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Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed

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Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed edited by

Reid Barbour and Claire Preston

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York q Reid Barbour and Claire Preston 2008 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–923621–3 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

[T]he wisdome of God . . . hath proposed the world unto our knowledge, and thereby the notion of himselfe . . . and the sense of man expressly disposed for that inquisition.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1.5.29)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors of The World Proposed wish to thank Andrew McNeillie of Oxford University Press for his enthusiastic support of this collection. His appreciation for Browne’s richness and significance has inspired us throughout our work. Richard Todd first brought many of the contributors to this volume together in Leiden for the Browne Quatercentenary Conference in 2005, and his genial encouragement made this volume seem inevitable. Anthony Batty Shaw (late of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital), a scholarly and medical heir to the seventeenth-century Norwich physician, has done much to bring Sir Thomas back into the center of early modern studies, and in the spirit of Browne supplied us with his own work and expertise. Nigel Smith gave us good advice at a critical juncture. We thank Professor John Wall and the Southeastern Renaissance Conference for sponsoring a panel on Sir Thomas Browne at the 2008 Renaissance Society of America in Chicago. Finally, we want to celebrate the contributors to this volume: from start to finish, they have brought energy, dedication, and hard-won learning to the challenging prospect of understanding Sir Thomas Browne and his remarkable legacy.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations

vi ix xi

Introduction: ‘Many Things Untouch’d’: Browne at 400 Reid Barbour and Claire Preston

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PART I HABITS OF THOUGHT

1. ‘Speake that I may see thee’: The Styles of Sir Thomas Browne Sharon Cadman Seelig

13

2. The Laudian Idiot Debora Shuger

36

3. Thomas Browne and the Uses of Antiquity Graham Parry

63

4. The Browne Family’s Culture of Curiosity Brent Nelson

80

5. Engaging with Pygmies: Thomas Browne and John Milton Karen L. Edwards 6. ‘Wonders of the Invisible World’: The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches Victoria Silver

100

118

PART II WORKS

7. Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith Brooke Conti

149

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/ Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed

8. Brownean Motion: Conversation within Pseudodoxia Epidemica’s ‘Sober Circumference of Knowledge’ William N. West 9. The Politics of Painting: Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm Kevin Killeen

168 188

10. ‘An Incomium of Consumptions’: A Letter to a Friend as Medical Narrative Claire Preston

206

11. Urne-Buriall, Cultural Difference, and the Question of Jewish Readmission Achsah Guibbory

222

12. ‘A Likely Story’: Plato’s Timaeus in the Garden of Cyrus Kathryn Murphy

242

13. Miscellaneous Browne among the Tombs of Norwich Cathedral Jonathan F. S. Post

258

PART III LIFE AND AFTERLIVES

14. The Hieroglyphics of Skin Reid Barbour

279

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

296

16. Thinking with Thomas Browne: Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian Peter N. Miller

311

Bibliography The Editors and Contributors Index

329 352 357

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Embellished capital from Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646)

101

2. Title-page from James Primrose, Popular Errours, or the Errours of the people in matter of Physick (1651) 215 3. Mid-seventeenth-century Engraving of Norwich Cathedral

261


ABBREVIATIONS

Except for those to Pseudodoxia Epidemica, all references to Browne’s works refer, unless otherwise stated, to The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 2nd ed. 4 vols. (Chicago, 1964). References to Pseudodoxia Epidemica, unless otherwise stated, refer to Robin Robbins, ed., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1981).

AH

Artificial Hills (in Miscellany Tracts (Keynes 3); numerals refer to page numbers)

CM

Christian Morals (op. post. 1716) (Keynes 1; numerals refer to page numbers)

GC

The Garden of Cyrus or The Quincunx (1658) (Keynes 1; numerals refer to chapter and page numbers)

Keynes

The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 2nd edn., 4 vols. (Chicago, 1964)

Letters

All correspondence refers to that published in Keynes 4, unless otherwise stated

LF

A Letter to a Friend (op. post. 1690) (Keynes 1; numerals refer to page numbers)

MB

Motion of Bodies, Ebullition, Coagulation, etc. (in Keynes 3; numerals refer to page numbers)

MC

Musæum Clausum (in Miscellany Tracts (Keynes 3); numerals refer to page numbers)

NCB

Notes from Commonplace Books (Keynes 3; numerals refer to page numbers)

NNHN

Notes on the Natural History of Norfolk (Keynes 3: numerals refer to page numbers)

OA

Observations in Anatomy (Keynes 3; numerals refer to page numbers)

OL

Of Languages (in Miscellany Tracts (Keynes 3); numerals refer to page numbers)

ON

Observations and Notes (in Keynes 3; numerals refer to page numbers)

PE

Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors (1646), ed. Robin Robbins, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1981), (numerals refer to book, chapter, and page numbers in Vol. 1)

xii


PS

Plants in Scripture (in Miscellany Tracts (Keynes 3); numerals refer to page numbers)

R

Repertorium (op. post. 1712) (Keynes 3; numerals refer to page numbers)

RM

Religio Medici (1643) (Keynes 1; numerals refer to part and chapter numbers)

Robbins

notes and other editorial material in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1981)

Sloane

Browne MSS held in the British Library

TB

Thomas Browne

UB

Hydriotaphia or Urne-Buriall (1658) (Keynes 1; numerals refer to chapter and page numbers)

Wilkin

Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, including his life and correspondence (roman and arabic numerals refer to volume and page numbers), ed. Simon Wilkin, 4 vols. (1835–6)

Introduction: ‘Many things untouch’d’: Browne at 400 Reid Barbour and Claire Preston

It is a paradox worthy of one of Browne’s own meditations on memory and authority that he should be among the most influential of writers in the history of English literature, and yet be one whose works have for some time been largely relegated by the academy to the category of literary curiosity. The roll-call of his admirers and imitators is hardly less impressive than that of Shakespeare or Milton; it includes John Dryden, Robert Boyle, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, J. B. Priestley, Jorge Luis Borges, Javier Maria´s, Bruce Chatwin, Roberto Calasso, Mario Praz, William Styron, and W. G. Sebald. Johnson committed his most detailed literary ‘life’ to Browne, who was also the only writer of prose biographized by Johnson; Thoreau consciously mimicked his style; for Borges, Browne was a kind of alter ego whose writings and personality haunted him throughout his life. If imitation is an index of real regard, there can be few writers of higher rećlame: a rough count yields at least twenty effusions entitled Religio Somethingor-Other in the past three-and-a-half centuries, from George MacKenzie’s Religio Stoici (1663) to Gilbert Murray’s Religio Grammatici (1918). Until very recently, Browne’s works have never been out of print, and he has maintained a prominent place in the literate imagination of writers and amateur readers

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alike. And yet, such credentials notwithstanding, he has been generally neglected by the academy for the past four decades—that is, when he was not under demolition by a style of opposition strangely redolent of Browne’s earliest moral and religious critics in the seventeenth century. The high repute of Religio Medici (1643) ensured that the very word ‘religio’ as part of an essay title became a byword for a species of measured personal, philosophical manifesto from the Restoration onward; and the eighteenth century concurred with Johnson’s estimate of its peculiar virtues: ‘the novelty of paradoxes, the dignity of sentiment, the quick succession of images, the multitude of abstruse allusions, the subtlety of disquisition, and the strength of language’.1 Johnson himself was, according to Walter Pater, guilty of Browne’s ‘slow Latinity’;2 and Coleridge’s rapturous sense of Browne’s magus-like insights, illuminated by ‘the faery Glory round his own Head’, is only a little less bizarre than Melville’s image of ‘a crack’d Archangel’.3 There can be few second-hand bookstores in the English-speaking world which lack a few nineteenth-century editions of selected Browne: Emily Dickinson kept one by her bedside, and the Victorian bien-penseés tradition, especially in England and best exemplified by Pater, valued Browne almost as a thesaurus of lapidary wisdom, a tradition of hearty but hardly stringent appreciation which lasted until well into the twentieth century. That tradition does not constitute neglect precisely, but it represents an unwillingness to consider Browne’s prose with the rigour that the New Critics, for example, happily vouchsafed to many of Browne’s contemporaries. And in the last quarter of the century, neo-historicist focus on subversion and the structures of power served to marginalize what is actually the biggest cultural product of the period—an identifiable, vibrant, coherent intellectual programme of cooperation represented by ambitious projects geared towards social and moral advancement by individuals deeply involved in a distinct and orderly commonwealth of learning. Of this profoundly important cultural movement, Thomas Browne is the paradigm. 1 Samuel Johnson, The Life of Sir Thomas Browne (1756), in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (Harmondsworth, 1977), 486. 2 Walter Pater, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, in Appreciations (London, 1910), 134. 3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 12, no.1, Ed. George Whalley (London and Princeton, 1985), 763; Evert Duyckinck reported this phrase in a letter from Melville (quoted in Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge, 1953), 56.

Introduction: ‘Many things untouch’d’: Browne at 400

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We must not, however, insist too emphatically on Browne’s prolonged partial eclipse: there have been heroic scholarly efforts from editors, historians, and critics alike. Vittoria Sanna’s edition of Religio Medici appeared in 1958—an edition in which all the extant manuscript copies of the work were studied— and set the scene for the three major editorial events of the 1960s: Geoffrey Keynes’s revised edition of the complete works of Browne (1964), L. C. Martin’s annotated edition of most of the major works (1964), and Norman Endicott’s highly useful classroom edition of selected major works (1967). All of these were attentive to Browne’s important manuscript instantiations. The 1960s was also a good decade for studies of Browne: two excellent monographs by Joan Bennett and Frank Huntley appeared at this time, and Endicott made biographical headway in archives such as the Court of Orphans.4 Historians of science and medicine—including Allen G. Debus, Charles Webster, and Stephen Merton—were taking Browne seriously on wide-ranging matters such as colour indicators, physiology, and plant sensitivity. Intellectual historians offered full, vigorous studies of Browne’s engagements with both Aristotelian and Platonic legacies, all the while understanding that Browne’s complex patterns of thought were reducible to no single legacy. Browne’s style was the subject of important studies (such as Joan Webber’s The Eloquent I (1968)). The revised edition of Sir Geoffrey Keynes’s bibliography testified to the amplitude and vitality of the field. Even when Browne was not the nominal subject, he could serve as the presiding spirit over major scholarship: witness Rosalie Colie’s Paradoxia Epidemica (1966). Thomas Browne was, in other words, present in the canonical landscape of critical and textual scholarship; and yet the last two English monographs on Browne in the twentieth century, Leonard Nathanson’s The Strategy of Truth (1967) and Jonathan Post’s Sir Thomas Browne (1987), were separated by twenty years. At the end of the century, Daniela Havenstein’s Democratizing Sir Thomas Browne (1999) innovatively divided its energies between Browne’s imitators and Religio’s stylistics. There has been, fortunately, excellent work on Browne since that abundant decade of the 1960s in the form of articles and editions. Foremost of these is Robin Robbins’s indispensable, magisterial edition of Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1981); C. A. Patrides’s Penguin edition of the major works (1977) and Claire Preston’s Selected Writings (1995) have kept him available to students, although the Patrides 4 N. J. Endicott, ‘Sir Thomas Browne as ‘‘Orphan’’, with Some Account of his Stepfather, Sir Thomas Dutton’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 30 (1961), 180–210.

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edition—the most accessible version of Browne—has recently gone out of print. The Browne bibliographies by Dennis Donovan (1981) and Andrea Sununu (1989) are highly useful guides to study. Many articles in the past twenty years have contributed richly to the study of Browne and genre (Anne D. Hall, 1979, 1990), theology (Victoria Silver, 1990), epistemology (Achsah Guibbory, 1976), and language (Janet E. Halley, 1985). The tercentenary lectures and essays published in 1982 as Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne (Patrides, 1982) are rich and stimulating. Even in that fine collection, however, there is evidence of two impediments blocking the advancement of our understanding of Browne: a compulsion to ‘answer’ Stanley Fish’s 1972 indictment of Browne as the ‘bad physician’ (Fish, 1972), sometimes in Fish’s own terms or according to his criteria, and the neo-historicist claim, inaugurated by Michael Wilding’s engaging essay, that Browne’s complex thought is reducible to an essentially oppressive conservatism (Wilding, 1987). James N. Wise’s 1973 defence of Browne against the recriminations of his earliest attackers, Sir Kenelm Digby and Alexander Ross, now comes across as an uncanny defence against Fish’s hostilities. Despite the excellence of the foregoing catalogue, it is far too slight for a writer of such stature. Thus with Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed, we mark the rejuvenation of scholarship on this exceptionally influential and exceptionally understudied figure. The signs of revival are already manifold: 2005 was the quatercentenary of the birth of Sir Thomas Browne, an anniversary celebrated by two conferences, and the inauguration of the annual Thomas Browne Seminar. In that year Claire Preston’s Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (2005) appeared; and in 2008 Kevin Killeen’s The Thorny Place of Knowledge: Thomas Browne and Early-Modern Intellectual Culture, as well as a collection of essays, ‘A man very well studyed’: New Contexts for Thomas Browne, edited by Richard Todd and Kathryn Murphy. A biography of Browne by Reid Barbour is nearing completion. Larger trends in early modern scholarship amply and variously support excellent new work on Browne. Perhaps most broadly, methods of intellectual history such as those formulated by Quentin Skinner have militated against the simplistic division of meaning from rhetoric that has long plagued the analysis of Browne’s writing. While Skinner’s goal may seem conventional for an intellectual historian—‘to grasp their concepts, to follow their distinctions, to appreciate their beliefs and, so far as possible, to see things their way’—his emphasis on what authors ‘were doing’ with


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their words and sentences makes possible a more dynamic and nuanced situating of Browne’s ideas in ‘their relationship to each other and to broader networks of belief’. Skinner’s reminder of what early modern writers understood about rhetoric—that they intended ‘language not merely to communicate information but at the same time to claim authority for [their] utterances, to arouse the emotions of [their] interlocutors, to create boundaries of inclusion and exclusion and to engage in many other exercises of social control’5—helps dispense with the old canard that Browne was disengaged from his world or his times, a misconception that a cursory inspection of his many letters immediately dispels. Such an understanding of language as action also needs Skinner’s other emphasis, that we try to understand Browne’s intellectual, political, and theological formation in what are inevitably idiosyncratic terms which defy narrow classification; and to situate him in the ‘broader networks’—social and cultural—of his contemporaries. With these goals in mind, we can revisit more productively Browne’s relationship to contemporary religious divisions, his place in civilwar debates, and his intervention in a witchcraft trial. What is more, in resisting arbitrary limits on Browne’s range of associates, we can more fully appreciate his appeal to, and interest in, a very wide spectrum of contemporaries, including Presbyterians and Quakers, antiquarians and experimentalists, leading cultural and intellectual arbiters such as John Evelyn and William Dudgale, the reform-minded and international interlocutors trading letters back and forth in the so-called Hartlib circle, alchemists like Arthur Dee, and natural historians like John Ray. The interdisciplinary study of literature and science in the early modern period, which the present volume attempts to extend, is now at the forefront of interest in the period, with important work on major figures such as Newton and Boyle, and synoptic studies of ideas of scientific civility, the nature of truth-claims, the basis of evidence, and the development of the scientific report. Approaches to Browne’s philosophical complexity are also strengthened by recent tendencies in the history of science. Obviously historians of science no longer accept a triumphalist model in which modern science liberated itself simply and cleanly from its occult oppressors. Nor do they uncriticially embrace the notion, most commonly associated with 5 Quentin Skinner, ‘Introduction: Seeing things their way’, in Visions of Politics: Volume I: Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002), 4–5.

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Frances Yates, that what we call science developed seamlessly from an essentially sympathetic esoteric tradition. It is no longer credible to anchor the emergence of science in any one religious or political orientation, nor is it necessary to conclude from the dense texture of institutional constraints and contexts of experimentation that scientific knowledge must be wholly ‘constructed’. With the interests of seventeenth-century natural historians differing so greatly from those of astronomers; with the conventional heroes of the scientific revolution such as Galileo and William Harvey recognized as having sophisticated methodologies with lingering commitments to ancient philosophy; with all this, the history of science no longer need question whether a complex figure such as Browne is ‘scientific’ or not. The answer to such a question requires an appreciation of changes over time, intricate institutional affiliations, as well as all the other elements—from methodological to spiritual—of thinking and writing about nature over the course of Browne’s lifetime. A simple comparison of Browne’s and Harvey’s intellectual projects shows how unpredictable the course of natural studies in the period could prove: when Browne was moving from Religio Medici to Pseudodoxia Epidemica, from the meditative to something more essentially Baconian, Harvey was apparently moving in the opposite direction, from his methodical, empirical exposition of the blood’s circulation to the still highly experimental, yet profoundly meditative, exploration of the efficient cause of generation, a movement that in turn was of great interest to Browne. Yet such unexpected trajectories merely reinforce what we already know: that the study of nature was radically transformed over the course of the seventeenth century, so much so that by mid-century at least one commentator scoffed at Robert Fludd’s claim that he and Francis Bacon were birds of a feather.6 One crucial subset of the new histories of science having an impact on the study of Browne is the excellent work on the early modern physician. Richard Grassby’s study of the mercantile community of seventeenth-century England proposes that the self-identity and values of that ‘middling sort’ are far more subtle and dynamic than has previously been maintained, and he draws analogies between the status of the merchant (of whom Browne’s father was one) and the learned physician. Work on the profession of 6 Seth Ward was the scoffer (quoted in Allen G. Debus, Science and Education in the Seventeenth Century: The Webster–Ward Debate (New York, 1970), 240.


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medicine has been gaining ground since the 1970s with such scholars as William J. Birken; and recent work by Nancy Siraisi and Margaret Pelling has served two key purposes: to clarify the presuppositions of learned medicine; and to complicate its status by situating the learned physician within a highly variegated set of medical practitioners, their economic bases, and their practical traditions. Indeed, Pelling’s work has been especially useful on Browne’s Norwich. Scholarship by, among others, Harold Cook has demonstrated the tensions within, and the pressures on, learned medicine that accrued over the course of the seventeenth century in the Royal College of Physicians (which made Browne an honorary member in the 1660s), and helps to make sense of the fact that a fellow physician, Gideon Harvey, could unleash a scathing attack on his learned colleagues, including Browne (posthumously), in 1683. Recent scholarship has also offered incisive analysis of the interaction between seventeenth-century natural philosophy and religious convictions. Through scholarship such as Amos Funkenstein’s Theology and the Scientific Imagination (1986) and the volumes of the new Oxford Bacon, we are coming to terms with the ways in which natural philosophy and theology ‘interinanimated’ one another, to enlist a term from John Donne. In religious studies alone, Browne is well served by the current revitalization of interest in seventeenth-century Anglican and Catholic spirituality. Historians of the Anglican church have pressed home the recognition that while polemic is a vital part of religious culture in the early Stuart period, we should not confuse it with the more localized positions of churchmen and lay religious authors all across England. As Anthony Milton summarizes the case: ‘historians have questioned the existence of an ideologically coherent, unitary and stable ‘‘Anglicanism’’, arguing instead for a broad spectrum of views . . . within a Church of England whose ultimate doctrinal and ideological identity was still unclear’. Reminding us that many distinct religious parties existed in England, Milton stresses that such a field was also a ‘shifting mass of doctrines and attitudes’ responding to ‘a time of change and development’.7 Such an approach explains why an early apologetic biographer would find a fundamental consistency in Browne’s lifelong devotion to the Church of England, even though the evidence of his life, works, and reception shows that at a given moment Religio Medici appealed to a broad 7 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 1, 5, 7, 26–7.

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range of readers from Quaker to Catholic, and that over time Browne himself experienced both civil-war destruction and Restoration partisanship. He knew from first-hand experience the potential diversity of the prelacy, having lived in Norwich under the aggressively anti-Puritan Matthew Wren in the 1630s; under the moderate Calvinist Joseph Hall, who had been by turns manipulated by Laud and victimized by Laud’s enemies in the 1640s; and under the tolerant and eirenic Edward Reynolds in the 1660s. Work on Archbishop Laud by Kevin Sharpe and Julian Davies, among others, has demonstrated that Prynne’s bogey has largely been interpreted through Prynne’s eyes, so that a closer examination of what Laud actually wrote and believed yields a far more nuanced picture. Scholarship by Peter Lake, Anthony Milton, and in the anthology of essays edited by Kenneth Fincham has helped to enrich our understanding of what it meant to have loyalty to the Church of England after the rise of Tyacke’s so-called Anti-Calvinists.8 One’s loyalty might, for instance, attach to the prayer book or to the holiday calendar rather than to prelates per se; and what the rails around the altar meant in one parish might differ notably from what they meant in another. Most obviously, the rapidly shifting political landscape could substantially change the tenor and ardour of one’s religious predilections, whether it was Browne or Milton experiencing the amazing events which began in 1637. And a Continental traveler such as Browne or Milton would be faced not only with the before-and-after picture of his homeland—Browne left England for the Continent around late 1629 or 1630, then returned in late 1633 or 1634— but also with the need to assess the differences between, say, the political implications of Dutch Arminianism and its English variety. The Restoration would bring a whole new set of concerns, anxieties, and alignments in English religion, so that Browne’s attempt to preserve some memory of the monuments in Norwich Cathedral (Repertorium) could strike his posthumous editor, a high-ranking Anglican cleric, as a worthless enterprise in 1686. Last but not least, a more nuanced understanding of Browne has been assisted by recent trends in editing and manuscript studies. The variants of the manuscript of Religio Medici have been analysed with increasing sophistication;

8 Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, 2001), Anthony Milton (1995); and Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church (London, 1993).


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and attention to variants of printed works allows us to see more clearly developments in Browne’s intellectual aims in Pseudodoxia Epidemica. The reasons for Browne’s revival are, in short, abundant, and in the following essays we have tried to represent them by offering the very latest thinking about the works themselves and about the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century and its various political and spiritual revolutions. Brooke Conti’s manuscript study of Religio Medici helps us to understand it as a dynamic and developing work which responds during its extended gestation to the changing doctrinal landscape; and Browne’s extensive miscellanies, notebooks, and commonplace books emerge as central to his many investigative projects and habits of thought in Jonathan Post’s essay on ‘miscellaneous Browne’. Provoked by revisionism and its critics, historians have offered more complex and subtle assessments of ideés recues such as ‘Laudianism’ or ‘Anglicanism’, inviting Debora Shuger, Kevin Killeen, and Achsah Guibbory to revisit Browne’s positions on contemporary religion and politics. Scientific and medical history has moved beyond two earlier phases—one arguing for the triumph of science over the occult; the other eliding science with the occult— into a more carefully differentiated and rigorous spectrum of possibilities that allows for a new understanding of Browne’s place in that history, whether the subject is disease, witchcraft, or scientific conversation. These themes are explored in essays in this volume by Claire Preston, Victoria Silver, Reid Barbour, and William West. The rhetorical inflection of intellectual history allows Kathryn Murphy and Graham Parry to examine Browne’s engagement with classical legacy; and Sharon Seelig introduces the volume with a reconsideration of the perennially difficult subject of Browne’s style. Recent historical assessments of the professional and social stature of the middling ranks have offered the scholarly attention to Browne’s own social class formerly reserved for monarchs and aristocrats on the one hand (history from the top down) and commoners and sectarians (history from the bottom up). In this vein, Brent Nelson reconsiders Browne’s position in the history of collecting; and his intellectual relationship to one of his major contemporaries, John Milton, is considered by Karen Edwards. Finally, the volume attends to the profound literary and intellectual influence Browne exercised in his own day and continues to exert on modernist and even post-modernist writers, with essays by Roy Rosenstein and Peter Miller, which discuss the nationally inflected response to Browne by the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges and the German W. G. Sebald.

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In A Letter to a Friend Thomas Browne discusses the phenomenon of those who die on their birthdays: ‘that the first day should make the last, that the Tail of the Snake should return into its Mouth precisely at that time, and they should wind up upon the day of their Nativity, is indeed a remarkable Coincidence . . . ’ (LF 105). Browne himself, by a long-standing tradition, was one of these: in 1712 his daughter told Dr White Kennet, the antiquarian and controversialist, that her father, who died on 19 October 1682, had died on his birthday. On this basis, 19 October has been inscribed on the monument which dominates Haymarket in Norwich outside Browne’s parish church, St Peter Mancroft, and is recorded elsewhere as authoritative. Nothing, indeed, could be more fitting for Browne, the admirer of symbolic figures and numbers, than that this circular ‘abridgement’ (to borrow Donne’s sense of it) should have fallen out so. The truth is not so easy to come by, however, since Browne himself inconveniently told Aubrey in 1672 that he was born on 19 November. Because no records remain of St Michael’s in the Corn, where Browne was baptized in 1605, the question remains unanswerable. As antiquarians we might explain these two irreconcilable dates in any number of ways: Browne was careless in writing to Aubrey; Mrs Lyttleton was mistaken about her father’s birthdate; or White Kennett misunderstood her. Or we might, in Brownean fashion, more profitably amuse ourselves with a meditation on the unreliability of records and monuments. That we know so little of Browne’s life in any detail before the Restoration makes this troubling abundance of birthdates the more ironic. And it is because we must get at him in the round—astonishing intellectual and stylist, oddly ordinary provincial professional and pillar of his family—that the following volume has been assembled. If, as Ben Jonson said, ‘language most shows a man’, we must begin to re-examine Thomas Browne and the period he represents so well through his remarkable words.

Part I Habits of Thought


1 ‘Speake, that I may see thee’: The Styles of Sir Thomas Browne Sharon Cadman Seelig

‘Language most shewes a man: speake, that I may see thee’.1 So wrote Ben Jonson, in words that come to mind when we think of Sir Thomas Browne. Yet the picture that emerges from Browne’s writing is not that of a single individual, but a veritable chorus, so diverse are the styles of the early Religio Medici, with its dramatic, often paradoxical boldness; the careful inquiry of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which examines and refutes popular and scholarly errors; the somber Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall, which ranges from the careful (if misguided) examination of a group of funerary urns found in a field in Norfolk to considerations of the transitory nature of all life; and the Garden of Cyrus, which finds patterns in all of nature. And this list omits Christian Morals, A Letter to a Friend, and other works. Throughout his long career, Browne employed a repertory of styles to enact meaning—to discover, confound, meditate, persuade, judge, and even play. But the brilliance and versatility of Browne’s stylistic achievements, which place him among the most remarkable writers of a century that included Andrewes, Donne, Burton, Bacon, Taylor, Milton, and Hobbes, do not altogether account for the kind of critical interest nor the degree of passion 1 Ben Jonson, Timber: Or Discoveries (1641), in Works, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, Vol. 8 (Oxford, 1947), 625.

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/ Sharon Cadman Seelig

that Browne has attracted. Complex as a consideration of Browne’s style is— involving questions of methodology and terminology—it is further complicated by a moral component in critical views of his work, a tendency to judge his style on other than stylistic grounds. As Ronald Huebert recently noted, ‘if there is anything more remarkable in the reception history of Religio Medici than its enduring success, it would have to be the ability of this text to provoke outspoken and even hostile attacks’.2 Analysis of Browne’s style has historically called forth a wide range of methods, including the syntactic and rhythmic analysis of the sort practised by Croll and Saintsbury; the more or less evocative labels of his own time and the earlier twentieth century—Senecan, Attic, antiCiceronian, baroque; and, more recently, the attempts of Daniela Havenstein to implement and refine Croll’s methodology.3 In reading Browne, should we give particular attention to matters such as length of period, Latinate and AngloSaxon diction, end-linking and conceptual association, to asyndeton and polysyndeton? Or must his prose be read in relation to his religious and political positions, variously judged as bold, admirable, comprehensible, and coherent, or naı¨ve, self-serving, and duplicitous? Can we identify the stylistic characteristics that distinguish one work from another, or are there in all the diversity of his work habits of mind and of rhetoric that mark it as distinctively his? Can we discern a development within his work that signals increasing maturity or control of effect, as well as diverse means appropriate to his subject-matter? My answer to most, if not all, of these questions is yes, as I’ll attempt to explain in the discussion that follows.

2 Ronald Huebert, ‘The Private Opinions of Sir Thomas Browne’, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 45 (2005), 117. Huebert considers two seventeenth-century responses, those of Sir Kenelm Digby and Alexander Ross, and two twentieth-century reactions, by Stanley Fish and Michael Wilding. 3 Havenstein, Democratizing Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici and its Imitations (Oxford, 1999), 89–103, asserts both the usefulness of Morris Croll’s analysis and its influence on subsequent criticism; her chapter includes a helpful summary of twentieth-century stylistic analysis up to Stanley Fish, whose influence she finds detrimental (2). Several of Croll’s seminal articles, ‘Attic Prose: Lipsius, Montaigne, Bacon’, in Schelling Anniversary Papers [no eds.] (New York, 1923), 117–50; and ‘The Baroque Style in Prose’, in Studies in English Philology in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, ed. Kemp Malone and Martin B. Ruud (Minneapolis, 1929), 427–56, are reprinted in Stanley Fish (ed.), Seventeenth-Century Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1971), 3–25 and 26–52, as well as Richard Foster Jones, ‘Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century’, in Fish (1971), 53–89. See also Robert Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style (Cambridge, MA, 1968).

The Styles of Thomas Browne / 15 Writing in a period of rich experimentation and within a shift from Ciceronian to anti-Ciceronian or Senecan prose, from forms more closely associated with oratory to those more reflective of the process of thought, Browne has been usefully seen in the context of seventeenth-century prose as well as of the Latin authors whose work framed the stylistic universe. Yet the extensive discussion of terminology4 suggests that such designations as curt, loose, Senecan, or baroque, both in their historical grounding and in their twentieth-century use, can be both ambiguous and subjective. ‘Curt’ and ‘loose’ finally designate tendencies rather than absolutes: while one can locate models such as Bacon’s 1597 Essays, or passages from Burton’s ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, Browne’s more variable discourse is harder to define.5 And while ‘Senecan’ helps to mark a historical context and ‘baroque’ an emotional or aesthetic effect, these terms are more suggestive than definitive. For example, the thoughtful stylistic account of George Williamson, in which he attempts to discriminate between Ciceronian and Senecan, curt and loose, in Browne, illustrates both the usefulness—in the hands of a skilled practitioner—and the difficulty of this approach: ‘While the loose period may suggest the Ciceronian, its concinnitas or symmetry of structure is more evasive; while it may adumbrate a Latin climax, it follows a more organic order of thought’.6 Beyond the challenge presented by technical description and appropriate terminology, Browne’s work has aroused a degree of enthusiasm and animus remarkable given its subject matter. A writer of self-proclaimed irenic tendencies, Browne has nevertheless evoked strong personal reactions, ranging from admiration to ad hominem attack, beginning with Religio Medici, and a tendency to find in it the unmediated and definitive voice of the author.7 Most notorious is Stanley Fish’s designation of Browne as ‘the bad physician’, 4 Extending essentially from Croll’s initial essays, cited above, to the shift in thinking precipitated by Fish in ‘The Bad Physician: The Case of Sir Thomas Browne’, in Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley, 1972), 353–73. 5 Croll himself, in ‘The Baroque Style in Prose’ (1929), 436, notes that ‘some searching is necessary to discover examples as pure as those that have been cited’; Havenstein (1999), 115, concurs. 6 Williamson, The Senecan Amble: Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (Chicago, 1951; repr. 1966), 188. Havenstein (1999), 117, questions Croll’s notion of baroque style as portraying ‘not a thought but a mind thinking’. 7 As J. R. Mulryne says, ‘In Religio Medici it is hard to separate Browne from ‘‘Browne’’, author from persona’ (‘The Play of Mind: Self and Audience in Religio Medici’, in C. A. Patrides (ed.), Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays (Columbia, MO, 1982), 64).

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a charge amply answered in subsequent criticism.8 More sympathetic and nuanced views are expressed by Victoria Silver, who argues that ‘Browne treats rhetoricity . . . as an arena of symbolic action’, and Achsah Guibbory, who sees in the subtle prose of Religio Medici neither simply Laudian politics (as argued by Michael Wilding) nor the tentative exploration of old and outmoded errors, but rather the articulation of theological positions with quite distinct political associations.9 Beyond the much-probed question of Browne’s involvement in the initial publication of Religio Medici, it is certainly the case that the writer who claims in the preface that these are merely his private opinions also goes on to establish his own positions as normative. While Religio Medici is meditative and exploratory, working through a series of loosely organized topics, it is also assertive, declamatory, and self-justifying.10 Although Browne claims, ‘I have no Genius to disputes in Religion’, and ‘in Divinity I love to keepe the road’, he also takes positions very far from the middle: ‘me thinkes there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith’ (RM 1.6; 1.9). The man who begins so circumspectly quickly becomes a high-wire performer in the realm of religious truth and mystery. It is perhaps this aspect of the work that leads Claire Preston to label Religio Medici ‘practically a juvenilium’, the over-confident, self-congratulatory, even naı¨ve assertions of a young man whose later work is marked by civility and collaborative inquiry.11 8 Fish (1972), 353–73. Among the liveliest responses to Fish was Frank J. Warnke, ‘A Hook For Amphibium: Some Reflections on Fish’, in Patrides (ed.) (1982), 49–59. See also Anna K. Nardo, ‘Sir Thomas Browne: Sub Specie Ludi’, The Centennial Review, 21 (1977), 311–20. 9 Victoria Silver, ‘Liberal Theology and Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘‘Soft and Flexible’’ Discourse’, English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990), 99; Michael Wilding, ‘Religio Medici in the English Revolution’, in Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1987), 89–113, emphasizes Brown’s Laudian views; Achsah Guibbory, ‘Sir Thomas Browne: The Promiscuous Embrace of Ritual Order’, in Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton (Cambridge, 1998), 125, argues that Browne’s ‘ ‘‘charity’’ . . . was carefully constructed to contrast with puritan zeal’, yet she sees him as essentially tolerant and generous in outlook. 10 Anne Drury Hall, ‘Epistle, Meditation, and Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici’, PMLA, 94 (1979), 234–46, describes Religio Medici as a merging of the confessional meditation and the epistolary mode. Claire Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005), argues against a strong organizational structure in Religio Medici. 11 Preston (2005), 17, and later discussion, 42–55. For an instance of what seems like selfcongratulation—though couched in terms of gratitude—see Religio Medici 1.52: ‘I thanke God, and with joy I mention it, I was never afraid of Hell, nor never grew pale at the description of that place; I have so fixed my contemplations on Heaven, that I have almost forgot the Idea of Hell . . . ’.

The Styles of Thomas Browne / 17 Religio Medici, for all its caution and qualification, the careful balancing with which it opens, the assertion that it advocates no dangerous or modern heresies, is also bold, even outrageous, articulating positions in their extreme form, treating faith like a spiritual athletic contest. Because it is so firmly grounded in the first person, it is tempting to take Religio as an absolute and final representation of Browne’s world view, and to see him as assertively propounding antiquated positions.12 But, as Victoria Silver has argued, Browne’s ‘distinctive rhetoricity’ is not merely flamboyant but purposeful, often used to undermine ‘the reader’s confidence in terms, doctrines, philosophies, and creeds’.13 Those tendencies are displayed early in Religio Medici, as Browne moves even-handedly between those two great attributes of God, ‘his wisedome and eternitie’, continuing, ‘with the one I recreate, with the other I confound my understanding’ (RM 1.11). The balanced style, the use of isocolon, anaphora, and zeugma, give a sense of calm yet playful inquiry. The pattern repeats itself in the following clause, in a doubled rhetorical question that solicits our assent, in units that are not only syntactically parallel (‘speake . . . thinke’; ‘without . . . without’) but also rhythmically analogous, with the pattern more fully elaborated and cadenced in the second instance: ‘for who can speake of eternitie without a solœcisme, or thinke thereof without an extasie?’14 The reader who assents to Browne’s rhetorical question is led quickly down the path towards assertions that he may neither agree with nor comprehend: while Browne maintains the same balance, leaving the number of phrases and clauses on either side of the equation roughly equal, the statements themselves propel us over the brink. ‘Time we may comprehend’, says Browne, easily. But once we have granted that proposition, and its corollary (‘’tis but five dayes elder then our selves, and hath the same Horoscope with the world’), we are committed to a dizzying reversal of directions and expectations: 12 Marta Straznicky, ‘Performing the Self in Browne’s Religio Medici’, Prose Studies, 13 (1990), 218, notes that ‘Throughout Religio Medici we are made to feel that a person of specific definition is speaking directly to us in his own voice’, even though she finds complementary voices in Religio Medici. 13 Silver (1990), 96, 101. 14 Readers of Browne still owe much to the seminal discussions of cadence and rhythm in George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm (London, 1922), and Austin Warren, ‘The Style of Sir Thomas Browne’, Kenyon Review, 13 (1951), 674–87; Browne’s use of cadence (and the elaborate patterns thereof), though undetected by most readers, is an essential element of his style. The quotation would scan as follows: ‘for who can speake of e ter ni tie with out a sol œ cisme, or thinke there of with out an ex ta sie?’

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but to retire so farre backe as to apprehend a beginning, to give such an infinite start forward, as to conceive an end in an essence that wee affirme hath neither the one nor the other; it puts my reason to Saint Pauls Sanctuary. (RM 1.11)

Browne moves us backward—to the beginning, beyond time—and then just as quickly forward—to the end, combining a sense of physical movement with temporal movement, forcing our imaginations to work strenuously with his. Some have relished the heady experience of dislocation and disorientation that such passages provide (Nardo (1977); Warnke (1982))15; others have taken offence, accusing Browne of venturing into areas of faith and reason of which he knows nothing (Digby; Ross); or of showing off for self-aggrandizement and love of amplificatio (Fish).16 But the very vehemence of the protest may be a sign of Browne’s success. In displaying the magnitude of the divine mysteries of time and eternity, Browne shows the limits of reason and, having exercised that faculty, allows it to surrender to faith: ‘I love to lose my selfe in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an o altitudo’ (RM 1.9). In the exaltation of belief, Browne comes close to condescending not only to the amazement of ‘ruder heads’ (RM 1.15) but also to the superior minds ‘unhing’d’ by ‘those wingy mysteries in Divinity and ayery subtilties in Religion’ (RM 1.9), before asserting that ‘to beleeve onely in possibilities, is not faith, but meere Philosophy’ (RM 1.48). If, as some have argued, Browne is out of his depth philosophically and theologically, finding no difficulty where ‘better heads’ have been troubled, his capacity for brilliant statement indicates that he is not beyond his depth rhetorically.17 His forte and his

15 See also Jonathan F. S. Post, ‘The Politics of Laughter: Comic Autobiography in Religio Medici’, in Post, Sir Thomas Browne (Boston, 1987), 87–90, on the rationale behind Browne’s verbal play. 16 Sir Kenelm Digby, Observations upon Religio Medici (1643); Alexander Ross, Medicus Medicatus: Or the Physicians Religion Cured . . . (1645), discussed by Huebert, 118–23; Fish (1972), 368. As I have argued in ‘Sir Thomas Browne and Stanley Fish: A Case of Malpractice’, Prose Studies, 11 (1988), 72–84, this is to pass a negative judgement on effect, based on a presumption of motive; see also Warnke, ‘A Hook for Amphibium’, in Patrides (ed.) (1982), 49 ff. 17 Anne Drury Hall (1979), 243, reminds us that ‘if we complain about Browne’s lack of philosophical rigor, we are voicing philosophy’s old quarrel with rhetoric’s condescension to the way the ordinary man takes hold of his experience, and rhetoric, as we know, was at the heart of Christian humanism’. The point has been more recently articulated by Ingo Berensmeyer, ‘Rhetoric, Religion, and Politics in Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici’, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 46 (2006), 113–32.

The Styles of Thomas Browne / 19 ambition in Religio Medici are less philosophical inquiry than, as he says, to ‘recreate’ and ‘confound’ his understanding, to enact the process of meditation, discovery, and, finally, celebration. Browne moves characteristically in Religio Medici from uncertainty to increasingly dramatic assertions of faith. For example, he begins Section 1.32 with apparent neutrality: ‘Now, besides these particular and divided Spirits, there may be (for ought I know) an universall and common Spirit to the whole world’. However that may be (and Browne cites Plato and Hermetic writers in support of the notion), he firmly asserts the presence of an indwelling spirit, one to be identified with the Spirit that created the world. The relatively commonplace trope of creation as incubation leads him to a progressively forceful articulation of the concept of a spirit both immanent and transcendent: This is that gentle heate that brooded on the waters, and in six dayes hatched the world; . . . whosoever feels not the warme gale and gentle ventilation of this Spirit, (though I feele his pulse) I dare not say he lives; for truely without this, to mee there is no heat under the Tropick; nor any light, though I dwelt in the body of the Sunne. (RM 1.32)

The syntax here is paratactic and the movement of the sentence cumulative, involving the repetition and amplification of an idea stated at the beginning, the notion of the divine spirit as creatively present, even if unperceived. Browne invokes his own expertise as a physician (‘though I feele his pulse’), but does so in a parenthesis, thus emphasizing the greater certainty of a reality beyond the physical: ‘(though I feele his pulse) I dare not say he lives’. Interestingly, and persuasively, the image begins as a ‘gentle heate’, a ‘warme gale and gentle ventilation’, but moves by association to something far more calorically intense, the heat of the tropics, the blinding light of the very ‘body of the Sunne’, all contrasted with the ultimate reality of that indwelling spirit. Both meditative, imitating Browne’s own reflection on the subject, and revelatory, the sentence enacts an apparently innocuous progression of idea and image. The irresistible movement of the passage is supported by patterns of sound and rhythm, for example, in the alliteration of ‘This is that gentle heate that brooded on the waters, and in six dayes hatched the world’; ‘the warme gale and gentle ventilation of this Spirit’; or by assonance and internal rhyme (gentle, ventilation), by the cascade of short i’s (‘this is . . . in six . . . ventilation . . . this . . .

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Spirit . . . ’) playing against the long vowels; and by the interlacing of words with w and r in close proximity: ‘waters . . . world . . . warme’. The passage moves from the softer sounds of warme, gale, gentle, to the conclusion, both conceptually and consonantally more assertive, with its prevalence of dentals and sibilants: ‘I dare not say he lives; for truely without this, to mee there is no heat under the Tropick; nor any light, though I dwelt in the body of the Sunne’. Such intricate and subtle effects are characteristic of a style that is not merely sonorous or showy but that reinforces and dramatizes meaning. A similar process is at work in 1.59, the brilliant penultimate section, in which Browne first forces the distinction between verifiable fact and belief, and then progressively reveals the all-encompassing power of God. This passage begins with an elaborate deployment of balanced and cautionary phrases: Againe, I am confident and fully perswaded, yet dare not take my oath of my salvation; I am as it were sure, and do beleeve, without all doubt, that there is such a city as Constantinople; yet for me to take my oath thereon, were a kinde of perjury . . .

All this precedes the radical unpacking of the idea of divine eternity and beneficence, in the course of which Browne applies the paradoxes of faith to himself: That which is the cause of my election, I hold to be the cause of my salvation, which was the mercy, and beneplacit of God, before I was, or the foundation of the world. Before Abraham was, I am, is the saying of Christ; yet is it true in some sense if I say it of my selfe, for I was not onely before my selfe, but Adam, that is, in the Idea of God, and the decree of that Synod held from all Eternity. And in this sense, I say, the world was before the Creation, and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive; though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of mee before she conceiv’d of Cain. (RM 1.59)

This passage, which has been taken as an instance of Browne’s self-serving wit,18 is, to be sure, breathtakingly bold, first in its quotation of Christ, with its embedding of the present-tense ‘I am’, an allusion to Jahweh’s words to Moses,19 in a way that 18 Not only by Fish, but also, more recently, by Ladina Bezzola Lambert, ‘Moving in Circles: The Dialectics of Selfhood in Religio Medici’, Renaissance Studies, 19 (2005), 374. 19 Exodus 3:13–14: ‘And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you’. Browne’s quotation from John 8: 58 is exact: ‘Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am’.

The Styles of Thomas Browne / 21 first implies that this is Browne’s own statement, then seems to retreat, showing it to be a quotation (‘is the saying of Christ’), before finally claiming it for himself as well. The complexity of the prose reflects the complexity of the idea, as Browne plays on both casual and more seriously existential meanings of ‘my selfe’,20 and on the meanings of life and death, of physical and spiritual existence, of conception and miscarriage. Like Religio Medici 1.11, this passage juxtaposes the realms of time and eternity, and moves us rapidly backwards—to before the Creation— and forwards—to the end, not of time; but of innocence and of life—‘and at an end before it had a beginning’. Although the idea does not change, it is articulated in ever more radical forms, until the whole of human history and of Browne’s own life is reduced to a single moment in Eden. This passage demonstrates the tension possible within a paratactic structure, where the writer does not suspend meaning as in a Ciceronian period, but draws it out in a succession of brilliant formulations of a principle stated at the beginning. Whereas Fish thinks Browne wants us chiefly to admire his wit, we might better see Browne employing the kind of metaphysical wit described by such contemporary theorists as Emmanuele Tesauro—the notion of the witty Creator whose creation is appreciated and articulated by the poet—or the prose writer—who perceives it.21 If we take seriously Browne’s description of Religio Medici as private in inception and intention, we might appropriately compare it to Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, that dazzling exploration of the self in sickness, full of fear, deeply introspective and cosmic at once, proceeding out of the experience of the individual, yet applicable to all human nature as Donne and his contemporaries understood it. Similarly, one might see the delight that Browne conveys in the paradoxes of faith or the possibilities of tolerance less as arrogant self-display than as pleasure in the exploration of the self in relation to the universe and to God, of extravagant rhetoric that depicts the extravagance of experience. In the words of a later writer who learned a good deal 20 First as a personal reference (myself ) and then as essential being, designating the self. 21 According to Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, ‘Tesauro maintained that ‘‘acutezze’’ or conceits were not created by men only but by God, his angels, and by animals. The universe was created by a God who was a ‘‘witty creator’’, an arguto favellatore, a witty writer or talker. . . . As God created a ‘‘metaphysical’’ world, so the poet creates ‘‘metaphysical’’ poems’; (‘Metaphysical Poetry and the Poetic of Correspondence’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 14 (1953), 228). See also Mazzeo, ‘A Seventeenth-century Theory of Metaphysical Poetry’, Romanic Review, 42 (1951), 245– 55; and C. A. Patrides, ‘ ‘‘The Best Part of Nothing’’: Sir Thomas Browne and the Strategy of Indirection’, in Patrides (ed.) (1982), 46, on the ‘implicit parallel between the creator of Religio Medici and the Creator of the world . . . ’.

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from Browne, ‘I fear chiefly lest my expression may be not extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced’.22 If Religio Medici gives dramatic expression to extreme positions of doubt and belief, looking backwards even as it plays a role in contemporary religion and politics, Pseudodoxia Epidemica has been seen as Browne’s response to Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, an exploration of errors of the material more than the spiritual world. First published in 1646, shortly after Religio Medici, it both precedes and follows Urne-Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus, since it appeared in five subsequent revisions and augmentations from 1650 to 1672. In this work, which might well be described as standing between the old world and the new, Browne’s method is not simply to refute error but to sift through the possibilities, testing old opinions against new knowledge: the chapters of Pseudodoxia, as Robin Robbins says, ‘are not accounts of particular experiments . . . ; rather they synthesize ancient and modern opinions . . . clearing the path for subsequent investigators’.23 Knowledge of the natural world, enlisted in Religio Medici primarily in the service of faith,24 is harder won here, so that the progressive rhetoric of celebration becomes the rhetoric of deliberation and judgment. Beginning with the address ‘To the Reader’, Browne first invokes Plato before anticipating the increased difficulties of his own undertaking: Would Truth dispense, we could be content, with Plato, that knowledge were but Remembrance; that Intellectuall acquisition were but Reminiscentiall evocation, and new impressions but the colourishing of old stamps which stood pale in the soul before. For, what is worse, knowledge is made by oblivion; and to purchase a clear and warrantable body of Truth, we must forget and part with much wee know. (PE ‘To the Reader’, 1)

While these opening sentences use techniques familiar to the reader of Religio Medici—the balancing of the elements of subject and complement on either 22 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, 1971), 324. I have further explored the relation between Browne and Thoreau in Generating Texts: The Progeny of SeventeenthCentury Prose (Charlottesville, 1996), chs. 4 and 5. 23 Robbins, i, p. xxxvii. 24 As in RM 1.13: ‘The wisedome of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads, that rudely stare about, and with a grosse rusticity admire his workes; those highly magnifie him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research of his creatures, returne the duty of a devout and learned admiration.’

The Styles of Thomas Browne / 23 side of the verb (‘that knowledge were but Remembrance’), and the amplification of the idea in a parallel clause that employs near synonyms (from ‘knowledge’ to ‘Intellectuall acquisition’ and ‘Remembrance’ to ‘Reminiscentiall evocation’)—the syntax conveys the weighing of alternatives and the complexity of the intellectual and emotional tasks involved. Not only the simple elimination of memory, the wiping of the hard disk, as it were, but also the more emotionally fraught ‘part[ing] with much wee know’ is required. Characteristically, and familiarly, Browne moves from the Latinate and abstract to the more vivid and concrete: ‘new impressions but the colourishing of old stamps which stood pale in the soul before’.25 And he moves slowly but deliberately to the further complication, finding that we are in a worse state than that envisioned by Plato, since ‘to purchase a clear and warrantable body of Truth, we must forget and part with much wee know’. The doublets so familiar to readers of Browne here both reiterate and elaborate one another: the ‘body of Truth’ must not only be lucid and comprehensible but also ‘warrantable’, subject to verification.26 The preface and the text itself show Browne as investigator (if not always precisely the experimental scientist at his best), compiler, and the master of metaphor— though less pronouncedly than in Religio—in a way appropriate to the scholarly enterprise as distinguished from the personal, though normative, declarations of his earlier work. In this vast undertaking, less flamboyant than Religio Medici, and less grand than Urne-Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus, Browne’s prose enacts the process of investigation and judgment.27 25 On this metaphor, see Edwards’s essay in this volume. 26 Robbins, ii. 750, cites the case of Robert Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays (1661), 98 f., attempting a second time to reproduce a result reported by Browne, ‘being unwilling that so faithful and candid a Naturalist should appear fit to be distrusted’. 27 Of the evaluation of received opinion, Browne writes, ‘Wee hope it will not bee unconsidered, that wee finde no open tract, or constant manuduction in this Labyrinth; but are oft-times faine to wander in the America and untravelled parts of truth’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 3). Labyrinth of course has ancient roots, contrasted with the subsequent, and newer, reference to ‘the America . . . ’. Robbins notes an allusion in Bacon to the Labyrinth and cites references in Pliny and Hakewill to untrodden ways in the pursuit of truth but does not mention the equally striking coupling of ‘America’ with the ‘untravelled parts of truth’, which recalls Donne’s brilliant phrase in Elegy 19, ‘O my America, my new found-lande’; that usage suggests Browne’s openness to the witty and metaphorical as well as to the traditional. Robbins, ii, 645–6, cites Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, trans. Gilbert Watts (1640), preface i. 13; and George Hakewill, An Apologie . . . Consisting in an Examination and Censure of the Common Errour Touching Natures Perpetuall and Universall Decay (1627; 1630; 1635), Preface (b5r); see also Robbins i, pp. xxi–xxiv; xxviii–xxx. Donne, ‘To His Mistris Going to Bed’, The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1965), 15.

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Throughout Pseudodoxia, Browne characteristically uses syntactical balance to represent the judicious consideration of opinion, whether popularly held or arising from scholarly accretion. In a sequence of antithetical clauses on the subject of the relation between sense and reason, he sets one element against the next, maintaining a kind of equilibrium while moving forward, with the balance shifting subtly as more phrases and clauses are added: ‘And therefore if any affirme the earth doth move, and will not believe with us, it standeth still, because he hath probable reasons for it, and I no infallible sense nor reason against it, I will not quarrell with his assertion’ (PE 1.5.29). This sentence turns on its fulcrum midway: ‘but if like Zeno he shall walke about, and yet deny there is any motion in nature, surely that man was constituted for Antycera, and were a fit companion for those, who having a conceit they are dead, cannot be convicted into the society of the living’(PE 1.5.29). Having set individual points of his position against one another, Browne proceeds to a larger, more encompassing antithesis, and concludes with an image of the madness of those who deny even the evidence of their own senses. This passage may be usefully contrasted with the radical skepticism and fideism of Religio Medici 1.59, in which Browne’s avowed unwillingness to take an oath on the existence of Constantinople leads him to rely wholly on the mercy of God, but also to elaborate a series of paradoxes, culminating in ‘and Eve miscarried of mee before she conceiv’d of Cain’. Both argument and style differ in these two passages: the one elaborates a paradoxical concept in an everunfolding sequence; the other sets clause against clause and phrase against phrase to reflect the more deliberative and collaborative process of inquiry representative of Pseudodoxia Epidemica. This method is frequently used in much simpler ways in Pseudodoxia, as Browne moves from report, to doubt, to evidence, balancing member against member to represent that process of inquiry, and following it up with further substantiating evidence: ‘The Rose of Jerico, that flourishes every yeer just about Christmas Eve is famous in Christian reports, which notwithstanding wee have some reason to doubt; and are plainely informed by Bellonius, it is but a Monasticall imposture, as hee hath delivered in his observations, concerning the plants in Jericho’ (PE 2.6.149). The Latinate vocabulary for which Browne has been praised and criticized also appears in Pseudodoxia, sometimes in daunting measure. But its function here, consistent with Browne’s status as an investigator, is rarely a matter of creating resonant or cadenced prose, and far from the cry of ‘o altitudo’; more

The Styles of Thomas Browne / 25 often it is an attempt to find appropriate technical terms for phenomena, including those that are newly observed:28 Therefore true it is, and confirmable by every experiment, that steele and good Iron never excited by the Loadstone, discover in themselves a verticity; that is, a directive or polary faculty, whereby, conveniently placed, they do septentrionate at one extreme, and Australize at another; this is manifestible in long and thin plates of steel perforated in the middle and equilibrated, or by an easier way in long wires equiponderate with untwisted silke and soft wax. (PE 2.2.88)

But Browne, who conducted a number of his own experiments, sometimes casually mentioned in startling ways,29 can also rescue himself and the reader in a quick descent to simpler diction and more easily comprehensible description: The same is also manifest in steele wires thrust through little spheres or globes of Corke and floated on the water, or in naked needles gently let fall thereon, for so disposed they will not rest untill they have found out the Meridian, and as neere as they can lye parallell unto the axis of the earth. (PE 2.2.88)

Besides weighing one fact or opinion or clause against another in a syntactic balance that enacts the process of judgment, Browne also resorts to lists of matters of question or doubt, often noun clauses in sequence or adverbial clauses that put before us the idea or opinion that is to be examined. For example, Browne early on records the false beliefs propagated by Satan ‘[t]hat there is no God. That there are many. That he himselfe is God. That he is lesse then Angels or Men. That he is nothing at all’ (PE 1.10.65). But whether in these brief fragments or in more extended clauses, Browne uses this formula throughout Pseudodoxia to set the agenda, to state the contention or the belief that is to be examined and then, often, rejected: That Lapis Lazuli hath in it a purgative faculty we know, that Bezoar is Antidotall, Lapis Judaicus diureticall, Corall Antepilepticall, we will not deny . . . But that an Amethist prevents inebriation, that an Emerald will breake if worne in copulation. That a Diamond laid under the pillow, will betray the incontinency of a wife . . . that the fume of an Agath will avert a tempest, or the wearing of a Crysoprase make one 28 As Browne notes in ‘To the Reader’, ‘the quality of the Subject will sometimes carry us into expressions beyond meere English apprehensions’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 2). 29 e.g., his note ‘That Flos Affricanus is poyson, and destroyeth dogs, in two experiments we have not found’ (PE 2.7.158).

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out of love with gold, as some have delivered, we are yet, I confesse, to believe, and in that infidelity are likely to end our dayes. (PE 2.5.139)

This apparently casual list is also purposefully organized. In moving from the known and acknowledged early in this passage to the possibly true to the obviously absurd with which it concludes, Browne constructs not only a method of assessment but also, without apparent effort, an effective argument. As he arrives at the last far-fetched possibility, he occupies the skeptical posture of not yet believing, and converts assent to a matter of faith, in this case against all evidence, as he concludes with the witty play on ‘that infidelity’. Such wit and skepticism are cherished features of Pseudodoxia, particularly in the sections treating animal behavior, as in the verbal play on the generation of error in the well-known account of the beaver: ‘That a Bever to escape the Hunter, bites off his testicles or stones, is a tenent very ancient, and hath had thereby advantage of propagation’ (PE 3.4.172). The popularity of this notion notwithstanding, Browne goes on to demolish it. His treatment of unicorns is no less witty and equally devastating, as the unicorn is multiplied out of existence: wee are so farre from denying there is any Unicorne at all, that wee affirme there are many kinds thereof. In the number of Quadrupedes, wee will concede no less then five; that is, the Indian Oxe, the Indian Asse, the Rhinoceros, the Oryx, and that which is more eminently termed Monoceros, or Vnicornis. (PE 3.23.256)

If the attempt to define himself and his religion in Religio Medici involves Browne in what has seemed an extravagant and antiquarian enterprise, and if Pseudodoxia Epidemica canvasses the errors of the past to provide a basis for truths yet to be discovered, Urne-Buriall is quite literally antiquarian. But although written in response to the discovery of ‘between fourty and fifty Urnes’, ‘digged up’ ‘in a Field of old Walsingham’, it proceeds from that single archeological point to the burial customs of humankind and the human understanding of death and immortality. Published along with The Garden of Cyrus sixteen years after the pirated edition of Religio Medici, Urne-Buriall has often been described as the most stylistically ornate of Browne’s prose, yet it ranges from the quite simple and utilitarian to the grand and sonorous, evincing yet again the difficulty of arriving at a single designation for works as complex and nuanced as Browne’s. The account of the urns themselves, for example, is altogether specific and concrete:

The Styles of Thomas Browne / 27 deposited in a dry and sandy soile, not a yard deep, nor farre from one another: Not all strictly of one figure, but most answering these described: Some containing two pounds of bones, distinguishable in skulls, ribs, jawes, thigh-bones, and teeth, with fresh impressions of their combustion. Besides the extraneous substances, like peeces of small boxes, or combes handsomely wrought, handles of small brasse instruments, brazen nippers, and in one some kinde of Opale. (UB 2.140–1)

Like some sections of Pseudodoxia, this passage may at first appear little more than a list of those things that can be seen or measured. In compiling this information, Browne hardly bothers to construct complete sentences or to join elements that in another document might be part of a larger period, and frequently he begins with a noun clause to open a new area of inquiry: ‘That these were the Urnes of Romanes from the common custome and place where they were found’; ‘That Britain was notably populous is undeniable’ (UB 2.141, 142). But even here there are subtler aspects of shaping, as in the parallel phrasing: ‘not a yard deep, nor farre from one another’; in the frequent use of alliteration: ‘deposited in a dry and sandy soile’; ‘handsomely wrought, handles of small brasse instruments, brazen nippers’; and in a gesture towards precision that uses both positive and negative: ‘Not all strictly of one figure, but most answering these described’. Whereas sections of Religio Medici create the experience of paradox, and Pseudodoxia Epidemica surveys the opinions of centuries, these sections represent a different kind of thinking aloud, a sorting through of data, often leading to the conclusion that no conclusion can be drawn: ‘A great obscurity herein, because no medall or Emperours Coyne enclosed, which might denote the date of their enterrments’ (UB 2.143). Indeed, for all the tangibility of the urns themselves, the overriding fact is the lack or inconclusiveness of the evidence: ‘Some finding many fragments of sculs in these Urnes, suspected a mixture of bones; In none we searched was there cause of such conjecture, though sometimes they declined not that practise’ (UB 3.151). Paradoxically, this scant collection of material evidence, which so provokes inquiry, is the firmest thing in Urne-Buriall; the rest is a succession of things unknown, as summarized in Chapter 3: ‘The certainty of death is attended with uncertainties, in time, manner, places’ (UB 3.152). In the opening of Urne-Buriall, Browne shows a remarkable ability to modulate from the grand gesture of the first sentence (rather like the opening of Samuel Johnson’s ‘Vanity of Human Wishes’)30 to a sudden descent into the tactile and the mundane: 30 ‘Let observation with extensive view, j Survey mankind, from China to Peru’; The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr, with George Milne, Vol. 6 (New Haven, 1964), 91.

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In the deep discovery of the Subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfie some enquirers; who, if two or three yards were open about the surface, would not care to rake the bowels of Potosi, and regions towards the Centre. Nature hath furnished one part of the Earth, and man another. The treasures of time lie high, in Urnes, Coynes, and Monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables. (UB 1.135)

This passage has some of the magisterial aspects of Religio Medici—the comprehensive view of human behavior, the use of parallel structures, the preference for balanced and antiphonal phrasing—but also skillful asymmetry in the length of members, which reverses our expectations and grounds the passage in the limitations of human experience: ‘Nature hath furnished one part of the Earth, and man another’. Here too Browne creates resonance with alliteration: deep discovery; Subterranean . . . satisfie; rake . . . regions; treasures . . . time. But there is also a kind of radical wit in this survey, which surprises as it moves from the ambitiously ‘deep discovery of the Subterranean world’ to a mere ‘shallow part’ to ‘two or three yards . . . about the surface’. And Browne, characteristically, ranges from the exotic (‘the bowels of Potosi’) or Latinate (Subterranean; Centre, vegetables) to the earthy—literally, the world, deep, rake, high, roots. The coup de graˆce comes at the end of the passage, in the unexpected materiality of the final example: ‘scarce below the roots of some vegetables’, in which the height of human pretension and the shallowness of human imagination and endeavor are suddenly evident in the linking of our inquiries with the world of carrots and potatoes. Indeed the feebleness of our efforts and limits of our success, as figured in the structure of this opening passage, are precisely the point of Urne-Buriall. And that, of course, is where the entire work is heading: to the grand summation of human failure to preserve memory. In contrast to the optimism of Religio Medici, in which Browne asserts the ultimate reality of ‘the warme gale and gentle ventilation of this Spirit’, he here identifies most powerfully not with immortality but with the radical dependency of human life. Just as at the beginning ‘a large part of the earth is still in the Urne unto us’, so we remain finally ignorant, and the most powerful images here are of the brevity of life, the imminence of dissolution. The urns themselves, at first tangible objects whose weight and contents may be described in physical terms, next become objects of speculation, placed in the context of a wide array of interment customs, and finally, and repeatedly, an image of what we do not know and never can. The general sense of our lack of knowledge

The Styles of Thomas Browne / 29 expressed in the first paragraph is focused more narrowly in the second chapter: ‘Than the time of these Urnes deposited, or precise Antiquity of these Reliques, nothing of more uncertainty’ (UB 2.143). In Chapter 3 the urns are a reminder of our beginning in the womb and of our end, the cervical imagery inexorably connecting the two: ‘the common form with necks was a proper figure, making our last bed like our first; nor much unlike the Urnes of our Nativity, while we lay in the nether part of the Earth, and inward vault of our Microcosme’ (UB 3.148).31 And little as we know of this world and of the provenance of these urns, we know far less of the world to come: ‘A Dialogue between two Infants in the womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Platoes denne, and are but Embryon Philosophers’ (UB 4.162). The final two chapters of Urne-Buriall move towards a peroration on immortality and the brilliantly aphoristic statement, ‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us’ (UB 5.169), in which Browne moves from the small to the great, the perceived to the unperceived, from the noun to the verb. But this light is surrounded by the deep darkness of our radical lack of knowledge and of the grave: ‘it cannot be long before we lie down in darknesse, and have our light in ashes’ (UB 5.168), a sequence in which parallel syntax and alliteration emphasize our inevitable decline. Chapter 4 prepares the way conceptually by asserting, on the one hand, that pre-Christian burial rituals anticipate Christian belief, and on the other, more unsettlingly, that belief in an afterlife is simply a psychological necessity: ‘It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seemes progressionall, and otherwise made in vaine’ (UB 4.163). Christian rites are both expressed and limited in the alliterative doublet, speaking ‘hopes of another life, and hints of a Resurrection’ (UB 4.158). Far more certain is death, articulated in a series of relatively short, emphatic clauses: ‘If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death, our life is a sad composition; We live with death, and die not in a moment’ (UB 5.164–5). Perhaps the most powerful image of Urne-Buriall is the equinox of Chapter 5, in which the shadows of our uncertain life are seen as declining precipitously 31 The echoing of ‘Earth’ in ‘Urnes’ of the opening paragraph of Chapter 1 is repeated in reverse order here, as ‘Urnes’ leads to ‘Earth’, linking the two and marking our final dissolution.

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towards death. Once again, the march of Browne’s clauses, with their initially simple, parallel structure, their declarative and exclamatory function, conveys the inevitable drumbeat of the passing of time and of life, coupling a strong sense of movement with an inability to know the precise time, in a sequence intensified by patterns of alliteration and assonance: be, before, we; Lucina, life; long, lie, light; down, darkness: The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Æquinox? Every houre addes unto that current Arithmetique, which scarce stands one moment. And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt whether thus to live, were to dye. Since our longest Sunne sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darknesse, and have our light in ashes. (UB 5.167–8)

Even though we pass through death to life like the infant through the birth canal into the outside world, that passage is attended by images of darkness and the dust to which we must return. Browne, very much like his contemporary Jeremy Taylor in The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, emphasizes the brevity and fragility of human life. But whereas Taylor, appropriate to his office as chaplain and bishop, urges his readers to live each moment as if it were their last, Browne’s proclamation of human vanity bears some resemblance to the preacher of Ecclesiastes, declaring that ‘all is vanity’, or to Donne in An Anatomy of the World, declaring the utter paltriness of what is left. If the hallmark of Religio Medici is exultant paradox, the mark of Urne-Buriall is irony: human attempts to preserve memory of the dead are utterly futile; the very obscurity of these urns is what has kept them until now; all below the moon is transitory, and all above it too, as Browne states in a brilliant antiphonal statement: ‘Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osyris in the Dogge-starre’ (UB 5.168–9). The only solution is to look beyond the physical: ‘There is nothing strictly immortall, but immortality. Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end . . . ’ (UB 5.169). Yet Urne-Buriall does not conclude with the vibrant image of the ‘invisible Sun within us’, or the certainty of immortality, but quickly turns to the minute and minimal, to the smaller fires that produced the ashes in the urn.32 The ending of Urne-Buriall, like the 32 ‘A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus; but the wisedom of funerall Laws found the folly of prodigall blazes, and reduced undoing fires unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an Urne’ (UB 5.169).

The Styles of Thomas Browne / 31 treatise itself, conveys a deep ambiguity: it meditates on urns long preserved and ultimately mysterious; by its careful attention to burial customs it asserts their utmost interest, and finally their utter insignificance: ‘ ’Tis all one to lye in St Innocents Church-yard, as in the sands of Ægypt: Ready to be any thing, in the extasie of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrianus’.33 The connections between Urne-Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus extend beyond the fact of their publication as companion pieces in 1658. As Frank L. Huntley cogently argued, and as others have elaborated since, the essays are related in subject-matter and epistemology ‘as they pass from ignorance to knowledge; and . . . in their images, which take us in circles from darkness to light to darkness again, from womb to urn to new birth, from the ‘‘sleep’’ of death to drowsiness when the ‘‘quincunx of heaven runs low’’ and ‘‘the huntsmen are up in America’’ ’.34 But the contrasts between the two are also notable: the prose, already elaborate in Urne-Buriall, is even more sumptuous in The Garden of Cyrus, and the more strikingly so as the subject turns to the natural world. Whereas Urne-Buriall meditates on loss of memory and on ultimate disorder, The Garden of Cyrus celebrates ‘the orderly hand of nature’ (GC 3.207), and by implication the ordering hand of the Creator, recalling the insight of Religio Medici: ‘In briefe, all things are artificiall, for Nature is the Art of God’ (RM 1.16).35 Where Urne-Buriall finds loss of certainty and permanence, The Garden of Cyrus finds images of order everywhere; and Browne’s piling up of examples amounts, paradoxically, to a virtual riot of pattern, seen in spider webs, honeycombs, reticular patterns of bird feathers, snake skins, proportions in the legs of quadrupeds, in human organization, and everywhere in the natural world. If at times the style is almost parodically Latinate (‘The exiguity and smallnesse of some seeds extending to large productions is one of the magnalities of nature . . . ’ (GC 3.199)),36 grand in its diction and solemn in its movement, it also imitates, like Browne’s earlier prose, the movement of the enumerating and discovering mind. It manifests the same thoroughness 33 As Guibbory (1998) notes, ‘The radically contradictory perspectives in Urn Buriall do not admit of any easy resolution’ (139). 34 Frank L. Huntley, ‘Sir Thomas Browne: The Relationship of Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus’, Studies in Philology, 53 (1956), 204–19, repr. in Fish (1971), 427. 35 As Browne says, ‘nature delighteth in this number . . . ’ (GC 3.200). 36 C. A. Patrides (ed.), The Major Works of Sir Thomas Browne (London, 1977), 351, cites Thomas Blount, Glossographia; or a Dictionary (1656) on exiguity (littleness) and magnalities (‘great things to be wondred at’).

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of inquiry, the cataloguing of instances: ‘That the first Plantations not long after the Floud were disposed after this manner . . . ’ (GC 1.184); ‘The same is not forgot by Lapidaries while they cut their gemms pyramidally, or by æquicrural [isosceles] triangles’ (GC 2.188); ‘The same is also observable underground in the circinations and sphærical rounds of Onyons’ (GC 4.213). Like the list of burial customs in Urne-Buriall, such sequences of short grammatical units convey both the ubiquity of pattern and an inability to compass the endless variety of nature: ‘The true seeds of Cypresse and Rampions are indistinguishable by old eyes. Of the seeds of Tobacco a thousand make not one grain, The disputed seeds of Harts tongue, and Maidenhair, require a greater number. From such undiscernable seminalities arise spontaneous productions’ (GC 3.199). Claire Preston has argued that The Garden of Cyrus ‘shows us Browne in his most rigorously scientific mode. As he discusses the structure, vegetation, and generation of plants, seeds, eggs, insects, and higher animals, the enormous range of his biological, botanical, anatomical, and physiological expertise becomes obvious’.37 But though the abundance of Browne’s knowledge, including that of local flora in particular, is everywhere evident, the driving force of this treatise is not scientific inquiry, but rather the pursuit of the idea of order in nature, Browne’s desire to see and to show ‘how nature Geometrizeth, and observeth order in all things’ (GC 3.203). The impulse, in fact, is that glimpsed already in Religio Medici: The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man: ’tis the debt of our reason wee owe unto God, and the homage wee pay for not being beasts . . . The wisedome of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads, that rudely stare about, and with a grosse rusticity admire his workes; those highly magnifie him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research of his creatures, returne the duty of a devout and learned admiration. (RM 1.13)

Browne, patient and judicious in Pseudodoxia, reasoned in his judgments and capable of sustained inquiry, is also characteristically an enthusiast, even when, as in The Garden of Cyrus, his subject is order; the multiplicity of his discoveries and the serial quality of his prose enact the promiscuous discovery of pattern where the naked eye can hardly discern it, whether in ‘the Favaginites or honey-comb-stone’, in the ‘Catkins, or pendulous excrescencies 37 Preston (2005), 175.

The Styles of Thomas Browne / 33 of severall Trees, of Wallnuts, Alders, and Hazels’, in the leaves of artichokes or ‘the little creepers about the head of the burre’, or ‘the Autumnal budds, which awaite the returne of the sun, [and] doe after the winter solstice multiply their calicular leaves, making little Rhombuses, and network figures, as in the Sycamore and Lilac’ (GC 3.193, 194, 195). Browne proceeds on the one hand in orderly fashion, moving in time and by genre, tracing gardens from their very origins, declaring that ‘Gardens were before Gardiners, and but some hours after the earth’ (GC 1.179), and citing the famous gardens of the ancient world before proceeding to culturally imposed design—sculpture, lapidary art, chess boards, battle formations—and then to the designs found in nature itself. Yet the movement from the simple listing of instances to the overwhelming profusion of examples balances a sense of delight in pattern with an enthusiasm for abundance that is nearly bewildering. Browne’s repeated assertion of the ubiquity of the number five, that we ‘may readily discover how nature rests in this number’ (GC 5.221; emphasis mine), is accompanied by a restless exploration, a series of questions beginning with what and leading inexorably to why: ‘Why amongst Sea-starres nature chiefly delighteth in five points?’; ‘Why the fifth years Oxe was acceptable Sacrifice unto Jupiter?’ (GC 5.225). As Browne traces the mysteries and prevalence of the number five, he moves from what is at first a pattern in the growth of plants, a ‘strict rule’ seen in the ‘rudimental spring of seeds’, the opposition of leaves or shoots so that they form ‘in crosse [or] decussation to those above or below them’ (GC 3.196, 195), and finally to the principle of order itself, to a sense of alternation and complementarity in all things. Not only does the angle of incidence equal the angle of reflection, but ‘[d]arkness and light hold interchangeable dominions’ (GC 4.218); as in the realm of ‘that great and true Amphibium’ of Religio Medici, what we see leads inexorably to what we cannot see and cannot fully understand, to a sense of relationship between the physical and metaphysical. The range of Browne’s stylistic accomplishment, attested to long ago when Austin Warren wrote of the low, middle, and high style in Browne, and Morris Croll found in his work the classic characteristics of both the curt style and the loose,38 proceeds both from decorum, a style suitable to a method of inquiry or statement, and from the full engagement of Browne’s intellect and imagination. Throughout his work Browne manifests deep 38 Warren 678; Croll (1929), 431.

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curiosity, a desire to set the record straight with the help of all the authorities he could read and all the observation he could engage in, and, equally, a sense of admiration—that is, wonder—both ‘devout and learned’. Browne’s imaginative grasp is expressed not only in elegant and ceremonial but also in simple and serviceable prose; in lists on the one hand and alliterative and parallel structures on the other; in brisk aphorism and elegant cadences; and finally in images and concepts that link his works together. If we are startled by the sudden shift in the opening of Urne-Buriall from the depth of the mines of Potosi to ‘scarce below the roots of some vegetables’, it is perhaps worth noting that The Garden of Cyrus deals precisely with such things as the roots of vegetables: ‘For most plants, though green above-ground, maintain their Originall white below it’.39 Appropriate as the Greek letter theta (Ł) is to the meditation on death of Urne-Buriall, as articulated in ‘Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortall right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all’ (UB 5.166), the mirror image of that statement appears in Browne’s account of plants in the Garden of Cyrus: ‘Right lines and circles make out the bulk of plants’ (GC 3.207). In other words, as ‘nature Geometrizeth’, Browne, in discovering and meditating on patterns and lack of pattern in life, repeats images and phrases as he moves from one work to the other. If ‘we live by an invisible Sun within us’ in Urne-Buriall, we find in The Garden of Cyrus that ‘[t]he Sunne it self is but the dark simulachrum, and light but the shadow of God’ (GC 4.218), itself a repetition of the Latin version from Religio Medici. The writer who began by depicting himself moving within ‘the great wheele of the Church’ (RM 1.6) calls on another image of circularity in his last published work: ‘All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mysticall Mathematicks of the City of Heaven’ (GC 5.226). In styles ranging from exploratory to hieratic, meditative to assertive, Browne articulates a world view that allows for, and flourishes under, the dual enthusiasms of observation of the natural world and a pervasive sense of what we cannot see. These diverse works are linked by an imaginative approach that joins a sense of order with a sense of inquiry and of mystery, manifested in images that signify both. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne compares the process of our learning to two circles, ‘like the great and 39 This is in contrast to the ‘colours of mediocrity, that is blew and green’ of the upper world (GC 4.217).

The Styles of Thomas Browne / 35 exemplary wheeles of heaven . . . that while we are daily carried about, and whirled on by the swindge and rapt of the one, wee may maintaine a naturall and proper course, in the slow and sober wheele of the other’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 1). And at the conclusion of The Garden of Cyrus, he sees our actions in relation to ‘our Antipodes’, showing in his awareness of the two hemispheres the complementary and opposed view of things, so that dawn intersects with dark, death with life: ‘who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again?’ (GC 5.226).40 The rich complexity of Browne’s prose, then, depends not only on sounds, on grammatical or rhetorical structures, on cadences, rhythms, diction, and patterns of speech, but also on images and themes, on a series of dynamically opposed possibilities that persist through his work. In the notion that ‘Darknesse and light divide the course of time’, articulated in Urne-Buriall, is perhaps also the key that unites the several voices and styles of Browne, the means by which he looks backwards and forwards, balancing dark and light, knowledge and ignorance, in an ongoing effort to discern and to understand, for however much we see and know and catalogue, we do not know ‘when was the Æquinox’. As Browne says, ‘Light that makes things seen’, even the light of scientific inquiry that he prized, ‘makes some things invisible’ (GC 4.218). And in that perfect and characteristic balance of two things not quite opposite, the seen and the invisible, (all) things and some things, he gives us both a sense of order and understanding and a sense of mystery, ever to be pursued. 40 As Browne pointed out in Pseudodoxia, an attempt to date the creation of the world, ‘whether in the Autumne, Spring, Winter or Summer’, must confront the logical difficulty that ‘when ever the world had its beginning it was created in all these four’ (PE 6.2.453).

2 The Laudian Idiot Debora Shuger

The Jesuites could not shake him: for he would not Take orders, but remaine an Idiote. Henry Goodier1

In Achsah Guibbory’s words, Religio Medici comes ‘discomfortingly close to the controversial positions of the Laudians’.2 She is certainly right, and not the first to note the proximity. Yet one does not find Browne’s name in recent historical scholarship on Laudianism, which is surprisingly thin and, as Guibbory’s discomfort suggests, still surprisingly hostile to Laud, who remains cast as the ‘evil counsellor’ whose authoritarian rigidity and intolerance ‘cost the king his crown’.3 The evidence set forth by Julian Davies and Kevin Sharpe in the early 1990s showing that Laud never played this role has not changed the overall picture; nor, in truth, do their revisionist accounts, which primarily concern Laud’s enforcement of ecclesiastical policy, shed much light on Browne’s Laudianism. Peter Lake’s seminal ‘Laudian Style’, with its emphasis on the questionable holiness of compulsory beauty, is similarly unhelpful, given that Browne’s 1 Commendatory verses prefixed to Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities (1611). 2 Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1998), 120. 3 See Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641 (Oxford, 1992), 49; Keven Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), 284, both of which contest this historiographical tradition.

The Laudian Idiot / 37 religion manifestly does not center on liturgical forms but on the imbrications of reason and revelation, science and mystery, time and eternity.4 Hence the first half of this essay, which attempts to get at the very real sense in which Browne is a Laudian, is also an attempt to define Laudianism—to define it as a theological vision rather than a liturgical ideal or an ecclesiastical policy. It was, of course, all three, but so was Calvinism, and yet scholars have found it possible to treat Calvin’s theology of grace apart from Presbyterianism and the burning of Servetus.5 For much the same reason, in discussing Browne’s Laudianism, I will not focus on altar rails or Prynne’s ears but on Laud’s one full-dress theological work, the Conference with Fisher.6 For Guibbory, Browne was not a Laudian, only ‘close’ to one; the label fails in her eyes because Browne’s ‘ ‘‘singularity’’ and skepticism distance him from Laudian rigor’: whereas the archbishop ‘tried to compel uniformity in worship’, the doctor’s ‘independent, inquiring, skeptical mind’ underwrote a more ‘generous vision of a church’ that allowed for individuals’ ‘eccentric beliefs’ so long as peaceably held.7 Insofar as this distinction is valid—a matter to which we will return—it seems related to the fact that Browne was a layman. The title of his apologia calls attention to this: the work is about a physician’s religion, not a priest’s. It thus belongs to the ‘new and unique approach to matters divine’ that Amos Funkenstein denominates ‘secular theology’, in which for the first (and last) time ‘science, philosophy, and theology [were] seen as almost one and the same occupation’. This was a theology ‘conceived by laymen for laymen’.8 Its practitioners make an impressive roll-call: Grotius, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Boyle, Spinoza. Of these, all but the first entered print after 1636, when Browne composed Religio—one year after in Descartes’s case.9 Browne’s work is thus a very early experiment in secular theology. It was, moreover, an experiment 4 Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Stanford, 1993), 162. 5 Browne might be a Laudian although critical of Wren’s tactless management style during his tenure as Bishop of Norwich. See Jonathan Post, Sir Thomas Browne (Boston, 1987), 54. 6 First published anonymously in 1624 as an appendix to Francis White’s Replie to Jesuit Fisher’s Answere, an expanded edition came out under Laud’s name in 1639. 7 Guibbory (1998), 119, 130–1. 8 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1986), 3–4. 9 Descartes’s Discourse on Method appeared in 1637. Digby read it at once and immediately recommended it to Hobbes (R. T. Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby: The Ornament of England, 1603–1665 (London, 1936), 122).

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/ Debora Shuger

whose 1642 publication immediately spurred replies from other lay intellectuals. Taken together, these disclose a new intellectual cosmos in that obscure and unstable moment before the big bang that we now call ‘early modern philosophy’. Between 1643 and 1645 Religio Medici elicited three responses, the discussion of which, in conjunction with Religio, will occupy the second half of this essay. The micro-exchange is of particular interest because of the authors’ religious affiliations. Kenelm Digby (1603–65) had reverted to his ancestral Catholicism eight years prior to the 1643 publication of his Observations upon ‘Religio Medici’. Alexander Ross (1590–1654), whose 1645 Medicus Medicatus took on both Browne and Digby, was a Calvinist conformist; he was also a minister—a chaplain to Charles I, in fact—but his writings, which include critiques of Copernicus, Galileo, Hobbes, Ralegh, and Harvey, put him squarely within the lay intellectual cross-currents of the age. Edward Herbert (1583–1648), George’s older brother, Jacobean ambassador to France, and after 1629 peer of the realm, seems to have been sufficiently unremarkable in his conformity that his De Religione Laici elicited no comment; presumably his outward piety was that of a conventional Protestant gentleman. Published the same year as Ross’s tract, De Religione Laici reworks the final chapters of Herbert’s 1624 De veritate, yet the title acknowledges filiation to Browne’s essay, whose traces can be discerned throughout Herbert’s treatise.10 We thus have three works—one by a Roman Catholic, one by a Calvinist, one by some sort of conformist—responding to the (allegedly) Laudian Browne. It would seem fairly easy to predict how this conversation will play itself out. It is not. None of the participants sticks to the anticipated script. Neither the issues on which they focus nor the positions they take retrace the steps of the clerical controversialists. Instead, this little constellation of works opens onto an intellectual milieu discussed neither in current scholarship on the Tudor–Stuart church, which mostly still keeps the laity outside the rails,11 nor in histories of early modern philosophy, which preserve a Baconian distance from religion.

10 See Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2002), 211–14. 11 A stunning exception being Nicholas Tyacke’s ‘Arminianism and English Culture’, in Britain and the Netherlands: Church and State Since the Reformation, A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (eds.) (The Hague, 1981), 94–117.

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I Religio Medici’s most flagrant Laudianisms cluster in its opening sections. By the Caroline period one told a Calvinist conformist from a Laudian by the presence, or refusal, of strident anti-popery,12 and on this topic, Browne makes his position unusually clear: the Church of England and of Rome share ‘one common name and . . . one faith’, and therefore he may ‘enter their Churches . . . and either pray with them, or for them . . . we being all Christians’ (RM 1.3).13 Browne rings similarly Laudian changes in his happy embrace of ceremonial worship and ‘all those outward and sensible motions, which may express or promote . . . invisible devotion’, as likewise in his detestation of sacrilege. ‘I should’, he avers, ‘cut off my arme rather then violate a church window’ (RM 1.3). Even tiny details betray the same commitment. The authorized edition of Religio Medici omits the flourish that in earlier versions had concluded Browne’s declaration of allegiance to the established Church: ‘no man shall reach my faith unto another Article, or command my obedience to a Canon more’ (RM 1.5). The excision almost certainly sought to remove a faux-allusion to the Laudian Canons of 1640, whose ‘etcetera oath’ sparked widespread opposition.14 The Canons had been proposed years after Browne wrote the passage, but in 1643 a refusal to swear to new canons would have sounded like an anti-Laudian swipe, and so Browne removed it.15 As Guibbory observes, the opening of Religio Medici ‘would have made [Browne’s] Laudian connection clear to contemporary English readers’.16 The connection, however, goes deeper than shared views on Rome or ritualism. To see the more fundamental likeness, a comment of William Chillingworth’s provides a suggestive entry point. At the beginning of his Religion of Protestants (1638), Chillingworth charges that the Jesuits themselves have spread rumors 12 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 4, 34–6, 117, 530, 538. 13 Compare Laud, A relation of the Conference betweene William Lawd . . . and Mr. Fisher the Jesuite (London, 1639), repr. in Vol. 2 of The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, D.D., 7 vols. (Oxford, 1849), ii. 414, 417. See also Guibbory (1998), 121; Milton (1995), 81. For Browne’s equally Laudian refusal to identify the pope as anti-Christ, see Milton (1995) 63, 117; Guibbory (1998), 124; and RM 1.5 and 1.46. 14 Kevin Sharpe 879–84. 15 However, see also Jonathan Post, ‘Browne’s Revisions of Religio Medici’, SEL, 25 (1985), 149; Guibbory (1998), 130. 16 Guibbory (1998), 120–1.

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about Laudians ‘making haste to Rome’ in order to discredit a party that Rome had come to regard as particularly dangerous. Doctrinaire Calvinists who ‘pull down your infallibility, and set up their own’, are the sort of men, Chillingworth alleges, that the papal controversialists ‘love to deal with’; but the Laudians present unexpected problems, for ‘upon men of temper and moderation . . . such as require of Christians to believe only in Christ, and will damn no man nor doctrine without express and certain warrant from God’s word; upon such as these you know not how to fasten’. This ‘latitudinarian’ minimalism presents the real threat to Rome’s dogmatic intolerance, which is ‘the true reason, that you thus rave and rage against them’.17 One does not usually think of Laudians as quite so easy-going, and in truth, one can locate some rigidly authoritarian cheerleaders for Caroline policy in the parochial sermons of the 1630s.18 If, however, one looks at Laud’s own writings, Chillingworth’s claim begins to make sense. Laud’s Conference with Fisher responds to the dilemma that formed the centerpiece of the early seventeenth-century Jesuit argument: either there exists an ‘infallible visible Church’ (i.e., Rome) or our faith rests merely on ‘the dictates of a private Spirit’. For the Church to have any real authority it must be infallible, since, Fisher explains, if one may ‘doubtfully dispute against’ one doctrine, why not ‘against another, and another, and so against all’. Moreover, the Jesuit continues, Protestants cannot appeal to Scripture as a certain ground of faith, because without the infallible testimony of the Church, how could one possibly know that Holy Scripture is the Word of God. There must be ‘some other foundation, to wit, ‘‘unwritten’’ tradition, and this of infallible authority, to assure us infallibly that these books are divine’.19 Before turning to Laud’s response, it is worth noting that some of those writing on Browne’s coat tails take, as it were, the Jesuit’s bull by the horns. In his critique of Religio Medici, Alexander Ross accepts Fisher’s dilemma— that the ground of faith must be either an infallible Church or a private Spirit—and opts for the latter: better the ‘private pole of Athanasius his spirit’,

17 William Chillingworth, The Works of W. Chillingworth, M.A., Containing his Book, Entitled ‘Religion of Protestants: A Safe Way to Salvation’ (Philadelphia, 1841), 28–9. 18 See Lake (1993), 166–7; Anthony Milton, ‘The Creation of Laudianism: A New Approach’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002), 165–71. 19 Laud, Works, ii. 84, 44–5, 70.

The Laudian Idiot / 41 than the visible church of official Arianism.20 For Ross, who here reaffirms the dominant ecclesiology of the early Reformation, the holy does not inhabit ecclesiastical institutions, but rather dwells invisibly within the scattered individuals who comprise the tiny flock of the elect. With quite different results, Edward Herbert takes the bait dangled by Fisher’s second dilemma: how, without the testimony of an infallible church, can one know that Scripture is the Word of God. Herbert accepts that, without such testimony, one cannot know. Since we only know the past by others’ relation, ‘[a]ll tradition and history . . . possesses for us only probability’, and hence cannot provide an adequate basis for religion, which seeks the Truth. We must therefore, Herbert continues, look past Scripture to the universal common notions that God has implanted in the hearts of all persons.21 That is, in responding to the Jesuit’s question about how Protestants can know Scripture is the word of God, Herbert argues himself out of Christianity. It is a result that testifies to the corrosive force of the question and thus helps to explain why in Religio Medici Browne lays such weight on the Bible’s factual inerrancy: why for him the ‘difficultest points’ of faith, those that require him ‘to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason’, time and again concern the literal truth of such minor scriptural details as Deuteronomy’s ‘triall of the Pucellage and Virginity of women’ (RM 1.9–10). Laud’s reply to Fisher, unlike Ross’s and Herbert’s, rejects the Jesuit’s dilemma. The argument has two main parts, the first concerning the nature of saving faith; the second, the grounds for accepting Scripture. With respect to the first, Laud argues that there are no infallible authorities in this world, nor need there be. The Romanist claim that without an infallible Church chaos will come again rests on the false premise that ‘all points defined by the Church are fundamental’ and hence necessary for salvation to be believed. Against this, Laud reaffirms the minimalist position of Erasmian tradition:22 for salvation, it is enough to believe in the Apostles’ Creed, or perhaps only 20 Alexander Ross, Medicus Medicatus: or the Physicians Religion Cured (1645), 3, 9, 63. 21 Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De Veritate (1624), trans. with intro by Meyrick H. Carre´ (Bristol, 1937), 308, 314–15. 22 Laud, Works, ii. 31, 362. On this Erasmianism, see Milton (1995), 164, 250; G. Posthumus Meyjes, ‘Protestant Irenicism in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in David Loades (ed.), The End of Strife (Edinburgh, 1984), 86; Peter Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2000), 103–4, 107.

