some of the discipline's representatives weren't so ferocious in their dogma.
All in all, it's interesting to find out more about this little remembered man. He might not have done much to further science, but his interest in the world around him can feel infectious across the centuries, and more of his supportive, positive approach would be a welcome addition to the skeptical (with a K) movement. At its best, Aldersey-Williams' writing is enjoyable and thoughtful, though the interest did not remain consistent throughout. The result might not have been a total success, but it is refreshing to see a book in which the author tries to do something different.
Browne was a seventeenth century man with a strong interest in science in the widest medieval sense of being 'knowledge of the world'. It's equally possible to regard him as a dilettante or someone with an enormous appetite for finding things out, who was prepared to question some of the beliefs of his day to an unusual degree.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams comes close to a kind of hero worship of the man, admiring his writing style, his thoughtfulness about the world around him, and his ability to challenge false beliefs without any of the nastiness that seems common in the approach of Richard Dawkins and others today. This is put across to us in an interesting style, which covers major areas that Browne considered, such as medicine, animals, plants and science, but also meanders pleasantly around topics, sometimes giving us Aldersey-Williams' modern attempt to follow up Browne's often faint trails, and even at one point adopting the ancient style of a conversation with the dead man.
I'll be honest, I struggle to agree with Aldersey-Williams' enthusiasm for Browne's writing, which to the modern eye seems pompous and overblown. The view you take can by identified from your reaction to a quotation that the author gives as an 'especially fine paragraph.' In it, Browne, giving proverb-like advice, is telling the reader to seize the day. But what he says is:
Since thou hast an alarum in thy Breast, which tells thee thou hast a Living Spirit in thee above two thousand times in an hour; dull not away thy Days in slothful supinity & the tediousness of doing nothing. To strenuous Minds there is an inquietude in over quietness, and no laboriousness in labour; and to tread a mile after the slow pace of a Snail, or the heavy measures of the Lazy of Brazilia, were a most tiring Pennance, and worse than a Race of some furlongs at the Olympicks.
There's no doubt Browne was not a man who liked to use five words where 20 would do, or short ones where he could go polysyllabic. (He was, indeed, a great coiner of new words, including electricity, medical and precarious.) While I can see there is something dramatic in Browne's style, and some would love it, it's not one that I can find anything but hard work to read.
The sections of the book itself were very variable. The two on animals and plants, which primarily reflected Browne's descriptions of what he met in his native Norfolk, were too much collections of descriptions and suffered accordingly, but others were far more interesting, particularly when Aldersey-Williams compares Browne's attitudes to scepticism to the modern day heavy scientific approach. The author is rightly down on the unpleasantly personal and belittling approach that Dawkins takes to adversaries, though he is also unnecessarily negative about Simon Singh, who I have never found to make his points in a heavy preaching style.
In many ways I'm all in favour of Browne's more amenable attitude, to argue without insult in a gentlemanly way, and I applaud Aldersey-Williams' support for it. (Not one, I suspect, that would have been popular with Newton.) I think the author goes too far towards the 'it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere' point of view, but there is not doubt that we would encourage more people to take a positive view of science and scientists if some of the discipline's representatives weren't so ferocious in their dogma.
All in all, it's interesting to find out more about this little remembered man. He might not have done much to further science, but his interest in the world around him can feel infectious across the centuries, and more of his supportive, positive approach would be a welcome addition to the skeptical (with a K) movement. At its best, Aldersey-Williams' writing is enjoyable and thoughtful, though the interest did not remain consistent throughout. The result might not have been a total success, but it is refreshing to see a book in which the author tries to do something different.
March 14, 2016
In short, needs more adventures of Sir Thomas Browne, less ramblings of Hugh Aldersey-Williams.
A patchy book. First half, focused on Browne and his works, much better than the second, in which the author appears to run out of things to say about his subject, so spends many pages blathering about the clash of science and religion and politics in the present day, all without saying much that hasn't been said before, more engagingly, elsewhere. A shame - really wanted to love this, but it didn't manage to live up to the promise.
A patchy book. First half, focused on Browne and his works, much better than the second, in which the author appears to run out of things to say about his subject, so spends many pages blathering about the clash of science and religion and politics in the present day, all without saying much that hasn't been said before, more engagingly, elsewhere. A shame - really wanted to love this, but it didn't manage to live up to the promise.
July 16, 2016
Someone commented about this book saying its not a biography of sir brown but a book about the authors enthusiasm for sir brown
February 8, 2016
Too much of the author and not enough Thomas Browne.
