Sir Thomas Browne The World Proposed

by Barbour, Reid; Preston, Claire

• ISBN13: 9780199236213
• ISBN10: 0199236216
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-02-09
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Doctor, linguist, scientist, natural historian, and writer of what is probably the most stunning prose in the English language, Sir Thomas Browne was a virtuoso in learning whose many interests form a representative portrait of his age. To understand the period which we more usually refer to as the Civil War, the Restoration, or the Scientific Revolution, we need to understand parts of the intellectual and spiritual background that are often neglected and which Browne magnificently figures forth. This collection of essays about all aspects of Thomas Browne's work and thought is the first such volume to appear in 25 years. It offers the specialist and the student a wide-ranging array of essays by an international team of leading scholars in seventeenth-century literary studies who extend our understanding of this extremely influential and representative early-modern polymath by embracing recent developments in the field, including literary-scientific relations, the development of Anglican spirituality, civil networks of intellectual exchange, the rise of antiquarianism, and Browne's own legacy in modern literature.

Author Biography

Claire Preston is Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Her research interests include the literature and science of the 16th and 17th centuries; early-modern word-image relations; Philip Sidney and his circle; and American literature of the Gilded Age and of the Progressive Era.
Reid Barbour is Gillian T Cell Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina. His research interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England; intellectual history; the history of classical transmission; the history of science; and the history of religion. He is currently working on a biography of Sir Thomas Browne and on an edition of Lucy Hutchinson's Lucretius for OUP.

Table of Contents

Claire Preston

Introduction: 'Browne at 400'

Habits of Thought

Sharon Seelig: 'Speake that I may see thee': the styles of

Debora Shuger: The

Graham Parry Thomas Browne and the Uses of Antiquity

Brent Nelson: The Browne Family's Culture of Curiosity

Karen Edwards: Engaging with Pygmies

Victoria Silver: 'Wonders of the Invisible World'

The Bury

Works

Brooke Conti: iReligio Medici/i's Profession of Faith

William N. West: Brownean Motion: Conversation within iPseudodoxia Epidemica/i's 'Sober Circumference of Knowledge'

Kevin Killeen: The Politics of Painting: iPseudodoxia Epidemica/i and Iconoclasm

Claire Preston: 'An Incomium of Consumptions': iA Letter to a Friend/i as Medical Narrative

Achsah Guibbory: iUrne -Buriall/i, Cultural Difference, and the Question of

Kathryn Murphy: 'A Likely Story': Plato's iTimaeus/i in the iGarden of Cyrus/i

Jonathan F.S. Post: Miscellaneous Browne Among the Tombs of

(After)Lives

Reid Barbour: The Hieroglyphics of Skin

Roy Rosenstein: Browne, Borges, and Back: Phantasmagories of Imaginative Learning

Peter N. Miller: Thinking with

Bibliography

The Contributors

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