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‘ ‘‘[t]hat God is; and that He is a rewarder of them that seek Him’’—that seek Him in Christ’.23 Beyond this foundation, ‘there is a latitude in the faith’; ‘[n]or’, Laud adds, ‘will I ever take upon me to express that tenet or opinion, the denial of the foundation only excepted, which may shut any Christian, the meanest, out of heaven’.24 The Laudian preacher Thomas Laurence similarly confines the ‘essentiall measure of faith’ to ‘a verse in S. Pauls Creede: if thou confesse with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe with thy heart, that God raised him from the dead, thou shalt bee saved’. As for the rest, ‘the safest way is to be a scepticke’.25 On all but the fundamentals, that is, individuals may respectfully disagree, there being, in Browne’s words, ‘many things . . . wherein the libertie of an honest reason may play and expatiate with security and farre without the circle of an heresie’ (RM 1.8); or as Laud puts it, if ‘Christian men do differ, it is no more than they have done, more or less, in all ages of the Church; and they may differ’,26 so long as such differences ‘are not made the occasion for dissolving the community’.27 In a 1625 letter defending Richard Montagu, Laud thus insists that, although the clergy are ‘bound to maintain . . . the resolved doctrine of the Church of England [i.e., the 39 Articles]’, other matters might safely be ‘left at more liberty, for learned men to abound in their own sense, so they keep themselves peaceable and distract not the church’.28 The final sentence of Montagu’s own wildly controversial New Gagg similarly avers: ‘Quisque abundet in sensu suo, so be it hee trouble not the Church therewith’.29 The unity of the Church does not require doctrinal uniformity but mutual charity, or, as Browne puts it, the sin of Lucifer was not error but faction (RM 1.7).30 As the caveats against troublemaking imply, Laudian minimalism with respect to saving faith is not what we mean by liberalism. No one has ever 23 Laud, Works, ii.403, quoting Hebrews 11:6. 24 Ibid., ii. 362, 402–3. 25 Thomas Laurence, Two Sermons (Oxford, 1635), 1.14, 2.33 (the initial numbers refer to the individual sermons, since the volume is not paginated sequentially). 26 Laud, Works, ii. 400. 27 Guibbory (1998), 130–1; see also Post, (1985), 158; Barbour, (2002), 73, 190. 28 A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, ed. T. B. Howell, 33 vols. (London, 1816–26), ii. 1260. 29 Richard Montagu, A Gagg for the New Gospell? (1624; repr. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1975), 328. 30 For similar sentiments among Laudians, see Montagu, 47; Laud, Works, vi. 265; Laurence, 2.13, 23–4; Guibbory (1998), 124–5.

The Laudian Idiot / 43 accused Laud of this. But he does argue for a crucial distinction between requiring obedience to the canons of one’s church and enforcing them as necessary de fide. The Church can, he insists, ‘bind us to peace and external obedience, where there is not express letter of Scripture and sense agreed on; but it cannot make anything fundamental to us, that is not so in its own nature’. If the church has erred, as long as it ‘be not manifestly against fundamental verity’, private individuals must preserve ‘external obedience’, as ‘ ‘‘an erring mother’’, loses neither the right nor the power of a mother by her error’. And yet, Laud immediately adds, ‘the son is not to follow his mother’s error’.31 While Browne never says how, or whether, he would enforce church authority were he given a diocese, he seems to allow himself even less wiggle room than Laud had been prepared to grant, ‘in Divinity’ loving ‘to keepe the road, and . . . [in] an humble faith, follow the great wheele of the Church, by which I move, not reserving any proper poles or motion from the epicycle of my owne braine’ (RM 1.6), following his ‘private reason’ or ‘humour’ only where both Scripture and church are silent (RM 1.5). And like his archbishop, he is fundamentally unsympathetic to ‘heads . . . complexionally propense to innovation’ (RM 1.8). With respect to the second part of Fisher’s challenge, that concerning Holy Scripture, Laud argues that the Bible cannot be proven God’s word on any of the four main grounds commonly appealed to: neither tradition; nor reason, nor ‘the light, which is in Scripture itself ’; nor the inner testimony of the Spirit, taken singly, suffices for the certainty of faith. While the latter is perhaps the ‘most infallible’, yet ‘ordinarily [it] is not so much as considerable in this question; which is not, how, or by what means, we believe, but how the Scripture may be proposed as a credible object, fit for belief’. Laud, that is, acknowledges that the inner testimony of the Spirit has almost no argumentative weight, and yet holds that it is the principal reason that people do in fact believe, for faith is a gift of God, infused by the Holy Spirit, who bestows the ‘grace to believe what Himself had revealed’.32 Yet while faith rests on ‘the principles of Grace’, it also seeks support from ‘the law of mine owne reason’ (RM 1.1). These are Browne’s words, but Laud likewise describes their ideal co-operation. ‘Reason without grace cannot see the way to heaven’, yet grace is seated in reason ‘to make reason see what by ‘‘nature only it cannot’’ ’. 31 Laud, Works, ii. 38, 41, 274, 250, 287.

32 Laud, Works, ii. 93, 84–5.

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Nonetheless, while reason can adduce strong arguments for the divine authority of Scripture, they are not ‘so demonstratively evident . . . as to enforce assent’.33 We are given ‘light enough for faith to believe’, but not to attain ‘full demonstrative knowledge’. For Laud, no less than for Browne, ‘haggard and unreclaimed reason’ must be taught to ‘stoope unto the lure of faith’ (RM 1.10); so Laud comments that since man sinned by pride, ‘God thought fittest to humble him at the very root of the tree of knowledge, and make him deny his understanding, and submit to faith, or hazard his happiness’.34 Reason, for both, plays rebel as well as handmaiden unto faith (RM 1.19). Browne’s affirmation of a ‘mysticall Philosophy’ that verifies the mysteries of faith ‘from the visible effects of nature’ (RM 1.48) is cross-hatched by an awareness that ‘the propositions of Faith seeme absurd unto Reason’ (RM 1.19). This recognition of the supernatural and subjective bases of faith, although traditional enough in itself, will come into stronger relief when set against the heady rationalism of Edward Herbert and Kenelm Digby. A consciousness of reason’s limits—that it is neither final arbiter nor bond of participation—characterizes the Laudian stance. In Browne, as in the Laudian divines, one notes the tendency to push reason to the point where it surges to wonder’s ‘o altitudo’ before the ‘wingy mysteries in Divinity’ or is stilled by Tertullian’s ‘odde resolution . . . Certum est quia impossibile est’ (RM 1.9). Above all, predestination impels ‘reason to Saint Pauls Sanctuary’, it being impossible to ‘speake of eternitie without a solœcisme, or thinke thereof without an extasie’. Predestination loses its terror for Browne not because he comes to understand it, but because it is inexplicable, rooted as it is in the mystery of God’s eternal present, for Whom ‘the last Trumpe is already sounded’ (RM 1.11) and ‘I [was] dead before I was alive’ (RM 1.59). Beyond such paradoxical fireworks, Browne refuses to go, but contents himself with seeking the vestigia Dei in ‘the obvious effects of nature’, it being mere arrogant folly ‘to pry into the maze of [God’s] Counsels’ (RM 1.13). Among Laudian divines one finds similar emphases on the suspension of reason in the face of transcendent mystery. Confronting predestination, Montagu flees with Browne to St Paul’s sanctuary, unlike those who have ‘waded deep into the hidden Secrets of the almighty; no-where more, or with 33 Laud, ii. 93, 84–5; and ii. 87, 89, 99–100, 398; RM 1.5. On Browne’s ‘Arminian’ epistemology, see also Victoria Silver, ‘Liberal Theology and Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘‘Soft and Flexible’’ Discourse’, ELR, 20 (1990), 60–105. 34 Laud, Works, ii. 100, 123–4; see ii. 87–8.

The Laudian Idiot / 45 greater Presumption, than where that grand Apostle stood at gaze with O the depth!’35 The sense of mystery and paradox suffusing Laurence’s first sermon brings it very close to Religio Medici, although the decorum of the pulpit has edged Browne’s mysterium ludivagum towards the mysterium tremendum. There are things in divinity, Laurence writes, ‘beyond my reason, though not against it . . . I know that I know not . . . Credo quia impossibile, saith Tertull. I beleiue it is so, because it is impossible it should bee so’, for ‘my vnderstanding . . . is of too narrow a size, or bore to comprehend the secrets, and infinitude of God’. Thus, ‘the birth of God is a mystery . . . and the death of God a mystery . . . the Sacrament a mystery’, and if I seek to ‘fathome the abysse of his judgements . . . I am instantly blinde’. And yet, like Browne, Laurence adds that we are ‘permitted to know . . . the hinder parts of God, in the heauen and earth, the volumes of his creatures’. As for the rest, Laurence, like Browne, loses himself in Pauline wonder: ‘O the height, and the depth; the maze and riddle of this ineffable God!’36 Browne’s Laudianism runs deep but, it should be added, only down certain channels. There is certainly less emphasis on liturgy and sacrament than one might have expected, although what Browne does say has a Laudian ring. Far more peculiar, and, one would think, significant, is the minor role Christ plays in Browne’s religious imagination. Now and then he speaks reverently of his ‘Saviour’, but never about the Incarnation, Crucifixion, or Atonement; he writes at length about the general resurrection, but not about the Resurrection of our Lord. We will return to this odd silence at a later point.

II Herbert’s De Religione Laici sets forth its author’s theology; Digby and Ross use Religio Medici mostly as an occasion to do the same. As interpretations of Religio Medici all three are worthless. Creative misreading, however, is an old and honorable practice, and Browne’s respondents do at least take Religio 35 Montagu, 178; see also 107–8. For Browne’s generous tribute to Montagu many years later, see Repertorium, 129–30; and Jonathan Post’s essay in this volume. 36 Laurence, 1.27–33. This attraction towards mystery and the numinous distinguishes Laudian Christianity—and, it seems to me, Browne’s—from that of the Great Tew circle. But see also Silver 84, 90 n.

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seriously as a contribution to the emergent forms of secular theology. This second section attempts to grasp that contribution by placing Religio back into the conversation it initiated and, by so doing, to elucidate the varieties of religious experience among the lay intelligentsia of Caroline England.

Providence, Predestination, and Eternity Towards the end of Religio Medici’s first part, Browne describes how ‘the line of our dayes is drawne by night . . . by a pencill that is invisible’ held in ‘the hand of God’ (RM 1.43). The image calls attention to the design, at once sacred and aesthetic, ordering each individual life, but also to our lack of control over its emergent shape; we do not determine and cannot predict the line being drawn in the darkness. Although the passage evokes a sense of mysterious and meaningful order rather than our subjection to divine control, one could imagine a Roman Catholic objecting to the implicit predestinarianism. Digby’s response is so utterly different that it catches one off-balance. ‘Our Author’, he observes, ‘quite mistakes . . . the nature of Predestination’, which, properly understood, is ‘an unalterable Series and chaine of causes, producing infallible (and in respect of them, necessary) effects’.37 This is mechanistic causality. Here, as in his slightly earlier Of Bodies, Digby in fact formulates the ‘first fully developed atomistic system of the seventeenth century’,38 and a fully deterministic one, in which ‘providence operates by a mechanical necessity inherent in the original construction of the machine’.39 Hence all spiritual beings, including devils, know future contingents, for causes are ‘so immediately chayned to their effects, as if a perfect knowing nature get hold but of one linke, it will drive the entire Series or pedegree of the whole to each utmost end’.40 Digby acknowledges, albeit sotto voce, the consequences of his determinism for human freedom, commenting that angels know our ‘free thoughts, past, present, and to come; for they see 37 Sir Kenelm Digby, Observations upon Religio Medici (1643), 18. 38 Roy Digby Thomas, Digby: The Gunpowder Plotter’s Legacy (London, 2001), 192; see also Petersson, 120–1. 39 Richard Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, 80–1; quoted in James Wise, Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Religio Medici’ and Two Seventeenth-Century Critics (Columbia, MO, 1973), 81. See also Dorothea Krook, John Sergeant and his Circle: A Study of Three Seventeenth-Century English Aristotelians, Beverly Southgate (ed.) (Leiden, 1993), pp. x, 26. 40 Digby (1643), 27–8. In current philosophical parlance, this being is known as Laplace’s demon; Digby, however, predates the Marquis de Laplace (d. 1827) by over a century.

The Laudian Idiot / 47 them in their causes’.41 Alexander Ross, ever alert to others’ mistakes, homes in on the contradiction between ‘free’ and ‘causes’, pointing out that angels cannot know our thoughts precisely because ‘they are free, and variable at our pleasure’.42 This exchange yields the interesting picture of a Calvinist defending human freedom against a Catholic determinist—although Ross does add that the will remains subject to God, who ‘onely can encline it as hee pleaseth’. The obvious point of collision between Browne and Digby (with Ross chiming in on the former’s side) comes over special providence, which Browne defines as the ‘way full of Meanders and Labyrinths’ whereby God actively directs ‘the operations of individualls and single Essences’, so that events that seem ‘the effects of chance . . . at the last, well examined, prove the meere hand of God’.43 It is therefore not absurd, he adds, to pray before a game of chance, for ‘there is no liberty for causes to operate in a loose and stragling way, nor any effect whatsoever, but hath its warrant from some universall or superiour cause’ (RM 1.8). The terminology at the end is not all that different from Digby’s, but to opposite effect, since Browne’s ‘superiour cause’ must be of the sort that can hear prayers and rearrange a deck of cards accordingly. Digby will have none of this: there can only be general providence, one single chain of causes, established ‘at the first setting out of the first Mover’ and unfolding, according to God’s foreordination, into all the outward circumstances of ‘every individuall on earth’. Our prayers cannot speed or slow the clockwork. Yet Digby’s point is not the remotion of God but the knowability of things; as he explains, by denying special providence, he has rid the world of ‘secret, invisible, mysticall’ causes, from which it follows that there is nothing beyond ‘the search or cognizance of a prudent indagation’.44 Digby’s determinism is thus almost anti-reductive; rather than make men into machines, it vastly extends the scope of human knowledge by making the universe mechanistic and therefore intelligible.45 The same impulse shapes Digby’s handling of eternity. He is, as before, responding to Browne: in this instance, to Browne’s depiction of eternity as God’s eternal present, for whom 41 Digby (1643), 40. 42 Ross (1645), 89–91. 43 RM 1.17; Ross (1645), 26, 34. 44 Digby (1643), 29. On the Stoic origins of Digby’s denial of special providence, see Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. John Stradling (1595), 48–51. 45 See Krook, pp. xii, 9–11.

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all time is ‘but one permanent point without succession, parts, flux, or division’ (RM 1.11). The passage is wrestling with predestination; construing eternity in this way rejects the temporal sequencing of the divine decrees on which Reformed theology rests—which is presumably why Ross responds that eternity, even for God, is simply endless duration; God knows the future in its causes, but it remains future to Him.46 Digby, however, recasts the issue. Like Browne, he regards eternity not as ‘infinite extension of time’ but actual timelessness. For Browne, however, eternity thus defined was an attribute of God; for Digby, all spiritual beings—angels, saints, even the damned—exist outside of time and on the edge of omniscience: they experience ‘no change, no variety . . . doe not so much as change a thought. All things, notions, and actions, that every [sic] were, are, or shal bee in any creature, are actually present to such an intellect’.47 As this suggests, the flip side of Digby’s determinist physics is something very close to the divinization of the soul and, as will become increasingly evident, the relative diminution of God.

Identity: Body, Soul, and Self Digby thus turns out to be a dualist of a platonizing and rationalist stripe. He accordingly views evil as ‘carnall affections’ and makes salvation reward those who, longing to ‘bee in the society of that supereminent cause of causes . . . hate their life & body as cause of this divorce’. The self, in turn, is distinctly nonamphibious, being identical to reason, which is ‘that which constituteth him a man’.48 One is taken aback by this stringent dualism in part because Digby was a Catholic, and therefore supposedly unafraid of the sensuous, the embodied, the incarnational. Puritans, not Catholics, are supposed to be dualists. One finds a similarly hard-core dualism in Edward Herbert among the most flamingly heterodox thinkers in mid-seventeenth-century England (Hobbes at least claimed to be a Christian), and yet resolutely hostile to the world and its jouissances. In Herbert this neo-platonizing has a fairly clear subversive point: his depreciation of the body calling into question its resurrection, a doctrine specific to Christianity and therefore no part of Herbert’s universal religion.49 Digby’s dualism, by contrast, does not bring 46 Ross (1645), 19. 47 Digby (1643), 16–17. 48 Ibid., 44, 63–5, 110. 49 Herbert (1624), 297; Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De Religione Laici (1645), ed. and trans. Harold R. Hutcheson, Yale Studies in English, 98 (1944), 121, 109–11.

The Laudian Idiot / 49 him to disavow the resurrection, but creates its own clutch of problems, and here Browne re-enters the picture, since it is his reflections on how our ‘estranged and divided ashes shall unite againe’ to form ‘our restored selves’ (RM 1.48–9) that inspire Digby and Ross to lock horns over fairly fundamental questions of personal identity. Browne wrestles with the issue as well, but the singularity, even strangeness, of his approach comes into sharper focus when set against that of his commentators, with whom we shall therefore begin. If Browne’s musings are strange, Digby’s are positively weird, their incoherence testifying to the massive dislocations produced by the collision of the new philosophy with inherited structures of belief. Digby starts by arguing that form rather than matter individuates,50 and hence it is not necessary that ‘every Atome of the present individuall matter of a body’ be restored to it.51 This makes perfect sense as long as one thinks of matter as undifferentiated atoms, which Digby initially does. As the discussion proceeds, however, the Aristotelian distinction between matter and form begins to intrude, and since, with respect to persons, the soul is the form of the body, Digby’s ‘matter’ slowly mutates from atomic bits to an individual’s body, so that he ends up holding that when a human soul ‘is united to matter againe . . . it maketh againe the same man’; hence, if the soul of a dead European were joined to a corpse taken ‘from some mountaine in America’, this would become ‘the same Identicall body he lived with before his Death and late Resurrection’.52 The soul has become the person, which at times occupies a body, but whether this body or that has no more bearing on personal identity than whether one wears grey trousers or navy. The Calvinist Ross counters this ghost-in-the-machine model of personal identity with a rousing defense of Thomist hylomorphism. It is ‘the conjunction of the forme with the matter [that] makes identity’, from which it follows that the resurrected body must be composed of the same material bits as the original. Nor are souls pre-existing entities that subsequently get bodies; rather, the body comes first, each soul being created ‘to informe its owne bodie, to 50 For Aristotle, matter individuates; see A. C. Lloyd, ‘Aristotle’s Principle of Individuation’, Mind, n.s., 79:316. (Oct. 1970), 519–29. Similarly for Thomas, form is individuated ‘in that it is received in this or that distinct matter, and determined to here and now’ (In Boeth. de Trin. Q. iv, a. 1 in Aquinas, 1961). See also Funkenstein, 101, 135. 51 Digby (1643), 78. 52 Digby (1643), 78–86.

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which onely it hath relation’. It is this union of matter and form that constitutes the person. The soul, when separated from the body in death, has neither senses nor affections but only ‘the reasonable and inorganicall faculties of the Intellect and Will’. Its separation is thus not liberation but, even for the blessed, ‘part of its punishment, & of the bodies also, for sin’.53 Both Digby and Ross anchor their discussion of personal identity in Browne’s passages on the resurrection; the passages themselves, however, do not really engage this issue. Browne takes the wholly traditional view that ‘our estranged and divided ashes shall unite againe’, but the two analogs he cites point in opposite directions: that of mercury associating individuation with matter; that of the burned plant, with form (RM 1.48). The question does not seem to interest Browne. Yet the sentence that Ross singles out for criticism—Browne’s claim that ‘there is something . . . within us, that was before the elements’54—is striking both in suggesting the pre-existence, and perhaps eternity, of the soul and in implicitly distinguishing it from the self signalled by the personal pronoun. The sentence belongs to a series of observations on the relations of body, soul, and self that Browne weaves through Religio Medici as one of its central preoccupations. Taken together, these scattered comments seem to be saying something unfamiliar, although probably not heterodox. Unlike Digby or Herbert, who, when they depart from the straight and narrow, usually remain on labelled routes (rationalism, determinism, deism, etc.), Browne tends to expatiate off the map. What is clear is that a good deal of Religio Medici is taken up with Browne’s account of, and reflections on, himself—on Thomas Browne as a specific ‘irregular selfe’ (RM 1.60), endowed with a delightfully ‘extravagant’ bent (RM 1.6) that moves him to weep at solemn processions (RM 1.3) and allows him to eat snails without gagging (RM 2.1). He finds that his ‘soule’ is under the ‘Triumvirate, or Triple government’ of ‘affection, faith, and reason’, which have an alarming tendency to fight among themselves, but with a little coaxing can be brought to share a non-dualistic, non-hierarchical inner kingdom, in which ‘they may bee all Kings, and yet make but one Monarchy’ (RM 1.19). ‘Soul’, in this final sentence, simply means ‘self ’, the referent of the firstperson pronoun.55 Yet when Browne writes about the soul in relation to the 53 Ross (1645), 100–5, 93–4, 79. 54 Digby (1643), 78, paraphrasing RM 2.11. 55 i.e., ‘there is in our soule’ is equivalent to ‘there is in us’ or ‘there is in ourselves’.

The Laudian Idiot / 51 body (or is it in relation to the self?), he tends, although not consistently, to use the personal pronoun for the body (the self?). So, after reporting that he can find no organ for the soul, he concludes, ‘[t]hus are we men, and we know not how; there is something in us, that can be without us, and will be after us’ (RM 1.36). Subsequent sections then go on to describe how ‘the soules of the faithfull’ enter heaven (RM 1.37), while ‘Birds and Beasts . . . begin to prey upon us’ (RM 1.40). One would not wish to put too much weight on Browne’s use of the personal pronoun to refer to the corpse rather than separated soul, but it calls attention to how time and again he depicts the soul as somehow inhabiting, rather than constituting, a person. One notes this early on, in his definition of the soul as ‘angelus hominis’ (RM 1.10).56 In later sections, this interior angelic presence fades into a ‘something in us that can be without us’ (RM 1.36), phrasing which does not suggest the soul’s imprisonment in the body but rather the self’s inhabitation by a soul. This suggestion resurfaces in Section 39, where Browne proposes that the ‘immortall spirit and incorruptible substance of my soule may lye obscure, and sleepe a while within this house of flesh’, a possibility that has something to do with the ‘strange and mysticall transmigrations that I have observed in Silkewormes’. The implication cannot be that the soul and body sleep together in the grave until the final resurrection; that would be the mortalist heresy Browne renounced. The ‘house of flesh’ refers to a living body, whose soul, like a butterfly, lies dormant and cocooned within, and which therefore cannot be the self that enjoys escargots. These intimations carry over into descriptions of the soul as the ‘translated divinity and colony of God’ (RM 1.51), the ‘peece of Divinity in us, something that was before the Elements’ (RM 2.11), becoming increasingly emphatic in the final sections of Religio Medici. These dwell on how we become ‘somewhat more than our selves in our sleepes’; on the ‘Noctambuloes’, whose ‘abstracted and ecstaticke soules doe walke about in their owne corps, as spirits in the bodies they assume’; on the dying, whose ‘soule beginning to bee freed from the ligaments of the body, begins to reason like her selfe . . . in a straine above mortality’ (RM 2.11); on the ‘part [of us] which is as it were [God] himselfe, and the traduction of his holy Spirit’ (RM 2.14). In Western Christianity from the Middle Ages on, the indwelling Spirit is a gift of grace, not the soul or any 56 On the meaning of Browne’s angelus hominis, see Thomas Keck, Annotations upon ‘Religio Medici’ (1654) (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/relmed/annotations.html)

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other part of our being. Nor does the Pauline distinction between soma, psyche, and pneuma, although it must be somewhere in the background, explain what Browne intends by his own trinal configuration. He does not say what he intends, except to underscore the mysteriousness of identity: that ‘we are men, and we know not how’. And that may be the point.

The Internalization of the Supernatural Ross’s critique of Religio Medici recurs time and again to the literal external reality of the supernatural. He is adamant on the matter of spiritual geography, pouncing on Browne for intimating ‘Hell and Hell-fire to be metaphoricall, and in mens consciences onely’, whereas Christians ‘beleeve Hell to be under earth’. Browne is similarly mistaken, Ross avers, to call ‘the celestiall world . . . immateriall’, for were ‘the Heavens’ immaterial, they could not ‘be the habitation of materiall substances’, and then, he queries, where ‘will the bodies of the Saints, after the resurrection, have their residence?’ Those of us not confined under the earth are apparently destined for outer space, which, for Ross, is the kingdom of heaven, the ‘peculiar ubi of blisse and happinesse beyond the tenth Sphere’.57 As Ross’s heaven and hell are ‘out there’, so too his objects of aggression: Catholics are worse than heathens; Orthodox Christians are apostates; and so forth. He thus criticizes Browne’s distaste for ‘disputes in Religion’, since how else ‘should [we] maintaine the truth. . . . Not to dispute against an Heretick, is not to fight against an enemy’.58 It is this second sort of externalization whose absence is particularly conspicuous in Religio Medici, where one’s real enemies are within: ‘passion against reason, reason against faith, faith against the Devill, and my conscience against all’ (RM 2.7). The corruption Browne fears is that ‘within’ himself, not contagion from those ‘without’ (RM 2.10).59 Regarding the locus of the supernatural, however, Browne takes a more hesitant, and complex, stance. ‘Strictly to determine’ where heaven and hell are, he confesses, ‘surpasseth my Divinity’. Yet he clearly does not think them the sort of places one could find on a map. Heaven is ‘wherever God will . . . manifest himselfe’, so that ‘the soule of man may bee in Heaven any where, even 57 Ross (1645), 60–1, 43, 57. For his equally literal treatment of the Last Judgment as a ‘judiciary’ proceeding, see Keck, 52. 58 Ibid., 4, 64, 68–9. 59 On this internalization of conflict, see also RM 1.6, 1.19, 1.38.

The Laudian Idiot / 53 within the limits of his owne proper body’. Paradise is thus within, yet not simply a psychological state, since it depends on—is nothing else than—‘the presence of God’ (RM 1.49).60 Nor does the devil have his kingdom ‘under earth’, for ‘[t]he heart of man is the place the devill dwels in’, and Browne finds ‘sometimes a hell within my self’. Yet he immediately pulls back, adding that ‘a distracted conscience here is a shadow or introduction unto hell hereafter’ (RM 1.51), whose fires may be, although Browne is not sure, ‘the same specificall fire with ours’ (RM 1.50). He is, however, quite certain that there will be no actual ‘Judiciall proceeding’ at the end of time (RM 1.46), but here too he stops short of denying a Last Judgment, since this day alone has ‘power to make us honest in the dark’ by holding forth the promise of divine recompense; simply being virtuous is not its own reward any more than heaven and hell are merely internal states (RM 1.47). Yet in contrast to Ross, Browne generally views Scripture’s depiction of such matters as representing ‘unspeakable mysteries . . . not as they truely are, but as they may bee understood’ (RM 1.45). The words gesture towards something whose referent exceeds the capacities of human knowledge and human language.61 The impact of Cartesianism on the theological imagination of the seventeenth century is vividly apparent in the contrast between Browne’s ‘o altitudo’ before such ‘wingy mysteries’ (RM 1.9) and Digby’s confident striding through the veil of symbols to behold the clear and distinct ideas within.62 From this previously undiscovered country the latter returns to announce a drastically internalized vision of our future state. Heaven and hell, he reports, are not places; or, to the extent they are places, they are the same place, but it is a place that some souls experience as bliss, and others as eternal misery, depending on the tastes and desires a person has cultivated in this life. For, Digby explains, ‘what impressions are once made in the spirituall substance of a Soule, and what affections it hath once contracted, doe ever remaine in it’. Souls thus depart this life ‘with affections to those objects they leave behinde them’, retaining ‘a byas, and a languishing towards them’. If their earthly desires had been set on sensual pleasures, then their souls will be perforce miserable, since in the afterlife ‘those objects neither 60 For the analogous substitution of relational for spatial terms in George Herbert, see Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago, 1983), 232–4. 61 This is also St Thomas’s position; see Summa Theologiae 1.1.9. 62 On Browne’s and contemporary attitudes to symbolism, see Silver’s essay in this volume.

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are, nor can be enjoyed’. Conversely, a soul ‘released out of this Prison of clay and flesh, with affections setled upon intellectual goods as Truth, Knowledge, and the like’, finds ‘true happinesse’. Since, as Digby makes clear, it is we alone who make the impressions on our souls,63 how we spend eternity hinges solely on our self-fashioning. There is no divine judgment, no rewarding or punishing of men by God ‘according as their actions please or displease him’.64 This is about as far as one can get from Protestant voluntarism, but even a Laudian churchman like Francis White responded in horror to the suggestion that people could attain heaven through their own ‘deservings’.65 This is, however, Digby’s view, and he accepts its heterodox corollary: namely, that God’s role in our salvation is passive and secondary. If a soul has, during this life, thirsted after knowledge and truth, God ‘cannot chuse but environ with his beames . . . a soule so prepared and tempered to receive them’. Not because He loved us, but because we first loved Him. Hence Digby never mentions the Atonement and starts referring to God under such depersonalized labels as ‘that supereminent cause of causes.’66 Nor does this radical internalization only concern the life to come. Rather, in this life as well, the self or soul (Digby, unlike Browne, makes no distinction between them) resembles a Democritean atom, the Latin for which is, of course, individuum—something indivisible, impenetrable, like a marble. It follows, as Digby maintains against Catholic orthodoxy as well as against Thomas Browne, that grace is not ‘a quality infused by God Almighty into a Soule’, but instead works externally by a providential arrangement of carrots and sticks. So, for example, when a man plunged in sensuality falls gravely ill, and a visitor accidentally leaves a good book in his bedroom which awakens stirrings of repentance, and shortly thereafter, a wise and holy priest happens to drop by, and so on until ‘hee is at last perfectly converted’, this ‘chaine of causes, ordered by God to produce this effect’, Digby concludes, is what ‘I understand to bee Grace’. The work of Christ is similarly externalized. To the question of what difference the Incarnation made, Digby’s answer is simply that it would have 63 Digby (1643), 13, 45–6, 63–5. The basic idea probably comes from Plato’s Phaedo 81. In Christianity, it is almost always God who inscribes the heart. See Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago, 2000), 7, 141, 145–6, et passim. 64 Digby (1643), 57–8. 65 See Barbara Donagan, ‘The York House Conference Revisited: Laymen, Calvinism and Arminianism’, Historical Research, 64 (1991), 319. 66 Digby (1643), 67, 64.

The Laudian Idiot / 55 been very difficult for most persons to ‘attaine unto Beatitude, if Christ had not come to teach, and by his example to shew us the way’, for by His ‘enjoying none of the delights of this life’, we are taught that ‘no man should sticke at foregoing them, since his example sheweth all men that such a course is best’.67 Browne’s speculation about the periodic return of heresies, like that of comets, is borne out here, since Digby’s view of grace is straight Pelagianism.68 Browne’s, of course, is not. If anything, his theological instincts point in the opposite direction: to finding within (although not there alone) ‘the wonders . . . [that] wee seeke without us’. ‘[A]ll Africa, and her prodigies’ are there (RM 1.15): the devil who dwells in the heart, ‘principles of Grace’, a soul that is ‘angelus hominis’ and ‘colony of God’, but also a ‘common Spirit that playes within us, yet makes no part of us’, whose ‘gentle heate’ both ‘hatched the world’ and ‘preserves the region of the mind in serenity’ (RM 1.32). Internalization in Religio Medici is the discovery of supernatural mystery and the wonders of the macrocosm within ‘the Cosmography of my selfe’ (RM 1.15). For Digby, by contrast, we are quite literally individuals. Heaven and Hell reside within us only because they are merely inner states. There is nothing within us that is not part of us. We fashion our own souls and spend eternity either enjoying or lamenting the results. For all his dualism, Digby is an astonishingly secular thinker. One suspects it was lucky for him that he wrote in English, since he might otherwise have found himself before the Holy Office in less time than it takes to say ‘Giordano Bruno’.

The Salvation of the Infidel and the Disappearing Jesus We have already noted how rarely Browne mentions Christ, and the same is true of Digby and Herbert. This may simply be a matter of turf proprieties, laymen focusing on the ‘mysticall Philosophy’ that teaches divinity from the ‘visible effects of nature’ (RM 1.48), leaving revelation to the specialists. Yet it is hard not to see this avoidance as linked to the problem all discuss at length: namely, the salvation of non-Christians. In reading Ross one is repeatedly made aware of the connection because in his hands Christianity functions, it 67 Digby (1643), 73–4, 122–4. 68 See Augustine, On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin, 1.2, 1.8; On the Spirit and the Letter, 4–5, 7, et passim. Krook similarly notes the Pelagianism of Digby’s mentor, Thomas White (alias ‘Blacklo’) 55–66.

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would seem primarily, as an exclusionary principle: ‘If there be no salvation but in Christ’, then infidels, however virtuous, are out of luck, and papists worse off than infidels.69 What’s so disturbing here is not just that so many fail of heaven, but that Christ appears responsible for keeping them out. Ross is an easy target for liberal self-righteousness, but there are moments in Religio Medici where faith in Christ likewise seems a bizarrely arbitrary prerequisite for salvation. The final section of Part I begins by denying that faith merits heaven, but then goes on to elucidate its true role by drawing an analogy with God’s decree ‘that onely those that lapt in the water like dogges, should have the honour to destroy the Midianites’. The lappers get chosen not because such peculiar table-manners ‘deserved that honour’, but, apparently, just because God so decreed (RM 1.60). Browne seems distinctly less comfortable than Ross with this conclusion, but he proposes no alternative that would either drop belief in Christ as an entrance requirement or make it morally intelligible.70 Such alternatives were available within Christian orthodoxy. Many Church Fathers, most Tridentine Catholics, and some Reformers allowed for the salvation of virtuous heathens before and (less often) after the Incarnation.71 Luther and Calvin, however, did not, and in post-Reformation England the possibility largely disappears from view. The disappearance seems almost a willy-nilly corollary of Protestantism, given the theological centrality of justification by faith. For most English Protestants, even those very far from being strict Calvinists, opening the gates of heaven to unbelievers may well have seemed tantamount to abandoning Christianity, which is why when the issue comes to the fore in the mid-seventeenth century, it presents such terrible problems. Seventeenth-century England seems to have known no tertium quid: one either forgets about the heathen or forsakes Christ.72 Edward Herbert takes the second 69 Ross (1645), 62, 4. 70 As it is for Laud, who argues that God has resolved ‘to bring mankind to their last happiness by faith, and not by knowledge, that so the weakest among men may have their way to blessedness open’ (Works, ii. 120). 71 See George Huntston Williams, ‘Erasmus and the Reformers on Non-Christian Religions and Salus Extra Ecclesiam’, in Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe, Theodore Rabb and Jerrold Seigel (eds.) (Princeton, 1969), 319–70; Louis Cape´ran, Le proble`me du salut des infide`les: Essai historique, 2 vols. (Toulouse, 1934), i. 218–304. Melanchthon retained the medieval limbus patrum. On virtuous pagans, see Guibbory’s essay in this volume. 72 Donne seems a partial exception here; although some sermons do make faith in Christ necessary for salvation, others, preached during the same period, allow for alternative routes to

The Laudian Idiot / 57 option, reducing the ‘essentiall measure of faith’ to those beliefs ‘clearly accepted at all times by every normal person’, since requiring belief in Christian revelation would mean that ‘God has created and condemned certain men, in fact the larger part of the human race,’ which cannot stand with divine goodness.73 Nor, it should be added, are these universally accepted tenets required as articles of faith, for their universal acceptance shows that reason alone suffices to apprehend them; it is ‘those who use right Reason’, Herbert concludes, to whom is granted ‘hope of a more blessed state after death’.74 This is, of course, what one expects from the father of English deism, but not from a Counter-Reformation Catholic, yet Digby’s position is amazingly close to Herbert’s. Digby saves his Christianity (barely) by the Pelagian argument cited above: virtue suffices for salvation, but few pagans achieved the requisite moral excellence since Christ had not yet come ‘by his example to shew us the way’. Other than this minimal concession to Christ’s role, Digby makes salvation strictly a matter of reason and virtue. Eternal torment results from men’s failure to have ‘governed themselves according to Reason’, whereas ‘naturall and inward affection to vertue, for vertues and Reasons sake’ guarantees beatitude.75 As these remarks suggest, there is a streak of rigorism in Digby’s theology. The joys of heaven are reserved for those who used their time on earth to pursue intellectual and spiritual goods,76 a soteriology that finds room for Socrates by shutting out publicans and prostitutes. Herbert’s rigorism is equally stringent, he himself declaring that ‘far from softening religion’, his De Religione Laici ‘provides a spur to its severity’ by making salvation hinge on our virtue rather than God’s mercy. A religion that promises believers forgiveness of sins, he goes on to argue, scarcely ‘advances that austere virtue by which we are made worthier of fellowship with God’, for men are more ready to commit evil if they think some ‘kindly ruler’ might pardon their crimes, than if punishments be inflicted ‘solely according to the measure of the fault’.77 One suspects that Herbert, who had switched to Parliament’s side the year before, is here insinuating that it is the fixed heaven; for those preached between 1626 and 1628, see John Donne, Sermons, 10 vols., George Potter and Evelyn Simpson (eds.) (Berkeley, 1953–62), vii. 225, 395–6; viii. 59–60, 247–8. 73 74 75 76 77

Herbert (1624), 291, 299; see Herbert (1645), 87–9, 109, 121. Herbert, 109. Digby (1643), 63, 68. Ibid., 106, 109. Herbert (1645), 127, 131. See Barbour (2002), 214.

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sanctions of the common law, and not, as traditional analogies held, the arbitrary mercy of the royal prerogative, that resemble divine justice. The immediate occasion of Herbert’s metaphor, however, may have been Religio Medici’s likewise politically valenced allusion to the ‘prerogative of God’ trumping ‘his owne Law’ in matters of individual salvation (RM 1.57). It is a crucial passage, linked to a long chain of reflections circling around the eternal fate of unbelievers that stretches across the second half of Part I. This sequence repays examination: it is at the heart of the meditation on faith structuring this first part, and Browne’s chain of thought is not only long but tangled, yet in the end does seem to escape the pincers of the dilemma posed by the virtuous heathen. The initial passages express an Erasmian optimism. The heathen found God in the book of nature (RM 1.16). Socrates, who died for his faith in one God, may be a more perfect martyr than some the Church has canonized (RM 1.26). In the final clause of Section 53, however, Browne makes the jarring claim that, as heaven is far above our deserts, so hell is ‘infinitely below our demerits’. Nothing in Religio Medici seconds this grim assessment, but it alone justifies the opening sentence of the next section: ‘There is no salvation to those that beleeve not in Christ . . . which makes me much apprehend the end of those honest Worthies and Philosophers which died before his Incarnation’ (RM 1.54). Yet he evidently finds the justification unsatisfactory, since Section 54 continues to wrestle with the problem. ‘It is hard’, Browne goes on, ‘to place those soules in Hell whose worthy lives doe teach us vertue on earth.’ Perhaps, he suggests, they reside in the green meadows of the limbus patrum. He does not, however, seem to consider this a real possibility, since by the next sentence it has vanished, leaving the ancient worthies at the mercy of ‘reall Devils’, a fate that the remainder of the section attempts to justify along standard Calvinist lines: a potter may do what he likes with his own pots; the virtuous heathen merely fulfilled the dictates of nature and so do not merit a supernatural reward. Browne is now squarely in Ross’s corner, but the naked voluntarism of the pot–potter analogy runs so counter to Browne’s emphases on divine wisdom and the soul’s divinity that one cannot but feel its inadequacy. His claim that obeying the ‘law of reason’ does not entitle one to heaven implies that obeying the rule of faith does, but Browne explicitly denies this at the opening of 1.60. Yet if neither reason nor faith merits heaven, then the exclusion of the virtuous heathen remains inexplicable.

The Laudian Idiot / 59 Beginning with Section 55, the argument jumps the track and starts improvising its own zigzagged course. It opens by questioning whether the virtuous heathen were really all that virtuous, but quickly modulates into a meditation on the complexity and difficulty of virtue itself, and thence into the realization that none of us is all that virtuous; rather, ‘we are all monsters, that is, a composition of man and beast’, and the latter cannot be driven away but at best induced to sit ‘at the feete of reason’. That we are sinners all becomes pivotal in Section 57, but the end of 55 veers back to the problem of salvation from a slightly different angle. ‘Lastly’, Browne avers, ‘I doe desire with God, that all, but yet affirme with men, that [very] few shall know salvation’; yet, although the gate is narrow, those who confine it to a particular people or church ‘have made it far narrower than our Saviour ever meant it’. This conclusion, and the whole of the following section, which Browne added in 1643, mark the re-entry of the Laudian motifs that dominated the work’s opening sections. Laud, as noted above, had argued for ‘a latitude in the faith’. Moreover, although he makes some sort of Christian belief necessary, he almost always qualifies this as referring only to ‘the ordinary way of salvation’, just as baptism is necessary ‘in the ordinary way of the Church, without binding God to the use and means of that sacrament, to which He hath bound us’.78 One detects similar intimations in Browne’s ‘with God . . . with men’, whose syntactic parallelism momentarily obscures the fact that God’s desires override the affirmations of men, and hence that the Kingdom of Heaven may prove more capacious than Protestant orthodoxy allows. Section 57 opens by reinforcing these doubts about what men affirm concerning others’ salvation, for ‘many are saved who to man seeme reprobated’, and vice versa. But it then returns to the universality of human sinfulness and what that implies about who does or does not make it to heaven. ‘By the letter, and written Law of God’, Browne reminds his reader, we, as sinners, ‘are without exception in the state of death’. The problem of unbelievers’ salvation thus turns out to be part of the larger question of how anyone escapes deserved condemnation. And to this question Browne gives, for once, a direct answer: ‘there is a prerogative of God, and an arbitrary pleasure above the letter of his owne Law, by which alone wee can pretend unto salvation’ (RM 1.57). It is a lovely piece of royalism 78 Laud, Works, ii. 48, 64.

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( pace Edward Herbert) as well as of theology.79 Yet it also implies that heathen and Christian are in the same (foundering) boat, equally dependent on a rescue to which they have no title. However, if salvation is by prerogative, if there are no criteria whose fulfillment guarantees admission or that enable one to differentiate the saved from the reprobate, then one’s own chances depend a great deal on the total quantity of pardons granted. Hence, in Section 58, Browne admits that the ‘number of those who pretend unto salvation’, when set against Christ’s reference to His ‘little Flocke’, leaves him anxious and uncertain, especially when he reflects upon his ‘owne unworthinesse’. This disquiet spills over into the next section, where the same tacking between yes and no that marked the sections on unbelievers’ salvation now reappears re personal assurance. He is, Browne declares, confident of his own salvation, and yet he would not swear to it, cannot be sure, and indeed, whatever some people claim about their ‘absolute certainty . . . when an humble soule shall contemplate her owne unworthinesse, she shall meete with many doubts and suddainely finde how little80 wee stand in need of the precept of Saint Paul, Worke out your salvation with feare and trembling’. This suspension between yes and no, between confidence and doubt, is where Browne leaves it, the remainder of the section wheeling off into a burst of ecstatic solecisms on eternity (RM 1.11).81 But this confession of faith and fear, with which the meditation on the fate of the virtuous heathen concludes, echoes the contested Laudian position that, in Montagu’s words, ‘every Child of God, renued by Grace, may and ought infallibly assure himselfe of his owne Salvation procured in Christ: who yet, in regard of his owne Infirmity and Inconstancy, cannot chuse but waver in his assurance, and feare the worst, though he hope the best’.82 We thus find ourselves back where we began—on Laudian ground. Nor should this surprise. The preceding discussion makes clear Browne’s engagement in the theological ferment stirring among the lay intelligentsia of the 1630s and 40s, but it also reveals how much closer his commitments are to those of Laud and Montagu than of Digby, Herbert, or, for that matter, Ross. Yet Religio’s 79 For similar uses of the prerogative/law contrast, see Barbour (2002), 122. 80 This is the 1643 reading; Keynes follows a manuscript variant which substitutes ‘much’, which seems to completely miss the point. 81 On this passage, see Post (1987), 154. 82 Montagu, 186. For the opposing Calvinist view on assurance, see Debora Shuger, ‘Faith and Assurance’, in Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden, 2008), 222–33.

The Laudian Idiot / 61 troubled concern for the fate of unbelievers and its almost surely related, and distinctly unLaudian, avoidance of Christology betray the pressure of divided and distinguished worlds. The text, like its author, is Janus-faced. Both sets of eyes provide a mirror of the age, but they reflect quite different images. Yet, although the images are different, were the worlds to which they belong really divided? For Laud, amazingly enough, had ties to all three of Browne’s respondents.83 Digby referred to himself as Laud’s ‘best friend’; up to 1636 Herbert enjoyed a cordial, although probably not close, relationship with Laud, who authorized the first English edition of De Veritate in 1633; and it was apparently Laud’s influence that procured the royal chaplaincy for Ross, who dedicated his 1634 refutation of Copernicus to the Archbishop.84 Digby left Laudian England for voluntary exile in Paris, but on account of his Romanism, not his speculative heterodoxies;85 the other two remained at home, not only tending their own theological gardens but publishing the fruits unmolested throughout the Personal Rule. As Gladstone remarked long ago, ‘Do you know who I find the most tolerant churchman of that time? Laud!’ The Liberal Prime Minister was, Trevor-Roper adds, probably right.86 If he was, then Browne’s allowance for ‘eccentric beliefs’ will not detach him from the Laudian fold. This much seems obvious. However, if Thomas Browne can be termed a Laudian, Digby, Herbert, and Ross clearly cannot. Laud allowed for their beliefs but he did not hold them. The worlds Religio Medici reflects, although not divided, remain distinct. These reflected images, moreover, suggest a two-fold revision of our picture of the Caroline landscape. For, as Browne’s Laudian face alters and complicates our sense of Laudianism, so his interface (and Laud’s) with Herbert, Ross, and Digby reveals an elite culture more multiform, heterodox, even ‘post-Christian’, than generally thought.87 We are accustomed to religious 83 Ian Atherton similarly notes that the circle of the ardently Laudian Viscount Scudamore included Digby, Mersenne, Hobbes, and Grotius (‘Viscount Scudamore’s ‘‘Laudianism’’: The Religious Practices of the First Viscount Scudamore’, The Historical Journal, 34 (1991), 567–71, 592–5). 84 Laud, Works, vi. 454; David A. Pailin, ‘Herbert, Edward, first Baron Herbert of Cherbury and first Baron Herbert of Castle Island (1582?–1648)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 85 Indeed, when Digby was contemplating a return to Rome, Laud’s main talking point against it was the intellectual freedom available in the English church (Laud, Works, vi. 449). 86 Trevor-Roper, From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (Chicago, 1992), 133, 141. 87 This is implicit in Barbour (2002), 234 et passim, as well as in mid-twentieth-century scholarship (e.g., Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (London, 1975)); the politicized, loosely neo-Marxist, orientation of so much historical and literary scholarship after 1980 tended to assume that ideology would track class, rendering ‘elite’ more or less synonymous with ‘conservative’.

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radicals lurking in the conventicles of the disenfranchised, not in the House of Lords or the boudoir of Henrietta Maria, not among statesmen, peers, Catholic courtiers, and Calvinist royal chaplains, and not under the nose of Archbishop Laud. The hermeneutic circle that formed around Religio Medici suggests that Laudianism was facing demons larger and stranger than Calvin, and yet one also gets the distinct impression that it was not seeking to cast them out.88 88 See Ephesians 6:12. My endless debt of gratitude to both Reid Barbour and Richard Strier for iron-fisted criticism gloved in velvet encouragement.

3 Thomas Browne and the Uses of Antiquity Graham Parry

Browne was in love with antiquity. He was fascinated by the depth of time, and excited by its obscurity. The grand actions and ‘wilde enormities of ancient magnanimity’ stirred his imagination, while the wisdom and knowledge he supposed the Ancients to possess aroused in him both admiration and envy (UB 5.170). Almost everything that Browne wrote has antiquity for a background, to provide the basic information on a subject, to offer contrast or confirmation, or to act as illustration or exotic amplification to the matter in hand. Whether he was writing about Christian morals, giving a medical prognosis, discoursing on gardens or urns, or trying to clarify the perplexity of knowledge in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the examples of the ancient world were always present in his thoughts. Consider, for instance, a passage from Christian Morals, where Browne is reviewing the best ways of controlling our emotions: To well manage our Affections and wild Horses of Plato, are the highest Circenses; and the noblest Digladiation is in the Theater of our selves: for therein our inward Antagonists, not only like common Gladiators, with ordinary Weapons and down right Blows make at us, but also like Retiary and Laqueary Combatants, with Nets, Frauds and Entanglements fall upon us. Weapons for such combats are not to be forged at Lipara: Vulcan’s Art doth nothing in this internal Militia; wherein not the Armour of Achilles, but the Armature of St. Paul, gives the Glorious day, and triumphs not leading up into Capitols, but into the highest Heavens. (CM 252)

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The boisterous and conflicting passions of the self are immediately and instinctively referred to Greek and Roman myth and history, and then vividly presented as games and combats in a Roman circus. The details are given with scholarly accuracy and imaginative involvement. Browne’s pleasure in the technical specificity of detail is evident: retiary and laqueary, the antagonists with a net and a noose; digladiation, or fighting with swords. An allusion to Plato’s Phaedrus and one to Virgil (Lipara as Vulcan’s forge)1 lead on to a reference to St Paul (Ephesians 6:13) in a fluent sequence that brings classical and Christian antiquity easily together in an illustration by analogy of moral strife, in which the Christian attitude gains the palm. Such mastery is highly gratifying to the learned reader, and there can be no other sort of reader for Browne—which is why, today, his audience is in decline. Plato, Virgil, and St Paul are anything but obscure authors, and Browne in this passage is moving along the high road of European civilization. But he could equally well invoke little-known authors of antiquity or learned European contemporaries. In his writings there seems to be no subject on which he cannot produce testimony from some ancient authority. The presence of their respected names in his prose bestows resonance and reassurance, as Browne puts his reader in touch with sources he would never find himself, or even know existed. A matter of small interest grows great by the accumulation of potent witnesses. For example: That the Balsam Plant hath grown and prospered in Judaæ we believe without dispute. For the same is attested by Theophrastus, Pliny, Justinus, and many more; from the commendation that Galen affordeth of the Balsam of Syria, and the story of Cleopatra, that she obtain’d some plants of Balsam from Herod the Great to transplant into Ægypt. . . . while we read in Pausanias, Strabo and Diodorus, that it grows also in Arabia, and find in Theophrastus, that it grew in two Gardens about Jericho in Judaæ. (PS 28–9)

There are no references given for these authors, but such is the assurance of the tone that we trust Browne to have done the reading on our behalf, and believe in the truth of his statements. The Ancients gave an account of their world that made it seem simpler, grander, nobler, more heroic, and more passionate than the modern world. That impression was created by the Ancients’ fondness for grand figures and themes, by the subsequent magnifying effect of time, and by the loss of much of the corpus of antiquity over the centuries. Browne had mastered the 1 Phaedrus, 246b; Virgil, Aeneid VIII, 416–24.

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surviving literature of the ancient world by his prodigious capacity for study, and his astonishing powers of memory allowed him to recall the details of his reading with an enviable facility, although on occasion he would misquote or even misremember the true source of information. His attitude towards the Ancients as sources of authority was complex and at times contradictory. In Pseudodoxia he warns against overmuch respect for the Greek and Roman writers as being an impediment to the advancement of learning. He recognizes the common tendency to think that, being ‘farther removed from present times, [they] are conceived to approach the neerer unto truth it selfe’ (PE 1.6.32). But he reminds his readers that the Ancients were human and fallible; that they lived in a more circumscribed world than modern men know; that they were often demonstrably wrong in their opinions; and that they were excessively fond of fables, which have confused learning ever since. They were also much given to the resounding affirmation of commonplaces. Browne condemns ‘a resolved prostration unto Antiquity’ as ‘a powerfull enemy unto knowledge’ (PE 1.7.40), yet his pages contain more citations from ancient writers than any of his contemporaries offered, and his affection for their names and opinions is everywhere apparent. In spite of his reservations, Browne, like so many educated men of the seventeenth century, was temperamentally inclined, by the imprint of his own education, to accept the superiority of the Ancients in almost all departments of knowledge. He attributed that superiority to their flourishing in the youth of the world, when nature was more vigorous and confident, and when faculties were not diminished by the debilitating effects of time. Browne acknowledged the usual advances that the modern world had made, in printing, navigation, astronomy, gunpowder, and in certain areas of medicine, such as an understanding of anatomy and the circulation of the blood, but for the most part the advantage lay with the Ancients. Part of that advantage was their reputed wisdom, which came from their living in those early times when understanding of the mysteries of the Creation was still strong. This ancient wisdom was attributed to the Patriarchs of the Old Testament; to the early Greek poets, the legendary Orpheus and his disciples; and to the priests of the Egyptians, whose hieroglyphic writings seemed to encode the most profound secrets.2 2 Browne’s ambivalent feelings about the wisdom of the Egyptians is expressed in PE 1.9.56, where he ruminates about their ‘Hieroglyphicall doctrine (which . . . some conjecture they learned from the Hebrewes)’. He writes of ‘the profound and mysterious knowledge of Aegypt; containing the Arcana’s of Greek Antiquities’, yet suspects it has been perverted in its transmission to the Greeks.

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Browne was willing to recall the opinions of the ancient writers for his readers, and criticize them when he thought fit, but he was not content just to be a spectator of the ancient world, admiring its exploits and transmitting its opinions in his writings. He wanted contact with that world too, by handling its factual remains in the form of coins and medals and urns, and by delving into the past to try to make sense of the earliest parts of history, the beginnings and origins of things. This empirical relationship with antiquity, however, was slow to develop. Although as a young man he had studied and travelled in France, and then in Italy, where he could have seen monumental Roman remains at first hand, his early writings give no indication that he had any particular interest in such antiquities at that time. In Religio Medici, written in the mid-1630s, he expressed a somewhat dismissive attitude towards the survivals of the past. Declaring his sceptical opinion of holy relics, he enlarged the scope of his discourse to say: Now one reason I tender so little devotion unto reliques is, I think, the slender and doubtfull respect I have alwayes held unto Antiquities: for that indeed which I admire is farre before antiquity, that is Eternity, and that is God himselfe. (RM 1.28).

Viewed against the immeasurable panorama of eternity, temporal objects redolent of decay were diminished into total insignificance. But Browne’s insatiable curiosity about the things of this world could not be denied or suppressed by a pious regard for the next. For all his magniloquent piety, his instincts drew him to the study of material remains, to reflect upon the ways the past survived into the present and modified understanding. His work as a doctor provided a parallel to this attitude. He knew his patient had a soul and a spiritual life, but his concern was with the details of his patient’s body and with its pathological history.3 Browne’s earlier books, Religio Medici and Pseudodoxia Epidemica, engage with antiquity in a more general way than his later productions do, and a steady growth of interest in material remains is evident in his writings over the decades. This growth probably came about because of his increasing awareness of antiquarian activities in England in the 1650s. In those early books, he was much exercised by the question of how much one could trust the authority of ancient writers in matters spiritual, physical, and historical, and use them as a basis for one’s own moral and intellectual life. As I have 3 On Browne’s attitude to his patients, see Preston’s essay in this volume.


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remarked, he appears to have had a temperamental disposition to accept the validity of the observation and judgements that had come down from the scholars of Greece and Rome. Concerning the sacred Scriptures, there was no doubt in Browne’s mind about their authority and authentic wisdom. It was via the books of the Old Testament that Browne came to make his first extended intellectual enquiry into a fundamental matter of antiquity, when he addressed himself in Pseudodoxia Epidemica to the obscure questions of the date of Creation and the origins of time. This was an exercise that did not require material evidence, but could be carried out entirely by the study of the early books of the Bible and the works of chronological commentators. The subject, however, was one that had attracted scholars of antiquity, and most notably and recently the Frenchmen Joseph Scaliger and Dionysius Petavius, and there was a long and honourable record of enquiry into the date of Creation going back to Eusebius in the time of Constantine. To estimate the date of the Creation and the age of the earth, and to assign dates to the notable events of the ancient world, was both a historical challenge and an act of religious merit, for the possible date for the return of Christ and the Last Judgement might be deduced from an accurate measure of time since the Creation. The only continuous record of mankind was in the books of the Old Testament, so chronology in the JudaeoChristian tradition depended on scrupulous tracing of the generations that were confusedly registered there. Classical chronologers had attempted to work out a coherent comparative history for Greece and early Rome, and the nations with which they came into contact.4 One could say that an accurate chronology was indispensable to the study of the ancient world. Browne was not prepared to engage in the hard graft of working out his own system, but he was willing to synopsize the various competing calculations that were current in the seventeenth century for the benefit of his readers. He was also sufficiently well informed about the subject to explain why these calculations differed from each other, with most of them estimating the time between the Creation and the birth of Christ, or the reign of Augustus, to be between four and five thousand years. Ultimately he approves the work of Scaliger and Petavius as the most dependable, with their estimate of about four thousand years for that early span of world history. 4 Useful material towards an understanding of the complexities of ancient chronology can be found in Alden A. Mosshammer, The Chronicle of Eusebius and Greek Chronographic Tradition (Lewisburg, PA, 1979) and E. J. Bickerman, Chronology of the Ancient World (London, 1968).

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Browne himself is sceptical that any precise results can be obtained from the sparse records of the early world. ‘Now for the true enquirie thereof, the means are as obscure as the matter, which being naturally to be explored by History, humane or divine, receiveth thereby no small addition of obscurity’ (PE 6.6.469).5 To one aspect of the early world, however, he does bring an unexpected specificity, and that is the population density. Wishing to dispel what he regards as the popular belief that the world before the Flood was very thinly populated, he considers the procreative capacity of the long-lived patriarchs and the likely consequences of relentless productivity on the part of their offspring, and comes up with a figure of 1,347,368,420 as a probable global population by the time of the Flood. He arrives at this sum by geometric progression, in a way that modern demographers would approve. He assumes that a patriarch might have 20 children by the age of 100, and that a typical pre-diluvian life-span was 700 years. Acknowledging that he has been moved to make this calculation by his reading of Petavius, he goes on to express his horror at the overcrowding of the early world, and reflects that we ‘might conceave the Deluge not simply penall, but in some way also necessary’ in order to relieve the burden on the earth (PE 6.6.476). The Flood having washed away the sin-ridden generations, Browne goes on to consider the rapid repopulation of the earth, and how it came about. Here he is participating in another familiar antiquarian topos, the origins of the nations of antiquity. By the application of reason and probability, he suggests that human fertility will soon lead to overcrowding, as he established in his mathematical demonstration of the ante-diluvian population, and overcrowding leads to migration and the establishment of colonies. Places far from the Biblical lands, such as India, China, and the Americas, became inhabited by the familiar processes of expansion—‘we . . . have beheld examples thereof in our days’. The steady spread of people over great distances poses no real problem for him. As for the first settlement of Britain, another standard topic of antiquarian enquiry, he has no strong opinions, noting that even Julius Caesar, who had an early view of these islands, was unable to determine where the people had come from. ‘The Brittish originall was so obscure in Cæsars time, that he affirmeth the Inland inhabitants were Aborigines, that is, such as reported that they had their beginning in the 5 It has to be remembered that Browne undertook his chronological exercises before the supreme chronologist James Ussher published his Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti (1650).


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Island’ (PE 6.6.481). Browne shows his modernity by rejecting as ‘fabulous’ the traditional account of settlement by Trojans, led by Aeneas’ greatgrandson, Brutus, an account given wide currency in the Middle Ages by the twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth.6 The most plausible origin of the British, he believes, was as a colony of the Phoenicians, a view proposed by the French scholar Samuel Bochart in his book Geographia Sacra, published 1646, the same year in which Pseudodoxia first appeared. Bochart presented the Phoenicians as universal colonists, responsible for settlements all around the coasts of Europe, and even reaching Brazil, Cuba, and Jamaica on their extended voyages. India, too, had known their presence. Since the Phoenicians were the next neighbours to the Israelites (the glory and downfall of Tyre is described in Chapter 27 of the Book of Ezekiel), they provided a close and welcome link with the Holy Land.7 Browne showed himself sympathetic to Bochart’s theories in Pseudodoxia, and in his notes in his commonplace books he again entertained the possibility that ‘the Tyrians and the Carthaginians’ had made settlements in America, for ‘being a people of civillitie [they] could not butt continue the use of navigation, so that ether the Carthaginians in their after recerches might bee caryed away by the trade winds between the Tropicks, or finding therin no difficult navigation might adventure on such a voyage’ (NCB 308). To Browne’s thinking, such ‘adventures’ were probable, on the basis of literary record, but nowhere does he enquire after physical traces of a Phoenician presence. In this section of Pseudodoxia, we see him engaging with issues that were in the mainstream of antiquarian discussion in the earlier seventeenth century, but everything he proposes is worked up from books; there is no material evidence, and no contact with ancient objects or places. 6 Although Browne rejects Geoffrey’s histories of Trojan settlement in PE 6.6, he does accept the ancient history of Berosus in its fraudulent edition by Annius of Viterbo. Berosus was a Chaldean priest who lived in Babylon in the fourth century bc, whose ‘History of Babylonia’ in Greek had been preserved in fragments by Eusebius. A much enlarged version, a forgery, was published in 1498 by the Dominican monk Annius, and achieved a remarkable currency all over Europe in the following century. Annius’ version gave copious detail about the origins of the different nations after the Flood, and linked the heroes and gods of Greek mythology with the descendants of Noah, thus making a neat connection between the two major accounts of the early world. See Thomas Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950, repr. 1970), 71–3. 7 For an account of seventeenth-century theories of Phoenician settlement of Britain, see Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995, repr. 2007), 308–30.

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It was only in the later 1650s that Browne began to take an interest in the material remains of antiquity, and in this respect he was part of a general trend, for that decade was a time when antiquarian studies developed a broad appeal among educated people, especially those who had shown royalist sympathies during the 1640s. Such men were now commonly excluded from public affairs, and concentrated their attention on their estates and families. The study of antiquities became fashionable: it could be patriotic and non-polemical. Many significant works were brought to completion and published during this decade: some were county histories; others preserved the memory of ecclesiastical buildings that had been damaged by the iconoclasm of the civil wars. There were accounts of the lost monasteries, and publication of medieval chronicles. Looking even further back, there were books about the Romans in Britain.8 All had one feature in common: they had a strong nationalist theme, dwelling on the depth and richness of the British past. Browne was drawn into this antiquarian world by very modest means: the ever-memorable urns of Walsingham, Norfolk. The sight of these urns gave him a chance to engage in an antiquarian discourse about the early history of Britain, and join the ranks of English antiquaries, whose books and thoughts ran much upon the origins of the British and on life in Britain under Roman domination. Ever since William Camden had drawn a credible picture of ancient British society in his Britannia (1586), and related the British tribal areas to the map of Roman occupation, antiquaries had taken these matters as fundamental to their enquiries into the national past. The English antiquarian endeavour in the seventeenth century was concerned with the origins, languages, customs, institutions, and religions of early Britain. When the ancient British were conquered by the Romans, and became subject to Roman laws, culture, and customs, the study of antiquity became invigorated by the accounts of classical historians such as Caesar and Tacitus, who had close contact with the Romano-British world, and Greek and Roman writers who were reporting what they had heard about Britain. The spectacle 8 Books with an antiquarian subject-matter published during the 1650s include Roger Dodsworth and William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum (1655); William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), The History of St Pauls Cathedral (1658); Daniel King, The Cathedrall and Conventuall Churches of England and Wales (1656), Vale-Royall of England (1656); Inigo Jones, Stone-Heng Restored (1655); William Burton, A Commentary on Antoninus his Itinerary (1658); Thomas Philipot, Villare Cantianum (1659); Richard Kilburne, A Topographie of Kent (1659); Roger Twysden, Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem (1652); James Ware, De Hibernia et Antiquitatibus (1654); William Somner, Dictionarium Saxonico-Anglicum (1659).


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of a primitive culture caught up in a higher, classical culture was a stimulating one to Renaissance scholars. Browne himself was excited by the thought that the ancient inhabitants of Britain had beheld ‘the faces of many Imperiall persons, and in large account no fewer than Cæsar, Claudius, Britannicus, Vespasian, Titus, Adrian, Severus, Commodus, Geta, and Caracalla’ (UB 2.143). Camden had opened this enquiry, for his mission was to place Britain in the context of the Roman Empire. He was proud of the native Britons who had put up such determined resistance to the Romans, and gratified that Britain had eventually been subjected to the civilizing effects of Roman culture. John Speed had reiterated these views in somewhat more popular form in his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611) and The History of Great Britaine (also 1611). A highly polemical account of the Roman occupation and British resistance to it was produced by Speed’s associate, the recusant historian Edmund Bolton, in his Nero Caesar (1624). There he wrote of the civilizing benefits of Roman rule and the barbarity of the Britons under Boadicea in their rebellion against the invaders. The masques of the Stuart Court from time to time put the ‘civiliz’d Brittaines’ of the Roman era on stage, as in Albion’s Triumph (1632) and Coelum Britannicum (1634). Inigo Jones had designed the sets of both masques, and his own thoughts about Roman Britain can be found in his Stone-Heng Restored (1655). The most intensive study of Roman Britain came out in the same year as Browne’s Urne-Buriall, 1658, from William Burton, a lawyer turned schoolmaster who produced a substantial work of serious scholarship in A Commentary on Antoninus his Itinerary. This book traced the probable location of the Roman military stations, as Camden had begun to do, and brought together a mass of miscellaneous information about Roman Britain. Burton, too, discoursed of funeral urns that had been found—in Kent—in terms that were remarkably similar to Browne’s, in content if not in style. Urns were in the air in 1658, as well as in the earth, as Burton’s Commentary makes clear. Urns were being dug up in vast quantities in Kent at this time. He writes of ‘the multitude of Roman Urns lately found in digging’ on the road between Canterbury and Rochester. They were being preserved, traded, studied, and exchanged as gifts between gentlemen with antiquarian interests. William Somner, the Canterbury antiquary, had a collection of urns, and his friend Meric Casaubon (‘that incomparable man’, in Burton’s phrase) had discoursed on Kentish urns in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (1643). Burton paraphrases what Casaubon had to say about

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ancient burial customs, prompted by a remark in Marcus Aurelius: ‘The Grecian did burn; the Persian burie; the Indian doth anoint with Swines grease; the Scythian eat; and the Ægyptian powder, or imbalm’. Burton goes on to observe that Marcus Aurelius doth allude to the custome of his daies among the Romans, which was either to bury . . . or to burn: though indeed the later, through the increase of Christians, began soon after Antoninus his time to grow much out of use every where. Now they that burned, used to gather the reliques of the dead corps, consisting of bones and ashes, and to lay them up in Urnis, Ollis, Ossuariis, in Pots, Urns, Crocks, and the like earthen Vessels made of purpose; and so to bury them.9

Here we are in the same subject area as the first two chapters of Urne-Buriall, where Browne reflects on the differing and exotic customs of disposing of bodies in antiquity, and wonders if the Christians in Roman Britain accepted the cinerary practices of the Romans. Browne, too, had visited this same work by ‘the most learned and worthy M. Casaubon’, and alludes to it in a marginal note in Book III of Urne-Buriall. Burton and Browne both had the good sense to include an engraving of some specimen urns in his book. There was no question that Burton had encountered genuine Roman urns, for there was a Latin inscription on one of them. Browne assumed his urns were Roman, and based his remarkable oration about mankind’s defiance of death and oblivion on his conviction that he had before him an authentic Roman relic. In fact, the engraving shows that Browne’s urns were Saxon, although there was no way in 1658 that Browne could have known that. Burton, like Browne, mused over the contents that lay with the urns, evoking the ‘fragrant odoriferous liquor, and durable confection; or that libatio of wine and milk, that they used about their dead; or lastly (not to speak here of those burning Lamps that have been found in some antient Urns and Monuments . . . ) to receive and preserve the tears that were shed by the friends of the deceased for grief of their death’. He went on to discuss the different styles and sizes of the Kentish urns, their possible relation to the age, gender, and status of the deceased. He was responsive, too, to the pathos of these remains of antiquity, sounding a theme that Browne would amplify and cause to echo down the centuries: ‘no Urn is there found, but is 1200 or 1300 years old, at the least: so many ages of men have these poor Earthen 9 All quotations in this paragraph are from William Burton, A Commentary on Antoninus his Itinerary (1658), 181–4.


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Vessels (of so much better clay for durance than humane bodies are) outlasted both the Makers of them, and the persons to whose memory they were consecrated’.10 Burton’s observations enable us to see Browne as a figure fully involved in contemporary antiquarian studies. He had the requisite learning to make pronouncements on the remains of the ancient world, especially numismatic skills that helped with dating; he had the ability to see artefacts as a way into vanished societies, and the curiosity to pursue these opportunities: ‘ ’Tis time to observe Occurrences, and let nothing remarkable escape us’ (UB Preface, 132). Helpfully, he was able to apply the methodical observations he had acquired as a doctor to archaeological subjects, so that his accounts of the Walsingham urns and of those found at Brampton in 1667 can be read even now as informative excavation reports.11 Of course, Urne-Buriall is largely read today for his eloquence and his extraordinary speculative power and for the unforgettable elegy on the vanity of human aspirations in Book V, but Browne clearly desired in the latter part of his life to be counted among the ranks of serious English antiquaries. Although he said ‘We are coldly drawn unto discourses of Antiquities, who have scare time before us to comprehend new things’ in the preface to Urne-Buriall, he proved, in fact, very warmly engaged with the study of the past. Chapter 2 in particular is a sound contribution to the understanding of the state of the Roman occupation in eastern England, and on the kinds of remains one might expect to find there. He justifies his ascription of the urns to the Romans because they had several military establishments in the neighbourhood of Norwich, and many Roman coins are found there. But he recognizes that there was a numerous British population long established in East Anglia, because many of their coins have survived. Unfortunately, the Roman writers said nothing about ancient British burial practices, and since Browne was mostly dependent on literary sources for his knowledge of antiquity—coins and inscriptions were the other sources—he leaves open 10 More urns, and another ever-burning lamp, appear on p. 230, at Coggeshall in Essex, where ‘an Hypogaeum or Grot, with arched work, [was] opened not long since. There was a Lamp yet burning still in a glasse Viall, covered with a Roman Tile. There were also some Urnes, or Crocks, which contained in them ashes, and bones’. Browne speculates on the physics of the ever-burning lamps reputedly found in Roman tombs in PE 3.21.247–8. 11 As Stuart Piggott demonstrated in his lecture ‘Sir Thomas Browne and Antiquity’, published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 7:3 (1988), 257–69.

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the possibility of a British origin for the urns. He shows the same openmindedness towards the possibility that the pagan Saxons left these urns, but admits he knows little about their customs. The balance of probability is that they are Roman or Romano-British: ‘since from the account of Tacitus the Romanes early wrought so much civility upon the Brittish stock, that they brought them to build Temples, to wear the Gowne, and study the Romane Laws and language, that they conformed also unto their religious rites and customes in burials, seems no improbable conjecture’ (UB 2.146). ‘Conjecture’ is a word that occurs frequently in Urne-Buriall, for Browne is often speculating in the dark about matters of antiquity, yet his conjectures are grounded on broad knowledge and high probability. Progress in antiquarian studies was the result of well-informed conjecture, as well as documentary research. Fieldwork was only in its infancy. But Browne knew that such work was necessary. In his reply to a query in 1658 from William Dugdale about the origin and purpose of ‘Artificial Hills, Mounts or Burrows’ that he has seen in the Fens, Browne writes ‘there can be no clear and assured decision without an ocular exploration, and subterraneous enquiry by cutting through one of them either directly or crosswise’ (AH 86). He knows what is likely to be unearthed, and will be prepared to offer an interpretation. His correspondence with Dugdale shows him on excellent terms with England’s leading antiquary. By 1658 Dugdale had published The Antiquities of Warwickshire, the first volume of the Monasticon Anglicanum, and The History of St Pauls Cathedral. Though both of an age, Dugdale addresses Browne deferentially, as a man of superior learning. Browne’s university education, his European experience, and his remarkable familiarity with the literature of antiquity must have made him appear monumentally learned to the provincial Dugdale, who was very much a self-taught man. The letters of December 1658 show Browne effortlessly revealing his credentials as an English antiquary: he talks of monasteries in Norwich, in relation to Dugdale’s Monasticon, mentions his familiarity with Daniel King, who etched many of the plates for that book, discusses the work of John Leland the Tudor antiquary, and William Lambarde the perambulator of Kent, touches on Inigo Jones’s Stone-Heng, and acknowledges an interest in fossils. His second letter takes all antiquity as its province. Dugdale found himself in receipt of a formidably learned discourse on land drainage schemes in antiquity, drawing on Dio Cassius, Suetonius, Strabo, Aristotle, and Herodotus, as well as several modern European scholars. Browne then moves the correspondence on to


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discuss fossils, of which he sagely remarks that ‘the greatest antiquities of mortall bodies may remaine in petrified bones, whereof some may be older than the pyramides in the petrified reliques of the generall Inundation’.12 Of course, being trapped by Biblical chronology, he cannot get back earlier than the Flood (generally reckoned to have occurred about 1,650 years after the Creation of the world, or some 2,350 years before Christ), but Browne does recognize fossils as the remains of ancient creatures that were wiped out by the Flood, and sees evidence of geological change over the millennia, with sea-beds rising and seas covering land that was once raised. The Flood also prevented Browne from making much progress with an understanding of the origins and relatedness of languages, another common topic of seventeenth-century antiquaries. He accepts that languages differed only after the destruction of the Tower of Babel, built by the sons of Noah and their tribes, but is at a loss to explain how so many languages could have developed in so short a time. When he considers the multiplicity of languages that colonists have encountered in the Americas, he is baffled, and China is beyond his comprehension. Hebrew, he is certain, was the original language of mankind, but how things developed after Babel he cannot fathom (OL 70–1). He regards Egyptian hieroglyphics as the earliest form of writing, a system of communicating ideas by images, such as he believes Adam might have done. Adam, of course, understood the true nature of all things, whereas the Egyptians had a corrupted understanding, and so promoted errors in their sign language of concepts, although Browne believed that much ancient wisdom was preserved in the enigmatic characters. Browne admires what he takes to be the animating principle of hieroglyphics, but lacking the means of decipherment, he soon closes his discussion (PE 3.20.419–20). This is an unprofitable area of enquiry, and he knows it. By the time of the Restoration in 1660, Browne had become an established antiquary. He had published Urne-Buriall; he was on friendly terms with William Dugdale and John Evelyn, and also with Daniel King (for whose book on Cheshire, Vale-Royall of England, he had written a commendatory letter); he was also part of an antiquarian circle in Norfolk. Among this group was Thomas le Gros, to whom he dedicated Urne-Buriall, declaring him 12 TB to William Dugdale, October 1660 (Keynes, 324). The correspondence with Dugdale has been usefully examined as a case-study of Browne’s modus operandi in proto-scientific matters by Claire Preston in Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005), 123–31.

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to be one who has ‘beheld the best of Urnes, and noblest variety of Ashes; Who are your self no slender master of Antiquities, and can daily command the view of so many imperiall faces; Which raises your thoughts unto old things, and consideration of times before you’ (UB Preface, 131–2). Browne, too, had formed a coin collection of his own, something he refers to in a letter to his son Thomas in 1661: ‘my coyns are encreased since you went, I had 60 coynes of King Stephen found in a grave before Christmas, 60 Roman silver coyns I bought a month agoe, and Sr Robart Paston will send me his box of Saxon and Roman coyns next week.’13 In another letter to his son in France he urges him to inspect the amphitheatre of Bordeaux, ‘built by the Emperour Gallienus whose coyns you have seen’, and also to look at the Roman amphitheatre at Pe´rigueux—classical antiquities are now part of a humanist education.14 Browne’s antiquarian expertise was best exercised in areas that were truly familiar to him, and of these, Norfolk was the most natural field of enquiry. Norfolk was an undescribed county, and remained so until the early eighteenth century, in spite of several attempts to produce a county history.15 Some of Browne’s contemporaries must have hoped for an ‘Antiquities of Norfolk’ from his pen, or later, after the Restoration, as Baconian attitudes came more into vogue, a ‘Natural History of Norfolk’. The scale of such an enterprise would undoubtedly have been too much for Browne to have undertaken, for he was an actively practising doctor. Yet he accumulated much material that could have gone into such a work. His knowledge of East Anglia in Roman times went into Urne-Buriall and his discourse on the Brampton urns. He made copious notes on the birds and fish of Norfolk, and compiled extensive church-notes on Norwich Cathedral. These notes were published in his Posthumous Works of 1712 as Repertorium (meaning an index or catalogue), and they belong to the mainstream of English antiquarian documentation.16 13 TB to Thomas Browne the younger, 22 April 1661 (Keynes, 8). On Browne’s collecting practices, see Nelson’s essay in this volume. 14 TB to Thomas Browne the younger, 10 March 1661 (Keynes, 7). 15 Sir Henry Spelman made brief topographical collections for Norfolk, published as ‘Icenia’ in 1698; the herald Peter le Neve made extensive collections on Norfolk over four decades, but never brought them to publication. The first substantial description of the county, by Francis Blomefield, was published in 1739. See Richard Gough, Anecdotes of British Topography (1768), 366–76. 16 For further discussion of Repertorium, see Post’s essay in this volume.


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Recording the tombs and inscriptions in churches had a well-established tradition, beginning with John Leland in Tudor times. William Camden had published a guide to the tombs and inscriptions in Westminster Abbey in 1600, and Henry Holland had done the same for St Paul’s Cathedral in 1614. John Stow and Anthony Munday had trawled through the City churches for the Survey of London. John Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments of 1631 set a new standard for recording the contents of churches, with a lively commentary in addition. Sir William Dering was making his church-notes on Kent churches in the 1620s and 1630s, taking down inscriptions and drawing the monuments.17 William Somner published his Antiquities of Canterbury in 1640 with detailed accounts of the memorials, and William Dugdale produced his History of St Pauls Cathedral in 1658 with handsome etchings of the monuments by Wenceslaus Hollar. Closer to Norfolk, in the years before the Civil War, the cleric Symon Gunton was busy recording the lives and deeds of the abbots of Peterborough, and noting the memorial inscriptions and details of the windows in the cathedral; all these would eventually be published in 1686 as The History of the Church of Peterburgh. These collections proved their worth after the war and the Great Fire, when so much damage to churches took place. It was the damage inflicted on Norwich Cathedral during the Civil War and the Commonwealth that moved Browne to preserve what he could when calmer times arrived at the Restoration, as he told John Aubrey in a letter on 1672.18 (Aubrey’s omission of Thomas Browne from his Brief Lives is odd and inexplicable.) Repertorium is Browne’s own attempt to defeat Oblivion, whose power he had so memorably celebrated in Urne-Buriall, by preserving the names, reputations, and burial places ‘of many noble and considerable persons’ before all is forgotten (R 123). Since some of his information came from aged men with long memories, and Browne himself had known some of the more recent cathedral figures, there is an anecdotal quality that lightens the long inventory of tombs and monuments. His account is punctuated by recollections of the long neglect of the church in Elizabethan 17 For information on Dering’s ‘Church Notes’ (Society of Antiquaries of London MS 497A), and on the collecting of epitaphs and recording of memorials by William Dugdale and William Sedgwick, see Making History: Antiquaries in Britain [Royal Academy exhibition catalogue] (London, 2007), 44–7. 18 TB to John Aubrey, 24 August 1672 (Keynes, 373–4). Browne goes on to mention his coin collection, and Roman camps in Norfolk where coins are found. He also encourages Aubrey in his researches into ‘Druids Stones’.

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times, by details of the destruction wrought during the Civil War, and by puritan hatred of images and ceremonies. In unsettled times, who knew what the future might bring? The antiquary’s most important role was that of preserving the accessible past, and Repertorium can be regarded as Browne’s most valuable antiquarian exercise, more valuable than ‘conjectures’ about the practices of the ancient world. Many of the writings mentioned in this chapter are secondary pieces, but cumulatively they show that Browne was well equipped to appear among the English antiquaries of his time, sharing interests that were common to the fraternity. Yet, unlike other scholars, he retained an ambivalent feeling about his studies of the past. Always with Browne there was that overarching awareness of something vaster than antiquity and infinitely more important. If time was mysterious, eternity was sublime, and of greater personal relevance than time. Just as he had acknowledged the superior claims of eternity to antiquity in Religio Medici, so he continued to feel the pressure of that unknowable dimension throughout his life. In the dedicatory letter to UrneBuriall he confessed that ‘the Antiquaries truest object’ was ‘the ancient of dayes’, ‘unto whom the eldest parcels are young, and earth it self an Infant’ (UB Preface, 132). Chapter 5 of that book is a sustained threnody on the futility of all earthly designs, above all the ambition to be remembered in after ages by grand and ingenious memorials. Survivals from the ancient world may seem a miraculous defeat of time, but time itself is defeated by eternity. The antiquary must lift his eyes above the level of dead and crusted things, and direct his thoughts to matters ‘above Antiquarism’ (UB 5.166). As a Christian, the antiquary must realize that his preoccupation with the past is delusive and a distraction, for we ‘are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment’ (UB 5.165). To return to our beginning—a movement appropriate to the study of a man who died on his birthday—it is true to say that Thomas Browne was in love with antiquity, but it was a restless, uneven love affair, sometimes afflicted with doubts. Although he eventually joined the ranks of English antiquaries, what makes him different from all the others is his astonishing familiarity with the Greek and Roman worlds, recollections of which are present in the background of all his writings. Browne’s access to these societies was almost entirely through his reading, and his coverage of the


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classical writers seems to have been total. The friend who jotted down recollections of him remarked ‘His Memory . . . was Capacious and Tenacious, insomuch as he remembered all that was Remarkable in any Book that he had read’.19 He remembered indiscriminately, so that no authors have especial prominence in his writings, except perhaps Aristotle. The result is often a blizzard of allusions. The reader is lost and intimidated in this storm. There is so much learning in the air that one simply has to trust Browne as a reliable guide through the obscure ways of antiquity. It is ironic that a scholar who often expressed a distrust of the authority of ancient writers should himself become a trusted authority to his own readers. We share irresponsibly in Browne’s knowledge, because we cannot hope to verify it. Undeniably, too, we are moved to assent by the power of the language that transmits that knowledge. As we read, we share his vision of antiquity with its perfections of achievement, its noble bearing, and generous gestures; but once we close the book, the vision fades. It depended on the sonorities of Thomas Browne’s prose, the entrancing rhythms and cadences, the splendour of his phrasing; and when the music stops, antiquity is colourless and cold. 19 ‘Some Minutes for the Life of Sir Thomas Browne, by John Whitefoot’, in Posthumous Works (1712), p. xxix.

4 The Browne Family’s Culture of Curiosity Brent Nelson

Thomas Browne spent almost all of his professional life in Norwich, a major regional centre but far enough from London to prevent his active membership in the major learned societies of the time; but his intellectual reach extended well beyond his geographical limits. He corresponded widely with learned men both in England and abroad, contributed to the researches of such early modern luminaries as William Dugdale and John Evelyn, and made contributions of naturalia to the Royal Society’s museum; and as a published author his reputation extended as far as the court of Emperor Leopold I, and into Italy.1 He contributed to diverse intellectual pursuits, from botany and anatomy to antiquarianism, and, most enduringly, religious and literary discourse. Among his most important contributions to contemporary intellectual life was his fostering of a family culture of curiosity. The Browne household was a lively and stimulating place, with people constantly coming and going not only for medical attention but to bring specimens to the local savant 1 On Browne’s involvement in the learned circles of his time see Claire Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005), 33–4 et passim; and on Browne’s scholarly exchange with Dugdale see Preston (2005), 123–34; and Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995), 244–5, 260.

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who was known to have an interest in collecting all things strange and unusual. More than simply tolerating her husband’s curious interests, Dorothy Browne actively participated in her own way, concocting a recipe for cooking dolphin (after her husband had finished dissecting it) and continually making room for his growing collection of plants, skins, and skeletons.2 Browne attended carefully to the intellectual development of his daughters, whom John Whitefoot, Browne’s friend and first biographer, describes as ‘Partakers of his Ingenuity and Vertues’.3 Browne’s third daughter, Elizabeth, was especially involved in her father’s intellectual interests, drawing and painting her imaginings and observations and spending her evenings reading to him in a wide range of genres.4 Most of Browne’s educational efforts, however, were devoted to his sons, Tom and Edward, and the most extensive indication of these efforts comes from their foreign travels. In Browne’s correspondence with his sons in the 1660s we get a picture of a rich family life of rare intellectual quality and a unique view of a father-savant educating and preparing his sons for participation in the culture of curiosity5—the activities, values, and attitudes involved in visiting and amassing collections of rarities and curiosities as expressions of a complex intersection of intellectual pursuits.6 2 Browne describes the dolphin’s fate in a letter to his son Edward (TB to Edward Browne, 14 June [1676] (Keynes, 60–1)). On Dorothy Browne’s involvement in her husband’s interests see also Jeremiah S. Finch, Sir Thomas Browne: A Doctor’s Life of Science and Faith (New York, 1961), 87, 200. 3 John Whitefoot, ‘Some Minutes for the Life of Sir Thomas Browne’, in Posthumous Works of the Learned Sir Thomas Browne (1712), p. xxxii. Whitefoot is describing all of Browne’s surviving children at the time of his writing: Edward, Elizabeth (‘Betty’), Frances (‘Frank’), and Anne. In the passage quoted, he also characterizes Browne himself as ‘favouring of much Ingenuity, and Curiosity’. 4 Browne reports that Elizabeth is practising in ink and water colours (TB to Edward Browne, 2 December 1668 (Keynes, 33)). Edward writes to her, ‘I want you with me, to draw me abundance of fine pictures of strange things’ (Edward Browne to TB, 9 March 1669 (Wilkin, i. 180)); and later, ‘Though I make many journeys, yet I am confident that your pen and pencill are greater travellers. How many fine plaines do they passe over, and how many hills, woods, seas doe they designe?’ (Edward Browne to TB, 5 July 1669 (Wilkin, i. 190)). Elizabeth even drew anatomical depictions for her father (TB to Edward Browne 21 June [1675] (Keynes, 56)). Her commonplace book contains an account of the books she read to her father (Keynes, 3, 331–2). 5 I am adapting the term from Krzysztof Pomian’s chapter ‘La Culture de la curiosite´’, translated as ‘The Age of Curiosity’, in Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1990), the English version of Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux (Paris, 1987). 6 Neil Kenny describes this nexus of curious activities in The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford, 2004), 165–7.

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Browne was himself a collector of enough distinction to impress John Evelyn, who described his ‘whole house & Garden’ as ‘a Paradise & Cabinet of rarities’ that included medals, books, plants, and ‘amongst other curiosities, a collection of the Eggs of all the foule & birds he could procure, that Country (especialy the promontorys of Norfolck) being (as he said) frequented with severall kinds, which seldome or never, go farther into the Land, as Cranes, Storkes, Eagles &c: & variety of Waterfoule’.7 In his tutelage in the pursuits of curiosity, Browne was part humanist in his persistent dialectic of scholarship and observation, part empiricist in his disciplined interest in a taxonomy of naturalia and ‘things themselves’, and part ‘baroque’ in his barely restrained enthusiasm for curious objects of all kinds.8 As a practitioner of physic, however, and especially as a parent preparing his sons for adult employment in public service, Browne also expressed a sometimes uneasy tension between, on the one hand, a practical interest in the uses of knowledge and collected objects and, on the other, the impulse of mere intellectual curiosity. In these educative relationships, Browne attempted to negotiate the pull between virtuosity and professional practicality; between curiosity in things for their own sake and for their use; between regard for objects as signifiers of meaning beyond themselves (what Krzysztof Pomian calls ‘semiophores’) and as repositories of information.9 Here objects of curiosity were not the cultural capital of genteel virtuosity, but rather ‘sites of knowledge’ in an education directed towards active involvement in the republic of learning.10 7 John Evelyn, Diary, Vol. 3 (London, 1960), 594 (17 October 1671). 8 Browne exemplifies the blending and overlapping of epistemes that characterized the slow transition from the humanist to the scientific era, as described by Anthony Grafton in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 1–22. On the ‘baroque’ interest in strange objects of all varieties see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, 1994), 35 ff., 94–6. 9 Pomian, 5, 10, 30. A ‘semiophore’ is an object whose value is based on its removal from economic circulation and functionality and whose meaning or significance is found somewhere beyond the immediate visual experience of its material presence. On the often conflicting attitudes towards utility and curiosity see Kenny, 27, 56, 68–74 specifically in relation to medicine, et passim. 10 On the collecting and consumption of curiosities as social capital for negotiating political self-fashioning see Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, 2001) and Stephen Bann, Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness (Ann Arbor, 1994). On the museum as a ‘site of knowledge’ see Findlen, 97–209. On the professional context of collecting, see Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, 2007), 124 et passim.