Read
May 17, 2016Vague and rambling.
October 26, 2017
I enjoyed learning about Thomas Browne but I wish Aldersey-Williams had not interpolated himself and his own beliefs in the narrative so frequently.
March 28, 2024
It's a tribute to Thomas Browne's multifariousness that this book is filled with his writings and ideas and yet so much is missing. Here he is depicted as a proto-scientist with one foot in the middle ages and one in modernity. His curiosity and skepticism are on full show, but I miss the musical prose and wry humor.
The paucity of information regarding Browne's life, and the wide scope and limited quantity of his writings are a challenge to any author trying to present a complete picture of this fascinating figure. We have here a very English approach that serves to introduce Browne, but doesn't go quite deep enough to send one to his books, where the real gold lies!
The paucity of information regarding Browne's life, and the wide scope and limited quantity of his writings are a challenge to any author trying to present a complete picture of this fascinating figure. We have here a very English approach that serves to introduce Browne, but doesn't go quite deep enough to send one to his books, where the real gold lies!
July 28, 2016
This starts out as a relatively interesting overview of the life and times of Thomas Browne. I say 'relatively' because my interest was sustained chiefly by the fact that I had read some of Browne's work before embarking on this volume; had I not done so, I am not sure I would have been able to see what was fascinating enough about him to justify a book of this kind. As the author gets into his stride, the passages with Browne as their chief subject become fewer and further between. Instead, the reader is treated to a series of largely rather unstructured and not particularly insightful discussions of broader issues tangentially related to Browne's own work. In short, the author takes the opportunity to outline some of his own ideas about subjects like the relationship between religion and science or the evolving nature of jurisprudence. There is little which counts as either original or interesting in these passages, with the exception of one rather troubling passage dealing with the notion of punishment for paedophillic behaviour, which the author seems to feel is misguided. In summary, if you were hoping for a work about Browne, you will probably be disappointed.
December 31, 2016
Sir Thomas Browne is an exceptional character that should be more widely known and appreciated.
A curious mind struggling between science and Christian religion in a time (mid-17th century) when the latter was exerting a strong control over people's lives and beliefs and the former was emerging as a new way of explaining the mysteries of the natural world.
The book is very well written. Aldersey-Williams entertains the reader by tackling pressing topics (such as religion, the role of science in society, curiosity and superstitions) and more mundane ones (such as how to deal with a garden and collectible paraphernalia) with constant references to the popular thinking in Browne's time and contrasted with Browne's own opinions.
It is very appropriate and nice to realise that the author tries to write with a style that is sometimes akin to that of Sir Browne, which is not less beautiful than the one found in the classical British literature of that time.
A curious mind struggling between science and Christian religion in a time (mid-17th century) when the latter was exerting a strong control over people's lives and beliefs and the former was emerging as a new way of explaining the mysteries of the natural world.
The book is very well written. Aldersey-Williams entertains the reader by tackling pressing topics (such as religion, the role of science in society, curiosity and superstitions) and more mundane ones (such as how to deal with a garden and collectible paraphernalia) with constant references to the popular thinking in Browne's time and contrasted with Browne's own opinions.
It is very appropriate and nice to realise that the author tries to write with a style that is sometimes akin to that of Sir Browne, which is not less beautiful than the one found in the classical British literature of that time.
June 28, 2016
Didn't finish because, after being intrigued by the (hugely fascinating) subject and the framing as a How To Live-style study of Browne, I became frustrated with the blandly "pop science" approach that surfaced the deeper I went. Stick to Sarah Bakewell's masterful How To Live (which is about Montaigne) or even Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve and, if you're interested in Browne, try WG Sebald's astonishing The Rings of Saturn and, indeed, Browne's own essays, a few of which were recently republished by NYRB Classics with an introduction by Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff.
October 26, 2019
Sir Thomas Browne provides the inspiration for a series of discursive riffs by the author. For this reason, the 'search' does not really go far. Although there is stuff about witches and the world-view of the time, somehow things like climate change manage to be part of the picture. Not enough history, too much navel gazing for this reader.
March 25, 2018
I had never heard of Sir Thomas Browne before reading this book, and I'm sorry for that. In a kind of a way, and for his day, he embodied the combined worldviews of both Dana Scully and Fox Mulder - approaching everything with wonder and skepticism at once, telling the story of the world around him and inventing words to do it, if there were none that would do. He invented 784 words!
Hallucination, expectoration, medical - also stingy, antediluvian (one of the most delightful words I know!) ferocious, deleterious - cryptography... all words that didn't exist before Browne made them. What a grab-bag!
