Background
He was born in in London on 19 October 1605. He was the son of a mercer of genteel Cheshire ancestry, who died 8 years later, leaving "a plentifull Fortune. "
(Sir Thomas Browne is one of the supreme stylists of the E...)
Sir Thomas Browne is one of the supreme stylists of the English language: a coiner of words and spinner of phrases to rival Shakespeare; the wielder of a weird and wonderful erudition; an inquiring spirit in the mold of Montaigne. Browne was an inspiration to the Romantics as well as to W.G. Sebald, and his work is quirky, sonorous, and enchanting. Here this baroque masters two most enduring and admired works, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, appear in a new edition that has been annotated and introduced by the distinguished scholars Ramie Targoff and Stephen Greenblatt (author of the best-selling Will in the World and the National Book Awardwinning The Swerve). In Religio Medici Browne mulls over the relation between his medical profession and his profession of the Christian faith, pondering the respective claims of science and religion, questions that are still very much alive today. The discovery of an ancient burial site in an English field prompted Browne to write Urne-Buriall, which is both an early anthropological examination of different practices of interment and a profound meditation on mortality. Its grave and exquisite music has resounded for generations.
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( Sir Thomas Browne was one of the greatest English prose...)
Sir Thomas Browne was one of the greatest English prose stylists--a physician by vocation, a theologian by inclination, and a writer of great elegance and erudition. This edition of his works, with Introduction, Notes, Comments, and Bibliography, includes all Browne's major pieces and selections from his minor papers and letters. The Notes are designed to help the student understand Browne's references, and the Introduction provides an account of his life and an analysis of his baroque style against the background of seventeenth-century literature.
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He was born in in London on 19 October 1605. He was the son of a mercer of genteel Cheshire ancestry, who died 8 years later, leaving "a plentifull Fortune. "
He was admitted as a scholar of Winchester school in 1616, and matriculated at Broadgates Hall (Pembroke College), Oxford, in 1623, where he graduated B. A. in January 1626.
He took the further degree of M. A. in 1629, studied medicine, and practised for seme time in Oxfordshire.
Between 1630 and 1633 he left England, travelled in Ireland, France and Italy, and on his way home received the degree of M. D. at the university of Leiden.
He returned to London in 1634, and, after a short residence at Shipden Hall, near Halifax, settled in practice at Norwich in 1637.
Browne's first literary work was Religio Medici (The Religion of a Physician).
In 1646 he published Pseudodoxia Epidemica; or Enquiries into very many commonly received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths (1646), and in 1658 Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall; or, a discourse of the sepulchrall urnes lately found in Norfolk.
He began a correspondence with John Evelyn in 1658.
He did not speculate systematically on the problems of existence, but he meditates repeatedly on the outward and visible signs of mortality, and on what lies beyond death.
Of Browne, as of the greatest writers, it is true that the style is the man.
Much of the quaintness of his style, no doubt, depends on the excessive employment of latinized words, many of which have failed to justify their existence; but the peculiarities of his vocabulary do not explain the unique character of his writing, which is appreciated to-day as much as ever. The Religio Medici was a puzzle to his contemporaries, and it is still hard to reconcile its contradictions.
A Latin translation appeared at Leiden in 1644, and it was widely read on the continent, being translated subsequently into Dutch, French and German.
It is the confession of a mind keen and sceptical in some aspects, and credulous in others.
Browne professes to be absolutely free from heretical opinions, but asserts the right to be guided by his own reason in cases where no precise guidance is given either by Scripture or by Church teaching.
The Pseudodoxia Epidemica, written in a more direct and simple style than is usual with Browne, is a wonderful storehouse of out-of-the-way facts and scraps of erudition.
The dignified "Letter to a Friend, upon the occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend" (written about 1672, pr. 1690) has been generally supposed to be a preliminary sketch for Christian Morals, but Dr W. A. Greenhill thinks it was written later. exhibiting a singular mixture of credulity and shrewdness.
Sir Thomas evidently takes delight in discussing the wildest fables.
That he himself was by no means free from superstition is proved by the fact that the condemnation of two unfortunate women, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, for witchcraft at Norwich in 1664 was aided by his professional evidence.
The first collected edition of Browne's works appeared in 1686.
It is said to have been edited by Dr. afterwards Archbishop Tenison.
Sir Thomas Browne's Works, including his Life and Correspondence, were carefully edited by Simon Wilkin in 1835-1836.
Among modern reprints may be mentioned Dr W. A Greenhill's editions in the "Golden Treasury" series of the Religio Medici, Letter to a Priend and Christian Morals (1881), with an admirable bibliographical note on the complicated subject of the numerous editions of the Religio Medici, of the Hydriotaphia and the Garden of Cyrus (1896), completed by Mr E. H. Marshall; a complete edition for the English Library, edited by Mr Charles Sayle (1904).
(Sir Thomas Browne is one of the supreme stylists of the E...)
( Sir Thomas Browne was one of the greatest English prose...)
He writes as a humane Anglican, convinced of his own faith, enraptured by the wonders of theology, but open-minded and aware of the limitations of human reason and the folly of pious prejudices.
Browne was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Physicians before 1671.