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Travel was an opportunity to participate in the culture of curiosity, especially for Englishmen, who were geographically removed from the network of European collectors. Although Browne traveled extensively as a medical student, we know relatively little about this period of his life. Before that, however, he went to Ireland with his father-in-law, Sir Thomas Dutton, probably late in the summer of 1629, after receiving his MA in Oxford on 11 June. Shortly thereafter, he embarked on a tour of professional education through France, Italy, and Holland, studying medicine at Montpellier and Padua before taking his MD at Leiden in December 1633.11 Browne left few records of what he saw while traveling in pursuit of his medical education,12 for which cause Samuel Johnson lamented that ‘[t]o consider . . . what pleasure of instruction might have been received from the remarks of a man so curious and diligent, would be voluntarily to indulge a painful reflection, and load the imagination with a wish, which, while it is formed, is known to be vain’.13 Consequently, we know very little about Browne’s engagement with the culture of collecting while abroad. C. W. Schoneveld finds evidence in Browne’s writing of the influence of the anatomy theatre at Leiden (which housed a significant collection of curiosities), but no direct evidence remains of the other collections Browne might have seen on the Continent.14 He was acquainted, through the printed catalogues he owned, with the famous collections of Olaus Worm in Copenhagen and Francesco Calceolari in Verona (which he might well have visited while studying in nearby Padua), and he was aware of the collections of Ulisse Aldrovandi and Athanasius Kircher.15 The record of Browne’s connection to domestic collections is only slightly better. He corresponded with Elias Ashmole, but it is not clear whether he visited either this collection or that of the Royal Society, to which he donated ‘a great petrified bone, a double goose-egg, the one included in the other, and a stone-bottle, which had been filled seven years before with Malaga sack, and was well-stopped, but now found almost empty, and the 11 C. W. Schoneveld sets the earliest date of departure at 19 November 1629 (‘Sir Thomas Browne and Leiden University in 1633’, English Language Notes, 19:4 (1982), 336–7). 12 See, however, Reid Barbour’s essay in this volume; and Barbour’s forthcoming biography of Browne. 13 Samuel Johnson, ‘The Life of Sir Thomas Browne’, in Christian Morals: by Sir Thomas Browne . . . The second edition (1756). 14 Schoneveld, 242–5. 15 Olaus Worm, Musæum Wormianum (Leiden, 1655); Benedetto Ceruti and Andrea Chiocco, Musæum Francisci Calceolari (Verona, 1622).

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outside covered all over with a mossy coat’.16 Closer to home, in Norfolk, he had more than passing familiarity with the collection of his friend Robert Paston, first Earl of Yarmouth, at Oxnead Hall. For Browne, collecting was multifunctional, involving the collection of information (recorded verbally or in drawings) as well as material objects, sometimes for interest, use, or both; and through his sons traveling abroad, letter-writing served as an extension of this participation in the culture of curiosity. Browne encouraged his sons to travel for the benefit of their personal growth and education and funded at least three, and perhaps five, trips abroad at considerable personal expense: one for Tom, two for Edward, and according to John Whitefoot, a trip for two of his daughters to France.17 Although not as directly involved in his father’s collecting activities as was his older brother, Tom in his earlier journey and subsequent naval service in many respects set the pattern for Edward’s travels. In late autumn 1660, after a short time at Trinity College, Cambridge, Tom began a tour of France with extended stops in Bordeaux, Saintes (where he lived with an apothecary), La Rochelle, and Paris, before returning to England in the spring of 1662. He was 14 years old when he left, apparently unaccompanied, with only his father’s letters to comfort and guide him. Browne encouraged his young son through bouts of homesickness and persistently instructed him in ways to preserve his health: to ‘eat very few grapes and fruits for they cause diseases in strangers’ and ‘to keep quiet and in shades’ to avoid the heat.18 Browne also directed ‘honest Tom’ (as he often addressed him) in his education abroad, advising his son to hone his French and Latin and also to practise arithmetic. He encouraged him in reading (they exchanged comments on Lucan) and other studies—including dancing, and especially 16 Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 2 (1756–57), 253. The entry is dated 12 February 1668 with a note at the bottom of the page referring to an account of these contributions in Robert Hooke’s Philosophical Experiments and Observations (1726), 31. Hooke dates this transaction 27 February 1668. 17 Whitefoot, p. xxxvi. In a letter to Edward c. February 1679 Dorothy Browne alludes to Anne’s past travels in France (TB to Edward Browne [c. February 1679] (Keynes, 96)). In a note to his sister Mary (‘Moll’), Edward alludes to the possibility of her traveling with him: ‘How unlucky was it that you did not goe with me into Holland; for (so being obliged to returne with you into England) I had in all probability been with you at present’ (Edward Browne to Mary Browne, 5 July 1669 (Wilkin, i. 190)). 18 TB to Thomas Browne the younger, 26 July [1661] (Keynes, 12), and 22 April [1661] (Keynes, 8).


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painting so he could record things he saw—and directed him to learn what he could of pharmacy, the wine trade, and the various practices of the Protestant religion, and he even provided advice on polite conduct. Above all, Browne guided young Tom in the practices of curiosity. Collecting was part of the family culture and continually on the minds of both father and son. In one letter to Tom at Saintes, Browne is apparently responding to his son’s offer to procure some coins for his collection when he says, ‘I would not beg any there except some few Choice ones wch I have not already’.19 Evidently he expected Tom would be able to identify such coins based, presumably, on his familiarity with his father’s collection. Browne’s stated reason for this stipulation was his recent acquisition of 120 coins (half from the reign of King Stephen and half Roman) and his expectation of 30 more Saxon and Roman coins from Robert Paston. He is not so coy later in the letter, however, where he requests that his son fill a box with any insects he might come across. A half year later he acknowledged receiving just such a box containing some ‘pritty stones and insects’, and another, its contents undisclosed, two months later.20 Despite attempts elsewhere to moderate his son’s collecting activities, Browne nonetheless encouraged him to visit other collectors: ‘some likely have Collections [of coins] wch they will in Courtesie show, as also urns and Lachrimatories, any freind will help you to a sight thereof, for they are not nice [i.e. coy] in such things’.21 Shortly after arriving home in 1662, Tom took a recreational trip into Derbyshire with his brother Edward, then returned with him for a final term at Cambridge in July 1663. In autumn 1664, at age 18, Tom left for London to join the navy, where he thrived until his premature death, probably in the autumn of 1667, of unknown cause.22 Throughout Tom’s naval career, Browne continued to advise his son on reading and various matters he perceived to be of immediate concern, such as navigation and protecting his ears from the noise of cannon fire; and Tom was again his agent abroad for collecting material and observation. In anticipation of his son’s departure for Calais en route to the Mediterranean, Browne sent a letter to Plymouth in February 1667 asking that he procure some ‘Jesuits powder’, specifying that 19 TB to Thomas Browne the younger, 22 April [1661] (Keynes, 8). 20 TB to Thomas Browne the younger, 2 November [1661] (Keynes, 15). 21 TB to Thomas Browne the younger, 22 April [1661] (Keynes, 8). 22 Browne details the sources of Tom’s good reports, with much evident pride (Keynes, 22–4); cf. Finch (1961), 193–5 and Edmund Gosse, Sir Thomas Browne (London, 1905), 151–3.

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he would prefer to have it in bark (cinchona) form.23 This is a significant item because it represents two comfortably compatible motives: practical use and mere curiosity. Jesuit’s powder, or Peruvian bark, was both an exotic rarity and a drug sought by physicians and apothecaries as a febrifuge for malaria.24 He also asks his son to gain more information on the mineral waters near Tangier (of which Tom had previously reported), and to ‘[t]ake notice of such plants as you meet with ether upon the Spanish or African coast & if you knowe them not, putt some leaves into a booke, though carelessely, and not with that neateness as in your booke at Norwich’.25 Such books were typically compiled and collected by virtuosi and men of science in the period and were common practice in the Browne family as well.26 Another oftencultivated skill was the drawing of items for record, especially by travelers, a skill that was also promoted in the Browne household and in Browne’s exhortation of his sons to develop their painting technique. Having newly returned home to Portsmouth some four months later, Tom was commended by his father not only for the multiple good reports of his naval service but also for his practice of ‘tak[ing] the draughts of remarkable things where ere you goe; for that may bee very usefull, and will fasten themselves the better in your memorie’.27 Edward, the elder son, was busy with his training and did not take his first trip until 5 April 1664, departing from Dover at age 20 after completing the first stage of his medical studies, including a brief internship with his father. With stops in Paris, Montpellier, Turin, Geneva, Rome, Bologna, Padua (where, like his father, he studied anatomy), Arles, Toulouse, La Rochelle, and points in between, Edward met with several of his countrymen, including Christopher Wren and Samuel Tuke, and traveled at times with William Trumbull (later Secretary of State), Tuke, John Ray, and Philip Skippon, Ray’s assistant and former student, before returning in October 1665. He followed a similar pattern after completing his MD at Oxford in 1667, being accepted as a member of the Royal Society and subsequently nominated to 23 TB to Thomas Browne the younger, [February 1667] (Keynes, 21). 24 Finch (1961), 158. Browne probably learned of Jesuit’s powder through his son Edward, who was introduced to it by Dr. De Veau at the Duke of Norfolk’s palace in 1664; see Norman Moore, The History of the Study of Medicine in the British Isles (Oxford, 1908), 73. 25 TB to Thomas Browne the younger, [February 1667] (Keynes, 21). 26 Two of these are preserved at the Natural History Museum in London: one compiled by Edward (Hortus Siccus 108); and another by both Thomas (the elder) and Edward (Hortus Siccus 107). 27 TB to Thomas Browne the younger, [May or June 1667] (Keynes, 24).


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the College of Physicians, taking another turn on the Continent from August 1668 to Christmas 1669. Edward’s third and final foreign journey was in the summer of 1673 to the peace congress at Cologne as part of a delegation, giving him opportunity to visit several sites in the southern Netherlands and imperial Aachen. For Tom, under the direction of his father, curiosity was part of a liberal education that had no obvious practical outcome related to his chosen naval career, but for Edward the exercise of curiosity was explicitly tied to his developing identity as a physician and man of science. On his first trip, as an undergraduate in medicine, Edward attended lectures in Paris, observed anatomical dissections in Padua, and boarded with an apothecary (as did his younger brother) in Montpellier, where he studied pharmaceutical botany, all the time supplementing his more formal education with frequent visits to collections. Browne directed his sons to seek lodging with apothecaries because their shops were not only central to medical practice but also favorite gathering places for merchants, collectors (often the apothecary himself ), and academics seeking information and materials from abroad.28 In Rome Edward observed ‘antiquities, pallaces, statuas, and other curiosities’, and reported seeing here and elsewhere collections of various kinds: botanical and physic gardens, the scholarly studiolo of Athanasius Kircher, art galleries, and princely and ducal treasuries.29 His enthusiasm for one class of collection—relics—began to flag somewhat midway through his trip, yet he dutifully and diligently continued to report them: a thorn of the Saviour’s crown, the Virgin Mary’s slippers and cup, St Mary Magdalen’s ‘gigantick arme and head’, and St John’s finger. He visited the collection at St Denys near Paris, where he saw ‘a great many rarities and fine relickes’, including one of the water pots used at the wedding at Cana, the lantern Malchus carried when he came to arrest Jesus, and ‘many pieces of saints, as the head of St. Denys, the chin of St. Lewis, &c’. He then makes an offer of souvenirs to one of his sisters: ‘If you will have any beads or little pieces of silver that have touched these things, write mee word, 28 On the apothecary’s shop as a centre of collecting activity see Cook, esp. 29–30, 141–2; and Findlen, 99. The famous Italian collectors Francesco Calceolari (Verona) and Ferrante Imperato (Naples) were both apothecaries (Findlen, 31). 29 Edward Browne to TB, 16 January 1665 (Wilkin, i. 85–7). Among others, the Jardin Royal in Paris, the Duke of Savoy’s house at Rivoli near Turin, the Grand Ducal treasury at Florence (i.e., the Galleria degli Uffizi), Prince Domenico Caracciolo’s treasury in Rome, and the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

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and the next opportunity I meet with, I will send you some; but it may be you are not curious for such things’.30 Edward continued, however, to enthuse about the Grand Ducal treasury at Florence and Ulisse Aldrovandi’s famous cabinet of curiosities in Bologna, though he also learned early in his trip that collections could be found everywhere. In Rome he saw John Ray’s traveling collection of naturalia; and he reports having ‘already seen some pretty rarities in apotheacary’s closets’:31 I went into [an apothecary’s] chamber, where hee shew mee a great many pretty things which hee himselfe had made out of divers sorts of Shells fastned in order into divers shapes. I saw a very Good Nautilla made into a Cup. One odde head prettily Contrived—the forehead, Cheeks and Chin were the back of a strange Crab, the eyes were two handsome Coloured snail-shels, the ears two hornes. Two other shells in the same fashion with hornes, the Mouth likewise was of a shell just like a mouth. Hee had a Cabinet finely set within and without with shells, and looking Glasses handsomely placed for they often reflected these pretty rarities which were in it.32

These were pedestrian versions of the similar but more opulent shell compositions and ornamental cups that were staples of the princely Kunstkammer.33 In this apothecary’s shop Edward reports an interesting nexus of collecting practice, where the medical practitioner, valuing both utility and passionate curiosity, is also involved as an artisan playing upon the boundary between the natural and the artificial. Shells in themselves were items of interest for collection by naturalists, but put together in composition they became art. Edward’s use of the word ‘pretty’ captures this ambiguity, meaning both generally attractive and, more specifically, elegantly made, implying artifice. The elder Browne used the same word to describe the stones and insects Tom had sent him, an application that is entirely consonant with his meditations some thirty years earlier in Religio Medici on the ‘Art’ of God who ‘raise[d] so beauteous a structure, as the world and the creatures thereof’ (RM 1.14). This apothecary’s shells, crafted into pretty sculptures representing natural 30 Edward Browne to a sister, 24 May 1664 (Wilkin, i. 62–3). 31 Edward Browne to TB, [c. 9 June 1664] (Wilkin, i. 64). 32 Edward Browne, Journal of a Visit to Paris in the Year 1664, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports, Vol. 56, Pt 1 (London, 1923), 14 (27 May 1664). 33 Engravings of humanoid shell compositions can be found in Filippo Bonanni (or Buonanni), Musæum Kircherianum (Rome, 1709) and Ricreazione dell’occhio e della mente (Rome, 1681). See also figs. 97–8 in Adalgisa Lugli, Naturalia et Mirabilia: il collezionismo enciclopedico nelle wunderkammern d’europa, 2nd edn. (Milan, 1990).


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creatures, are a trope on the craftedness of nature. A similar bridging of scientific and curious interests occurs in Edward’s earlier record of his visit to a Pisan physic garden where he saw ‘a beast which they called a syren; Ægyptian idolls, much larger than those I had seen before; all sorts and productions of mineralls, very orderly placed; with gummi, resinæ, &c’.34 Here are three classes of objects that are considered remarkable for vastly divergent reasons: one for its claim on the fabulous; another for being a grander example of a previously viewed artifact; and the third, comparatively mundane, for its rich variety, convenient presentation, and scientific value. Edward himself collected several and divers material objects. He ‘bought diuers Roman coins, Roman seals, some odd fishes, shells, and such like curiosities’ at ‘ancient Puteoli’ [Puzzuoli]35; but he was a cautious collector, and complains that ‘strangers [come] thither so often, they hold [coins and medals] at strange prises, though most of them bee worth nothing’.36 And because transporting rarities was also logistically difficult, he reports: ‘I dare buy litle here, by reason I shall bee searched so often before I come at Venice, which I haue often found extremely troublesome and chargeable; but at Venice . . . there is a conuenience of shiping any thing for England, with out any farther trouble’.37 Despite successfully transporting several packages of specimens home, John Ray and Philip Skippon recently ‘had the illfortune to loos one venture with a seruant of thers, who is now slaue in Tunes [Tunis]’.38 When acquisition was impractical Edward sometimes, like his younger brother before him, captured a curiosity in a drawing, some of which are preserved in his and his father’s notebooks. He apparently sent two drawings of ‘a dominican frier from Turin, the brother (as they say) to the grand Turck’.39 He also commissioned a gardener in Padua ‘to make mee a book of 600 plants’, a convenient form for conveying botanical specimens.40 Although compiling 34 Edward Browne to TB, 6 December 1664 (Wilkin, i. 76). 35 Edward Browne to Isaac Craven, 16 December 1664 (Wilkin, i. 78–9). 36 Edward Browne to TB, 2 January 1665 (Wilkin, i. 84). 37 Edward Browne to TB, 16 January 1665 (Wilkin, i. 87). 38 Edward Browne to TB, 16 January 1665 (Wilkin, i. 86). 39 Edward Browne to TB, 5 November 1664 (Wilkin, i. 72); Edward Browne to Thomas Browne the younger, 14 November 1664 (Wilkin, i. 73). It is unclear whether he made a copy for both his brother and his father, sent one copy as common property, or simply forgot to whom he had sent the picture. 40 Edward Browne to TB, 2 April [1665] (Wilkin, i. 93); and Edward Browne to TB, 9 April 1665 (Wilkin, i. 97).

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such books was an established family practice, he was no doubt inspired by what he saw in Aldrovandi’s museum, where he viewed ‘the gretest collections of naturall things’ he had ever seen, which included many volumes of dried and pressed plants as well as ‘bookes painted of all sorts of annimalls [and] twelue large folios of plants, most exquisitely painted’.41 Edward began his second Continental trip after receiving his MD. In his father’s mind this would be a more focused and practical tour in preparation for an intellectual and professional career in London as a member of the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society. One clear objective was to establish Edward’s scholarly and professional credit with the Society.42 This was also the most significant trip for both father and son as collectors. Edward began this eighteen-month trip in August 1668 at Yarmouth, proceeding through Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Brussels, Vienna, Hungary, Turkey, and back again through Vienna, Prague, Dresden, and Hamburg, arriving back in Norfolk from Cuxhaven by Christmas 1669. Edward again relied heavily on his father, corresponding not only as a son but also as an apprentice of sorts, actively seeking his father’s advice. Browne continued to be a channel for his son’s thoughts and observations, as well as for the rare and curious material he collected and sent home, much of it bound for the Royal Society, but some of it ultimately destined for Norwich. Whatever Edward collected, and whatever its intended destination, he did it with his father in mind: 41 Edward Browne to TB, 7 February 1665 (Wilkin, i. 89). Ulisse Aldrovandi, collected over 8,000 pictures to make up for lacunae in his specimen collection, which comprised over 11,000 animals, fruits, and minerals, and 7,000 plants ‘dried, pasted’ into fourteen volumes: see Giuseppe Olmi, ‘Science-Honour-Metaphor: Italian Cabinets of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in O. R. Impey and Arthur MacGregor (eds.), The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, new edn. (Thirske, 2002), 4. The ‘Digital Library’ on the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna website offers facsimile images of eighteen volumes of Aldrovandi’s collected pictures (www.filosofia.unibo.it/aldrovandi/pinakesweb/main.asp?language¼it). There are examples of drawings used as travel records in Peter Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy, in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667, ed. Richard Carnac Temple and Lavinia Mary Anstey, n.s. 45: 17 (London, 1907–36). See also The Paper Museum of Cassiano Dal Pozzo (series in progress) and Nick Grindle, ‘ ‘‘No Other Sign Or Note than the Very Order’’: Francis Willughby, John Ray and the Importance of Collecting Pictures’, Journal of the History of Collections, 17:1 (2005), 15–22. 42 The acquisition of ‘scholarly credit’ was a common motive for a young gentleman’s travels abroad. See Michael G. Brennan (intro and ed.), The Origins of the Grand Tour: The Travels of Robert Montagu, Lord Mandeville (1649–1654), William Hammond, (1655–1658), Banaster Maynard (1660–1663) (London, 2004), 2. Browne’s intent was more precisely professional.


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Petrus Lambecius [the Emperor’s librarian] gave me a little booke wrote by ye Emperour Ferdinand [III] his father in Latine. I sent you Sr in one letter a picture of the Triumphal Arch at Petronell. I have also drawne ye other side of it, and am not of Lambecius opinion that it is a Triumphal Arch, but rather part of a temple of Janus. When it pleaseth God to bring me safe to you, Sr, you may please to Judge and instruct me which you thinke it is most probably, when I shall have the opportunity to show you more exactly the manner of it.43

Edward’s formal tone here and throughout the correspondence is attributable not only to a sense of filial duty expressed in his terms of address (‘honoured sir’ shifting part way through his trip to ‘most honoured father’), but also to his acknowledged status as a junior intellectual partner. He was willing to debate the emperor’s librarian, but quick to defer to his father’s authority on learned matters. Even at this stage of life, having taken one tour on the Continent and subsequently completed his medical schooling, Edward still relied upon his father to approve his itinerary and to secure credit and transfer funds for his travels. Browne’s frequently expressed desire for Edward’s speedy return was in part paternal concern for his son’s security, but it was also professional: he was anxious to see Edward established in his professional career. Moreover, during his travels, Edward continued to defer to his father on matters of intellectual inquiry, even in his relationship and correspondence with the Royal Society, though he was a member and his father was not. While Edward was in Venice his father recommended: ‘It were well you could observe anything in order to the Royall Societie’, particularly ‘speciall medicines & preparations’.44 But Edward had already presented his services to the secretary, Henry Oldenburg, offering to report on mineral mines ‘or any other naturall curiosityes in Germany or Bohemia or Austria’,45 and tells his father, ‘if you would informe me of what naturall curiosities I ought to looke after here about I shall strive to be diligent in observing them, in hopes to please my most honourd father’.46 Oldenburg responded promptly with an extensive list of requests, mostly 43 Edward Browne to TB, 16 May 1669 (Sloane 1911, f. 35). This arch is reproduced in Edward’s A Brief Account of Some Travels (London, 1685), 15. In the same, he gives the title of the ‘little booke’ as Princeps in Compendio (141). 44 TB to Edward Browne, 2 December 1668 (Keynes, 33); and 21 December 1668 (Keynes, 37). 45 Edward Browne to Henry Oldenburg, 6 December 1668 in Henry Oldenburg, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. and trans. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, Vol. 5 (Madison, 1968), 205. 46 Edward Browne to TB, 13 December 1668 (Sloane 1911, ff. 9, 10).

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pertaining to mines, minerals, and baths in Hungary. Edward’s first response to these queries won hearty approval from Oldenburg, who called him ‘a genuin member of the R. Society, in being so inquisitive, and so sollicitous for their concern’.47 Edward sent further reports of observations and gathered information and several specimens related to the interests expressed by the Society through Oldenburg and continued to build intellectual credit with the Society.48 Yet despite this strong footing, Edward still depended on his father’s advice regarding the formulation and timing of his communications to the Royal Society.49 Edward’s native respect for his father as an intellectual guide was continually reinforced by the latter’s daunting reputation both at home and abroad. He felt the extent of the shadow cast by his father’s renown when on his first trip he met Pierre Briot in Paris, who intended to translate Pseudodoxia Epidemica, probably into French, and Pierre Petit, who was already translating it into Latin, and whose collection of ‘diuers fine instruments, glasses, and other inuentions’ Edward enjoyed.50 Here he also met Dr Guido [Guy] Patin, who, Edward says, ‘saluted mee very kindly, asked mee many things concerning my father, whom hee knew only as Author of Religio Medici, discoursed with mee very lovingly, and told mee hee would write to my father’.51 Early on, Edward recognized the vicarious value of his father’s reputation in negotiating the learned circles of Europe. In Padua he met the English anatomist Sir John Finch, whom he describes as a ‘great honourer’ of his father, which, he says, ‘made him willing to doe me a kindnesse’.52 On his second trip he found similar favour with the emperor and his librarian, Lambecius, on account of their high opinion of his famous father. The latter, he writes, ‘doth courte your acquaintance, if you would be pleased to write something to him, or of him, in a letter to me . . . so that he shall thereby see, sir, that I have not neglected his civility’.53 Edward continued to rely on his father’s guidance in the practices of curiosity: in his reporting of curiosities in his journals and correspondence, 47 Henry Oldenburg to Edward Browne, 1 March 1669 (Oldenburg, 420). 48 There is an inventory of at least some of these specimens in a letter to his father dated 8 August 1669 (Sloane 1911, ff. 44, 45). 49 See Sloane 1911, ff. 13–14, 17–18, et passim in Wilkin. 50 TB to Edward Browne, 22 September [1665] (Wilkin, i. 110) and Edward Browne to TB, [‘September last’] 1665 (Wilkin, i. 113–14). 51 Edward Browne (1923), 31. 52 Edward Browne to TB, 20 March 1665 (Wilkin, i. 91–2). 53 Edward Browne to TB, 25 August 1669 (Wilkin, i. 193). Cf. Edward Browne (1685), 141.


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and ultimately his later publications;54 in his sketches of various items of interest; and in his material acquisition of curious specimens and artifacts. As to the practice of observation and recording generally, the elder Browne twice cautions against ‘intention upon varietie of objects’,55 an interesting injunction given that variety was one of the cardinal virtues of collection and observation, one that he himself seems to embrace in the opening pages of Urne-Buriall, where he describes ‘Time’ as a cabinet of curiosities that ‘hath endlesse rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth’, such as the unearthed ‘Urnes, Coynes, and Monuments’ that were the present concern of his book (UB 1.135). Edward Phillips, for example, describes the Paston collection in similar terms, as ‘abounding with an infinite variety of the most choice and admired Rarities’.56 The thrill of plenitude was one of the chief delights of viewing such collections. Nonetheless, Browne’s efforts to limit his son’s curious activities is a recurring theme in the letters surviving from this period. Some of this concern was bare pragmatism; some of it parental protectiveness; none of it, as one would expect, derived from any qualms Browne himself had about the exercise of curiosity and collection per se. He tells Edward to collect no book, unless it be very small, the reasons being that they would be cumbersome to transport and that most books could be obtained in London.57 Similarly, in the interest of health and ease, he advises Edward, ‘burden not yourself with superfluous Luggage, and if you buy anything lett [it] bee of easie portage. Keepe yourself still temperate, which virtue may conserve your parts’.58 Browne is often thus caught between the impulses of curiosity and paternal concern, first commending and then cautioning his son: You have taken good observations of very many things & used great industrie every where, wch, though I like well, yet I cannot butt renew my old admonition to afford convenient rest & quiet unto thy self, nor to fatigate thy spirits & body to the discomposure of your health or hazard thereof.59

54 Chiefly in his Travels (1685). 55 TB to Edward Browne, 2 and 15 December 1668 (Keynes, 32, 35). 56 Phillips in his dedicatory letter to William Paston, Robert’s father, in The New World of English Words (1658), sig. b. 57 TB to Edward Browne, [22 September] 1668 (Keynes, 30). 58 TB to Edward Browne, 2 December 1668 (Keynes, 32). 59 TB to Edward Browne, 28 April [1669] (Keynes, 44).

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Practicalities notwithstanding, he confesses he ‘should bee willing to receave or see such things’ as minerals.60 He clearly valued Edward’s observations as well, copying his letters into a letter-book and culling passages from these and his son’s journal for his own notebooks, often adding annotations and sometimes making corrections.61 Browne also counsels his son to curb his curiosity so as not to allow distraction from his main purpose, which, in his mind, was to accumulate experience and knowledge of physic and medicine. He sometimes sounds like Claude Fleury, who warns against curiosity as a distracting influence, admonishing those who ‘spend their life on the pure curiosity of travelling, of expertise in the fine arts such as painting and music, of seeking out rare things’ and advising instead that young travelers ‘inform [themselves] about the matters which are specific to [their] profession’.62 To this practical end Browne advises Edward always to be reading a book on physic to maintain his focus, fearing that by earnestly pursuing too many objects of interest he will weary himself and compromise his health. Browne nonetheless urges his son to locate and visit the emperor’s ‘treasure of rarities’ in Vienna (i.e. of Leopold I), including the botanical garden established by Carolus Clusius (Charles de l’Ecluse, 1526–1609) under Maximilian II, and adds the more general directive to visit ‘what is remarkable in any private custodie’. This interest in the emperor and his gardener, it seems, was inspired by Browne’s knowledge of Clusius’ Stirpium Nomenclator Pannonicus.63 Browne often advocated a combination of scholarship and observation to inform and direct his son’s inquiries and to satisfy his own curiosity. Just as the book on physic would provide a practitioner’s frame of reference for these observations, so too did his own reading provoke many of his inquiries and directions to his son. He directs Edward to descriptions in Ortelius’ Geography of myrrh that is extracted from rocks at Gradisco in Moravia and of a lake at Mansfeld ‘wherin the shape of fishes & froggs are found in stones’ and suggests he might ask his new acquaintance in Vienna, an apothecary named Du Bois, concerning 60 TB to Edward Browne, 1 March 1669 (Keynes, 41). 61 TB to Edward Browne, 28 April [1669] (Keynes, 44); this book appears to be Sloane 1861. Passages related to Edward’s travels can be found throughout Browne’s surviving notebooks. 62 Kenny’s translation from Fleury’s Traite´ du choix et de la me´thode des études (Paris, 1686), 85–6 (Kenny, 213). 63 TB to Edward Browne, 1 March 1669 (Keynes, 42). On the Emperor’s garden and Clusius’ intellectual network see Cook, 84–106, esp. 102.


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them.64 Edward replies that he has ‘inquired after the myrrha fossilis in many places, but cannot procure it’ and has not yet located the frogs in Mansfeld, though he has read in Agricola about some found in Schneberg, near Bohemia.65 In Rudolf II’s imperial treasury Edward had seen ‘a magicall glasse, whereby the Emperor Rudolphus saw many strange sights, and the manner of conversing with spirits; perhaps the same or like that of Dee and Kelly’.66 ‘How came you to see Rudolphus his glasse & what credit doth it beare?’, the elder Browne responds.67 Edward’s account is a particularly important record, being one of the most informative depictions of this collection, for which no detailed inventory survives.68 Edward also described the Elector Augustus’ Kunstkammer together with the collection in his stablehouse at his palace in Dresden,69 as well as several other collections, including an unidentified one at Nuremberg, the collection of Moritz [Mauritius] Hoffman, Professor of Botany and Anatomy, and that of Johann Christoph Wagenseil, a Professor of Hebrew, Law and History, both at Altdorf.70 He is reminded of his father’s house and garden when he describes the home of Christian Lorentz von Adlershelm, mayor of Leipzig, which contained strange fish and fowl, skins and skeletons of exotic mammals (including the tail of a whale which he likens to that of his father’s dolphin), various curiosities of English origin (e.g., a piece of wood with King Charles I’s blood upon it), ethnological artifacts from Greenland, another siren’s hand, and ‘a peece of Iron which seemeth to be the heade of a Speere founde in the tooth of an Elephant, the tooth growne about it’.71

64 See TB to Edward Browne, 28 April [1669] (Keynes, 42, 44). See Abraham Ortelius, Theatrvm Orbis Terrarvm (1570). 65 Edward Browne to TB, 9 May 1669 (Wilkin, i. 185). On Browne’s attempts to interpret these and other fossils see Preston (2005), 126–7. 66 Edward Browne to TB, 14 February [1669] (Wilkin, i. 175). 67 TB to Edward Browne, 1 March [1669] (Keynes, 42). 68 Sloane 1911, ff. 31, 32; Sloane 1922, f. 48 (Edward’s notebook, dated 1 May 1669). See Sloane 1879, ff. 59–66 for Browne’s copy of Edward’s description. See Rudolf Distelberger, ‘The Habsburg Collections in Vienna during the Seventeenth Century’, in Impey and MacGregor, 53–4. 69 Sloane 1911, ff. 60, 61; cf. Travels (1685), 166–7. See also Joachim Menzhausen, ‘Elector Augustus’ Kunstkammer: An Analysis of the Inventory of 1587’, in Impey and MacGregor, 91–9. 70 Sloane 1911, ff. 7, 8, in Edward Browne (1685), 126. 71 Sloane 1911, ff. 65, 66. Cf. Edward Browne (1685), 172–3. In his Travels, Edward also mentions visiting the collections at the University of Leiden and Jan Swammerdam’s collection in Amsterdam, among others (93, 100).

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Edward also collected drawings and watercolours, for example of the ‘soles parelii’ (parhelia, or sun dogs) that he saw in Hungary, a copy of which his father conveyed to the Royal Society. This, Edward’s first contribution to the Society, was so well received, writes his father, that ‘Your informations hereafter will bee very welcome’.72 He sent several drawings designated for his father as well, some of them specifically requested by him, and some of which were preserved in Browne’s notebooks, perhaps as part of the Norwich collection.73 Browne directs his son to observe fish and fowl (and their names) in the markets and other natural things native to each region, including minerals. Edward sent a picture of a fish from Vienna (a ‘biscurn’) which, he says, ‘is ill painted, [but] represents the shape of ye fish notwithstanding’.74 Collecting fish specimens abroad was not out of the question—John Ray’s collection, which Edward had seen in Rome on his first trip abroad, included fish, birds, and other zoological specimens—but it was more practical to collect them in drawings.75 Edward managed to procure another book of plants, again at Padua and again containing 600 specimens, this one originally made for Prince Pamfilio of the papal Pamphili family, and he sent this book, a box of minerals, and another package of books and quicksilver ore home via Yarmouth.76 These volumes of plants, pictures of fish, books, and mineral samples are the very sorts of things Evelyn reports having seen in Browne’s collection. The Brownes’ diverse interests extended beyond such naturalia to include many objects that were simply rare, curious, or just ‘odd’. In one package sent to his father Edward included, along with several Roman coins, objects with altered, unexpected, or simply strange properties: money coloured by the baths of Glasshitten, Baden, and Banca; ‘A stone against frights’, listed elsewhere as a ‘A Schreek Stone’; ‘Three ringes made of Elkes Clawes’; and ‘The haire of a boy like woole’.77 He also lists ‘a Thunderstone’ which he describes as ‘transparent 72 TB to Edward Browne, 28 April [1669] (Keynes, 45). Account recorded in Philosophical Transactions, 47 (10 May 1669). There is a watercolor of the parhelia at the Royal Society (LBO 3) and two more at the British Library (Add. 5233 ff. 22 and 32). 73 Sloane 5234 and Add. 5233. 74 Sloane 1911, ff. 35, 36. Illustrated in Edward Browne (1685), 154v. 75 On the practicalities of collecting, transporting, and preserving zoological specimens see Wilma George, ‘Alive or Dead: Zoological Collections in the Seventeenth Century’, in Impey and MacGregor, 250–2, 262. 76 TB to Edward Browne [13 August 1668] (Keynes, 29); Edward Browne to TB, 5 July 1669 (Wilkin, i. 188); and 21 July 1669 (Sloane 1911, f. 42). 77 Edward Browne to TB, 8 August 1669 (Sloane 1911, ff. 44, 45); this letter from Vienna includes a master-list of things he had sent home to England. Earlier versions of this list are in Sloane 1922, f. 39 and (a fuller version) ff. 51, 52.


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yellow & red it strikes fire and is counted an amulet against thunder and hinders burning’.78 In another package, along with samples of antimony, nitre, vitriol, and silver, Edward assembled diverse tracts, including ‘a discourse of silence in Dutch’, ‘A French manuscript being a Panegyrique of Women very odde’, and ‘the Voyage of Sign[ior] Ludovico of Friame [Fiume]’79 which Edward copied out of the author’s own papers. A distinctive item in this box is ‘The picture of ye Great Agate in ye Emperours Treasure’, the only identified memento of his visit to the great collection in Vienna, apart from his tract of the voyage of Ludovico, who was connected to the emperor.80 This drawing is valued not only as a representation of a spectacular object but also as a token of a valued, distinguished social connection. Much of Edward’s education in the culture of curiosity involved navigating the social networks of courts, universities, and the marketplace. Professor Hoffman not only showed him many rare plants but also gave him several of them. Similarly Dr Wagenseil, says Edward, ‘sheew[ed] me his library and all his rarities and coynes, of which he hath a good collection’ and ‘gave me this inclosed for a piece of the first mony that was coyned in Germany[, ] and a letter to one of the magistrates of Nurnberg to helpe him in the use of a Microscope which he bought out of England’.81 Edward also tells of his visits to various mines in Hungary and the governors there who showed him all he wanted to see, as well as the soldiers and commanders who, he says, ‘presented me with many curiosities’, presumably minerals.82 But the exercise of curiosity was sometimes complicated by the complex dynamics of social exchange. Edward describes ‘a head carved in a Cornelion’ that he had bought at Pressburg (Bratislava, Hungary)83 and showed to Lambecius, who promised to ‘have it drawne, and cut in brasse by the Emperours graver’; although he admits he would be loath to part with it, he recognizes that ‘if ye Emperour should like it because that it was lately found though it be worth no great matter, I must present it’.84 78 Edward Browne to TB, 13 December 1668 (Sloane 1911, ff. 9, 10). 79 Edward Browne to TB, 14 February [1669] (Wilkin, i. 175). 80 Sloane 1911, ff. 44, 45. 81 Edward Browne to TB, 31 October 1668 (Sloane 1911, f. 8). 82 Edward Browne to TB, 4–14 April 1669 (Wilkin, i. 181). 83 Edward Browne to TB, 16 May 1669 (Sloane 1911, ff. 35, 36). 84 Ibid. Edward’s description of the carnelian as ‘lately found’ suggests it might have been of antique origin. Carnelian had been used for signets since before the Christian era.

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The most important relationship in his network, however, remained that with his father. Much of what Edward Browne observed and collected was under the direction of the elder savant and on the impulse of his curiosity. One item, a replica of the very stone (or one of them) that felled St Stephen, interested Browne greatly. He asks Edward ‘What kind of stone is that wch stoned St Stephen, pebble, flint or freestone?’—evidently referring to a famed relic on display at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.85 The younger Browne answers, ‘The stone with which St. Stephen was stoned is a kinde of pebble. I will sende you, sir, a piece just like it; but it [presumably the original] looketh like marble, and is polished, and worne a little hollow in the middle by the continual touching of it by every one that goeth in or out of that door of the church wherein it is fixed’.86 In the same letter Browne inquires about ‘a white waved wood which is calld Ayre & sayd to come from Germanie’ and is used to make musical instruments, to which Edward replies, ‘The woode which they make violins of groweth by Saltzburg. I hope to procure some of the leaves. The woode here is not deere; they make trenchers of it. It is called Augenes Holtz’.87 Edward’s travels abroad, shared through his correspondence with his father, enriched significantly both their intellectual lives and their collection. The civility and spirit of generous co-operation that Claire Preston finds in Browne’s domestic interaction with men of learning radiated through his son to connect for a time into a vast new network abroad, which helps to explain how it was that a Norfolk country physician could amass such a ‘Paradise & Cabinet of rarities’.88 This particularly intense period of activity in the collecting enterprise of the Brownes contributed significantly to the variety of items Evelyn would have seen when he visited Norwich in 1671. It was also a formative time for Edward, forging a lasting professional collaboration with his father that would see him through his early professional life and involvement in the Royal Society and inculcating a full and varied habit of curiosity.89 For Thomas and Edward Browne, the exercise of curiosity was more than the ‘gentlemanly pastime’ of the virtuoso: it was an 85 TB to Edward Browne, 1 March [1669] (Keynes, 42). 86 Edward Browne to TB, 9 May 1669 (Wilkin, i. 185). 87 Ibid. 88 Preston (2005), 33, 93. 89 Joan Bennett describes the subsequent co-operation between father and son who conferred and referred patients between them, in Sir Thomas Browne: A Man of Achievement in Literature (Cambridge, 1962), 44–5.


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essential element in the preparation of a practising physician.90 In this fatherson didactic relationship we see something approaching a modern model of professional preparation, pursued in the context of a liberal education but focused on experiential learning by forging relationships with established scholars and practitioners. While much of this networking involved the giving and receiving of information and, in some cases, the exchanging of gifts in the form of collectible objects, it was not the old rewards of patronage that Edward sought, but, following the example of his father, membership and participation in the republic of learning.91

90 On the leisurely pursuits of the gentleman virtuoso see W. E. Houghton, Jr, ‘The English Virtuoso in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 3 (1942), 51–73, 190–219; and Findlen, 15. 91 On the polite practices of gift-giving in the patronage system of Italian collecting see Findlen, 348 ff.

5 Engaging with Pygmies: Thomas Browne and John Milton Karen L. Edwards

A historiated capital W, 2 38 inches square, ornaments the first page of Thomas Browne’s address to readers of Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or, Enquiries into Very many received Tenents, and commonly presumed Truths (see Fig. 1).1 The woodcut is badly worn and damaged, but near the top, visible between the limbs of the two large Vs that comprise the capital W, a reader can see a long-necked bird against the clouds, flying with open beak and raised wings. The head of another bird is just discernible below the extended neck of the first. In the bottom right corner, diminutive human figures astride sheep point a tiny forest of spears at the flying birds. At the bottom left, birds with arched necks stand confronting other small human figures, who advance towards them with arrows strung on taut bowstrings. It is obvious, despite the worn condition of the woodcut, that the scene depicted is the famous battle between pygmies and cranes mentioned by Homer and by innumerable writers thereafter.2 The details of the woodcut generally correspond to Pliny’s account, translated here by Philemon Holland: 1 Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (London, 1646), a3r. 2 The term pygmies, in ancient as in early modern literature, does not refer to tribal peoples of equatorial Africa, who were not encountered by Europeans until the nineteenth century. It is just possible that distorted reports of such a people had reached Aristotle or Herodotus, but even if this is so, the reports were assimilated to the stories and the name already in circulation.

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Figure 1. Embellished capital from Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) in the Spring time they set out all of them in battell array, mounted upon the backe of rammes and goats, armed with bowes and arrowes, and so downe to the sea side they march, where they make foule worke among the egges and young cranelings newly hatched, which they destroy without all pitie. . . . for otherwise if [the cranelings] should continue any longer, they [i.e., the pygmies] were never able to withstand the new flights of this foule, growne to some strength and bignesse.3

The printer, John Dod, rather than Browne, would almost certainly have chosen the ornamental capital W for use in Pseudodoxia Epidemica. The same 3 Pliny [Plinius Secundus], The Historie of the World, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1601), i. 156. See Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, et al., 10 vols., 2nd edn. (London and Cambridge, MA, 1969–84), ii. 522–5 [7.2.26].

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historiated capital, unworn and sharp, appears at folio 190r of William Cuningham’s The Cosmographical Glasse (1559), printed by John Day. There are nine historiated initials of the same size and ornateness in Cuningham’s book, and given the correspondence in each case between the historiation and the subject of the chapter it introduces, the capitals may well have been commissioned for the book. The capital W occurs at the beginning of the section entitled ‘Of Asia the Thirde Parte of th’Earth’. Within a few paragraphs of its appearance, Cuningham writes of Asia’s inhabitants: ‘There are also Pygmeans (men but a` cubite in height) which riding on Goates, & Ram [m]es, do kepe warre with Cranes’.4 How the block came into Dod’s possession, and indeed how it survived over a hundred years, are questions beyond the scope of this essay. But after the printing of the first edition, it was not used again for Pseudodoxia Epidemica. It was replaced in the 1650 edition, also printed by Dod, with a smaller capital W, modestly decorated with an abstract foliage pattern. Perhaps the ‘pygmy’ block was rendered unfit for further use after the 1646 printing. Or perhaps Browne objected to it as inappropriate—for there is in fact considerable tension between the woodcut’s represented story and the meaning of the sentences it ornaments. To gain true knowledge, Browne states, we must first unlearn the untruths we have picked up along the way: Would Truth dispense, we could be content, with Plato, that knowledge were but Remembrance; that Intellectuall acquisition were but Reminiscentiall evocation, and new impressions but the colourishing of old stamps which stood pale in the soul before. For, what is worse, knowledge is made by oblivion; and to purchase a clear and warrantable body of Truth, we must forget and part with much wee know. (PE ‘To the Reader’, 1)

The historiated capital W—an old stamp newly pressed—revives our memory of just the sort of knowledge that the passage, and indeed Pseudodoxia Epidemica proper, urge us to forget. Browne’s metaphor is apparently unaware of its relevance to its material context, or, rather, its near relevance, for ‘new impressions [which are] but the colourishing of old stamps’ refers not to the re-use of moveable type, but rather to the early seventeenth-century vogue for making old prints saleable by colouring them.5 Browne’s metaphor, in 4 William Cunningham, The Cosmographical Glasse (London, 1559), f. 190r. 5 Stamp may well be a Gallicism for estampe, print. I am endebted to C. H. Page for this observation. For studies of early modern coloring of prints, see Susan Dackerman (ed.), Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts (University Park, PA, 2002).

Thomas Browne and John Milton / 103 other words, depends upon the process of cultural production—the process, that is, of renewing and recontextualizing inherited material for new political and social uses—which the address to the reader declares to be outmoded. The ambivalence towards cultural production evident in the address to the reader reappears in more dramatic form when Browne turns to the question of pygmies’ existence in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Book Four, Chapter Eleven.6 To assert that it is erroneous to believe ‘that there is, or ever was such a race or Nation’ does not necessarily exclude considering why, in the first place, the existence of pygmies may have been claimed (PE 4.11.330). Yet Browne does exclude the question and indeed all questions related to what pygmies mean. He declines to think about them, in other words, as cultural products, in which context they can be known and reflected upon for further cultural production. Instead, he focuses his attention on whether or not they exist. The ontological scepticism of this approach, which would seem to qualify it as ‘scientific’ (or, more accurately, ‘proto-scientific’), is superficially similar to the approach to, say, griffins or basilisks. In these latter chapters, Browne begins by acknowledging that griffins and basilisks are meaningful products of ancient cultures, signifying guardianship and eternity, respectively; he then proceeds to demonstrate their literal impossibility. (The lion body and eagle head of a griffin are ‘cemented’ parts, unlike the ‘comixture’ of bird and quadruped in a bat; as for the basilisk, a putrescent cock’s egg hatched by a toad might produce a monster but not a regular species, and in any case incubation does not affect species.7) What is most striking about these chapters is the ingenuity with which Browne analyses the different kinds of information circulating about the beasts. It is unlikely that many of his contemporaries believed griffins or basilisks to exist; one’s pleasure in reading the chapters derives from Browne’s explanation of why they cannot exist. The chapter on pygmies, however, lacks comparable analytical ingenuity. Ignoring the question of what pygmies anciently signified, Browne strictly confines himself to the question of their existence. Yet this is a question that necessarily precludes a firm answer, for (unlike basilisks or

6 The chapter on pygmies is substantially unchanged in successive editions of PE, except for some elaboration in the 1650 and 1658 (folio) editions of the rendering of the Hebrew word Gammadim in various translations of the Bible. These changes can be followed in Robbins’s textual notes at PE 4.11.331. 7 See Browne, PE 3.7.181–6 for basilisks and PE 3.11.199–201 for griffins.

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griffins) pygmies are improbable but not impossible. Moreover, the experiential knowledge that could prove their existence was not available to Europeans in the early modern period, and there is no experiential knowledge that could disprove their existence. The chapter is so designed, in other words, that it stymies analysis. In order to discover why the mode of analysis that Browne chooses for his discussion of pygmies so clearly lacks the energy and inventiveness displayed abundantly elsewhere in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, it is necessary to do what Browne avoids doing, that is, to consider the ancient significance of pygmies. It will soon become clear that in avoiding this subject Browne has done violence to his classical sources, or has at the very least treated them with astonishing high-handedness. My essay will argue that Browne’s discussion of pygmies needs to be treated as political rather than ‘scientific’ and sceptical, for the manifold peculiarities of the chapter become comprehensible in the context of royalist defeat in the mid-1640s. The politics of Browne’s chapter is not overt; it is built into the way he fails to engage with pygmies as cultural products—a fact that can best be illuminated by comparison with John Milton’s treatment of pygmies, with which the essay will conclude. Browne begins the chapter on pygmies by invalidating the ‘testimonies’ of virtually all of his classical sources. Although we find references to pygmies in ‘Herodotus, Philostratus, Mela, Pliny, Solinus, and many more; yet’, Browne states, ‘were they derivative Relators, and the primitive Author was Homer’, whose comparison of Trojans to cranes warring against pygmies ‘was more largely set out by Oppian, Juvenall, Mantuan, and many Poets since’ (PE 4.11.330). Classical and Renaissance authors seem, in short, simply to elaborate Homer’s simile, a claim that justifies Browne’s (and, by implication, readers’) ignoring of them. Browne does not quote the simile but declares it originally to have been but ‘a pleasant figment in the fountaine’, since when it has become ‘a solemne story in the streame, and current still among us’ (PE 4.11. 330). The pun on current reinforces the notion that Homer is simply being pleasant, implying that there is no need to think seriously about pygmies. The implicit claim is less plausible, however, when one examines the simile, given here in a modern translation: When the division on both sides had been marshalled under their leaders, the Trojans came on with cries and shouting, like birds—as when the cries of cranes fill the sky, when they make their escape from the huge downpours of winter, and with loud cries

Thomas Browne and John Milton / 105 they fly on towards Ocean’s stream, bringing death and destruction to the Pygmies: and at early morning they launch their grim battle. But the Achians came on in silence, breathing boldness, their hearts intent on supporting each other.8

The primary function of the simile is, ostensibly, to convey the noisiness of the Trojans’ advance in contrast to the silence of the Achaeans’. But the simile folds into itself, the discreteness of its terms ominously dissolving. The warrior cranes, apparently speeding forward in formation across the sky, are shown in fact to be retreating from winter—thus predicting in the Trojans’ present advance their eventual fleeing. As G. S. Kirk notes, the cranes’ flight towards ‘Ocean’s stream’ means a flight to ‘the ends of the earth rather than specifically the south’, for the destination of migrating cranes was not known in antiquity.9 From the perspective of the human beings who stay behind, migration looks like disappearance. The cranes’ migration, that is, points to the ultimate fate of the Trojans, who are not merely defeated but deracinated and scattered throughout the world. How, then, do the pygmies function in the simile? They would seem, necessarily, to be affected by the reversal of expectations affecting the Trojans/cranes. Just as the latter seem to be all-conquering attackers but are in fact heading for destruction, so we might expect the pygmies, their apparently doomed victims, to be figures for the victorious Achaeans. But that would be to read the simile, erroneously, as if it were an equation. Instead, the entire vignette of screaming cranes fleeing winter storms and destroying a diminutive army works as a portrait of the Trojans. The function of the simile’s pygmies is thus to reinforce the ‘message’ of the Trojans’ coming obliteration. Whether from this reading of Homer’s simile or from material known from other sources, the literature of antiquity represents pygmies as the people par excellence who have disappeared, who have been dis-placed, marginalized, and lost. Classical authors convey the meaning of pygmies in a variety of ways. Surveying the east coast of Thrace and its cities, Pliny (in Holland’s translation) ends with the city of Gerania, ‘where it is reported that the nation of the Pygmeans kept, whome the barbarous people called Catizi, and they are of beliefe that they were chased away and put to flight by cranes’.10 Pomponius Mela describes pygmies as the tiny people from the interior of Arabia 8 Homer, The Iliad, trans. Martin Hammond (Harmondsworth, 1987), 41. 9 G. S. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1985–93), i. 264. 10 Pliny, Historie of the World, i.78. See Pliny, Natural History, ii.150–1 [4.11.44].

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who were lost (defecit) in the war to defend their harvests against the cranes.11 In another version of their marginalization, several ancient authorities state that pygmies dwell in the ground. Aristotle, in one of the two testimonies regarded by Browne as worth serious consideration, describes cranes’ migration from the distant plains of Scythia to the region above the Nile, where cave-dwelling pygmies live.12 Philostratus states that pygmies are earth-born, living underground and storing their food like ants.13 Even the ‘circumstantiall relations so diversly or contrarily delivered’, which Browne cites as casting doubt on pygmies’ existence—the fact that ancient and early modern geographical speculation assigns them variously to the head of the Nile, the Ganges, ‘Gerania in Scythia’, Japan, ‘the Molucca’s’, Greenland—confirms their cultural currency as the people who live elsewhere (PE 4.11.332).14 Hence Virgil is silent about pygmies when, echoing Homer, he compares the shouts of Aeneas’ army to the clamor of Strymonian cranes returning from their winter haunts.15 The simile signifies the founding of a new homeland for the Trojans; hence Virgil omits pygmies, signifiers of those who have lost their homeland. Let us ask why pygmies have this significance. It is true that their representation is part of the ‘monstrous races’ strand, and all such races are said to inhabit remote and inaccessible places, which explains why no one has seen them. But unlike other monstrous races, pygmies can be seen; they are indeed a relatively common sight, for classical antiquity does not make a clear 11 Pomponius Mela, Chorographie (Paris, 1988), 90 [3.98.81]. 12 Aristotle, History of Animals Books VII–X, trans. D. M. Balme (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 132 [597a]. 13 Philostratus, Imagines, trans. Arthur Fairbanks (London and New York, 1931), 228. 14 Browne is citing, in order, Aristotle, Philostratus, Pliny, Paulus Jovius, Pigafetta, Olaus Magnus. Robbins provides textual references for these (Robbins (ed.), PE Vol. II, 928–9). In his commentary on Metamorphoses, Book 2, George Sandys interprets diverse testimonies about pygmies’ homeland as meaning ‘that they dwelt, if any such were, not only in one country’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. George Sandys (1626) (Lincoln, NB, 1970), 288). Alexander Ross, disputing Browne’s denial of pygmies’ existence, observes: ‘Circumstantiall differences cannot overthrow the substance of a truth’. Authorities also disagree about the location of Ophir or Tharsis; ‘shall we hence inferre, that there was never any such place?’ Moreover, Ross goes on to point out, ‘Buchanan speaking of the Isles of Scotland, amongst the rest sets downe the Isle of Pigmies, in which there is a Church where are yet digged up divers small skuls and bones answering to the report of the Pigmies little bodies; so that the inhabitants and neighbours make no question but that Pigmies of old dwelt there’ (Ross, Arcana Microcosmi; or, The Hid Secrets of Mans Body Disclosed (1651), 163; see George Buchanan, Rerum Scoticarum historia, Edinburgh, [1582], f. 11r ). 15 Virgil, Aeneid VII–XII; The Minor Poems, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. edn. (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 188–9 [Aeneid 10.265] ).

Thomas Browne and John Milton / 107 distinction between pygmies and dwarfs. Uncertainty about where they belong on the map, in other words, seems to encode uncertainty about where they belong in relation to the human. The range of tones in which ancient writers discuss them (including fear, disgust, delight, and ridicule) expresses conflicting attitudes towards physical anomalies. It is significant, then, that Browne begins his chapter by ruling (what we would call) dwarfism out of consideration—as indeed he must in order to maintain the position that belief in pygmies’ existence is a vulgar error. ‘By Pigmies’, he begins, we understand a dwarfish race of people, or lowest diminution of mankinde, comprehended in one cubit, or as some will have it, in two foot, or three spans; not taking them single, but nationally considering them. (PE 4.11.330)

Browne thus erases what is, for Augustine, the crux of the matter. What is the relationship, Augustine asks in The City of God, between ‘monstrous births’ (offspring whose form deviates from their parents’ or the prevailing pattern) and the monstrous races described by the Ancients?16 He has doubts about the existence of the latter.17 He reasons, however, that if such races exist and are, in fact, human (by which he means rational and mortal), then they may be intended to show us that God has not erred when a monstrous birth occurs.18 He concludes that monstrous offspring (which do exist) are to individual races what monstrous races (which may exist) are to the entire human race.19 Thus when, at the end of the pygmy chapter, Browne attributes to Augustine the opinion that the existence of pygmies is not impossible, he is not inaccurate, but he has not done justice to the complexity of Augustine’s argument. 16 Augustine of Hippo, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge, 1998), 707–10 [16.8]. The discussion of pygmies occurs in the context of Adam’s and Noah’s descendants. 17 He notes that if it were not for our familiarity with them, we could easily have been persuaded by ‘those historians who revel in curiosities’ that monkeys, apes, and baboons were strange kinds of men. He thus implies that the remote habitation of the supposed monstrous races makes it difficult for us to guard against deception (City of God, 709). This is a rather more subtle point than that which Browne attributes to Albertus Magnus, Cardan, and ‘many others’: ‘if any such dwarfes were ever extant, they were surely some kinde of Apes’ (PE 4.11.330). 18 Accordingly, Augustine reproves anyone who, not able to see the whole of Creation, is nevertheless ‘offended by what he takes to be a deformity of a part’ (City of God, 708). 19 Isidore transfers Augustine’s conclusion to his discussion of giants, and calls the birth of dwarfs—‘or those whom the Greeks call pygmies (pygmaeus), because they are a cubit tall’—a ‘portent’ (Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies, trans. S. Barney et al. (Cambridge, 2006), 244).

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This tactic is characteristic of the chapter, in which the troubling question of human physical anomaly, present in Browne’s sources, is consistently suppressed. Browne’s reference to ‘two foot, or three spans’ in the sentence quoted above, for instance, indicates that he has been reading Aulus Gellius (or Ulisse Aldrovandi’s citing of Gellius).20 In Book Nine of Attic Nights, Gellius offers up to his readers the usual monstrous races (cannibals, Arimaspi, monocoli, and so on), which he claims to have read about in a bundle of old books.21 The list concludes with pygmies, at which point, significantly, Gellius declares that he is disgusted with such worthless writings.22 Herodotus, who appears at the very head of Browne’s list of ‘derivative relators’, has nothing to say of pygmies and cranes. Rather, he tells of Cambyses’ mockery and destruction of dwarf-shaped idols during the Persian campaign, equating the idols with the figures of dwarfs on the prows of Phoenician ships.23 Another of Browne’s ‘derivative relators’, Juvenal, whose Satire Six targets disproportion of every sort, satirizes women with piled head-dresses which make them seem an Andromache from the front but a ‘Pygmy girl’ from the rear.24 Sneering at our willingness to subject ourselves to fashion’s deformations, the satire also exploits our tendency to ridicule human beings regarded as ‘lesser’ than we. Satire Thirteen crucially exposes the self-delusion behind that tendency: ad subitas Thracum volucres nubemque sonoram Pygmaeus parvis currit bellator in armis,

20 See Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae, 3 vols. (Bologna, 1599–1603), iii. 140; Robbins ii. 926, n. 330.5. 21 Aulus Gellius, The Attic Nights, trans. John C. Rolfe, 3 vols. (London and Cambridge, MA, 1927–52), ii. 162–7 [9.4.2–10]. Gellius lists the ‘authors’ of these books, who are either legendary themselves or known to have compiled legends and marvels. 22 Gellius, ii. 166–7 [9.4.11–12]. Disgust for abnormality is not uncommon. Suetonius states of Augustus that ‘he abhorred dwarfs, cripples, and everything of that sort, as freaks of nature and of ill omen’ (Lives of the Caesars, trans. J. C. Rolfe, 2 vols. (London and New York, 1914], i. 250–1 [83]). In contrast, Pliny reports that Augustus’ granddaughter, Julia, ‘set great store by and made much of ’ a dwarf named Conopas (Pliny, Historie of the World, i.165; see Natural History, ii. 554–5 [7.16.75]. 23 Herodotus, Herodotus, trans. A. D. Godley, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1920–57), i. 312–13 [2.32]; ii. 48–51 [3.37]. Godley notes that Greeks identified the image in question, that of the Ptah of Egypt, with Hephaestus, who was always depicted as a dwarf (Herodotus ii. 49, n. 1). In Book Two of his history, Herodotus tells of the small dark men (‘of stature smaller than common’), encountered in the deserts of Libya, who lead the Nasamonians safely through vast marshes to a city of similarly small inhabitants (Herodotus i. 312–13 [2.32]). 24 Juvenal, Juvenal and Persius, trans. Susanna M. Braund (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 280–1 [6.503–6].

Thomas Browne and John Milton / 109 mox inpar hosti raptusque per aera curvis unguibus a saeva fertur grue. si videas hoc gentibus in nostris, risu quatiare; sed illic [quamquam eadem adsidue spectentur proelia, ridet] nemo, ubi tota cohors pede non est altior uno. [A Pygmy warrior in his tiny armour races towards the raucous cloud of Thracian birds that’s suddenly appeared and in a moment he’s been grabbed by a savage crane and carried off through the air in its curved talons, no match for his enemy. If you saw this among our own people, you’d shake with laughter. But there, where the entire army is no taller than one foot, no one laughs.]25

It is certainly the case that Juvenal has drawn on Homer’s simile for the details of this passage, but to dismiss it as derivative, as Browne does, is reductive in the extreme. The passage suddenly jolts us from the comfortable position that allows us to sneer because we assume we are uninvolved. Juvenal’s satire implies the contrary: there is no place from which we can remain untouched by and safely separated from the spectacle. His satire suggests why pygmies signify displacement: the potential for human physical anomaly to which they point both fascinates and horrifies, a mixture so troubling that it is dealt with by claiming that pygmies live somewhere else, or at least that they no longer live here. Pygmies’ disappearance, which ‘resolves’ the discomfort they produce, is motivated in almost all ancient authors by their military aggression, itself motivated by the derivation of pygmy from pugme, meaning both ‘fist’ and ‘cubit’ (i.e., the length from elbow to knuckles).26 This link to pugilism is a feature to which Browne gives some attention, though only in connection with the Vulgate’s translation of Ezekiel 27:11. The verse lists the mercenary armies hired by the city of Tyre, among which are the mysterious ‘Gammadims’, which the Vulgate renders ‘Pgymæi’.27 Browne devotes two full paragraphs to this, the second of his two weighty testimonies, challenging Jerome’s term with numerous citations to other translations of the verse. 25 Juvenal, 446–9 [13.167–73]. 26 Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C.T. Onions et al. (Oxford, 1966), s.v. pygmy, pigmy. 27 Browne quotes the Vulgate’s rendering of the verse at PE 4.11.331. ‘The identity of Gamad is uncertain; perhaps the word should be read Gomerim, i.e., the Cimmerians in Cappadocia’ (The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy [New York, 1991], Ezekiel 27:1–11, note).

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Only after a glance at commentators who read Jerome’s Pgymæi metaphorically (the watchmen on the towers look like pygmies from the ground) or etymologically (the name means ‘men of cubits’, or giants)—only then does Browne admit that by pygmies Jerome means ‘pugills, that is, men fit for combat and the exercise of the fist’ (PE 4.11.332). What he does not do is address the paradox that pygmies are warriors so tiny that their skill at arms serves not even to defend them against fowls. The ‘derivative’ Philostratus dramatizes the paradox in his account of Hercules and the pygmies. Although they must use an axe even to cut stalks of grain, he observes, pygmies display an extraordinary boldness against the sleeping Hercules. They send phalanxes against his hands and feet and prepare assault weapons for his head—until, suddenly waking, Hercules stands, laughs, and scoops the pygmies up into his lion’s skin.28 Browne’s silence about Hercules and the pygmies may be explained by the clearly fictional status of Philostratus’ tale. Ben Jonson refashions it for the antimasque of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, but what Philostratus represents as pygmies’ courage, with a hint of respect for their doomed attack on Hercules, Jonson represents as mere pygmy courage. His pygmies are earth-bound cowards who boast that they will avenge the death of their kinsman, Antaeus. The ‘1st Pygmy’, clearly a miles gloriosus, wonders whether they should hurl Hercules ‘gainst the moon, j And break him in small portions’, or ‘[g]ive to Greece j His brain, and every tract of earth a piece’—fantasies that would reduce Hercules to earthy fragments, a version of themselves.29 The mightiness of heroic virtue means that Jonson’s Hercules is invulnerable to the assault of those lacking moral stature; when he awakens and stands, the pygmies fling themselves into holes in the ground, demonstrating their debased character. That Jonson’s masque aims to undermine the equation between military might and heroism (an aim no doubt pleasing to Jonson’s pacifist monarch) is reinforced by a surviving detail of their costumes. The chaplain to the Venetian ambassador, who attended the performance of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue in 1618, reported that the ‘pygmies’ were boys dressed as frogs.30 Like pygmies, frogs are regarded in the early modern period as excrements of the earth—begotten, as Edward Topsell puts it, of the earth’s 28 Philostratus, 228–31. 29 Ben Jonson, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, in D. Lindley (ed.), Court Masques (Oxford, 1995), 120. 30 Ibid., 118 n.

Thomas Browne and John Milton / 111 ‘slime and rotennesse’.31 But the frog costumes may also indicate that Jonson is suggesting a parallel between the pygmies and the straw-wielding frogs who war with mice in the Batrachomyomachia, the mock epic attributed in the Renaissance to Homer. Shakespeare (who perhaps contributes to Jonson’s conception of pygmies) had suggested such a parallel in King Lear: Through tattered clothes small vices do appear; Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it.32

If Browne alludes in his chapter to Shakespearean pygmies, it is not by glancing at this passage but rather by making a facile equation between fairies and pygmies in his reference to ‘the tale of Oberon’ at the chapter’s end (PE 4.11.333).33 It is, in any case, a bare and unelaborated reference, failing, like the rest of the chapter, to mint new meaning from the pygmy lore Browne has inherited from ancient and more recent predecessors. Stating at the outset of Pseudodoxia Epidemica that ‘to purchase a clear and warrantable body of Truth, we must forget and part with much wee know’, Browne identifies his work as participating in the Baconian project. Many chapters of Pseudodoxia Epidemica may rightfully be described as doing so. The chapter on pygmies, however, diminishes the magnitude of that project by excluding the social-political reality within which an inquiry into pygmies has meaning. Bacon’s theory of the idols (of the tribe, cave, market-place, and theatre) memorably articulates his awareness that the construction of knowledge is always, necessarily, interested. Many of Browne’s chapters demonstrate the same awareness, as, for instance, ‘Of the [J]ewes’, which precedes the chapter on pygmies. Here, Browne submits the belief ‘That Jews stinck naturally, that is, that in their race and nation there is an evil savour’, to two sorts of analysis: one that we might call scientific or objective (the 31 Edward Topsell, History of Four-footed Beasts (1608), 718. 32 William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear, in A. Harbage (ed.), William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Baltimore, 1969), iv. 6.161–4. 33 Robbins suggests that Browne is referring, rather, to The Ancient Historie of Huon of Bordeaux or to Michael Drayton’s Nimphidia (Robbins ii. 929–30, n. 333.19). It is true that a very nonShakespearean Oberon and fairies figure in several chapters of Huon’s story. Drayton, however, is clearly drawing on Shakespearean sources for his fairies—not only A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also the Queen Mab passage in Romeo and Juliet and the witches’ chants in Macbeth. Browne, that is, may have been exposed indirectly to Shakespearean fairies.

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difficulty of determining race, for instance, or the effect of diet on bodily odours—although the concepts of race and attitudes towards diet are themselves supremely interested concepts) and one that addresses the relationship between the belief and the self-interest of the believers (PE 4.10.324). In terms of the latter, he remarks with more than a little irony that if Jews could ‘be smelled out, [it] would much advantage, not onely the Church of Christ, but also the coffers of Princes’ (PE 4.10.325). His chief point, however, is that the ground that begat or propagated this assertion [that Jews stink] might be the distastfull aversenesse of the Christian from the Jew, upon the villany of that fact, which made them abominable and stinck in the nostrils of all men; which reall practise, and metaphoricall expression, did after proceed into a literall construction. (PE 4.10.328)

Although Browne concludes by remarking ‘how dangerous it is in sensible things to use metaphoricall expressions unto the people’ (PE 4.10.328), his chapter clearly points to the role of religious prejudice in the origin of the fable. In this sense, believing that Jews stink confirms for those who endorse the fable the ‘sweet savour’ of their Christianity (2 Corinthians 2:15). In contrast, Browne is silent about what might be at stake for those who claim or, more importantly, for those who deny the existence of pygmies. It is in this silence that one can locate the politics of the chapter: in the mid1640s, the problem of a vanquished or marginalized people cannot but be relevant for supporters of the monarchy in the Civil War. To deny the existence of pygmies is to avoid having to deal with the unbearably painful question of what will happen to those who lose the battle for control of their homeland, the question facing royalists by 1646. The nostalgia that haunts Cavalier poetry is one response to the prospect of royalist defeat. Browne’s refusal to reflect on, perhaps even to recognize, the cultural meaning of pygmies is another. His refusal manifests itself in the chapter’s centrifugal mode, for the discussion of pygmies is so constructed that it does not, and cannot, gather its various strands into a clear, argumentative point. Indeed, Browne seems to model the chapter on one of his classical sources, Athenaeus’ The Deipnosophists, a work nostalgically fixated on sustained sociability in the absence of conditions that would permit truly fruitful conversation. Browne refers to, or draws upon, Athenaeus five times in the chapter on pygmies, although in an early chapter of Pseudodoxia Epidemica he classifies Athenaeus with those ancient authors guilty of ‘taking upon trust most they

Thomas Browne and John Milton / 113 have delivered, whose volumes are meer collections, drawne from the mouthes or leaves of other Authours’ (PE 1.6.34). Yet Athenaeus, whose Deipnosophists is part of the platonic tradition of representing symposia, offers a model of fluent urbanity that forever defers a confrontation with a diminished political and social context.34 The social exchange represented in his work pays tribute to a vanished, idealized Athenian past and its Socratic symposia. The point is to keep the conversation going in such a way that it will not have to confront what has been lost. Following Athenaeus’ example, which must resonate for all those who dread Charles’s imminent defeat, Browne avoids seeing that the fate of the pygmies is a bad portent for nations and peoples. Milton would have recognized the refusal to see as a political choice. He would have appreciated, too, the irony of the historiated W—and perhaps did appreciate it. The two writers were almost exact contemporaries, their publishing careers overlapping for more than thirty years. There is no direct evidence that Milton read Pseudodoxia Epidemica or any other works by Browne, nor that Browne read Milton’s poems or prose.35 Neither writer mentions the other, and their circles barely intersect. It is possible, however, that the title of Browne’s book attracted Milton’s attention. The title suggests a kinship with other catalogues of error that Milton was known to have been reading in 1645 and 1646: Thomas Edwards’s Gangræna: or a Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of This Time (1646), and (in all probability) Robert Baillie’s Dissuasive from the Errors of the Time (1645). Milton is named in both heresiographies, and he, in turn, names Edwards and Baillie—or, more accurately, insults Edwards and reduces Baillie to a periphrasis—in ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience’:36

34 Jacob Christian, ‘Athenaeus the Librarian,’ Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, ed. David Braund and John Wilkins (Exeter, 2000), 85. 35 Fifty years ago M. I. Corcoran drew attention to some of Browne’s speculations about Creation in light of Milton’s depiction of Paradise, though she did not go so far as to suggest Brownean influence on Milton (Corcoran, Milton’s Paradise with Reference to the Hexameral Background: A Dissertation (Washington, DC, 1945), 24, 36, 66, 92). The 1711 sale catalogue for the library of Thomas Browne and his son Edward lists several of Milton’s works, but some of these were certainly and others were probably purchased by Edward (A Catalogue of the Libraries of the Learned Sir Thomas Browne, and Dr. Edward Browne, His Son [1711], Jeremiah S. Finch, (Leiden, 1986), (ed.) 46, 52). 36 For Milton’s naming, see Edwards, Gangræna (1646), 34, and Baillie, Dissuasive, 112 [misnumbered 116]. Edwards, in fact, mentions Milton again in Gangræna: The Second Part (1646), 9.

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/ Karen L. Edwards Men whose life, learning, faith and pure intent Would have been held in high esteem with Paul Must now be named and printed heretics By shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d’ye-call:37

The fact that Milton could expect to find himself ‘named and printed heretic’ was, we may assume, a spur for picking up a book whose title promised yet another cataloguing of errors and their proponents. And indeed Milton would have found himself named and printed heretic in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, if by ‘name’ we include the category ‘poets’, and by ‘heretic’, those responsible for ‘advancing’ ‘the vaine and idle fictions of the Gentils’ (PE 1.9.56–7). Milton’s ‘advancement’ of the pygmy fiction consists of one reference in his antiprelatical tract, Animadversions upon the Remonstrant’s Defense (1641), and two in Book One of Paradise Lost. The former occurs in the context of the discussion of Anglican bishops’ ‘blind reverence’ for ancient authorities, which Milton figures as a giant statue, a ‘liveless Colossus, that like a carved Gyant terribly menacing to children, and weaklings lifts up his club, but strikes not, and is subject to the muting of every Sparrow’. To take this statue apart is to ‘marre him’, observes Milton, in that he is a historical agglomeration and cannot be put back together again. But ‘if you thinke like Pigmees to turne and wind him whole as hee is, besides your vaine toile and sweat, he may chance to fall upon your owne heads’.38 Thus glancing at Juvenal and Philostratus (whose pygmies appear in contexts in which assessments of self are out of proportion with reality), Milton implies that when they attribute godlike stature to anything other than God, human beings diminish their conception of themselves.39 The object of Milton’s mocking anger is the distance between ordinary human capacity and the requirements of religion 37 ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience’, in J. Carey (ed.), John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, 2nd edn. (Harlow, 1997), 299. Baillie is now the generally accepted candidate for Milton’s ‘Scotch What-d’ye-call’, although Honigmann observes that earlier commentators preferred George Gillespie, author of Wholesome Severity Reconciled with Christian Liberty (1645), another catalogue of errors (E.A.J. Honigmann, Milton’s Sonnets (London and New York, 1966), 201). Gillespie does not name Milton, but Milton names him in Sonnet 11, turning ‘Gillespie’ to ‘Galasp’ and rhyming it with ‘gasp’ and ‘asp’ (Complete Shorter Poems, 308). 38 Animadversions upon the Remonstrant’s Defense, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven, 1953–82), i. 698–700. 39 Given Milton’s evident association here of pygmies with spiritual disproportion, it is perhaps interesting to note that the anonymous author of an early life of Milton claimed that the poet ‘was of a moderate Stature, and well proportion’d’ (in Helen Darbishire (ed.), The

Thomas Browne and John Milton / 115 assumed by the bishops when they claim that ancient tomes of theological dispute hold the key to Christian doctrine. On the contrary, argues Milton, the Scriptures left to us by God provide ‘the just and adequate measure of truth, fitted, and proportion’d to the diligent study, memory, and use of every faithfull man’.40 In the sense that they reflect on pygmies as cultural products, the two representations of pygmies in Paradise Lost may be thought of as analytical. The second, slightly longer, representation occurs at the end of Book One, when pygmies are invoked in a simile that describes the shrinking of the fallen angels so that they can crowd into Pandaemonium. Behold a wonder! they but now who seemed In bigness to surpass Earth’s giant sons Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless, like that pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount, or faerie elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest side Or fountain some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth Wheels her pale course, they on their mirth and dance Intent, with jocund music charm his ear; At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds. Thus incorporeal spirits to smallest forms Reduced their shapes immense, and were at large, Though without number still amidst the hall Of that infernal court. (PL 1.777–92)

The dizzying metamorphosis—from ‘bigness to surpass Earth’s giant sons’ to ‘less than smallest dwarfs’—is a ‘wonder’ that in fact changes nothing. In the first place, the measure of moral stature used by Jonson in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue has been adapted here to the elasticity of the fallen angels, so pygmies and giants are spiritual equivalents. In the second place, there is nothing here Early Lives of Milton (London, 1932), 32. Milton defends his stature in the Second Defence: ‘I admit that I am not tall, but my stature is closer to the medium than to the small. Yet what if it were small, as is the case with so many men of the greatest worth in both peace and war? (Although why is that stature called small which is great enough for virtue?)’ (Milton, Complete Prose Works, Don M. Wolfe (ed.) iv. 583). 40 All quotations from Paradise Lost are from John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. A. Fowler, 2nd edn. (London and New York, 1998).

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to be changed: the passage calls witty attention to the fictional construction of the bodily forms of the beings it represents. The ‘numberless’ thronging of fiends, pygmies, and faerie elves means that there are too many to count and that there are none to count, a point reiterated in ‘without number’. These are beings with meaning but not literal existence; their representation recedes in the lines above from the gross tangibility implied by ‘giants’ to the intangible emotions of a human heart. Thus the passage ends by reflecting on the imagination’s joyous and fearful construction of human-like forms—forms which the imagination then contemplates with joy and fear. The dangerous circularity of the process (for it is akin to idolatry) is emphasized by the threatening moon wheeling overhead in her orbit, the ‘charming’ fairy round, and the rebounding emotions of the belated peasant. What Thomas Browne offers piecemeal in the chapter on pygmies is in this passage of Paradise Lost organized into a coherent commentary on the history of our unresolved reactions to those bodies in which the human form is both recognizable and different. The first reference to pygmies in the poem attends more specifically to the classical material inherited by the seventeenth century. Organized and shaped, this material makes sense of pygmies as carriers of meaning. The reference appears as Satan reviews his troops, reassembled and standing ‘in guise j Of warriors old with ordered spear and shield’, after having marched in silence (like Homer’s Achaeans) across Hell’s scorched soil ‘to the Dorian mood j Of flutes and soft recorders’ (PL 1.564–5, 550–1). Satan’s heart distends with pride to see them: for never since created man, Met such embodied force, as named with these Could merit more than that small infantry Warred on by cranes: though all the Giant brood Of Phlegra with the heroic race were joined That fought at Thebes and Illium, on each side Mixed with auxiliar gods; and what resounds In fable or romance of Uther’s son Begirt with British and Armoric knights; And all who since, baptized or infidel Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore

Thomas Browne and John Milton / 117 When Charlemain with all his peerage fell By Fontarrabia. (PL 1.573–87)

Addison famously suspected a pun on infantry, a possibility that ought to be regarded as a certainty. Not only does the pun establish the tongue-in-cheek tone of the passage; by drawing attention to the identity of the small infantry, it jolts us into recognizing that the entire passage is conditioned by the notion of the pygmaean.41 The concept of heroic virtue peddled by the romantic tales evoked here is a severely diminished one; the warriorly knights whose deaths they glorify are truly lost and vanished in being but illusory embodiments of the heroic.42 (The very name ‘pygmy’ is lost.) Here, cranes (praised by classical and Renaissance writers alike for their military formations and wondered at for their mysterious disappearance each year) are fully the equal of pygmies, Trojans and Greeks, and Arthurian knights. In this sense, Charlemagne did fall ‘By Fontarrabia’, his heroic stature shattered. So, too, fell a latter-day Charlemagne, as Alastair Fowler has suggested: in 1659 at Fuenterrabia Charles II unsuccessfully sought aid from the French and Spanish.43 The fictiveness of pygmies is, for Milton, not the end but the starting-point for demonstrating that their meaning is enmeshed in history. Browne’s dictum, that ‘to purchase a clear and warrantable body of Truth, we must forget and part with much wee know’, is one that Milton would repudiate. But Browne himself is more complicated in his treatment of the ‘vaine and idle fictions of the Gentils’ than ‘forget’ would suggest. Suppressing and forgetting are not equivalent: the pygmy chapter is characterized by what appears to be a systematic suppression of the classical sources to which Browne is usually so scrupulously attentive. But like all knowledge that is suppressed, the meaning of pygmies ‘will out’—emerging, one is tempted to conclude, in the woodcut that graces the first page of the 1646 edition. 41 Alastair Fowler’s note at PL 1.575—‘M[ilton] dismisses only to mention armies previously thought heroic; evoking the ‘‘matter of Rome’’, the ‘‘matter of Britain’’, the ‘‘matter of France’’, and other pygmy arguments’—makes the same point: pygmy encapsulates Milton’s attitude towards warriorly heroism. 42 Barbara Everett has suggested that the passage is tender as well as ironic, a possibility that seems unlikely. Tenderness implies the presence of nostalgia, for which I find no evidence. Indeed, what is ironically presented here is condemned in sober seriousness in Book Nine: that inditing wars and dissecting ‘fabled knights j In battles feigned’ has hitherto been mistaken for the only ‘subject for heroic song’ (PL 9.31, 25). See Everett, ‘The End of the Big Names: Milton’s Epic Catalogues’, in J. Carey (ed.), English Renaissance Studies (Oxford, 1980), 260. 43 PL 1.586–7, n.

6 ‘Wonders of the Invisible World’: The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches Victoria Silver

Lastly, wee are not Magisteriall in opinions, nor have wee Dictator-like obtruded our conceptions, but in the humility of Enquiries or disquisitions, have only proposed them unto more ocular discerners. And therefore opinions are free, and open it is for any to think or declare the contrary. And wee shall so farre encourage contradiction, as to promise no disturbance, or reoppose any Penne, that shall Fallaciously or captiously refute us, that shall onely lay hold of our lapses, single out digressions, Corollaries, or ornamentall conceptions to evidence his own in as indifferent truths.

‘To the Reader’, Pseudodoxia Epidemica

To return once again to the issue of Sir Thomas Browne and witchcraft is a testament to our disbelief, beginning with Religio Medici (1643) and its extended credo to the invisible world of spirits, where Browne wonders ‘how so many learned heads should so farre forget their Metaphysicks, and destroy the Ladder and scale of creatures, as to question the existence of Spirits: for my [owne] part, I have ever beleeved, and doe now know, that

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 119 there are Witches; they that doubt of these, doe not onely deny them, but Spirits; and are obliquely and upon consequence a sort, not of Infidels, but Atheists’ (RM 1.30). My purpose here is to extenuate in the equitable sense for that opinion and its consequences, in so far as equity, in the words of Christopher St Germain’s Doctor and Student (1538), ‘considereth all the particular circumstances of the deed, the which also is tempered with the sweetnes of mercy’.1 For the long-discarded notions that delight and bemuse us on Religio’s pages, quaint echoes of a world we have lost to all but imagination, provoke our appalled incredulity when Browne puts them into practice in 1662. It was in March of that year, at Bury St Edmunds during the Lent session of the Norfolk Assizes, that Rose Cullender and Amy Duny (or ‘Denny’) of Lowestoft township, Suffolk, were tried on fourteen counts of witchcraft under the residual statute 1 James 1.12 (‘An Acte against Conjuration Witchcrafte and dealinge with evil and wicked Spirits’2), convicted of twelve,3 and afterwards hanged, having ‘confessed nothing’.4 Neither apparently did Browne, whose surviving papers make no mention of the trial, much less the infamous role he played as an expert witness, observing and diagnosing the spectacular afflictions of three of the five Lowestoft girls, ranging in age from 9 to 18, who had accused Duny and Cullender of bewitching them. The larger world only became acquainted with this circumstance some twenty years later, through the publication of an anonymous pamphlet, A Tryal of Witches (1682), whose purportedly first-hand account of the proceedings is advertised by its publisher as the ‘most perfect narrative of any thing of this nature hitherto extant’.5 Besides Browne, among the ‘divers known persons’ mentioned as attending the trial6 were the presiding judge, the eminent jurist Sir Matthew 1 By way of conveying the dialogue’s continuing influence, St Germain is quoted here from Edward Hake, Epieikeia (c.1603), ed. D. C. E. Yale (New Haven, 1953), 8. See also St. German’s Doctor and Student, ed. T. F. T. Plucknett and J. L. Barton (London, 1974), 95. 2 C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials: The Indictments for Witchcraft from the Records of 1373 Assizes held for the Home Circuit A.D. 1559–1736 (New York, 1929), 19. 3 Gilbert Geis and Ivan Bunn, A Trial of Witches: A Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Prosecution (London, 1997), 38–9. This essay is in close argument with Geis and Bunn’s well-nigh exhaustive account of the trial, which while most useful, engages not only in Browne-bashing but the species of categorical judgment I associate below with ‘magical thinking’. 4 T. B. Howell (ed.), A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, 34 vols. (London, 1816–26), vi. 702. 5 Ibid., vi. 687. 6 Ibid., vi. 697.

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Hale, then Lord Baron of the Exchequer;7 another future chief justice, Sir John Keeling (or ‘Kelynge’),8 and two other sergeants-at-law newly appointed at the Restoration, attending Hale in the absence of a second Westminster judge; Lord Charles Cornwallis, Baron of Eye, Member of Parliament and magistrate from Suffolk;9 and Sir Edmund Bacon, baronet of that distinguished family, Member of Parliament, and the justice of the peace who issued the warrant for the two women.10 As it had always been in a world that William Holdsworth describes as perpetually on the brink of social breakdown, where the rule of law was hardly pervasive and in some places functionally unknown, a belief in the value of ‘order’ and ‘authority’ was shared by all ranks,11 leading to the reinstitution of monarchy in 1660 after two decades of institutional flux in church and state, and a recurrent civil war whose human costs included 190,000 dead, not to mention the maimed and incapacitated who inevitably flooded the parish rolls, precipitously expanding the nation’s indigent population.12 This was in addition to the daily experience of suffering at every level of early modern society, a condition with which Keith Thomas opens his classic study of magic in the period, and not a little germane to the subject, given that the crime of witchcraft—maleficium or ‘doing harm’—presupposes the misfortune or injury of the accuser.13 All these factors had a hand in fomenting the last great English witchcraft panic that occurred directly after the first civil war, instigated in Essex by Matthew Hopkins, the self-declared ‘Witch Finder General’, and spreading to the surrounding counties including Suffolk,14 where Amy Duny’s family would appear to have been swept up in the prosecutions.15 Nor is it merely coincidental that the 1662 Norfolk Assizes succeeded preparations for the treason trials of the regicides. For the deep and justifiable anxieties of the political classes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, 7 William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 9 vols. (Boston, 1927), vi. 577; Alan Cromartie, Sir Matthew Hale 1609–1676: Law, Religion and Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, 1995), 4–5; Geis and Bunn, 4–5. 8 Holdsworth, vi. 501, 560; Geis and Bunn, 78–82. 9 Geis and Bunn, 86–7. 10 Ibid., 21–5. 11 Holdsworth, v. 196. 12 James Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History 1550–1700, 2nd edn. (London, 1997), 21. 13 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), 6–9. 14 James Sharpe (1997), 21. 15 Howell, vi. 689.

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 121 from local justices and Members of Parliament to assizes judges and the Privy Council, would seem to have found in witchcraft belief the daylight vehicle for their night terrors of subversion and invasion. These classes, represented by the gentlemen attending the trial of the Lowestoft witches, were responsible for the Tudor and Stuart witchcraft statutes, whose ideas about that impossible crime were formed both by the popular tradition of maleficium with its cursings, animal familiars, and witches’ ‘teats’, and by the extravagant demonologies and juridical formalism of the Continent,16 thought to have been imported with the Marian exiles on their return at Elizabeth’s accession.17 They were therefore inclined to view witchcraft and sortilegium or sorcery in the European, not just the native English, fashion: that is, as a grand heretical conspiracy to subvert all decent order by those who, in an act of le`se majeste´ against God and monarch, compacted with the devil to promote universal misrule. Despite the politically insignificant character of those most frequently accused of such crimes—‘unowned’ or contumacious women past middle age like the widows Duny and Cullender, usually illiterate and impoverished, for whom the real ordeal often lay in reciting the Lord’s Prayer from beginning to end18—witchcraft and conjuration, especially judicial astrology, were treated as a real and proliferating danger to the nation in the somewhat hysterical preamble to the first Elizabethan statute (1563), and made tantamount to sedition and rebellion in 23 Elizabeth 2 (1581) and 27 Elizabeth 1 (1584–5), alongside subversion by Roman Catholic infiltrators and fifth columnists among the recusant population, with whose religion they were inevitably associated in the fervent Protestant mind.19 To quote Edward Coke in the Third Part of his Institutes (1648): ‘the Holy Ghost hath compared the great offence of rebellion to the sinne of witchcrafte’, where he goes on to remark ‘that it had been a great defect in government, if so great an abomination had passed with impunity’.20 In this case, government had 16 The authority here is, of course, Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), which does include abundant examples from English witchcraft lore, literature, and intellectual culture more largely. For juridical practice on the Continent, especially the inquisitorial procedure of the criminal law as compared with its English counterpart, see Holdsworth, v. 170–93; in the matter of evidence, see James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal (Baltimore, 2001), 12–63. 17 Sharpe (1997), 315–23. 18 James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, 1996), 222–3, 230–1. 19 The Statutes of the Realm ([London], 1819), Vol. 4, Part 1, 445–7, 659–60, 704–8. 20 Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (1817; repr. Clark, NJ, 2001), 44.