He wrote about religion, archaeology, plants, melancholy. He was a Christian - in a time when NOT to have religious beliefs, as Aldersey-Williams points out, would be akin to rejecting technology today - and a scientist, and he married the two with thoughtfulness and reason.
I enjoyed this book a lot. Aldersey-Williams has no illusions about the man, he presents both what is admirable and what is not, but he does it both from the vantage of our time and also in the context of the 16th century that Browne inhabited. He divides the book into Browne's various subjects - Physic, Plant, Animals, Objects - which may seem like odd and very general headings, but it works. At one point he has a conversation with Browne's statue, which obligingly climbs down off its plinth and walks round his town with him, something which was both daring and well done. He pulls no punches - time has moved on, things that you thought could never be proven have been - and lets Browne answer with wisdom and the humor of a man removed by time, age and the vantage of the dead (who surely know everything in the end), as one can imagine he would have.
I'll be looking up Browne's writings. A man who investigates the phenomena of rainbows scientifically and after his analysis concludes, "Very beautiful is the Rain-bow still" is a man with his head and his heart in the right place.
Hallucination, expectoration, medical - also stingy, antediluvian (one of the most delightful words I know!) ferocious, deleterious - cryptography... all words that didn't exist before Browne made them. What a grab-bag!
He wrote about religion, archaeology, plants, melancholy. He was a Christian - in a time when NOT to have religious beliefs, as Aldersey-Williams points out, would be akin to rejecting technology today - and a scientist, and he married the two with thoughtfulness and reason.
I enjoyed this book a lot. Aldersey-Williams has no illusions about the man, he presents both what is admirable and what is not, but he does it both from the vantage of our time and also in the context of the 16th century that Browne inhabited. He divides the book into Browne's various subjects - Physic, Plant, Animals, Objects - which may seem like odd and very general headings, but it works. At one point he has a conversation with Browne's statue, which obligingly climbs down off its plinth and walks round his town with him, something which was both daring and well done. He pulls no punches - time has moved on, things that you thought could never be proven have been - and lets Browne answer with wisdom and the humor of a man removed by time, age and the vantage of the dead (who surely know everything in the end), as one can imagine he would have.
I'll be looking up Browne's writings. A man who investigates the phenomena of rainbows scientifically and after his analysis concludes, "Very beautiful is the Rain-bow still" is a man with his head and his heart in the right place.
March 18, 2018
Tis book is more of a memoire than an actual biography, and I admit to skimming the last quarter in a rush to get through it. I think it is the product of a rush to publish because that explains the lacks I found in it- a lack of cohesion for starters, a lack of perspective on Browne. I cannot pretend that I am well familiar with Browne, and certainly not to the degree of intimacy this author (AW) displays. I have read the Quincunx book and little else. It may be truw there was not enough material on Browne to write a standard biography, but a more orderly analysis of his work would have been more to my taste than the chronic digressions into current events and attitudes. I bridled at the seeming contradictions every few pages until I realized that AW had immersed himself in Browne's prose to the point that he imitated his prevaricating style. He persists in using the term scientific in an anachronistic way and gives a great deal of commentary on the National Health system, particularly it's nod to homeopathic clinics. Not being British I can' ssay anything about his opinions, except that I f ound them unwelcome in a book I had wanted focused on Browne. ANd like a previous reviewer, I was incensed by 'conversation' with Browne. Still I will enjoy the bibliography and I found some interesting facts.
April 20, 2023
Not exactly a biography, this meander through various topics suggested by Sir Thomas Browne's truly eclectic array of interests proved surprisingly informative and full of delightful tidbits. Who knew he invented so many words, and many of them favorites of mine (electricity, hallucination, ruminating, variegation). I found my (annotated) copy of Urn Burial, Garden of Cyrus, and Religion Medici from my 1972 class with K. Laurence Stapeldon on Metaphysical Prose Exclusive of Milton and remembered my college roommate's delight at the archeological meticulousness of his discussion of ancient burial practices in Britain. Looking at the Garden of Cyrus was a treat, since 50 years ago, I was not at all interested in gardens. Was delighted to find the pattern I was favoring for my curbside verge is the quincunx. Got a good sense of STB's wit, skepticism, pragmatic tolerance, and wonder which elps me understand why Woolf was also enchanted with him.