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clearly done its duty, if we can credit the testimony of Samuel Pacy, the Lowestoft merchant who laid the original information against the women, and whose two daughters were most insistent in accusing them: [The girls’] fits were various, sometimes, they would be lame on one side of their bodies, sometimes on the other; sometimes a soreness over their whole bodies, so as they could endure none to touch them: at other times they would be restored to the perfect use of their limbs, and be deprived of their hearing; at other times of their sight, at other times of their speech; sometimes by the space of one day, sometimes for two; and once they were wholly deprived of their speech for eight days together and then restored to their speech again. At other times they would fall into swoonings, and upon the recovery to their speech they would cough extremely, and bring up much phlegm, and with the same crooked pins, and one time a twopenny nail with a very broad head, which pins (amounting to forty or more) together with the two-penny nail, were produced in court, with the affirmation of the said deponent, that he was present when the said nail was vomited up, and also most of the pins. Commonly at the end of every fit they would cast up a pin, and sometimes they would have four or five fits in one day.21

Unfortunately, the Pacy sisters did not end their demonstrations there: ‘In their fits they would cry out, There stands Amy Duny, or Rose Cullender, and sometimes in one place and sometimes in another, running with great violence to the place where they fancied them to stand, striking at them as if they were present; they would appear to them sometimes spinning, sometimes reeling, or in other postures, deriding or threatening them’.22 In keeping with the peculiarities of English witchcraft lore, a spectral deluge of animal familiars (‘imps’) accompanied these afflictions—invisible mice and a duck who exploded with a ‘flashing of gunpowder’ when consigned to the flames;23 flies and a bee whose demonic task it was to insert those crooked pins and the nail into the sisters, leading them to complain in heroic style against Cullender and Duny: ‘Why do not you come yourselves, but send your imps to torment us?’24 The trial entailed more of the same, as the court sought to distinguish between actual and assumed bewitchment by having the accused and others touch one or more of the three girls in attendance, all of whom, before the bills of indictment could be drawn up, ‘fell into strange and violent fits, shrieking 21 Howell, vi. 692. 23 Ibid., vi. 694.

22 Ibid., vi. 692. 24 Ibid., vi. 694.

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 123 out in a most sad manner, so that they could not in any wise give any instructions in the court who were the cause of their distemper’.25 Although the afflicted eventually ceased their violence, ‘yet they were everyone struck dumb, so that none of them could speak neither at that time, nor during the assizes until the conviction of the supposed witches’.26 Whether from some sudden moral scruple or metaphysical fear, this expedient silence put the onus of accusation on their elders, who at such a late stage in the proceedings had no choice but to fulfill the girls’ all but express intent. The outcome of the ‘touching’ experiments, which supposedly broke whatever spell the witch had cast, came similarly pat: ‘it was observed that, when they were in the midst of their fits, to all men’s apprehension wholly deprived of all sense and understanding, closing their fists in such a manner, as that the strongest man in the Court could not force them open; yet by the least touch of one of these supposed witches, Rose Cullender by name, they would suddenly shriek out opening their hands, which accident would not happen by the touch of any other person’.27 When their aprons were used to blind the girls, the outcome was the same.28 So instead of Cullender, Hale had Duny covertly touch the eldest Pacy girl, ‘whereupon the child without so much as seeing her, for her eyes were closed all the while, suddenly leaped up, and catched Amy Duny by the hand, and afterwards by the face; and with her nails scratched her till the blood came, and would by no means leave her till she was taken from her, and afterwards the child would still be pressing towards her, and making signs of anger conceived against her’.29 ‘Scratching’ or ‘blooding’ was a counter-magical remedy against witchcraft, along with ‘swimming’ a suspect bound thumb to opposed toe, whose drowning posthumously signified innocence; ‘pricking’ with a needle or other sharp object the suspect’s naked body for the supposedly insensible ‘devil’s mark’; the physical deprivation and psychological extremity of ‘watching’ or ‘waking,’ where the naked suspect was bound cross-legged and kept conscious for several days or until the notional familiar arrived on the scene (the specialty of Hopkins, along with ‘walking’ by relays); and, of course, beatings and other physical abuse—practices banned as torture by the Privy Council in 1662.30 That the girls knew such lore was undeniable 25 Howell, vi. 688. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., vi. 697. 28 Ibid., vi. 698. 29 Ibid., vi. 690. 30 Ewen (1929), 60–71, esp. 63, gives a detailed account of these countermeasures, which sometimes served as legal proof. See also Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (1970; repr. Prospect Heights, IL, 1991), 103–13; and Sharpe ((1996) 1–4, 159–62).

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since the depositions prove their parents lived and breathed it, reproducing with uncanny accuracy the very model of an early modern witch in Duny and Cullender,31 while the afflicted themselves exhibited every conventional symptom of bewitchment.32 But if Elizabeth Pacy’s display much impressed the pamphlet’s author, for whom it was a very observable instance of witchcraft, not everyone in the courtroom was convinced by the children’s spectral sightings that Duny and Cullender were the specific agents of their sufferings, or indeed that the afflictions themselves were not pretence. After the witnesses had finished their testimony against the two women, the pamphlet reports that Sergeant Keeling ‘seemed much unsatisfied with it, and thought it not sufficient to convict the prisoners; for admitting that the children were in truth bewitched, yet said he, it can never be applied to the prisoners, upon the imagination only of the parties afflicted; for if that might be allowed, no person whatsoever can be in safety, for perhaps they might fancy another person, who might altogether be innocent in such matters’.33 Inasmuch as the specters of Cullender, Duny, and their familiars were invisible to all but the afflicted, their claims were, of course, incapable of direct substantiation,34 and like all the proofs put forward, depended for their plausibility on belief in a spiritual reality whose two poles are God and the devil; in the existence of witches and in the claim that Scripture expressly abominates them (an inference drawn from unrelated passages in Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Exodus, and 1 Samuel, the sense of whose original language was much debated in the witchcraft literature35); and in the capacity of the law to prove maleficium, although the act itself was secret and concealed from ordinary view, not least by the invisibility or metamorphosis of the witch’s demonic agents. 31 Ewen’s introduction to Witchcraft and Demonism (1933), 21–141, is at once witty and detailed in its scholarship, while Thomas’s chapters on witchcraft remain magisterial for the English prosecutions (435–583), along with Macfarlane, and James Sharpe (1996), esp. 58–69. 32 Ewen (1933), 92–8. 33 Howell, vi. 697. 34 In historical analyses of witchcraft, the subject of ‘spectral evidence’—a seventeenthcentury innovation—seems to be peculiarly the preserve of the Salem witchcraft panic, although Cotton Mather cites the Bury St Edmund’s trial, buoyed by Hale’s reputation, as a precedent for the Salem judges and includes a paraphrase of the pamphlet’s account in his Wonders of the Invisible World (1692; repr., New York, n.d.), 92–8. 35 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (Carbondale, IL, 1964), 129 ff., seems to have inaugurated the exegetical controversy in England.

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 125 These notions were likely entertained as an article of faith by everyone in the room, including Keeling (who does not appear to have repudiated the jury’s verdict or Hale’s judgment). What he disputes is the claim that the Lowestoft girls see real spiritual entities as against the ‘spectres’ of ‘imagination’ and ‘fancy’, nor was he alone in resisting that construction: ‘There was an ingenious person that objected, there might be a great fallacy in this experiment [of touching], and there ought not to be any stress put upon this to convict the parties, for the children might counterfeit their distemper, and perceiving what was done to them, they might in such manner suddenly alter the motion and gesture of their bodies, on purpose to induce persons to believe that they were not natural, but wrought strangely by the touch of the prisoners’.36 In a variation devised finally to get at the truth, Hale asked Cornwallis, Bacon, Keeling, ‘and some other gentlemen there in court’ to take Elizabeth Pacy ‘whilst she was in her fits’ into another part of the room, where they covered her eyes with an apron. At that point, Amy Duny was brought to her, but the hand that touched the girl belonged to a person unassociated with the case, ‘which produced the same effect as the touch of the witch did in court. Whereupon, the gentlemen returned, openly protesting, that they did believe the whole transaction of this business was a mere imposture’.37 But Samuel Pacy apparently reconciled them to the event by suggesting ‘That possibly the maid might be deceived by a suspicion that the witch touched her when she did not’, attesting that even in their fits, ‘their understandings were perfect’—a claim also conventional in such cases.38 Or, as the anonymous author puts the point, when the girls ‘apprehend or understand by any means, that the persons who have done them this wrong are near, or touch them; then their spirits being more than ordinarily moved with rage and anger at them being present, they do use more violent gestures of their bodies, and extend forth their hands, as desirous to lay hold upon them; which at other times not having the same occasion, the instance there falls not out of the same’.39 On this occasion, in other words, the behavior that 36 Howell, vi. 698. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. See, e.g., the 1603 accounts of Mary Glover’s afflictions by Edward Jorden, John Swan and Stephen Bradwell, collected in Michael MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (London, 1991). 39 Howell, vi. 698–9.

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had previously been assigned a magical cause was now ascribed to an error of understanding. As is usual in law, the difference—otherwise indistinguishable—between a magical fit and a rational one came down to the question of intent: according to that venerable legal authority, Bracton, ‘It is will and purpose which mark maleficia’, which is to say legal offenses generally; and that is why ‘In crimes, the intention is regarded, not the result’.40 And intention is constructed by inference from the known circumstances attending any offense: it is a legal conjecture whose parameters depend not only upon the contents of law, but upon the stated and unstated assumptions of the culture that devises law, which constitute the grounds of legal possibility. At the end of this evidentiary phase of the trial, Duny and Cullender were formally asked, whether they had anything to say for themselves, to which they reportedly replied, ‘nothing material to any thing that was proved against them’—language neither woman was likely to have used, and which should caution us against an implicit faith in the pamphlet’s account.41 Perhaps out of deference to Keeling’s objection, Hale then gave a brief yet correct direction to the jury, without summing up the evidence for them, ‘lest by doing so he should wrong the evidence on the one side or the other. Only this acquainted them, that they had two things to enquire after. First, Whether or no these children were bewitched? Secondly, Whether the prisoners at the bar were guilty of it?’ That there were such creatures as witches he made no doubt at all; For first, the scriptures had affirmed so much. Secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime. And such hath been the judgment of this kingdom, as appears by that act of parliament which hath provided punishments proportionable to the quality of the offence. And desired them, strictly to observe their evidence; and desired the great God of heaven to direct their hearts in this weighty thing they had in hand: For to condemn the innocent, and to let the guilty go free, were both an abomination to the Lord.42

The jury took half an hour to deliberate before delivering its verdict; the five ‘bewitched’ girls took half an hour to be relieved of their identical symptoms; the next morning, their parents promptly presented them to 40 George E. Woodbine (ed.) and Samuel Thorne (trans.), Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1968), ii. 384. 41 Howell, vi. 700. 42 Ibid.

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 127 Hale at his lodgings, and then to the whole court where the girls ‘affirmed in the face of the country, and before the witches themselves, what before hath been deposed by their friends and relations; the prisoners not much contradicting them’.43 Once again, the relative silence of the two women was presumed by the pamphlet’s author to signify their relative assent, and with the belated testimony of the erstwhile bewitched, ‘the judge and all the court were fully satisfied with the verdict, and thereupon gave judgment against the witches that they should be hanged’.44 For the death of a neighbor’s child in the case some six years earlier, which appears to have set the pattern for the girl’s bewitchment (including the immolation of familiars with ‘a flashing in the fire like gunpowder’45), automatically rendered the sentence capital under the terms of the Jacobean statute. The very dispatch with which each event succeeded the other seems to have confirmed in the minds of those present the justice of the proceedings; and to complete the happy spectacle, Cullender and Duny ‘were much urged to confess’.46 But here, for the first and last time, they refused to oblige the court; and since no one appears to have suspected further intrigues from the defendants than the diabolical one of which they stood convicted, confession could have served no evidentiary purpose, except to disguise the more than ordinarily conjectural, literally specious and therefore uncertain grounds on which conviction in any witchcraft case was justified—the forensic difficulty whose troubling recognition increased in proportion to the number of witchcraft trials.47 It is a fact discussed in English witchcraft literature from the late-sixteenth century onwards that the notional evidence of the crime was susceptible of completely different, even opposed, constructions,48 an issue perhaps raised by revulsion against the great wave of witchcraft trials that took place in the 1580s and 1590s, prosecutions coinciding with a period of

43 Howell, vi. 702. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., vi. 689. 46 Ibid., vi. 702. 47 See James Sharpe (1996), 220–3; and Macfarlane, 16–18. 48 See, e.g., George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (1593; rpr. London, 1931), K-L4; John Cotta, The Triall of Witch-Craft (1616; rpr. 1968), 114–28; Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand-Jury Men (1627), 198–201; and Robert Filmer, An Advertisement to the Jury-Men of England, Touching Witches (1653), 9–15, who attacks the exegetical grounds adduced by William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608; Cambridge, 1618), 642–5, as well as his criteria for discovering a witch, which were probably derived from Bodin, On the Demon-Mania of Witches, trans. Randy A. Scott (Toronto, 1995), 198–202.

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real political and economic jeopardy.49 In the course of the seventeenth century, this recognition was joined by another, namely, that the legal usage licensed in such cases by the prosecution’s notional defense against the dark arts, and justified by so considerable an authority as Bodin’s De la Demonomanie des sorciers (1580),50 was disallowed when trying every other criminal offense on the books, with the sole and significant exception of treason.51 The growing sense that their native law had itself become a source of injustice more likely contributed to the ‘mysterious’ decline in prosecutions than a sudden scepticism about witchcraft or spiritual apparitions,52 whose existence continued to be upheld in the last half of the seventeenth century by such luminaries of the Royal Society as Robert Boyle, Joseph Glanvill, and Henry 49 By all accounts, the last two decades of the sixteenth century saw the height of witchcraft prosecutions in England, which, given that such accusations at both the elite and popular level were largely driven by fear—fear engendered by actual or anticipated suffering—is hardly surprising. If popular accusation remained constant throughout the period of the persecution, the willingness of the political classes to legitimate such charges varied. Thomas cautions against drawing any direct correlations between historical events or conditions and the intensity of prosecutions (583); but the 1580s statutes strongly suggest such a correlation: see James Sharpe (1996), 91. For estimates of witchcraft indictments, prosecutions, and executions see Ewen (1929), 111–13; Thomas, 449–53; Macfarlane, 23–63; and James Sharpe (1996), 108–27. 50 ‘Now the trial of so despicable a crime as this must be handled in an extraordinary way and differently from other crimes. He who would like to keep legal tidiness and normal procedures would pervert all divine and human law’ (Bodin, 200). 51 The accused in both witchcraft and treason trials were disallowed counsel to conduct the defense, and testimony as to character was not given under oath. But the real scandal of course lay in evidentiary matters where, as Macfarlane observes, ‘no class of person was debarred’ from witnessing against the defendant: ‘Not only was the accused person’s spouse allowed to witness, contrary to normal rules, but children, also, were permitted to give evidence against their parents, clearly an unusual proceeding’ (17). See Gregory Durston on oral testimony, Witchcraft and Witch Trials (Chichester, 2000), 405–17. 52 It is in this context that we should understand Browne’s remark in his commonplace book, where he adopts the ambivalent position of writers like Gifford, Cotta, and Bernard: ‘Wee are no way doubtfull that there are wiches, butt have not been alwayes satisfied in the application of their wichcrafts or whether the parties accused or suffering have been guiltie of that abomination, or persons under such affliction suffered from such hands. In ancient time we reade of many possessed & probably there are many still, butt the common crye & generall opinion of wiches hath confounded that of possession, men salving such strange effects from veneficial agents & out of the partie suffering. Many strange things have been done beyond the salvo of human reason wch might proceed as well from possession as venefication.’ (NCB 293) Veneficium or ‘poisoning’ became a synonym for witchcraft for a number of reasons: because its occurrence was largely undetectable without witnessing the act itself, as were bewitchment and demonic possession; and because poisoning, like witchcraft, was generally associated with political conspiracy, assassination, and therefore treason.

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 129 More. As Charles Webster observes: ‘We must look in other places than science for the explanation of these changes’.53 However, a comparable recognition has yet to be made in Browne studies: with his reported testimony the warrant for such criticism, our assessments of his work have tended to vacillate between condescension towards his credulity on the one hand, and, on the other, outrage at what we choose to see as the culpable complacency of his judgment, especially in Religio and Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646). But we are too easy on ourselves and too hard on Browne, not least because we still entertain the habits of thought for which we condemn him—most notably, the mentality we currently like to apostrophize as ‘magical thinking’. Indeed, the issue is less about what beliefs Browne holds than about how he holds them; for in the end I would argue he holds his more discriminately and with greater scepticism than we do our own. As it happens, Sir Kenelm Digby, in his Observations (1643) on Religio, best captures this magical or occult mentality for my purposes, even as he is the first publicly to take issue with Browne’s claim to ‘now know, that there are witches’: I acknowledge ingenuously our physician’s experience hath the advantage of my philosophy, in knowing there are witches. Yet I am sure I have no temptation to doubt the Deity; nor have any unsatisfaction in believing there are spirits. I do not see such a necessary conjunction between them, as that the supposition of the one must needs infer the other. Neither do I deny there are witches; I only reserve my assent till I meet with stronger motives to carry it.54

In thus denying what he describes as a false necessity in Browne’s logic—‘a necessary conjunction’ between belief in witches and belief in spirits, ‘as that the supposition of the one must needs infer the other’—Digby refutes the conceptual move typical of occultism, which in the perpetually apt phrase of the anthropologist E. B. Tylor, consists in ‘mistaking an ideal for a real connexion’.55 According to Tylor, this confusion has its basis in ‘the Association of Ideas, a faculty which lies at the very foundation of human reason, 53 From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (1982; rpr. Mineola, NY, 2005), 100; Webster is responding here to the claims of Francis Hutchinson’s Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), that the rise of science brought about the decline in prosecutions, on which Geis and Bunn tacitly build their argument for the untoward credulity of Browne and Hale. See also James Sharpe (1996), 262–75; and Clark (1997), 294–311. 54 Religio Medici, with the ‘Observations’ of Sir Kenelm Digby (London, 1899), 155. 55 Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, 2 vols. (Boston, 1874), i. 115.

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but in no small degree of human unreason also’: for ‘having come to associate in thought those things which [it] found by experience to be connected in fact’, humanity ‘proceeded erroneously to invert this action, and to conclude that association in thought must involve similar connexion in reality’.56 Digby charges Browne with a comparable propensity in promoting, however occasionally, the idea of ‘this visible world’s being but a picture or shadow of the invisible and intellectual: which manner of philosophising he attributeth to Hermes Trismegistus but is everywhere to be met with in Plato, and is raised since to a greater height in the Christian schools’.57 Here as well, humanity is said to confound mental experience with the objective operation of things—to treat mental categories and relations as if their properties had an exact reflex in res naturae. But unlike hermeticism, platonism, or the scholastic realism (‘the Christian schools’) whose hypostasizing logic had so thoroughly predicated and systematized the metaphysical as to render the existence of witches not only possible but necessary, Digby argues that ‘the notions of matter, form, act, power, existence, and the like’ are ‘nowhere by themselves in nature’58: They are terms which we must use in the negotiations of our thought, if we will discourse consequently, and conclude knowingly. But then again, we must be very wary of attributing to things in their own natures such entities as we create in our understandings, when we made pictures of them there. . . . In a word, all these words are but artificial terms, not real things; and the not right understanding of them is the most dangerous rock that scholars suffer shipwreck against.59

For Digby, the human mind fragments the individual unity of res naturae into a plethora of conceptual pictures or ‘notions’, rendering the integral structure of any one thing as kaleidescopic as our perceptions, while it obliviously assigns those notions ‘a real existence in nature’, as mathematicians do who ‘allow the like to a point, a line, or a superficies in figures’.60 In sum, he contends not only that Browne promotes a false necessity when he conjoins 56 Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, 2 vols. (Boston, 1874), i. 15–16. 57 Digby (1899), 149. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 149–50. 60 Ibid., 149. On this head, see also James Wise, Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Religio Medici’ and Two SeventeenthCentury Critics (Columbia, MO, 1973), 93–6; John Yolton, ‘Locke and the Seventeenth-Century Logic of Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 16 (1955), 433–4; and Digby (1644), Two Treatises [Of Bodies and of Man’s Soul to Discover the Immortality of Reasonable Souls] (1669), 1–7.

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 131 a belief in witches to a belief in spiritual existences but also that such a move has its origin in the platonizing fallacy that mistakes an ideal for a real connection in the hermetical manner, and which constitutes the modus operandi not only of magical thinking but symbolism more largely, however rationalized or indeed rationalist. As Wittgenstein suggests in several remarks he struck from his manuscript on Frazer’s Golden Bough, metaphysics— specifically, the analytic logic of his own Tractatus—functions like magic in its motives as well as its inevitably symbolical idiom: ‘For when I began in my earlier book to talk about the ‘‘world’’ (and not about this tree or table), was I trying to do anything except conjure up something of a higher order by my words?’61 Indeed, he describes that professed atheist and public rationalist, Bertrand Russell, as practising a kind of ‘mathematical alchemy’ like that which Digby dismisses, exploring a spirit world of mathematical invisibilia, whose nature and operations the activity of logic makes manifest through its propositions62—inferences which, unlike our ordinary statements, follow necessarily, inexorably, magically one upon the other because they describe the unseen yet essential structure of reality.63 In this ruthlessly self-conscious query and in the Philosophical Investigations as a whole, Wittgenstein exposes the egoism that perpetuates modern versions of magical thinking, disguising their failure to account for more than psychological or aesthetic phenomena even as he anatomizes the epic delusion of metaphysics which, like Digby (and Hobbes), he argues is ‘conjured up’ by the conceptual pictures with which we associate any meaning, thus creating for our ideas the impression of ‘a distinct being by itself’. Yet if various rationalisms or idealisms share magic’s propensity to self-aggrandisement as well as its rage for symbologies, they lack its immediate and cathartic power to satisfy the human need to articulate our sensate and impassioned apprehensions of the unknown, a capacity Wittgenstein explicitly acknowledges—while condemning Frazer for an obtuse scientism. A contemporary of Wittgenstein’s, Johan Huizinga, displays a similar sympathy in The Autumn of the Middle Ages, where he also tries to capture the conceptual habitus of symbology that arguably inaugurated three centuries of witchcraft prosecutions in Europe, 61 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, trans. A. C. Miles and Rush Rhees (Doncaster, 1979), pp. v–vi. 62 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G. H. Von Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe, rev. edn. (Cambridge, MA, 1956), 273–4. 63 Wittgenstein (1956), 45.

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Britain, and North America, at the same time helpfully supplying that early modern bestseller and essential handbook for secular authorities, the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) or ‘Hammer of Witches’: Viewed from the standpoint of causal thinking, symbolism represents an intellectual shortcut. Thought attempts to find the connection between things, not by tracing the hidden turns of their causal ties, but rather by suddenly jumping over these causal connections. The connection is not a link between cause and effect, but one of meaning and purpose. The conviction that such a link exists may come into existence whenever two things share an essential quality that relates to something of general value. Or, in other words, any association on the basis of any identity may be directly transformed into an awareness of an essential and mystic connection. From an ethnological viewpoint we can see that it is very primitive. Primitiveness of thought reveals itself in its weak ability to perceive the boundaries between things; it attempts to incorporate into the idea of a particular thing all that which constitutes by its very presence any kind of connection based on similarity or membership in a particular category. The symbolizing function is most intimately related to this.64

That function, as Huizinga goes on to explain, comes down to a question of belief; for any ‘symbolic postulation of identity on the basis of shared characteristics is only meaningful if the qualities shared by the symbol and the thing symbolized are regarded as truly essential’—where the empirical properties of things ‘are regarded not as mere labels for physical differences on a quantitative basis, but as real entities, as realities themselves’.65 He is distinguishing here between the quantitative symbologies of mathematics and their qualitative counterparts in other disciplines, which included the occult arts through the end of the seventeenth century. For where the symbolic methods of quantification convert observed circumstance into the alien idiom of metrical and mensurable terms, magic elects its symbols and constructs its symbolic relations according to the promiscuous and impoverishing principle of perceived and so superficial similarity. Moreover, in the process of assimilating every significant difference to some overriding likeness, it fosters the comforting illusion of a deep and intricate order to the world that merely must be noticed to be known, one in which the humble 64 Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996), 236. 65 Ibid., 236–7 (my emphasis).

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 133 walnut can be the incarnate God: ‘the seed kernel is the divine nature, the outer shell His human nature, and the woody membrane in between is the cross’.66 For magical thinking, as we like to say of rationalism, colonizes experience: ‘There is ample room in symbolic thought for an immeasurable variety of relationships among things, since anything with its individual qualities can be the symbol of yet other things, and may, with one and the same quality, signify quite various other things’.67 Digby would observe that there is no causal, much less necessary, connection between the natural structure of walnuts, on the one hand, and the religious doctrine of the theanthropos, on the other. Their relation is at once specious and spontaneous, arbitrary yet profoundly meaningful to those who share the symbological mentality—what Huizinga, like Digby, calls ‘this worldview that was known as realism during medieval times and that we, somewhat less fittingly, call Platonic idealism’.68 Indeed, the assertion of likeness is fostered by the very generality that realism celebrates in our ideas, from which virtually all sensory particularity—all the circumstantial detail that accompanies perception and constrains inference—has been effaced by what amounts to a magical belief in the effective identity of thought and world. For belief in the transitive and material power of such symbols is all that is required to secure their ideational force, an effect exploited by professed magicians like Giordano Bruno, who insists that ‘practitioners of magic, medicine and prophecy produce no results without a pre-given faith, and unless they act according to the rules of that faith’.69 It is Bruno who, in his tracts on magic, emphasizes this psychological and, to that extent, therapeutic power of symbologies long before Freud spoke of dream-work and transference, or compared the symptomology of neurotics with the ritual practices of indigenous cultures in Totem and Taboo, where he quotes Tylor approvingly.70 Indeed, Wittgenstein himself would have it that psychoanalysis has neither scientific nor historical force, with its therapeutic power derived exclusively from the analysand’s acceptance of the analyst’s symbology. For ‘realism’, 66 Huizinga, 239. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 236. 69 Giordano Bruno, ‘On Magic’, in Cause, Principle and Unity and Essays on Magic, ed. and trans. Richard J. Blackwell and Robert de Lucca (Cambridge, 1998), 141. 70 A. A. Brill (ed. and trans.), The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York, 1938), 868.

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Huizinga observes, ‘independent of philosophy, is the primitive mode of thought, in which everything that is capable of being named immediately assumes an essence, be it a quality, a form, or something else. They project themselves automatically on the heavens. Their essence may almost always (but not necessarily always) be personified; the dance of anthropomorphic terms may begin at any moment’.71 Yet he allows, and Wittgenstein argues in his own case and throughout the Philosophical Investigations, that the so-called modern mind is perfectly susceptible to this ‘primitive mode of thought’, inasmuch as idealism or rationalism is simply a more austere kind of anthropomorphics, their conceptual usage manifesting the same egoism, the same uninhibited will to significance that abstracts or reduces experience to categorical relations wherever there is a possibility of intelligible, if not always sensible likeness. For rational symbologies like Russell’s are ‘immediately’ hypostasized into entities and projected ‘automatically’ onto the world where they too are felt to work ex opere operato, in the mechanical manner vulgarly supposed for the words of eucharistic institution. Thus in the Malleus, it is not the music David plays that soothes Saul’s madness—the aural effect of sound, rhythm, harmony—but a symbolic one: the harp itself ‘was in the sign of a cross, being a cross of wood with the strings stretched across’, whose brandishing drove out the demons possessing the king; for ‘even at that time the devils fled from this’.72 On the same specious and arbitrary grounds, the authors promulgate a false and misogynistic etymology for femina—fe and minus (‘without faith’), signifying the inherent faithlessness of womankind;73 in a sort of aetiological myth, they state on Augustine’s authority that classical fauns and satyrs are incubi, yet not because these figures are pagan gods but because they are ‘wild shaggy creatures of the woods’ whose images resemble the devil’s iconography, itself derived from them.74 There is no methodical effort at particular and discriminate analogy, simply an associative leap like that Alan Macfarlane ascribes to witchcraft accusation, where the strained association—now a symbolic connection—made by a suspect’s neighbors ‘between her supposed malice and an observed illness or strange event, was enough to lead to a 71 Huizinga, 237–8. 72 Montague Summers (ed. and trans.), The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger (1928; repr. New York, 1971), 41. 73 Ibid., 45. 74 Ibid., 24–5.

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 135 conviction of witchcraft’.75 It is this ‘general formalism’ of thought76 on which Huizinga blames ‘the terrifyingly sick delusion that was shortly to hatch the Malleus Maleficarum’.77 As I have argued elsewhere, Browne is no less conscious in Religio of the inveterate discrepancy between our ideas and our actualities than Digby in his criticism of that work. Rather, as he does all such intellectual artifacts, Browne construes hermetical symbology to a fundamentally sceptical, because anti-dogmatic, and irenic thesis, whose express subject is as always human belief and its moral consequences, not knowledge as such. It is indicative of this scepticism that, in the very same passage where he asserts the reality of witches, Browne also acknowledges a distinctly discriminate belief in the works of the devil, whose existence no professing Christian in the seventeenth century would deny: ‘I hold that the Devill doth really possesse some men, the spirit of melancholy others, the spirit of delusion others; that as the Devill is concealed and denyed by some, so God and good Angels are pretended by others, whereof the late detection of the Maid of Germany hath left a pregnant example’ (RM 1.30). The reference to one Eva Flegen, who claimed not to have eaten for some thirty years,78 argues that even as some perceived wonders are the work of human fraud, so human suffering can have its source in natural or psychological causes as well as diabolical ones. In a similar vein, Browne refers to ‘a traditionall Magicke, not learned immediately from the Devill, but at second hand from his Schollers; who having once the secret betrayed, are able, and doe emperically practice without his advice, they both proceeding upon the principles of nature: where actives aptly conjoyned to disposed passives, will under any Master produce their effects’ (RM 1.31). This is to suggest that, except for the intent behind their use, there is nothing intrinsically diabolical about the procedures of magic, which by his description amount to an applied science; and Browne concludes accordingly that ‘a great part of Philosophy was at first Witchcraft; which being afterward derived from one to another, proved but Philosophy, and was indeed no more than the honest effects of Nature: What invented by us is Philosophy, learned from him is Magicke’ (RM 1.31). 75 76 77 78

Macfarlane, 18–19. Huizinga (1996), 281–2. Ibid., 289. Sir Thomas Browne, The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (Harmondsworth, 1977), 98 n.

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Indeed, by the seventeenth century, the devil had become less a supernatural than a natural magician or philosopher, a physician, whose residual angelic intelligence allows him both uncanny access and understanding of phenomenal operations, all the better with which to abuse our inferior intelligence.79 William Perkins’s Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1608) may be taken as typical in describing him as the original empiricist—‘an auncient Spirit, whose skil hath been confirmed by experience of the course of nature, for the space almost of six thousand yeares’, who ‘hath attained to the knowledge of many secrets, and by long observation of the effects, is able to discerne & iudge of hidden causes in nature, which man in likelihood cannot come unto by ordinarie meanes, for want of that opportunitie both of vnderstanding and experience’.80 So when Remy’s Demonolatry (1595) and Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum (1608) argue, where the Malleus does not, that witches do indeed fly, if not by their own power, early modern demonology has so thoroughly disenchanted the demonic, that there is a sense that the devil has simply stolen a march on human technology with his ‘transporting’ unguents. Yet even earlier, the authors of the Malleus had contended that the devil’s residual angelic or ‘spiritual’ being makes him our superior in creaturely knowledge and ability, while his spiritual nature constrains him from accomplishing physical effects, since ‘he is not able to add to created material objects any form or shape, be it substantial or accidental, without some admixture or compounding with another created natural object’.81 He was, however, permissively compensated for this constraint with ‘a certain dominion over bodies and material things’ that he exercises on account of his own corruption, especially the human body in whose mental and genital operations he can effect any number of psychological and physiological changes.82 It is because the devil’s contact with material bodies must always be mediated by other bodies that he requires human minions—witches and conjurers—to accomplish his vile purposes, on whose primal corruption he plays in seducing them to his will. Thus the Malleus goes to sometimes obscene lengths to explain ‘how the devil knows the thoughts of our hearts; how he can substantially and disastrously metamorphose bodies with the help of an agent; how he can move bodies locally, and alter the outward and 79 See Clark (1997), 233–50. 81 Summers, 11.

80 Perkins, 610. 82 Ibid.

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 137 inner feelings to every conceivable extent; and how he can change the intellect and will of a man, however indirectly’83—all of which malefic marvels are performed by abnormal yet phenomenal means. The most elaborate consists in engineering the artificial insemination of human beings,84 to which Browne also refers in the same passage: ‘I could beleeve that Spirits use with man the act of carnality, and that in both sexes; I conceive they may assume, steale, or contrive a body, wherein there may be action enough to content decrepit lusts or passion to satisfie more active veneries; yet in both, without a possibility of generation’ (RM 1.30). The difference between the two accounts lies in the auxiliary ‘could’: Browne does not assert what the Malleus assumes, namely, the ongoing reality of such ingenious diabolical labors. Instead, he admits the phenomenal possibility, in keeping with his remarks about the consecutive relations between witchcraft, traditional magic, and natural philosophy: unlike the Malleus, spirits for Browne are on the spectrum of created beings, and no less subject to ‘the principles of nature’ than the human species; but like the Malleus, the generation of life requires not just mechanical motion but actual animation or vitality in the agent. Yet ‘could’ here is not only a logical stipulation in the manner of the Malleus’ hypostasizing scholasticism, but a methodological condition as Browne declares in the Pseudodoxia: ‘Tis a new and unseconded way in History to fornicate at a distance, and much offendeth the rules of Physick, which say, there is no generation without a joynt emission, nor onely a virtuall but corporall and carnall contaction’ (PE 7.15.586). It follows that, in his view, devils are no more likely to engender progeny than women to conceive in public baths (a claim to which he compares demonic insemination), and for the same mundane physiological reasons (PE 7.15.586). This naturalized and naturalist devil, whose ‘occult’ activities can only be called such because their natural basis remains as yet unknown to humanity, unseen by our less discerning and so incapable understanding, is Browne’s devil. It could therefore be argued that Browne’s style of demonology is indicative of his character as a ‘Christian virtuoso’ (in Boyle’s phrase), which he shares with Digby and which Richard Westfall confirms, who not only remarks upon the prominence of physicians in the Royal Society, notwithstanding the philosopher Digby’s tacit disdain for the empiric of Religio, but includes Browne in the 83 Summers, 23.

84 Ibid., 21–31, 109–14.

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company of such devout experimentalists.85 And Browne’s testimony at Bury St Edmunds is certainly conformable to that identity: There was also Dr. Brown of Norwich, a person of great knowledge; who after this evidence given, upon view of the three persons in Court, was desired to give his opinion, what he did conceive of them: and he was clearly of opinion, that the persons were bewitched; and said, That in Denmark there had been lately a great discovery of witches, who used the very same way of afflicting persons, by conveying pins into them, and crooked as these pins were, with needles and nails. And his opinion was, That the devil in such cases did work upon the bodies of men and women, upon a natural foundation, (that is) to stir up, and excite such humours super-abounding in their bodies to a great excess, whereby he did in an extraordinary manner afflict them with such distempers as their bodies were most subject to, as appeared in these children; for he conceived, that these swooning fits were natural, and nothing else but that they call the mother, but only heightened to a great excess by the subtilty of the devil, co-operating with the malice of these which we term witches, at whose instance he doth these villainies.86

When Browne diagnoses hysteria or ‘suffocation of the mother’ in the three girls he observes at the trial, giving their behavior a psychosomatic cause in humoral imbalance, which the devil by whatever ‘secret and undiscerned Wayes of Nature’ aggravates to an excess, he argues a more sophisticated order of causation than was usually assumed for witchcraft in either its popular or elite incarnations. That is perhaps another reason why the pamphlet’s author feels obliged to clarify and so distort the thrust of Browne’s testimony, by way of countering the salient objections of Keeling which it immediately follows in the trial narrative. For Browne’s diagnosis treats the preternatural role of the devil in exacerbating human suffering as more a constant principle than an immediate actuality, while the bewitchment itself involves the exclusively natural operations of hysteria, with the only sign of diabolical causation being the degree or extremity of the girls’ afflictions, not their kind. Both melancholy and passio hysterica or ‘suffocation of the mother’ appear to have been given the same uterine origin in women past menarche: namely, amenorrhea—the retention and supposed corruption of menstrual blood, which also carried the female seed required for reproduction, and whose regular expulsion was conveniently thought by male writers to require regular sex. 85 Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (1958; rpr. Ann Arbor, 1973), 14–17. 86 Howell, vi. 697.

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 139 In Galenic physiology—and Galen, it will be remembered, rivalled Aristotle in Browne’s affections—the uterus (‘mother’, ‘matrix’, ‘womb’) was imagined as a separate animal with its own sense of smell and consequently its own disorders.87 Thus when the uterus was deprived of sex and its reproductive function, it would wander about the female body in search of satisfaction—a condition called furor uterinus and the source of both womankind’s insatiability and her mental instability, since it aggravated the melancholic humour apparently associated with menstrual blood, precipitating the diseased imagination or fancy typical of melancholy and described at some length both in Johannes Weyer’s De prestigiis daemonum (1563) and the supremely sceptical Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Given that most witchcraft suspects were menopausal, Scot for one supposed that ‘the stopping of their monethlie melancholike flux or issue of bloud, in their age must needs increase therein, as (through their weaknesse both of bodie and braine) the aptest persons to meete with such melancholike imaginations: with whom their imaginations remaine, even when their senses are gone’.88 ‘Suffocation of the mother’ also had its source in amenorrhea, whose noxious fluids caused vapors to arise in the body, disturbing the animal spirits and what little rationality the female sex was allowed to possess.89 It was the novel opinion of Doctor Edward Jorden, at the London trial of Elizabeth Jackson, accused of bewitching the much-celebrated Mary Glover, that the symptomology of hysteria could be caused by psychological trauma, say, extreme fear or aversion, in those like the Lowestoft girls who had yet to reach menarche. In his treatise anatomizing the condition, A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603), Jorden lists among its manifold symptoms: ‘Gnawing in the stomacke, and paine; in diuerse partes of the bodie, breaking of wind, vomiting, purging by siege, urin, or other excretion, loathing of meate, thirst, extraordinarie hunger, swelling in the throat, swelling in the body, in the feet, obstructions in the vaines, consumptions, tumors, feuers, priuation of voice, paleness of colour, rumblings and noise in the belly or throat, like vnto frogs, snakes, or other creatures,’90 as well as lethargy, trance, coma, tetanic paralysis, anesthesia, distortion or deprivation of the senses, 87 Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the fortunes of scholasticism and medical science in European intellectual life (Cambridge, 1983), 40–1. 88 Scot, 65–6. 89 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, 1995), 66. 90 Jorden, A Briefe Discourse (1603), repr. in MacDonald, F2/18.

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epilepsy or convulsions ‘where the motions are immoderate, peruerse, inordinate, or indecent, as when they are unquiet, & cannot abstaine from motions and gestures, casting their armes and legges to and fro, up and downe’.91 All of these disparate behaviors coincide with the characteristic signs of bewitchment or possession as C. L’Estrange Ewen describes them, and the five Lowestoft girls exhibited them.92 The only exception to the psychological model of hysteria are the pins and nails placed in evidence as the very same pins and nails vomited by the children, which Weyer and other sceptical or at least more circumspect tracts like John Cotta’s Triall of Witch-Craft (1616) and Richard Bernard’s Guide to Grand Jury Men (1627) nonetheless regard as a legitimately supernatural occurrence—although the ingestion of such objects was susceptible of natural and preternatural explanation by Weyer,93 while Scot characteristically dismisses the phenomenon as simple legerdemain.94 Yet even here Browne does not invoke the preternatural operations of the devil but assimilates such palpable facts to a recently recorded case—a Danish precedent, as yet untraced, in which such phenomena occurred. Whether or not there was actually such a Danish case is immaterial: indeed, the stated nationality may be an error on the part of the pamphlet’s author, who after all mistakes the year of the trial and the number of counts on which Duny and Cullender were tried and then convicted.95 For as Ewen remarks, ‘In England the vomiting of hardware and cutlery was by no means unusual’: a case in 1650 apparently involved ‘a large variety of building and household material’.96 Finally, it is significant, as any number of Browne’s apologists have remarked, that he does not identify Cullender and Duny as the human agents of the children’s afflictions: he only expounds their symptoms’ medical aetiology within the providential scheme of God’s permissive will and the devil’s preternatural orchestration of human suffering and delusion—in this case, the ‘spectral evidence’ that Browne locates in an immediate physiological cause and psychological effect as against supernatural agency. Given the extent 91 Macdonald: Jordan. E2–3/14–15. 92 Ewen (1933), 92–8. 93 Johann Weyer, Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance, ed. George Mora et al., trans. John Shea (1991; rpr. Tempe, AZ, 1998), 286–303. 94 Scot, 255–96. 95 Geis and Bunn, 38–9. The authors make much of the error, ascribing it to Browne, but the more likely suspect in my view is the pamphlet’s author. 96 Ewen (1933), 95.

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 141 of contemporary medical knowledge (itself inclined to symbologies), there is little magical about Browne’s thinking or his testimony: it is, as one would expect of a physician and a naturalist, a fully circumstantial account; but then so for that matter was the experimental conduct of the trial’s evidentiary phase, a fact that often goes unmentioned by Browne’s critics and, I would add, Sir Matthew Hale’s. Even the pamphlet’s author, who insists that the Lowestoft girls were bewitched, is perfectly aware that the mistake made by Pacy’s eldest daughter is susceptible of an altogether different construction from the one ultimately placed upon it by both the jury and the narrative. Thus he remarks that, ‘by the opinions of some, this experiment (which others would have a fallacy) was rather a confirmation that the parties were really bewitched, than otherwise: for, say they, it is not possible that any should counterfeit such distempers, being accompanied with such various circumstances, much less children; and for so long time, and yet undiscovered by their parents and relations: For no man can suppose that they should all conspire together, (being out of several families, and, as they affirm, no way related one to the other, and scarce of familiar acquaintance) to do an act of this nature whereby no benefit or advantage could redound to any of the parties, but a guilty conscience for perjuring themselves in taking the lives of two poor simple women away, and there appears no malice in the case. For the prisoners themselves did scarce so much as object it. Wherefore, say they, it is very evident that the parties were bewitched . . . ’.97 It is rather the irony of the author’s absolute declaration, ‘it is impossible that’, which remains truly inescapable at this distance, since the only aspect of the case that now appears credible is that the ‘bewitched’ exploited their circumstances, perhaps compulsively (or ‘hysterically’) but none the less consciously, to do exactly what they are supposed incapable of doing here. Yet, on the face of it, his reasoning is unexceptionable, weighing the various circumstances militating against the children’s imposture: no pretence was discovered by the adults intimate with the girls during the lengthy period of their affliction; the absence of any social intercourse between the households undermines a concerted conspiracy on the children’s part; by their very nature, children lack the experience, the practiced cunning, for so perfect a dissimulation; moreover, common sense revolts against the otherwise motiveless malignancy of their behavior, especially given the intolerable burden of guilt they would always bear if their afflictions were indeed ‘counterfeit’. 97 Howell, vi. 698–9.

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But Browne in the Pseudodoxia ascribes to his scientific devil a species of maleficium also pursued by the Malleus’ grand metaphysical evil, but which here is significant of Browne’s scepticism as against that text’s opportunism. For the devil in the Malleus is mostly a consummate fraud and illusionist; and his diabolic means—the magical working of ‘glamours’, ‘charms’, ‘fascinations’, and ‘prestiges’—delude our understanding by variously obscuring and disfiguring our perceptions.98 By such obscurantism, which in any other context would be regarded as perfectly ordinary to human cognition, he wreaks havoc with the wonted transparency of the created world that had once allowed Adam to read the names of the animals off their bodies as they passed, and to whose immediacy of knowledge and power humanity still mistakenly aspires. In Browne’s opinion, human sin is partly adventitious through the devil’s agency but also in a manner autochthonous, since ‘permitted unto his proper principles, Adam perhaps would have sinned, without the suggestion of Satan, and from the transgressive infirmities of himselfe might have erred alone, as well as the Angels before him’ (PE 1.10.58). As the Pseudodoxia puts the case: ‘beside the infirmities of human nature, the seed of error within our selves, and the severall wayes of delusion from each other, there is an invisible Agent, and secret promoter without us, whose activity is undiscerned, and playes in the darke upon us, and that is the first contriver of Error, and professed opposer of Truth, the Divell’ (PE 1.10.58). Any aspect of that fatal and finite condition our first parents brought upon their posterity—whatever infirmity of mind, absurd notion, vicious propensity, or fraudulent practice by which we can divert ourselves from faith and worship of the one true God, and so inflict our own suffering—the devil amplifies or counterfeits. Thus ‘we are dayly betrayed’ into delusion about the ‘obvious occurrents of the world, wherein he induceth us, to ascribe effects unto causes of no cognation, and distorting the order and theorie of causes perpendicular to their effects, he drawes them aside unto things whereto they runne parallel, and in their proper motions would never meet together’ (PE 1.11.67). In sum, the devil dallies with our perceptions and understandings, deflecting effects away to specious causes, creating conjunctions of antecedent and consequence which bear no actual and effectual relation to each other, concealing his strategems behind the flux of phenomena while seducing us 98 See Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford, 2007), 123–60.

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 143 into inert or intransitive speculations that tend to hypostasize the superficial and incline us to idolatry (PE 1.11.68–70). Unfortunately, those extraordinary concurrences and effects which the devil orchestrates ‘by secret and undiscerned wayes of Nature’ (PE 1.11.69) are intended to emulate the precedent operations of God and his providence, while even those ‘natural productions from second and setled causes’ do ‘sometimes admit a respect therein, and even in their naturalls, the indifferencie of their existences contemporised unto our actions, admits a farther consideration’—indeed, ‘beside the Philosophical assignment of the cause’, they allow ‘a Christian apprehension in the signality’ (PE 1.11.67–8). So at any given time, God, nature, and the devil can be the cause of superficially similar phenomena, which are exceptional insofar as they exceed the limitations of human cognition. This accords with the current state of demonological speculation, which denied the devil anything like God’s capacity substantially to alter the created order, and so to perform supernatural feats (miracula) of the sort implied by the specters of Cullender and Duny. In the judicious distinction of Martin Del Rio, the devil’s ‘wonders’ (mira) were confined to ‘preternatural’ operations (Del Rio’s term), since to allow him the substantial as against specious transformation of things argues power on a par with the divine.99 Yet Browne’s devil resembles his deity, as demons do the good angels, in one respect—ubiquity combined with hiddenness, which is, of course, the condition of the ‘spiritual’—allowing the devil not only to dissemble any natural or divine occurrence, but in making himself as God or nature also to conjure up a likeness discomfiting to the believer, who must carefully sift phenomena to discern who or what is their source. This difficulty of detection is not only Browne’s problem, and the court’s at Bury St Edmunds: it is the legal problem of the age—for the relatives of the professed ‘bewitched’, any number of whom were not immediately inclined to embrace a ‘spiritual’ explanation; for the physicians who were regularly called upon to make that discrimination, as Browne is at Bury St Edmunds; and for every representative of the legal system from the justice of the peace to the grand jury to the members of the Assizes or Quarter Session court itself. It is further exacerbated by the very inclination to supernaturalism, which, in designating one or other 99 Martin Del Rio, Investigations into Magic, ed. and trans. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manchester, 2000), 81.

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phenomenon as divine or demonic, renders the contingent effectively absolute and the course of experience perfectly arbitrary. For supernaturalism licenses thought to void everything of its circumstantial complexity, inasmuch as the supernatural by its very definition operates exceptionally, against ‘nature’—the routine course of things on which we depend for a viable existence. To take an extreme instance from the annals of Matthew Hopkins: John Stearne, Hopkins’s accomplice, records in August 1645 that Binkes of Haverhill, also in Suffolk, having first denied the charge of witchcraft and called in her local vicar, was eventually brought by unstated duress to ‘confess’ that ‘The fly seen in her chamber was one of her imps’, inasmuch as ‘The imp ‘‘in the same shape it was formerly seen’’ ’, fastened itself on her body, ‘not far from other marks, but upon them, and so remained above half a quarter of an hour’, when some women ‘wiped it off with a cloth’.100 As Ewen wryly comments, ‘What became of the familiar is not known, but ‘‘it had drawn a new mark like the others’’, proving that once the magical thinking of a witchcraft panic had taken hold, with its incontinent propensity to symbolize, even insect bites, always plentiful in summer, could become the demonic ‘teats’ of English witchcraft lore and evidence of diabolism.101 I would just observe how the specious work of ‘similitude’ or ‘likeness’ on which magical thinking depends, notionally for its efficacy and actually for its credibility, has deprived the two things compared—a ‘teat’ and an insect bite—of all the particularity that would otherwise inhibit the false assertion of their identity. Instead, each has become a mere adumbration or outline of the thing as it is experienced or perceived, in order to permit a plausible but impossible resemblance, consisting of the few superficial qualities that enable the comparison (protuberance, an opening that leaks fluid, and the activity of sucking). On similar grounds, Kepler distinguishes his calculations in the indubitably mystical Harmonice Mundi (1619) from those of the physician and hermeticist Robert Fludd in the latter’s rival publication, the Historia (1617–18)—a difference Fludd indicatively cannot recognize because he grounds his numerological figures magically in the superficial resemblance of things as these move him. Kepler accordingly dismisses Fludd’s rival harmonies as ‘mere symbolism’—‘poetic or rhetorical rather than philosophical or mathematical’—while 100 Ewen (1933), 283.

101 Ibid.

The Trial of the Lowestoft Witches / 145 pointing out that his own version translates Tycho Brahe’s vast and detailed astronomical observations, expressed in the exact symbolization of quantity, into a mathematical model that with comparable precision describes the empirical behavior of planetary bodies.102 Fludd, he declares, ‘conjures up the cosmos privately depicted in his mind, or deems them to be represented by it. I have demonstrated that the whole body of harmonic combinations, with all its parts, is found in the planets’ own extreme motions, according to measures which are certain and derived from astronomy’.103 Kepler accordingly concludes: ‘Thus for him his conception of the cosmos, for me the cosmos itself, or the real motions of the planets in it’.104 Appearances to the contrary, Browne is of Kepler’s mind, not Fludd’s. In the preface to the Pseudodoxia, Browne alludes to such latter-day saints— ‘those Honoured worthies, who endeavour the advancement of Learning’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 4)—with a certain wistful envy, whom he expects to produce ‘that regular and constant stile, those infallible experiments, and those assured determinations, which the subject sometime requireth’, but which are lacking in his own endeavors on truth’s behalf. In the meantime, he will address instead ‘the common infirmity of humane nature; of whose deceptible condition . . . perhaps there need not any other eviction, then the frequent errors, we shall our selves commit, even in the expresse declarement hereof’ (PE 1.1.5). 102 Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of the World, ed. and trans. E. J. Aiton, A. M. Duncan, and J. V. Field (Philadelphia, 1997), 505. The best because most informed and exact account of Kepler’s cosmic symbology and the controversy with Fludd appears in ‘The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler’ by the Nobel-prizewinning physicist Wolfgang Pauli (Writings on Physics and Philosophy, ed. Charles P. Enz and Karl von Mayenn, trans. Robert Schlapp (New York, 1994), 218–79). The essay was originally a joint publication with C. G. Jung, who, Robert Westman speculates, psychoanalyzed Pauli. See the essays by Westman, Edward Rosen, and Judith Field in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge, 1984). 103 Kepler, 507–8. 104 Ibid., 508.


Part II Works


7 Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith Brooke Conti

A few sections into Religio Medici, Browne gives this description of his attitude towards religion: I love to loose my selfe in a misterie[,] to pursue my reason with an O altitudo; t’is my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involv’d Enigma’s & riddles of the Trinity, Incarnation and resurrection[;] I can answer all the objections of Satan, & my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learn’d of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est [it is certain because it is impossible]. (RM 1.9)1

This passage is typical of everything we think we know about Browne: his playfulness, his intellectual curiosity, and his delight in paradoxes. Throughout Religio Medici Browne emphasizes how much he loves to ponder the imponderable and how unconcerned he is that the mysteries of Christianity so often appear contrary to reason. He indulges in metaphorical and metaphysical flights of fancy, confesses to past doctrinal errors with seeming ease, and assures his readers that, whatever mistakes he may stumble into, they are redeemed by both his good intentions and his unshakeable devotion to the Church of England. 1 All quotations are taken from my transcription of the manuscript copy of Religio Medici held by Pembroke College, Oxford; however, because no transcription of this copy is readily available, for the reader’s ease of reference I will cite those quotations by the 1643 part and section numbers.

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The dilations and qualifications so characteristic of Religio Medici have long been central to interpretations of both the work’s purpose and its author’s personality. Religio’s many admirers tend to regard its leisurely expansiveness as the expression of an amiable, playful temperament, one whose tolerance and adaptability embody the best qualities of the English Church.2 Even Stanley Fish, Religio’s most notable modern detractor, focuses on the work’s impulse towards amplification—although to Fish it is evidence of intellectual laziness: Browne likes to hear himself talk, but he has nothing of substance to say.3 What both Religio’s defenders and its critics have so far failed to explore, however, is the possibility that Browne’s slippery and protean persona might be a response to real religious uncertainty.4 As I shall argue, despite Browne’s frequently confident statements on matters of faith, a significant degree of doctrinal anxiety underlies the work. With each revision that Browne made to Religio Medici, however, evidence of this anxiety diminishes.5 A careful reading of the work’s earliest version— especially in light of some of Browne’s later revisions—will soon reveal the degree of his theological uneasiness. In a work that is ostensibly about his religion, Browne makes few positive declarations of faith, frets continually over those he attempts, and only barely conceals a number of sympathies that are unorthodox or downright heretical. Browne may have intended his work as a profession of faith, but it is one that seems to have been motivated less by the cheery good humor and tolerationist spirit that many ascribe to Browne than by real doubts about his own orthodoxy. 2 See, e.g., Joan Webber, The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison, 1968), 151, 158, 182; Murray Roston, ‘The ‘‘Doubting’’ Thomas’, in C. A. Patrides (ed.), Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne Patrides (ed.) (1982) (London and Columbia, MO: 1982), 69, 72, 74–5; Frank J. Warnke, ‘A Hook for Amphibium: Some Reflections on Fish’, in: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays, 49–59; Jonathan F. S. Post, Sir Thomas Browne (Boston, 1987), esp. 77, 85, 89–90; Victoria Silver, ‘Liberal Theology and Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘‘Soft and Flexible’’ Discourse’, English Literary Renaissance, 20:1 (Winter 1990), 69–76, 86 ff.; Anne Drury Hall, Ceremony and Civility in English Renaissance Prose (University Park, PA, 1991), 174–6, 188–90; Leonard Nathanson, The Strategy of Truth: A Study of Sir Thomas Browne (Chicago, 1967), 8–9. 3 See Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley, 1972), 367–8, 372. As Fish writes towards the end of his essay, ‘it becomes obvious that Browne doesn’t feel anything, except the impulse to amplificatio’ (368). 4 I believe that Claire Preston is exactly right in describing Religio Medici as messy, disorganized, and inconsistent (in contrast to other scholars, who insist that the work follows an elaborate and intentional pattern); the project of this present essay is to examine the nature of some of those inconsistencies. See Claire Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005), 51, 53. 5 On Browne’s theology see Shuger’s essay in this volume.

Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith / 151 A short review of Religio Medici’s textual history is useful at this point. The work survives in eight contemporary manuscript copies and two early printed ones, which together represent three distinct stages of composition: the first version, which apparently had limited circulation in manuscript, was probably written around 1635; this is the date that Browne himself suggests in the prefatory letter to his authorized edition of 1643, but there is also internal evidence to indicate that Browne composed the work as he was approaching his thirtieth birthday, in 1635.6 Although this first version is shorter than the two published ones, it also contains numerous passages or individual readings omitted or altered later. The second version was probably written between 1638 and 1640, and it appears to have circulated more widely in manuscript before appearing in the pirated printed edition of 1642.7 The final version is Browne’s 1643 authorized printed edition, which reflects still more changes and additions by Browne. Most modern editions of Religio rely primarily upon the text of the 1643 version, operating under the assumption that this final revision best represents Browne’s intentions for his work. But while this version may in some ways be the ‘fullest’ of the three—it is indeed the longest—it is also, by definition, the furthest from Browne’s original version and the circumstances that produced it. For this reason, I will be focusing in this essay on the work’s earliest version, the only complete copy of which is held by Pembroke College, Oxford. One of the many curious features of Religio Medici is its status as Browne’s only overtly autobiographical work. Both his next publication, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), and his major works of the 1650s, Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus (both 1658), are shorn of almost all personal references. One possible reason for Browne’s turn to autobiography in Religio emerges in the work’s 6 The only complete manuscript copy of this first version is held by the library at Pembroke College, Oxford, although a second, partial copy is held by the British Library (Lansdowne 489). For the genealogy of these copies, see Jean-Jacques Denonain’s discussion in the introduction to his edition of Religio Medici (Cambridge, 1953), pp. ix–xxiv. 7 The extent of the second version’s circulation can be gauged by the fact that none of the six surviving manuscript copies is in Browne’s handwriting, none is identical, and none, according to Denonain, even appears to be descended from the same source copy. According to Peter Beal’s Index of English Literary Manuscripts, the six copies from this stage are now located at the following institutions: St John’s College, Cambridge (James 281); the Bodleian Library (Rawlinson D 162); McGill University (Osler 4417); Lehigh University (828.3 B884r); and the Norfolk Record Office, which holds two different copies (21267 and 21268). My reasons for assigning this version to 1638–40 can be found in Brooke Conti, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’s Annotated Copy of His 1642 Religio Medici’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 67:3 (Spring 2006), 595–610.

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first line, that abrupt opening sentence that reads like a response to a question: ‘For my religion, though there bee severall circumstances that might perswade the world I have none at all . . . yet in despite hereof I dare without usurpation assume the honourable style of a Christian’ (RM 1.1). In other words, the work begins as if Browne were professing a creed or taking part in a catechetical dialogue—and in fact his entire opening section bears a resemblance to the opening of one of England’s most popular catechisms, Alexander Nowell’s, of which Browne owned a copy.8 As Ian Green has shown, in the 1630s England saw the publication of more catechisms and other works of religious didacticism than during any other decade from the English Reformation until the 1740s.9 The question of what it was necessary for a Christian to know or believe was hardly new, but the flood of doctrinal and instructional materials during the 1630s can probably be attributed to the push for greater centralization and conformity then taking place in the English Church under Charles I and Archbishop Laud. From 1628 to 1634 the Thirty-Nine Articles were republished every single year (rather than approximately once every five years, as had been the case since the late sixteenth century), and in 1633 Charles decreed that the Canons of 1604—which had never been systematically implemented—would from then on be rigorously enforced.10 (The Canons, unlike the Thirty-Nine Articles, are primarily concerned not with articles of faith, but rather with comportment, ritual, and forms of worship—the very ceremonies that had until recently officially been considered ‘points indifferent’.) That year the Canons went through five separate editions, as many as in the preceding twenty-eight years combined.11

8 See Alexander Nowell, A Catechisme; or first Instruction and Learning of Christian Religion. Translated out of Latine into Englishe (1570), B1r–B2r. In addition to the great popularity of Nowell’s work, evidence that Browne knew it can be found in the sale catalogue for his library. See Jeremiah S. Finch (ed.), A Catalogue of the Libraries of Sir Thomas Browne and Dr. Edward Browne, His Son: A Facsimile Reproduction (Leiden, 1986), 26, 85. The edition listed in this catalogue, however, was not in English, but in Latin and Greek. 9 Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c., 1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996), 68, 76–7. 10 See Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism 1625–1641 (Oxford, 1992), 26, 62–5. 11 Publication figures for both the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Canons of 1604 are based on the English Short-Title Catalogue.

Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith / 153 In this climate, it is not surprising to find such a large number of catechetical works on the market. But if examining and declaring one’s religious beliefs had a new urgency for many during this period, there may have been a special urgency for Browne. In 1634 he was freshly returned to England from the Continent, where he had spent three or four years studying medicine at Montpellier, Padua, and Leiden. Though the universities he attended were in places as different as war-torn France, Catholic Italy, and Reformed Protestant Holland, all three universities were strikingly independent of their local civil and ecclesiastical authorities, and at least two of the three were associated with notable heresies and heterodoxies, some of which would later make an appearance in Religio.12 The university at Padua, which had long been a center for humanist studies, was also a center for skepticism about the nature of the Trinity and the immortality of the soul, while Leiden was the epicenter for the controversy over Arminianism that eventually led to the Synod of Dort’s 1618 condemnation of Arminianism as a heresy.13 Although Jacobus Arminius had been a professor of theology at Leiden and had many supporters there, four other professors of theology at Leiden formulated the Synod’s official statement for publication in 1625, less than a decade before Browne arrived in the city.14 Although, as I shall demonstrate, many of the ideas and controversies current at the universities that Browne attended appear to have influenced him to a greater or lesser degree, more important for the composition of Religio Medici may have been the simple contrast between the England Browne returned to in 1634 and the vigorous, skeptical, and largely tolerant academic environments that he had left behind. For while Religio is often regarded as a celebration of the English Church’s via media, signs that Browne is not wholly comfortable within the Church of England appear almost immediately. That opening declaration—in which Browne asserts that ‘though there bee severall 12 For the climate of religious tolerance at these universities, see Finch (1986), 57, 67, 75–6; Antonino Poppi, Ricerche sulla teologia e la scienza nella Scuola padovana del Cinque e Seicento (Soveria Manelli, 2001); Christine Kooi, Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation, 1572–1620 (Leiden, 2000), 134, 155. 13 Notable anti-trinitarians associated with Padua include Michael Servetus (1509–53), the Catholic whom Calvin eventually had burned at the stake in Geneva, and both Laelius and his nephew Faustus Socinus, who studied in Padua off and on throughout the 1540s, 1550s, and 1560s, and whose beliefs are the foundation of Socinianism. 14 See C. W. Schoneveld, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and Leiden University in 1633’, English Language Notes, 19:4 (1982), 354.

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circumstances that might perswade the world’ he has no religion at all, he nevertheless dares to call himself a Christian (RM 1.1)—seems strangely defensive, and might make a reader wonder whether he had been charged with impiety in the past or had reason to fear it in the future. Moreover, for many long sentences, Browne leaves it unclear just which version of Christianity he subscribes to. Whereas in his revised versions of Religio Browne describes himself, at the beginning of 1.2, as being ‘of that reformed new-cast Religion, wherein I mislike nothing but the name’, in the Pembroke manuscript this line is absent, and it not until what would become 1.5, after a long, meandering genealogy of Christianity, that Browne finally declares, there is noe church wherein everie thing soe squares to my conscience, whose Articles, constitutions, & customes seeme soe consonant, to reason, & as it were fram’d to my particular devotion as this whereof I hold my beliefe[,] the Church of England, to whose faith I am a sworne subject, & have a double obligation to subscribe to her articles, & endeavour to observe her constitutions. (RM 1.5)

As a loyal English subject, Browne naturally owes allegiance to the state Church, but he also claims a second, purer allegiance: of all the denominations—which Browne implies he has made a study of—this is the one most worthy of belief. This should be a ringing endorsement of the English Church, but then (in lines that Browne would omit in the 1643 version) he immediately adds, noe man shall wreath my faith to another article, or command my obedience to a cannon more[;] whatsoever is beyond as points indifferent I observe according to the rule of my private reason, or the humour, and fashion of my devotion . . . I disallow not all things in the Councell of Trent, nor believe all in the Synod of Dort. (RM 1.5)

There is an uneasy tension between Browne’s initial, seemingly absolutist, statement of allegiance to the English Church (there is no church wherein everything so squares to his conscience), and this defiant addendum in which he sounds almost hostile, as if Browne felt he had already been pushed to the furthest verge of what he could accept. He makes a similar point a little later in the work, where he claims that, although he would willingly embrace a necessary martyrdom, ‘from the morall duty I owe to the commands of God; & the naturall respect I tender unto the conservation of my essence & being; I would not perish upon a ceremonie, politique point, or indifferency’ (RM 1.26). In both these passages, Browne seems all too able to envision a day

Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith / 155 when more obedience than he would be willing to give might be demanded of him, and in imagining a man or men who would have him ‘wreath [his] faith to another article, or command [his] obedience to a [canon] more’, he shows precious little trust in the leaders of what only a moment before seemed to be his ideal church. In 1635 there was, of course, plenty of distrust to go around, especially between the Puritan and Laudian factions. But Browne cultivates an attitude of tolerant independence. As he writes in the next section, ‘I could never divide my selfe from anie man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his Judgement in not agreeing with mee in that, from which perhaps within a few daies I should dissent my selfe’ (RM 1.6). This is one of Religio Medici’s most frequently quoted lines, and it is usually cited as evidence of Browne’s great tolerance. However, just as Browne’s statement of complete allegiance to the Church of England diminishes upon inspection into a much more conditional fidelity, so here Browne’s declaration of cheerful sectarian disengagement is almost immediately called into question. He does not say that he believes representatives of opposing factions are all Christians of good will, or that he can see merit in more than one side; instead, as he continues it becomes clear that he does not entirely trust himself to know truth from falsehood: I have noe genius to disputes in Religion, & have thought it wisdome to decline them especially upon a disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the weakenes of my reason. Where wee desire to bee informed t’is good to confer with men above our selves, but to confirme our opinions t’is best to argue with judgments below our owne, that the frequent spoiles & victories over their reasons, maie settle in us an esteeme, & confirm’d opinion of our owne. (RM 1.6)

Although this passage contains sensible statements to the effect that not every believer can argue persuasively on behalf of his belief, and that even a right-thinking Christian might find himself out-reasoned by a sophist, Browne does not rest with such unobjectionable remarks. Instead, he seems to urge believers to engage only in those intellectual battles that they can win; it is all very well to confer with those above oneself in intellect, but arguing with them is risky business. If Browne believes that disputing with those beneath us in brainpower inevitably confirms us in our opinions, the unavoidable implication is that arguing with those who are brighter makes us—and our beliefs—intellectually vulnerable.

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For someone who has elsewhere championed reason and its role in religion, this is a curious argument. Browne has declared that his membership in the Church of England is the result of an active choice, and that he made his decision in large part because the Church’s positions ‘seeme soe consonant to reason’. However, in this section Browne first declares that he will not dispute anyone who can out-think him (suggesting that it is dangerous to do so), and then a few lines later seems to shrug off this worry on the grounds that, as he writes, ‘if there arise anie doubts in my waie, I can forget them, or at least deferre them till my better setled Judgement, and more manly reason bee able to resolve them’ (RM 1.6). With this turn Browne appears to be struggling to redeem the role of reason—but he concludes the section with another apparent reversal: in order to keep himself free from heresy, he says, he always ‘follow[s] the great wheele of the church’ (RM 1.6). Negotiating the relationship between faith and reason was certainly not an easy task for anyone in the seventeenth century, but Browne’s rhetorical gymnastics hint not just at confusion but deep anxiety over the role played by each. While no early modern theologian would have considered reason sufficient to bring a person to religious knowledge, most nevertheless regarded it as an indispensable component. In her essay on the relationship between Religio Medici and liberal theological discourse, Victoria Silver argues that Browne shares—and in Religio is modeling—the views of divines such as William Chillingworth and Jeremy Taylor, who believed that reason, when assisted by grace, was perfectly capable of, and indeed necessary for, distinguishing between religious truth and religious error.15 In one illustrative footnote, Silver quotes Taylor as saying: ‘Faith and reason are several things . . . but it is reason that carries me to objects of faith, and faith is my reason so disposed, so used, so instructed.’16 This, however, is not quite Browne’s position—or at least not one he takes consistently; instead, he alternates between making bold claims for reason and discounting its operation entirely. Whereas Taylor presents 15 Silver, 84–5. Although I am in more doubt whether Religio is a successful embodiment of this sort of liberal theology, it seems quite possible that Browne is drawing upon the works of such divines and attempting to recast his doubts and anxieties as simple adiaphora. See also Hall (1991), 179–84. 16 Silver, 84 n.24, 85 n.27 (the quotation is from Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium). For further comparisons between Browne and Chillingworth and Taylor see Nathanson (1967), 116–28. For a more detailed discussion of the attitude of the latitudinarian divines towards reason see Martin I. J. Griffin, Jr., Latitudinarianism in the Seventeenth-Century Church of England (Leiden, 1992), esp. ch. 5.

Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith / 157 reason and faith as operating in tandem, the one essential to the other, Browne seems to believe that the two belong to radically different spheres. As he writes a short while later in the work: as the propositions of faith seeme absurd unto reason, so the Theorems of reason unto passion, & both unto faith; yet a moderate & peaceable discourse maie soe order & state the matter that they may all be as Kings . . . everie one exerciseing his soveraignety, & prerogative in due time & place according to the restraint & limits of circumstances. (RM 1.19)

Browne’s version of the harmonious coexistence of faith and reason is not a marriage, but a divorce settlement: each faculty gets custody of the issues proper to it—and so long as each stays out of the other’s way, all is well. Although Browne does not come out and say so, his distrust of reason when it comes to matters of faith seems the result of unfortunate personal experience. In following the wheel of his church, Browne tells his reader, ‘I leave noe gap to heresies, scismes, or errors, of which at this present I shall not injure truth to say, I have noe taint, or tincture.’ But, he adds, ‘I must confesse my greener studies have beene polluted with 2 or 3, not anie begot in these later Centuries, but old, & obsolete, such as could never have infected anie, but such an extravagant head as mine’ (RM 1.6). Browne’s tone seems off-hand, as if he were both dismissing and taking a kind of casual pride in his youthful heresies. However, as he begins to enumerate these errors, it becomes clear that he is more apprehensive about his lapses than he seems—and that he is hardly telling his reader the full story. His first heresy, he says, ‘was that errour of the Arabians, that the soules of men perished with their bodies, but should both bee raised againe at the last day’ (RM 1.7). Browne is correct in describing this as an old heresy, but in the 1630s it was far from obsolete. In fact, during the Reformation both psychosomnolence—the belief that the soul sleeps until the resurrection—and thnetopsychism—the belief that the body and soul both die and then both rise again—were quite common; Martin Luther himself appears to have subscribed to a form of psychosomnolence.17 The northern Italian humanists—including those centered in the University of Padua—were also notably skeptical about the immortality of the soul, and it was their vocal doubts that led directly to the fifth Lateran Council’s condemnation of psychosomnolence 17 George Hunston Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962), 104.

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in 1515.18 Although the council met more than a century before Browne reached Padua, the heresy was still very much alive there, and Religio Medici indicates that Browne was familiar with the works of at least one of the Paduan skeptics—Pietro Pomponazzi, whose statements on the nature of the soul Browne alludes to later in this same section.19 Browne’s second and third heresies, which are equally concerned with what happens after bodily death, should raise similar red flags. He describes his second error as ‘that of the [O]riginists or Chiliasts, that God would not allwaies persist in his veangance, but after a definite terme of his wrath hee would release the damned soules from torture’ (RM 1.7). Where or how Browne came upon this heresy is unclear, although Origen was a favorite with many Renaissance humanists, in part because of his early immersion in the philosophy of Plato and the Stoics—and possibly also because Origen argued that those virtuous pagans who had the misfortune to be born before Christ might nevertheless be saved. Browne’s third heresy, a belief in the efficacy of prayers for the dead, is even further from being obsolete than the other two, being, after all, current practice in the Catholic Church (RM 1.7). Browne spends a fair amount of time describing and excusing these heresies on the grounds that his motives were always good—for instance, in thinking that the damned might eventually be saved he was carried away with a love of God’s mercy—but in the end he undoes all these excuses by declaring that his errors were not really heresies to begin with: these opinions I never maintained with pertinacity, or endeavoured to inveigh anie mans beliefe to mine; not soe much as ever revealed, or disputed them with my dearest friends, by which meanes I never propagated them in others, nor confirm’d them in my selfe; but suffring them to flame upon their owne substance without addition of new fewell they went out allmost of themselves. Therefore these opinions though condemned by law, were not heresies in mee but bare errours, & single lapses of my understanding without a joint depravity of my will. (RM 1.7)

18 See Maurice Kelley (ed.), The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Vol. 6 (New Haven, 1955), 92; Williams (1962), 22. 19 Pomponazzi maintained his allegiance to the Catholic Church by declaring that, since the immortality of the soul could not be proved philosophically, it must be accepted on ecclesiastical authority. (See Anthony Levi, Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis (New Haven, 2003), 164–5, and the ‘Pomponazzi’ entry in The Catholic Encyclopedia.) In Religio Medici, Browne describes mortalism as something ‘which faith not philosophy can throughly disprove’ (RM 1.7).

Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith / 159 Despite his earlier claim that he outgrew his heresies, and despite the good impulses that supposedly undergirded them, Browne now denies that they even were heresies to begin with; instead, they amounted only to private errors of reason made by one who nevertheless always regarded himself as a conforming Christian. However confident Browne may say he is that these lapses did not amount to heresies, his many different explanations for their innocuousness, and especially the alterations that he makes to this portion of Religio in the work’s later two versions, suggest that he himself is not as convinced as he would have his readers be. Whereas in the Pembroke manuscript Browne’s announcement that he always follows the great wheel of his church in order to keep himself free from heresies is immediately followed by a discussion of those errors that ‘polluted’ his ‘greener studies’, which is then followed by his denial that these even were heresies to begin with, in Religio’s second and third versions Browne makes a number of changes. After his remark about following the wheel of his church, he inserts a long, leisurely, very general discussion of heresies and their tendency to disappear in one place only to pop up again in another. Then he discusses his own heresies, and after that he inserts a reflection about the villainy of Lucifer and all subsequent schismatics, as well as another very general meditation on the fact that we have Christ’s word that heresies will always arise, but no guarantee that they will disappear. Finally, he gets to the disclaimer for his own heresies. These changes more than double the amount of text in which Browne discusses heresy, but at the same time they significantly dilute the autobiographical content of the subject. As rewritten in the version that most readers know, Browne’s own heresies are easily overlooked; they seem, in fact, like mere illustrations of a larger point about the nature of heresy—when, in the original work, they were the point. If Browne’s nervousness about these three heresies causes him to leave out some of their important details, there is yet another heresy that he never even mentions, but whose fingerprints are all over Religio: anti-trinitarianism. This was also a resilient heresy throughout the Renaissance and Reformation, perhaps because the scriptural evidence for a tripartite God is rather scanty, and the evidence for a co-equal, co-eternal tripartite God almost non-existent; one can imagine that Browne—who wrestles so mightily with such Biblical brain-teasers as how Noah could have fitted all those animals in the ark, along with enough food to sustain them (RM 1.22)—would have tried to reconcile the Church’s notion of the Trinity with the scriptural

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evidence for it. Anti-trinitarianism also frequently went hand in hand with mortalism, and Browne’s discussion of his one Origenist heresy may hint at a second: Origen was frequently accused of a form of anti-trinitarianism much like Arianism.20 The evidence, however, is more than merely circumstantial. Although Browne’s statements on the Trinity throughout Religio maintain a superficial orthodoxy, there are signs of great strain. In the Pembroke manuscript, the section immediately following the one in which Browne discusses his heresies is a consideration of ‘those wingie misteries of Divinity, & aerie subtilties of Religion, which have unhing’d the braines of better heads’ (RM 1.9).21 But Browne assures his readers that his own brains are in no danger: ‘I love to loose my selfe in a misterie’, he writes in the passage with which I began this essay; ‘t’is my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involv’d Enigma’s & riddles of the Trinity, Incarnation and resurrection[;] I can answer all the objections of Satan, & my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learn’d of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est’ (RM 1.9). Once again Browne presents himself as someone who is cheerfully following the wheel of his church, undisturbed by what he cannot fully understand. However, only a few sections later, the Trinity appears to give him more trouble: ‘There is noe attribute’, Browne reflects—meaning, attribute of God—‘adds more difficulty then the misterie of the trinity; where though in a relative way of father & son, wee must denie a priority. I wonder how Aristotle should conceive the world eternall, or how hee could make good 2 eternities’ (RM 1.12).22 As Browne attempts to understand a Christian mystery such as the Trinity, it is striking that he has recourse, in this passage as in the previous one, to an ancient writer: first it was the patristic Tertullian, but now it is Aristotle. In fact, as this section continues, Browne eventually has recourse to three, moving from Aristotle to Pythagoras to Hermes Trismegistus as he searches for the right metaphor and skitters away from a direct investigation of the paradox of the Trinity. I will quote the entire remainder of the section to illustrate the uneasy progress of Browne’s argument: 20 ‘Origen’, Catholic Encyclopedia. 21 The section now numbered 1.8 was added by Browne for the 1643 version and does not exist in any form in the earlier two versions. 22 In Religio’s later two versions the first part of this line is revised to read—less controversially, although also less comprehensibly—‘There is no attribute adds more difficulty to the mystery of the trinity’ (emphasis added).

Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith / 161 [Aristotle’s] similitude of a triangle comprehended in a square doth somewhat illustrate the Trinitie of our soules, & that the triple unitie of God[,] for there is in us not 3 but a Trinity of soules; because there is within us if not 3 distinct soules, yet different faculties that doe and can subsist apart in different subjects, yet in us are so united as to make but one soule & substance[;] if one soule were soe perfect as to informe 3 distinct bodies that were a petty Trinity[;] conceive the distinct number of 3 not divided or separated by the intellect, but actually comprehended in it’s unity; & that is a perfect Trinity; I have often admired the mysticall way of Pythagoras, & the secret Magicke of Numbers. Beware of philosophie, t’is a precept not to bee received in a narrow sense; for in the masse of nature there is a sett of things which carrie in their front, though not in capitall letters; yet in stenography, & short character, something of divinity, which to wiser reasons seeme as Luminaries in the A.B.C. of knowledge, & to judicious beliefe, as scales & roundels to mount the pinacles, & highest peeces of Divinity; the severe schooles shall not laugh mee out of the phylosophie of Hermes; that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a portraite things are not truly but in Equivocall shapes, & as their counterfaites some more reall substance in that invisible fabricke. (RM 1.12)

Browne begins by declaring that there is no aspect of the Trinity more difficult than the co-equality and co-eternality of its three persons. He then turns to Aristotle, implying that the Greek would be baffled by the idea of three eternities—but immediately concludes that, actually, Aristotle’s metaphor of a triangle inscribed in a square, which indicates the tripartite nature of the soul, works as a metaphor for the divine Trinity as well. But Browne does not rest here, instead veering off into a discussion of the three faculties of the soul—which he admits is not really the same thing as three distinct souls—and so in effect he starts over: what if, he says, there were instead not three souls in one body, but only one soul that animated three different bodies? That, he claims, would be ‘a petty Trinity’. Perhaps, but from the standpoint of the Church it would also be a heresy: Sabellianism. Whereas Arians believed that there were three distinct persons in the godhead who were not perfectly co-equal (the Father existing before and willing into being the other two persons), Sabellians took the reverse position, envisioning a single divine person who assumed three different (but co-equal) forms.23 In Browne’s attempt to describe the Trinity, he begins by wrestling with what seems an essentially Arian notion of the godhead—the difficulty of 23 I am indebted to Maurice Kelley’s description of the relationship between these two heresies (Kelley, Prose Works of Milton (1955), vi. 48–9).

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‘deny[ing] a priority’ to the divine persons—but ends by having talked himself away from that and into the opposite, Sabellian, extreme. Browne may or may not have realized the heretical nature of his example, but he certainly does not seem satisfied with it as a description. Instead, he makes one last attempt to understand the Trinity, by trying to ‘conceive the distinct number of three not divided or separated by the intellect, but actually comprehended in its unity’; this, of course, is not so much a description of the Trinity as it is a definition. At this point, Browne abandons his efforts to understand the nature of the Trinity. He begins to speak loftily but rather irrelevantly of ‘Pythagoras, & the secret Magicke of Numbers’, and then of ‘the phylosophie of Hermes; that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible’—never mind that he has not actually provided an example of anything in the visible world that could serve as a picture of the Trinity. By the end of the section he has completely failed to come to terms with the nature of this mystery, but by changing the subject to something about which he can take a definite stand—that oddly defiant assertion, ‘the severe schooles shall not laugh me out of the phylosophie of Hermes’—he seems to be trying to distract his audience from this failure, and perhaps also himself. There are other indications of Browne’s possible anti-trinitarian sympathies. He immediately discounts the only scriptural passage that he produces as possible evidence for the Trinity (‘faciamus hominem’, from the beginning of Genesis),24 and in the entire Religio Browne mentions the Holy Ghost only once, in passing.25 I agree with Leonard Nathanson that Browne also seems generally uninterested in the second person of the Trinity, although he does routinely refer to Jesus as ‘my Saviour’ and at one point goes out of his way to say of him, ‘I believe hee was dead[,] buried & rose againe’ (RM 1.9).26 But while this statement of belief should be thoroughly unremarkable—it is practically a 24 Some people, Browne says, would ‘proove the Trinity from that speech of Gods in the plurall number[,] faciamus hominem, let us make man, which is but the common style of princes, & men of eminency[;] hee that shall reade one of his Majesties proclamations, may with the same Logicke conclude there bee two Kings in England’ (RM 1.22). 25 See RM 1.20: ‘Those that have wickedly denied the divinity of the holy Ghost have beene condemmed but as Heretiques; & those that now denie our Saviour though more then Heretiques are not soe much as Atheists’. Although Browne implies that the Holy Ghost is divine, he also seems to subordinate its importance to that of the Son. In the second-stage revision of the work Browne will add an entirely new section, 1.32, which contains a second discussion of the Holy Spirit. 26 Nathanson (1967), 93.

Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith / 163 line from the Apostles’ Creed—it comes in a work that is starved for such statements. A similarly forceful and similarly suspect statement of belief appears in a meditation midway through Religio. Browne has again been worrying about whether the soul is organic or inorganic; when and how it gets infused into the body; and what happens to it after bodily death (RM 1.36–7). At the end of these speculations, Browne suddenly launches into an impromptu creed: I beleeve that the whole composition or frame of a beast doth perish after his death; and is left in the same estate after death as before it was materiall[ed] unto life[;] that the soules of men know neither contrary nor corruption[,] that they subsist beyond the body, & outlive death by the priviledge of their proper nature & without a miracle, that the soules of the faithfull as they leave earth take possession of heaven, that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandering soules of men; but the unquiet walkes of Devills. (RM 1.37)

Syntactically, this passage is more direct and affirmative than most in Religio Medici; there are almost none of the tangled negative constructions, ambiguous pronouns, or anxiously qualifying conjunctions so characteristic of Browne; for once, his meaning is absolutely clear. However, since we know from his earlier discussion of his heresies that at one point in his life he held views about the soul quite contrary to those expressed here, this passage, like those on the Trinity, should alert us to his continuing nervousness about his ostensibly repudiated heresies. It is impossible to know whether Browne makes these statements in good faith, and his precise beliefs at the moment of writing are really beside the point. What seems clear is that he is anxious about his orthodoxy when it comes to the Trinity—as he is when it comes to the nature of the soul—and when he has failed either to describe or to reason himself through that mystery, he resorts to a blunt declaration of faith otherwise wholly out of character for the work. For although catechetical works seem to have provided some initial inspiration for Religio, the declarative mode with which Browne opens the work proves to be one to which he is largely unable to return. If Browne indeed began Religio Medici because he was concerned about how well his beliefs, influenced by years abroad in relatively free-thinking circles, now squared with the increasingly rigid positions of the English Church, it has to be said that he seems not to have resolved these anxieties with total success. Although he begins virtually every section of Religio Medici by contemplating

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a more or less theological issue, as the work progresses his explorations of these issues become diluted by his autobiographical investigations into his own temperament and intellectual processes. He may still begin sentences with the phrase ‘I confess’, but what Browne actually confesses is, increasingly, a habit, opinion, or personality trait rather than an article of faith. Browne continues to make nervous gestures in the direction of orthodoxy— especially when he seems to think that he has strayed too far from it—but we wind up learning surprisingly little about Browne’s position on most essential matters of Christian belief. Of course, it is possible that Browne simply does not have any view about— or any real interest in—many of the expected articles of faith; it is striking, for example, how little he says about sacramental issues such as infant baptism or the nature of the Eucharist.27 For Browne, science, philosophy, and religion bleed into each other to an extraordinary degree, and it is likely that his heresies and heterodoxies owe less to the influence of radical Christian thinkers or any particular religious sect than to what he calls, in the work’s opening sentence, ‘the naturall [i.e., the scientific and philosophical] course of [his] studies’ (RM 1.1). As I noted in Browne’s discussions of the Trinity, when dealing with things of a spiritual nature he refers surprisingly often to the works of the ancient pagans, especially the Epicureans and the Stoics, and from Religio’s very first line he seems preoccupied with warding off whatever suspicion of atheism might attach to this fondness. Browne’s affection for classical thinkers clearly makes him nervous.28 He reveals to his reader that he has actually gone so far as to attempt to live his life according to the moral philosophy of the Stoics—trying, he says, to ‘reach that great resolution of [Seneca’s], & be honest without a thought either of heaven or hell’ (RM 1.43). Apparently he succeeded at this task, but he insists that he found his resolution but weak and doubts whether he could have persevered in that course for very long. This account may well be the truth, but the way that Browne seems once again to be pulling himself up short is striking. Perhaps he is afraid of the results if he were to pursue his Senecan inclinations any further, or perhaps he is unwilling to tell his audience the full story of whatever may actually have happened when he attempted to lead a strictly Stoic life. 27 Browne mentions baptism twice in passing and communion once, also in passing (RM 1.44 and 2.7). 28 On Browne’s reading of classical writing see the essays by Shuger, Guibbory, and Parry in this volume.

Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith / 165 Browne’s attraction to the Stoics appears to have been both intellectual and temperamental. Whatever some Christian interpreters might be inclined to think, the Stoics believed in the soul’s mortality—indeed, they denied that there was anything at all after death—and they regarded human life as a generally cold and irrational affair.29 As we have seen, each of Browne’s heresies is concerned, to a greater or lesser degree, with what happens after death, and his uneasiness about the nature of the soul echoes throughout Religio. Moreover, by his own description Browne appears to have suffered from fits of melancholy, and he certainly seems to have been in the grip of one as he wrote Religio. In addition to his apparent worries about his orthodoxy, Browne is preoccupied by his approaching thirtieth birthday, which he never mentions without seeming to heave a deep sigh; he refers to suicide three times (two of these references are deleted in later versions of the work); discusses marriage and children with a lack of interest bordering on contempt; and indicates that he feels the entire world to be in a state of decline.30 Such a temperament may have made the writings of the Stoics congenial to Browne, and their philosophy may also have provided him with a certain degree of solace in his more depressive moments. However, as appealing as moral philosophy may have been to him, it seems to have lacked one important element. After describing his attempts to live according to the precepts of Seneca, Browne concludes: The life therefore & Spirit of all our actions, is the resurrection, & stable apprehension, that our [ashes] shall enjoy the fruits of our pious endeavours[;] without this all religion is a fallacie, & those impieties of Lucian, Euripides, & Julian are noe blasphemies, but subtile verities, & Atheists have been the onely Philosophers. (RM 1.47)

What religion offers Browne in this account is not so much a way to live a good life as the hope for something beyond life. Christianity may not have proven itself essential for a moral existence, and Religio Medici certainly 29 R. W. Sharples, Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics (London, 1996), 94–9; A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (London, 1974), 41 ff. For more on Browne and Stoicism see Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst, 1998), 226–7, 236; Preston (2005), 67–72. 30 Browne refers to his age in the sections that would eventually become RM 1.39, 1.41, 1.42, and 2.11; to suicide in 1.38, 1.44, and 2.7 (the only one of these that remains in the authorized version of 1643 is that in 1.44, which seems, at least superficially, to condemn the Stoics’ exalting of suicide as a means to end troubles); to the impermanence of all natural bonds in 2.5, 2.9, and 2.14; and to the decline of the world in 1.17 and 1.45.

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shows that it contains doctrines that Browne finds vexing, but I think it is not too much to say that it offers him a refuge from despair that classical philosophy does not: a religion or moral system without the hope of life after death deserves to have its gods mocked as Lucian and Euripides mocked theirs, or to be disestablished as the Emperor Julian disestablished Christianity. Religio Medici is thus the portrait of a man whose Christianity is quite sincere—if uneasy and not entirely orthodox—and who very much wants to find comfort in the arms of the Church of England. This desire and this nervousness are underscored by many of the changes that Browne makes to the later versions of the work. I have already noted a few of these changes, which, as a rule, work to temper or even obscure his statements on religious matters. In addition to more substantive alterations, he continually moderates or qualifies formerly absolute statements, as when he replaces such remarks as ‘I believe’ with ‘I could believe’ or ‘it is’ with ‘I think it is’. These changes suggest that as Browne revised his work he did so with an eye towards a different audience and a different political climate. It may be that the first version of Religio Medici had already circulated, in manuscript, beyond a community of Browne’s intimates, or it may be that Browne saw the potential of the new version to do so, but either way he seems to be anticipating a readership that does not know him intimately, and before whom he must be more circumspect.31 What a careful reading of Religio Medici in all the stages of its composition reveals is that the work is both autobiography and artifice; it is neither a straightforward reflection of its author’s personality nor an impenetrable mask. Rather, the work seems to have been motivated by a genuinely autobiographical desire: Browne’s impulse to take stock of himself and his beliefs, and to reassure himself that he is at least still orthodox enough. However, the anxiety that prompts this self-scrutiny—Browne’s evident nervousness about that orthodoxy—causes him to project an idealized and perhaps somewhat fictitious self. Browne’s may well have been a whimsical and extravagant personality, but such scholarship as regards his dilations and expansions as merely playful misses their compulsive and circular nature, as 31 For a more detailed look at the changes that Browne made between the second and third versions of the Religio see Jonathan F. S. Post, ‘Browne’s Revisions of Religio Medici’, Studies in English Literature 25 (1985), 145–63, as well as Conti, which discusses the nature of the changes between versions one and two.

Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith / 167 well as the escape they seem to provide him from the dangerous temptations of reason. As he writes: [T]’is not an easie point of art to [u]ntangle our selves from this riddle & web of sin . . . wee naturally know what is good, yet naturally pursue what is evill; the Rhetoricke wherewith I perswade another I cannot persuade my selfe. (RM 1.54)

We probably cannot know whether Browne ever did persuade himself of his orthodoxy, but Religio Medici stands as a complex record of that attempt.

8 Brownean Motion: Conversation within Pseudodoxia Epidemica’s ‘Sober Circumference of Knowledge’ William N. West

I intend no Monopoly, but a Community in learning. Sir Thomas Browne (RM 2.3)

Seventeenth-century readers approached Thomas Browne as an encyclopedic polymath with wide-ranging opinions of general interest in science and religion. But for much of the twentieth century, Browne was read principally as a prose stylist, often with the unstated assumptions that the style was the man, and also perhaps that the reader was the author—learned, tasteful, tolerant, and exceptional.1 The mobility of Browne’s distinctive style continues to be seen as an essential content of his writing among academic critics, from Morris Croll’s germinal analysis of Browne’s ‘baroque’ style as imitating ‘the movements of a mind discovering truth as it goes’ to Stanley 1 See, e.g., Virginia Woolf ’s discussion of Browne as a character study and ‘the first of the autobiographers’ in ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’ (The Common Reader (New York, 1925), 61–72,) or the narrator of Borges’ ‘Tlo¨n, Uqbar Orbis Tertius’ in Ficciones (New York, 1962), 17–35, who at the end of the story turns in despair to translating Urne-Buriall; see, too, Rosenstein’s essay in this volume.

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Fish’s reading of Browne as ‘the bad physician’ more concerned with pleasing than with correcting.2 More recent analyses have explored Browne’s elliptical compositional structures and virtuosic play of language as symptoms of cultural elitism or his accommodation to the dangers of writing against a dominant politics.3 Browne’s stylistic singularity may speak for itself, but readers have characterized it as agile and unpredictable in its metonymic ‘freedom of intellectual movement’, capacious but evasive in organization (‘Browne did not provide digressions for his nominal subject: he provided a nominal subject for his digressions’), of ‘such voluptuous baroquosity it melts the straight lines of the Euclidean universe, [and] stretches every assumption of Cartesian logic’—above all, that is, as topically, semantically, and syntactically mobile.4 The ongoing interest in Browne’s style has been coupled with an emphasis on his more obviously essayistic works like Religio Medici or Urne-Buriall. About Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne’s very popular refutation of popular errors, critics have had less to say.5 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, after all, seems to want to be about something. Browne’s capacity for circumlocution, digressions, and 2 Morris W. Croll, ‘The Baroque Style in Prose’, in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, ed. J. Max Patrick, Robert O. Evans, with John M. Wallace and R. J. Schoeck (Princeton, 1966), 221; Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley, 1972), ch. 7. 3 Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1987), 89–113; Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1998); Anne Cotterill, Digressive Voices in Early Modern Literature (Oxford, 2004), ch. 3. 4 Quotations are from Robin Robbins, ‘Browne’s Cosmos Imagined: Nature, Man, and God in Pseudodoxia Epidemica’, in C. A. Patrides (ed.), Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays (London and Columbia, MO, 1982), 162; C. A. Patrides, ‘ ‘‘The Best Part of Nothing’’: Sir Thomas Browne and the Strategy of Indirection’, in Patrides (ed.), (1982), 38; and Tony Kushner, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and the Restoration’, the introduction to Hydriotaphia; or, The Death of Dr. Browne, in Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia & Other Plays (New York, 2000), 34. On Browne’s style see also Daniela Havenstein, Democratizing Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici and its Imitators (Oxford, 1999); Victoria Silver, ‘Liberal Theology and Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘‘Soft and Flexible’’ Discourse’, ELR, 20 (1990), 69–105; Ted-Larry Pebworth, ‘Wandering in the America of Truth: Pseudodoxia Epidemica and the Essay Tradition’, in Patrides (ed.) (1982), 166–77, and in fact most of the essays in Patrides (ed.) (1982), Croll (1966); Fish (1972); and Seelig’s essay in this volume. 5 Pseudodoxia was first published in 1646 and reprinted in 1650, twice in 1658, 1669, and 1672, each time but one with various revisions. The book was a tremendous success in Europe as well, going through many more editions and printings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries including translations into German, Dutch, French, and Italian. For the publication history, see Robbins, i. xxxix f. on Browne’s delight in the book, Pebworth (1982), 166.

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recondite lexical elements is undiminished in Pseudodoxia,6 but its style fulfills a distinct function: it introduces other views and especially other viewers and engages them in conversation. It is neither Croll’s representation of the uneven rhythms of thought nor an instrument to provoke (or, as Fish thinks, to anesthetize) introspection. Its rehearsal of nearly synonymous instances (whether redundant or ever more finely discriminating), digressive organization, and strenuous vocabulary are instruments allowing different voices to be brought into a shared arena. Pseudodoxia Epidemica’s wandering course encourages not just an inward-looking meditation but a conversation among diverging voices that Browne anticipates will, in their mutual challenges, corrections, and propositions, open a path towards knowledge. Browne’s movement from topic to topic might be described—exploiting the homology of the names and the digressive meditations in which Browne himself indulged—as Brownian motion, the distinctive, wandering, lively motion of particles suspended in a fluid. Wonderful though it would be, Brownian motion does not take its name from Sir Thomas Browne, but from its discoverer, the nineteenth-century biologist Robert Brown. Brownian motion is random, but can be analyzed probabilistically; while no particular movement of a particle can be predicted with certainty, it is possible to determine a probable distribution of events within a bounded space and/or time. This stochastic, non-deterministic process also characterizes Browne’s writing in Pseudodoxia, in which even a comparatively staid chapter ‘Concerning the Loadstone’ begins with the question whether iron draws magnets as well as the reverse, moves on to the possibility of similar ‘hidden qualities’ (PE 2.3.112) in non-metallic bodies, and touches on Paracelsus’s attempts to turn ‘humane ordure’ (PE 2.3.104) into a perfume, asks whether or not the tomb of Mohammed floats between powerful magnets, and weighs the possibilities of sympathetic magic before concluding with praise for the fertility of the magnet in generating interesting tales. But Browne’s writing, while it wanders, always stays within a few turns of its topic; Browne’s digressions are allowed by his sense of the ultimate, if inarticulable, relatedness of things and their ultimate inclusion under God. 6 Claire Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005), 88–9, corrects Austin Warren’s claim that PE is written in the plain style, although she acknowledges a stylistic difference between this work and Browne’s others. PE remains marked by digression and other figures of thought characteristic of the essay; see Havenstein (1999), 104–28; Pebworth (1982); and Patrides, ‘Strategies’ in Patrides (ed.) (1982).


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My likening of Browne and Brownian motion indulges in a quasi-allegorical, half-informed deployment of scientific terminology, a weaker example of the sort of analogic or metonymic thinking that Thomas Browne regularly exercises. But this seemingly eccentric meditation is also Pseudodoxia Epidemica’s characteristic tactic for bringing the world under investigation. Writings from the seventeenth century, including Pseudodoxia Epidemica, were instrumental in establishing the modern definitions under which allegory and science do not mix, assigning knowledge to science and illusion to allegory. But although Pseudodoxia repeatedly urges experiment as a way of testing error, Browne never dismisses speculative thinking, even in the sciences. The chapter ‘Concerning the Loadstone’ ends by surveying not what loadstones are, but how they provide their investigators with things to think and talk about: Other Discourses there might be made of the Loadstone, as Morall, Mysticall, Theologicall; and some have handsomly done them . . . but these fall under no rule, and are as boundlesse as mens inventions; and though honest minds do glorifie God hereby, yet do they most powerfully magnifie him, and are to be looked on with another eye, who demonstratively set forth its Magnalities, who not from postulated or precarious inferences, entreate a courteous assent, but from experiments and undeniable effects, enforce the wonder of its Maker. (PE 2.3.115)

‘Morall, Mysticall, Theologicall’ discourses entreat where ‘experiments and undeniable effects’ enforce, but both are imagined here as bids for certain kinds of agreement from others, and their distinct effects are both human responses, assent or wonder. Startlingly, given the strength Browne attributes to experiment in engaging the world, ‘mens inventions’ lead to ways of understanding the object of attention, whereas experimental evidence leads the mind away from it to speculation on the divine. In Religio Medici, Browne describes the world he inhabits as a dissemination of things that at creation ‘lay involved in one masse’ and that are tending over time towards absolute dispersal into a ‘wildernesse of forms’, at which point of maximum entropy, ‘God by a powerfull voyce shall command them back into their proper shapes’ (RM 1.48) and restore their order.7 This is a 7 Browne’s complex attitude towards errancy, error, knowledge, and certainty is frequently acknowledged, and Browne offers many memorable phrases for it (as in the title of this article as well). Preston has a heading in her chapter on Pseudodoxia Epidemica entitled ‘The Wilderness of Forms’; see also John R. Knott, Jr., ‘Sir Thomas Browne and the Labyrinth of Truth’, in Patrides (ed.) (1982), 19–30; Pebworth (1982); Patrides ‘Strategies’ (1982).

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natural world imagined from the perspective of eternity, as it were, outside its own bounds—a story of fall and redemption from the standpoint of the redeemed. Pseudodoxia Epidemica is likewise written awaiting the ‘hopefull dominion of truth’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 3), but it emphasizes crossing the unredeemed wilderness of forms rather than dwelling, or dreaming of dwelling, in an unachieved ‘Paradise or unthorny place of knowledge’ (PE 1.5.30). Its wandering takes place within what Browne calls ‘the sober circumference of knowledge’ (PE 1.5.30), the orderly edge of what can be known, but he introduces a catch in the form of a differing perspective: in this Encyclopædie and round of knowledge, like the great and exemplary wheeles of heaven, wee must observe two Circles: that while we are daily carried about and whirled in by the swindge and rapt of the one, wee may maintaine a naturall and proper course, in the slow and sober wheele of the other. (PE ‘To the Reader’, 1)

Within the stable structure of the ‘slow and sober wheele’ of the great circle of the year, Browne’s study traces the unpredictable and ‘daily’ movement of error, seeking to limit it through ‘the two great pillars of truth, experience and solid reason’ (PE 3.28.288), so that its chaotic whirl is seen to be contained within an ordered wheel.8 As this passage suggests, Pseudodoxia Epidemica is an encyclopedia, or antiencyclopedia, that catalogs popular errors of belief to expose and dismiss—if not always to correct—them, through the weighing of authorities, reasoning, and experience that support them. The premise that the garden of knowledge needed weeding was central to many works of the new science in the first half of the century. Rene´ Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) opens with his decision to demolish the received assumptions of his education, and Francis Bacon had argued the need for a ‘Kalendar of popular errors’ as a preliminary step towards his universal program of science.9 But Browne’s execution of the project revealed a set of unforeseen complications in the imagined relations between theory and experience, just as his encyclopedic round of knowledge shows two patterns of 8 See also ‘the definitive confirmatory and test of things uncertain, the sense of man’ (PE 3.12.202). Throughout, Browne relies on experience to reject beliefs, e.g., ‘enquiry and ocular experience’ (PE 2.5.136). On the ambivalent imagery of the circle and the encyclopedia in Browne see Achsah Guibbory, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica and the Circle of Knowledge’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 18 (1976), 486–99. 9 Descartes, Second Discourse, in A Discourse on Method: Meditations and Principles, trans. John Veitch (North Clarendon, VT, 2004), 9; Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan, The Oxford Francis Bacon, Vol. 4 of (Oxford, 2000), 91–3.


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circulation that are not easily reconciled. The world’s complexity and obscurity are significant causes of error, but a still more pronounced cause is confusion in ways of describing the world. Browne’s approach in Pseudodoxia Epidemica is necessarily discursive, since it is directed at the discourses within which error accumulates. It proposes that before investigators can agree on the nature of things, they must come to terms with their distinct ways of talking about them.10 The solution it undertakes is to convert disagreement about the nature of the world into grounds for discussing approaches to its understanding. The elusive, suggestive, propositional meander of Pseudodoxia Epidemica aims to question received ideas and to spur the formulation of new ones. In this its mobile writing differs from that of ‘learned Philosophers and criticall Philogers’, who seek to know and tell the truth directly and whose ‘exacter performances our adventures do but sollicite’ (PE 5.23.439). The writings of such exacter men are, as Browne shows, apt to come too quickly to conclusions that cannot be supported except by their own authority. Solicitations like Browne’s, simultaneously challenging and calling forth the work of those who know, are the motor for the continuing progress of knowledge.11

I Browne begins Pseudodoxia Epidemica with a contrafactual enthymeme, showing how what is not the case requires his book: ‘Would Truth dispense, we could be content, with Plato, that knowledge were but Remembrance’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 1). Contrafactual statements, like propositions of undecideable alternatives, are stylistically prominent in Pseudodoxia Epidemica in part because they are rhetorically central to its project. Such sentences introduce a topic, in this case the impulse to seek knowledge in the form of memory, whether individual or cultural, and then decline either to affirm or to negate it fully. Browne acknowledges the desire that knowledge could be attained through better archiving, but in so doing admits the wishful thinking that entails: 10 The phrase ‘ways of talking’ is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s recurrent, intentionally flat attempt to resist justifying language games: ‘the language-game is . . . not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there—like our life’ (On Certainty (Oxford, 1969), 73). 11 Browne would not have needed Derrida to see the double sense of sollicitare: to entreat and shake; Jacques Derrida, ‘Diffe`rance’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1982), 21.

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knowledge is not the recovery of a truth once possessed, despite the Platonizing desire ‘that Intellectual acquisition were but Reminiscentiall evocation, and new impressions but the colourishing of old stamps which stood pale in the soul before’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 1). The mistake here, like that in the encyclopedic tradition, is not the commitment to the unity of knowledge, which Browne is also ready to imagine, at least in revelation. It is complacency towards that unity. Browne foresees the attainment of perfect knowledge only in a divine futurity or a paradise lost, whereas Platonism and encyclopedism are committed to the human possibility of an immediate consonance of truth and knowledge. In Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon had proposed a ‘Georgics of the mind’ that would not be fitted to what people already knew, but would offer a strenuous way forward towards further, fuller understandings. Pseudodoxia Epidemica is a work for a georgic present. In Platonism and encyclopedism, all that is knowable has a synoptic and quasi-visual order, and right knowing reflects that order.12 Were these theories correct, truth itself would guarantee the agreement of those who know, and their community would have little independent interest. As Bacon observed in his analysis of the idols of the market-place and of the theater, though, communities gather around error as readily as around truth and then perpetuate their false beliefs by substituting consensus for observation. As Pseudodoxia’s address ‘To the Reader’ makes clear, community of belief is far from a guarantee of accuracy. In fact, error is often caused by a premature instinct for community. One opinion forcibly expressed and disseminated through a group takes root as a ‘Goliah and Gyant of Authority’, and once this happens, further debate is discouraged by the ‘difficulty of disswasion from radicated beliefs’ and ‘strength of opinion’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 2–3). Pseudodoxia Epidemica’s title addresses itself to communities that have stopped seeking the truth because they assume they have found it. Doxa is the Platonic term for unfounded common opinion, whether right or wrong, as distinct from knowledge, episte¯me¯.13 This unfounded opinion is epidemic, spread across the demos or community, ‘as boundless as mens inventions’ but everywhere resistant to change because of their inertial 12 An example of contemporary scientific ‘unification metaphysics’ is Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York, 1998), 6. On the history of the encyclopedic tradition see my Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), esp. ch. 1. 13 The distinction is introduced in Meno and developed in Gorgias and Republic.


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‘supinity’ (PE 1.5.28). Pseudodoxia thus describes the problem of education as political as much as epistemological: it can identify false belief, but it must correct it by reforming the wrongly constituted society of potential and actual knowers. Bacon and Descartes avoid the problem of resistance to change in their theories by authorizing themselves as new centers of knowledge. Descartes treats the community of custom as a practical limit to what a seeker can undertake. Communally held beliefs restrict the innovations that can be undertaken on behalf of a group, not only because it may resist change but because abandoning shared beliefs itself may be too destructive. Descartes’s theory demands an individual as an avant-garde: it is not customary to pull down all the houses of a town with the single design of rebuilding them differently, and thereby rendering the streets more handsome; but it often happens that a private individual takes down his own with the view of erecting it anew.14

The scale of Bacon’s advancement of learning requires co-operative work, but its impetus and design come from a monarchical ‘Architect in this building’ of knowledge.15 Bacon’s scientific utopia New Atlantis (published 1627) imagines a hierarchical community guided towards the pursuit of knowledge by the investigators of the House of Salomon, who direct the efforts of their subordinate knowledge-workers, who do not understand how their individual tasks come together.16 A unified leadership like Bacon’s or Descartes’s is capable of focused activity against ‘radicated beliefs’. But to put too much trust in such an individual risks erecting a new ‘Gyant of authority’, which will once again impede progress towards truth. Pseudodoxia Epidemica’s approach to stirring a change in communally held belief differs from both of these positions. Unlike Descartes, Browne assumes that the reformation of knowledge must from the beginning include the group, since reformation relies on the group to ratify and extend Pseudodoxia Epidemica’s discoveries. Unlike Bacon, Browne rejects a hierarchy in which knowledge is reserved for a few, although he shares Bacon’s doubts that it will appeal to all 14 Descartes, 2, 11. 15 Sylva Sylvarum; or, A naturall historie (1626), ‘To the Reader’, n.p., written by Bacon’s chaplain, William Rawley. 16 In The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, ed. Thomas Case (Oxford, 1969); see also Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, NC, 1996), 107–12.

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equally. Pseudodoxia Epidemica presents knowledge as the shared property of a group that is projected rather than existing.17 Browne mediates between a ‘Dictator-like’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 4) control over the production of knowledge and capitulation to the ‘Democraticall enemies of truth’ (PE 1.3.21) by distributing the effort and the understanding among equals along the model of conversation, in which there is no authority to compel assent and no prohibition to taking part. Whereas the truth is singular and so can be revealed from many sides, error is protean and infinite. Only God is free from ‘the impossible society of error’ (PE 1.1.9); for mankind ‘opinions are free, and open it is for any to thinke or declare the contrary’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 4). But human proneness to error also makes error a possible if unpredictable resource for the revision of wrong opinion, one opinion, as it were, loosening another and making it possible to see it otherwise. As divergence from established positions, error represents the possibility of change and is at least potentially positive. This potential profit from error is what Browne hopes to benefit from when he emphasizes his willingness ‘to bee swallowed in any worthy enlarger’, ‘humbly acknowledging a worke of such concernment unto truth, and difficulty in it selfe, did well deserve the conjunction of many heads’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 4). Pseudodoxia Epidemica welcomes addition, correction, or simply argument, if only because they prevent its writing from freezing in place. This errancy of thought is how science, as an active knowing rather than as a static knowledge, can advance, which is to say, reveal its own always-unrealized tendency towards truth. Pseudodoxia Epidemica must not only expose error, then, but to some extent promote it as well, since error perpetuates the activity of thought. In order to maintain the mobility of belief, it is necessary that the writer be a single voice within a group—neither a dictator nor one of the undifferentiated heads of a multitude, but one who can listen, speak, and judge as an individual from within a conjunction of other speakers, listeners, and judges.18 A word used elsewhere by Browne for such a literally eccentric position was singularity, meaning a radical individualism, an irreducibly characterizing difference from others. Such distinctness was ambivalently appealing and threatening for many seventeenth-century thinkers.19 In 17 See Preston (2005), 89–96. 18 Ibid., 27–35, 83–96. 19 On the tensions between individual exploration and the need for community in Browne and others see Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2002), 189–204, 236 ff.; Guibbory (1998), passim.


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Pseudodoxia, it offers foothold for difference that stands against the natural supinity that permits a community of error. To retain singularity that can work towards community and persist within it, Pseudodoxia Epidemica champions an individual voice that will be not merely eccentric to the ‘naturall and proper course’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 1) of the world. The end of the labor undertaken by Pseudodoxia Epidemica demands co-operation, even if in fact assistance has been lacking during its composition: Surely more advantageous had it beene unto Truth, to have fallen into the endeavours of some co-operating advancers, that might have performed it to the life, and added authority thereto: which the privacie of our condition, and unequall abilities cannot expect. (PE ‘To the Reader, 1)

As their absence from Pseudodoxia Epidemica attests, Browne’s hoped-for ‘co-operating advancers’ are not under his direction. They will be his imitators only in their respective singularity, following his individual and erratic method of testing and collating results in various venues.20 In spite of his dismay at the carelessness of the bulk of human beings, Browne imagines that in the coming community, knowledge will be much more fully distributed than in that envisioned by Bacon or claimed to have been realized in Descartes. For Browne, the recognition that ‘knowledge is made by oblivion’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 1), the practical impossibility of erecting a structure of knowledge all at once, and the social dangers of removing communal beliefs compel the singular course that Pseudodoxia Epidemica takes: not being willing to make himself an architect of knowledge, Browne must proceed little by little, and rely on persuasion rather than force to recruit allies for his efforts. Like many contemporaries, Browne saw considerable risk in challenging communal beliefs, particularly when it was not clear what might replace them, and was chary of sweeping falsehood aside too suddenly or completely. Browne shows little hope that the people as a whole can be educated out of their prejudices; instead he directs the book towards scholarly amateurs like himself, who, he believes, are capable of reform.21 But it is crucial to Pseudodoxia that it not be merely a collection of inaccuracies. Its underlying premise is that somebody believes its inaccurate accounts to be true, even if that person is not the reader and those who believe them are unlikely to be 20 On essayistic writing as a sign of individuation see Cotterill (2004), Introduction; Pebworth (1982), passim. 21 PE, ‘To the Reader’, 2–4; Preston (2005), 83–5.

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corrected by reading Pseudodoxia. What the book articulates, appraises, and finally engages with, then, are the ways people have of talking about the world. Browne’s topics are the ways in which objects can be described and approached rather than physical objects apart from description. Because the causes and significance of things are, ultimately, invisible, what we believe them to be must finally be decided in conversation. Browne repeatedly uses contrafactual constructions, or frames his objections as paralipses that at once invoke views from which he dissents and calls them into question: ‘The verity of these stories we shall not further dispute . . . ’; ‘We are unwilling to question . . . We will not dispute . . . We shall not at all contend’ (PE 2.3.107; 5.19.415–17). Browne’s frequent digressions similarly include others’ views neither as solid data nor as mere falsity, but in the spirit of a rhetorical exercise like a teacher’s thetic ‘Discuss’. All these stylistic tactics—paralipses, contrafactual statements, digressions—bring voices into conversation, even when the speaker disagrees with what they have to say. Inclusiveness comes before rightness: Nor have wee let fall our penne, upon discouragement of contradiction, unbeleefe, and difficulty of disswasion from radicated beliefs . . . wee shall so farre encourage contradiction, as to promise no disturbance, or reoppose any Penne, that shall Fallaciously or captiously refute us. (PE ‘To the Reader’, 2, 4)

Far from being quaint touches of eccentric color or intellectual exhibitionism, Browne’s digressions provide fodder evenhandedly for speculations or objections that he only anticipates, but that he hopes will shape the afterlife of his work.22 The contradictions, partialities, and incoherencies aim to be touchstones for further discussions.

II Because error reflects controversy between discourses that make particular claims to truth and put faith in different things, the accuracy of differing 22 Havenstein’s (1999) stylometric analysis of Browne’s conjunctions and transitions is illuminating; she notes his frequent use of pairs of words or phrases and similar bifurcating structures that multiply ways of reference (119–28). See also Knott (1982). Against Pseudodoxia’s ‘quaintness’, see Preston (2005), 96.


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accounts cannot be easily settled by appeals to a shared authority. A shared authority, like a shared discourse, would imply an existing rather than a projected community. Nor, more surprisingly, can authority easily be resituated, as Bacon or his materially minded epigones Sprat or Glanvill would have it, to the court of things themselves. Bacon’s errant idols of the theater must be dispelled by careful attention to things: ‘To the immediate and proper perception of the sense therefore I do not give much weight; but I contrive that the office of the sense shall be only to judge of the experiment, and the experiment itself shall judge of the thing.’23 Browne too avers that nature is a final judge, but in the interim judgment must come in the form of further experiments—or further comparisons of experiments, since Browne emphasizes how much experiments can disagree. Attempting to determine the degree of difference between magnetic and true north, he notes ‘of those tables of declination which I have perused, there are not any two that punctually agree’ (PE 2.2.93). The experimental record, then, cannot settle the matter in the court of things, since even when things themselves are consulted, they may give diverging answers, eliciting further discussion among the examiners. Browne’s evocation of ‘this Encyclopaedia and round of knowledge’ is thus quite literal: the world is a kind of universal writing or reference work, in which experiments are always mediated by their reporting, and finally secured by a consensual community that experiment does not verify, within which conversation can take place and aim towards conviction. The difficulty, then, is how to conduct a discourse about what is true and what is not in such a way as to include all participants and the world as well, when ‘opinions are free, and open it is for any to thinke or declare the contrary’ (PE ‘To the Reader’, 4). Pseudodoxia Epidemica is concerned with determining the truth of an object of inquiry—but no less concerned with the ways of talking that might establish a forum within which consensus about such truth could eventually emerge. Truth and error in language are nevertheless emphatically to be distinguished, and ‘where the real works of Nature, or veritable acts of story are to be described, digressions are aberrations’ (PE 5.19.418). But given that in a fallen world they cannot reliably be disentangled, Pseudodoxia is particularly attuned to the refractive ways of talking about the world’s truth that are not 23 Instauratio Magna, ‘Plan’; and Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1857–74; facs. Stuttgart, 1963), vol. I, 138 f.; vol IV, 26.

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disagreements but alternative forms of proposition that are liable to be mistaken for disagreement; such differences are not semantic, but grammatical.24 The errors Pseudodoxia picks out often arise from confusing the modes of meaning, mistaking (for example) a symbolic mode of representation for a description of experience. The ring finger, for instance, is believed to contain a nerve or vein that leads directly to the heart because ‘this finger was an Hieroglyphick’ for the perfect number six (PE 4.4.301). Conversely, sometimes the belief provides the hieroglyphic sense: newborn vipers, for instance, are believed to eat their way through their mother’s side, so the image is ‘entertained in the Hieroglyphicks of the Ægyptians’ (PE 3.16.220) as an example of ingratitude. Browne notes other kinds of meanings as well: language may signify ‘mystically . . . Emblematically’, ‘Poetically, Rhetorically, Enigmatically, Hieroglyphically’, even ‘Emphatically’ (PE 3.12.204, 3.12.207, 5.2.371), each case qualifying how a linguistic use has been mistaken for, and mistakenly redeployed as, a description of reality rather than as a mode of expression. But each of these ways of talking has an authority of its own, for instance in speculation on the type of wood used to make the cross, ‘[w]hereof prudent symbolls and pious Allegories be made by wiser conceivers, yet common heads will flye unto superstitious applications, and hardly avoid miraculous or magicall expectations’ (PE 7.1.537–8).25 If some allegories are superstitious, others are prudent or direct prudently. Any way of representing has the potential to mislead if we forget that it is ‘not reall but representative’ (PE 2.4.121), a question Browne poses of flies in amber, or if we confuse a discourse with the world. In the case of vipers’ broods, Browne’s attempts to consult the vipers themselves are inconclusive, because he is unable to keep pregnant females alive long enough to observe what happens when they give birth, so the descriptive accuracy of this belief that young vipers eat through their mothers’ sides remains open. The hieroglyphic sense is the only one in which this statement is clearly right. Throughout Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne is especially attuned to the errors in the understanding of nature that arise from the mistaking of a ‘Hieroglyphicall’ sense for a description: Thus may wee make out of the assertions of ancient Writers, and safely receive the expressions of Divines and worthy Fathers; but if by a transition from Rhetorick to Logick, 24 On grammar as a category of enquiry in Browne see Silver, 70–4. 25 On Browne and allegory see Robbins (1982); Leonard Nathanson, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and the Ethics of Knowledge’, in Patrides (ed.) (1982), 12–18.


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hee shall contend, it [the dove] hath no such part, or humour [gall], he committeth an open fallacy, and such as was probably first committed concerning Spanish Mares, whose swiftnesse tropically expressed from their generation by the wind, might after be grosly taken, and a reall truth conceived in that conception. (PE 3.3.171)

The ‘reall truth’ of the cause of the fleetness of Spanish mares is false; it is real only in the sense that it has been misunderstood as pertaining to res rather than to verba. The metaphor of horses fathered by the wind is properly true in the tropological sphere of discussion. Error is corrected by identifying the modes or figures in which it surfaces, and recognizing that different ways of talking have different standards, intentions, and functions. Through this work of identifying ways of talking, Pseudodoxia undertakes to craft a vocabulary that permits ongoing discussion about the things of the world instead of requiring either complete agreement about them or complete dismissal of different descriptions of them. The divergence of opinions that arise in discussion makes progress towards a unity of knowledge possible. In Religio Medici, Browne wistfully recalls Adam’s mastery that enabled him to decipher the divine writing of creation: The finger of God hath set an inscription upon all his workes, not graphicall or composed of Letters, but of their severall formes, constitutions, parts, and operations, which aptly joyned together doe make one word that doth expresse their natures. By these Letters God calls the Starres by their names, and by this Alphabet Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar to its Nature. (RM 2.2)

But although the Adamic language has been lost, the variety of languages is productive in ways that Adam’s apt language was not, because it did not need to be. Human beings ‘are but bad discerners of verity, and in the numerous tract of error, but casually do hit the point and unity of truth’ (PE 1.3.15). Given this human incapacity, the best tactic to avoid becoming rooted in false beliefs is to multiply one’s guesses at the truth, increasing the likelihood of accidentally striking it. Differences from truth and between people produce the erratic movement of conversation, from which sometimes emerges a truer representation of the world than that of any single belief. What is in error can nonetheless offer an indirect path to truth. Richest of all in productive error is a society that can cultivate errors ‘as boundless as mens inventions’ without taking them for truths: Certainly of all men that suffered from the confusion of Babel, the Ægyptians found the best evasion; for, though words were confounded, they invented a language of

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things . . . this indeed might Adam well have spoken, who understanding the nature of things, had the advantage of naturall expressions. (PE 5.20.419)

Such confused inventions enable speculation into a truth that is no longer possessed. The Egyptians suffered the effects of Babel and could no longer capture the world in their hieroglyphs as Adam did, but found ways through them none the less to converse, ‘erecting significations not inferrible from their natures’ (PE 5.20.419) and thus generating new approximations and testing old ones without ever resting with full confidence in any. Much riskier is the literality that Browne reproaches in common belief, which insists on holding to a single, unquestioned reading of things (e.g., PE 1.3.16). Browne’s mobile, contrafactual language is instrumental rather than mimetic or representational. His periphrases do not just reflect a complexity immanent in the order of things or in the roundabout way that order is conceived; they are solicitations to bring a multitude of inventions into discourse, from which an increase in knowledge may flow: Whoever shall peruse the signatures of Crollius, or rather the Phytognomy of Porta, and strictly observe how vegetable realities, are commonly forced into Animall representations, may easily perceive in very many, the semblance is but postulatory. (PE 2.6.141)

After Adam, the desire to read off the nature of things from their appearances is vain. What Browne calls a ‘postulatory’ resemblance is directed towards debate and refutation, both with the world and with others who inhabit it. The gap between word and world is productive because it allows for new postulates. In fact, the more vividly and originally wrong a belief, the more likely it is to present to its holder an approach to real knowledge, however indirect or unpredictable. This comes most clearly into focus when Browne observes what is not the case. The explicitly contrafactual statements of Pseudodoxia mark the unique voice that expresses them as much as the object they describe; it distinguishes its speaker from another supposed speaker who would make the same statement without repudiating it. The openness of the contrafactual to other voices and positions makes it an opportunity for conversation, which requires the maintenance of difference among those who undertake it. Disagreement is paradoxically a precondition for the final agreement in truth towards which Pseudodoxia tends. Singularity would not be necessary if, as Bacon had hoped, things and experiments could be relied on immediately to judge of things—a community relying on shared truth would be univocal and absolute. But since agreement is no sign of rightness,


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it is necessary to preserve difference within community. As Browne observes: ‘A man should be something that men are not, and individuall in somewhat beside his proper nature’ (PE 1.5.31). The singular individual is a point of resistance to doxa, a wedge that undermines premature conviction, and thus the possibility of a contribution to conversation that will bring doxa into line with truth, even if in the end the individual must give way to the voice of things themselves. It is thus crucial to individuate distinct voices before community can be recognized—with other humans, with nature, and finally with God. Experiment inevitably requires conversation, beginning in it and returning to it, if only because despite their insistence on the fact, early modern producers of knowledge did not, and could not, work alone.26

III This weighing of ways of talking about the world makes Browne, as Leonard Nathanson puts it, a ‘double agent’ in the ‘wars of truth that marked the seventeenth century’.27 Browne’s amphibious resistance to staking out claims to exclusive truth in the many disputes of the period takes place within an ethical framework that places community and communication first, because truth can be sought effectively only once the ‘two great pillars of truth, experience and solid reason’ have been agreed upon. The epistemology of Pseudodoxia comes close, in fact, to communicative ethics as outlined by Ju¨rgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, which argues that any participation in discussion projects at least implicitly a regulative ideal of non-coercive, nonfoundational rationality.28 That is to say, to converse at all implies the ideal of a community in which all can participate evenly. Habermas and Apel, however, restrict the authority of conversation to the establishment of social 26 For several approaches to this social fact see, e.g., Preston (2005), esp. 27–35; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994); Andrew Barnaby and Lisa Schnell, Literate Experience: The Work of Knowing in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke, 2002). 27 Nathanson (1967), 12. 28 The Communicative Ethics Controversy, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmayr (Cambridge, MA, 1990), esp. Apel’s ‘Is the Ethics of the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia? On the Relationship between Ethics, Utopia, and the Critique of Utopia’, 23–59, and Habermas’s ‘Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Problem of Philosophical Justification’, 60–110.

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norms.29 Browne extends it to include the description of the physical world. Rather than sharing this division of practical and objective worlds assumed by Habermas and Apel on the basis of what can be decided and what must be taken as given, Browne explicitly directs the arena of conversation in Pseudodoxia Epidemica towards the things of the natural world, initially to determine where those things end and socially determined ones begin—to fix, in other words, what sort of discourses may be taken up about the world and in what circumstances discourse can legitimately be called upon to supplement those things. Browne’s guard against constructionism is that although he seeks a consensus among the different voices of viewers, the world also plays a part in the conversation, contributing to it by resistance to infelicitous descriptions.30 The world is one conversant among others, though, a privileged source but not a final arbiter. While things and experiments contribute crucially to the description of the world, they do not simply have unequivocal say: magnetic north cannot be made to explain its position clearly, and doves have gall in a physical sense but—equally importantly—not in others. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica nature stops being a book and starts becoming a subject with which the investigator exchanges descriptions, offering up versions for comment or correction and in turn correcting the responses. The model for knowing is not reading but conversing. Rather than look into himself in silence or turn outwards to decipher what the world says, in Pseudodoxia Browne invites the world into his discourse. Browne’s ideal scientist is a tolerant and lively conversationalist, engaging and debating with others and his environment. Bacon’s concept of literate experience is one theoretical formulation for teaching the world to speak back to its human investigator, but once again Browne’s attempt to put Bacon’s theory into practice reveals unforeseen complexities. In ‘Concerning the Loadstone’, Aristotle and William Gilbert are made into exemplary figures for the possibilities of experiment as conversation. Browne is more forgiving of Aristotle than was Bacon, crediting Aristotle with a praiseworthy willingness to consult his predecessors and to leave his own works open to later correction (PE 1.6.32; 1.7.41); Bacon saw him as an intellectual tyrant who had actively obliterated the memories and 29 Habermas, 64–6. 30 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, 2005), esp. 70–82, 88–93.


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arguments of his peers and continued to dominate contemporary thought.31 But despite the incomparable opportunities provided to him by the worldly ‘acquirements’ that Alexander put at his disposal, Aristotle only ‘collected great observables’ (PE 2.2.97) without being able to advance his understanding of the magnetic compass. Instead, he halted at gathering observations, a bystanding philosopher in the theatrum mundi, acutely but ineffectually looking on in isolation from both the world and other investigators. In contrast, William Gilbert’s resources were fewer and his achievements greater. In Browne’s account, Gilbert begins by collating the disagreeing ‘due records preserved’ of his predecessors into a coherent starting point for his own investigations of magnetism. His humble but productive experiments with bits of cork, dishes of water, and magnetized needles lead him in many wasted directions, but in the end the accumulation of right and wrong steps brings him closer to the way things work than Aristotle’s superior resources did for him. Although Aristotle possessed every advantage of intelligence and energy, he had no sense of how every kind of being wrong is a possible step towards being right. Gilbert’s ability to err productively and especially to enter into exchange with the world he was studying makes it possible for him to do more with less. By sharing the experiences of other investigators as well, Gilbert makes their words and experiences meaningful and useful in his own. Pseudodoxia Epidemica ends with an epigraph from Lactantius: Primus gradus sapientiae est, falsa intelligere, ‘The first step to wisdom is to know false things.’ Browne thinks that even wrong belief can be a step in the right direction, or towards the right goal—that a real truth, like the windborn mares, can be ‘conceived in that conception’ (PE 3.3.171). What is important is that wrong belief be a step and not a stand, and that error remain in motion. Motion, discourse, and experience always make for knowledge, no matter how obliquely, because they multiply opportunities for engagement with other possibilities. Only stasis is fruitless, if it exists at all within Browne’s circling, encyclopedic universe. The task of Pseudodoxia is precisely this soliciting of differences to open conversation. The work of discovery ends only with the apocalyptic end of all things together with all the ways of talking about them. In the interim, there is much to talk about. In a long, late chapter, Browne tries to estimate the population of the world before the Flood (a problem comparable, no doubt, to the questions 31 e.g., Novum Organum, Bk I, aphorism 67, in Bacon, Works, eds. Spedding et al., vol I, 178–9.

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‘what Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women’ (UB 5.165)) and concludes by laying out the parameters and the ethics of his inquiry: Thus have I declared some private and probable conceptions in the enquiry of this truth; but the certainty hereof let the Arithmeticke of the last day determine, and therefore expect no further beliefe then probability and reason induce; onely desire men would not swallow dubiosities for certainties, and receive as principles, points mainly controvertible, for we are to adhere unto things doubtfull in a dubious and opinative way; it being reasonable for every man to vary his opinion according to the variance of his reason, and to affirme one day what he denyed another, wherein although at last we misse of truth, wee dye notwithstanding in inoffensive errors, because we adhere unto that whereunto the examen of our reasons, and honest enquiries induce us. (PE 6.6.483)

Like good readers of hieroglyphs, Browne’s readers know when they are using errant ways of speaking. Doomsday will finally allow certain knowledge of all things, a position of deferred attainment of an ideal that in the meantime functions as a ‘regulative idea’ that shapes discourse. Until then, Browne enjoins dedicated ‘honest enquiries’ not because it will yield accurate knowledge—although it is also the only hope of that—but as the particularly ethical position that is to be had towards truth, the right reasoning that will lay the groundwork for a community that in its conversation can effectively seek for truth. This ethical imperative to talk, and the attempt to generate conversation even with error, colors the conduct of Pseudodoxia Epidemica throughout. Although the discourses of meditation and description differ, ultimately each refers to the ethical realm of human action and particularly interaction.

IV The problem that occupies Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica is the relation of wandering to truth. Pseudodoxia Epidemica is committed to its wandering through the ‘abysse of knowledge’ (RM 1.12) towards knowledge—from within the abyss, this is the best that can be done. This unspecified state of wandering is tracked in detail in Pseudodoxia and thereby made less threatening,


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more negotiable. The only final conviction Pseudodoxia offers is that error can be safely handled, and that, in the end, the truth will be revealed through the interruption of divinity. Its methods are contrafactuality, digression, conversation—towards truth through non-truth. This seems to mirror the Platonic, encyclopedic method that is accretive—towards truth through other truths. But there is a hidden intellectual elitism native to the approach to truth through truth that Browne, for all his frequently expressed other social elitism, does not share. In this conception, knowledge is a scale or a pyramid, and at every step fewer and fewer remain capable of balancing on it. Browne’s investigation into popular errors takes truth as the common goal of all who are active in looking for it, and each position of error in relation to that final destination is alike in being a stepping-stone that offers a peculiar angle of approach, some more privileged than others perhaps, but none in a predetermined hierarchy and none wholly in darkness. One cannot always anticipate in which voices truth may startlingly emerge, because any who wander may suddenly arrive closer to it, moving in leaps and discontinuities rather than by slow but steady climbing. Establishing a Brownean community demands scrupulous diligence and rigorous openness to debate and contradiction, distributed across a number of actors. These labors hasten the conversation through which truth is produced. Ultimately, though, access to the truth through what is not the truth is open: it is a demesne that in the end, Browne promises, will be large enough for any who seek it.

9 The Politics of Painting: Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm Kevin Killeen

William Dowsing, commissioned by Parliament as the ‘Iconoclast General’ for East Anglia in 1643–4, was impressively assiduous in the records he kept of the thousands of images that he and his deputies managed to destroy. His journal is thorough, orderly, and, in its sheer scope, remains shocking. For all that contemporary royalist accounts may have reported the iconoclasts as consumed with rage, there is little frantic about his operations; indeed, they show a certain patience with local obstructions and refusals of help from antagonistic clergy and parishioners. Dowsing merely commissions the work out to the local sheriffs. In the parish church of Clare, Suffolk, he reports that ‘We brake down a 1000 pictures superstitious; and brake down 200, 3 of God the Father, and 3 of Christ, and the Holy Lamb, and 3 of the Holy Ghost like a dove with wings; and the 12 Apostles were carved in wood, and on top of the roof, which we gave order [to] have taken down; and 20 cherubims to be taken down. And the sun and moon in the east window, by the King’s Arms, to be taken down.’1 1 William Dowsing, The Journal of William Dowsing, ed. Trevor Cooper (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2003), 6 January 1644, 214. The number of images claimed may be an exaggeration: Cooper estimates that a figure of 200 is more likely (215).

Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm / 189 Though largely a journal of fact, on occasion Dowsing highlights the rationale for his actions, noting instances of evident idolatry, as when, at Frostenden on 8 April 1644, he records being told by ‘Mr Ellis, an high Constable of the town’ how ‘he saw an Irish man, within two months, bow to the cross on the steeple, and put off his hat to it’.2 Dowsing’s itemized tally of images might almost have served, too, as a table of contents for Book 5 of Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which discusses pictures of God, the Son, the Holy Spirit—depictions of the Trinity coming in for especial concern from iconoclasts—Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, Moses, the Tribes of Israel, St George, St Christopher, and a range of other images, all without mention of the rage and ire that their purported idolatrous display, or conversely their sacrilegious destruction, was provoking throughout the country. One could fill a large cathedral with such pictures, and the term ‘picture’, incidentally, in William Dowsing’s journal of iconoclasm includes other kinds of representations too: glass, sculpture, tapestry, heraldry, and so on.3 Pseudodoxia’s extensive and uniquely detailed book of pictures was produced in a culture whose obsession with, and occasional phobia of, images led to intense conflict at both local and national levels. Browne’s Norwich, with its large Presbyterian and Independent civil polity, was subject to particularly severe municipal clashes, its citizens iconoclastic enough in their own right not to require the services of Dowsing, who was so active elsewhere in East Anglia. The surviving accounts of iconoclasm in Norwich are extensive and dominate the civic and parish politics of the era. These were, clearly, heated times in which to discuss the gestures of saints and the length of Jesus’ hair. It seems remarkable, given such a fraught context, that Browne’s book of errors in pictures has never been linked to iconoclasm—particularly because this is a subject whose currency for Browne spans his career from Religio Medici, with its Laudian defence of music and pictures, written in the mid1630s and published in 1642/3, through to Repertorium, his record of the destruction of Norwich Cathedral, dating from 1679/80, though begun at the Restoration.4 This essay makes the case, first, that contrary to Browne’s 2 Dowsing, 295. 3 Trevor Cooper in Dowsing, 90–2. See also Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry, 1560–1620: Relations between Literature and the Visual Arts in the English Renaissance (Leamington Spa, 1981), 6. 4 Jonathan Post remarks briefly on the notion of pictures as a contentious political matter, that while Browne seems ‘excessively Protestant in his quest for exactitude, his criticisms of the pictorial arts are notably free of iconoclasm. Browne exhibits none of the radical Puritans’ fear that the form itself is idolatrous’ (Jonathan F. S. Post, Sir Thomas Browne (Boston, 1987), 111).

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apolitical reputation, there is a conscious political stance in Pseudodoxia, which emerges from, and responds to, the conflicts in ecclesiastical culture of Norwich in the civil war period. Second, it argues that Book 5 of Pseudodoxia constitutes a sophisticated response to the epistemology of iconoclasm, rather than a mere dismissal of it as unregulated violence. Browne’s account of pictures is not, in itself, so much a subtle as a blatant engagement with the subject of iconoclasm. What is subtle, as well as understated, is the manner in which he undertakes in this book a critique of idolatry and the rationale of the iconoclasts, with an adroit analysis of the hermeneutics by which images are to be judged. The critical neglect of iconoclasm as the background of this part of Pseudodoxia is in many ways a feature of the work itself, insofar as Browne silently omits the existence of any controversy in his discussion of the images. He displays the ability to disinfect the context in which he is writing, to play down the political wrangles over church imagery. While Browne may not mention the breaking of glass, he does attempt something equally political. In response to the widely voiced proposition that pictures were liable to idolatrous interpretation (and this is by no means a position confined to those who might be labelled ‘puritans’), Browne offers an alternative hermeneutics of pictures—in an era when Biblical interpretation was itself a consummately political act—particularly when the subject of that interpretation was the political space of church windows. In discussing, for example, ‘The Picture of Abraham sacrificing Isaac’ (PE 5.8), Browne objects to a depiction of Isaac as a mere boy because the Bible tells us he had to carry the wood for his immolation. Such a depiction is not consentaneous unto the authority of Expositors, or the circumstance of the Text; for therein it is delivered that Isaac carried on his back the wood for the sacrifice, which being an holocaust or burnt offering to be consumed unto ashes, we cannot well conceive a burthen for a boy. (PE 5.8.389)

The amount of wood he carries must also be sufficient to remind the viewer, typologically, of Christ and ‘the wood or crosse whereon he suffered, which was too heavy a loade for his shoulders’. Nor would it be right to depict Isaac as a grown man on the curious grounds that he could then fight back against the 120-year-old Abraham, ‘for had he resisted, it had not been in the power of his aged parent to have inforced; and many at his yeares, have performed

Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm / 191 such acts’ (PE 5.8.389). Browne polices the detail of the depiction in order that the general principle of representation be conceded: the boy, Isaac, and the muscular man are wrong, and we are left only with the option that Isaac be depicted as a suitably adolescent sacrifice. Browne discusses at length precision of gesture within these images, insisting that any depiction should correspond in some way with the letter of the text (and Browne’s idea of the letter of the Biblical text in Pseudodoxia is strict) and implying that once this stringent exegetical condition is adhered to, church ornament becomes de facto legitimate. Such an extended critique of imagery accords iconoclasm more weight than it is often granted in both contemporary and subsequent discussions which deem it to be little more than vandalism. Browne does not engage with iconoclasm merely as an act of violence, in Pseudodoxia at least, but rather as a hermeneutical act. Iconoclasts object, he implies, to a lax epistemology of representation, a failure of textual fidelity, and the likelihood that the representation of the unrepresentable will lead to idolatry. A more cautionary hermeneutics would forestall the possibility of idolatry and, at the same time, the need to break windows, and the book presents itself as a model of precise exegesis. However, the stringent truth-standards that Pseudodoxia demands in its interpretation, its insistence on what it sees as absolute precision and literal adherence to the scriptural text, leads him into positions that sound almost iconoclastic in impulse: where the real works of Nature, or veritable acts of story are to be described, digressions are aberrations; and Art being the Imitator or secondary representor, it must not vary from the verity of the example, or describe things otherwise then they truly are or have beene; for hereby introducing false Idea’s of things, it perverts and deformes the face and symmetrie of truth. (PE 5.19.418)

The telling final phrase here, that inaccuracy ‘perverts and deforms the face and symmetrie of truth’, touches on the traumatic scratching out of faces and feet that was the trademark of those who would re-enact the primal moment of iconoclasm when the idol Dagon was toppled. Browne’s efforts at discerning pictorial probity involve a complex negotiation between literal interpretation of the Bible, historical accuracy, and ideas of artistic decorum, a distinctly slippery set of concepts, as he attempts to articulate the conditions under which images might be acceptable. Roland Freárt’s An idea of the perfection of painting (1662), a work translated by John

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Evelyn, sets out a primary rule for painters: ‘that in Historical Composures the pure and rigid truth be always religiously observed’.5 Evelyn, connoisseur, naturalist, and a visitor to Browne in Norwich, deplores anachronistic elements in pictures, citing a painting of Moses being drawn out of a river accompanied by a Swiss Guard, along with that piece of Malvogius in His Majesties Gallery at Whitehall, who not only represents our first Parents with Navils upon their bellys, but has plac’d an Artificial stone-Fountain carv’d with imagerys in the midst of his Paradise.6

About such anachronism, Evelyn comments: ‘how indecorous it is to introduce Circumstances wholly improper to the usages and Genius of the Places, where our Histories are suppos’d to have been acted’.7 Both Evelyn’s remarks and Browne’s practice in Pseudodoxia are related to the much-cited Horatian injunction on the likeness of text and image, ut pictura poesis, a concept explored in a classic account of humanist painting theory by Rensselaer Lee. In relation to the Bible, at least, the emphasis in the early modern era increasingly aimed to discern a correlation between painterly and textual detail. Lee notes, for example, that ‘from 1550 to 1750 a host of passages might be quoted in which the mantle of poet, historian, or sage is made to descend upon the painter’s innocent shoulders, or in which he is enjoined to deal accurately with the printed word’.8 While such accuracy is almost a condition for reproducing Biblical images, there is slightly more latitude with pagan writers, whose works do not have to measure up to the same standards of truth. Browne will concede, for example, that because writers cannot agree how many sibyls there were, ‘therefore not discovering a resolution of their number from the pens of the best Writers, we have no reason to determine the same from the hand and pencill of Painters’, though even in classical cases, he can offer stern restrictions. Noting depictions of the death of Cleopatra, with the asps variously biting into her arm or breast, he adds ‘that this variety is not excusable’ (PE 5.11.396, 5.12.398). In his repeated use of the term ‘propriety’, Browne is connecting his sense of pictorial decorum with his sense of proper exegesis, so that the avoidance 5 6 7 8

Roland Freárt de Chambray, An idea of the perfection of painting (1662, trans. John Evelyn, 1668), 72. Evelyn, ‘To the Reader’, in Freárt, b5r. Ibid. Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, The Humanist Theory of Painting (New York, 1967), 47.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm / 193 of incongruities of style, subject, and sometimes class blends with what is textually and historically accurate. He worries about whether one may ‘contend a propriety’ in the picture of a horned Moses, and elsewhere about the ‘sundry improprieties’ in depictions of the Nine Worthies (PE 5.9.391, 5.13.400). Decorum remains, however, a knotty concept in the range of demands it must meet. While Moses’ Swiss guard of honour is identified by Evelyn as historically indecorous, in terms of social propriety it is wholly in accord with the status of a Prince of Israel. Exegetical precision may on occasion coincide with historical accuracy or with social decorum, but not always. Among Browne’s pictures in Pseudodoxia we find an account of John the Baptist and the nature of the camel’s hair discussed in the Gospels, whether it implies a sheer skin of the camel or a hair shirt, a topic which brought these conflicting aspects of decorum into play. There was evidently a degree of social consternation among Browne’s contemporaries that John could not see fit to wear something more sumptuous and befitting his role as herald to Jesus. Browne, with careful textual and cultural analysis, concludes that a pictorial error has crept in and he chides those who suppose this habit of Iohn, was neither of Camells skinne, nor any course texture of its haire, but rather some finer weave of Camelot, Grograine or the like, in as much as . . . Ælian affirmeth, that Camells haire of Persia, is as fine as Milesian wooll, wherewith the great ones of that place were clothed. (PE 5.15.408)

Browne explains, in answer to the social embarrassment surrounding the lowly social status of the New Testament cast, that a luxurious weave would not be ‘sutable to the austerity of his life; the severity of his doctrine, Repentance; and the place thererof, the wildernesse’ (PE 5.15.407). Pictorial interpretation of the Bible was not always so even-handed, however. The stained glass of Browne’s parish church after 1650, St Peter Mancroft, incorporates in its windows not only the praying image of the donor, Robert Toppes, a Norwich cloth merchant, and his wife, but also an opportunity to dress the scriptural figures in Toppes’s own sumptuous fabrics, which, as far as we know, did not include camel-hair shirts.9 In his notebook ‘Addition to Pseudodoxia Epidemica’, Browne considers the picture of the severed head of John the Baptist, and reports that it was ‘An improper spectacle at a feast & very incongruous unto the birthday of a 9 See David King, The Medieval Stained Glass of St Peter Mancroft (Oxford, 2006), p. xcv.

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prince, a time of pardon & relaxation’.10 Browne is, presumably, commenting primarily on the artist’s interpretative decision about how to depict the scene most accurately. There is, however, a certain slippage here between correct exegesis and correct etiquette. The breach of dinner-time decorum which makes it an ‘improper spectacle’ sounds very much as though Browne objects to the poor table manners involved, as though severed heads should only be brandished during working hours. It is tempting to presume a joke here, although it is hardly more absurd than other exegetical extremes Browne takes his reader to, that for example Adam had no navel (PE 5.5). A further cause of interpretive difficulty is the occasionally tricky negotiation between the literal and, as Browne calls it, the deuteroscopic (PE 1.3.16). The latter term encompasses various levels of emblematic, typological, and allegorical meanings, which are all the more prone to error and misrepresentation when delivered in pictorial or iconic form. If, on the one hand, Isaac must carry enough wood to represent, typologically speaking, the burden of the cross, it implies that he is a grown man. However, he is also sacrificially replaced by a lamb, emblematized by the child, Isaac, meekly and Christologically awaiting his fate. The resolution of such a typological quandary might seem like an arbitrary artistic choice, in which the competing emblems both have some claim. Pseudodoxia, however, with its strict criteria of error, tends to eschew such latitude, or rather Browne oscillates between an acceptance of this fact (that the iconic is necessarily polysemous), and a stringent literalism in which accuracy (historical and exegetical) becomes crucial. Browne’s presumption that exegetical accuracy is definitively attainable, that meaning can be determined via context, scholarship, and linguistic acuity, is not subject to any searching or sceptical analysis in Pseudodoxia. Indeed, it is a defining presupposition of the work. Pseudodoxia shows Browne wrestling with the nature and applicability of allegorical and hieroglyphic imagery. While he is inclined to accept allegory as a licit pictorial and didactic strategy, nevertheless he delivers a number of stern injunctions on the need for precision and the avoidance of emblematic ambiguity: Now if any shall say that these are petty errors and minor lapses not considerably injurious unto truth, yet is it neither reasonable nor safe to contemne inferiour 10 MS. Sloane 1827, ff. 16–17, ‘Addition to Pseudodoxia Epidemica’ 5.1, ‘Of Many Things Questionable as Commonly described in Pictures’ (not published with the text of Pseudodoxia). Included by Keynes 3.223, and Wilkin, iii. 157

Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm / 195 falsities; but rather as betweene falshood and truth, there is no medium, so should they be maintained in their distance, nor the contagion of the one, approach the sincerity of the other. (PE 5.13.402–03)

Far from the ‘soft and flexible’ postures of Religio Medici, such tense and insistent caveats register the politically fraught nature of pictorial representation in early modern England and the extent to which contemporary events in Browne’s Norwich intrude into Pseudodoxia.

Writing Images Pseudodoxia is in many ways a unique document. There are few such extended discussions of Biblical pictures within the context of civil war iconoclasm, and none that so systematically pursues exegetical accuracy as its main criterion, and, as such, it is not entirely clear what its purpose is. The pictures section of Pseudodoxia does not sound like an aesthetic theory, partly because there is very little sense of the pictures as art or even as specific objects. In all but a few cases, neither painter nor location is given. This is neither careless nor incidental. The lack of specificity allows Browne to refer, with dexterous ambiguity, either to profane portrayal or church art, street signs or stained glass.11 Robbins’s commentary on Pseudodoxia suggests a range of images which may inform Browne’s pictures. Eighteen of his subjects, for example, are identified as street signs for taverns or trades in the account of John Taylor the Water Poet’s Travels (1636), though there are ample examples from the medieval churches, great houses, and taverns in Norwich and Norfolk that might provide equally plausible models.12 Browne’s extended, seamless integration of religious and secular imagery cloaks all pictures under the protective neutrality of accurate description. However, such elision is disingenuous. The distinction between sacred and civil space is a topic of vehement contemporary debate in which Browne pointedly refuses to engage,

11 Exceptions being, e.g., ‘the authentic draughts of Urbin [ie., Raphael], Angelo and others’, ‘that eminent artist Michael Angelo’, PE 5.5.377; 5.6.386; 5.11.397. 12 John Taylor the Water Poet, Travels and circular perambulations of London and Westminster (1636), noted by Robbins, ii. 946.

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even though, in the context of iconoclasm, a picture’s location in a church or in a profane space is of crucial importance.13 Before pursuing the terms of this important debate, however, it is worth noting that Browne performs a similar blurring of the secular–religious distinction in Religio Medici, in his discussions of ceremony and church music. He describes his distrust of ‘the symmetry of those heads which declaime against all Church musicke, . . . for even that vulgar and Taverne Musicke which makes one merry, another mad, strikes mee into a deepe fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer’ (RM 2.9): at my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hands, with all those outward and sensible motions which may express, or promote my invisible devotion . . . I could never heare the Ave Maria Bell without an elevation . . . At a solemne Procession I have wept abundantly, while my consorts, blind with opposition and prejudice, have fallen into an eccesse of scorn and laughter. (RM 1.3)

Such statements have often been taken to imply a laudable tolerance and refined sensibility on Browne’s part, but some caution is needed. Religio Medici, written in the mid-1630s, at the height of the Laudian innovations, conveys a satisfaction in the devotional experience of high church Laudianism.14 The work focuses on the affective experience of church, the ability of its pictures, music, and dećor to induce emotional and devotional states. However, it is precisely such emotional affect, and its liability to incite idolatry, that lies at the root of the objections to church decoration. Browne places these comments squarely in the context of iconoclasm when he says: ‘I should cut off my arme rather then violate a church window, then deface or demolish the memory of Saint or Martyr’ (RM 1.3). These are statements with a strong political–ecclesiastical charge. The emotional responses to ceremony that Browne records were, for many early modern Protestants, precisely the insinuating and idolatrous seduction by which Catholicism perpetrated its superstitious tricks. The anonymous 1641 pamphlet True Newes from Norwich, which came amid a series of accusations of Catholic arson attempts on the city, attacks the ‘musicall Masse’, and parodies the ‘papist’ in a voice that 13 On the changing conceptions of sacred space see Philip North and John North (eds.), Sacred Space: House of God; Gate of Heaven (London, 2007). See also Roberta Gilchrist Norwich Cathedral Close: The Evolution of the English Cathedral Landscape (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2005), 229–30; and Kevin Killeen, ‘Heroic Indifference’, in C. H. L. George and Julie Sutherland (eds.), Heroes and Villains (Durham, 2004), 97–111. 14 On Browne’s Laudianism see Debora Shuger’s essay in this volume.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm / 197 sounds very much like Browne: ‘for says he, if I doe but goe into Church and say my prayers, and heare the Organs goe, they make water runne downe my cheeks, they are so good and so sweet a musick’.15 Browne’s denial of any distinction between sacred and secular space is no neutral comment. However, the Norwich of 1646, when Pseudodoxia was published, was a very different place from the England of the mid-1630s when Religio Medici was first drafted, and there is much to be gained from comparing the effusive ceremonialism of Religio Medici with the reticent, cautious, and carefully bounded approach to pictures in Pseudodoxia. While both works presume that imagery is indifferent, Pseudodoxia takes an approach markedly distinct from Religio Medici’s, in exhibiting a stern and indeed punctilious concern with accuracy and with the literal. Michael Wilding some years ago made the case that Religio Medici should be seen less in the context of Laudian ascendancy of the 1630s than in the fraught breakdown of authority of the civil war. He noted various changes between the 1642 unauthorized version of Religio Medici and the 1643 revised text, which he saw as Browne’s responses to the emergent separatism of radical groups and to the parliamentary statutes authorizing the destruction of imagery.16 Aside from the 1643 additions on the proliferations of sects and their heresies, however, the changes remain relatively minor, and while Wilding produces surely irrefutable evidence of the political engagement of Religio Medici, that engagement does not consist only in the differences between the two published versions of Browne’s first work. Far more significant is the major change of approach between Religio and Pseudodoxia, between the concept of the ‘Beauty of Holiness’ in Religio Medici and the starkly literal attitude to church pictures in Pseudodoxia, a change which registers Browne’s response to the traumatic and fast-moving events over the 1640s.17 In 1642, the font at St Peter Mancroft was flat-chiselled. The 15 Anon., True Newes from Norwich (1641), 5. See also Anon., Bloody nevves from Norwich or, a true relation of a bloody attempt of the papists in Norwich, to consume the whole city by fire (1641); and Anon., Foure wonderfull, bloudy, and dangerous plots discovered and brought to light by Gods providence (1642). 16 Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1987), 89–114. Wilding notes in particular RM 1.3. See also Raymond Waddington, ‘The Two Tables in Religio Medici’, in C. A. Patrides (ed.), Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays (Columbia, MO, 1982), 86–7. 17 For a good survey of the iconoclasm controversies see Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2003). On the legislation see John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley, 1973), 184–9; and Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford, 1988), 75–7.

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altar rails of the cathedral were removed when rumours of a Shrove Tuesday plan by apprentices to tear them down were circulating,18 and events culminated in the much-quoted lament of Browne’s friend Joseph Hall for the destruction wrought in Norwich Cathedral in 1643: It is tragical to relate the carriage of that furious Sacrilidge [sic] . . . what clattering of glasses, what beating down of walls, what tearing down of monuments, what pulling down of seates and wresting out of irons and brass from the windows and graves, what defacing of armes, what demolishing of curious stone work, that had not any representation in the world but the cost of the founder, and skill of the mason.19

In 1644, religious pictures hidden in St Peter Mancroft were discovered and burned.20 Norwich Cathedral suffered extensive damage to its organs, its windows, and to the impressive series of medieval carved bosses in its cloisters and aisles.21 This, then, is the context of the publication for Pseudodoxia—the politics of broken windows and shattered images that Browne seems so resolutely determined to ignore within the work. By 1646, in other words, Browne is scrupulous in avoiding discussion of pictures in terms of their affective content, but only by arguing that pictures, properly vetted and exegetically correct, remain licit objects.

Dećor and Deity—Idolatry and Pseudodoxia If Browne’s pictures are mere extensions and didactic simulacra of Biblical material, adhering rigorously to the word, is Pseudodoxia suffering from the ‘visual anorexia’ that Patrick Collinson has ascribed to early modern English 18 Trevor Cooper in Dowsing, 96. See also Ian Atherton and Victor Morgan, ‘Revolution and Retrenchment: The Cathedral, 1630–1720’, in Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996, ed. Ian Atherton, Eric Fernie, Christopher Harper-Bill, and Hassel Smith (London, 1996), 552. Some doubts remain as to whether the flat-chiselling occurred in an earlier wave of iconoclasm, though money was paid in 1642 to a Mr Ducket ‘for takeing downe images at the font’. 19 Joseph Hall, The shaking of the olive-tree . . . together with his Hard measure (1660), 63. See Stanford E. Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege, Cathedrals in English Society 1600–1700 (Exeter, 1996), 32. 20 John Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich (Chichester, 1988), 91. My thanks to Barbara Miller for information about St Peter Mancroft. 21 See Jonathan Post’s essay in this volume on Browne’s account of the destruction in Repertorium.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm / 199 society, a morbid suspicion of sensuality in art?22 Joseph Koerner has argued that such a position constitutes a standard Protestant compromise on images: ‘Didacticism required that the image become less rather than more: less visually seductive, less emotionally charged, less semantically rich’.23 Browne’s approaches to the art he describes in Pseudodoxia might, initially, seem to bear out Collinson’s claim, a refusal to take sensuous sustenance from art. However, given that this is certainly not the case in Religio Medici, the different attitudes to pictures in the two works might more plausibly be attributed to the changed context than any wider cultural distrust of art’s sensory appeal. Pseudodoxia does not exhibit any rapturous and emotive response to beauty because, in 1646, this more reticent stance was a prudent and contingent response to the unprecedented iconoclastic and political turmoil, and to the accusations that art constituted a set of sensory traps and idolatrous snares. Browne’s account of pictures, with its careful measures to avoid any taint of idolatry, has, however, what are perhaps unintended results. Pseudodoxia continually attempts to limit the allusiveness of pictures in its demand for precision and exactitude, a position that puts Browne—a writer who sees literal interpretation as the mark of the vulgar—in an incongruous, ultra-literal position, which can usefully be compared with the rationale of iconoclasts themselves. Idolatry, in its way, dominates Pseudodoxia, which comments explicitly on the nature of idolatry and contains a model of exegetical painting that meticulously shadows and explicates its textual source, distinguishing between hieroglyphic and literal levels of meaning, and coming down in most cases on the better-literally-safe-than-idolatrously-sorry side of things. For iconoclasts, images provoked idolatry by their very nature. The Norfolk minister Edmund Gurnay, addressing those who are ‘addicted unto images’, suggests that art intrinsically predisposes its viewers to animate objects, ‘Pygmalion-wise, to wish it alive, and in the end to bowe down unto it and worship it’.24 George Salteren in A treatise against images and pictures in churches 22 Patrick Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation (Reading, 1988), 22, 27; and Patrick Collinson The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Basingstoke, 1988), 119. There have been a number of rebuttals of this claim about the ‘visual anorexia’ of the period. See responses from Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge, 1991), 136–8; and Spraggon, pp. xiv–xvii. 23 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (London, 2004), 28. 24 Edmund Gurnay, Toward the vindication of the Second Commandment (1639), 138.

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(1641) similarly doubts the possibility of looking at or praying before an image without an attendant animation of the picture in the mind of the beholder: ‘Who worshippeth or prayeth looking upon an Image, and is not moved in conceit, that the Image heareth him?’25 Browne’s response to such claims that images seduce the beholder is to suggest that idolatry is a more specific exegetical error in which symbolic objects, including pictures, are wrongly interpreted. Where the iconoclasts suppose idolatry to seep in with the mere presence of images, or even to consist in ‘any reverend submissive gesture, as a bowing down, kneeling, prostrating . . . lifting up of the eyes’ (as Henry Ainsworth puts it), for Browne, idolatry involves an interpretative mistake that can be averted through a precautionary logic and the proper exercise of the quadriga or fourfold method of interpretation.26 This is the dynamic of error throughout Pseudodoxia. Repeatedly, we hear of things belonging to the higher levels of the fourfold method or ‘deuteroscopy’ (in other words, representations which are properly emblematic, figurative, or allegorical) being taken literally. Browne gives the example of Satan’s attempt to induce Jesus to idolatrous worship and argues that this is one of the key origins of error: By this same fallacie we proceed, when we conclude from the signe unto the thing signified. By this incroachment Idolatry first crept in, men converting the symbolicall use of Idols into their proper worship, and receiving the representation of things as the substance and thing it selfe. (PE 1.4.26)

For Browne idolatry is, resolutely, a product of the ‘people’. Give them a concept, an object, or a moment to consider God, and they will debase it ‘into manuall expressions’ (PE 1.3.16), decimating all subtlety in their literal interpretation. Browne makes clear that he sees error and idolatry as intertwined. Thus, the problem of idolatry for him lies not in the image per se, but in the vulgar viewer: For although in that ancient and diffused adoration of Idolls, unto the Priests and subtiler heads, the worship perhaps might be symbolicall, and as those Images some way related unto their deities, yet was the Idolatry direct and downe-right in the people, whose credulity is illimitable, who may be made believe that any thing is God, and may be made believe there is no God at all. (PE 1.5.28) 25 George Salteren, A treatise against images and pictures in churches (1641), C1v. 26 Henry Ainsworth, An arrow against idolatry (1640), 2–3.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm / 201 Browne throws back the charge of church idolatry at the vulgar, dovetailing the iconoclasts themselves with the people who ‘will alwayes betake themselves, unto sensible representations, and can hardly be restrained the dulness of Idolatry . . . making God one way, as he made us another; that is, after our Image, as he made us after his owne’ (PE 1.3.16). In response to the deficit of interpretation by which the vulgar produce their idolatrous error, Pseudodoxia offers an alternative hermeneutics of pictures, a careful strategy to immunize pictures from the charges that they are intrinsically liable to induce idolatry. For the Laudian programme of reform, the key test-case on the rights of the individual to destroy idolatrous images was the state trial, in Star Chamber, of Henry Sherfield, the Recorder of Salisbury, for iconoclasm in 1633. The deposition of Peter Thatcher, clerk and vicar of Sherfield’s parish, stated that a certain Emma Browne and two Irish visitors to the church had been found beating their breasts and plainly transported in idolatry as they prayed in front of the window scenes. The trial papers resonate interestingly with Browne’s work—and it is here that we detect in Browne’s discursive strategy for reading pictures a disconcerting resemblance to the iconoclastic rhetoric recorded in the trial. Sherfield’s objection to the window was that it depicted a creation scene which was palpably untrue and un-literal: That this Window and the painting therein, was not a true Representation of the Creation; for that it contained divers forms of little old men in blue and red coats, and naked in the heads, feet and hands, for the picture of God the Father; and in one place, he is set forth with a pair of compasses in his hands, laying them upon the Sun and Moon; and the painter hath set him forth creating of the birds on the third day . . . and the Sun and Moon were not made on the third day, but on the fourth day, nor the trees and herbs on the fourth day, but on the third day . . . in regard of which falsification, this Defendant deemeth, that this was not a true Representation of the Creation, though it be so pretended, but rather an abuse of the true and lively Word of God.27

Sherfield’s case is generally treated, in modern accounts, as the epitome of childish, simple-minded petulance, an act of zealous literalism committed by a yokel, despite his being both MP for Salisbury and a successful lawyer and

27 Proceedings in the Star-Chamber against Henry Sherfield esq. Recorder of Salisbury, for breaking a painted GlasWindow in the Church of St. Edmonds in the said City (1633) in T. B. Howell (ed.), A Complete Collection of State Trials (London, 1816–26), Vol. 3, Cols. 519–62 (Col. 523).

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JP, with the added joke that not only was he ridiculous, he was also clumsy, falling and injuring himself in the act of poking out the windows.28 However, this was by no means how it was treated by the assembled judiciary. The fourteen judges of the trial, each of whom gives an individual verdict, show a remarkable consensus with Sherfield that, as the Earl of Dorset’s judgment has it, the window was indeed idolatrous and that ‘If it had been done by the proper Judge, [it] had been well done’, but that he was wrong to take action as a ‘private man’.29 Overwhelmingly, it is the issue of authority and order that preoccupies the judges, even while they support Sherfield’s contention about the idolatrous nature of the picture. But equally important for my purposes is that Sherfield’s reproach of impropriety and inaccuracy (‘the painter hath set him forth creating of the birds on the third day’ and so on) is very much the underlying supposition of Pseudodoxia. Indeed, the passage could quite easily fit into Pseudodoxia, just as Browne quibbles over the aged parent of Isaac, or the length of Jesus’ hair, or whether Adam had a navel. Both Browne and Sherfield are explicitly concerned with textual fidelity. While for an iconoclast such as Sherfield, the window’s enticing scenes are the prelude to idolatry and their scriptural inaccuracy is a slur on the ‘true and lively Word of God’, for Browne the opposite strategy is at work. Scripture, minutely interpreted in visual media, sanitizes pictures; exegetical accuracy disinfects them from the potential for idolatry and thereby the pictures are again made safe for churches. This is a provocative hermeneutic move, not least because Browne discusses, by turns, depictions of the entire Trinity—the topics most obviously contravening the two commandments bearing on idolatry. In discussing the ‘Picture of God the Father’, the subject of Sherfield’s complaint, Browne likewise holds that the depiction of God ‘in the shape of an old Man, is a dangerous piece’. Browne’s grounds for objection, however, are merely pragmatic, in that it might ‘in this fecundity of sects revive the Anthropomorphites’, and produce yet more schisms in the church (PE 5.22.429). At times he represents his conclusions as a reluctant concession, that while he and his educated readers know that the pictures are just emblematic, to save the ignorant he would be prepared to forgo such images in churches: 28 See, e.g., Paul Slack, ‘The Public Conscience of Henry Sherfield’, in John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (eds.), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), 151–71; and Phillips (1973), 163. 29 Howell, Col. 554.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm / 203 because it is metaphorically predicated of God, that he is a consuming fire, he may be harmlesly described by a flaming representation: yet if, as some will have it . . . because an unrequitable evill may ensue, an indifferent convenience must be omitted; we shall not urge such representments, wee could spare the holy Lamb for the picture of our Saviour, and the Dove or fiery Tongues to represent the holy Ghost. (PE 5.22.430)

Browne’s exemplary pictures, we are told, are ‘pieces of good and allowable invention unto the prudent Spectator, but are lookt on by vulgar eyes as literall truths or absurd impossibilities’ (PE 5.20.419). This might lead us to conclude that Browne is only advocating a literal approach to pictures for tactical reasons, while for Puritans, this literalism is an ingrained intellectual limitation. Such a view, however, would neglect the extent to which Browne goes to police pictures and to establish their historical and scriptural accuracy. In many ways, Pseudodoxia is more stringent and careful than the iconoclastically inclined texts (those which would avoid images in an ecclesiastical context), in attempting to establish the criteria by which pictures are judged accurate. For most iconoclasts, pictures in church, however precise, are intrinsically liable to provoke idolatry and contravene the second commandment and the numerous other injunctions against making ‘any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth’.30 John Vicars’s argument in The Sinfulness and Unlawfulness of making or having the Picture of Christ’s Humanity (1641) never centres on the nature of pictures themselves. For Vicars, any such image will induce idolatry and he believes such a picture ‘even for civil or morall uses, to be utterly unlawful and so absolutely sinful’.31 This uncompromising stance does not, however, preclude picking apart the errors in pictures. A poem by William Prynne attached to Vicars’s book is more specific in its argument against Christ shown with long hair. Prynne argues against the kind of Jesus depicted in ‘papist’ pictures which, he complains, portray the Saviour ‘with long compt haire, and somewhat fleshy’. He cites, in contrast, scriptural clues to the skinniness of Christ: Nay, where the Scripture saith, that his body Was like a potsheard, so lean, withered, dry 30 Exodus, 20:4. 31 John Vicars, The Sinfulness and Unlawfulness of making or having the Picture of Christ’s Humanity (1641), ‘Epistle to the Reader’, b3r.

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/ Kevin Killeen That men might all his bones tell; these mistake In that in their images him make Plump, fleshy, so that none can tell his bones; His pictures then are mere lies and false ones.32

It is precisely this focus on the specifics of an image that enables Browne to justify pictures in a climate of iconoclasm. Carefully marshalling what scant evidence there is about the length of Jesus’ hair, Browne investigates the fact that Jesus was a Nazarite, and the supposition that, like Samson, he would be required not to cut his hair. However, he then argues that since Jesus does not follow the other proscriptions of the Old Testament Nazarites, to avoid the dead and shun wine (he was, we are told, a ‘Wine bibber’), we should not suppose that Christ followed the rules on long hair, but rather that he was a mere ‘Nazarene’, a dweller in Nazareth (PE 5.7.388). Here is Browne’s exegetical trick: we may depict Jesus, we are to surmise, so long as the hairlength is correct, according to the historical ‘evidence’, which, one would have to concede, is circumstantial at best. The debates on the depiction of Jesus, which so preoccupy writers on idolatry, and which have weighty consequences for church windows, are first evoked by Browne and then side-stepped as he rests his case for imagery in exegetical precision. For all that Browne is reticent about employing an overtly political diction, Pseudodoxia registers clearly the experience of iconoclasm and produces a substantial engagement with the destruction of churches that so exercised the country in the years of the civil war. Religio Medici positions itself very much within the rhetoric of the via media, the purported middle way between full Catholic ceremony and puritan starkness. Laudian rhetoric was adept at staking out what Peter Lake terms the ‘normative middle ground’, although this did not by any means signal widespread acceptance of the claim.33 What is most remarkable about Pseudodoxia is the disappearance of any such notion of middlingness. The ‘beauty of holiness’ and the sensuous experience of church, so important in the earlier work, is not a term of reference in Pseudodoxia. According to Tessa Watt, following Margeret Aston’s analysis, the iconoclastic debate can be divided into moderates, who ‘tended 32 William Prynne in Vicars, 73–4. 33 Peter Lake, ‘The Moderate and Irenic Case for Religious War: Joseph Hall’s Via Media in Context’, in Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1995), 57.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm / 205 to focus on the social function of an image: was it the object of pilrimage, of offerings, of adoration?’; and radicals, who condemned images as intrinsically idolatrous.34 Such a divison makes eminent sense and might describe the position of Religio Medici, in which Browne insists on the indifferent nature of art, idolatry being the misuse and animation of the art into a deity. However, Browne’s explorations of pictures in Pseudodoxia slip through the categories of such an analysis of moderates and radicals. Resolutely ignoring the social function and occasion of images—as church objects—Browne’s defence of pictures in Pseudodoxia cannot appeal to their indifferent usage, as in Religio Medici. Pictures are to be decorous not in terms of location or function, as church dećor, but in their rigorous adherence to the text, conferring on them, in Browne’s reiterated phrase, a particular ‘propriety’. This puts Browne outside the sphere of the moderates, as Watt characterizes them, and it is worth noting too that ‘radicals’, while they may have suspected pictures of being intrinsically liable to idolatry, were also exercised by the nature of the image and the extent to which it adhered to the text, whether Jesus was thin and withered, or on which day of Creation the birds made their first appearance. Clearly, Browne’s purpose in Pseudodoxia is diametrically opposite to that of the radicals, but he is very much arguing on their terrain. In this respect, he has shifted ground quite extensively between Religio Medici and Pseudodoxia and the same presumptions of middlingness and the via media are no longer the terms of reference. 34 Watt (1991), 132; Aston, 379.

10 ‘An Incomium of Consumptions’: A Letter to a Friend as Medical Narrative Claire Preston

When Robert Loveday, of Chediston in Suffolk, died of a phthisis at age 35 in May 1656, he was at the upper end of the disease’s most dangerous age range. Hippocrates and the Galenists agreed that between 17 and 35, when we are most full of ‘hot and bilious blood’,1 we are most susceptible to the phthisical or consumptive fever which slowly burns up or ‘consumes’ the substance of the body. Phthisis, under which term early modern medicine comprehended several kinds of marasmus or the wasting diseases, including scrofula (lymphatic tuberculosis), was most commonly associated with the ulceration of the lungs caused by pulmonary tuberculosis. Some consumptions were understood as primary diseases; others were ‘accidents’ (in other words, side-effects or secondary symptoms) of other complaints. The Galenic remedies for all consumptions promoted moist and cold humours to combat the fiery dryness of the hectic fever. This sense of the disease as almost an internal combustion of the body is widespread in the literary tropes of the period, where consumption is often presented as a devouring flame which ‘drinks up 1 James Primrose, Popular Errours, or the Errours of the people in matter of Physick (1651), 98.

A Letter to a Friend as Medical Narrative / 207 Life’s Moisture’,2 after which life gutters as a small flame ‘till all its oile was spent, j Glimmer’d i’th’ socket, as if when’t went out’.3 Thomas Nashe’s popularizing imagination converts the learned Galenic humoral explanation into layman’s terms: ‘it is as a man should be roasted to death and melt away little by little, whiles physicians like cooks stand stuffing him out with herbs and basting him with this oil and that syrup . . . ’.4 Until the advent of antibacterial agents in the early twentieth century, pulmonary consumption was incurable and likely to be fatal; and of all the ills of seventeenth-century flesh, consumption was the one patients most fretted their doctors about, whether or not they were exhibiting any of the classic symptoms.5 Doctors well knew that the imperturbable disease was more virulent than ever—consumptive morbidity accounted for 25 per cent of recorded deaths in 1667,6 and Marchamont Nedham concluded that its effect on the Bills of Mortality since 1629 far outweighed any demographic shift or increase. ‘[W]hat can that be’, he asked, ‘but the change of the Disease it self to be of another nature than heretofore?’ The old remedies were useless because ‘the Phthisis is another kind of Phthisis, the Atrophie another kind of Atrophie; and the Hectick another manner of Hectick’.7 He attributed this to a new aetiology primarily caused by the upsurge of scurvy and syphilis in England, with consumption their accident. Thomas Browne notes this development, too, although typically he casts his medical history much further back, observing on Plato’s authority that there was no catarrh in Homer’s time, and that the British Isles were less troubled with consumption when men ‘lived much upon Milk’, went naked, and slept in caves and woods (LF 107). Whatever the learned understanding of its causes—too little milk or too many feather beds, according to Browne—the unfortunate Robert Loveday could not but have suspected, perhaps for years before he finally took to his bed, that his prognosis was very poor. 2 Margaret Cavendish, ‘What Atomes make a Consumption’, in Poems and Phancies (1664), 23. 3 Nicholas Hookes, ‘An Elegie on the death of Mr Frear Fellow of Trin. Coll. In Cambridge who died of a Consumption’, in Miscellenea Poetica (in Amanda) (1653), 206. 4 Thomas Nashe, ‘The Terrors of the Night’, in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth, 1972; repr. 1985), quoted by Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000), 150. 5 Primrose, 87. 6 R. Y. Keers, Pulmonary Tuberculosis (London, 1978), 23. 7 Marchamont Nedham, Medela Medicinae (1665), 47.

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The identity of the recipient of the Letter is not securely established, but it has been persuasively argued that this was the leading citizen of Chediston, Sir John Pettus of Cheston Hall, who was a friend of Loveday’s.8 Although Browne would, fifteen years later, be called to attend Lady Townshend 25 miles away at Raynham Hall,9 Chediston was still quite a long way for him to travel—about 20 miles, or a day’s ride, south of Norwich—to treat a worthy, but less exalted and probably less lucrative, patient. The most likely explanation is the interest of Pettus himself, a wealthy royalist who also had property just outside Norwich and was already acquainted with Browne, a man who could have engaged his illustrious medical friend to travel so far. Thomas Browne was called in to treat Loveday—now the presumed subject of A Letter to a Friend10—at some very late point in the progress of the illness, who died after only a very short time. In the Letter Browne makes it clear that from the outset there was little he could do other than to prepare the family for the inevitable. Pettus was absent at the time of the death, and it fell to Browne to inform him of it, or so, at least, the premiss of the Letter suggests. If Robert Loveday was not illustrious, he was accomplished: educated at Peterhouse, he had translated part of La Calprene`de’s huge heroic romance Cleópaˆtre (1647–58) at the age of 26; and he had been employed, until his illness prevented him, as a secretary in the family of the Earl of Clare, with whom he travelled widely. When his debilitation became acute in the early 1650s, he wrote to his brother in Suffolk about the possibility of obtaining treatment from ‘Dr B. from whose advice I fancy most hope of all’.11 Since, as Primrose says in his Popular Errours, ‘it is a disease much to be bewailed and hard to be cured, yea perhaps impossible’,12 Loveday’s confidence, even in so celebrated a physician as Thomas Browne, was misplaced. But Browne’s strong conviction of wasted talent and virtue, so poignant a feature of his account of 8 The identity of Pettus and Loveday was first proposed by Frank L. Huntley, and has generally been accepted as conclusive since then. See Huntley, ‘The Occasion and Date of Sir Thomas Browne’s A Letter to a Friend’, Modern Philology, 47 (1951), 157–71. 9 I thank James Rosenheim for this information. See also his The Townshends of Raynham: Nobility in Transition in Restoration and Early Hanoverian England (Middletown, CT, 1989), 170. 10 This identification has, like that of Pettus, been convincingly argued by Huntley (1951). The original version of LF is now securely assigned to 1656. 11 Quoted in Frank L. Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne: A Biographical and Critical Study (Ann Arbor, 1962; repr. 1968), 101–91. 12 Primrose, 97.

A Letter to a Friend as Medical Narrative / 209 Loveday’s character and his last days, clearly was not misplaced, and for whatever reason, either sentimental or aesthetic, it appears that he regarded the Letter as important enough to revise substantially twenty years after its composition. Although the historical occasion of the Letter and the identity of Browne’s patient have for long been somewhat speculative, its status as a literary document is almost non-existent, having to my knowledge received almost no rigorous critical attention. With belletristic vagueness, Pater regarded it as ‘elfin’, and John Addington Symonds as ‘diaphanous’.13 Norman Endicott, its only precise critic, like Symonds pronounced it a ‘medical version of the traditional formal consolatory letter’, but this promising formulation gives way to what he calls its ‘Christian exaltation’.14 All of these remarks have the generally appreciative but essentially impressionistic air which for so long characterized writing about Browne’s work. A Letter to a Friend is a bifurcated essay belonging to two very specific genres which themselves belong to two quite separate periods of composition. The first two-thirds are a ramified and elaborated form of medical consilium, the report of the learned physician on the diagnosis and prognosis of the individual case, and this part of the Letter was almost certainly written in 1656, shortly after the events it describes. The final third, meanwhile, is quite different—it is an advice tract, a series of hortatory sententiae concerning virtuous behaviour, and this material was probably worked up from Browne’s own collection of commonplaces much later, in the 1670s.15 ‘None’, Browne remarks, ‘have attempted the incomium of Consumptions’ (LF 120), and nothing in the Letter suggests that Browne was prepared to celebrate this horrible disease as anything other than a pernicious and intractable condition; and yet the yoking of the two apparently unrelated genres—the medical consilium which attends to the specifics of an individual case history, and sententiae which expound general truths—may be just that, a moralizing of a disease which has its own peculiar, peculiarly meaningful, features.16 13 Walter Pater, Appreciations (London, 1910), 153; John Addington Symonds, Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Urne-Buriall, Christian Morals, and Other Essays (London, 1886), p. xxiv. 14 Norman Endicott, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’s Letter to a Friend’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 36 (1966), 68. 15 Much of the advice section of LF also appears (and may thus have been recycled) in slightly different form as the opening of Christian Morals. 16 On Browne’s writing about the aetiology and pathology of other diseases see Barbour’s essay in this volume.

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When the learned physician treated his patient, he was likely to produce a consilium, a history of the case which would include the following considerations: the nature and identity of the disease based on observation or accounts of symptoms, and on Hippocratic and Galenic theory; a description of the patient’s particular expression of the disease, a description which might include the account of it by the patient or the patient’s family; and details of the physician’s therapeutic interventions. The consilium’s range of reference as a record of a medical consultation allowed it to include, at times, everything from local details of the case at hand to larger considerations of the workings of the body and the history of epidemics. In both categories, microcosm and macrocosm, the physician presented himself as learned in the authoritative medical texts as well as practically capable in dealing with the sick. Nancy Siraisi observes that the early modern consilium was an opportunity for the learned physician to paint a professional self-portrait for the benefit of current and future clients, and for other physicians, who might be called in to continue treatment or to give further opinion.17 It is thus at once a disinterested empirical genre and one potentially open to the rhetorical manipulations of self-interest. Although the consilium is an early form of case notes which evolved, via ancient precedent, in medieval medical practice, and may be a primitive version of the natural philosopher’s experiment-report of the seventeenth century, it was primarily designed as a letter of advice to the patient or to those who nursed him. The consilium gave diagnosis and prognosis, and recommended pharmaceutical, dietary, or other treatment; other learned doctors would use the consilium to catch up on the case to-date, and to swap remedies and therapies. The form of the consilium could be highly conventional or formulaic: for example, the remarks might be organized to conform to the Galenic categories of ‘naturals’ (or parts of the body), ‘non-naturals’ (environmental and physiological conditions), and ‘contranaturals’ (diseases). The fate of the individual patient was rarely included, nor was it necessarily the case that the doctor had seen the patient. Browne’s account of Loveday’s case offers many of these features, hardly surprising given that the consilium would have been the stock-in-trade of such a highly trained doctor. His remarks on ‘malevolent places’ in the aetiology of disease are among the non-naturals; the extensive discussion of Loveday’s own 17 Nancy Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (Princeton, 1997), 203.