July 20, 2017
Although I din't think this was as coherent and well written as 'Tide', I very much enjoyed it for the information it contains about Thomas Browne and his writings, which I am now longing to read. I thought the relationship of the book being about both Hugh Alderney-Williams and about the study of Browne and his ideas was less well resolved than the similar relationship in 'Tide'. The concept explained in the title didn't quite work. Perhaps it didn't cross the divide between science and art quite as well as 'Tide'. Nevertheless I learned lots of fascinating words and facts. I felt the way the book deals with ideas is a bit magaziney and lacks an overarching theme, but it was interesting. All my literary heroes seem to have loved Thomas Browne!
December 3, 2017
The history of Sir Thomas Browne was interesting. The author's attempts to bring his life into the 21st century fell well short of the mark. Enough so, that I need to note that I rounded up my rating by overlooking most of the last CD.
A book on the life of Sir Thomas Brown has relevance in today's world, if for no other reason than his writings which showed how the common beliefs of the credulous can be shown to be factually wrong. His contributions to today's world include the coinage of hundreds of common words such as electricity and medical. We could use a critical mind like his in today's world.
A book on the life of Sir Thomas Brown has relevance in today's world, if for no other reason than his writings which showed how the common beliefs of the credulous can be shown to be factually wrong. His contributions to today's world include the coinage of hundreds of common words such as electricity and medical. We could use a critical mind like his in today's world.
November 27, 2021
Very engaging book about this early scientist and physician who is hardly remembered in his home town Norwich(unlike Dr.Johnson in Lichfield).
As a biographer, Hugh Aldersey-Williams doesn't hold back with his own views but he certainly puts his subject on the map.
Some delightful insights here into Browne's use of language,often colourful- in his many additions to the language. We owe to him the words 'hallucination' and 'electricity', but he also invented more unfamiliar words,for example the wonderful "retromingent" (to describe an animal that urinates backward) and "tollutation" (a walk at an ambling pace).
As a biographer, Hugh Aldersey-Williams doesn't hold back with his own views but he certainly puts his subject on the map.
Some delightful insights here into Browne's use of language,often colourful- in his many additions to the language. We owe to him the words 'hallucination' and 'electricity', but he also invented more unfamiliar words,for example the wonderful "retromingent" (to describe an animal that urinates backward) and "tollutation" (a walk at an ambling pace).
December 13, 2018
Certainly not a biography of Browne, rather he serves as the author's "companion" in his musings of science, religion, and what we can and cannot know. Some of the author's musings are a bit pompous, but most are worthy of further thought on the reader's part. There is little biographical material, as little has survived, but I was intrigued enough with the author's thoughts about Browne to order a book of Browne's writings, to meet him myself.
April 4, 2024
Sir Thomas Browne was a 17th Century doctor and writer. His work coverers a wide variety of subjects including burial urns and the occurrence of the number river in nature. He lived in Norwich, in East Anglia. In 1978 I lived in Aylsham, a village about ten miles away from Norwich. I spent some time in the city of Norwich but mostly I walked in the countryside.
August 14, 2017
Row 5, 4 down Nonfiction
October 18, 2017
For lovers of Sir Thomas Browne, this is a thoughtful book with good information and personalization of what Browne's life must have been like.
February 25, 2021
I chose this audiobook solely because I like the narrator. This turned out to be a delightful trip of intellectual curiosity driven by an examination of Sir Thomas Browne works and life.
August 10, 2015
Hugh Aldersey-Williams admires Browne’s labyrinths, but as a science writer himself he is particularly interested in Browne’s understanding of science. Browne was a medical man, but he was also, in an age before specialisms, a naturalist, an archaeologist, an anthropologist, a linguist and an inventor of words—“medical” itself being among the 784 he coined.
Mr Aldersey-Williams is a rational man, but he takes care to distinguish between “knowable and unknowable truth”. He is an atheist, but hates the absolutism of some modern atheists. He fears that as science reveals more, it becomes more impatient with what it cannot show. Browne knows less than the moderns and is often wrong-headed, but he is more generous and good-humoured. Mr Aldersey-Williams does not quote Keats, but the poet might have provided the epigraph to this book, when he writes to a friend about the kind of man he most admires—“capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Mr Aldersey-Williams is a rational man, but he takes care to distinguish between “knowable and unknowable truth”. He is an atheist, but hates the absolutism of some modern atheists. He fears that as science reveals more, it becomes more impatient with what it cannot show. Browne knows less than the moderns and is often wrong-headed, but he is more generous and good-humoured. Mr Aldersey-Williams does not quote Keats, but the poet might have provided the epigraph to this book, when he writes to a friend about the kind of man he most admires—“capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
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