A Letter to a Friend as Medical Narrative / 211 symptoms, his history of rickets, and those of related illnesses such as the morgellons are contra-naturals; but naturals, other than the observations on Loveday’s beard and teeth, make the slenderest category, because his original bodily features have long since been effaced by the disease. By the same token, the Letter is not a fully conventional consilium because it doesn’t discuss diagnosis or treatment, probably because the first was already clearly established, and the second was profitless at this terminal stage. Beyond this, there are a number of important departures in the Letter from the conventional consilium format, tending towards the even more personalized humanist medical epistolary tradition.18 It is useful, therefore, to compare the Letter to Browne’s Latin correspondence with other doctors in cases where the consilium was required in order to solicit second and third opinions. In 1642 he writes formally to Dr Samuel Bave, a German physician practising in England; and is later consulted by Dr John Maplet, who after Bave’s death in 1668 took over at least one of his patients. Less formally, he discusses cases with his son, Edward Browne, a doctor and naturalist; and we possess, in addition to this epistolary evidence of Browne’s formal consultations with learned colleagues, a fascinating piece of encomiastic doggerel written by the husband of one of Browne’s own consumptive patients whom he appears to have cured. The last of these, a poem by ‘N.S.’ (possibly Nathan Scottowe, a Norwich friend of the Browne family), describes Browne’s careful observation of the symptoms and of the parts of the body, ‘[h]ow with exactest care, j Hee’s [sic] thoughts of her distemper did declare’, and how, after due consideration of the case, he said ‘with God’s help, I’le show j What man can do’. Browne addresses the various symptoms by name, enlisting them in the fight for a cure: . . . thus ffever, thy heat Her ague & chilness shalt breath out in sweat; Consumption thou must wast its congel’d cake; Thou Looseness must a double office take, Agues dregs purg; and ffeavers heat abate, keeping the body in a soluble state.19 18 Ibid., 205. 19 N[athan] S[cottowe], ‘A Cordiall return of thanks unto Dr Browne for the despaired off Cure of Mrs E.S aged 57 . . . Possessed by a strong Consumption’ (Bodleian Rawl. D.391). I am most grateful to Reid Barbour, who discovered this document and kindly brought it to my attention, and who has tentatively identified its author. The ‘strong consumption’ seems, in this case, to have been an ‘accident’ of some other primary condition, possibly the quartan ague.

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The fever, itself a cause of her wasting, is to be harnessed to drive out the coldness of the ague, and the marasmus or consumption is, in turn, to lay waste to the fever itself. ‘Loosenes’ refers both to her symptoms and the effect of the purgatives which will act against both fever and ague. Mrs E.S.’s bowels, kept temporarily ‘soluble’ for the purposes of healing, will assist in expelling the evil humours which have sickened her. Browne’s explanation to Mrs E.S.’s worried family must have been unusually precise, and delivered in layman’s language, since Scottowe’s rehearsal of the Galenic approach to the disease and its cure is remarkably coherent. The poem continues: When thus the Dr did himself express; London’s skild Drs, nay Courts, more and less, Might all as one have said, had they been by Hic est Religio et Ars Medici.

The adulatory tone (it begins ‘He Came, Saw, Cur’d!’, and rates the doctor above Caesar, Galen, Hippocrates, and the Royal College of Physicians) and the meticulous account of the doctor’s grave, confident comportment during the stages of his diagnosis and treatment give a clear picture of the way a seventeenth-century patient’s family could be rallied by the learned counsel, spoken or written, of the physician. In commending to Dr Bave’s care at Bath Sir Charles Le Gros (father of the dedicatee of Urne-Buriall), Browne enumerates the symptoms of a nasty skin condition (possibly erysipelas) which covered much of the poor man’s body. He recounts remedies already attempted, beginning with infusions of simples (syrup of elder and horseradish, a concoction of white bryony, and antiscorbutic juices), exhibited medical compounds (chalybeate tartar, salt of coral, and iron pills), and finally simples again, this time complexly compounded in an elaborate receipt of twenty-eight ingredients including sassafras, caper root, bindweed, and betony, all administered in a draught of beer. This account is punctuated by general remarks and observations: I had also a mind to use sudorifics, but the sweat which is of prime value in wandering arthritic pains is provoked by no drugs, poorly by astringents, only, as he tells, by hot baths abundantly and with good effect’.20

Browne then tells Bave he tried to reproduce the effects of bathing with diuretics and eccoprotics (evacuative purges), but these apparently had not 20 TB to Bave, 24 April 1642 (trans. Keynes, 243).

A Letter to a Friend as Medical Narrative / 213 worked well. Finally, he warns Bave that this patient is very likely to resist correction of the non-naturals—what we would call ‘lifestyle choices’ in the form of air, exercise, diet, and so on—‘without which a true and constant treatment can hardly, or not even hardly, be looked for’. Without adjustment of these, says Browne, ‘sadness supervenes’.21 What is interesting here is the way in which learned physic is mingled with the assertions of the patient himself, who tells Browne [‘uti refert’] that he is assisted by very hot baths, and the attention Browne gives to Le Gros’s tendencies and personality as a feature of his medical profile. Indeed, Bave replies to Browne several months later in a kind of despair about Le Gros, who turns out to be a couch-potato, refusing to collude in his own cure ‘by the use of . . . the non-naturals’, namely, he won’t leave the house and takes no exercise or air, stays up too late, and eats too much.22 In the very different case of Dr Maplet’s patient, a little boy suffering from dumbness and paralysis,23 the report to Browne carefully repeats and then dismisses the amateur diagnoses of local people and family, who think the child has rickets, has a malformed tongue, or is merely simple. Maplet records the opinions of these unspecified ‘others’ (the local sages who fancy their own diagnostic wisdom), but grandly intervenes: ‘Istis respondeo, Rachitidis symptomata non apparere . . . His, non concedo . . . ’(‘I answer that the symptoms of rickets do not appear . . . To the others, I do not concede . . . ’.).24 Maplet’s disregard is standard in the consilium, where formal medical learning trumps local or folkloric knowledge, and this is a feature of A Letter to a Friend. It reflects the continuing contention between the physician or learned doctor and the empirics, quacksalvers, and cunning-women who were also available to prescribe for the ill, lay-practitioners who were especially sought-after for popular cures for consumption, among other common ailments.25 The Royal College of Physicians and its members produced much evidence against these unlearned practitioners, who nevertheless enjoyed wide custom with a desperate public. Primrose’s Popular Errours in English (1651) has a vivid frontispiece showing a sickroom with an angel pushing away a countrywoman holding her 21 TB to Bave, 24 April 1642 (trans. Keynes, 244). 22 Bave to TB, 2 July 1642 (trans. Keynes, 247). 23 Keynes speculates that the boy had myaesthenia gravis or amyotonia congenita (Keynes, 240). 24 Maplet to TB, 27 August 1668 (Keynes, 249–50). 25 Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London, 1998), 77.

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antimonial cup (a popular and potentially dangerous emetic and cathartic derived from the solution of stibium in spiced wine) and ushering towards the patient a figure in doctor’s academical robes with the phrase Infirmum corpus medico commito fideli (‘I commit the sick body to the trustworthy doctor’); in an accompanying poem the woman derides the senna, rhubarb, and cassia of learned physic: Tush, give the Doctors leave to talk, I’ve brought A pepper posset, nothing can be bought Like this i’th’ Pothecaries shoppe . . . . . . one little suppe Will doe more good, and is of more desert Then all Hippocrates, or Galens Art.26

Loveday, unlike Mrs E.S. of Norwich, is long past any pharmaceutical help, learned or local, and there is no suggestion in the Letter that empirics have been consulted, but Browne is instead accosted, as Maplet had been, by the family’s pathetic hope of his recovery and their eagerness to find signs of it; and, as a learned physician, he is bound to discourage their superstitious and unlearned interventions in the same authoritative and condescending tone as Maplet and Primrose. Spes phthisica is the medical term for the well-known delusion of health in consumptive patients and their friends in the face of so clear a set of mortal symptoms, and it is tantamount to the last men mistaking the signs of the apocalypse. ‘Upon my first Visit’, Browne explains, ‘I was bold to tell them who had not let fall all hopes of his Recovery, That in my sad Opinion he was not like to behold a Grashopper, much less to pluck another Fig (LF 102). These same family members, he says, especially the women, ‘were irrationally curious’ in interpreting his dreams for ‘Fantasms of Health’. These oneirocritics (all female, it seems) foolishly persist in the ‘easie and feminine Exposition’ of dreams, expositions which, like the diagnoses of Maplet’s little boy, are hardly authoritative; and Browne again disabuses them: ‘ ’Twas too late to dream of Flying, of Limpid Fountains, smooth Waters, white Vestments, and fruitful green Trees, which are the Visions of healthful Sleeps . . . ’(LF 108–9). The evocation of a watery, verdant dreamland is pointedly melancholy in respect of a disease explained as a desiccation and feverish devouring of the body which finally became fully 26 Primrose, frontispiece.

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Figure 2. Title page from James Primrose, Popular Errours, or the Errours of the people in matter of Physick (1651)

‘exuccous’ in death. Loveday is literally too seared and parched to be able to summon such images. The personal medical narrative is relatively straightforward: Browne first visits Loveday when he is already in an advanced state of illness, and implies that he saw him subsequently. The classic indications of consumption are all present: although he exhibited an uncanny youthfulness, ‘Age having set no Seal upon his Face’ (LF 113), it was moribund and engraved with Dante’s ‘starved characters’—the rebus-like O–M–O of his eyebrows and nose; he was extremely wasted at the end, having lost half his body-weight. During the autopsy the corrosion of his teeth by the rheums of his disease was noted, as were the withering of his internal organs and the adhesion of the pleural surface of the pulmonary lobes to the chest wall. With such unmistakable omens, ‘medical Predictions fail not’ . . . ‘ ’Tis as dangerous to be sentenced by a Physician as a Judge’(LF 102) is Browne’s sombre and unanswerable conclusion from the incontrovertible physical evidence. But he is as interested in the psychological

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manifestations of the disease, and at least as many of his observations of the patient are of this sort. Loveday believed himself to be well, but dreamed of the dead, and was resigned to death; he had deliberately remained unmarried and childless, ‘leaving no Earnest behind him for Corruption or Aftergrave . . . but amply satisfied that his Disease should dye with himself’ (LF 109); and yet he had never been given to ‘Cautelous Chastity [or] crafty Sobriety’(LF 113). He failed to become (as is so often the case) ‘narrow minded, miserable and tenacious, unready to part with any thing when . . . ready to part with all’ (LF 110), and was quite willing to leave the world while in his prime, having practised a sober contemptus mundi, neither fearing nor desiring death, but rather living in expectation of dissolution into Christ. This attention to the metaphysical as well as to the merely physical is a feature of the whole letter: Browne constantly moves away from case-specificity to clinical generality, from the temperamental to the exemplary. The post mortem condition of Loveday’s lungs, for instance, prompts a wide-ranging natural history of coughing in birds and animals. He recognizes that Loveday spent a considerable portion of his life practising renunciation in the certain expectation of an early death, and in this he becomes a pattern of Christian humility. The consumptive symptoms of approaching death, opaque to the hopeful Loveday family, are for Browne apocalyptic signatures, harbingers of the last day, wherein ‘the firy Principle would wear out all the rest, and at last make an end of the World’. A consumption or consummation, he recognizes, has already been ordained for the end of the world which, ‘if other Diseases fail, will put a period unto long Livers, and at last make dust of us all’ (LF 103). This movement away from the purely clinical presentation of disease—to embrace natural history, the human condition moralized, and Biblical typology—also directs the progress of the Letter to its final section, the advice tract or table of ‘good Wishes and Mementoes’ which further enlarges Loveday’s piety into maxims of good life. The young man’s exemplary humility is expanded into a universal tenet: He that is chaste and continent, not to impair his Strength, or terrified by Contagion, will hardly be heroically virtuous. Adjourn not that Virtue unto those Years when Cato could lend out his Wife; and impotent Satyrs write Satyrs against Lust: but be chaste in thy flaming days, when Alexander dared not trust his Eyes upon the fair Daughters of Darius, and when so many Men think there is no other way but Origen’s. (LF 114)

A Letter to a Friend as Medical Narrative / 217 Loveday’s disdain of the world and quiet expectation of death, which Browne has carefully charted in the consilium section as an index of mental composure in the throes of relentless physical breakdown, are recapitulated in the advice section as a pithy maxim: ‘Measure not thy self by thy Morning shadow, but by the Extent of thy Grave’ (LF 117). That the concluding advice tract is an addition to the original manuscript version of the 1656 Letter, probably appended by Browne in the 1670s, has already been noted; and thus this finished version of the Letter is not the one personally directed to Pettus in the aftermath of the event, nor to the surviving Lovedays, or to other physicians and learned persons. Together with the acquired title,27 and the palliative classical euphemism of grasshoppers and figs in the consilium section, the presence of this consolatory advice tract is a clear sign of an authorial shaping which belies, or at least contends with, the supposedly spontaneous and urgent delivery of bad news. But although the actual urgency of the 1670s Letter is artificial, Browne’s brisk movement among mixed modes sustains the mood: he shifts from sympathetic comments about the young man as if directed at those who knew him, to learned observations for other doctors; to moral and didactic expansions for the layman; to the minutiae of antiquarians and natural historians; to the epistolary tract of the amicitiae tradition. It is as if, within the formal occasion of the medical consilium, Browne is insinuating other forms of discourse familiar from his more famous works. What, then, are the nature and purpose of its address? Lacking the formal salutation of an epistolary work, almost casual in its initial friendly, headlong imperative, the opening remains intimate and personal: Give me leave to wonder that News of this nature should have such heavy Wings, that you should hear so little concerning your dearest Friend, and that I must make that unwilling Repetition to tell you Ad portam rigidos calces extendit [‘he stretches out his heels cold and stark to the door’]. (LF 101)

This is notable post-bedside tact: despite having ‘boldly’ informed the family of the mortal prognosis, bearing bad news to the friend remains discomfiting even to so seasoned a practitioner, and at first Browne couches many of his direct remarks to Pettus and the Lovedays in elaborate euphemism, as if breaking it to them gently before moving on to the grisly reality of a consumptive death. 27 Browne himself referred to the Letter as ‘the epistle give me leave to wonder’, after its opening line (Endicott, 71, 48).

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He occludes the cold and stark heels of the corpse with a Latin tag before he can bring himself to say bluntly ‘that he is Dead and Buried;’ and even so, an odd litotes veers away from declarative and unvarnished fact when Loveday is pronounced ‘by this time no Puny among the mighty Nations of the Dead’. Still, it seems, the rhetorical blow must be cushioned by the reassurance that every hour you know largely addeth unto that dark Society; and considering the incessant Mortality of Mankind, you cannot conceive there dieth in the whole Earth so few as a thousand an hour. (LF 101)

Although much given to truism early in his career (for example, in the 1635 elements of Religio Medici), it is otherwise rare in the luminous writings of his mid-career; such resort to the comforting cliche´s of bereavement may be evidence of a sensitive clinical manner adopted in recognition of the heightened emotions of the sickroom immediately after the crisis. This is a rhetorical delicacy we also observe in his instructions to his son in dealing with patients. He advises Edward Browne to ‘Give . . . the best satisfaction without great discouragement, yet with truth. [The patient] is hypochondriacall, meticulous & diffident & apt to lay hold of what you say . . . do all with the best secrecy for that will give him best content’.28 Another of Edward’s patients, a fussy man suffering from depression, is, according to Thomas, ‘a meticulous doubting man of a good nature, & unwilling to offend God or man, & seldome without thoughts to perplex himself & making his life the more unconfortable. I perceaved his head to [be] buisie 5 or 6 dayes ago . . . [he is] his owne foe most’.29 ‘Meticulous’ here means ‘fearful’ or ‘timid’, and, as with Sir Charles Le Gros, Browne is keenly aware of the psychic distress, illness, or incapacity of the unwell, and of their families. Even in his kindliest, most diplomatic, professional manner he does not obscure higher truths with local facts. Loveday’s death, however meaningful to his friends, is, after all, but one in a mighty nation or dark society, by itself of hardly any consequence, and in his office as a mercurius of death Browne is bound to recall the puniness of every loss. Although the fame of the great Italian masters has been salvaged by their works, he notes, Loveday may not be so well memorialized by his. The young man, ‘no minor wit’ in Browne’s second 28 TB to Edward Browne, 17 May [1679] (Keynes, 107–8). Augustine Blennerhassett, the patient, suffered from a venereal disease. 29 TB to Edward Browne, 18 May [1679] (Keynes, 108–9). Alderman Wisse probably also had testicular cancer.

A Letter to a Friend as Medical Narrative / 219 curious litotes,30 leaves no such lapidary record and only a worthy translation of a second-rank French romance; he is as likely to disappear from the record as the Saxon individuals known only by the teeth which survive the pyral fire. In a work which seems initially to memorialize and specify Robert Loveday, Browne simultaneously prepares for forgetfulness and erasure of memory. In other words, however personalized and sympathetic A Letter to a Friend may be within the tradition of the professional consultation, the death of the patient, like the discovery of Saxon urns in Norfolk, prompts a disquisition on the failure of individuality against the anonymity and commonality of death. Yet it is too simple to read the Letter as a tract on oblivion, for by various detailed analogies Browne simultaneously aggrandizes this death as symbolic of all deaths, of all decay, mortality, and memory. The comparison of Loveday’s teeth with the corroded dentition of ancient Egyptian mummies enrolls him in the antiquarian register of the ancient world. His failure to make an epitaph for himself (‘either unwilling to commend himself or be judged by a Distich’) attaches his reticence and literary remains to those of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto, who produced only wretched epitaphs for themselves. By connecting Loveday’s death to the grander scheme of human mortality and sempiternal recollection, Browne makes it resonant and powerful, but also typical, unmarked, and commonplace. This ‘relentment’, as he elsewhere called it (UB 1.137), or dissolution into the general fate of man, is recapitulated in the advice section, which may once have been intended for Pettus, but could not possibly have been directed to Loveday. The earlier consilium section of A Letter to a Friend, probably coterminous with the composition of Urne-Buriall, is almost completely concerned with the processes of death as they afflict the living body, and moreover the body of a very specific person. Although written post mortem, this part of the Letter reads like a blow-by-blow account of the withering away of a patient for whom we are concurrently offered a brief but memorable spiritual biography. This disease-narrative yields, however, to a series of adages which utterly forget him as their subject; the personal consilium yields to impersonal sententiae. ‘There is no Community or Commonwealth of Virtue’, Browne concludes diagnostically; ‘every Man must study his own Oeconomy, and erect these Rules unto the Figure of himself’ (LF 118). And yet the injunction to ‘behold thy Trophies within thee, not without thee’ seems, like the whole of Letter to a Friend, to obliterate private virtue in public pattern, to subsume 30 Endicott, however, thinks that the phrase ‘this serious person, no minor wit’ refers to Scaliger, not Loveday (Endicott, 75).

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personality in obscurity. Whatever regret or bereavement Browne actually felt at the loss of Loveday, his literary purpose is to translate the event into something altogether exemplary, so that in one sense Browne’s decision to append the advice section to the consilium has the effect of using up the patient as effectively as his disease consumed him. In another sense, however, the Letter also enlarges and flourishes the barely known and desiccated young man, a paradox in which disease and cure are lodged in the self-same subject. As the ash-filled urns at Walsingham prompted a meditation on futurity, after-discovery, anonymity, and the failure of memory, so part of Loveday’s legacy is the generation of universal truths and good maxims. Another afterlife is the even more impersonal autopsy, and again, we are alerted to the very particular metaphors generated by terminal consumption. The cadaverous patient, in the last stage of the disease, looked like an anatomical specimen on the table, his skeleton and even his organs open, as it were, for inspection. ‘Thou look’st as if thou’dst past through Chir’gions hall j A live Anatomie’, said a poet also writing of a consumptive in the 1650s.31 Likewise, Browne says that ‘an Aruspex might have read a Lecture . . . without Exenteration, his Flesh being so consumed that he might . . . have discerned his Bowels without opening of him’ (LF 105 [my italics] ). The consumptive subject’s very disease colludes with the professional undertakings of physicians and the purposes of natural knowledge. In this case, Loveday’s remains prove to be both clinical and didactic, with the dissecting table as a kind of memory theatre. Such ‘enlargements’ of disease (within which, of course, is comprehended the notion of liberation, and by extension, resurrection) are familiar in the early modern period in works such as Barnabe Googe’s The Overthrow of the Gout (1577) and Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624); and consumption seems to have generated its own particular catalogue, as we observe in James Shirley’s moralizing of consumptive marasmus: Thy flesh an upper garment, that it might Aide thy eternal progresse, first grew light: Nothing but Angel now, which thou wer’t neer Almost reduc’d to thy first Spirit here.32

31 Hookes, 15–16. 32 James Shirley, ‘Upon Mr Charles Beaumont who died of a Consumption’, Poems (1646), 65.

A Letter to a Friend as Medical Narrative / 221 A Letter to a Friend constantly moves among generically distinct kinds of enlargement—medical, anatomical, natural-historical, spiritual, antiquarian, and literary—dilations which simultaneously specify and anonymize Loveday, enacting and opposing his withering: as he is wasted or consumed by his disease, and his mortal remains are nearly obliterated, his moral remains blossom and expand even as they are being ‘reduc’d’ (‘diminished’ but also ‘led back’ in Shirley’s etymologically complex phrase) to spirit. The somewhat lapidary quality of the advice section thus becomes Loveday’s lasting monument, the distilled wisdom and virtue of a life consumed down to its bare bones. In a particularly powerful passage in the manuscript excised in the printed version, Browne discusses the resuscitation of the dead as an imperfect type of resurrection: he has, he notes, read of such ‘virbiuses’33— the medically resurrected—in history, and has even heard of them in his own lifetime, but he dismisses these: despite seemingly miraculous medical intervention, ‘they lived not long after;’ and the only true miracle of reanimation was ‘wisely managed by our Saviour’ on the third day after his death (LF 119). Loveday had no chance of such a resuscitation, a fluke which is only possible, Browne tells us, ‘wherein the lamp of life is butt puft out or seemingly choaked, and not where the oyle is quite spent and exhausted’ (LF 119). Instead, he undergoes a literary re-animation in which his virtue is resurrected in a table of suggestions for a good life. In Urne-Buriall Browne describes those who ‘make one particle of the public soul of all things’ (UB 5.168), and this surely would be Loveday’s fate, except that his long dying and slow progress to the threshold have become an ars moriendi which Browne writes as a ‘postliminious’ biography in the now-disanimated consumptive body. It is a type of that final consumption and combustion to which Browne always looks forward in every work. 33 Virbius was, variously, a son of Hippolytus or a minor deity associated with him who was restored to life, as was, in one legend, Hippolytus himself by Æsculapius. Browne has apparently coined this term for the medically resurrected.

11 Urne-Buriall, Cultural Difference, and the Question of Jewish Readmission Achsah Guibbory

A remarkable generosity of spirit pervades Browne’s survey of the burial customs in Urne-Buriall (1658). A tendency towards inclusivity and a preference for ‘flexible’ definitions (or to put it a different way, his reluctance to draw firm boundaries) characterize much of his writing. We see these qualities in the opening sections of Religio Medici (1643), and even in the skeptical Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), which seeks to determine ‘vulgar errors’ in popular beliefs but is often inconclusive. His major works are characterized by what Claire Preston describes as his willingness to ‘revolve a great variety of possibilities and to entertain various conclusions without apparent bias’.1 But the curiosity about different cultures and the flexibility evident in Urne-Buriall take on a historically distinct significance when we read Browne’s essay in light of the controversy in the mid-1650s over the possible readmission of Jews to England. In surveying practices surrounding death, it bespeaks an unusual tolerance for difference, and thus deserves a place in the history we tell of the idea of toleration.2 1 Claire Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005), 130. 2 Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford, 2006), makes a powerful case for Selden’s inclusion in the history of toleration, the importance (and influence)

Urne-Buriall and the Question of Jewish Readmission / 223 In Religio Medici, Browne speaks of his willingness to enter a Roman Catholic church, and his unwillingness to ‘deface’ a ‘church window’ or ‘the memory of Saint or Martyr’ (RM 1.3). Such statements seem to express an anti-puritan position that would have aligned Browne with the English Church as it had developed under the influence of ‘ceremonialist’ clergy in the 1630s. In its survey of funerary practices, Urne-Buriall posits the universal human need for ceremony at a time when the Church of England’s burial rites had been proscribed by the Parliament, and its ceremony rejected by the puritan ‘godly’ as idolatry.3 Browne’s sympathies here associate him with the outlawed Church of England, which in two years would be re-established along with monarchy. Yet there is more to Urne-Buriall than a nostalgia for ceremony. Although Browne is again expressing his desire for connection rather than conflict among human beings, and his sense of ceremony’s role in creating community, in 1658 the issues about community in England were different from those of 1635–43 when he wrote and published Religio Medici, as civil war was erupting. Urne-Buriall has been read as an antiquarian work, expressing the interest in antiquities that preoccupied royalists in the 1650s. Graham Parry places Browne among the ‘royalist gentlemen up and down the country [who] were taking a new interest in the visible traces of the remote past, perhaps as a way of diverting their minds away from present discontents’.4 Claire Preston, however, questions this understanding of Browne’s antiquarianism, suggesting that Browne’s essay ‘finally disparages the antiquarian project’, for he is ‘interested in oblivion and its effects rather than in re-collecting the past from the grave of time for the benefit of the future’. Browne’s antiquarianism is complicated, even undermined, by his sense that he was living in the end-time and by his expectation of the last days5—a preoccupation of religious radicals more than royalists, which fostered interest in the Jews, who, it was expected, would finally accept Christ. of his remarkably disinterested understanding of rabbinic thought, and his expression of the rabbis’ ‘self-understanding’ of Judaism. Browne might be part of the picture, too. 3 See Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1998; paper, 2006), 131–40. 4 Graham Parry, ‘In the Land of Moles and Pismires: Thomas Browne’s Antiquarian Writings’, in English Renaissance Prose: History, Language,and Politics, ed. Neil Rhodes (Tempe, AZ, 1997), 247–58, 247; Preston (2005), 3, 132. See also Parry’s essay in this volume. 5 This is Preston’s position (134–6); but cf. Adam H. Kitzes, ‘Hydriotaphia, ‘‘the Sensible Rhetorick of the Dead’’ ’, Studies in English Literature, 42: 1 (Winter 2002), 137–54, 150–1.

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Urne-Buriall was published just after the height of the controversy over Menasseh ben Israel’s November 1655 petition to Cromwell and his Council of State to allow the Jews to be readmitted to England. The Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, though small numbers of Jews had been living clandestinely in England at least since the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century, and probably earlier. The possibility of formal Jewish readmission being considered in the 1650s critically raised the question of whether English Protestants could include, and how far they could tolerate, the cultural, racial, and religious ‘other’ in England. Menasseh’s petition, and the surrounding controversy, proved a test-case for toleration and for how inclusive Christian England could be. The possibility of readmitting the Jews absorbed much attention in the mid-1650s, producing anti-Judaic polemic by William Prynne, but also a plea for toleration by Roger Williams, as well as various positions between these. Browne’s treatment of difference and community as he discusses funerary practices engages issues at the heart of the debate over readmission. Paradoxically, Browne’s fascination with particularities in Urne-Buriall leads him towards universality and a position that embraces difference, in spite of his orthodox presumption of the superiority of Christianity. The belief in universal ‘truths’ is often thought to repress difference, as it erases particular identities, but Browne’s universalism actually arises from his fascination with bizarre, unusual practices of different cultures. Urne-Buriall’s rhetorical strategies and its careful meditations demonstrate an inclusivity that speaks to England’s situation in the late 1650s. If we listen to the voices of those who expressed the various positions about the Jews, the distinctive quality of Browne’s voice becomes clearer.

I According to David Katz, ‘the campaign for the readmission of the Jews was . . . fairly well under way by 1652’.6 While interest in Jewish readmission had intensified with the millenarian expectations raised during the 1640s, the appearance of Menasseh ben Israel’s The Hope of Israel in 1650 in England, 6 David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655 (Oxford, 1982), 188; see also Katz, The Jews in the History of England 1485–1850 (Oxford, 1994).

Urne-Buriall and the Question of Jewish Readmission / 225 translated by Moses Wall, was a turning-point. Menasseh’s expectation that the days of the Messiah were near—and his suggestion that the Jews had only to be admitted to England in order to fulfill the prophecy that they would be scattered to all the ends of the earth before their ingathering— intersected with the hopes of English Christian millenarians who thought the Second Coming was near, and that the conversion of the Jews would be part of those end-times. The Hope of Israel, which rapidly went through several editions, was much in demand during the early 1650s. The Welsh royalist prophet Arise Evans mentioned that in the summer of 1652 he found it impossible to buy a copy in London; he only put his hands on one when he visited the Independent minister Hugh Peters.7 In the fall of 1655, Menasseh traveled from Amsterdam to London to deliver his formal petition to Cromwell’s Council of State. Cromwell called a conference at Whitehall beginning 4 December to consider the issue, but abruptly dissolved it after the 18 December 1655 meeting.8 Support for readmission came largely from millenarians. John Dury’s inquiries and his millenarian questions to Menasseh had originally encouraged the rabbi to write The Hope of Israel,9 and the Baptist Henry Jessey, who participated later in the Whitehall conference, had contact with Menasseh even before he wrote it. In 1656, Jessey published A Narrative Of the late Proceeds at White-hall, concerning the Jews, describing what was ‘spoken unto Pro, and Contra, at several meetings, some more private, and some more public at White-Hall, and else where’.10 Support for the Jews also came from Quakers and Fifth Monarchists. The Baptist preacher Thomas Collier spoke of the ‘longing desire amongst the most of the godly and faithfull people after [the Jews]’; surely ‘a hand of the Lord’ must be ‘in it’.11

7 Arise Evans, An Eccho to the Voice (1652), 105–6. For an excellent modern critical edition with scholarly apparatus see Menasseh ben Israel, The Hope of Israel, the English trans. by Moses Wall 1652, ed. with intro. and notes by Henry Mechoulan and Gerard Nahon, intro. and notes trans. from French by Richenda George (Oxford, 1987). 8 See esp. Katz (1982), ch. 6, 190–231; also Lucien Wolf, Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell (London, 1901). 9 See Cecil Roth, A Life of Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi, Printer, and Diplomat (Philadelphia, 1945). 10 Henry Jessey, A Narrative of the late proceeds at White-Hall, concerning the Jews (1656), 2. 11 Thomas Collier, A Briefe Answer to some of the Objections and Demurs Made Against the coming in and inhabiting of the Jews in this commonwealth (1656), 18.

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Many more people, however, were unenthusiastic, even hostile to the idea of Jewish readmission. Jessey summed up the opinion of the Whitehall conference: ‘The most did fear, that if they should come, many would be seduced and cheated by them, and little good would be unto them [the English]’.12 There was keen opposition from London merchants, who, rather than being comforted by Menasseh’s assurances that the Jews would be economically productive, feared the competition. Strong opposition also came from lawyers like William Prynne and from conservative, Presbyterian clergy who, holding to the ideal of a national church (despite their failure to reestablish one), found it difficult if not impossible to imagine tolerating independent, ‘gathered’ churches or sects, let alone Jews. After all, for a millennium and a half Christianity had defined the Jews as ‘anti-Christian’. If there was a philo-Semitic strand in post-Reformation England (as David Katz has argued) and if Protestantism lacked the institutionalized violence of the Catholic Church towards Jews, it is also true that a strong anti-Judaism was part of reformed Christianity, which identified the corrupt Church of Rome with the continuation of Judaism as well as paganism. James Shapiro has argued that in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century, traditional anti-Judaism modulated into a sense that English (and not just Christian) identity was defined in opposition to Jews.13 Thus the question of Jewish readmission was complicated and vexed. Those who supported Jewish readmission did so in the expectation that the Jews would eventually be converted, thus ceasing to be Jews—their religious difference ultimately to be erased. Quakers believed the Jews might embrace the truth of the ‘inner light’. In the mid- and late-1650s, the Quaker leader Margaret Fell wrote pamphlets addressing them, had two translated into Hebrew, and employed Quaker missionaries to distribute her pamphlets in synagogues in Europe.14 A few people, however, rejected the idea that the English Christians should actively try to convert the Jews. Although they believed conversion would be part of the final redemption, it would be effected by God, not man. Thus, in a statement appended to The Hope of Israel, Moses Wall insisted that the Jews’ conversion (in a time ‘not 12 Jessey (1656), 2. 13 James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York, 1996), 3–7, 225. 14 See Achsah Guibbory, ‘Conversation, Conversion, Messianic Redemption: Margaret Fell, Menasseh ben Israel, and the Jews’, in Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MO, 2000), 210–34.

Urne-Buriall and the Question of Jewish Readmission / 227 farre off’) would be ‘in an extraordinary way’, and not the ‘ordinary way of Christianizing a person, or peoples. . . . by Discourses, written or printed Books, Preachers’.15 Roger Williams, who defended the admission of the Jews to England as a ‘duty’, a ‘great . . . Work’, also believed the Jews would eventually ‘imbrace Christ Jesus’. But he opposed proselytizing, and argued for toleration, explaining: ‘the Wheat and the Tares, should be permitted to dwell, to trade, to live and die in the common Field of the World together’.16 For others, England was imagined as being purely Christian: the Jews were irrevocably alien, their difference (cultural and religious, even racial) permanent, threatening, something that could not be assimilated. Two of Menasseh ben Israel’s seven requests in his petition submitted to Cromwell and the Council of State on 13 November 1655 seem especially to have hit a raw nerve: he requested that Jews, admitted into England, be permitted to have synagogues and worship publicly, and that they be able to consecrate cemeteries in which they could bury their dead.17 The first raised the specter for some of the English that, rather than being converted to Christianity, the Jews would ‘seduce’ English Christians, thus spreading Judaism.18 We know that the merchants were opposed to the readmission of the Jews out of economic motives, but there were also religious anxieties. What made the English particularly vulnerable during this period of the English Revolution was the collapse of a national church and the proliferation of sects. If Jews were to worship publicly, not clandestinely, their religion might prove more contagious. Henry Jessey mentions that ‘some other, though desiring heartily the Jews conversion, yet feared greatly, it would prove the subversion of many here, if Jews were suffered to return hither, because so many here are soon carried aside to new Opinions’.19 The implication was that the Christian faith of many English people was not secure (hence the flourishing 15 Moses Wall, Considerations upon the point of the conversion of the Jewes, appended to the 2nd edn. of The Hope of Israel (1651), 53, 54. 16 [Roger Williams,] The Fourth Paper, Presented by Major Butler . . . Also a Letter from Mr. Goad . . . together with A Testimony to the said fourth paper by R. W. (1652), 19, 18, 13. 17 See Katz (1982), 202 (in n. 40, he cites SP 18/101, ff. 275r–276r. English trans., SP 18/101, f. 277r– 277v ). A list of Menasseh’s seven ‘proposals’ in his Petition is printed in ‘A Postscript’ to Jessey (1652), 12–3. See also Menasseh ben Israel, To His Highnesse The Lord Protector . . . The Humble Addresses . . . [1655]. 18 See Shapiro (1996), on the fear of Christians turning Jew in Shakespeare’s time (ch. 1, 13–42). 19 Jessey (1656), 8.

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of heresies) and that sectarian opinions were not that far from Judaism. William Hughes’s Anglo-Judæus, or the History of the Jews, Whilst here in England (1656) made the connection explicit: England could not bear to receive the Jews ‘especially at this time, when we stand least in need of their Religion to come amongst us; too many having already taken up, if not their opinions, yet such as border near upon their hold’.20 The second request, for cemeteries, is of particular importance, because it brought to the fore the reality that, if Jews were admitted, their bodies would be buried in English soil, and thus literally would become part of England. Anxiety about Jewish cemeteries suggests Jews were considered different not only culturally and religiously but also physically, that there was a material dimension to their supposed spiritual deficiency. Prynne’s Short Demurrer to the Jews (1656) chronicled the Jews’ petition to Henry II in 1178 to have a ‘License to have church-yards without the Cities wherin they inhabited . . . wherein to bury their dead’. Until then, the Jews, though living in several cities, had to bury all their dead in a single cemetery in London, which, Prynne admitted, caused great difficulty. According to Prynne, the petition showed that ‘the Jews were then so odious to the whole Nation, that they would not permit them to bury their very dead corps in any English soyl’.21 Prynne viewed Henry II’s granting of the petition with distaste. Readmitting the Jews would pollute an England that was in danger of turning Jewish, materially as well as spiritually. Prynne’s preface ‘To the Christian Reader’ explains that he was prompted to write this history of the Jews in England by several encounters he had on 7 December 1655, three days after the conference had begun. First he met the minister Philip Nye, who asked Prynne ‘[w]hether there were any Law of England against bringing in the Jews amongst us?’ To which Prynne answers that the Jews were ‘all banished’ in 1290 ‘as a great Grievance, never to return again’.22 He then meets ‘seven or eight maimed soldiers’, begging for money. One says, ‘We must now all turn Jews, and there will be nothing left for the poor’. In a third encounter, Prynne overhears ‘another company of poor people’ crying aloud ‘to each other: They are all turned Devils already; and now we must all turn Jews’, alluding to John 8: 44, in which Jesus says to the Jews: ‘Ye are of your father 20 W[illiam] H[ughes], Anglo-Judæus, or the History of the Jews, Whilst here in England (1656), ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, A2v. 21 Prynne, A Short Demurrer To the Jewes Long discontinued barred Remitter into England, 2nd edn. (1656), 7; The Second Part of the Short Demurrer was also published in 1656. 22 A Short Demurrer, A3v.

Urne-Buriall and the Question of Jewish Readmission / 229 the devil’. Inspired by these ‘unexpected concurrent Providences’, Prynne peruses his English histories, finding evidence of the Jews’ ‘misdemeanors’ which serves to confirm and, indeed, inflame widespread anxiety about an impending influx of Jews.23 Those who wrote against Jewish readmission insisted on the sharp difference between Christianity and other religions, indeed between mainstream reformed Christianity and the various sects (understood to be not really Christian), and between Christians and Jews. Though Paul’s comment in Romans that ‘all Israel would be saved’ was interpreted by millenarians to mean that the Jews would be converted, those like Prynne who opposed Jewish readmission thought Paul was referring to the Jews who converted in the early years of Christianity, not to any future (or mass) conversion. Opponents of Jewish readmission insisted on maintaining what Roger Williams called the ‘wall of separation as to Civil things’ as well as religious. Williams condemned that ‘wall’ as ‘superstitious’ as he argued that the English should ‘freely . . . make way for their free and peaceable Habitation’ in England.24 By 1656, however, even millenarians who had earlier supported readmission and still hoped for the conversion of the Jews had drawn back, feeling that there would need to be what Williams had called ‘answerable Expedients’ or safeguards.25 Jessey’s account refrained from offering his own opinion, and showed Cromwell pulling back, as if worried that he might seem too friendly to the Jews: the Lord Protector insisted that ‘he had no engagement to Jews but only what the Scripture holds forth’, and dismissed the conference, since there was no agreement that could settle this ‘case as to conscience’.26 As if in response, on 8 January 1656, John Dury wrote to Samuel Hartlib ‘in haste’ A Case of Conscience, Whether it be lawfull to admit Jews to come into a Christian Common-wealth. His position was now wary. Jews may be ‘lawfully . . . received into any civil Societie’ as ‘strangers’, but as ‘a People, set apart above all others, for the manifestation both of [God’s] Mercies and Judgments’, they

23 Ibid., A3v. Katz (1982) says the first part of his Short Demurrer ‘was already in the hands’ of some of the delegates before the last (18 December) meeting of the conference (221). 24 Williams (1652), 18. 25 Lucien Wolf observes the falling off of support by the time Menasseh petitioned in 1655. ‘Not a single influential voice was raised in England in support of Menasseh’s proposal’, and he notes either the silence of former supporters or their shift (p. xliii). 26 Jessey (1656), 9.

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must be ‘made strangers every where’.27 In a casuistical twist, Dury argued that the Jews’ separateness (indeed, the Hebrew word for ‘holy,’ ka’dosh signifies ‘separate’) means they must be contained, kept from contaminating Christians. And so he proposed ‘Rules of Expediencie’ if Jews are admitted: they must be ‘restrained’ from blaspheming Jesus Christ; they must not ‘seduce any’ or proselytize; they must rest on the Christian Sabbath as well as their own. But they should also be ‘induced’ to ‘heare us, concerning the grounds . . . for Christianity’; they must ‘declare to us the grounds of their Faith and Practice’, avoiding ‘contradictory disputes in these Conferences’. The goal would be to ‘Edifie’ the Jews, ‘doing them good’ by softening their ‘hard hearts’ while keeping them from seducing English Christians. Dury’s postscript even more sharply warns that the Jews have ‘wayes . . . to undermine a State’ ‘if they be not wisely restrained’.28 By the time Browne’s UrneBuriall appeared in 1658, fear of contamination or seduction by the Jews, a fear of losing English (and Christian) identity, seemed to have triumphed over the millenarian hopes that there would be one fold.

II We do not know if Browne ever took a position about Jewish readmission to England, but remarks in his earlier writings imagine the possibility of living among Jews. The second part of Religio Medici (on ‘that other Vertue of Charity’) begins with Browne’s boast that he has a ‘constitution’ that ‘consorts and sympathizeth with all things; I have no antipathy . . . in dyet, humour, ayre, any thing; I wonder not at the French, for their dishes of frogges, snailes, and toadstooles, nor at the Jewes for Locusts and Grassehoppers, but being amongst them, make them my common viands; and I finde they agree with my stomach as well as theirs’ (RM 2.1). Browne does not just present himself as cosmopolitan in taste, or able to be at home in France. He considers ‘being amongst’ the Jews, and even eating with them. In Book 4 of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne considers but refutes the old but persistent myth that Jews have a particular, unpleasant smell. ‘That Jews 27 John Dury, A Case of Conscience, Whether it be lawfull to admit Jews to come into a Christian Commonwealth (1656), 3. 28 Dury, 5, 7, 9.

Urne-Buriall and the Question of Jewish Readmission / 231 stinck naturally, that is, that in their race and nation there is an evil savour, is a received opinion wee know not how to admit’ (PE 4.10.324). His comment that ‘[t]he nastinesse of that Nation, and sluttish course of life hath much promoted the opinion’ (PE 4.10.328)—as well as his acceptance of the traditional Christian notion, particularly based on the Gospel of John, that the Jews killed Christ—shows he has not entirely escaped the anti-Jewish stance of his Christian culture. Yet this derogatory comment may well refer not to the Jews’ ‘nature’ but to physical conditions attendant on poverty, which would improve if the Jews were not persecuted. Browne argues at length to show that the Jews do not exude any evil odor. He examines the issue from contrary perspectives, suggesting that the Jews, paradoxically, are both impure and purer than others. As a ‘race’ or ‘nation’ (in the older sense of a ‘people’), they are not pure, since they have ‘suffered inseparable commixtures with nations of all sorts’ because of ‘their universall dispersion’ (PE 4.10.325); thus it would be impossible to attribute an ill smell to them and to sniff out Jews, as it were. However, Browne then insists that Jews are ‘lesse subject’ to ‘unsavourinesse’ than ‘any people’, because they are ‘more pure and perfect’ in ‘diet and generation’ (PE 4.10.326–7) than Christians. Browne gives supporting details—all accurate—about the Jews’ dietary laws and practices, as well as about the codes of purity governing sexual intercourse. Finally, Browne looks to ‘experience’, which shows that ‘this offensive odor is no way discoverable in their Synagogues where many are’ (PE 4.10.327)—a remark that raises the intriguing possibility that he himself had visited a synagogue, probably in Padua.29 Browne’s final judgment is that the charge is ‘not verifiable by observation’ (PE 4.10.329). The implication is that he has been near enough to Jews to test—and reject—the prejudice.

III Browne wrote the preface to Urne-Buriall from Norwich, where he lived most of his life. Norwich was a city in which, during medieval times, Jews had lived, the object of hatred by Christians who accused them of ritual anti29 The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry by Robin Robbins suggests that in Padua Browne may have had ‘experience of their synagogues and commerce, their houses and conversation’.

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Christian violence. Norwich’s history of violent Christian–Jewish relations was described in Prynne’s Short Demurer and William Hughes’s Anglo-Judæus (both 1656), the two most fiercely anti-Jewish tracts responding to Menasseh’s petition for readmission of the Jews. Both Prynne and Hughes recounted the slanderous story of two infamous incidents in Norwich. Taking material from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Hughes tells how in 1144, ‘all Laws of humanity’ were ‘broken’ by the Jews when they laid ‘violent hands upon a poor infant; which following the example of their Ancestors, they most cruelly crucifie and murder’. In 1239, the Jews again supposedly tried to repeat the crime, ‘circumcising another [Christian] childe’, who was ‘also destined by them to the Cross’ but rescued in time by his father.30 Prynne prints the proceedings in this case to show the ‘wickednesse’ of the Jews,31 whom he presents as monstrous, non-human Christ-killers, repeatedly reenacting the original crucifixion. To Prynne, the Jews are ‘ungodly men’, the ‘inveterate enemies’ of ‘our Church, & Nation’.32 The antagonism between Christian and Jew that Hughes and Prynne describe is a far cry from what we see in Thomas Browne’s references to Jews. The catalogue of Browne’s library contained a significant number of scholarly books related to Jews and things Jewish.33 We find multiple grammars and lexicons of Hebrew, a book on Jewish theology, John Selden’s De Successionibus . . . ad leges Ebræorum, books by Buxtorf, Peter Cunaeus, and others. Moreover, his library included volumes published in the early 1650s, as part of the intensified interest in Jews: a 1650 edition of Josephus’s Works, Leo Modena’s History of the Rites, Customes, and Manner of Life, of the Present Jews, throughout the World (1650), Thomas Fuller’s Pisgah-sight of Palestine (1650). Notably, the library catalogue does not list millenarian pamphlets or books that were directly part of the controversy over Jewish readmission. But the presence in the catalogue of related books published within ten years after Urne-Buriall suggests a continuing interest: Solomon Lee’s Temple of Solomon pourtray’d by

30 Hughes, 8, 16. See Prynne, A Short Demurrer, 6 on the incident in the twelfth century (he gives 1145, and cites Holinshed’s Chronicles). Prynne discusses the second incident at Norwich, citing John Stow’s Survey of London, and giving the year 1240 (18–22). 31 Prynne, A Short Demurrer, 19. 32 Ibid., ‘To the Christian Reader’, B2v. 33 Jeremiah S. Finch, A Catalogue of the Libraries of Sir Thomas Browne and Dr. Edward Browne, his Son (Leiden, 1986).

Urne-Buriall and the Question of Jewish Readmission / 233 Scripture Light (1659), and John Evelyn’s History of the Three Late Famous Impostors (1667), one of whom was the Jewish ‘false messiah’ Shabbatai Sevi. Urne-Buriall only discusses the Jews a handful of times. The first chapter includes several paragraphs on the practices of ‘the Jewish Nation’. Chapter 2 briefly refers to ‘the ancient Hebrews’. Passing references to Jews appear in Chapters 3 and 5. Although Browne never directly addressed the issue of Jewish readmission, the way in which he places and discusses the Jews, and his treatment of religious and cultural difference more generally, have bearing on the readmission controversy. Urne-Buriall begins its project of determining the identity of the funeral urns dug up in Norfolk by discussing the ways people have disposed of the dead body, but the essay opens out as Browne surveys the practices and customs of various people, cultures, and religions (both past and present), and meditates on mortality and the ubiquitous hope for immortality. Past and present, Christian and non-Christian, meet in his essay, which moves from the physical to the metaphysical; from the particular to the universal; from ‘scientific’ writing to speculative, deeply metaphorical prose; from a listing of facts and practices to their larger significances. Inevitably, his perspective is that of a seventeenth-century Christian. Still, his vision is capacious, and his not-unexpected conclusion about the superiority of Christianity is postponed to the end, and even then, as we shall see, gently expressed. Throughout, he shows an anthropological curiosity about human customs, and he is more concerned to understand than to judge what he discovers. Browne’s opening remark on things long buried in darkness having been brought to light introduces the desire for another life that appears in all the various funerary practices that he will survey, and that will become Browne’s primary concern in the fifth and final chapter. But distinctly religious preoccupations recede in the pages between. Proto-archeology and antiquarianism become cultural anthropology. Repeatedly, and in a variety of ways, differences tend to dissolve or blur even as Browne exhibits a fascination with the variety of human practices and the ‘phantasticall’ ways some men have contrived ‘their corporall dissolution’ (UB 1.136). The more varied the practices, the more difficult it is to distinguish sharply between the Christian and non-Christian, and all are equally interesting. Browne ponders the relative antiquity of burying or burning. He first seems to make a distinction between the two, announcing at the outset that burying was ‘of the elder date’, but quickly notes that ‘the practice of

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Burning was also of great Antiquity’ (UB 1.136). The implication is that there is not much difference between the two. For burying, he mentions ‘the old examples of Abraham and the Patriarchs’; for the practice of burning, he cites ‘descriptions’ in ‘the Grecian Funerals of Homer’, the ‘Funerall Pyre of Hector’, the Celts, Germans, Danes, Swedes, Carthaginians, Americans, and the Romans; Numa and Ovid’s description of Remus (UB 1.136). He makes no distinction between the Hebrew Bible, ancient epics, and histories, between Asia or the East and the West (UB 1.136). When Browne remarks that ‘many Nations embraced’ cremation and ‘many left it indifferent’, but some ‘too much affected, or strictly declined this practice’ (UB 1.137), he implies a distaste for those who are too zealous, no matter on what side, but he refrains from deciding whether burial or burning is ‘better’. All sorts of different peoples populate his survey: Chaldeans, Egyptians, Scythians, Balearians, Christians, ‘Musselmans’, and ‘the Jewish Nation’ (UB 1.139). The order seems random; though Christians, Muslims, and Jews come after the others, and thus seem to have a certain privilege, these three Abrahamic peoples or religions are not presented in order of chronology or a supposed movement towards greater truth. The practices of ‘the Jewish Nation’ receive four paragraphs in this first chapter (in contrast to one each for Christians and Muslims). We find that Christians ‘abhored’ cremation, though Browne with grim wit remarks that ‘they stickt not to give their bodies to be burnt in their lives’ (UB 1.138)—as if pointing out an absurdity. That they refused ‘promiscuous enterrment with Pagans’ (UB 1.139) suggests that Christians were intent on remaining separate. In contrast, the Jews turn out to be less obsessed with separation, more flexible than Christians—an observation that goes against the commonplace Christian assumption that Jews are overly concerned with separateness and purity. Browne remarks that, though the Jews ‘entertained the old way’ of burial, ‘yet sometimes [they] admitted’ burning, especially ‘in time of pestilence’, where burning the ‘bodies of their friends’ was a practical way of trying to control contagion (UB 1.139). Even more important, he comments on the Jews’ flexible, moderate, even affectionate, exchanges with other peoples with whom they had lived. For many nights after ‘the death of Cæsar their friend, and revenger on Pompey’, the Jews visited ‘the place where his body was burnt’ (UB 1.139). Just as the Jews ‘raised noble Monuments and Mausolæums for their own Nation, so they were not scrupulous in erecting some for others’ (UB 1.139). Such details allow Browne to imply that Jews, generous in

Urne-Buriall and the Question of Jewish Readmission / 235 honoring virtuous non-Jewish rulers, have been anything but ‘inveterate enemies’ (Prynne’s term) to the nations in which they have lived in diaspora.34 Although the Jews were not so ‘averse from Pagan burning’ (UB 1.139) or from mixing with those of other religious cultures as the Christians, Browne marks the limits of their conformity with others. They ‘conformed not unto the Romane practice of burning’, which ‘secured’ the prophecy that Christ’s body would not be destroyed. ‘In their long co-habitation with Ægyptians’, they never adopted the ‘custome of exact embalming’, which might have ‘broken’ Christ’s body ‘of so entire a Resurrection’ (UB 1.139). In both instances, Browne points to the recurring idea of resurrection and suggests that the Jews, even when they do not know it, are fulfilling God’s plans—a point made more crudely by those who suggested that the Jews’ persistence in denying Christ, and hence their suffering, providentially bore witness to the truth of Christianity. Yet Browne does not emphasize the Jews’ supposed errors and crimes, and he describes Christ’s unbroken body in pragmatic, scientific terms, neutralizing the traditional animus against the Jews for their part in the death of Christ. Moreover, the Jews’ time in Egypt is referred to, not as a period of ‘bondage’ or slavery but simply as ‘their long co-habitation with Ægyptians’, a phrase that obscures the oppositional relation between the two peoples—and encourages readers to imagine Jews cohabiting with non-Jews. This first chapter of Urne-Buriall concludes by detailing Jewish mourning customs: though they embraced not this practice of burning, yet entertained they many ceremonies agreeable unto Greeke and Romane obsequies. And he that observeth their funerall Feasts, their Lamentations at the grave, their musick, and weeping mourners; how they closed the eyes of their friends, how they washed, anointed, and kissed the dead; may easily conclude these were not meere Pagan-Civilities. (UB 1.140)

The past tense here mingles with the present as Browne describes the Jews’ ceremonies as both ancient and still practised. When Browne suggests that the Jewish rites were ‘agreeable’ to pagan ones and yet also consonant with sacred (Christian) beliefs (their rites were ‘not meere Pagan-Civilities’), he stresses connections rather than oppositions between religious cultures. 34 In his petition Menasseh ben Israel (1655) gave numerous examples from the past as well as the present of ‘the faithfulnesse and loyalty [the Jews] show to all Potentates that receive and protect them in their Countries’ (10).

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Perhaps most striking, the phrase ‘he that observeth’ imagines his Christian readers having the opportunity to see contemporary Jewish funerals, and again leads us to wonder whether he himself had witnessed one. At the least, it suggests his interest in the particularities of Jewish practice, and his refusal to label them absurd or un-Christian. The second chapter of Urne-Buriall attempts to determine the identity of the Norfolk urns by cataloguing the peoples who inhabited the region in the past, and how they treated their dead. Coins had been found in the region from the Romans, who ‘early possessed this Countrey’ (UB 2.141), as well as ‘Norman, Saxon and Danish peeces’, and ‘som Brittish Coynes of gold’ (UB 2.142). Coins are traces of the past, and thus provide clues to the identity of these urns. Browne concludes, incorrectly, that the urns were the remains of ‘Romanes themselves, or Brittains Romanised, which observed the Romane customes’ (UB 2.141). But what I would stress is that Browne gives the reader an England—or Britain—whose land and people are anything but pure. Its soil contains the coins from many ‘Conquerours’ (UB 2.143). Prynne’s anxiety about alien Jews being buried in England seems irrelevant in an England in which so many people from other nations lived and died that it is impossible to determine any pure British or English identity. Having dismantled illusions about a pure Christian England, Browne in Chapter 3 enlarges the perspective to focus on various kinds of minglings and connections. His prose weaves between describing ‘the present Urnes’ (UB 3.147) and describing other urns or burials in the past. He moves easily among other peoples. Mostly, Browne speaks of practices and customs that were meant to continue the connections between people, and between the living and the dead. ‘The rigid Jews’, though they favoured simple, plain burials, ‘were wont to garnish the Sepulchres of the righteous’ (UB 3.147). Other peoples placed ‘Lamps’, ‘Tear-bottles’, ‘Vessels of Oyles and Aromaticall Liquors’ (UB 3.149) in sepulchres. While death separates, human beings try to preserve their connections, in material or symbolic ways. Some urns have contained remains of more than one person: ‘Without confused burnings they affectionately compounded their bones; passionately endeavouring to continue their living Unions’ (UB 3.151). Insisting on connections himself, Browne mingles various peoples. Within one paragraph, he discusses ‘Ægyptian Obelisks and Hieroglyphicall figures’, the Jewish ‘subterranean Cell at Rome’ with its pictures of ‘the holy Candlestick’; the ‘cemiteriall Cels of ancient Christians and Martyrs’, with pictures of ‘Scripture Stories’, ‘flourishes of Cypresse’ and other plants, and

Urne-Buriall and the Question of Jewish Readmission / 237 ‘mysticall Figures of Peacocks, Doves and Cocks’ (UB 3.151–2). All of these different peoples—Christians, Jews, and Egyptians—made symbolic attempts to ‘continue their living Unions’ and employed imagery suggesting a belief in ‘Resurrection’ (UB 3.152). So many different peoples populate Browne’s essay, their practices presented in a way that mixes scientific objectivity (as Browne assembles ‘facts’), sympathy (as he brings out the human desires and longings), and irony (as he suggests the futility of human attempts to perpetuate or renew life). It would have been far more conventional for Browne simply to exalt the Christians, to distinguish them from the ‘others’. His assertion that ‘Christian invention hath chiefly driven at Rites, which speak hopes of another life, and hints of a Resurrection’ (UB 4.158) suggests that he is about to distinguish Christians from non-Christians. Yet he next argues that the rites of ‘ancient Gentiles’ also bespoke hopes for a future life, despite their supposed disbelief in the ‘immortality of their better part’ (UB 4.158). From a scientific, practical point of view, all human ceremonies concerning death are mere folly and madness (‘Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion’ (UB 4.158)). Yet, from another view, the funerary rites mentioned in his cross-cultural history show there is reason and logic in all of them, no matter how seemingly bizarre: the mother who wrapped her dead child’s bones in linen and ‘dryed them in her bosome, the first fostering part’ (UB 4.158); Romans and Greeks who strewed the tombs with flowers; a funeral pyre consisting of ‘Trees perpetually verdant’ (UB 4.159); Christians decking coffins with bay, a tree that ‘seeming dead, will restore it self from the root’ (UB 4.159). Although we repeatedly expect Browne to distinguish between Christian truth and non-Christian error, that distinction is elusive. If non-Christian rites suggest a hope for renewed life just as much as Christian ones, Christians turn out to be as ignorant as non-Christians about the nature of the afterlife. ‘Christian Philosophy yet determines [the particulars of future beings] but in a Cloud of opinions. A Dialogue between two Infants in the womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Platoes denne, and are but Embryon Philosophers’ (UB 4.162). It is only at the end of this chapter and in the fifth one that Browne finally moves to assert the superiority of Christianity and the unavailability of immortality to non-Christians, whose desires for a ‘further state to come’ (UB 4.163) are every bit as intense. But he does so with a surprising tentativeness and even a

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touch of regret. Thinking of Epicurus, whom Dante placed ‘deep’ in his hell, Browne considers: ‘But whether the virtuous heathen, who lived better than he spake, or erring in the principles of himself, yet lived above Philosophers of more specious Maximes, lye so deep as he is placed; at least so low as not to rise against Christians, who beleeving or knowing that truth, have lastingly denied it in their practise and conversation, were a quæry too sad to insist on’ (UB 4.163). The sense of this strange sentence, and its tone, are nearly as hard to decipher as Epicurus’ fate. Is this Christian condescension, or a charitable impulse at odds with his embrace of Christian dogma, or both? Epicurus may have lived well but, lacking the Christian faith and denying the immortality of the soul, he apparently is consigned to a place even lower than those Christians who violate Christian truth in act and speech. Browne leaves it as a ‘quæry’, refusing to pronounce with certainty on someone else’s fate. But, by not ‘insist [ing] on’ the possibility that Epicurus might be redeemed (or, that he does not lie as ‘low’ as Dante placed him), Browne makes clear his belief that only Christians will ‘rise’ to enjoy immortality, while implying his wish that virtuous non-Christians, too, will find their desires fulfilled at the end of time. A number of questions arise as we think about Browne’s statement. Is his desire that the righteous non-Christians could be saved inflected by the knowledge that Jews believe that righteous gentiles will have a place in the world to come? If so, Browne would consciously be voicing a position similar to the Jewish one. If Browne wishes that the pre-Christian pagans could be saved, would he have extended such charity to the Jews? Or would he have thought there was a difference between these virtuous pagans and the Jews, whom Christians usually thought of as ‘rigid’ and obstinate in their refusal to accept Jesus as Messiah? The antiquarianism that leads to an appreciation of difference is qualified by Browne’s sense that he is living in the end-times and that only Christians will be redeemed. Yet his apocalyptic thinking in Urne-Buriall does not emphasize the Day of Judgment and shows no trace of the millenarianism (the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth) that was embraced by the religious radicals who favored Jewish readmission. Instead, Browne is moved by a profound sense of a diminishing future. His sad, elegant meditation on death, dissolution, and human vanity in Chapter 5 concludes that it is vain to hope for continuation through earthly, material means or rituals. Against ‘[p]agan vain-glories’ (UB 5.165) and the ‘iniquity of oblivion’ which ‘blindely scattereth her poppy’ (UB 5.167), stands Christian immortality. ‘The sufficiency of Christian Immortality frustrates all earthly glory’ (UB 5.169).

Urne-Buriall and the Question of Jewish Readmission / 239 But no sooner does Browne assert this sufficiency than he suggests that Christianity itself may be unable to satisfy human desires. For God, who ‘hath assured our resurrection, either of our bodies or names hath directly promised no duration’ (UB 5.169). If we do not get our individuality or bodies back, or our connections with our loved ones—if all there will be is the resurrected immortal soul, unmarked by the identifying body or name— then even Christianity, with its promise of heaven and the soul’s resurrection, is incommensurate with human desire. Having admitted the uncertainty of Christian faith, Browne ends his Urne-Buriall resting in patient expectation of immortality (‘Ready to be any thing, in the extasie of being ever’ (UB 5.171)). Yet even this expression of Christian hope is followed by an epitaph from Lucan, whose wisdom makes it difficult to read Browne’s words as simply promoting Christian supremacy. In Urne-Buriall there is no simple opposition between the Christian and the non-Christian, despite the move towards Christian faith. Browne’s capacious, inquisitive mind is more interested in noting the particularities of cultural differences than in making prescriptive judgments. Even at the end, hesitations frame his presentation of Christianity in relation to other religious perspectives and suggest a skeptical faith conducive to toleration of difference, including Jewish difference.

IV In 1658, the same year as Urne-Buriall, a second edition appeared of Pansebeia: A View of all Religions in the World, by Alexander Ross, the Presbyterian controversialist who had earlier attacked Browne’s writings.35 Angered by ‘the multitude of false Religions in the World’, Ross recorded the diversity of religious beliefs for the purpose of separating Christian truth from other error.36 Ross considers the ‘Religions of Asia’ (including here the religion of the Jews), ‘Religions of Africa and America’, the ancient Romans and Grecians, the pre-Christian Germans, Gauls, Britains, Danes, Russians, Thracians, 35 Alexander Ross, Medicus Medicatus (1645), and Arcana Microcosmi (1651), ‘A Refutation of Dr. Browns Vulgar Errors’. 36 I quote from the first edition of Alexander Ross, —`˝¯´¯`; Or, A View of all Religions in the World: With the several Church-Governments, from the Creation, to these times (London, 1653), ‘The Preface to the Reader’.

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Goths, and others, and finally Islam, before focusing on Christianity. He tells his ‘Christian Reader’ that ‘these different opinions in Religion are brought into the light . . . that we may see their deformity and avoid them’.37 Whereas the final chapter of Urne-Buriall (in Jonathan Post’s words) ‘recast[s] Christian faith into something like its fundamental role, embracing all godly persons’,38 Ross tries to shore up the boundary between Christianity and other religions in order to strengthen the bonds among Christians in England, who must be ‘united in love’ so as to be sturdy in the face of enemies—‘Jewes, Turks, Pagans, Atheists’.39 Describing the religion of Jews as the antithesis of Christianity, Ross becomes increasingly hostile as he describes current Jewish practice and prayers. Jews ‘depart out of the synagogue with their faces still towards the Ark, like crabs going backward’. On the Sabbath, they ‘eat and drink largly in the day time, and kiss their Wives often in the night’. They conclude the Sabbath with ‘singing, or caterwaling rather’. Ross’s Jews are carnal, bestial, and consciously anti-Christian, uttering ‘an execrable prayer against all Christians and baptized Jews’.40 How could such people be tolerated in a civilized, Christian society? Unsurprisingly, Pansebeia ends considering the issue of toleration. Ross asks whether a ‘State’ may ‘tolerate different Religions’ and concludes it would be ‘wise’ to tolerate ‘diversities of opinions’, so long as the people are ‘honest, simple, tractable, obedient to Superiors’, so long as those religions ‘doe not overthrow the fundamentals of truth’, and so long as they are practised ‘in private’. For Ross, a state’s stability depends on having only ‘one Religion’ publicly. Religious difference must be kept private, invisible. Moreover, his requirement that tolerated groups embrace ‘the fundamentals of truth’, suggests toleration would not be extended to Protestant sectarians and Catholics, let alone Jews.41 ‘If there be but one true Religion, the rest must needs be false’.42 This widely held assumption was the main obstacle to toleration. But its strength was being undermined by skepticism about human knowledge and authority and the experience of religious persecution. At the end of the sixteenth

37 —`˝¯´¯`; Or, A View of all Religions in the World: With the several Church-Governments, from the Creation, to these times (London, 1653), ‘The Preface to the Reader’. A5r–A5v. 38 Jonathan F. S. Post, Sir Thomas Browne (Boston, 1987), 128. 39 Ross (1653), 577. 40 Ibid., 1, 17, 11. 41 Ibid., 527, 525. 42 Ibid., 526.

Urne-Buriall and the Question of Jewish Readmission / 241 century, Donne had asserted in Satire III: ‘seeke’ religious ‘Truth’, which stands on ‘a huge hill, j Cragged, and steep . . . hee that will j Reach her, about must, and about must goe (ll. 74, 79–81).43 A Catholic who became a priest in the Church of England, Donne stands at the far end of the confessional spectrum from Milton, raised in the Church of England but eventually rejecting institutionalized religion. Yet both privileged the conscience and the search for religious truth. In Areopagitica (1644) Milton advised Parliament to tolerate heresy and sectarian dissent; each individual has the obligation to search for ‘scattered’ pieces of ‘Truth’. Still, Milton could not tolerate ‘popery’.44 Toleration, that is, was a difficult, complex, slippery matter in the seventeenth century, its limits variously defined. Significantly, Browne refrains from marking the limits of toleration. Perhaps Browne is Stanley Fish’s ‘bad physician’, after all, constitutionally incapable of rigorous discrimination, using ‘the vocabulary of distinguishing’ only ‘to subvert its customary ends’, refusing to subordinate or divide.45 But, I would suggest, Browne’s way of writing about religious and cultural difference, the quality of mind and style that inclines him to tolerate, even embrace, all rather than discriminate harshly, suggests that his is the therapeutic perspective. 43 The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson, Vol. 1 (London, 1963). 44 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957), 742, 747. 45 Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley, 1972), 358.

12 ‘A Likely Story’: Plato’s Timaeus in the Garden of Cyrus Kathryn Murphy

Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus struck its readers as strange from the first. Samuel Hartlib inscrutably remarked to Robert Boyle on 13 May 1658, the month of publication, that the Garden ‘seems to be no ordinary book’.1 Subsequent judgements agree on the Garden’s peculiarity, though varying widely in their attempts to justify it. A consistent response has been negative: critics otherwise sympathetic to Browne have called it ‘a radically bad book’, ‘a tiresome game’, ‘the least important of the works published in Browne’s lifetime’.2 Though the closing paragraphs of Chapter 4 have been deemed ‘the finest he ever wrote’, others are ‘almost unreadable’.3 The eccentric subject—‘the quincuncial, lozenge, or network plantations of the ancients, artificially, naturally, mystically considered’4—has been difficult to account 1 The Hartlib Papers, 2nd electronic edn. (Ann Arbor, 1995), reference Boyle/18. The Garden was published in a single volume with Urne-Buriall. 2 Edmund Gosse, Sir Thomas Browne (London, 1905), 128; Leonard Nathanson, The Strategy of Truth: A Study of Sir Thomas Browne (Chicago and London, 1967), 210; Joan Bennett, Sir Thomas Browne (Cambridge, 1962), 208. 3 William P. Dunn, Sir Thomas Browne: A Study in Religious Philosophy (Minneapolis, 1950), 137; Gosse (1905), 127. 4 This was the subtitle as it appeared on the title-page of the first printing of 1658; in the second and in 1669 it appeared as ‘the quincuncial lozenge, or network plantations’. Other editions, e.g. 1659, exclude the words ‘quincuncial’ and ‘lozenge’ altogether.

Plato’s Timaeus in the Garden of Cyrus / 243 for. Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously registered the sense of delirious idiosyncrasy and profusion that the Garden can induce: attention to Oddities, to the remotenesses, & minutiae of vegetable forms— . . . Quincunxes in Heaven above, Quincunxes in Earth below, & Quincunxes in the water beneath the Earth j Quincunxes in Deity, Quincunxes in the mind of Man j Quincunxes in bones, in optic nerves, in Roots of Trees, in leaves, & in petals, in every thing!5

This disproportionate ‘attention to Oddities . . . & minutiae’ has sometimes found praise: Samuel Johnson remarked: ‘it is a perpetual triumph of fancy to expand a scanty theme, to raise glittering ideas from obscure properties, and to produce to the world an object of wonder to which nature has contributed little’.6 Others, however, have found this extravagance wearying: ‘a panoply intended to overburden the mind’.7 The discrepancies and inconsistencies of style are exacerbated by an impression of a chaotic lack of organization. Though Browne intends to ‘illustrate the excellency of this [quincuncial] order’ (GC Preface, 176), for many readers the impression is of disorder. Despite organization according to the adverbs of the title—artificially, naturally, mystically—the essay has seemed a more or less haphazard cull from reading and notebooks.8 Moreover, pace Coleridge, and Gosse’s claim that ‘it is quincunx, quincunx all the way’,9 Browne augments his discussion with ‘excursions’, ‘collaterall truths’ (GC Preface, 176), and ‘additionall ampliations’ (GC 4.209). He includes a blizzard of examples not only of the quincunx, but of the number five in whatever disposition he finds it, and, since ‘five is remarkable in every circle’ (GC 3.201), of instances of circles in nature. The third chapter abandons the quincunx entirely for a lengthy digression on seeds and generation. In

5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, Vol. 1, Collected Works, Vol. 12, ed. George Whalley (London and Princeton, 1980), 764. 6 Samuel Johnson, ‘The Life of Sir Thomas Browne’, in Christian Morals: By Sir Thomas Browne . . . The second edition (London, 1756), pp. xxiv–xxv. 7 Frank L. Huntley, ‘The Garden of Cyrus as Prophecy’, in Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays, ed. C. A. Patrides (Columbia, MO and London, 1982), 141. 8 Jeremiah S. Finch, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and the Quincunx’, Studies in Philology, 37 (1940), 282. 9 Gosse, 125.

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consequence some critics have deemed the Garden with Coleridge ‘interesting, tho far less interesting’ than its companion piece, Urne-Buriall.10 More recently, attempts to redeem the Garden have sought a key to unlock its paradoxes. The work’s confusion has been interpreted as symptomatic of theories of language or epistemology in the mid-seventeenth century.11 It has been read as a retirement tract and response to the disorder of the 1640s and 1650s,12 even as millenarian prophecy.13 The most subtle readings have seen the disorder as thematic. Claire Preston sees the Garden ‘flourish[ing] in extravagant, almost unmanageable, verdancy’, and suggests that it is the ‘natural-historical’ investigation of generation and profusion, rather than the quincunx, which is the focus: the digressions are its ‘heart’ and ‘major element’.14 Thomas Singer agrees: [t]he seemingly endless and arbitrary enumerations of the quincuncial forms in the Garden of Cyrus are meant to give a sense of nature in all of her wonderful plenitude, and thus serve to contrast the chaotic fertility of this teeming world with the firm and inexorable order that underlies it. That order should underlie such chaos is purposively meant to seem miraculous.15

The sense that order underlies disorder is common to the best interpretations of the Garden.16 It is on these insights that I want to build here. First, I shall show that the climactic passages at the close of the mystical fourth chapter, where Browne invokes Plato’s cosmogony, the Timaeus, to allegorize the quincunx, have often been overlooked or misinterpreted, and that as a 10 Coleridge, i. 764. See, e.g. Nathanson (1967), which, oddly in a study of Browne’s Platonism, minimizes the importance of the Garden and treats Urne-Buriall separately as ‘more profound’ (179). 11 Janet Halley, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus and the Real Character’, English Literary Renaissance, 15 (1985), 100–21; Frank D. Walters, ‘A Strategy for Writing the Impossibilium: Aporia in Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus’, Prose Studies, 18 (1995), 19–35. 12 Jonathan F. S. Post, Sir Thomas Browne (Boston, 1987); Anne Cotterill, ‘ ‘‘Lights Framed like Nets’’ in Sir Thomas Browne’s Garden’, in Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford, 2004), 126–64; Claire Preston, ‘Of Cyder and Sallets: The Hortulan Saints and the Garden of Cyrus’, in ‘A man very well studyed’: New Contexts for Thomas Browne, ed. Kathryn Murphy and Richard Todd (forthcoming Leiden, 2008), 149–70. 13 Huntley (1982), ‘Prophecy’. 14 Claire Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005), 182, 207; see also Dunn, 134–5. 15 Thomas C. Singer, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘‘Emphaticall Decussation, or Fundamentall Figure’’ ’, English Literary Renaissance, 17 (1987), 102. 16 See also Halley, esp. 118–19.

Plato’s Timaeus in the Garden of Cyrus / 245 result some of Browne’s most subtle patterning throughout has been missed. The second section traces this patterning, and shows how it contributes to the theological and philosophical foundations of the Garden. Finally, I return to Browne’s reading of the Timaeus, to suggest how it shaped his understanding of how the order of the teeming world might best be read and written.

I It has often been recognized that the ‘truly magnificent sentences’ of the close of the fourth chapter are the climactic moment of the Garden.17 Yet Browne follows his rhapsodic high style with an explication of the mystical significance of the quincunx which is couched in such crabbed and congested prose that it has rarely been fully understood: Of this Figure Plato made choice to illustrate the motion of the soul, both of the world and man; while he delivereth that God divided the whole conjunction length-wise, according to the figure of a Greek å, and then turning it about reflected it into a circle; By the circle implying the uniform motion of the first Orb, and by the right lines, the planetical and various motions within it. (GC 4.220)

Browne’s elliptic description parallels a passage in the Timaeus in which the Demiurge fashions the cosmos and its motions from the world soul.18 This is imagined as a fabric which he then: split lengthwise into two halves; and making the two cross one another at their centres in the form of the letter X, he bent each round into a circle and joined it up, making each meet itself and the other at a point opposite to that where they had been brought into contact.19

Comparison with the original reveals the sketchiness of Browne’s paraphrase. Modern commentaries on the Timaeus often use the analogy of an armillary sphere to explain what Plato intends. The two circles formed by the bending of the å together delimit a sphere. One half of the fabric of the world soul 17 Dunn, 137; see also Post (1987), 140; Gosse, 128. 18 Literally ‘craftsman’, the Demiurge was understood, as Browne’s paraphrase makes clear, as representing God the Creator by later Christianizing Platonists. 19 Timaeus 36 b–c, quoted here from Francis M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The ‘Timaeus’ of Plato (London, 1937) (repr. Indianapolis, 1997), 73.

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represents the circular motion of the universe as a whole; the other, fastened within the first circle and at an angle to it, represents the various motions of the planets. Yet Browne suggests that the resulting figure creates a single circle, and his ‘right [ie., straight] lines’ can only be understood if the figure is conceived in two rather than three dimensions. He is not imagining Plato’s model of the motion of the spheres, but a cross of straight lines inside a circle: 6. This may still seem obscure from Browne’s account, and indeed I am aware of only one other reading which suggests that this is what Browne intends.20 It is corroborated, however, by a passage from a commentary on the Timaeus. The fifth-century Neoplatonist Proclus wrote in response to this passage: The figure å has an affinity to the universe, and also to the soul. And as Porphyry relates, a character of this kind, viz. å surrounded by a circle, is with the Egyptians a symbol of the mundane soul. For perhaps it signifies, through the right lines indeed, the biformed progression of the soul, but through the circle its uniform life, and regression according to an intellectual circle.21

Browne must have read this, or an account of it. Not only does he discuss a cross within a circle, but also extrapolates an extended allegory based on it for the symbol ‘with application unto the soul of man’, which parallels Proclus’ ‘affinities’: [t]he circle declaring the motion of the indivisible soul, simple, according to the divinity of its nature, and returning into it self; the right lines respecting the motion pertaining unto sense, and vegetation, and the central decussation, the wondrous connexion of the severall faculties conjointly in one substance. And so conjoyned the unity and duality of the soul, and made out the three substances so much considered by him [Plato]; That is, the indivisible or divine, the divisible or corporeal, and that third, which was the Systasis or harmony of those two, in the mystical decussation. (GC 4.220) 20 Halley, 112. Frank Huntley comes close, ingeniously, in ‘Sir Thomas Browne: The Relationship of Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus’, Studies in Philology, 53 (1956), 204–19, where, working on the Platonic model, he sees the image oscillating in three dimensions between a quincunx and a circle with a single line across it, depending on point of view (207). Readers paying less attention than Huntley misunderstand the figure: e.g. Laurence A. Breiner, ‘The Generation of Metaphor in Thomas Browne’, Modern Language Quarterly, 38 (1977) 261–75, 267; Singer (1987), 97. Given the obscurity and congestion of this passage, this is unsurprising. 21 Proclus’ Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato, trans. Thomas Taylor (1820) (repr. Frome, Somerset, 1998). Emphasis in original. This interpretation does not appear in the commentary of either Calcidius or Meursius in the edition of the Timaeus which Browne owned.

Plato’s Timaeus in the Garden of Cyrus / 247 Once it is clear that this passage describes 6, we can see that Browne emphasizes three elements which unify the apparently diverse subjects of the treatise and justify its digressions. The crossing lines of the quincunx represent the sensible rather than the rational world, or, as Browne emphasizes, vegetation, explored so exuberantly in the central chapter. The digressive focus on circular figures turns out to have anticipated the motion of the ‘indivisible soul’. The ‘central decussation’, meanwhile, concentrates the corporeal and the divine: a dot without dimension which nevertheless contains, wondrously, both body and soul. In his digression on seeds and generation, Browne had drawn the reader’s attention to ‘the Originall of Duckweed’, which begins ‘at the bignesse of a pins point’, and to ‘the puncticular Originals of Periwincles and Gnats’ (GC 3.199). A seed is a ‘little nebbe, or fructifying principle’, a ‘generative particle’, ‘germ’, ‘corculum’, or ‘punctilio’ (GC 3.196–7).22 The first definition in Euclid’s Elements is of ‘a signe or point’: Browne’s ‘punctilio’ is thus the point of origin for all bodies, natural and geometrical.23 Browne observes that ‘[t]he exiguity and smallnesse of some seeds extending to large productions is one of the magnalities of nature, somewhat illustrating the work of the Creation, and vast production from nothing’ (GC 3.199). The ‘digression’ on seeds is thus central to the treatise not just structurally, but also graphically.24 6 is thus the systasis which draws all elements of the digressive, copious, and fecund treatise into a single point, and shows its unity. The paraphrase of the Timaeus, once Browne’s description is properly understood, throws various aspects of the Garden and Urne-Buriall into retrospective relief. In Urne-Buriall, Browne had declared that ‘[c]ircles and right 22 A corculum is, etymologically, a little heart, and is defined as the embryo of a seed in a plant (OED s.v. corcle, corcule). Among the meanings which ‘punctilio’ carried in the period was ‘a point marked on a sundial’; if this was a resonance Browne intended, then it chimes with the solar imagery associated with Cyrus (whose name means ‘sun’) running throughout the treatise as a whole in contrast to the dark world of Urne-Buriall (OED s.v. punctilio 3). In A Letter to a Friend (first published 1690), Browne also supplies the first citation of the phrase ‘Salient point’ (103), rendering the Aristotelian punctum saliens—the first visible sign of the heart in the development of an embryo—which had first been introduced into English writing by William Harvey in the Anatomical Exercitations containing the generation of living creatures (1653), 91–4. I am grateful to the editors for drawing my attention to Harvey’s reference. 23 Quoting here from the translation of Henry Billingsley, The Elements of Geometrie . . . With a very fruitfull praeface made by M. I. Dee [John Dee] (1570), f. 1r, B.ir 24 For Browne’s attention to the centre of the thesis see Singer, 94; on the quincuncial disposition of the treatise, with the digression at the centre, see Preston, (2005), 207.

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lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortall right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all’ (UB 5.166). Just as all geometrical figures must be bounded by curved or straight lines, so, too, are objects in the world, and our lives. Browne explains in the margin that ‘the mortal right-lined circle’ is ‘Ł, the character of death’: the first letter of Greek thanatos. But as Browne states in the Garden’s prefatory letter to Nicholas Bacon, ‘the delightfull world comes after death, and Paradise succeeds the Grave’ (GC Preface, 176–7); in the Garden, Browne converts the mortal into the immortal right-lined circle with a single penstroke. Figures of circles and right lines are subtly woven into the fabric of the Garden throughout. When the reader first encounters the eponymous Cyrus, he is praised because he ‘brought the treasures of the field into rule and circumscription’ (GC 1.180). At a first reading, this seems merely one of Browne’s habitual doublets. Once Browne introduces 6, however, it is illuminated retrospectively as the first appearance of the motif which organizes the treatise. Browne refers to ‘the mysterious crosses of Ægypt, with circles on their heads’, by which was ‘ . . . expressed the processe and motion of the spirit of the world, and the diffusion thereof upon the Celestiall and Elementall nature; implyed by a circle and a right-lined intersection’ (GC 1.182). The conjunction of circular and crossing motions in the Hebrew ceremony of oblations is also mentioned (GC 1.183), and we are told that ‘[right lines] and circles make out the bulk of plants’ (GC 3.207). Mention of various crowns unites again the circle and the quincunx: in particular, the crown of Charles the Great ‘was framed after this manner; with an intersection in the middle from the main crossing barres, and the interspaces unto the frontal circle, continued by handsome network-plates, much after this order’ (GC 2.186). Viewed from above, then, this is no hollow crown, but a perfect prolepsis of 6. Retrospectively, the reader recognizes throughout anticipations of the mystical decussation.

II The frustrated critics of the chaotic Garden still have grounds for complaint, however. If there has been a unifying thematic principle in operation from the beginning, why does Browne neglect to indicate this earlier? Why is the reader

Plato’s Timaeus in the Garden of Cyrus / 249 deliberately bewildered? Though Urne-Buriall has often been seen as a ‘mimetic essay’ or ‘prose meditation’ enacting the reader’s realization of the spiritual lesson of the disinterred urns, this attentive reading has not been fully extended to the Garden.25 Indeed, the same critic who writes of Urne-Buriall’s ‘action of discovery’ and marvels at ‘the deliberateness of his design’ sees in the Garden ‘an epistemological utopia all too single-dimensioned and predictable’.26 Yet it, too, has its moment of discovery, which occurs at the same point as in Urne-Buriall. There, the fourth chapter enumerates and exposes the vanities of pagan burial rites; the plangent tones, however, turn in the closing paragraphs to praise for those pagans who have derived belief in ‘some future being’ without the benefit of revelation. Christians are yet luckier, since: they . . . live not in that disadvantage of time, when men could say little for futurity, but from reason . . . With these hopes Socrates warmed his doubtfull spirits against that cold potion, and Cato before he durst give the fatall stroak spent part of the night in reading the immortality of Plato [the Phaedo] . . . (UB 4.163)

The chapter ends as Browne leaves the body and its ‘present felicities’ behind in the urn to relish the satisfaction of the resurrected soul. With its invocation of Plato on the soul, then, the passage from Urne-Buriall foreshadows Browne’s use of the Timaeus at the corresponding point in the Garden. Does this indicate that the nature of the ‘discovery’ in the Garden is also the same— the revelation of resurrection? Certainly, Browne acknowledges the obvious Christian resonances. The ‘figure of a Greek å’ is the initial of Christ, and the implications are made explicit in the following paragraph: if that were clearly made out which Justin Martyr took for granted, this figure hath had the honour to characterize and notifie our blessed Saviour, as he delivereth in that borrowed expression from Plato; Decussavit eum in universo. (GC 4.220)27

Justin Martyr claims that Plato ‘plagiarized from our teachers [i.e., the Mosaic tradition]’, and thus typologically foreshadowed Christ in stating that the 25 See Nathanson (1967), 179–202; see also Walter R. Davis, ‘Urne Buriall: A Descent into the Underworld’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 10 (1977), esp. 76, 86–7; and Brent Nelson, ‘Curious Readers and Meditative Form in Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia’, in Murphy and Todd (eds.), (forthcoming, 2008), 107–26. 26 Nathanson (1967), 194. 27 For Justin Martyr see ‘The First Apology’, in Writings of St. Justin Martyr, ed. and trans. Thomas B. Falls (New York, 1948), esp. 97–9.

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Demiurge placed the world soul crosswise in the universe. The possibility that Browne, too, has been working typologically, foreshadowing the crucifixion through his instantiations of quincunxes in art and nature, gains credence from his earlier refusal to discuss it. In the first chapter Browne declares that he will ‘decline the old Theme, so traced by antiquity, of crosses and crucifixion’ (GC 1.182). He casts doubt on the precise shape of the crosses endured by Christ and St Andrew and rebukes overzealous interpreters who ‘could not escape a typicall thought of Christ’ in observing the crossing gestures made in the Hebrew ceremony of Oblations (GC 1.183). All this, however, is cast in Browne’s habitual paralipsis—drawing attention to something while, or precisely by, ostensibly omitting or ignoring it. It thus has the paradoxical effect of lodging the Christian significance of the subject in the reader’s mind, while at the same time removing it from the centre of attention until the moment of ‘discovery’. The single exception to Browne’s silence occurs at the beginning of Chapter 2, in a quotation of Song of Songs 2.9, ‘which ours [i.e., the King James Bible] hath rendered, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himselfe through the lattesse; that is, partly seen and unseen, according to the visible and invisible side of his nature’ (GC 2.187). Until the end of Chapter 4 the parallels between crucifix and quincunx are, like Christ behind the lattice, seen and unseen, at once visible and invisible through the warp and weft of the text of the Garden of Cyrus. Yet Browne’s paraphrase of Justin Martyr is sceptical. He immediately casts doubt on the possibilities of typology in Plato: ‘it is not improbable, he learned these and other mystical expressions in his Learned Observations of Ægypt’ (GC 4.220), where, as we have seen, Proclus finds 6. This is, in fact, another example of paralipsis: the tantalizing possibility of the anticipation of Christ, and the equation of the quincunx with the Christian cross, are offered to the reader only to be rejected. If the quincunx does not signify the crucifixion, then the crucifixion must be yet another example of the quincunx, joining nutcrackers and beds, honeycombs and a horse’s trot as an instance of the immortal right-lined intersection. If 6 is not a symbolic representation of the crucifixion, what is the ‘discovery’ towards which the reader has been coaxed? Close attention to the structure of Chapter 4 reveals in small the slow revelation of the intent of the treatise. It opens with the titular subject: the ordered plantation of trees. The focus is on the quincuncial plantation’s ‘delights, commodities, mysteries’ (GC 4.209), and in particular its pleasures and uses, dulce et utile. Browne begins pragmatically: it supplies the optimal distance between trees for

Plato’s Timaeus in the Garden of Cyrus / 251 growth, and ‘a due expansion of their branches, for shadow or delight’ (GC 4.210). The companionate alternation between the commodity of shadow and the pleasure taken in it, described in a delicate pun as ‘delight’, begins a series of such complementary couples: day and night; sun and moon; light and shadow. The pattern recalls the succession of the ‘delightful world’ of the Garden after the darkness of Urne-Buriall, and the image of Christ showing himself, now seen, now unseen, behind a window’s network. After a ‘digression’ of several pages on roundness and circles in plants, anticipating the mystical significance of the final paragraphs, the reader is invited to take ‘delight ornamentall view’ of the ‘delectable . . . variety of Figures, which these orders, open and closed, do make’ (GC 4.215, 4.214). Views of quincuncial plantation are pleasing because they are peculiarly suited to human vision, since ‘in this kinde of aspect the sight being not diffused but circumscribed between long parallels and . . . adumbration from the branches, it frameth a penthouse over the eye’ (GC 4.216). This leads Browne to the first explicit statement of the ‘discovery’ to which he has been leading his reader, uniting the commodity and pleasure of alternation itself: ‘therefore providence hath arched and paved the great house of the world, with colours of mediocrity, that is, blew and green, above and below the sight, moderately terminating the acies of the eye’ (GC 4.217). The appearance of providence, implying intention behind the phenomena which Browne has been describing, is unexpected: throughout Browne’s instantiations, the question of cause has not yet been raised. But an awareness of the world as made now becomes the dominant note: Nor are only dark and green colors, but shades and shadows contrived through the great Volume of nature, and trees ordained not only to protect and shadow others, but by their shades and shadowing parts, to preserve and cherish themselves . . . [T]he flowers themselves lye wrapt about the seeds, in their rudiment and first formations, which being advanced, the flowers fall away; and are therefore contrived in variety of figures, best satisfying the intention. (GC 4.217–8)

‘Contrived’, ‘ordained’, ‘intention’: the emphasis on agency behind plant life is suddenly everywhere. It is at this point that the gear of Browne’s prose shifts into passages that have been identified as among the best he wrote, ringing the changes on the principle of alternation for which the reader has already been prepared: Darknesse and light hold interchangeable dominions, and alternately rule the seminal state of things. Light unto Pluto is darknesse unto Jupiter . . . Light that makes things seen,

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makes some things invisible: were it not for darknesse and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of the Creation had remained unseen, and the Stars in heaven as invisible as on the fourth day, when they were created above the Horizon, with the Sun, or there was not an eye to behold them. The greatest mystery of Religion is expressed by adumbration . . . Life it self is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sunne it self is but the dark simulachrum, and light but the shadow of God. (GC 4.218)

Here, the paradoxical relationship of Urne-Buriall and Garden of Cyrus finds its fullest justification: seen through a mystical lens death is life, life death; the sun dark and light a shadow. These appropriately chiastic relationships introduce the explicit statement of the agent responsible for the contrivance of nature. The crescendo climaxes in God, who, like Christ, had received a cursory mention early in the work before becoming partially hidden behind the lattice of references to instances of the quincunx. Browne again forces the reader to shift perspective on what has gone before. The structure of the book has moved from the artificial to the natural to the mystical. The close of Chapter 4 is, however, the culmination of a slow realization that the phenomena of nature, created by God, are, in fact, artificial; the artificial productions of man, meanwhile, shot through with the quincunx, demonstrate the signature of God’s creation of the natural world. The reader is forced to perform a conceptual chiasmus, in which two terms—delight and commodity, light and darkness, life and death, art and nature—recur reversed, in inverted relation to one another. This hymn to God’s benign and commodious providence of alternation is closely followed by the mystical explanation of the significance of 6. The reader thus simultaneously reaches a realization of the design of the universe by God, and of the treatise by Browne. The reader’s experience of disorientation and digression is carefully calibrated with a slow realization of plan and intended significance in both world and book.

III Browne leads his reader slowly to this realization rather than stating it outright: his technique is, in Francis Bacon’s terms, initiatory rather than magisterial. The Garden is a course in reading: construing not just Browne’s essay, but also

Plato’s Timaeus in the Garden of Cyrus / 253 the world. In Religio Medici Browne had declared that the book of nature was ‘the Scripture and Theology of the Heathens’ (RM 1.16). A single, eternal, and creating God could be inferred from study of the natural world, without recourse to the revealed truths of the Bible. Indeed, ‘the Heathens knew better how to joyne and reade these mysticall letters, than wee Christians, who cast a more carelesse eye on these common Hieroglyphicks, and disdain to suck Divinity from the flowers of nature’ (RM 1.16). Distracted and made lazy by Scripture, Christians have allowed application of their hermeneutic capabilities to the book of the world to atrophy, a balance which The Garden of Cyrus and most of the writings of Browne’s maturity attempt to redress. It is thus clear why the crucifixion is an example of the quincunx, rather than vice versa. Of course, in the scope of providential history, the crucifixion is the single most important moment: the paradox of God’s simultaneous absolute presence and absence in the world, fulfilling the significance of human history and reversing the terms of the Fall. Within the Garden, however, using knowledge derived from revelation would prejudice the reader’s process of discovery. Browne’s readers could not be expected to set aside their theological assumptions. But his paralipsis forces the reader into a state of false innocence. Browne undertakes the more ambitious task of revealing the full wonder of Creation and the chiastic paradox of the crucifixion through inductive attention to occurrences of the quincunx and its related symbols in nature. The depth of the crucifixion’s significance must be proved and tested by other occurrences of the quincunx, not their significance proved by it. Browne, heuristically, wants to read the book of nature without recourse to the book of Scripture, and to show his reader how to do so. The prime example of such natural theology for Browne and his contemporaries was Plato, and in particular, the Timaeus.28 As we have seen, Browne’s study of the dialogue was more than cursory: in addition to his allegorical use of the creation of the motions of the spheres, he had read at least the commentaries of Proclus and Justin Martyr, or an account of them. Astonishingly, the Timaeus is the only Platonic dialogue included in the sale of

28 On the Renaissance reception of the Timaeus see, in general, Ada Neschke-Hentschke (ed.), Le Timeé de Platon: Contributions a` l’Histoire de sa rećeption (Leuven and Paris, 2000); Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils (ed.), Plato’s ‘Timaeus’ as Cultural Icon (South Bend, 2003); Thomas Leinkauf and Carlos Steel (eds.), Platons ‘Timaios’ als Grundtext der Kosmologie in Spa¨tantike, Mittelalter und Renaissance (Leuven, 2005).

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Browne’s library in 1711.29 It is also the first work Browne cites by name in the Garden, in a sequence of references to creation myths from various traditions. Although Browne’s ostensible purpose is to date the first gardens, the invocation of primal scenes of the imposition of order on chaos is clearly a thematic signal which achieves its full significance in the second direct reference to the Timaeus. Browne paraphrases its author as ‘the divine philosopher’, an epithet Plato deserved by inferring the existence of a single divine Creator without the help of revelation. In the dialogue, Timaeus describes the Demiurge’s motives and actions in creating the cosmos and all things in it. Unlike the first chapter of Genesis, the Timaeus describes not just the creation and distinction of matter but also the physical rules by which the cosmos is governed, from the motion of the spheres to the combination of imperceptible particles. The Timaeus is thus simultaneously cosmogony and physics, theology and science. If the Timaeus served as a model for reading nature in Browne’s two explicit references to it, an unattributed and hitherto unnoticed parallel uses the dialogue as a model for writing it. Before Timaeus begins his narrative of the Demiurge’s creation of the cosmos, he properly invokes the gods, asks for inspiration, and issues his auditors with a series of caveats about the limitations of accounts, verbal and written, of the natural world. The Demiurge made the world, he says, on the model of unchanging ideas, and, resembling such a model, it must be good. However, since it is only an imitation, it cannot be perfect, but only a flawed emulation. The account of creation which Timaeus is about to offer can in turn be only the imperfect likeness of that likeness. This has obvious implications for the truth-claim of writings on nature: ‘an account of what is made in the image of that other, but is only a likeness, will itself be but likely’. The best that any account can hope for is to resemble the original as closely as possible: 29 Browne owned the 1617 edn. of Calcidius’s translation of the Timaeus, with annotations by Johannes Meursius; see A Catalogue of the Libraries of Sir Thomas Browne and Dr Edward Browne, his Son: A facsimile reproduction, ed. Jeremiah S. Finch (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 33; facsimile p. 11, no. 106(b). Proclus’ commentary on the Timaeus did not appear in the sale, but Browne owned a commentary on Ptolemy (Catalogue, 54; facs. 30.1) and a manuscript transcription, not in his own hand, of part of Proclus’ Theologica Platonica in Latin translation. Huntley speculated that Browne’s interest in Plato was aroused by his Oxford tutor, Thomas Lushington: see ‘Dr. Thomas Lushington (1590–1661), Sir Thomas Browne’s Oxford Tutor’, Modern Philology, 81 (1983), 14–23. The claim that Browne owned a 10-vol. manuscript treatise on Proclus by Lushington is, however, unsubstantiated.

Plato’s Timaeus in the Garden of Cyrus / 255 If we can furnish accounts no less likely than any other, we must be content, remembering that I who speak and you my judges are only human, and consequently it is fitting that we should, in these matters, accept the likely story [eikos mythos] and look for nothing further.30

Like Plato, Browne opens his text with a generically bound proemium which, like Timaeus’s prefatory speech, casts doubt on the possibility of accurate representation in writings about nature. Browne defines the scope of his treatise negatively. ‘[W]e write no Herball’, he declares, signalling that he will not treat compendiously and comprehensively of the plants of even a limited area; nor does he intend to ‘erect a new Phytology’ (GC Preface, 175). Browne tells Bacon: [y]our discerning judgement so well acquainted with that study [i.e., of botany], will expect herein no mathematicall truths, as well understanding how few generalities and U finita’s there are in nature. . . . How Botanicall Maximes must have fair allowance, and are tolerably currant, if not intolerably overballanced by exceptions. (GC Preface, 176)

Browne urges Bacon to accept his likely story. ‘U finita’s’ refer to the rule that the final u in Latin is long, and thus among the ‘rules without exceptions’. ‘Botanicall Maximes’, however, promise only tolerable currency: an approximate likeness or likelihood rather than absolute adequacy to truth. Thus Browne finds in the Timaeus not only the mystical figure of the quincunx within a circle but also an endorsement for writing on the created world that aims for no more than tolerable currency, a licence for the playful exuberance of the Garden. Browne’s attempt to represent the world in The Garden of Cyrus is a ‘likely story’, and he relishes the telling of it. But Browne, unlike Plato, is not writing a cosmogony. The world is already created and disposed in order when he begins to write about it, and the treatise does not describe the creation of that order, but its discovery and appreciation by man. Religio Medici 1.16 opens with Browne’s familiar description of nature as ‘that universall and publik Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all’ (RM 1.16). It is here that Browne discusses nature as ‘the Scripture and Theology of the Heathens’. The reading of the book of nature is urged as aesthetic appreciation: I hold there is a general beauty in [all] the works of God, and therefore no deformity in any kind or species of creature whatsoever . . . [H]is will . . . is the rule of order and 30 29C-D, Cornford, 23.

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beauty . . . [T]here was never anything ugly, or mis-shapen, but the Chaos . . . Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence: Art is the perfection of nature: Were the world now as it was the sixt day, there were yet a Chaos: Nature hath made one world, and Art another. In briefe, all things are artificiall, for Nature is the Art of God. (RM 1.16)

The chiastic relation of artificial and natural consideration in the Garden is anticipated. Everything in nature is intended, and as intended; the assumption of a God behind the cosmos guarantees that everything is beautiful. Raymond Klibansky, writing on Platonic continuity in the Middle Ages, emphasizes the importance of the Timaeus in providing an exemple of pious investigation of nature: the very idea of a personal God, who out of his goodness ordered the cosmos, becomes the warrant for the possibility of its comprehension. Reason acquires a new dignity from its function to retrace and reveal the art of the divine craftsman; and the search for knowledge of the causes of things becomes the service of God.31

This casts God as the author function, a licence for the assumption of cohesion and order in the cosmos, his Creation. If God is author, then Browne becomes the appreciative critic, tracing and communicating God’s intention in the world, rousing his readers’ admiration and wonder at his artistry. A further passage from Religio Medici suggests that the task of this criticism and appreciation is both delight and duty: The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man: ’tis the debt of our reason wee owe unto God, and the homage wee pay for not being beasts; without this the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixt day when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive, or say there was a world. (RM 1.13)

To conceive and say there is a world, to study, contemplate and describe it, is the work of the Garden. Coleridge praised Browne’s insight that ‘our destiny & instinct is to unriddle the world’.32 The lesson which Browne learned from Plato is that this process is endless: no answer to the riddle can be exhaustive, definitive, any more than ‘tolerably currant’. Far from acting as a brake on natural history, however, Browne takes from the Timaeus a ‘warrant’ to 31 Raymond Klibansky, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition During the Middle Ages (London, 1939), 76–7. 32 Coleridge, i. 744.

Plato’s Timaeus in the Garden of Cyrus / 257 ‘retrace and reveal the art of the divine craftsman’. The final clauses suggest that such accounts are themselves acts of creation which fulfil and perfect the hexae¨meron. In line with Timaeus’s cautionary remarks, the Garden may be no more than a likely story. But without the spinning of such likely stories, Browne suggests, the world, for us, would not exist.

13 Miscellaneous Browne among the Tombs of Norwich Cathedral Jonathan F. S. Post

In a 1934 letter to Donald Stanford, written while Elizabeth Bishop was still an undergraduate at Vassar College, the aspiring poet delightfully exclaimed: Just now I am very proud because I recently acquired a wonderful edition of Sir Thomas Browne . . . very elegant, once selling for $36 and now remaindered at $12. It’s edited by Geoffrey Keynes and has a lot of charming portraits. I should like to do nothing but sit all evening and copy off such sentences as ‘That wee call a bee bird is a small dark gray bird’, or ‘What word you give our knots or gnats, a small marsh bird, very fatte and a daintye dish’. But Cotton Mather still awaits me with his prayers and groans.1

The copied sentences are both from The Miscellaneous Writings of Sir Thomas Browne, which appeared as Volume 5 of the 1928–31 Keynes edition; and for later readers the good fortune that Bishop reports would be only further underscored by the publisher’s note accompanying a subsequent reissuing of the Writings from Faber and Faber: The unsold remaining stock of the sheets of volumes one to four was destroyed by enemy action in 1941, and the survivors, the two volumes entitled five and six, are now reissued separately with the addition of a few errata.2 1 Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York, 1994), 16. 2 The Miscellaneous Writings of Sir Thomas Browne, including Miscellany Tracts and Repertorium, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1946), p. [iv].

Browne among the Tombs of Norwich Cathedral / 259 Like the urns in Urne-Buriall, these unsold sheets somehow survived the drums and tramplings—to say nothing about the bombs—of military conquest and come bearing curious messages from the past. My own copy, surfacing much later, included an additional touch of value in the signature and purchase date of its original owner: ‘James Merrill, 1947’. As Bishop’s comments suggest, Browne’s Miscellaneous Writings is a browser’s paradise. Just why these two bird passages caught her eye—out of a large number of possibilities from his Notes on the Natural History of Norfolk—is anyone’s guess. Was it the bee-like smallness of the first bird that appealed to her? Or the curious combination of daintiness and fatness of the second? In any event, their detailed monosyllabic particularity hints at a world—rather, a specific, local, identifiably rural region of England—teeming with things to be observed and interpreted, indeed even copied out and shared: a place rich in flora and fauna, bordered, not bounded, by water, and populated by seafarers and fowlers alike—and occasionally visited by a questing, keeneyed naturalist from the city, venturing to report the whereabouts and habits of, say, the ‘platea, or shovelard’, or ‘[a] sea fowl called a shearwater’, or, more simply, the common ‘smee, widgeon, Arts, ankers, noblets’.3 As such, Browne’s Notes on the Natural History of Norfolk, like The Miscellaneous Writings more generally, are not just about the world observed. They are about knowledge in the making, and they belong to an emerging community of inquirers, a loosely connected group of scholars, antiquarians, and quasiscientists, whose writings seek to know and name visible life. In this regard, Browne’s Miscellaneous Writings is memorable both at the level of the particular— few readers will forget his description of ‘Boulimia Centenaria’, involving a 102-year-old woman from Yarmouth afflicted with an eating disorder, which he communicated to the Royal Society—and also for the collective glimpse it affords of a life of commonality emerging from shared shop talk. The Miscellaneous Writings, in fact, has its textual origins in this communal impulse for collecting matter.4 The work’s rudiments were initially, albeit partially, assembled and published shortly after Browne’s death in 1682, first in 1684, then in 1686, as part of Browne’s Works by his kinsman and fellow East Anglian Thomas Tenison, the Anglican clergyman and Baconian who was eventually to become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1695, a position he held 3 Notes on the Natural History of Norfolk (Keynes 3, 403–4). 4 On Browne’s habits of collecting see Nelson’s essay in this volume.

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until his death in 1715. As the first to sort through Browne’s ‘many disordered Papers’,5 Tenison also clearly struggled with his task. He gathered together for inclusion the epistolary essays identified as Certain Miscellany Tracts—‘Tracts’ suggesting something more formed and elevated than the jumble of materials later editors have salvaged and printed under the general title of Miscellaneous Writings. But Tenison was also made uneasy by much of what he saw. ‘Men are not wont to set down Oracles in every Line they write to their Acquaintance’, he pronounced, with perhaps a backward glance at Urne-Buriall; and while he remained confident that ‘the Reader may content himself with these present Tracts’, he was less certain about the prospects of some ‘other brief Discourses’ including, as it happens, ‘one which gives a brief account of all the Monuments of the Cathedral of Norwich’, now usually referred to as Repertorium. Tenison’s decision to exclude this work is a little surprising given his clerical calling, which was to include an extended period from 1680 onwards as minister at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, near the site of the destroyed St. Paul’s, where Wren’s new church was emerging. So the decision warranted an explanation—and was the only excluded work to receive one. He noted, first, that the account ‘was written meerly for private use’. It therefore presumably lacked the greater appeal of the epistolary tracts, to say nothing of Browne’s already published works. There were also unresolved legal issues involving some ‘imperfect Copies’ of the account that had fallen into other ‘hands’. But perhaps most interesting, the future archbishop didn’t think very highly of the cathedral monuments as a subject, notwithstanding their prominent appearance in recent works such as John Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631): ‘The truth is, matter equal to the skill of the Antiquary was not, there, afforded: had a fit Subject of that nature offer’d it self, He would scarce have been guilty of an oversight like to that of Ausonius, who, in the description of his native City of Burdeaux, omitted the two famous Antiquities of it, Palais de Tutele, and, Palais de Galien.’ The inferior status of Repertorium could be partially excused by the inferior monuments themselves. Tenison did venture the opinion, however, that at least some of these fugitive writings might ‘come forth’, but ‘at such due distance from these Tracts, that They may follow rather than stifle them’.6 5 Quotations from Tenison are from his prefatory comments to Certain Miscellany Tracts in The Works of the Learned Sir Thomas Brown, Kt. (London, 1686), 3S2r-v. 6 Tenison, 3S2v.

Browne among the Tombs of Norwich Cathedral / 261

Figure 3. Mid-seventeenth-century engraving of Norwich Cathedral

Tenison’s remarks have proven to be both prescient and influential, and also, I believe, misleading. While he was still archbishop, Repertorium was, in fact, published in the 1712 edition of the Posthumous Works of the Learned Sir Thomas Browne (albeit in a ‘continued’ version, replete with many engravings, including a fold-out of the cathedral (Fig. 3)), and it has always followed the Miscellany Tracts at ‘such due distance’ as to be listed as a separate work in later editions, thereby occupying a kind of interpretive black hole. Not quite worthy of inclusion in The Miscellany Tracts, Repertorium is not quite miscellaneous enough for its paragraphs to be scattered like seeds among The Miscellaneous Writings at large, waiting for a latter-day Bishop to arrive and sample their worth. Nor can subsequent scholars, it must be said, be accused of letting it ‘stifle’ interest in the Miscellany Tracts or, for that matter, any other of Browne’s writings. Repertorium has rarely received more than a passing reference in the critical literature, and these few remarks are not of the kind to stimulate a closer look. The exception is perhaps Keynes’s comment, made

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amid demurrals about Repertorium’s appeal as ‘a literary work’, that ‘Browne had nevertheless taken considerable pains over it, and he wrote it out twice. Both MSS are now at Norwich’.7 A key place to begin reconsidering this most Norwichean of Browne’s writings, therefore, might be to note that, indeed, both manuscripts are still in Norwich, although not quite as Keynes characterized them. The two manuscript versions are actually quite different: one bearing the date 1679, the other 1680, both with the same subtitle, ‘Some account of the Tombs and Monuments in the Cathedral of Norwich’, but only the later one carrying the Latinate title ‘Repertorium’, a rare coinage (from the Latin reperire, ‘to find’) meaning a ‘catalogue’ or ‘storehouse’—from which we get the more familiar ‘repository’. The OED cites 1667 as the first usage by Anthony a` Wood in his Life, but that was not published until 1772, and therefore might not have been known by Browne. The 1680 version also includes a number of passages not in the 1679 version, and the later version, which possesses both small and substantial additions made on the left-hand page to the account on the right, suggests that Browne was working carefully towards a final version now bearing the typically Browne-like title of Repertorium. It is unclear which, if not yet another, version Tenison had before him. His failure to mention the later title suggests he was not using the 1680 text and therefore may have seen an even more fragmentary copy. But his assumption that the Norwich tombs as a subject were not ‘equal to the skill of the Antiquary’ indicates a misunderstanding of Browne’s intention on several fronts that continues to haunt later commentary. The first assumption is that Browne somehow needed a large topic, like the monuments of St Paul’s, in order to write a worthy account, when, of course, Browne’s genius was to construct large designs out of small matter (like a quincunx or some urns found in a field near Walsingham); the second is that his interests were identical with those of the usual antiquary, like Dugdale or Weever, in creating a catalogue to describe and commemorate the relevant, important monuments in a given cathedral when Browne’s concerns were less 7 Keynes 3, xii. See also Claire Preston’s characterization of Repertorium as being in the mode of Dugdale and ‘flat and lifeless’ in Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005), 133, n. 34. Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995), 216, is more charitable in noting Browne’s success at emulating ‘the engaging tone’ of Weever, but doesn’t develop this point in his brief discussion of Repertorium (259–60). The two manuscript versions are now housed in the Public Record Office as MS 21270.

Browne among the Tombs of Norwich Cathedral / 263 bounded, I think, by the hierarchical, socially restrictive assumptions often at work in these antiquarian texts, and more akin to the essaying (and assaying) practices of the musing traveler visualizing and interpreting the customary life of the particular found elsewhere in The Miscellaneous Writings. Whether in rural Norfolk or among cathedral tombs, miscellaneous Browne is quintessentially a browser. The appeal of Repertorium, then, is only in part its antiquarianism—it is also about the variously sized tidbits of knowledge a reader picks up about the building and its ‘commemorated’ occupants: Under the large sandy colourd stone was buryed Bishop Richard Corbett, a person of singular witt, and an eloquent preacher. Hee was Deane of Christ church in Oxford, then Bishop of Oxford, and afterward translated unto Norwich, where hee lived about 3 yeares. (R 130)

There is nothing so linguistically curious as a ‘shovelard’ here, just plainspoken reminders of the dignity of the named offices Corbett held and his reputation as speaker and preacher. Browne can do a little better across the choir aisle: In the same Rowe, of late times was buryed Bishop Richard Montague as the Inscription Depositum Montacutij Episcopi doth declare. For his eminent knowledge in the Greek languadge much countenanced by Sr Henry Savile provost of Eaton colledge, and settled in a fellowship thereof: was afterward made Bishop of Chichester, and from thence translated unto Norwich, where hee lived about 3 yeares. Hee came unto Norwich with the evell effects of a quartan ague, which hee had had above a yeare before, and which accompanyed him to his grave, yet hee studyed and writt very much. Hee left an excellent Library of bookes, and heapes of papers fayrly writt with his owne hand, concerning the ecclesiasticall history. His bookes were sent to London, and, as it was sayd, his papers agaynst Baronius & others unto Rome, from whence they never returned. (R 129–30)

Access to the on-line version of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) quickly tells us how much of Montagu’s life didn’t get into Browne’s account, especially the part pertaining to Montagu’s huge role as a religious controversialist leading up to the civil war. Browne’s, rather, is a product of ‘local knowledge’. Montagu’s poor health, even before he came to Norwich, receives emphasis, as does the curious bit about his having, along with ‘an excellent Library of bookes’, ‘heapes of papers fayrly writte with his own

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hand’. It is possible that Browne attended Montagu as his physician in his later days, which might account for so intimate a detail. But what also catches the eye, including that of Montagu’s most recent Oxford DNB biographer (John S. Macauley), is the concluding sentence, with its wistful itinerary recounting the disappearance of Montagu’s papers overseas in the mode of Musæum Clausum. It’s a good last word, reflecting a writer’s concern, and the last word in the Oxford DNB entry as well. The phrase also helps to spell out in small some of the larger epistemological differences between Repertorium and, on the one hand, Urne-Buriall, and, on the other, Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631), which includes a lengthy section on the tombs of Norwich Cathedral. In the first instance, the sense of evanescence in the last line from the Montagu account doesn’t spill over into irony—the kind of thing that grandly happens in Urne-Buriall when Browne underscores in Chapter 5 the limits (and seeming futility) of human inquiry in the face of oblivion. And the reason is revealing of Repertorium as a whole. As a ‘last word’, the sentence is really part of the story of Montagu’s life, indeed what Browne takes to be an important, if not the defining, activity of Montagu’s time on earth: his eminent scholarly abilities and habits, right down to possessing a fine hand, as we see. In this context, we might think of this brief character ‘sketch’ or ‘life’—and the many ‘lives’ given in Repertorium—as a modest but firm counter to the plangent sense of vacuity suggested by the memorable phrase from UrneBuriall: ‘and Methusalehs long life had been his only Chronicle’ (UB 5.167). Repertorium chronicles a different story, one as much of human accomplishment as of tombs and monuments. At the same time, the work is written with a recognition of its own temporal significance. As Browne noted in a 1672 letter written to John Aubrey, he began work on his account at ‘the Kings return’, a task he was prompted to take on because of the recent history of vandalism during the ‘late times’, in which ‘an hundred brasse inscriptions were stolne out of the church’, and because (rightly enough) he didn’t think ‘the church-men’ were much interested in ‘such things’.8 It is also clear from this remark, and from the manuscript evidence, that the work was put together over a number of years, no doubt as time and opportunity allowed for repeated visits to the cathedral to verify locations and permit additional research. We 8 TB to John Aubrey, 24 August 1672 (Keynes, 373).

Browne among the Tombs of Norwich Cathedral / 265 know, for example, that the reference to the actual site of Montagu’s inscription, ‘Depositum Montacutij Episcopi’, was added to the 1680 text, as was the more historically explicit allusion to the late ‘civill warres’, in place of late ‘troubles’, in the opening sentence of the work.9 Indeed, whatever Browne thought would be the eventual fate of his ‘account’, the manuscript versions testify to many textual accretions made over time, as Browne added relevant citations to works like Foxe’s Martyrology to bolster individual descriptions, and additional ‘lives’ as they came due with time, such as that of his friend, Edward Reynolds, who died in 1676 and figures in the 1680 version. The sense of Repertorium as a distinctly ‘Restoration’ work embedded in the history of its time points, of course, to its ‘conservative’ bias. In both the conservational and political sense of the word, the ‘account’ forms an immediate response to the degradation done to the cathedral by puritans during the civil war. It belongs in a small way, therefore, to the longer history of iconoclasm ignited by the Reformation, which led to the destruction of images and, in Calvinist circles at least, to the white-washing of church walls—the removal, that is, of all evidence that threatened the Protestant view that the true church was invisible.10 Browne was certainly already familiar with this latter effect, especially from his early days in Leiden; as the many cathedral paintings by Pieter Saenredam reveal, these were interiors purged of all color and most monuments. In Repertorium, however, there is no groundswell of irritation mounted against the desecrators (as there is, for instance, in both Dugdale and Weever), only a felt need to record the presence of past incidents of ‘cleansing’, and, as it were, to restore the missing images to memory, through writing: At the entrance into the cloyster by the upper doore on the right hand there was a handsome monument upon the wall, which was pulled downe in the late times, 9 Along with situating Repertorium more firmly in a context of Anglican apologetics, the change also prevents potential confusion with the ‘late troubles’ in Norwich involving party dissensions between Whigs and Tories, which threaten to make Norfolk ‘a countrey of Guelphs & Ghibellines’ (TB to Edward Browne, 25 April [1679] (Keynes, 102)). 10 See Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago, 2004), 40, 58–61. For an overview of the fate of the cathedral before, during, and after the civil war see Ian Atherton and Victor Morgan, ‘Revolution and Retrenchment: The Cathedral, 1630–1720’, in Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996, ed. Ian Atherton, Eric Fernie, Christopher HarperBill, and Hassell Smith (London, 1996), 540–75. On Browne’s relation to iconoclasm see Killeen’s essay in this volume.

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and a voyde space still remaineth. Upon this stone were the figures of two persons in a praying posture, upon their knees. I was told by Mr Sandlin that it was sayd to bee a monument for some of the Bigots, who built or beutified that Arch by it, which leadeth into the church. (R 128).

The Bigots or Bigods were descendants of Roger Bigod, founder of the Cluniac Thetford Priory in 1107 and associated with the origins of the cathedral.11 But Browne, it should be said, is not responding out of nostalgia for a cloistered past. He is simply trying to fill in the historical record and explain why ‘a voyde space still remaineth’. And yet the double reference to beauty, as well as the depiction of two people kneeling in prayer, speak to loss, and in conjunction with the many allusions to whitened walls and destroyed monuments—three on one page alone (R 127)—Repertorium cumulatively resists, even as it punctiliously records, efforts to turn the cathedral into a blank space. From this angle, the account of Bishop Corbett is perhaps not quite so plain as it appears, describing, as it does, a person of ‘singular witt and an eloquent preacher’, buried under a ‘large sandy colourd stone’ (R 130). Here and throughout, in the many lives briefly sketched, the antiquarian Browne ‘restores’ at least some color to the cathedral.12 For all its conservative bias, however, Repertorium departs from the usual antiquarian habits of cataloguing in some fundamental ways that suggest Browne is also doing something quite different here from Weever—that his sense of the church is, in fact, more spatially elastic and personal, subject, that is, to individual perspective; less focused, as it were, on the cathedral as a monument to preserve a social hierarchy, and more as a place to visit, to move through and from by all alike, author, reader, and even some of its clergy, as we discover. As such, it captures a sense of the human, social, and creative energy associated with the building and its people. This is not at all the effect produced by Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631), his massive omnium gatherum of tombs and memorials, which nonetheless still fell short of its original intention to cover all of England. Although Norwich Cathedral is singled out by Weever as one of the sites he visited, one would be hardpressed to say what he actually saw. His account is organized not spatially, according to the observed order of things, but chronologically and hierarchically, according to an already established and venerated line of descent; and 11 Deirdre Wollaston, ‘Herbert de Losinga’, in Atherton, et al., (1996), 29; Barbara Dodwell, ‘Herbert de Losinga and the Foundation’, in Atherton, et al., (1996), 39. 12 On Browne’s antiquarianism see Parry’s essay in this volume.

Browne among the Tombs of Norwich Cathedral / 267 in its preference for the written over the observed, it belongs to a pre-Baconian tradition of historiography and epigraphy. Pride of place is therefore given to the cathedral’s founder, Bishop William Herbert, in conjunction with the original Latin charter. Subsequent pages are then devoted to the succeeding bishops in historical order, each singled out by name in the margins, and concluding with Bishop Richard Nix, at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The remaining catalogue briefly mentions a few of the nobility, beginning with Sir Thomas Windam, in the Chapter House, and concluding with Sir William Bolen (or Boleyn), ‘great Grandfather to the most renownded and victorious Princesse Elizabeth, late Queene of England’, and the family’s descendants.13 But only a few names further down the hierarchy make it into Weever’s catalogue. By contrast, here is the opening view of Repertorium—and it is a view: First in the body of the church, between the pillars of the south Isle, stands a Tomb, covered with a kind of Touchstone, which is the monument of Miles Spencer Doctor of Lawe, and chancellour of Norwich, who lived unto ninetie yeares. The topstone was entire, butt now broken, splitt and depressed by blowes: more speciall notice being taken of this stone, because men used to trie their mony upon it, and because the chapter demanded their Rents at this tomb. Hee was Lord of the mannor of Bowthorp and Colney, which came unto the Yaxleys from him, and was also owner of Chappell in the feild Howse. I have his picture, drawne when hee was ninetie yeares old, as the inscription doth declare, which was sent unto mee from Colney. (R 123)

As with the Notes on the Natural History of Norfolk, this description is filled with bits of local history, in this case relating to matters of social economics in Norwich, as evidenced by the broken and split topstone, and testifying to frequent visits to the cathedral by people for other than devotional purposes. (Not all things beaten down or depressed in the cathedral were the result of the civil war.) Apparently, too, Spencer’s durability was also part of local legend; at least Browne was impressed enough by it to cite his advanced age twice. And Spencer seems to have contributed to this self-image by having his picture drawn at age 90, now somehow in Browne’s possession, a piece of information Browne thought worth adding in 1680. The only reason for this ramshackle account to be awarded pride of place in Repertorium is its location. In Weever, Spencer doesn’t appear at all. 13 Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631), 799.

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The sense of hierarchy fully operative in Weever undergoes other shifts as we move through Repertorium, in space rather than time, according to the somewhat serendipitous placement of objects that can make the cathedral seem a cabinet of curiosities. Next to Spencer, for instance, we come immediately upon ‘the monument of Bishop Richard Nicks, or the blind Bishop: because hee was blind many yeares before hee dyed. He sate in this see 36 yeares, in the Reignes of King Henry the seventh and Henry the 8th’ (R 123–4). Nicks or ‘Nix’ appears in Weever as well, but at the end of the list of bishops (as chronology dictates), where he receives a brief but dismissive notice, as if fully deserving his place: ‘I find little worth the rehearsing (saith Godwin in his Catalogue of Bishops) hee hath the report of a vicious and dissolute liver; was blinde long before his death, sate 36 years, and died, An. 1536’.14 Browne, too, notes that there is not ‘much delivered of him’, but, in fact, he tells quite a bit about Nicks, and in a narrative order that doesn’t make the bishop’s ‘blindness’ seem a judgment against him. A lifetime of medical practice, we might think, allows for some objectivity here. But it is also the case that Browne ‘sees’ more widely and fully than Weever in placing Nicks in an architectural and historical context. Although Weever, too, notes that ‘this Bishop built the north crosse Isle of this Church, and guilded the roofe of the same, upon which his cotes of Armes is to be seene’,15 Browne gives us, appreciatively, the details: The Arches are beutified above and beside [the monument], where are to bee seen the Armes . . . a cheveron between 3 Leopards heads. The same coat of Armes is in the roofe of the north crosse Isle; the roofe wherof hee els built or repayred. The tomb is lowe, and tis sayd that there was an Altar at the bottome of the easterne pillar: and the Iron work whereon the bell hanged, is yet [still] to be seen, on the side of the westerne pillar. (R 124)

This is written by someone who has explored the cathedral on more than one occasion, and is something of an architectural connoisseur, too—in the manner of a more restrained Evelyn—but who also wants to keep the ‘account’ open, as we discover in the tantalizing reference thrown in at the end: Though hee sate long in the see yet is not there much delivered of him. Fox in his Martyrologie hath sayd something of him, in the story of Thomas Bilney, who was burnt in Lollards pitt without Bishops gate, in his time. (R 124) 14 Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631), 796. The sentence is quoted exactly from Francis Godwin, A Catelogue of Bishops (London, 1615), 431. 15 Weever, 796.

Browne among the Tombs of Norwich Cathedral / 269 The ‘something’ turns out to be Nicks’s role in executing Bilney, one of Norwich’s most famous or infamous Protestants. Browne characteristically leaves unspoken which of these adjectives best applies to Bilney, and one has to turn to Foxe to get the martryologist’s full take on Nicks, who turns out to be identified there with Cain.16 Not just people and details differentiate Browne’s antiquarian habits from Weever’s, but, as the last episode suggests, for Browne the cathedral is more than a historical reference point, a named place on a page that houses tombs. It is a building to be traversed and the people in it to be understood in part for their role in creating their surroundings. Thus, when we arrive ‘at the upper end of the middle Isle’, where Bishop Walter Hart lies, Browne altogether departs from Weever’s unsympathetic account of the citizens’ attacks against the church, which he commends Hart for helping to quell, and attends, instead, to the ways in which Hart is reflected in the building in which he is housed: ‘Hee built the transverse stone partition or Roodloft, whereupon the great crucifix was placed, beutified the roofe of the body of the church, and paved the church’ (R 125). It also occurs to Browne’s visually tutored eye to mention that (Walter) Hart is remembered by ‘a Rebus unto his name, water Hart’, a figure that, to this day, links builder with building. So, too, when Browne moves on to Bishop James Goldwell, he gives us a detailed description of his tomb and of his ‘Armes’ as they appear elsewhere in the church, around town, and indeed in ‘Chart magna in Kent, the place of his nativity’, and of his ‘good works’ manifested in this church and elsewhere in repairing buildings (R 126). In Browne’s descriptive musings, then, there is a politics of constructive restoration as well as a moderate Restoration politics.17 Weever’s unsympathetic account of the ‘malcontented Townesmen’ above serves to bolster the place of the bishopric and the cathedral, not just in days of old but under Stuart absolutism as well when, in 1631, Ancient Funerall Monuments was first published. But in Browne’s post civil-war Repertorium not only is the old antagonism between the citizenry and clerical order removed, but the Church is, or rather has become with time, an altogether less militant— and certainly not an authoritarian—operation. But Repertorium has other ways to suggest the Church’s greater emphasis on civility. 16 Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ed. George Townsend, 8 vols. (London, 1843–9), iv. 650. 17 On Browne’s politics see essays in this volume by Shuger, Conti, and Killeen.

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Take the following sketch, which is remarkable for showing Browne’s ability (like Aubrey’s but in a different register) to capture in this otherwise often dusty mode of address a sense of the life lived—in this case, at something approaching a heroic level: In the same Rowe or not farre of[f] was buryed Bishop Henry le Spencer, as lost brasse Inscriptions have declared, and Mr Sandlin told mee that hee had seen an inscription on a grave stone thereabout with the name of Henricus Despencer, which was since taken away. Hee lived in the Reygne of Richard the second and Henry the fourth, & sate in the see 37 yeares. Of a souldier made a Bishop, and sometimes exercising the life of a souldier in his episcopacy, for hee led an Army into Flanders on the behalf of Pope Urban the sixt, in opposition unto Clement the Antipope, and also overcame the Rebellious forces of Litster the Dyer in Norfolk, by North Walsham in the Reygne of Richard the second. Hee came yong unto the see, and sate longer in it then any before or after him, butt his time might have been shorter, if hee had not escaped in the fraye at Lennam, a towne whereof hee was Lord, where forcing the magistrates Tiptstaffe to bee caryed before him, the people with staves, stones and Arrowes wounded and putt his servants to flight, hee being also wounded and left alone, as John Fox hath sett it downe, out of the Cronicle of St. Albans. (R 129)

Somehow, through all these tumultuous events Spencer has survived— overseas, at home, and then in the Church itself, where, in spite of two lost inscriptions, his name has not been altogether forgotten, thanks to the ancient memory of Mr Sandlin, who has also survived much dynastic change. In the opening paragraph of Repertorium, we first met the 89-yearold Sandlin, ‘a chorister in the reigne of Queen Elizabeth’ (R 123), and, as Sandlin has not forgotten Spencer, so Browne recalls Sandlin’s help. Three pages after this account of Spencer, however, we find yet another reference to the redoubtable bishop when Browne, now in another part of the cathedral, quotes the following remark from Sir John Harington’s A Brief View of the State of the Church of England: ‘the four Bishops in the Queenes dayes, they lived as Bishops should do, and were not warriars like B. Spencer their predecessor’ (R 132). Weever had been much impressed by ‘The warlike Bishop of Norwich’, especially in putting down the Peasants’ Revolt: ‘an action (howsoever some will say perhaps, not agreeable to his calling), worthie of eternall honour and remembrance’.18 In Repertorium, Browne 18 Weever, 793.

Browne among the Tombs of Norwich Cathedral / 271 gives Spencer his heroic due, as we’ve seen, although without applauding his role in the Peasants’ Revolt that so pleased Weever. But the quotation from Harington, added in 1680, allows, as it were, a second thought to emerge on the important subject of how bishops should now behave. The new perspective underscores an ideal of clerical civility clearly prized by Browne, and that perspective receives, in turn, its fullest delineation later in Repertorium in the remembered figures of Browne’s ministerial friend, John Whitefoot (another portrait-drawer in prose) and their Senecan companion, the long-suffering, literary, Bishop Joseph Hall, who in the Rebellious times, when the Revennues of the church were alienated, retired unto that suburbian parish [of Heigham,] and there ended his dayes: being above fourscore yeares of age. A person of singular humillity, patience and pietie: his owne works are the best monument, and character of himself. (R 134)

The reduction in military authority traced here parallels a more general dispersal of clerical power in Repertorium. In part this ‘reduced episcopacy’19 is simply a feature of the sheer proliferation of occupants, objects, and inscriptions within the cathedral and the attending diminution in visible prominence of any single bishop’s tomb. But the line of clerical descent that Weever asserts, in the order of the monuments and their perceived location in the cathedral, also comes under active scrutiny by a skeptical Browne: Many more Bishops might bee buryed in this church and wee find it so asserted by some historicall accounts [including Weever’s], butt there remaining no historie or tradition of the place of their enterrement, in vayne wee endeavor to designe and poynt out the same. (R 131)

‘In vayne’ inserts into Repertorium a sharp note of epistemological uncertainty familiar to readers of Urne-Buriall, as Browne sifts through the available lore for evidence to confirm their place of ‘enterrement’ in the cathedral, beginning with Bishop Grey, a list that expands to include another nine bishops, covering several pages, with several names added in the 1680 version. Not only does the main body of the cathedral begin to lose its place in Repertorium as the actual and symbolic center housing the dead bishops of the past. Browne’s own restless queries into those who have, at one time or 19 ‘Reduced episcopacy’ is the position religious moderates, like Browne’s friend Edward Reynolds, sought to promote in the early days of the Restoration. See John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991), 32–3.

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another, served the cathedral take him well beyond the initial, carefully delimited, scope of his project, given at the outset of Repertorium, in which he declares his intention to produce a catalogue of the tombs and monuments ‘according to my best search, enquiry and information both before and since those unhappy times’ (R 123). It is a simple, historical fact, not a discourtesy done to the cathedral and the people of Norwich, that ‘divers Bishops sate in this see who left not their bones in this church, for some dyed not heere butt at distant places, some were translated unto other Bishopricks, and some though they lived or dyed here, were not buryed in this church’ (R 133). But for Browne the cathedral is as much a crossroads as a burial plot, and part of his role here in writing the church into a fuller cultural existence than it possesses in Weever is to trace out the names of the many who left their mark in Norwich but their bones elsewhere, as if they were birds from the Broads who have migrated in response to a larger calling. From this angle, it needs to be emphasized that the admitted absence of closure and certainty in Repertorium doesn’t so much curtail or undermine Browne’s investigations as propel them into new geographical spaces or regions, accompanied by a requisite amount of diffidence on the author’s part: into the Lady Chapel, for instance, ‘at the east end of the church’, in which ‘Bishop Walter de Suthfeild in the reygne of Henry the third . . . was buryed, and miracles sayd to bee wrought at his tomb’ and wherein is located ‘probably other Bishops and persons of quality, whose tombs and monuments, wee now in vayne enquire after in the church’ (R 132). ‘Probably’ is the key word here, joined quickly by other conditional phrases: ‘Some though they lived or dyed here might not bee buryed in this church as some Bishops probably of old, and more certainly of later time’ (R 134)—the later times including, among others, Joseph Hall and Edward Reynolds. ‘And for ought wee now knowe some Bishops and persons of quality might bee buryed in the old Bishops chappell now demolished’ (R 134). But ‘where to find Heydons chappell is more obscure if not alltogether unknowne’ (R 139). And as with some of the bishops, so with the nobility: Now whereas there have been so many noble and ancient families in these parts, and yet wee find not more of them to have been buryed in this the mother church, it may bee considered, that no small numbers of them were enterred in the churches and Chappels of the monasteries and Religious howses of this citty. (R 135)

When Tenison complained that the subject-matter of the monuments was not ‘matter equal to the skill of the Antiquary’, he was, in a sense, only

Browne among the Tombs of Norwich Cathedral / 273 following out the logic of Browne’s thinking while resisting its spacious drift—and throwing in a red herring as well in the analogy to Ausonius. Browne hasn’t omitted Norwich’s famous antiquity while writing about his native city; he just hasn’t addressed the topic in the manner Tenison expected. One way to characterize Browne’s widening view of his subject is to note the surfacing of the root meaning of the Latin title (‘to find’) as the operative mode of Repertorium. That is, inseparable from the catalogue as a nominal ‘account’ is an accompanying recognition of the process of accounting itself, there from the beginning when Browne identifies the person of ‘Mr. John Sandlin’ as, in a sense, his guide to the cathedral, but brought further to the fore as Browne moves into more speculative regions of consideration, sometimes ruminating out loud, as it were, about things beyond what the eye can see. The person who offers appreciative evaluations of the cathedral’s artifacts—‘[t]he Roofe of the church is noble and adorned with figures’ (R 137)—is not quite as quirky as the author of Religio Medici, who ‘loves to lose [himself] in a mystery, to pursue [his] reason to an O altitudo’; but, as Tenison was quick to recognize when he noted that the account ‘was written meerly for private use’, Repertorium shares with Religio an emphasis on the subjective, perhaps for Tenison the more pronounced because of the presumed objectivity of the genre as practised by Weever and Dugdale. As we know, too, from Browne’s many letters to his sons, as well as from the books that ‘my daughter Elizabeth hath read unto me at nights till she read them all out’,20 he was an avid reader of travel literature in later life, and, as Evelyn discovered, also an enthusiastic guide to ‘all the remarkable places of this antient Citty’ of Norwich, including its ‘venerable Cathedrall’.21 With its ambulatory focus, Repertorium is a distillation of these readings, a temporally conscious, Pevsner-like guide to Norwich’s largest monument— and to what a visitor like Evelyn would, and would not, find inside, commemorating, as it does in writing, the traces left by those buried elsewhere as well. More than updated Weever, Repertorium belongs to a new 20 ‘Books Read’ (Keynes 3, 331–2). Browne’s intense interest in travel literature continued to the year of his death. See his letter to his son Edward describing, in detail, the 1682 translation into English of Hiob Ludolf ’s A New History of Ethiopia as an extended critique of Papal imperialism, a topic apropos of England’s past and present: ‘the People would not endure a religion brought in and settled by the sword’ (8 May [1682] (Keynes, 223–4)). 21 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1955), iii. 594 (18 October 1671).

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world of observed things and the people who have gone into making physical spaces imaginable, including the Norfolk author himself.22 As such, it concludes, rather triumphantly, with a three-star site bearing Browne’s signature. ‘I must not omitt to saye something of the shaft or spire of this church, commonly calld the pinnacle’ (R 141), Browne notes at the end of Repertorium, looking altitudinously skyward, in a gesture that simultaneously appeals to local civic pride, Restoration politics, and a tourist’s wish to climb to the top and take in the view. The spire is a handsome and well proportion’d fabrick, and one of the highest in England, higher then the noted spires of Lichfeild, Chichester, and Grantham, butt lower then that of Salisbury, for that spire being Raysed upon a very high tower becomes higher from the ground, butt this spire considered by itself seemes at least to equall that. It is a hundred and five yards and two foot from the top of the pinnacle unto the pavement of the Quire under it.23 (R 141–2)

Strictly speaking, from Browne’s boosterish perspective, not even Salisbury’s great spire can be said to be taller than Norwich’s. Indeed, one might have thought this passage alone would have redeemed Repertorium in Tenison’s eyes, especially given that the spire’s restored condition (like the Anglican clergy more generally) is owing to ‘His majesties Restauration, when the top was to bee mended, and a new guilded wethercock was to bee placed upon it’ (R 142). But maybe in spite of its sturdiness—‘[t]he spire is very strongly built, though the inside bee of Brick’—the ascent was still a touch too vertiginous and 22 For the literary consequences of this epistemological shift see Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 2006), ch. 3 (‘Seeing Things’). With the exception of Pepys and Swift, all of Wall’s examples are from people whose works Browne either knew or communicated directly with, including Hooke, Boyle, and Evelyn. Along with the Miscellaneous Writings, the great repository for seeing things in Browne are the many letters to his sons, Thomas and Edward, reprinted in Keynes 4. On observation of things in the Browne family correspondence see the essay by Nelson in this volume. 23 In The Miscellaneous Writings appears a brief note on the spire, which includes the following: ‘Measured 1663 by William Brigstowe, mason at the reparation of the steeple’ (Keynes 3, 225). One assumes, from the passage in Repertorium, that Browne was actually among those who climbed to the top. Browne’s interest in the cathedral’s fortunes also included contributing to its repairs. See Stanford E. Lehmberg, Cathedrals Under Siege: Cathedrals in English Society, 1600–1700 (University Park, PA, 1996), 68. Pride in the steeple remains undiminished to this day: ‘The spire of Norwich Cathedral joins that exclusive club of top quality East Anglian products—Bury St Edmunds west tower, the upper sections of King’s College Chapel and the central tower of Canterbury Cathedral by John Wastell of Bury’ (Francis Woodman, ‘The Gothic Campaigns’, in Atherton, et al., 193).

Browne among the Tombs of Norwich Cathedral / 275 whimsical, with its guilded weathercock, for the future archbishop. In any event, Browne’s is a rather technical account of the climb to the top, made interesting because we can picture precisely how it happened: there were stagings made at the upper windowe, and divers persons went up to the top of the pinnacle. They first went up into the Bellfrey, and then by eight Ladders on the inside of the spire till they came to the upper hole or windowe; then went out unto the outside, where a staging was sett, and so ascended unto the top stone on which the wethercock standeth. (R 142)

And the Norfolk birder is especially exacting about the cock, which is three quarters of a yard high, and one yard and two inches long, as is also the crosse barre and top stone of the spire, which is not flatt, butt consisteth of a half globe and channell about it, and from thence are eight leaves of stone spreading outward, under which beginne the eight Rowes of crocketts, which go doune the spire at five foot distance. (R 142)

This is the Browne who occasionally described things in measured terms for the newly founded Royal Society. The rungs have now been carefully climbed by the author of the earlier Religio Medici, but he still can’t resist the impulse to conclude on an upwardly airy note, an O altitudo—with a bird’s eye view of the surrounding sights:24 From the top there is a prospect all about the countrey. Mourshold hill seemes lowe & flatt ground. The castle and high buildings do very much diminish. The River lookes like a dich. The citty with the streets make a pleasant showe, like a garden, with severall walks in it. (R 142)

Added in 1680, the vista is refreshing in its variety, especially the cosmopolitan view of the city, whose ‘pleasant show’ and ‘severall walks’ remind us that Repertorium, like all of Browne’s writings, values the diverse itinerary as much as the single point of arrival. 24 Describing tower climbing, especially of the Tower of St Mark’s in Venice, was a staple of seventeenth-century travel literature. See Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities: hastily gobled up in five moneths travells (1611), 183–4, and Evelyn, ii. 445–6, June 1645.


Part III Life and Afterlives


14 The Hieroglyphics of Skin Reid Barbour

In the medical syllabus which he recommended to Henry Power in 1646, Thomas Browne celebrated the renaissance of anatomy and its direct experience of the inner workings of the body as the ‘foundation’ of all further study.1 According to Religio Medici, physiology advanced not only medical learning but also divinity, with Galen’s De Usu Partium offering a stronger apology for providence than the metaphysical systems from Aristotle to Sua´rez (RM 1.14). For all his support of anatomy, however, Browne returned time and again over a lifetime to that one physiological factor whose very neglect was synonymous with anatomical humanism and expertise from Vesalius onward: skin. In his Continental travels, Browne took note of a gruesome, vermiculate disease marring children in southern France, and he wrote his Leiden dissertation on another disease—smallpox—with a tendency for disfiguring the skin. In Religio he suddenly digressed into physiognomy, and in Pseudodoxia Epidemica he explored vulgar errors about pigmentation. As well as recommending the best of the very few experts on skin to his son Edward,2 Browne compiled anatomical notes on skin and consulted with the physician Samuel Bave on a skin disease aggrieving one of their shared patients. His memory of the cadavers in a crypt in Toulouse prompted thoughts on how human skin might serve industrial or artificial 1 TB to Henry Power [1646] (Keynes, 255). 2 TB to Edward Browne [7 August 1676] (Keynes, 71–2).

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purposes as a highly resilient glue. For Browne, however, skin could also purvey an unsettling and inverted hieroglyph, one likely to tell us more about ourselves than about the God whose purposefulness was supposed to appear everywhere within the human body. In a view of the Leiden anatomy theater printed early in the seventeenth century, two gentlemen and a lady examine a flayed human skin outside the boundaries of the theater itself and with their backs turned to the anatomy in session.3 Their curiosity about the skin might be intense but it is irrelevant to the official proceedings around the body’s three chief sections (head, abdomen, and loins) as well as its skeleton. Confirming that the removal of skin was the first step towards anatomical knowledge, textbooks frequently depicted a flayed human hide on their own covers, associating the integument of the body with that of the book.4 Browne’s own fascination with skin appears to have been inspired by a sight he described from his university days in a 1676 letter to Edward, according to which ‘above fortie yeares agoe the tanned skinne of a man was hanged up in the physick schoole at Oxford’.5 Although literally and figuratively skin was often imagined as the binding of the book of human anatomy, Browne’s early grounding in ancient medicine would have given him mixed messages about the actual anatomical value and meaning of skin: on the one hand, skin figured prominently as a guide to humoral complexion; but, as Steven Connor has noted, when Galen turned his attention to anatomy, he tended to be ‘curiously inattentive to the skin, which it was necessary for the anatomist to enter in order to conduct his enquiries’.6 In any case, and despite some extended discussions of skin in Celsus, Browne may have been taught to value the skin per se as a curiosity, but on the basis of the prescriptions for the Tomlins Lectureship in anatomy at Oxford, it is unlikely that his attention would have been directed to the physiology of skin as a matter of practical learning in its own right.7 Rather, he appears to have 3 Reprinted in Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London, 1995), fig. 5. 4 See Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York, 2002), 45–6. 5 TB to Edward Browne [7 August 1676] (Keynes, 72). 6 Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca, NY, 2004), 13. 7 See Robert G. Frank, Jr., ‘Medicine’, in The History of the University of Oxford: Volume IV: Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford, 1997), 541–6.

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developed his fascination with skin on his own, by means of reading and experience, and as an effect of his interest in the hieroglyphs of nature. Browne’s fascination with skin was not singular. With Girolamo Mercuriale and Samuel Hafenreffer leading the way, the history of systematic dermatology was undergoing its earliest birth pangs, a state of affairs that provoked both intense interest and instability in the field.8 If anatomists often ignored the skin, physiologists such as Jean Fernel sometimes included analyses of its layers and uses.9 Jean Riolan the Elder (1538–1605) instructed the physician that diseases of the skin were as much his concern as they were the surgeon’s.10 As Browne turned to medicine at the end of the 1620s, skin was making a comeback—it had been crucial to ancient methods of humoral diagnosis—and a major stride forward, with Hafenreffer’s De cutis affectibus (1630) marking a milestone in the study of seemingly obvious, but also ignored or misunderstood, phenomena such as itching. As recent historians have shown, skin was virtually bound to perplex its most devoted students. Philip K. Wilson explains that in the early modern period before the institutionalization of dermatology, ‘the skin represented or expressed the paradoxical barrier between the practices of physicians and surgeons’. Its value at times seemed highly significant, either for diagnosing the diseases ‘within’ or for displaying moles, warts, and marks that were factored into clerical, judicial, and physiognomic assessments of inner character (for instance, of witches);11 but skin was usually ‘removed from any discussion of anatomy’, often dismissed as only cosmetic in value, and rarely studied in anything approaching an extensive or systematic fashion.12 About the ‘language’ of skin, Claudia Benthien has remarked that skin was seen as both ‘protective’ and ‘deceptive’, as both too obvious for notice and too enigmatic for unskilled ‘decipherment’. Pervasive metaphors of skin treated the integument ‘metonymically for the whole human being’ yet also ‘as the other of the self . . . its cover, its prison or mask, its medium of communication with the world’. Medical strategies for preserving and restoring health 8 Girolamo Mercuriale, De morbis cutaneis (1572) and Samuel Hafenreffer, Pandocheion aiolodermon (1630). 9 See The Physiologia of Jean Fernel (1567), trans. and ed. John M. Forrester, intro. John Henry and Forrester (Philadelphia, 2003), 149–51. 10 See Herman Goodman, Notable Contributors to the Knowledge of Dermatology (New York, 1953), 72. 11 On this feature of evidence in witchcraft see Silver’s essay in this volume. 12 Philip K. Wilson, Surgery, Skin and Syphilis: Daniel Turner’s London (1667–1741) (Amsterdam, 1999), 60.

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obviously presupposed certain notions about the skin, for instance, that ‘therapeutic intervention . . . consisted primarily in clearing a path to the surface for the flows that were making the inside sick in order to achieve a purifying effect’. Whereas, however, anatomists might commence their explorations of the body with the removal of the skin, medical writers such as Mercuriale became increasingly interested in the skin per se, while artists and poets reconfigured the ancient (Biblical and pagan) legends of the flayed skin in paintings of the story of Marsyas made famous by Plato and Ovid, among others.13 Combining medical and scientific interests in his Musæum Clausum, Browne expressed a desire to see ‘[t]he exact method of flaying men alive, beginning between the Shoulders, according to the description of Thomas Minadoi, in his Persian War’ (MC 114). Browne’s formative medical education and experience coincided with the first major challenges directed at the commonplace that skin was simply an ornamental ‘accessory’, ‘excrement’, or at most a site of symptoms. Pioneers in dermatology began to challenge the notion that ‘although the skin conferred and confirmed entirety, it had none of its own’.14 If the ancient and medieval treatments of skin deemed it both glorious (or horrid) and disposable, Browne lived at a time when this paradox was still in place, to be sure, but was being undercut or transmuted by the suspicion that skin, like poxes great and small, might be a complex, dynamic, and particular something, an essence or a res.15 Beginning in the late-sixteenth century, and increasingly throughout the seventeenth, some medical writers began to realize that skin could no longer simply be taken for granted. Browne’s recollection of the ‘morgellons’ crawling on the flesh of the children in southern France appears in A Letter to A Friend, where he remembered that the Hairs which have most amused me have not been in the Face or Head but on the Back, and not in Men but Children, as I long ago observed in that Endemial Distemper of little Children in Languedock, called the Morgellons, wherein they critically break out with harsh Hairs on their Backs, which takes off the unquiet Symptoms of the Disease, and delivers them from Coughs and Convulsions. (LF 106) 13 Benthien, 17, 39, 68–85. 14 Connor, 11–21. 15 For diseases as an ontological res see Jon Arrizabalaga et al., The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven, 1997), 251.


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Although in the Rabelaisian spirit of the Midi, medical concerns are never far distant from laughter, Browne probably means that he was ‘amused’ in the sense of ‘perplexed and confounded’ as well as ‘arrested and engaged’. The protrusions of hairs, when they break out, are actually ameliorative expulsions which portend recovery, not convulsions and coughs, an aetiological paradox Browne would have already observed in his study of smallpox. In all likelihood Browne’s concern with the morgellons was heightened by his encounter with and admiration of Lazare Rivie`re. In traditional fashion, this famous Montpellier physician and professor included skin (with hair, a ‘habit’ of the body) within his semiotic taxonomy for the purposes of diagnosis, with his students also learning to decipher the difference between good and bad sweat, or between the humoral constitutions on display in the faces of patients. Among the diseases of children—coughs, catarrhs, fevers, and worms—Rivie`re had become interested in one that Browne remembered many years after his time in southern France. Calling the disease ulcus verminosum or ‘wormy ulcer’, Rivie`re described how a child of respectable parents was infested with strange tumors on his left tibia. ‘I didn’t know’, the doctor admitted, ‘whether this rot came from the use of a preposterous diet or from negligent care, but the ulcers were very hard to get rid of and indeed they multiplied, emerging from the patient’s flesh with an intolerable pain’.16 Having failed with standard remedies, he suddenly remembered a herdsman’s dog which was tortured by similar flesh-worms and responded well to the herb eupatorius (the plant agrimony, named after Mithidrates Eupator). With an application of this herb, a crowd of the wormy ulcers swarmed together then fell off, prompting Rivie`re to conclude that the case affords students an excellent example of argument by analogy in the face of an unknown disease. Even though he could not fully understand why the strategy worked, its basis in reason, experiment, and analogy was especially useful to Browne as an epitome of the good doctor’s resourcefulness and persistence. Whether Browne agreed with authorities such as Hieronymus Montuus or Jacques Guillemeau that the expulsions were hairs, or came to concur with seventeenth-century German authorities that they were worms, his high regard for Samuel Haffenreffer’s work on skin ensured that the morgellons retained a hybrid identity somewhere between the hirsute and the 16 Lazari Riverii . . . Opera Medica Universa (Lyon, 1738), 591.

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vermiculate.17 In recalling his time in southern France, Browne had a way of moving between corruption and regeneration by means of vermiculate paradox. In his tract ‘Of Plants in Scripture’ Browne recalled Languedoc and Provence in his meditation on a parasitical growth known as ‘Worm’ or ‘the Wormy Berry’, and in the Midi as manna rusticorum. Adhering to an evergreen, it produces ‘flies’ and ‘powder’ which can be made into a brilliant vermillion tincture. But the plant must not be gathered prematurely, Browne warned, lest it fail to produce its beautiful redness. Thus the resplendent color of vitality depends as much on worminess and flies as on evergreens and timely maturation (PS 34). Just as ‘Those strange and mysticall transmigrations that I have observed in Silkewormes, turn’d my Philosophy into Divinity’ (RM 1.39), so the red or wormy berry resonates with Browne’s sense of regeneration from corruption. It is not surprising, then, that another of Browne’s most vivid memories of the Midi centered on the miraculous capacity of medieval religious institutions to generate new life: the ancient cadavers in the crypt in Toulouse— mainly a tourist site in the seventeenth century—represented the wonderful possibility that skin demonstrated an ineffable, or perhaps artificial, source of human resilience and animation. During his travels to the Midi, that is, Browne’s education in skin found an inversion of the corrupting children’s flesh in an encounter with mummified cadavers whose skin wondrously retained its vitality. In his anatomical notes, Browne linked a wide range of instances in which the toughness of skin from dried bodies can produce exceptionally resilient glue, including the preserved corpses he witnessed ‘in the vault of the 17 Like Montuus, Jacques Guillemeau conceived of the disease as a matter of hair rather than worms, detailing how French women ‘rubbed the skin until they felt prickly hairs come out of the pores, which they then plucked with eyebrow tweezers’. As Samuel X. Radbill points out, it was among the German authorities on the disease that it came to be associated not with hair but with ‘parasites, little worms’, which they named ‘zehr wurmen (consuming worms) because the children often wasted away’. In Italian, too, the worms were thought to be consuming the children, perverting the season in their lives when growth, not emaciation, was appropriate. As the disease continued to provoke responses from medical authorities over the course of the seventeenth century, its status as hair, excrement, or animal persisted as a matter of debate. One of Browne’s favorite experts on skin, Samuel Haffenreffer, devoted a small section of his Pandocheion aiolodermon (1630; republished in 1660 as Nosodochium) to what he refers to variously as ‘hairs’ (de cridonibus) and ‘hair-worms’ (Haar-wurm), noting that many diseases have obtained their names from the resemblance to some animal. See Samuel X. Radbill, ‘Pediatrics’, in Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Allen G. Debus (Berkeley, 1974), 273–4.


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Cordiliers at Tholouze’. On testimonials concerning the resilience of skin, he remarked, ‘Wee had a like experience in a body wh. had been buried some hundreds of yeares in St. Pauls, as I have observed in the vault of the Cordiliers at Tholouze’ (OA 340). In Musæum Clausum, Browne imagined a souvenir among the ‘Antiquities and Rarities’, called the ‘Mummia Tholosana; or, The complete Head and Body of Father Crispin, buried long ago in the Vault of the Cordeliers at Tholouse, where the Skins of the dead so drie and parch up without corruption that their persons may be known very long after, with this Inscription, Ecce iterum Crispinus’ (MC 117). In Toulouse, the cadavers counted as evidence of the miraculous power of certain spaces in the church, even if, curiously, those spaces have lay rather than clerical associations. With morgellons, then, skin threatened to consume the vitality of Midi children, but somehow its horrific eruptions might save them; in the crypt skin could make even cadavers seem to live, though as specters arrested forever in their final expressions or poses. Dried after their removal from entombment in the church tower, the bodies were deposited about the walls of the vault for inspection by tourists. One guidebook explained that their bony structures and skin were so perfectly retained that the cadavers could support their own weight.18 Some tourists in the vault took home souvenirs: John Bargrave recorded that he had accepted ‘the finger of a Frenchman’ though, as Michael Brennan points out, he ‘graciously declined his host’s offer of the wellpreserved body of a baby’.19 Thomas Wentworth reported in 1611 that the mummies filled him with ‘great contentment’.20 Some of the bodies had identities with stories. One had belonged to a student who, dying from a sword cut received in single combat, had instinctively reached his hand to the wound, in which position the hand could still be seen. Visitors could move the hand with considerable effort but it always resumed its resting place, the last living gesture of a dying man. Another body belonged to a rare beauty, Paule de Viguier, or ‘beautiful Paule’. On all the mummies one saw the expressions which they showed during the instant at which their souls departed their bodies, including faces 18 Cited in A. Du Me`ge, Histoire des institutions religieuses, politiques, judiciaires et litte´raires de la ville de Toulouse, 4 vols. (Toulouse, 1844), iv. 610–17. 19 See Michael G. Brennan (ed.), The Origins of the Grand Tour (London, 2004), 46. 20 Quoted in John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667: The Influence in English Society and Politics, rev. edn. (New Haven, 1989), 44.

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of despair, sorrow, calm, fear, confidence, and hope, some tranquil, others tormented.21 Unlike the skeletons which Browne would see in Leiden, simple evocations of mortality, the preserved cadavers in the vault of the Cordeliers fused the macabre with the vital in the strangest fashion. By the time that Browne reached Leiden in 1633, the diseases disfiguring human, and especially children’s, skin still intrigued him sufficiently to inspire the subject of his medical dissertation on smallpox.22 Browne’s fascination with smallpox is not surprising, given his time spent in Montpellier with Rivie`re’s esteemed colleague François Ranchin, for whom mothers and their children amounted to a chief area of specialization. As Kellett points out, Browne’s library included ‘several of the early books on Pediatrics’, a fact suggestive of the influence that Ranchin had on the young medical student.23 In his treatise De Morbis ante partum, in partu, & post partum, a work included in Browne’s library, Ranchin’s analysis of specific diseases such as variolae (smallpox) and morbilli (measles) takes up the bulk of the treatise. It was to be expected, then, that Ranchin would weigh in on the controversies surrounding smallpox when he compiled his treatise on the diseases of children, published with his Opuscula Medica in 1627. Rivie`re, his colleague at Montpellier, was especially influential in assessing the state of learning about smallpox in a variety of medical treatises. Yet Browne’s dissertation on smallpox evinces far more about his medical education than just his formal learning in the history of medical aetiology. For it was precisely at the time that he was turning to his medical training, around 1628, that the everyday experience of smallpox in England was becoming a high-profile national trauma. In a work published in 1665, Marchamont Nedham observed that smallpox had remained relatively mild until ‘about 40 years agoe, and less’.24 In 1628, a combination of prominent cases with the epidemic scope and savage power of the disease prompted Lord Dorchester to name smallpox the ‘popular disease’, a judgment given official legitimacy by the debut of the Bills of Mortality in 1629. One of the earliest expressions of anxiety over smallpox in England had been 21 Du Me`ge, iv. 615–17. 22 See Reid Barbour, ‘The Topic of Sir Thomas Browne’s Dissertation’, Notes & Queries, 252 (2007), 38–9. 23 C. E. Kellett, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and the Disease Called the Morgellons’, Annals of Medical History, n.s., 7 (1935), 472. 24 Medela Medicinæ (1665), 52–5.


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voiced by the Venetian ambassador at the time of Browne’s birth, in October 1605. A notorious pandemic had ravaged the Continent in 1614. In the years just before and after Browne’s 1633 thesis, England suffered from two in a series of national smallpox epidemics about which Browne would still be remarking in the last year of his life: 531 died from the disease in 1632; 1,354 in 1634. Tobias Whitaker, a one-time Norwich physician, was shocked to find such an intensification of the disease in England from the time he left for the Continent during the civil war until his return in 1660. One treatise dealt with the disease and its cures under the moniker of hactenus inaudita (‘heretofore unknown’). Despite those few English medical writers who persisted in deeming smallpox among the mild diseases, most were intensely aware of the fact that it was replacing plague as the most hideous and lethal of all illnesses.25 The explanations offered by the old medical authorities Rhazes and Avicenna—that childhood smallpox involves the natural fermentation and ebullition of the blood, and that children derived the disease from the impure menstrual blood of their mothers—clearly located smallpox within matters of generation, no doubt another reason for Browne’s interest in it.26 But one of Browne’s favorite writers, Girolamo Mercuriale, criticized these theses on numerous grounds, not as it turns out in his treatise on skin, De morbis cutaneis, but in his study of the diseases of children, De morbis puerorum tractatus locupletissimi (1583).27 Challenging the isolation of smallpox as a disease of the skin, he nonetheless offered an analysis of the skin in relation to the question of whether it was a proper part of the body. According to Galen, skin is useful but has no actions and so cannot be subject to disease. But Mercuriale takes Galen’s assessment further, maintaining that skin must be understood in two senses: as the hide of the body (useful to cover and unify the body but not a part); and as a part that develops in relationship to other 25 See Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, 2 vols. (London, 1965), ii. 434–59; Donald R. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (Chicago, 1983); J. R. Smith, The Speckled Monster: Smallpox in England, 1670–1970, with Particular Reference to Essex (Chelmsford, 1987); Ian Glynn and Jenifer Glynn, The Life and Death of Smallpox (London, 2004); C. W. Dixon, Smallpox (London, 1962); Tobias Whitaker, An elenchus of opinions concerning the cure of the small pox (1661); Anon., Hactenus Inaudita (1663); Anthony Westwood, De Variolis & Morbillis (1656); and A. W. Sloan, English Medicine in the Seventeenth Century (Durham, 1996), 159. 26 See Victoria Silver on the menstrual associations of witchcraft in her essay in this volume. 27 On Mercuriale see Sixteenth-Century Physician and his Methods: Mercurialis on Diseases of the Skin, trans. and ed. Richard L. Sutton (Kansas City, MO, 1986).

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parts. In his book on temperaments, Galen has also allows for skin’s place among the parts, with its action involving the instrumentation of touch to which nerves extend. So skin can be a part affected by smallpox, he argues, but it surely is not the only one.28 In reviewing the history of scholarship on smallpox, Mercuriale enunciated many of the questions that many early modern investigators were striving to answer. One of Browne’s most trusted authorities, Daniel Sennert, attempted to reconcile opposing explanatory trends in discussions of the disease, which no doubt helps to account for the fact that his lead was closely followed by an extant 1640 Leiden thesis on smallpox.29 Whereas Sennert calmly guides the medical student towards the most viable means of treating smallpox, Mercuriale leads modern authorities in accentuating the questions raised by the new, or newly virulent, disease: was it mainly a disease of children? Was its virulence among adults a new twist in its history? Why was it nearly impossible to evade? Could it be attributed to contagion, as Fracastoro had?30 Was it to be classed with fevers or with skin diseases, as Giovanni Minadoi argued in De variolis et morbillis liber unicus, and as Hafenreffer would do in his Pandocheion of 1630?31 Was the smallpox a humoral condition like all the other diseases—that is, caused by an imbalance in the basic fluids of the body—or did it possess a discrete essence in its own right? Was skin disease the provenance of the surgeon or the physician, or both? Might the disease be located in ancient history, perhaps in the Athenian plague described by Thucydides? Was it a disease that developed among certain peoples in specific circumstances at particular times, owing as much to custom as to nature? Why did some people get it more than once? Did a cure involve heating further what nature was already boiling, and how might traditional methods of bleeding and purging be challenged by the habits of smallpox? Why did it seem to pick on royalty and aristocracy? Was it a ‘northern’ disease? Why were there both benign and lethal versions of the same disease? Why was smallpox so savage in its pocking or blemishing of 28 Mercuriale, De morbis puerorum tractatus locupletissimi (1583), 8v–9v. 29 The dissertation, by Franciscus Nansius, is included in a collection of Leiden medical dissertations at St John’s College, Oxford, shelfmark HB.415.6.4.5. 30 Hieronymus Fracastoro, Contagion, Contagious Diseases and Their Treatment (1546), trans. Wilmer Cave Wright (New York, 1930), 72–5. 31 Minadoi, De variolis et morbillis liber unicus (Padua, 1603); and Hafenreffer, Pandocheion aiolodermon (Tu¨bingen, 1630).


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humanity’s God-given beauty? Was this ironically nature’s way of using the less noble periphery to save the nobler parts of the body, or was it a token of corruption at the human core? Browne’s contemporaries were shocked by the brutality of smallpox on face and skin. Alice Thornton, a medical practitioner and a mother, not only recorded the ‘violent and extreme pain’ of her children as they suffered with smallpox—‘such scrikes and torments that [one] was deprived of reason’— but she also lamented how a daughter had ‘lost by this sickness her fair hair on her head, and that beautiful complexion God had given’.32 In Browne’s Oxford, leading wits such as Richard Corbett and William Strode grappled with the deformity that the disease wrought.33 In ‘An Elegie upon the death of the Lady Haddington who dyed of the small Pox’, Corbett decried thou deform’d unwoeman-like Disease, That plowest up flesh and bloud, & there sow’st pease, And leav’st such printes on Beauty, that dost come As clouted shon do on a floore of lome.

Her death having taken place in December 1618, she was (the poem continues) victim to an affliction ‘that of faces hony-combes dost make, j And of two breasts two cullenders’. Of a beautiful body smallpox makes ‘a huge Ulcer’, or an ‘ugly counterfett’.34 Strode’s poem on the death of Sir Thomas Savile offered a similar conceit in bemoaning how the smallpox ‘by a thousand stroakes . . . made one wound’ of Savile’s body, an occasion for Strode’s wit to counter ‘hatefull spots’ with his subject’s ‘virtuous gemmes’ and to convert his ‘every scar’ into stars ‘when death itselfe is dead’.35 Browne never forgot about smallpox; the times would not permit it even if he were so inclined. Over the final fifty years of his life, he would remark upon it often: in Religio Medici on how fetuses are ‘subject to . . . the malice of diseases in that other world, the truest Microcosme, the wombe of our 32 On Alice Thornton see Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1987), 229. 33 See Raymond Anselment, ‘Smallpox in Seventeenth-Century English Literature: Reality and the Metamorphosis of Wit’, Medical History, 33 (1989), 72–95. See also David E. Shuttleton, Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660–1820 (Cambridge, 2007). 34 Corbett’s poem appears in The Poems of Richard Corbett, ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. TrevorRoper (Oxford, 1955), 59–62. 35 The Poetical Works of William Strode, ed. Bertram Dobell (London, 1907), 86–7.

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mother’ (RM 1.39); in Pseudodoxia on the question of whether it was caused by ‘the menstruous impurities in the mothers bloud, and virulent tinctures contracted by the Infant, in the nutriment of the wombe’ (PE 4.10.327); in A Letter to a Friend on the certainty that like rickets and the king’s evil, smallpox ‘grows more pernicious than the Great’ (LF 107); in a note on the question of ‘whether anyone suffers from smallpox and pestilence simultaneously’ (‘An quis variolis et peste simul laborat’) (ON 252); perhaps in Musæum Clausum’s desire for the survival of ‘A Commentary of Galen upon the Plague of Athens described by Thucydides’ (MC 112); but certainly (and anxiously) in letters to his children on the devastating epidemic in Norwich from autumn 1681 through early 1682, a bout so intense and pervasive that Browne left it ‘to Gods mercy when he pleaseth to abate or Cease it, for the last run of the small Pox lasted much longer then this has yet dun’.36 When Edward himself had recovered from the illness in 1665, his father praised God and then urged his son to remove or ‘at least abate, the sollicitude and feares wch others have’ at its menacing prospect.37 Yet from Religio Medici onward, Browne articulated a far wider interest in skin as a hieroglyphic text, an anatomical structure, and a conglomeration of properties and powers than the strictures of his dissertation on smallpox would have permitted him to anticipate. Browne paused early in Religio’s meditation on charity to digress on physiognomy, that is, on the way in which our ‘aspect’ will ‘mystically’ convey our inmost natures by means of ‘signatures’, ‘markes’, ‘characters’, and ‘motto[es]’ (RM 2.2). Nor did he deem this expression of the inner self necessarily beneficial, since beggars can thereby abuse our tenderness and our faces reinforce our singularity and, therefore, our ultimate distance from one another. In Pseudodoxia, vulgar errors about ‘the Blacknesse of Negroes’ provoked Browne into declaring ‘that things most manifest unto sense, have proved obscure unto the understanding’, and that ‘of colours in generall, under whose glosse and vernish all things are seen, few or none have yet beheld the true nature, or positively set downe their incontroulable [i.e., absolute] causes’ (PE 6. 10. 507). In these chapters on blackness, Browne united the moral sense of human variation that he gathered from physiognomy with medical questions of the kind that he found in treatises on smallpox. 36 TB to Mrs Lyttleton, 15 September [1681]; TB to Edward Browne, 9 January [1681–2] ; TB to Edward Browne, 31 March [1682] (Keynes, 200, 202, 218). 37 TB to Edward Browne, 22 September [1665] (Keynes, 27).


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Yet Browne also celebrated the skin for its hieroglyphic signatures and virtues. In the Garden of Cyrus, he found the geometry of nature ‘in the skins and outward teguments of animals, whereof a regardable part are beautiful by this texture’ (GC 203). On various snakes he noted ‘the Chiasmus and larger decussations’ with the same delight that he took in the miniature operations of bees and ants in Religio; and he moved beyond the aesthetics of their ‘close and finer texture’ to the utility of the skins attached to various other animals (including turkeys, geese, ducks, and fish), and finally to human skin (GC 203). In ‘the skin of man’, Browne marveled at its ‘habits of neat texture’, at the way in which ‘Ægyptian Embalmers imitated this texture . . . still observable among their neatest Mummies’ in their linen wrappings; how the Egyptians encoded their admiration for reticulate vestment in ‘Orus, the Hieroglyphick of the world’; and how providence replicated the integument’s network ‘in the inward parts of man, not only from the first subtegmen or warp of his formation, but in the netty fibres of the veins and vessels of life’, a marvel not just to anatomists but to the Psalmist who admired how God ‘hast curiously embroydered me, thou hast wrought me up after the finest way of texture, and as it were with a Needle’ (GC 204). In a cosmos divinely woven in quincunxes, the skin serves as the most immediate paradigm of beauty and purpose, as surely as, in pursuit of vulgar errors, one might be bemused by its capacity to generate error from obvious effects. In Christian Morals, Browne is never very far from metaphors of skin: its colors, speckles and moles, and physiognomy, our tendency to ‘sleep in Lyons’ Skins in our Progress unto Virtue’ (CM 1.243). More magnanimously than in Religio Medici, he reverses the physiognomy of charity by urging not that we be mindful of how beggars read our faces, but that we be alert to ‘the Physiognomy of Want, and let the Dead colours and first lines of necessity suffise to tell thee there is an object for thy bounty’ (CM 1.245). If Browne in Religio Medici finds human difference in the markings of the face, in Christian Morals he emphasizes not only that our faces translate our characters with a simple clarity but also that mankind is united by skin, ‘comprehended in a few Faces, if we exclude all Visages which any way participate of Symmetries and Schemes of Look common unto other Animals’ (CM 1.264). In some measure, however, the unity proves deceptive: not only are we differentiated facially according to our provinces or nations, but the uniformity that appears to ‘our Eyes’ might not fool those ‘Animals of a more piercing or differing sight, who are able to discover the inequalities, rubbs and hairiness of Skin’. In sum, the

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question ‘is not without good doubt’ for Browne whether skin unites us as human beings in the same way that it integrates our bodies, or severs us from one another into endless variation.38 Browne goes even further to maintain that divine providence secures our love for one another by ensuring that we cannot see each other with anything approaching precision. ‘Love is not to be made by magnifying Glasses’, he quips, and credits ‘the wise Contriver’ with drawing ‘the pictures and outsides of things softly and amiably unto the natural Edge of our Eyes, not leaving them able to discover those uncomely asperities, which make Oyster-shells in good Faces, and Hedghoggs even in Venus’s moles’ (CM 1.265). We are, in short, always already pocked and scarred, and God makes us beautiful hieroglyphs by ensuring not that the letters are shorthand but that the reader is short-sighted. It was, however, in working out anatomical notes and observations for Edward that Browne devised his most concentrated study of human skin. Beginning with the claim that ‘[a] greater division of mankind is made by the skinne then by any other part of the body, that is into white & black’, he compiles a pot pourri of observations (for instance, the goose skin of young people as well as the ‘odde observation that such as have such skinns have not had the Lues venerea’), then proposes, in the manner of Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, certain experiments involving, for instance, ‘a blistering-plaster in a negros skinne’ to determine ‘if the next skin will bee white’. Over the course of these notes, Browne invokes the quantitative studies of Sanctorius with regard to the weight of perspiration, the effect of ‘hott minerall baths’ or of ‘temperate soft lotions’ on the skin, as well as the wondrous ability of ‘Cola, the famous Sicilian swimmer’, to dwell in water with ‘such abatement of perspiration as the cold water maketh’. He considers the function of skin as ‘the primarie instrument’ of touch, noting that this faculty is ‘commonly thought to bee more exact in the spider then in man’ (OA 338–40). Given this desire that Edward attend to skin, Browne was no doubt pleased by the fact that when his son studied anatomy with Dr Christopher Terne in the 1660s, Terne followed his Latin introduction with an analysis of the human casement.39 Browne valued the specimens of animal ‘cases’ in his personal museum, lamenting a caretaker’s jettisoning of around forty skins 38 See Guibbory’s article in this volume for seventeenth-century attitudes to racial and ethnic distinctions among bodies. 39 Edward’s notes on these lectures are discussed in Jeremiah S. Finch, Sir Thomas Browne: A Doctor’s Life of Science & Faith (New York, 1950), 225.


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during the time of plague in 1666.40 And he continued to draw Edward’s attention to the significance and complexities of human skin in medical study. In 1679, father sent son ‘a skinne of the palme of a woemans hand cast of at the end of a fever or in the declination thereof’. Having explained his nomenclature for the specimen, Browne added that ‘[i]t is neat & worthy to bee showne when you speake of the skinne. Snakes & lizards & divers insects cast their skinnes & they are very neat ones; men also in some diseases by peeces, butt I have not mett with any so neat as this; a palmister might read a lecture of it’. While the hand’s integument might prove especially valuable in deciphering the character of the patient, Browne added that he had yet another specimen: ‘the whole soles of the feet came of, & I have one’.41 Browne’s fascination with skin and its properties is extended into notes on the dynamics by which skin, among other vehicles, might express and mediate the critical processes of life and death. Including ebullition, coagulation, and bubbles, these phenomena ranged from the cosmological (‘the last circumference of the universe is butt the bubble of the chaos & pellicle arising from the grosser foundation of the first matter’—Browne denies this) to the artisanal ‘manufacture of soape & sugar’, with various ‘singular operations in nature’ and ‘remarkable considerables’. These notes take Browne through a wide range of natural histories even so far as the outer reaches of the macrocosm, and only rarely does he focus on the microcosm. When he observes that ‘Even man is a bubble if wee take his consideration in his rudiments, & consider the vesicular or bulla pulsans wherin begins the rudiment of life’, his frame of reference is as much William Harvey’s work on generation as it is the emblem of transitory vanity—a baby blowing bubbles—that he encountered in the anatomy theater at Leiden (MB 432– 62).42 If life begins in a bubble, it takes a miracle for it to persist in skin after death: this is the hope of the crypt in Toulouse. In a letter to Edward from August 1676, Browne guides his son through a pedagogy of skin.43 ‘First’, he advises, ‘you may speake of the common investing parts of the epidermis, cuticula or skarfe skinne as also of the 40 TB to Christopher Merrett, [May 1669] (Keynes, 362). 41 TB to Edward Browne, 28 May [1679] (Keynes, 113). 42 For Leiden’s image of the baby blowing bubbles see Theodoor H. Lunsingh Scheurleer, ‘Un Amphitheáˆtre d’anatomie moraliseé,’ in Scheurleer and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (eds.), Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century: An Exchange of Learning (Leiden, 1975), 224–5. 43 TB to Edward Browne, [7 August 1676] (Keynes, 69–74).

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æÆ, cutis or proper skinne, of their substance or fabrick’, he advises, then directs his son to explicate ‘the uses and remarkable qualities of them’. Browne helps out with his own descriptions, for instance, of the cuticula as ‘a kind of efflorescence of the skinne made like the thinne skinne filme or webb upon milk & broaths when they remitt of their heat, & beginne to coole, and somewhat resembleth the pellicules or tenuous skinnes of onyons’. Having reminded Edward that some animals cast off their skins, he moves beneath the surface to the cutis. The cuticula is useful in defense of the cutis, resilient in its capacity for renewal, properly attenuated so as not to ‘hinder the exactnesse of the touch, and the sense of feeling in the cutis under it’, but also relatively tough (‘close & compact’), and indeed a legitimate subject for rough handling, boiling, and excoriation. In the protected space beneath the outmost integument lies what Browne now treats as a more genuine skin, the cutis. Indeed it is responsible for enclosing the body’s fluids and activities, for establishing the body’s integrity ‘even in the tender bones of the infant’, for properly regulating the flow of ‘sweat & exhalations . . . wherin dependeth a maine part of our health’, in short, for helping not just the ‘Sicilian Amphibium’ Cola survive the water but also amphibian man to survive his perplexed and ever-changing relationship to the macrocosm. In an effort to situate proto-dermatology in the context of medical learning, Browne sounds almost ironic or dismissive in noting that while ‘[t]he consideration of the skinne takes up one part, that is the cosmeticall or exornatorie part of physik’, writers nonetheless ‘have sett downe more recepts then for any one part of the body beside, and whole bookes have been written of the diseases of the skinne as by Mercurialis, Haffenrefferus, and others; and chirurgeons are particularly concerned in many thereof’. In his letter to Edward, Browne seems slightly bemused by the recent surge of interest in the skin, then continues to express his own fascination with its anatomy, properties, and even its cultural history. ‘To excoriate men alive is still a practice in Turkie and Persia’, he explains to his son the travel-writer, citing authorities such as the orientalist Minadoi for his understanding of the procedure. Browne considers not just the ‘preternaturall maculations and marks’ of the skin but the artifice of coloring and decorating it, too. If love should avoid the microscopic view of skin, Browne advises his son in the final analysis to consult ‘Mr. Hookes micrographia, page 156, observation 32’ for a better understanding ‘of Hayre and the texture of


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the skinne’.44 There Edward might find what for Hooke was a work in progress, a still imperfect set of observations on the fibrous and porous functions of animal and vegetable integuments. Browne’s movement beyond the outer skin to a truer, inner, layer staves off what the metaphysician and theologian in him might consider an excessive concern with bubbly surfaces; after all, this was the same man who had written, in the early days of his medical practice, that ‘Men that look upon my outside, perusing onely my condition, and fortunes, do erre in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders’ (RM 2.11). But by such disparaged externals, Browne seems to refer to his social and economic status, to the significance of clothing rather than the hieroglyphics of skin. If immortality might be emblematized as a jettisoning of skin, mortality—its weakness and resilience alike—kept returning Browne to the human integument. Even in his own posthumous reputation, skin played a part in resurrecting his image: in one story, Browne’s certificate for a child to be touched by the king for scrofula ended up inspiring a radical nonconformist to embrace the sanctity of kingship and the established Church.45 For Browne, skin was no mere medical concern. As much as he appears to have cared about its anatomy, healthy functions, and diseases, he also explored its artistic, moral, theological, and social-cum-racial implications. He was not alone in his attentiveness to the larger meanings of skin. In 1663, John Heydon reminded his readers that Hebraic sources depicted God as stretching out the heavens like a skin or a parchment.46 Perhaps in his vision of nature as a manuscript, Browne made this connection, too. Yet if, like the other ‘obvious effects’ of nature, skin was a hieroglyph for Browne, it was more apt to reflect backwards on the human decipherer than outwards and upwards to the divine geometrician. And in that backward reflection, it evoked images of beauty and monstrosity, of power and weakness, and of unity and divisiveness from beneath the surface. 44 Cf. Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glass (1667), 159–62. 45 John Browne, Adenochoiradelogia (1684), 187–9. 46 John Heydon, Theomagia, or, The Temple of Wisdome (1663), 137.

15 Browne, Borges, and Back: Phantasmagories of Imaginative Learning1 Roy Rosenstein

Like many other readers of Sir Thomas Browne, the polymorphic, polymathic, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) juxtaposed Browne to his predecessors and contemporaries.2 This essay will propose a different exercise in intertextuality: not in the retrospective sense of Browne’s reading3 but in the prospective sense of his fortunes. Borges himself is the primary exemplar of this forward-facing Brownean movement. From his youth, the Argentine writer was expressly a self-styled, would-be Browne. 1 George Saintsbury spoke of ‘the phantasmagoria of Browne’s imaginative learning’, cited by Russell Kirk (ed.), Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici and Other Works (Los Angeles, 1956), p. vii. A phantasmagory is an optical illusion in which figures pass into each other, much as Borges and Browne have been confronted in this essay and their works assimilated by other critics. In so doing those critics follow their authors in supplementing knowledge with imagination. Browne ‘thought with his imagination’, observes C. H. Herford (ed.), The Religio Medici and Other Writings (London, 1940; many other editions), pp. xiii–xiv, just as Borges is often caught ‘meˆlant, selon sa coutume perverse, l’historique et l’imaginaire’, perhaps following Browne’s example, notes Michel Berveiller, Le cosmopolitisme de Jorge Luis Borges (Paris, 1973), 249. 2 e.g., Basil Willey, The Seventeenth-Century Background (New York, 1935), passim. 3 Robert Ralston Cawley, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and His Reading’, in Cawley and George Yost, Studies in Sir Thomas Browne (Eugene, OR, 1965), 104–66.

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This ambition was fulfilled late in life when a Browne fragment was repeatedly attributed to Borges, confirming and completing their association by the assimilation of the two writers. If for Borges all writing is a rewriting of one’s precursors, then through his Spanish translation of Browne he would finally become the author that he admired and praised for over fifty years. Borges consciously imitated Browne when, after a sojourn in Spain in 1919–21, he imagined himself a Spanish Golden Age writer on the model of Quevedo.4 In the twenties, in his twenties, the essays in his first book of prose ‘were written in an absurd style, a baroque style. I was baroque in my youth’.5 He subsequently made a number of pertinent comments about his relationship to Browne and Browne’s works: I was a young man. I did my best to be Sir Thomas Browne, to be Lugones, to be Quevedo, to be somebody else. But today I am satisfied to be my humble self, my private identity, if it exists. If that exists.6

He said elsewhere that two Spanish baroque seventeenth-century writers, Quevedo and Saavedra Fajardo . . . stood in their own stiff, arid, Spanish way for the same kind of writing as Sir Thomas Browne in ‘Urne-Buriall’. I was doing my best to write Latin in Spanish, and the book [Inquisiciones, 1925] collapses under the sheer weight of its involutions and judgments.7

Years later he elaborated on this: When I was a young man, I played the sedulous ape to Sir Thomas Browne. I tried to do so in Spanish. Then Adolfo Bioy-Casares and I translated the last chapter of ‘Urn Burial’ into seventeenth-century Spanish—[in the style of] Quevedo. And it went quite well into seventeenth-century Spanish . . . We did our best to be seventeenthcentury, we went in for Latinisms the way that Sir Thomas Browne did.8

The expression ‘to play the sedulous ape’ as repeatedly recycled by Borges is itself borrowed from Robert Louis Stevenson, who had earlier also used it to describe his own undertaking of what he labeled ‘a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne’.9 Just as Browne wrote in seventeenth-century Latinate 4 Borges, Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Jean-Pierre Berne`s (Paris, 1993–9), i. 1656. 5 Willis Barnstone, Borges at Eighty: Conversations (Bloomington, 1982), 140. 6 James Woodall, Borges: A Life (New York, 1997), 68. 7 Norman Thomas di Giovanni et al., Borges on Writing (New York, 1973), 6–7. 8 In answer to a 1983 question about his interest in Browne, cited in John Irwin, The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore, 1994), 131. 9 Ibid.

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English, so Borges would initially translate him into the seventeenth-century Latinate Spanish of Quevedo. Where Browne and Quevedo Latinized, Borges responded in proposing to translate the language of one into the language of the other, thus guaranteeing stylistic and temporal parity in translation. The closest parallel before Borges is found in the case of Marcel Schwob, who undertook a similarly doomed exercise in translating Hamlet into seventeenth-century French in 1900: like Borges, he came three centuries too late.10 Borges seems to refer to Schwob’s magnificent failure at archaizing translation and perhaps to his own efforts when he put his Pierre Menard to work on a seventeenth-century Spanish version of Don Quixote for twentiethcentury readers: Menard transcribes exactly, letter for letter, the text of several chapters as Cervantes had written them in 1606.11 Schwob, Menard, and Borges all confront the same three-century distance from their originals, but with varying degrees of success. Schwob failed in his artificially antiquated Hamlet. Menard nominally succeeded in recopying part of Don Quixote. Borges alone would ultimately triumph willy-nilly and to an unprecedented, enviable degree in virtually becoming the author he so admired and transposed, as we will see. The continuing presence of Browne’s various works is palpable throughout Borges’s career and writings, where Browne is frequently invoked and sporadically translated, beginning with Religio Medici several times in his first poetry collection, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), as well as in the early Proa article that was the Browne essay incorporated into his first volume of prose, Inquisiciones (1925).12 That essay is a paean to Browne, whose works are ‘a gift of beauty’.13 Borges later disowned his collection and that essay—too Latinate in style, too Brownean as pastiche—in modestly calling it ‘a quite bad essay on Sir Thomas Browne, which may have been the first ever attempted 10 The most spirited English versions of a Rabelais or a Quevedo are those by seventeenthcentury translators Urquhart-Motteux and Roger L’Estrange. Borges refers to other works by Schwob, whose wife coached in French diction Borges’s long-term acquaintance Victoria Ocampo, editor of the journal Sur, where ‘Pierre Menard’ first appeared, with a dedication to Victoria’s younger sister, Silvina, who was Bioy’s wife. 11 ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ was published in Sur, 56 (1939), 7–16, preceding ‘Tlo¨n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, in Sur, 68 (May 1940), 30–46, and the translation of ‘Quinto Capı´tulo de la ‘‘Hydriotaphia’’ (1658)’, in Sur, 111 (1944), 15–26. 12 ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, Proa (segunda e´poca), 2:7 (1925), 3–8; ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, Inquisiciones (Buenos Aires, 1925, 1994), 33–41. 13 Borges (1925, 1994), 33.


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on him in the Spanish language’.14 The essay is instructive, if more revealing about Borges’s youthful tastes than about Browne’s enduring virtues. It launched the recognition that Browne has lately enjoyed in Spanish-speaking lands. Two extended passages from Browne are presented there in a Quevedesque translation, also the first of any sort into Spanish. Fifty years later, Religio Medici became the title and starting-point of a sonnet in Borges’s last poetry collection, The Gold of the Tigers (1972). In the interim, his Book of Imaginary Beings (1967) draws rather on Pseudodoxia to deny the existence of creatures like the amphisbaena and the basilisk, or perhaps to admit the possibility of a plant like the borometz (PE 3.15.217–19; 3.7.181–6; 3.28.289). Borges writes about these and other imaginary forms of life, citing copiously as his authorities Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, and Aldrovandi, but also Lucan, Brunetto Latini, and Chaucer, before concluding on Browne, from whom he inherits about half of these references. Here Borges structures his themes and arguments as Browne does in Pseudodoxia and is not merely imitating his Latinate style. Finally, ‘Death and the Compass’, Borges’s most studied story, is haunted by a proliferation of V-shapes, decussations, lozenges, and especially diamonds inspired by Browne’s quincuncial Garden of Cyrus.15 By 1941, Borges had elevated Urne-Buriall to the status of Hamlet: it was ‘equaled but never surpassed in any language for the nobility of its music’;16 in 1944 Borges now with Bioy published the complete translation of Chapter 5 of Urne-Buriall; in 1965 in his history of English literature Borges described Urne-Buriall as Browne’s ‘greatest work’.17 Across a long career in writing and a longer lifetime of reading, Borges digested virtually everything, almost omnivorously. There were only a few contemporary works and authors he refused or was unable to read, such as Beckett, whom he dismissed in part for sharing his 1961 Formentor Prize; and Nabokov, whose novels were too long for his weak eyes (although this detail did not prevent him from commenting on the affaire Lolita).18 Among the vast sweep of his interests, Borges’s earliest literary love was Oscar Wilde, whom 14 Irwin, 129. 15 Irwin, ch. 15, passim. Irwin also traces the origins of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ to Cyrus. 16 Berveiller, 249. 17 Borges, An Introduction to English Literature, trans. and ed. L. Clark Keating and Robert O. Evans (London, 1974), 23–4. 18 ‘El caso Lolita’, Sur, 260 (September–October 1959), 49–50.

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he had translated for his first publication at age 10. But the Wildean side of Borges always remained tame and anonymous, less personal because more distant in its admiration for his wit.19 By comparison, the link to Browne is a later, closer, stronger sentimental tie to a kindred spirit. His long-standing familiarity with Browne, surpassing many of his other enthusiasms, is documented most strikingly by his full translation into Spanish of that famous final chapter of Urne-Buriall. When asked what were his favorite books when he was young, Borges replied that they were those he still loved in 1980. They included Cervantes, read first in English (he playfully denounced the Spanish original as a flawed translation) and Browne. These, with Quevedo and Shakespeare, all from the seventeenth century, were all implicated in the Borgesian translation enterprise. The allusions to Browne are legion in Borges’s criticism and poetry. But in his fictions, one reference is paramount. It comes as the last words of arguably his best-known story, and a personal favorite of its author, ‘Tlo¨n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’. Following other erudite references in the course of a narrative which traces its beginnings to the matchless eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the narrator promises to continue his translation of Urne-Buriall into a hesitant Quevedesque Spanish: ‘una indecisa traduccioń quevediana’.20 Although the same persona acknowledges that he does not plan to see it into print, the published Borges–Bioy version of the concluding chapter resembles that announced here in the fictional voice of ‘Tlo¨n’, but this time in modern Spanish. Composed and published in 1940, ‘Tlo¨n’ was printed with a fictitious postscript post-dated 1947, and it thus claims to overlap in time with the 1944 publication of the Borges–Bioy translation in the journal Sur. Borges’s point, as in Browne’s chapter, is the collapsing of the gap separating past, present, and future. Like the deliberately misleading date of the ‘Tlo¨n’ postscript, the Borges– Bioy version of Urne-Buriall Chapter 5 as published in Sur is intriguing. Not that this translation is more conceptually rich or stylistically dense than the 19 Roy Rosenstein, ‘Re(dis)covering Wilde for Latin America: Martı´, Darıó, Borges, Lispector’, Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. ed. C. George Sandulescu (Gerrards Cross, 1994), 348–61. 20 ‘Tlo¨n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,’ in Ficciones/Fictions, ed. Jean-Pierre Berne`s (Paris, 1994), 68. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, trans. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York, 1964), 3–18, esp. 18. According to Marina E. Kaplan, in some ways ‘Tlo¨n’ is a translation of UrneBurial (‘ ‘‘Tlo¨n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’’ y ‘‘Urn-Burial’’ ’, Comparative Literature, 36 (1984), 339).


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original, as Borges’s narrator claimed of Pierre Menard’s transcription of Don Quixote, but like the ‘Menard’ story it raises questions of authorial attribution and editorial responsibility. For some two hundred years, admirers have glossed, embellished, and pastiched Browne. No reader is immune to ‘vulgar errors’ in the study of Browne, given that some of his neologisms are hapaxes, that is, by definition unattested elsewhere. But the latest twist in Browne–Borges studies has inadvertently made a scholarly oversight into an entertainingly Borgesian situation: an uncommon error that would have amused Borges himself has allowed several recent readers to confuse Borges’s own writing with Browne’s, thus fulfilling Borges’s youthful ambition to be Browne. Not an intrusive scholar but a self-effacing librarian from Buenos Aires, Borges would have been unlikely to interpolate a paragraph of his own composition in his devoted, devout translation of Browne, neither in the pseudo-seventeenth-century Spanish he emulated as a young man for Proa nor in the limpid Spanish prose he practised in his mature years at Sur.21 Yet a handful of researchers in writing about Browne and Borges have succumbed to the tempting error not only of associating the two writers but assimilating them in attributing a Browne passage to Borges. Each of these readers of Browne and Borges has successively, but independently, noted the single passage added by Borges, rightly considered it ‘an interpolation not found in the original’,22 but wrongly attributed it to Borges himself.23 The passage in 21 Indeed, when questioned by Javier Marıás, Borges affirmed, ‘I have so great an admiration for Sir Thomas’s matchless prose that I would never have dared add a single line to it’ (see Javier Marıás (trans.), Religio Medici (La religioń de un me´dico) e Hydriotaphia (El enterramiento en urnas) (Barcelona, 1984, 2002), 294, 302; all page references to this translation cite the 2002 edn.). 22 Efraıń Kristal, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation (Nashville, 2002), 91. 23 Various critics and translators have misattributed the passage to Borges: see Marıás (trans.), (1984, 2002); also Marıás in intervening articles and book chapters on ‘literary falsifications’ in 1988, 1991, 1999: ‘un pasaje que Jorge Luis Borges y Adolfo Bioy Casares sin duda inventaron . . . la imitacioń no puede ser ma´s perfecta’’ (282–3). Cynthia Stephens, ‘Borges, Sir Thomas Browne and the Theme of Metempsychosis’, Forum for Modern Language Study, 28 (1992), 268: ‘[Borges and Bioy’s] sympathy with this chapter extended to them [sic] adding a paragraph of their own creation’. Kristal (2002): ‘One of Borges’s tours de force, as a translator, is his interpolation of a paragraph’ attributed to Borges himself because it is ‘not found in the original’ (27, 90–1). Kristal also thanks Jonathan Post, a fellow admirer of Borges, who concurred with another Browne specialist also consulted that the passage as examined in Kristal’s English translation was an effective pastiche by Borges, ‘capturing Browne’s ethos’ (157 n. 92, and letter of 5 March 2007). Marıás’s error was noted by Daniel Waissbein in ‘Borges: admirador, traductor, expositor y parodista de Browne’, in Waissbein (trans.), Sobre errores vulgares o Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Madrid, 1994,

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question is rather a majestic variant paragraph by Browne, cited by Wilkin and Keynes, the authoritative editors, in the standard collected editions: Large are the treasures of oblivion, and heapes of things in a state next to nothing almost numberlesse; much more is buried in silence than is recorded, and the largest volumes are butt epitomes of what hath been. The account of time beganne with night, and darknesse still attendeth it. Some things never come to light; many have been delivered; butt more hath been swallowed in obscurity & the caverns of oblivion.24

Wilkin and Keynes had placed this passage in a footnote or endnote at what they imagined to be the appropriate place in Chapter 5 of Urne-Buriall (UB 5.168). Following the authority of both Wilkin and Keynes, Borges simply concurred with their editorial decision.25 But, unlike the editors, Borges went one step further, incorporating the passage in the main text of his translation, rather than in a note as they had done, and at the very point in the text proposed by Wilkin and accepted by Keynes.26 This orphaned passage, derived from Browne’s fugitive papers but never incorporated by him into UrneBuriall, was identified (wrongly, of course) as an interpolation originating with Borges and Bioy in their Spanish translation of Chapter 5, ‘a false falsification’27 which began a series of concurring claims. Borges may not 2005), 385. Also Christopher Johnson, ‘Intertextuality and Translation: Borges, Browne, and Quevedo’, Translation and Literature, 11 (2002), 175 n. correcting Stephens. The slip was acknowledged by Marıás, ‘El apoćrifo apoćrifo’ (1993, 2001, and 2002), 291–306. Kristal learned early of his mistake and will correct it in future editions. Marıás (1984; 2002) prefers to reprint his translation without change but with an appendix explaining the context of this one error. 24 Keynes 1, 172. See also Keynes, Sir Thomas Browne: Selected Writings (London, 1968), 156, where it is again the sole note to the otherwise unannotated UB. The orphan passage originates in BL Sloane 1848, where it appears three times, ff. 162, 165v, 167v, as well as in Rawlinson D. 109, also three times, ff. 42v, 43, 44v; see most recently Waissbein, 386, who cites L. C. Martin, Religio Medici and Other Works (Oxford, 1964), p. xx. 25 Bioy had a personal copy of Keynes (Marıás (1984, 2002), 296, 304). Borges’s wealthy friend would have purchased a desk copy at the time of their collaboration because Wilkin and Keynes do not figure in the Argentinian national library catalogue. 26 In the same way, Wilkin added to his text some passages from Pseudodoxia that he had found in BL Sloane 1827. These were later removed from the main text by Keynes and placed among the miscellaneous writings (but certainly without attributing authorship to Wilkin) (Keynes (1968), x). 27 Waissbein 385–6. Marıás (1984; 2002) rationalizes his ‘lasting shame’ as a ‘very mysterious blunder’ in his still unrevised translation (292, 300). The 2002 reprint does not include the original 1984 Patrides preface announced in the book itself, 292 n., a footnote Borges—always fascinated by such scholarly and pseudo-scholarly annotations—would have observed with amusement.


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have intended or even imagined the flurry of mistaken scholarly comment his editorial-translational act would provoke. Browne’s original fragment invites comparison with three interrelated translations, beginning with Borges’s post-Quevedan contemporary Spanish. Efraıń Kristal has published a post-Brownean, contemporary American English version of Borges’s Spanish translation. To these two translations, into Spanish and thence back into English, we might add a second backtranslation in imagining what Browne himself might have written in his own English, based on Borges’s version. The first few sentences of the interpolated purple paragraph, which follows the ‘we lie down in darknesse and have our light in ashes’ passage, are translated by Borges thus: Amplios son los tesoros del olvido, e innumerables los montones de cosas en un estado pro´ximo a la nulidad; ma´s hechos hay sepultados en el silencio que registrados, y los ma´s copiosos volu´menes son epitomes de lo que ha sucedido. La crońica del tiempo empezo´ con la noche, y la oscuridad todavıá la sirve; algunos hechos nunca salen a la luz; muchos han sido declarados; muchos ma´s fueron devorados por la oscuridad y las cavernas del olvido.28

With no knowledge of the existence of the original English, Kristal glosses for his American readership what he assumes was composed of whole cloth by Borges in modern Spanish: Ample are the treasures of forgetfulness, and innumerable the piles of things in a state close to nullity; many more facts have been buried in silence than registered, and the most copious volumes are but epitomes of what has taken place. The chronicle of time began with the night, and obscurity still serves it; some facts never see the light; many have been declared; many more have been devoured by the obscurity and the caverns of oblivion.29

Despite the concluding accuracy of ‘caverns of oblivion’, colloquial American English does not honour the more formal gravity of the original. I doubt Browne or Borges or Menard would have been fully satisfied with this 28 Rather than the version in Kristal, 178 n. 8, into which have crept various typographical errors, I cite the original of the translation from Sur, 111 (1944), 20, reprinted among the previously uncollected works of Borges and Bioy, Museo: textos ine´ditos (Buenos Aires, 2002), 153–4. It is listed but not reprinted in Borges en Sur, 1931–1980 (Buenos Aires, 1999), 344. 29 Kristal, 178.

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version relying on so many easy cognates from the Spanish. My own version, also composed before I discovered Browne’s original, was proposed in a language intended to mirror in seventeenth-century Latinate English the style of a Borges, a Quevedo, and above all Browne: Large are the treasures of oblivion, and numberlesse the mounts of objects in a meannesse adumbrating annihilation: More deeds are inhumed in silence than are recorded, and the most ponderous tomes are but exilitous reflexes of extances. The chronicle of Time beganne in night; and darknesse still honours it; some matters never see the light of day; many have been opinioned; many more have been swallowed by darknesse & the profounds of oblivion.30

Or so I imagined Browne or Borges might have written in my unabashed English pastiche in which I reach back beyond Borges’s Spanish interpolation. But this latest sedulous aping of Browne is just another failed back-translation of Borges, this time into faux Browne, who as late as the twenty-first century cannot be one-upped or out-Browned in seventeenth-century English.31 That same lesson had been learned reluctantly by Schwob, when he attempted to render Hamlet in seventeenth-century French, as well as by Borges and Menard: if we are to translate at all, we must undertake to re-translate the classics for our own times, in the modern forms of our languages, as a contemporary re-reading, not an artificially antiquated re-writing.32 What Borges translated into Spanish, another translator back-translated into contemporary American English, and a third, less naively if more zealously, attempted to reconstruct in Browne’s English, in which it was originally composed, just as Menard copied Cervantes in seventeenth-century Spanish. 30 This version undertakes to draw on the language of Browne and his times, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, as documented in his works and confirmed in the glossaries to them, such as those found in Greenhill and Herford. Menard was no less scrupulous in respecting the original in his modern transcription of Cervantes. 31 That the reconstructed English original should begin and end in ‘oblivion’ was clear as day, from beginning with night to darkness still serving twice at the end. I would have been pleased that I could have restored ‘recorded’ had I not been tempted to out-Browne Browne with ‘opinioned’ (meaning ‘considered’) and ‘extances’ (that is, ‘existences’). Unfortunately, the depth of my ‘profounds of oblivion’ was not retained by Browne to balance the breadth of his ‘treasures’, by which we know he meant our ‘treasuries’. 32 If we compare Borges’s translation of one segment of the fifth chapter in Inquisiciones to the Sur version of the complete chapter composed some twenty years later, in the first line the 1944 text is lightened for a modern audience: ‘ciegamente’ for ‘a ciegas’ and other examples perhaps suggest Borges’s break with his more Quevedesque 1925 translation.


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Like Menard, like Schwob, like Borges in 1925, I wanted to restore Browne to the language of his times, but not simply by aping him word for word or by transposing languages. I attempted to reconstruct a seventeenth-century original which Borges and Menard possessed for Browne and Cervantes but which Kristal and I did not initially have for Browne. Menard did not translate Don Quixote in our linguistic sense: rather, he retranscribed his text word by word and letter by letter.33 Similarly, the ideal twenty-first century English ‘translation’ might simply be Browne’s original, as was Menard’s Cervantes in Spanish when he recontextualized the same seventeenth-century work for a modern readership.34 Borges’s translations, whether Quevedesque (1925) or contemporary (1944), cannot replace the English original of Chapter 5 to which they give access in ‘transferring’ it into another language. But his two partial Spanish translations do far surpass Kristal’s and my even more fragmentary English back-translations when compared with Browne’s original. If Menard were transcribing Browne in English, in the same way as he did Cervantes in Spanish, his version would be strictly identical to the original: the material form would be unchanged while only the context would vary and therefore in that sense alone, the ‘translation’ too.35 As Borges’s Menard teaches, the only perfect latter-day version is the original re-read with today’s eyes. 33 As has not been sufficiently noted, Menard is a glorified scribe whom Borges tantalizingly elevates to translator and ultimately author. In his painstaking transcription Menard resembles nineteenth-century predecessors like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pećuchet, Gogol’s Akaky Akakievitch in ‘The Overcoat’, or Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. 34 Today translations of French and English Renaissance texts into the modern forms of the original languages have begun to appear, including a bilingual French–French Rabelais by Guy Demerson and an English–English Hamlet by John J. Richetti. Perhaps we should congratulate Pierre Menard, author of a partial twentieth-century Quixote verbally identical to the seventeenth-century Spanish original, that there is to my knowledge no modern Spanish translation of Cervantes’s masterwork. The best translation is the original, Borges intimates. 35 Here is one example how Marıás, in the first pages of his Religio, not only recontextualizes but also reverses Browne’s meaning in making him anti-Semitic, which he expressly was not, any more than Borges. Browne wrote that it would be wrong to hate rather ‘than pity Turks, infidels, and (what is worse) Jews’, meaning that they are least of all deserving of our animosity. Much as Browne embraced the Jew and Spaniard among his fellows, so Borges welcomed other sides to himself, proudly citing his Jewishness via Portuguese Marrano ancestry. Astonishingly, Marıás translates the parenthetic matter as ‘(los peores son) judıós’, i.e., ‘Jews (who are the worst)’ (34). All previous versions readily avoided Marıás’s egregious misunderstanding and devastating mistranslation: nedum Judaeos (‘still less,’ Merryweather, 1665), ‘ch’e` peggio’ (‘even worse,’ Piccoli, 1930), ‘dont l’e´tat est pire encore’ (Chasse´, 1947), etc. As Waissbein points out in a forthcoming article, Marıás instead introduces a cultural dimension of his own Spanishness, in total contradiction to the English original. On Browne’s attitude to the Jews see Guibbory’s essay in this volume.

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One does not know a work—and therefore one’s own interpretation of it— until one has translated it. Translation is interpretation, said Aristotle. In the present case, these English back-translations are made into the original language, not a foreign one, and may—to their detriment—be juxtaposed with their model, which in an absolute sense they cannot duplicate. Setting aside Browne’s neglected original passage, the most faithful versions may be those of Borges and Bioy, the would-be-Brownes: their version has not yet been surpassed in Spanish, and complements its original, as does the work of ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. Partly as a result of the success of Borges’s translation, the authorship of the one small passage has been attributed as readily to Borges as to Browne. Urne-Buriall thus genuinely constitutes what Browne would have called a ‘comproduction’, that is, a joint production, not of Borges and Bioy, who called themselves ‘Biorges’ in a composite photograph, but of Borges and Browne, so perhaps ‘Brorges’.36 What a consummate testimonial to the two writers’ closeness, as in the collaboration of Cervantes and Menard, that some Browne scholars and some Borges scholars cannot distinguish one author–translator from the other.37 The attribution of authorship to the translator is an idea that would have much flattered the self-effacing Borges, and particularly so since the compliment concerns a favorite work of his.38 Pierre Menard, the translator in Borges’s story on translation, would also have heartily approved. Here author and translator are not crucified by their critics but, in Browne’s word, ‘cruciated’, in other words, crossed, overlapping, united. Such is the dream of any translator. For Borges, that wish was fulfilled in a case unprecedented in the annals of translation, except perhaps for his own ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. As Borges says of Pierre Menard, he is interested in ‘the theme of a [translator’s] total identification with a given author’.39 Has the neglected passage won acceptance by others since its publication by Wilkin and Keynes, and after its interpolation by Borges? BL Sloane 1848 is 36 Some have sought to blend Borges with authors other than Bioy or Browne. The two 1961 Formentor Prize co-winners, Beckett and Borges, have been rudely conflated as ‘Borckett’ or ‘Beges’ although they were poles apart and incompatible, pace William Marx, ‘Borckett, sa vie, son œuvre’, Borges, souvenirs d’avenir, ed. Pierre Brunel (Paris, 2006), 385–9. 37 As identified in note 23, above. 38 Bioy indirectly notified Marıás that he was proud he should have been thought capable of ‘inventing Thomas Browne’ (Marıás (1984, 2002), 296, 304). When Marıás accused Borges directly of the authorship of the interpolation and later of mendacity in denying it, the atmosphere would have been less cordial (Marıás (1984, 2002) 294, 302). 39 ‘Pierre Menard’, (Borges, 1964), 39.


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not a holograph manuscript and the passage in question was not incorporated among the manuscript additions by Browne to various surviving copies of the first edition.40 Except by Borges, who alone among Browne’s disciples has had the temerity to interpolate it, the errant passage has probably rightly never been incorporated into the text, although well known to many other readers thanks to Wilkin and Keynes. Not surprisingly, perhaps, there is no mention of the very existence of the additional passage in subsequent editions of Browne, concerned more with annotating the text and not reediting it.41 Using any of those commercial editions recommended after the collected works edited by Wilkin and Keynes, a Marıás might readily fall into the trap Borges set for future generations of his readers when he silently and probably playfully merged the lost passage.42 Two textuary antiquarians, for so Browne might have called them, L. C. Martin and Robin Robbins, redistribute the interpolation as belonging to Christian Morals.43 No one can be certain where the orphan passage rightly fits in Christian Morals, or anywhere else, and all judgments must remain conjectural. Other scraps of text by Browne are in a similar limbo: for Pseudodoxia, Keynes gives seven pages of such passages.44 For his part, Borges decisively, but still only speculatively, adopted the worthiest orphan and gave it a home, in keeping with the proposal of Wilkin and Keynes, with the consequences that have been described. Each generation re-translates its classics. We learn from Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard’ that translation is itself consigned to oblivion, for translation is ‘invisible work’, as the narrator says.45 Using this suggestive phrase as the title of his book, Kristal discusses the orphaned passage as Browne’s semi-private meditation on ‘the iniquity of oblivion’, on the Stoic values required to confront lost illusions, and on the Christian salvation that redeems us.46 40 Waissbein, 386–7. 41 See Norman J. Endicott (ed.), The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne (Garden City, 1967); Robin R. H. A. Robbins, Thomas Browne: Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus (Oxford, 1972); C. A. Patrides (ed.), Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works (Harmondsworth, 1977). 42 Marıás (1984, 2002) explains his missing the only note in Keynes because he was collating six different English editions of the text (297, 305). 43 L. C. Martin, Religio Medici and Other Works (Oxford, 1964), p. xx, cited by Waissbein, 386; and Robbins, personal communication to Waissbein. According to Waissbein (letter), Robbins also tentatively suggested the possibility that the fragment might belong to LF. 44 Keynes 2, 549–56. 45 See also Kristal, p. xiii. 46 Ibid., 93.

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Borges’s enthusiastic translation and incorporation of the passage articulate instead a powerful affirmation which flies in the face of oblivion, as does, finally, its attribution to Borges. In excerpting the key passage on oblivion from Browne in 1925, and revising and extending it with the interpolation in 1944, Borges demonstrated the daily task and occasional triumph of translation, in that wider meaning of transferral, its etymological doublet. To translate Browne is to internalize him, to extend his reach, to transcend. Surely no other version of Browne’s fifth chapter of Urne-Buriall has generated so much close attention as the Borgesian one.47 Currently, the translations by Javier Marıás are contributing to an extended interest in Browne in Spanish.48 More than ever, Borges’s partial version, despite its liberties, redounds to his credit as a Stanislavskian translation: as the actor becomes the character, the translator becomes the writer exactly as Menard became the author of the Quixote. Browne’s free-floating passage was nearly buried away forever in a scholarly footnote, consigned to the bottomless ‘oblivion’ that is its subject. Instead, thanks to Borges, the passage was resurrected and integrated by one admiring translator in Argentina and since then has provoked a flurry of general commentary. There lies a translational, transnational bridge on which the team of Browne and Borges might be congratulated. The 1940 narrator of ‘Tlo¨n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ announced his unfulfilled intention to continue his unpublishable translation of Urne-Buriall into the style of Quevedo after the initial passage in 1925. Similarly, there is no need for us to pursue the back-translation of Borges’s Browne into pseudoBrownean English, or to continue the work of Pierre Menard struggling with his fragmentary translation into seventeenth-century Spanish. The act of 47 That into French by Valery Larbaud as ‘Chapitre V de ‘‘Hydriotaphia’’ ’, Le Commerce, 21 (1929), 185–215, has not been studied. Larbaud knew of Borges from Guïraldes by 1924, reviewed Inquisiciones in 1925, and perhaps served as one of several models for Menard. Did Larbaud come to Browne’s fifth chapter partially under the influence of the Borges essay, which he had mentioned in his book review? Did Borges return to complete his Spanish translation of the same chapter following the example of Larbaud’s French version? And was Larbaud himself the ultimate Ur-Menard? The last word has not yet been written. 48 Of complete translations of Urne-Buriall into other languages there seem to be only Dominique Aury’s French version, Hydriotaphia ou discours sur les urnes fune´raires (Paris, 1970, 2004), and Rafaello Piccoli’s Italian Religio Medici e Hydriotaphia (Florence, 1930). In French there are also Religio Medici, trans. Charles Chasse´ (Paris, 1947), replacing the older 1668 version; Pseudodoxia, trans. Bernard Hoepffner (Paris, 2004); and Lettre a` un ami, trans. Marc Kunszel (Paris, 2007).


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translation—Borges’s translation, rather like Menard’s—allows us to rediscover Browne’s and Cervantes’s writings, whether just one lost paragraph of Browne or several chapters of Cervantes’s enduring masterpiece, for which a translation, seventeenth-century or contemporary, is no longer needed. Why pastiche Browne yet again when we have his original? Borges knew his Browne as well as anyone. At the same time, other, smaller fragments of Urne-Buriall, indisputably showing the hand of Browne, were excised by Borges from his more nearly complete version of 1944. Borges can be acquitted of fleshing out his translation with a modern paragraph of his own devising, but he did slim down the text for a modern audience, deleting a dated sentence here or several phrases there. After all, this was no longer the promised Latinate seventeenth-century Spanish he had begun decades earlier, but one prepared for a contemporary twentiethcentury Spanish-speaking audience, with a few cuts. Instead of padding Browne’s text with his own interpolation, Borges pruned the original. Although he faithfully annotated and glossed Browne, occasionally with reference to his beloved Quevedo, in his other editorial functions he did not resist the temptation to retouch and edit Browne’s text for a modern readership, as if the text were his own: Jorge Luis Borges, author of UrneBuriall, following the model of his ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’.49 Later in life Borges would take similar liberties following the English translation of his own work, occasionally changing his previously published Spanish in subsequent editions, most notably when, after discussion with his English translator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, he accepted suggested improvements for the original. Thus di Giovanni not only translated into English but occasionally rewrote the original Spanish, in this case with the author’s blessing. In the same spirit, no doubt, Borges tidied up Browne’s work long after its first appearance. In this way, too, the translator Borges assimilated himself to his author, even more than Menard to his revered Cervantes. When Murison in 1922 reprinted in a note the additional paragraph signaled by Wilkin, he included only the first third, the segment studied and translated above.50 When Borges addressed it, he incorporated in his 49 It is Borges who maintains in a footnote to ‘Tlo¨n’ that ‘All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare’ (Borges (1962), 27). 50 W. Murison (ed.), Hydriotaphia (Cambridge, 1922, 1937), 129, citing Wilkin, iii. 45.

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translation two-thirds of the complete passage from Keynes. Borges was surely a better translator than most, if not always a neutral editor. His editorial decision—to interpolate an expanded segment of the errant passage precisely where Wilkin and Keynes recommended—is in itself his most powerful translational act; and the very act of reading implies translation for Borges, at least in the sense of Menard’s recontextualization. Indeed, according to Borges, ‘nothing is as consubstantial with literature and its modest mystery [including its genesis and hermeneutics, for example] as the questions raised by a translation’.51 Browne spoke warmly of Platonic and Ciceronian bonds of friendship among men. He and Borges share an antiquarian, universalist, bookish spirit, so that the Borgesian and the Brownean could have been ‘overlapping circles with a partially common circumference but no single center’.52 Esteem between them might well have been mutual. Despite the apparent anachronism, it is not difficult to imagine a reciprocated friendship across three centuries for Borges on the part of Browne, who said he could love even the viper and the toad. What is certain is that the two writers’ intellectual closeness, like that of Cervantes and Menard brought to life, has been sufficient to unbalance the scholarship on both figures, prompting some readers of Browne and Borges to conflate and commingle author and translator. 51 ‘Las versiones home´ricas’ (1932), cited by Emir Rodrı´guez Monegal and Alastair Reid (eds.), Borges: A Reader (New York, 1981), p. xi. 52 For Alanus, Rabelais, Pascal, and others on Sphaera cuius centrum est ubique, circumferentia nusquam see Frank Livingstone Huntley, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and the Metaphor of the Circle’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 14 (1953), 362; and David Newton-de Molina, ‘A Note on Sir Thomas Browne and Jorge Luis Borges’, Antigonish Review, 22 (1971), 33–40.

16 Thinking with Thomas Browne: Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian Peter N. Miller

Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc liked chameleons. He received a male and female from Tunis on 18 October 1633. His letters of October and November are full of accounts of the chameleons in action. But the really interesting ones come after their deaths (the male on 31 October, the female on 10 November). For in two momentous letters to the great erudites Claude Saumaise in Leiden (14 November) and Gabriel Naude´ in Rome (1 December), he described what the insides of the chameleon looked like after it had been cut open. In these descriptions autopsia-as-first-hand-examination takes on its modern meaning of autopsy-as-dissection. We’ve found there amazing marvels in the eyes, four cartilaginous attachments in which are inserted so many double nerves that the animal could turn its eye in a circle, which the Ancients had such a hard time having us understand by their descriptions. But there was nothing more strange than the tongue, which I have seen many times darted out for catching flying gnats around more than 3 or 4 fingers’ lengths from their mouths, which was nothing compared to what we find there in the dissection. Because we found, when pulling out the tongue—without any force at all—that it was more than a whole foot in length, and that the animal

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could use it for catching, as if on a line, gnats or other insects without descending from the branches on which it likes to perch, having there a kind of bone at the root of the tongue of three fingers in length at the tip of which hangs a tube or nerve almost a foot long, which abuts a little bit of flesh, at the tip of which there is a point which is retracted for seizing the gnats or worms almost in the same way as the elephant with its trunk—which no author that I know of, neither ancient nor modern, had ever observed.1

In Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) all this rates about half a sentence: ‘But Bellonius hath beene more satisfactorily experimental, not onely affirming they feede on Flyes, Caterpillers, Beetles, and other insects, but upon exenteration he found these animals in their bellies: whereto we might also add the experimental decisions of the worthy Peireschius and learned Emanuel Vizzanius, in that Chameleon which had been often observed to drink water, and delight to feed on Meal-worms’ (PE 3.21.242). Browne excuses himself for not yet having made the dissection himself. We might take it for granted, or we might smile at its naı¨vete´, but Peiresc and Browne and their colleagues believed that scholarship was a necessary part of the pursuit of truth. Peiresc was a keen experimentalist, as well as archaeologist, and was committed to the ideal of an inter-generational scholarly project. Indeed, it was this hope for an ongoing advancement of learning that often salved the frustration of working with other less forwardlooking scholars. But at the heart of the notion of the advancement of learning, back to Bacon and back beyond him to Biondo, was the idea that there was something actually being gained, as if salvaged from a giant shipwreck. Browne may affect some skepticism about this, but he absorbs the ‘research’ language common to this type of scholarship. Indeed, when Arnaldo Momigliano talked about the contribution of the antiquaries to the ethics of scholarship, he singled out both the dispassionate sifting of evidence and the passionate pursuit of truth that he saw in someone like Jean Mabillon.2 In later years, as 1 Peiresc to Naude´, 1 December 1633, Carpentras, Bibliothe`que Inguimbertine, MS. 1875 f.4, quoted in Agne`s Bresson, ‘Un Zoologiste en queˆte de nouveaux savoirs’, Les Fiorettti du Quadricentenaire de Fabri de Peiresc, ed. Jacques Ferrier (Avignon, 1981). Peiresc was so charmed by chameleons that he asked his man in Tunis for more, and duly received them in December 1635. Of the three that were sent, however, only one arrived. Its life story is narrated in a letter to Pierre Gassendi of 23 November 1635 and was then incorporated by Gassendi in 1649 into his Syntagma Philosophiæ (Vol. 1, Sec. 1 (in the section ‘Physica’), Bk. vi, Ch. 4, 450). 2 Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’ (1950), in Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome, 1955), 102.

Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian / 313 Momigliano himself traced some of the long-term impact of antiquarianism, he recurred to the importance of truth at several key junctures.3 It’s easier for historians of scholarship to study practices—and Momigliano bids fair to be the inspiration for this approach—but motives may be just as important, if a more elusive, quarry. If Browne has the look and smell of the antiquarian it is because, like many of the best of them, he had trained as a medical doctor at Montpellier, Padua, and Leiden.4 His written work shows a deep familiarity with the erudite literature of his age and the previous one. In Urne-Buriall he engages with one of the canonical subjects of the seventeenth-century antiquary, the funerary remain. And, like many antiquaries of his day, these investigations serve also as the starting-point for reflecting on how to live—antiquarianism as a philosophical exercise.5 But is Browne an antiquary?6 If for someone like Peiresc, antiquarianism was a form of historical inquiry, for others, like Browne, it might have been an idiom, a language in which he could get at being ‘philosophical’. Probably closer to Browne than Peiresc would be someone like the Silesian poet Martin Opitz. He, too, was a learned man, and also studied at Leiden, with Heinsius. But he was first and foremost a poet. His personal interest was in extracting the poetic truth, or moral message, or natural lesson, from the archaeological reality, as in his great poem Zlatna, a vision of the Roman past in Transylvania as a lieu de memoire.7 Browne goes even further in this direction. Opitz still thought in terms of a great antiquarian reconstructive summa as the end-point of his reflections, the Dacia Antiqua. Browne seems instead to make melancholy, and thus the inevitable impossibility of reconstruction, the outcome of his antiquarianizing. And, indeed, anyone who has read Urne-Buriall would emerge with the 3 For the general story see Miller, ‘Introduction: Momigliano, Antiquarianism and Cultural History’, in Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter N. Miller (Toronto, 2007), 3–65. 4 On this relationship between history and medicine see Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi (eds.), Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005); and Momigliano, ‘History Between Medicine and Rhetoric’, Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome, 1987), 13–25. 5 For a general presentation of this idea see Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven and London, 2000). 6 For another discussion of this question, see Parry’s essay in this volume. 7 For Opitz see Miller (2000), 138–41.

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impression that Browne does not really think it possible to understand the past. For learning itself drives home the cold futility of the learned life: ‘To be read by bare Inscriptions like many in Gruter’—referring to the masterwork of Opitz’s teacher Janus Gruter—‘to hope for Eternity by Ænigmaticall Epithetes, or first letters of our names [as in inscriptions], to be studied by Antiquaries, who we were, and have new Names given us like many of the Mummies, are cold consolations unto the Students of perpetuity’ (UB 5.166).8 Browne, then, helps us discern better the distinct morphology of antiquarianism in early modern Europe, and some of the ways in which this fascination with the broken remains of the past was mobilized for cultural action.

I The story of the very complex afterlife of the antiquarian in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both as a social type and as a scholar, is still incompletely known.9 Its outlines are familiar enough: antiquaries were easily identified with the Ancients and therefore could be painted as enemies of the Moderns—whether as pedants, erudite bats, or stuffed shirts—in the battles of the eighteenth century. Jean Seznec’s lovely book of essays on Diderot and antiquity is a classic presentation of this tale.10 But there is also a nineteenth- and twentieth-century chapter in the history of the afterlife of the antiquarian. ‘Professional’ history, as it emerged in Germany, continued the work of the philosophes in discrediting the antiquaries. As history gained for itself a curriculum with the foundation of the Historical Institute at Go¨ttingen in 1766, it became much easier to see why antiquarians and historians were two different species of beast. Indeed, we find lots of expressly ‘historisch–antiquarisch’ investigation in the nineteenth century, but not in universities and not by habilitated professors. It fell now into the province of the semi-popular Historical Associations. And where there was 8 For Opitz see Miller (2000), 148–9. 9 Parts of it are told in Miller (2000), ‘Conclusion’; Miller (2007), ch.1; and François Louis and Peter N. Miller, The Age of Antiquaries in Europe and China, 1500–1700 (New Haven, forthcoming). 10 Jean Seznec, Essais sur Diderot et l’antiquite´ (Oxford, 1957). See more recently A. D. Nuttall, Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination (New Haven and London, 2003).

Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian / 315 direct comment on this kind of historical scholarship by professional historians, such as Ranke or Droysen, it was uniformly negative. Even the great Jacob Burckhardt, because he was an art historian and because he lectured to the general public and did not publish much—and not of the sort that academics had already come to expect from academics—was called a dilettante.11 (Though even he kept his distance from these latter-day antiquarians.) And yet, if we look closely, we do not find antiquaries disappearing. Instead, like water that always finds its level, this ‘longing’ for the past— Nietzsche actually uses the word Sehnsucht—issues forth in other ways, in other places, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The occlusion from sight of the early modern antiquary has meant that this later history of related but transformed antiquarianism has similarly been invisible. What we need to try and understand is how the antiquary’s intensive engagement with the broken ruins of the past could be the basis of so profound and so fundamental a feeling. Browne’s antiquarianizing style points us in this direction, and helps us to recognize what we might call the metaphysics of reconstruction.

II But to contribute a chapter to the ‘reception history’ of Browne and at the same time to that of the afterlife of the antiquarian I would like to turn, in what follows, to the end of this tradition. (It is, of course, the end only because it is happening now; the afterlife of the antiquarian will continue for as long as there is antiquity.) The contemporary German-English writer W. G. Sebald (1944–2001) presents us with the antiquarian in action and in spirit but now firmly located in the domain of imaginative literature. In ‘A Little Excursion to Ajaccio’ (1996), the torso of a never-completed project on Corsica, Sebald announces his theme as ‘trying to imagine what it would be like to live in one of these stone citadels, occupied to my life’s end solely with the study of time past and time passing’.12 It is difficult here not to 11 This is discussed in my Cultural History Before Burckhardt: Foundations of Material Culture (forthcoming). 12 W. G. Sebald, ‘A Little Excursion to Ajaccio’, Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell (New York, 2003; repr. 2005), 3.

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catch an echo of the unforgettable opening lines of Eliot’s Four Quartets. But perhaps we are meant to hear still more, even to Eliot’s own ‘antiquarian’ reflection on life: Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.13

These words are not just a fitting epitaph to Sebald’s œuvre, but actually a guide to his works. If we keep them in mind as we read through Sebald’s stories we will find ourselves as if in the presence of a person reflecting on these lines. Sebald’s narrators, or individual characters—none so very different from the author himself—are possessed by the need to repair some breach, close some circle, fill some gap in their lives. The worlds of Sebald’s characters, and of ‘Sebald’ himself, are strange, and their patterns complicated, intertwined with each other and with other equally complex lives, and each in turn is woven into a gigantic inter-generational tapestry. In the tales of The Emigrants, for example, lives break like pots and, like pots, can be restored more or less well. Sebald-the-novelist focuses on the fissures and the attempts at restoration. The stories here are all about people whose lives have broken somewhere, and about Sebald’s attempts to discover the breaks—which are at one and the same time ‘connections’ to other narratives. In an essay published in November 2001, Sebald gave an account of ‘my method of procedure’. He identified this as ‘adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life. . . . I have kept asking myself since then what the invisible connections that determine our lives are, and how the threads run’.14 The assumption that the threads do hold together is a version of the antiquaries’ confidence in wholeness, perhaps even a vestigial kind of sacred history. This same ‘early modern’ near-religious sense of obligation to 13 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York, 1963), 189. 14 ‘An Attempt at Restitution’, in Campo Santo, 200.

Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian / 317 reconstruct is clearly at work in Sebald’s case, too, though now motivated less by a particular religion than by his being born German just after 1939. Yes, his family was touched by the war: the father spent the years 1940–5 on the Eastern and Western Fronts and the family itself relocated to the house of his maternal grandparents in an out-of-the-way corner of south-western Bavaria.15 He was, therefore, of that generation of Germans whose comingof-age coincided with the awakened realization that their parents had kept too silent about too many things that were too much in need of discussion. Nor was Sebald’s immediate response—emigration—uncommon, nor even his long-term response—literature. But central to this felt need to narrate what was absent, a need which fills Sebald’s stories in larger or smaller measure, is the fate of Europe’s, and especially Germany’s, Jews. Without at all being a ‘Holocaust writer’, Sebald is one of the most powerful voices of the absence created by the destruction of Europe’s Jews. In the fortress-turned-Nazi-prison of Breendonk, outside Mechelen in Belgium, the unnamed narrator is moved to reflect on the natural limits of memory. ‘The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on’.16 Since this is the natural case, and generates the daily challenge facing someone wishing— or needing—to reconstruct the past, then those who willingly abet or accelerate memory’s loss are not merely bystanders, but also culpable. In the last of the four tales of The Emigrants, Sebald finds himself in the old, abandoned Jewish cemetery at Kissingen. After a few days there, and in a nearby town which, we are told, ‘retained not the slightest trace of its former character’, Sebald says he had to leave. ‘I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and my nerves’.17 For the reconstructor, or for the antiquary ‘in action’, the active resistance to reconstruction—what Sebald terms ‘memory’—is, then, not just culpable but sickening. Sebald’s investigation of resistance to reconstruction cannot avoid questions of culpability, however. Nor are these limited solely to the Germans’ 15 For further biographical discussion see Mark W. Anderson, ‘Fathers and Son: W. G. Sebald’, Bookforum, (December/January 2007), 28–31. Anderson is writing a biography of Sebald. 16 Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York, 2001), 24. 17 The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London, 1992; repr. 1996), 225.

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reluctance to confront their crimes against the Jews. Indeed, the strength and scope of Sebald’s critique of what we might call the non-antiquarian nature of modern German society—and is this perhaps to be taken as a stalking-horse for all modern, commercial societies?—are actually made clear in his stirring Luftkrieg und Literatur, translated as The Natural History of Destruction, which is actually an extended critique of this particular German failing. For were Sebald merely documenting the German resistance to taking responsibility for the Holocaust, it might be easier to see this as an unwillingness to confront culpability. But once Sebald demonstrates the German unwillingness to confront, and reconstruct, the historical reality of the destruction of Germans and German cities by Allied air attack, then the pathological character of resistance to reconstruction is unmistakably clear. Destruction, whether on the individual or communal level, called for its own kind of literary response. Sebald does not discuss works such as The Black Book of Russian Jewry, compiled by Ilya Ehrenberg and Vassily Grossman in 1946 but not fully printed until 1993, or the various Yizker-bikher (memorial books) produced in the decades after 1945. These are disparate compilations of memory that make no attempt at the literary; Sebald, by contrast, gives art to their idea. But he does discuss Erwin Lichtenstein’s account of the destruction of Danzig’s Jews, which Grass later incorporated into his Diary of a Snail. ‘Only the dimension of concrete remembrance’, Sebald writes, ‘lends substance to the central story of the school master nicknamed ‘‘Doubt’’, and on another level substance to the reflections on melancholy.’18 We will come to melancholy in a moment. But for now, let us remain attentive to the central role of truth, and its pursuit, and the literary style appropriate to it, within Sebald’s mature œuvre. For in this same essay on Grass he worries aloud ‘whether the dominance of fiction over what really happened does not tend to militate against the recording of the truth and the attempt to commemorate it’.19 As if this link between truth and commemoration were not clear enough, he elsewhere explains that ‘The ideal of truth contained in the form of an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreversible foundation of all literary effort’.20 We ought, then, to read The Natural History of Destruction by this light, as his attempt to be as truth-telling and ‘unpretentious’ (unliterary?) as possible. 18 W. G. Sebald, ‘Constructs of Mourning: Gı¨nter Grass and Wolfgang Hildesheimer’, in Campo Santo, 106. 19 Campo Santo, 111. 20 W. G. Sebald, ‘Between History and Natural History: On the Literary Description of Total Destruction’, in Campo Santo, 82.

Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian / 319 Sebald’s various and many commentators have gravitated to the unusualness of his voice. But they have not connected it to his explicit commitment to truth. Nor have they linked this in substance with the project of reconstruction and its antiquarian foundation in description.21 But from this commitment to the pursuit of truth follows Sebald’s often-remarked-upon precision of detail and incorporation of evidence into the narrative. Sontag came the closest to grasping Sebald’s core: ‘what keeps this writing always fresh, never merely rhetorical, is the saturated naming and visualizing in words; that, and the ever-surprising device of pictorial illustration’.22 Let us turn, now, to this incorporation of the machinery of evidence into his narrative—to his putting footnotes into the text, so to speak—except that in this case the evidence is visual. Perhaps the first clue to understanding the meaning of his photographs is that they are redundant. Sebald’s argument does not necessitate images, and his language is so precise—often much more precise than the low quality of the photographic reproductions—as to render their function superfluous or at best supplementary to verbal ekphrasis. Thus the insertion of the images into the text has the effect of calling attention not to their content but to the act of inserting them into the text in the first place. Now why might Sebald have done this? Martin Swales has observed that in Sebald ‘the appeal to factual, historical—as one might put it, archaeological—accuracy coexists with an intensely, poetically atmospheric recreation of the interplay of past and present’.23 Now, as it happens, the representation of evidence inside the body of the text was one of the revolutionary aspects of early antiquarian scholarship, whether in numismatics or epigraphy. One of the most striking examples of archaeological illustration is offered by a book that is antiquarian in imagination only, Francesco Colonna’s erotic archaeological novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). The implications of its remarkable illustrations have been studied in a half-century old but still-ravishing article entitled, with absolute clarity, ‘Archaeology and Romance in the Italian Renaissance’.24 21 See Miller, ‘Description Terminable and Interminable’, in Pomata and Siraisi, 355–97. 22 Susan Sontag, ‘A Mind in Mourning’, TLS, 25 February 2000, 3–4. Also noted in Martin Swales, ‘Intertextuality, Authenticity, Metonymy: On Reading W. G. Sebald’, Anatomist of Melancholy, ed. Ru¨diger Go¨rner (Munich, 2003), 82. 23 Swales, 83. 24 William Mitchell, ‘Archaeology and Romance in Renaissance Italy’, Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F. Jacob (London, 1960) 455–83.

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The Hypnerotomachia’s images are as one imagines documentary material to be, but documenting such sorts of things as could never be. Sebald’s images are like this, too, but with one twist: they are unimaginable because so blindingly quotidian, if not plain banal, whether of indistinct industrial landscapes, a demented Chinese quail pacing in its enclosure, advertising hoardings, the facades of Terezıń, pages from newspapers, interior spaces of no especial quality, the admissions ticket for a museum of veterinary medicine out in the banlieus of Paris, or a diary whose contents he deciphers and transcribes in print. These give his text a documentary—sometimes a near-epigraphic—quality but also a phantasmagorical one. The use of photography-as-evidence from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards was connected to a sense of its precision. Archaeologists, who were among the first to realize its potential, could argue, as did the archaeologist and photographer John Henry Parker, that ‘the modern science of Archaeology is the oppposite of the local school of Antiquarians’.25 But to Parker’s, and contemporaries such as Thomas Ashby’s, use of ‘photography as record’ and ‘photography as notes’ we need to add also that archaeological photographs supply ‘ambience’, whether intentionally or not. This brings us to other generic aspects of photography, then and now: the picturesque and the travelogue.26 And the picturesque now, as then, trails off into the melancholic with the addition of a time signature. That is why looking today at Parker’s photos, or those of any early photographer, can be a dizzying experience. Because of the inexorability of ambience the hoped-for precision seems, with time’s passage, to have turned the images from document to dream. As in Sebald one sometimes wonders what exactly the subject of the photograph actually was. The ordinariness of the nineteenth-century background seems more and more an artifact of a distant time—almost as far from our lives as the ancient ruins being foregrounded. As in Sebald, then, photographs that might once have had significance now take on a striking banality, are become mysterious and elusive altogether. In them the familiar has become de-familiarized. And yet it is also clear that Sebald stays on this side of the tendency to montage and collage that such a photographic style often devolves into. For Sebald the 25 Italienische Fotografien aus der Sammlung John Henry Parker 1806–1884, ed. Christine Ku¨hn with Annetta Alexandris (Berlin, 2000), 87. 26 Michael Shanks, ‘Photography and Archaeology’, in The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, ed. Brian Leigh Molyneaux (London, 1997), 76.

Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian / 321 illustrative function remains central, and with it the commensurate dependence of image upon text. Sebald remains, as it were, on the side of the antiquarian; Benjamin, to choose an important example, does so as well. Aby Warburg, however, in his final, unfinished (because unfinishable?) Mnemosyne Atlas liberated the image from the word, and so pointed towards a different approach to the Nachleben der Antiquar. Photographs, of course, also take us someplace else. One of the reasons why the frame of travel seems to have been so appealing to Sebald (Vertigo, Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants) is that the travelogue remains today one of the few genres where digression and mingling of surfaces and subjectivity are acceptable. In the great age of the antiquaries travel played a crucial and, some would say, even decisive role in shaping the skeptical, cosmopolitan culture of Western Europe.27 No reader of François La Mothe le Vayer (1585– 1672) goes away without thinking that travel’s expanded horizons were intended as a solvent of old-fashioned obscurantism. ‘Sebald’ is himself always on the move; or rather, perhaps, is unable to stay home. As a result of this professional deformation, Sebald the author can take advantage of a genre perfectly suited to his own style.28 In this we can catch more than a resemblance to Jacques Austerlitz, the central figure of Sebald’s eponymous masterpiece. Austerlitz travels through time, but he also travels through space. Indeed, he is constantly on the move. He meets the unnamed narrator off and on in different places. In London, where he owns a house, he wanders continually, often at night, from one end of the city to the other. One is reminded here of Socrates’ statement, quoted by Montaigne, that travel would be no cure so long as one had oneself as a companion. The therapy, in other words, had to come first. Perhaps a sense of Sebald’s radical use of evidence in transforming fiction into some new kind of para-historical genre can be grasped by turning, briefly, to a work of pure history that reaches towards images and spatial realities from its own standpoint. This is Karl Schlo¨gel’s stunning Im Raume lesen Wir die Zeit (2003).29 Focusing on maps and the spatial imagination, 27 On this see the seminal essays of Joan-Pau Rubie´s, ‘New Worlds and Renaissance Ethnology’, History and Anthropology, 6 (1993) 157–97; and ‘Instructions for Travellers: Teaching the Eye to See’, History and Anthropology, 9 (1996), 139–90, both now reprinted in Rubie´s, Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology (Aldershot and Burlington, 2007). 28 The essays of John Beck, Massimo Leone, and John Zilcosky, in W.G. Sebald—A Critical Companion, ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead (Edinburgh, 2004) all deal with this theme. 29 Karl Schlo¨gel, Im Raume lesen Wir die Zeit. U¨ber Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich and Vienna, 2003), esp. the sections ‘Kartenlesen’ and ‘Augenarbeit’.

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Schlo¨gel ranges from representations of the Kovno Ghetto in diaries of the destroyed, to Benjamin’s route to the Bibliothe`que Nationale, to the world as represented in Marlene Dietrich’s address book, to Jefferson’s map of the United States c.1783, pre-Second World War German atlases, a profile of Sańdor Rado´, the famous mapmaker and spy ‘Dora’ (who warned an unbelieving Stalin of the imminent launch of Operation Barbarossa), the shape of pavements in Berlin, domestic interiors, train timetables for Eastern Europe—and all of these with photographic evidence. Where Schlo¨gel’s work generates so much of its power is in its ability to start from a focus on the banal and ordinary and end with a complex vision of the European past and global future. If we had to draw one sure contrast between Schlo¨gel’s kaleidoscopic view of the material world and Sebald’s, it would be that the former, like a scholar, tries to take the strange and make it intelligible, whereas somewhere near the heart of Sebald’s is, instead, the making strange of the familiar. Another genre that allows for constant digression and endless detail is, of course, biography—what Austerlitz masquerades as, but which is found throughout Sebald’s œuvre. Indeed, one could take the tale of ‘Max Ferber’, the last of the Emigrants, with its embedded memoir of his deported mother, Luisa Lanzberg, as the model for Austerlitz—the child sent away to England by parents doomed to die, who lives uprooted and rootless seeking a past never to be restored. The very unpredictability of human lives, and how individual stories cut across others, intertwine with them, and sometimes change beyond recognition, is a constant echo in Sebald’s work. Austerlitz gives us the life of Jacques Austerlitz, Kinder-transport-ed from Prague, raised in Wales, but resettled nowhere. This tale, in which melancholy pervades every page, is a quest for reconstruction, but in the most murky of terrains—an individual’s own earliest memories. Jacques Austerlitz’s search for himself, after so many years, down so many darkened alleys, is the ne plus ultra of Sebald’s project of truth-seeking because it is one long set-piece on reconstruction: on the reconstruction of memory through the reconstruction of the spaces in which the remembered events took place. What one studied as ‘architectural history’ one relives, therapeutically, as antiquarian reconstruction. And, indeed, how could the protagonist of Austerlitz, therefore, have been anyone other than an art historian trained in the manner of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes in London (Sebald doesn’t say which)? His lifelong and

Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian / 323 uncompleteable scholarly project was a total history of architecture in the age of bourgeois capitalism. The intertwining of this with his equally incomplete personal history describes the book’s gathering storm. When we first meet him, Austerlitz is talking about the railway station in Antwerp. At London Liverpool Street Station the carapace of his memory first cracks open. At the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris he contemplates the route of his father’s flight from the Nazis in 1940. At Wilsonova Station in Prague he re-experiences his 4-year-old self ’s departure. In each of these places, it is intensive examination of shape and light and patterns—the superficial work of the art historian—that opens blocked doors into the self. Yet only when he contemplates the bleak view from Prague’s Holesˇovice Station on his way to Terezıń, in the footsteps of his newly discovered mother, do we finally grasp the subterranean source of the mysterious hold railways have over him. Austerlitz’s field of study, the architecture of nineteenth-century capitalism in its widest sense, ought to remind us of Walter Benjamin’s PassagenWerk, originally called by him ‘Paris, Capital of the XIXth Century’. Indeed, Austerlitz himself tells us that when he was in Paris in 1959 reading in the Bibliothe`que Nationale, he studied ‘the six-volume work pointing me the way in my own research, on Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitie´ du XIXe`me sie`cle by Maxime du Camp—one of Benjamin’s own, key, sources.30 Now, Benjamin famously wrote his book in this same Bibliothe`que Nationale that Sebald celebrates with photographs and, even, with a cameo scene occurring in the downstairs catalogue room where Benjamin was himself photographed working in 1937. Benjamin’s theory of the ruin, put forward in his failed Habilitationschrift of 1925, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, reappears here in Austerlitz’s description of the Palace of Justice in Brussels: ‘somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins’.31 And when Austerlitz buries his nolonger-precious life’s work explaining everything about the nineteenth century in the compost heap at the back of the garden, this at least faintly echoes Benjamin’s briefcase, lost or stolen in Port Bou, and containing or not 30 Austerlitz, 287. 31 Ibid., 19. For Benjamin’s notion of ‘ruin’ see the classic article by Charles Rosen, ‘The Ruins of Walter Benjamin’, reprinted in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA,1988), 129–75.

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containing his own great masterwork on the nineteenth century. Born under Saturn, as Susan Sontag so precisely described him, excluded from the Warburg circle in Hamburg by Panofsky despite Warburg’s own initial interest (he had himself instructed Saxl to buy the book on German tragic drama), and destroyed by the rise of Nazism in a different way from Austerlitz, Benjamin presents us with one of the most comprehensive examples of the antiquarian mode in the twentieth century.32 And while the rather narrow question of Benjamin’s importance for Sebald is not ours, others have pointed out that a large poster of Benjamin on the wall adjacent to Sebald’s university office was likely not there by chance.33 Austerlitz’s attempt to recapture, and thus relive, his life leads him into more explicit reflections on time present and time past than in Sebald’s other works. Thinking about the XIIIe arrondissement in Paris, where he believed his father to have lived after fleeing Prague, Austerlitz comments that fifty years later he still half expected to see his father materialize. ‘Such ideas infallibly come to me in places which have more of the past about them than the present. For instance, if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.’34 Benjamin had explicitly described Paris as a better home for the flaneur because it had less history, and thus exerted less distracting pull of place. But in this explicit reference, Sebald gives us an Austerlitz for whom Paris was as full of history as Rome, and thus implicitly criticizes the limits of Benjamin’s sense of what constituted history. It is as if we are being reminded here, again and always, that history is always personal. Austerlitz goes on, invoking yet another icon of modern antiquarianism: ‘It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last.’ This is Freud’s extraordinary image of the human mind as a magical archaeological site in which all strata of building 32 On Benjamin as a kind of antiquary see Miller, ‘Momigliano, Benjamin and Antiquarianism After the Crisis of Historicism’, in Miller (2007), 334–78. 33 Jo Catling, ‘Gratwanderungen bis an den Rand der Natur: W. G. Sebald’s Landscapes of Memory’, in Go¨rner (2003), 23. Another commentator has gone so far—too far, I think—in suggesting Sebald as ‘the reincarnation of Walter Benjamin’ (Massimo Leone, ‘Textual Wanderings: A Vertiginous Reading of W. G. Sebald’ (Long and Whitehead), 91). 34 Austerlitz, 257–8.

Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian / 325 are simultaneously present and accessible. Austerlitz wonders if we have commitments to the past, ‘in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak.’35 And when, a few pages later, in the new Bibliothe`que Nationale, where he had gone fruitlessly seeking information about his father, Austerlitz is informed that on the very spot where he was standing—the library obliterated the warehouses that had been there—the Germans brought the belongings of Paris’s Jews before they distributed them as war booty, the many layers of that Rome of the mind are brought together: physical space, memory, and history.

III These genres of travel writing and biography are among the last surviving heirs of what we might call the early modern antiquarian style. As Momigliano pointed out in his study of ancient Greek biography, what biography and antiquariaism had in common was their reliance on a pre-existing framework, or skeleton, on which details could be hung: in the case of the former the existence of such-and-such a person; and in the latter the existence of an Ancient World. Both relieved the researcher of the burden of narrative construction or of a principle of discrimination. It was precisely the prior existence of an easily discernible framework that allowed the antiquarian and the biographer to engage in a comprehensive reconstructive fantasy—that they could amass enough material to recreate past life adequately, whether of a city or a person. This tendency was described, already in the seventeenth century, with some discomfort and perhaps disdain, too, as ‘micro-history’ (micrologion). As the writing of history became more focused on arguments and more attentive to narrative requirements and audience, these micrologia looked more and more like digressions rather than significant details. The most micrological of Sebald’s works is The Rings of Saturn (1995; trans. 1998) originally subtitled ‘An English Journey’ (Eine englische Wallfahrt). It 35 Austerlitz, 257–8.

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begins and ends with Thomas Browne. Along the way, wandering through Browne’s East Anglian countryside, it thinks with Browne about the nature of human life. Only now, rather than the funereal urn as Denkmal, or thing to think with, it is monuments of twentieth-century devastation, such as the concentration camp of Jasenovac on the Sava, obsolete industrial wastelands, the feelings of a caught herring, abandoned coastal stations, the hurricane of October 1987, or the history of sericulture in the West. If the voice is detailed, the tone is melancholic. In that overgrown and abandoned cemetery of Ajaccio, in his Corsican essays, while looking out to sea, Sebald has another of those moments where Browne meets Opitz, UrneBuriall meets Zlatna, and the future the past: But here and there among the thin flower stems, the blades and ears of grass in the graveyard of Piana, a departed soul looked out from one of those oval sepia portraits set in thin gilded frames which until the sixties used to be placed on graves in the Mediterranean countries: a blond hussar in his high-collared uniform tunic; a girl who died on her nineteenth birthday, her face almost extinguished by the sun and the rain; a short-necked man with his tie in a large knot, who had been a colonial civil servant in Oran until 1958; a little solider, forage cap tilted sideways on his head, who came home badly wounded from the futile defense of the jungle fortress of Dien Bien Pho.36

Et in Arcadia ego, Sebald seems to be saying here: the twentieth-century German in the Mediterranean.37 The already dead, the newly dead, and the soon-to-be-dead loom over each of Sebald’s pages. Sebald may have begun with his discovery of the German desire to remember no longer, but he ends with the even larger species-wide rejection of the burden of remembering. For Sebald this was concentrated, as ever, in death, and the unwillingness to honor the dead. ‘We can no longer speak of everlasting memory and the veneration of our forebears’, Sebald writes. ‘On the contrary: the dead must now be cleared out of the way as quickly and comprehensively as possible’.38 If Alain Schnapp’s brief survey of the origins of antiquarian research in the age-old—nearly primeval—desire to achieve some kind of victory over mortality in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and Greece is right, then what Sebald is raising is the prospect of the end of antiquarianism with the end of reverence for the dead.39 36 Campo Santo, 18–19. 37 He refers explicitly to Poussin on p. 26. 38 Campo Santo, 31. 39 Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past (1994) (trans., London, 1996), Introduction and ch. 1.

Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian / 327 Browne, in dedicating Urne-Buriall, proclaims that ‘to preserve the living, and make the dead to live, to keep men out of their Urnes, and discourse of humane fragments in them, is not impertinent unto our profession; whose study is life and death, who daily behold examples of mortality, and of all men least need artificial memento’s, or coffins by our bed side, to minde us of our graves’ (UB Preface, 132). Sebald ends The Rings of Saturn with a discussion of Browne’s Musæum Clausum, a catalogue of rare—actually, non-existent– books, pictures, and antiquities. He gestures at the collections of Aldrovandi and Rudolf II and Ole Worm. Browne, by professional deformation, might not have needed to collect as a philosophical exercise. But perhaps Sebald— whose profession after all could also be said ‘to preserve the living, and make the dead to live, to keep men out of their Urnes, and discourse of humane fragments in them . . . whose study is life and death, who daily behold examples of mortality’—perhaps Sebald did. For the idea of a ‘Musæum Clausum’, or ‘Inaccessible Museum,’ lies close to the heart of Sebald’s practice. Thus, at the very end of Austerlitz, the narrator tells how the Anglo-Jewish writer Dan Jacobsen, described as a colleague of Austerlitz’s, had inherited from his grandfather, Heshel, ‘a pocket calendar, his Russian identity papers, a worn spectacle case containing not only his glasses but a faded and already disintegrating piece of silk, and a studio photograph of Heshel in a black coat with a black velour top hat on his head’. The ‘Musæum Clausum’, in other words, may be a clutch of family heirlooms, or even treasured memories. With these items Jacobsen had tried to peer back into the past, but instead faced a ‘chasm into which no ray of light could penetrate’. Sebald does not even try to provide a photograph at this crucial juncture. Hegel, most profoundly, and others more accessibly, have made this point about the antiquarian venture. But does no light emerge from the black hole of the past? Austerlitz gains knowledge of his identity, finally, even if not perfect knowledge, and even if unable to undo the lifetime’s damage that this prior oblivion had inflicted upon him. In any event, he seems slightly better off at the novel’s end than at its beginning. Yes, it is true that often all we have to work with is the outsides of things—Hegel describes historical reconstruction as ‘an external activity—the wiping-off of some drops of rain or specks of dust from these fruits, so to speak’—though in the hands of

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master historians like the medievalists Chris Wickham and Michael McCormick, archaeology goes far towards bringing the ways of the past to life.40 But where Hegel was right, he was also wrong. And writers like Sebald represent the answer. If the antiquarian could not summon the lived past back to life from the inside, the writer, through an imagination as finely trained as an antiquarian’s but with the freedom of empathy, could, just barely. Sebald’s effort shows that it is, almost, possible to pull light out from darkness, to reach back in time to origins, and if not wholly and completely, then at least to convey partial meaning to future generations. The old Chasidic myth that culminates with the late-born rabbi not knowing where to intercede with God, and not knowing how to intercede with God, instead telling the story of past intercessions and achieving redemption through this story-telling, might be an apt legend for the modern antiquarian enterprise, as Sebald lived it. If there is one driving force linking the Peirescs and Brownes Mabillons of yore with the Sebalds of today and tomorrow, it is, as Momigliano noted long ago, the shared commitment to pursue truth. Sebald owned this himself in the first lines of ‘Dark Night Sallies Forth’: For it is hard to discover the winged vertebrates of prehistory embedded in tablets of slate. But if I see before me the nervature of past life in one image, I always think that this has something to do with truth.41 40 Michael McCormick, The Origins of the European Economy: Commerce and Communication, 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001); Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford, 2005). 41 After Nature, trans. Michael Hamburger (2002) (New York, 2002), 83. Though published posthumously in translation, it is worth noting that these poems were actually written in 1988, before the prose literature for which he became famous.

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Bibliography / 349 Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971). Thomas, Roy Digby, Digby: The Gunpowder Plotter’s Legacy (London, 2001). Todd, Richard, and Murphy, Kathryn (eds.), ‘A man very well studyed’: New Contexts for Thomas Browne (Leiden, forthcoming, 2008). Trevor-Roper, Hugh, From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (Chicago, 1992). Tyacke, Nicholas, ‘Arminianism and English Culture’, in Britain and the Netherlands: Church and State Since the Reformation, A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (eds.) (The Hague, 1981), 94–117. Tylor, Edward B., Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, 2 vols. (1874). Vickers, Brian (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984). Waddington, Raymond. ‘The Two Tables in Religio Medici’, in Patrides (ed.), Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays (London and Columbia, MO, 1982), 81–99. Waissbein, Daniel, ‘Borges: Admirador, traductor, expositor y parodista de Browne’, in Sobre errores vulgares o Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Madrid, 1994, 2005), 385–92. Wall, Cynthia, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 2006). Walters, Frank D., ‘A Strategy for Writing the Impossibilium: Aporia in Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus’, Prose Studies, 18 (1995), 19–35. Warnke, Frank J., ‘A Hook for Amphibium: Some Reflections on Fish’, in Patrides, (ed.), Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays (London and Columbia, MO, 1982), 49–59. Warren, Austin, ‘The Style of Sir Thomas Browne’, Kenyon Review, 13 (1951), 674–87. Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991). Wear, Andrew, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000). Webber, Joan, The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison, 1968). Webster, Charles, The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1974). —— The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (London, 1975). —— From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge, 1982; repr. Mineola, NY, 2005). West, William N., Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002). Westfall, Richard, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, 1958). Wickham, Chris, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford, 2005). Wilding, Michael, ‘Religio Medici in the English Revolution’, in Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1987), 89–113. Willey, Basil, The Seventeenth Century Background (New York, 1935). Williams, George Hunston, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962).

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—— ‘Erasmus and the Reformers on Non-Christian Religions and Salus Extra Ecclesiam’, in Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe, Theodore Rabb and Jerrold Seigel (eds.) (Princeton, 1969), 319–70. Williamson, George, The Senecan Amble: Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (Chicago, 1951; repr. 1966). Wilson, Edward O., Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York, 1998). Wilson, Philip K., Surgery, Skin and Syphilis: Daniel Turner’s London (1667–1741) (Amsterdam, 1999). Wise, James, Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Religio Medici’ and Two Seventeenth-Century Critics (Columbia, MO, 1973). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. Anscombe (eds.) (Cambridge, MA, 1956 (rev.ed.)). —— On Certainty (Oxford, 1969). —— Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’, trans. A. C. Miles and Rush Rhees (Doncaster, 1979). Wolf, Lucien, Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell (London, 1901). Woodall, James, Borges: A Life (New York, 1997). Woodman, Francis, ‘The Gothic Campaigns’, in Ian Atherton, Eric Fernie, Christopher Harper-Bill, and Hassel Smith (eds.), Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996 (London, 1996) 158–96. Woolf, Virginia., ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’, in The Common Reader (New York, 1925), 61–72. Yolton, John, ‘Locke and the Seventeenth-Century Logic of Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 16 (1955), 433–4. MANUSCRIPTS Browne, Edward, [Watercolour of parhelia] (Royal Society MS LB03). —— [Watercolours of parhelia] (British Library MS Add. 5233). Browne, Thomas, Religio Medici, Pembroke College, Oxford. —— , British Library (Lansdowne 489). —— ‘Addition to Pseudodoxia Epidemica [5.1]’, ‘Of Many Things Questionable as Commonly described in Pictures’ (British Library MS. Sloane 1827, ff. 16–17). —— [Repertorium], Norwich Public Record Office, MS 21270. —— Letters (British Library MSS Sloane 911, 1879, 1922, 5234). —— and Browne, Edward, ‘Hartus Siccus’ (Natural History Museum, London, Hartus Siccus 107, 108). Dering, William, ‘Church Notes’ (Society of Antiquaries of London, MS 497A). Nensius, Franciscus, [medical dissertation an smallpox] (St John’s College, Oxford MS HB 415.6.4.5).

Bibliography / 351 S[cottowe] N[athan], ‘A Cordiall return of thanks unto Dr Browne for the despaired of Cure of Mrs E.S aged 57. . . . Possessed by a strong Consumption’ (Bodleian Library MS. Rawlinson D.391). REFERENCE AND DATABASES Aldrovandi notebooks and drawings, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna ‘Digital Library’(www.filosofia.unibo.it/aldrovandi/pinakesweb/main.asp?language¼it). Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts [1450–1700], 2 vols. (London, 1980–93). Thomas Browne Website (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/). The Thomas Browne Seminar website, Birkbeck College, London (www.bbk.ac.uk/ english/tbs/). The Catholic Encyclopedia (www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/). The Hartlib Papers, 2nd electronic ed. (Ann Arbor, 1995). The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy (New York, 1991). Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C. T. Onions, et al. (Oxford, 1966). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (www.oxforddnb.com).

THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

The Editors Reid Barbour is Gillian T. Cell Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent work includes John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England (Toronto, 2005); Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2001); English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Massachusetts, 1998); and Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction (Delaware, 1993). He is working on an intellectual biography of Thomas Browne, and editing Lucy Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius for Oxford University Press. Claire Preston is Fellow and Senior Lecturer in English at Sidney Sussex College, and Lecturer in the Faculty of English, Cambridge University. Her recent book, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early-Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005), won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. Her other books include Bee (Reaktion, 2006); Edith Wharton’s Social Register (Macmillan, 2000); and editions of Browne and Wharton. In essays and articles she has written widely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, and on American literature of the Gilded Age. She is preparing a study of the literature of scientific enquiry in the ‘long’ seventeenth century. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a British Academy research award. The Contributors Brooke Conti is Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York at Brockport. She has published articles on Milton’s political tracts and John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Her current projects include a book-length study of the intersection of autobiography and religious anxiety in seventeenth-century prose, as well as a parallel-text edition of Religio Medici.

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Karen L. Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature in the School of English, Exeter University. Her interest in the relationship between the history of science and early modern literature has led to articles and chapters on Thomas Browne and Robert Boyle as well as John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Her first book, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in ‘Paradise Lost’, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1999. Her second book, Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary, is currently being published in a series of special issues of Milton Quarterly. By what seems an inevitable progression, she is now working on a study of early modern insults. Achsah Guibbory is Professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her publications include Ceremony and Community, Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (1998); and The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (ed.), as well as many essays on seventeenthcentury literature and cultural history. She is currently completing a book, Imagined Identities: The Uses of Judaism in Seventeenth-Century England, under contract with Oxford University Press. Kevin Killeen is Lecturer and Leverhulme post-doctoral fellow at the University of Leeds. He is co-editor of The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early-Modern Science (Palgrave, 2007), and author of a monograph, Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (Ashgate, 2008). He is currently working on a study of scriptural kings and prophets in seventeenth-century culture, entitled The Political Bible in Early Modern England. Peter N. Miller is Professor and Chair of Academic Programs at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. He has written extensively about seventeenthcentury culture and scholarship, antiquarianism in particular, and is the editor most recently of Momigliano and the Antiquaries: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences (Toronto, 2007). Kathryn Murphy was Snell Scholar at Ballior College, Oxford, from 2004 to 2007. She is currently Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and works on early modern prose. She is co-editor, with Richard Todd, of a volume of essays an Browne: ‘A man very well studyed’: New Contexts for Thomas Browne (Leiden, 2008). Brent Nelson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan at Saskatoon. His major work has been on John Donne’s sermons, including

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a monograph, Holy Ambition: Rhetoric, Courtship, and Devotion in the Sermons of John Donne (MRTS, 2005) and two essays relating the sermons to his Satyres (Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Re´forme, forthcoming) and his Devotions ( John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives, 2003). He has written articles on Roger Ascham, John Hoskyns, and ‘The Social Context of Rhetoric, 1500–1660’ for the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Bruccoli, Clark, Layman, 2001). His current research studies literary representations of collections of rarities and curiosities in England, 1580–1700. Graham Parry is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of York, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. His books on seventeenth-century subjects include The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court 1603–42 (Manchester, 1981); and The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995). His most recent work is on the religious arts of the early Stuart Church: Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican CounterReformation (Boydell and Brewer, 2006). Jonathan F. S. Post is Professor of English at UCLA. His works include Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton, 1982); Sir Thomas Browne (G. K. Hall, 1987); English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth-Century (Routledge, 1999; repr. 2002); George Herbert in the Nineties, ed. with Sidney Gottlieb (George Herbert Special Studies & Monographs, 1995); and Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric, (ed.) (California, 2002); and many essays on Renaissance and modern poetry. Roy Rosenstein is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at The American University of Paris. Since his first book, The Poetry of Cercamon and Jaufre Rudel (Garland, 1983, with George Wolf), he has lectured and published widely on the major Romance languages. His seventeenth-century studies include Etienne Durand: Poe´sies Comple`tes (Droz, 1990, with Hoyt Rogers), essays on Shakespeare, and articles in Neophilologus and Papers in French SeventeenthCentury Studies. Sharon Cadman Seelig is the Roe/Straut Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Smith College. In addition to numerous essays on seventeenth-century prose and poetry, she is the author of Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge, 2006); Generating Texts: The Progeny of Seventeenth-Century Prose (Virginia, 1996); and The Shadow of Eternity: Belief and Structure in Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne (Kentucky,

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1981). She has held Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, Newberry Library, and National Endowment for Humanities fellowships, and is a member of the editorial board of English Literary Renaissance. Her current project concerns memory and modes of remembrance in early modern women writers. Debora Shuger is Professor of English at UCLA and author of Sacred Rhetoric (Princeton, 1988); Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (California, 1990); The Renaissance Bible (California, 1994); Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave, 2001); and Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor–Stuart England (Pennsylvania, 2006). Victoria Silver is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She has published articles on Browne and a variety of seventeenthcentury subjects from Jonson and Marvell to Hobbes, Milton, and Algernon Sidney, as well as a book on Milton (Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton’s Irony (Princeton, 2001)). She has just completed a revisionist account of Hobbes’s Leviathan, and is in the process of finishing another very long book on the principle of equity in seventeenth-century prose. William N. West is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He has written Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002; pbk. 2006) and co-edited (with Helen Higbee) Robert Weimann’s book Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Writing and Playing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge, 2000); and (with Bryan Reynolds) a collection of essays honoring Weimann, Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage (Palgrave, 2005). He is currently at work on a book called ‘Understanding and Confusion in the Elizabethan Theaters’ and on a project tracing the cultural functions of ‘the Renaissance’ at various moments in history.


INDEX

Achilles 63 Adam, depictions of 75, 142, 181, 192, 194 Adamic language 181 Addison, Joseph 117 advice tracts 209–21 Aeneas 69, 106 afterlife, see Browne, Sir Thomas, posthumous reputation of Agricola, Georg 95 Ainsworth, Henry 200 Albertus Magnus 107 n alchemy 5 Aldrovandi, Ulisse 83, 88, 90, 108, 299, 327 Alexander the Great 185, 216 allegory 171, 180, 194, 200, 244–6, 253 America 68–9 anatomy 65, 80–1, 83, 86, 87, 220, 221, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284–5, 290, 291, 292–5 Ancient Historie of Huon of Bordeaux, The 111 n Andrewes, Lancelot 13 angels 21 n, 47–8, 135, 136 Anglicanism, see Church of England Annius of Viterbo 69 n anti-popery 39 antiquarianism 5, 26, 63–79, 80, 85, 87, 93, 217, 219, 221, 223, 233, 236–9, 259–75, 310, 311–28 antitrinitarianism 153 n, 159–62 Apel, Karl-Otto 183–4 apocalypse 53, 54, 67, 185, 186, 214, 216, 223–30, 238–9, 244 Apostles’s Creed 41, 163 apothecaries 84, 86, 87, 88, 94 Aquinas, Thomas, and Thomism 49, 53 n archaeology 73–4, 233, 319–20, 324, 328 Arianism 41, 160, 161 Ariosto, Lodovico 219

Aristotle and Aristotelianism 3, 49, 74, 79, 100 n, 106, 139, 160, 161, 184–5, 247 n, 279, 306 armillary sphere 245 Arminius, Jacobus, and Arminianism 8, 153 ars moriendi 221 Arthurian romance 117 Ashby, Thomas 320 Ashmole, Elias 83 Aston, Margaret 197 n, 204–5 astrology 121 Athanasius 40 atheism 119, 164–5, 240 Athenaeus 112–13 Atherton, Ian 61 n atoms and atomism 49, 54 Aubrey, John 10, 77, 264, 270 Augustine of Hippo 107, 134 Augustus Caesar 67, 108 n Aulus Gellius 108 Ausonius 273 authority 1, 23 n, 65–6, 79, 91, 120, 172, 173, 174, 175–7, 179–80, 197, 202, 210, 240 autobiography 151, 159, 164, 166, 168 n Avicenna 287 Bacon, Sir Edmund 120, 125 Bacon, Francis, and Baconianism 6, 7, 13, 38, 76, 111, 172, 175, 177, 179, 182, 184–5, 252, 259, 312 Advancement of Learning 22, 174 Essays 15 New Atlantis 175 Sylva Sylvarum 292 Bacon, Nicholas 248, 255 Baillie, Robert 113, 114 n baptism 59, 164 Baptists 225 Barbour, Reid 4, 9

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Bargrave, John 285 Baronius, Caesar 263 Bave, Samuel 211, 212–13, 279 Beckett, Samuel 299, 306 n Bellonius, Petrus 312 Benjamin, Walter 321, 322, 323–4 Bennett, Joan 3, 98 n Benthien, Claudia 281 Bernard, Richard 128 n, 140 Berosus 69 n Bible 40–4, 53, 56, 64–9, 75, 109, 112, 124, 126, 127 n, 159, 162, 188–205, 228–9, 231, 234, 250, 253–4, 282, 291 King James 250 Vulgate 109 Bigod, Roger 266 Bills of Mortality 207, 286–7 Bilney, Thomas 268–9 biography 322–5 Biondo, Flavio 312 Bioy-Casares, Adolfo 297, 299, 300, 302, 306 Birken, William J. 7 Bishop, Elizabeth 258–9, 261 Blomefield, Francis 76 Blount, Thomas 31 n Boadicea 71 Bochart, Samuel 69 Bodin, Jean 127 n, 128 body 48–52, 136–7, 157, 219, 220, 239, 247, 249 Boleyn, Sir William 267 Bolton, Edmund 71 Borges, Jorge Luis 1, 9, 168 n, 296–310 botany 80, 87, 889–90, 94, 96, 97, 255, see also natural history Boyle, Robert 1, 5, 23 n, 37, 128, 137, 242, 274 n Bracton, Henry de 126 Bradwell, Stephen 125 Brahe, Tycho 145 Brennan, Michael 285 Brigstowe, William, Norwich mason 274 n Briot, Pierre 92 Brown, Robert 170–1 Browne, Anne 81 n, 84 n Browne, Dorothy 81, 84 n Browne, Edward 81, 84–99, 113 n, 211, 218, 273, 274 n, 279, 280, 290, 292–5 Browne, Emma 201

Browne, Frances 81 n Browne, Mary 84 n Browne, Sir Thomas Artificial Hills 74 ‘Boulimia Centenaria’ 259 Brampton Urns 73, 76 Christian Morals 13, 63–4, 209 n, 291–2, 307 Garden of Cyrus 13, 22, 23, 26, 31–3, 34, 35, 151, 242–57, 262, 291, 299 Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall 13, 22, 23, 26, 27–31, 32, 34, 35, 63, 70, 71, 72, 73–4, 75, 76, 77, 78, 93, 151, 169, 212, 219, 220, 222–41, 242 n, 247–8, 249, 251–2, 259, 260, 262, 264, 279, 297, 299, 300, 302, 306, 308–9, 313–14, 326–7 Letter to a Friend 10, 13, 206–21, 247 n, 282–3, 290 Letters 74–5, 76, 77, 84–99, 211–14, 218, 264, 273, 274 n, 279, 280, 290, 292–5 Miscellany Tracts 64, 74, 260–1, 264, 282, 284, 285, 290, 327 Musæum Clausum 264, 282, 285, 290, 327 Notes on the Natural History of Norfolk 259, 267 Plants in Scripture 64, 284 Posthumous Works 76, 260–75 Pseudodoxia Epidemica 3, 6, 9, 13, 22–6, 27, 32, 34–5, 63, 65, 66–9, 75, 92, 100–17, 118, 129, 137, 142–3, 145, 151, 168–87, 188–205, 208, 222, 230–1, 290, 291, 299, 307, 312 Religio Medici 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14–22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36–62, 66, 78, 88, 92, 118, 119, 129, 135, 137, 149–67, 169, 171, 181, 186, 189, 195, 196–7, 199, 204–5, 218, 222, 223, 230, 253, 255–6, 273, 275, 279, 284, 289–90, 291, 295, 298, 299 Repertorium, 8, 45 n, 76–8, 189, 260–75 and commonplace books 69, 128 n and digressiveness 169–70, 173, 177–8, 186–7, 243–4, 247, 251, 252, 290, 321–2, 325 and genre 4, 206–21 and language 4, 181 and notebooks 9, 89, 94, 193, 259, 267, 279, 284–5, 290, 292–3

Index / 359 and politics 9, 59–60, 100–17, 166, 169, 175, 188–205, 223, 269–71, 295 and religion 9, 36–62, 149–67, 188–205, 222–41, 242–57, 260–75, 291–2, 295 and ‘science’ 6, 9, 32, 171–87 and style 3, 9, 13–35, 79, 168–87, 245, 252–3, 296–310, anti-Ciceronian 14, 15 Attic 14 baroque 14, 15, 82, 168, 297 Ciceronian 15, 21 Senecan 14, 15 birthday of 10 dissertation of 279, 286–90 family of 80–99 posthumous reputation of 9, 178, 295, 296–310, 311–28 revisions by 22, 150–1, 159, 160 n, 166, 169 n, 193, 197, 209, 217, 221 Browne, Thomas (son of Sir Thomas Browne) 76, 81, 84, 85–8, 89, 273, 274 n Brownian motion 170–1 Bruno, Giordano 55, 133 Brutus 69 Buchanan, George 106 n Bunn, Ivan 119 n, 129 n, 140 n Burckhardt, Jacob 315 burial practices 71–4 Buonanni, Filippo 88 n Burton, Robert 13, 15 Burton, William 71–3 Buxtorf, Johann 232 cabinets of curiosity 82 n, 88–90, 95–7, 268 Cain 269 Calasso, Robert 1 Calceolari, Francesco 83, 87 n Calcidius 246 n, 254 n Calvin, John, and Calvinism 8, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44–62, 153 n, 265 Cambyses 108 Camden, William 70–1, 77 Canons of 1640 39, 152 Cardano, Girolamo 107 n Carew, Thomas 71 Casaubon, Meric 71 catechisms 152–3, 163

Catholicism 7, 8, 38–62, 121, 153 n, 158, 196, 203–4, 223, 226, 240, 241 Cato 249 causation 47–8, 54, 178, 290 Cavalier poetry 112 Cavendish, Margaret 206–7 Celsus, Aulus Cornelius 280 ceremony and ceremonialism 39, 45, 59, 152, 154, 164, 196–7, 223, 235, 237, 248 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 298, 300, 301, 304–5, 306, 309 charity 42, 238, 290, 291 Charlemagne 117, 248 Charles I of England 38, 95, 113, 152 Charles II of England 117 Chatwin, Bruce 1 Chaucer, Geoffrey 299 chiasmus 242–57 Chillingworth, William 39–40, 156 China 68, 326 Christology 45, 54–61, 160–2, 194, 249–50 chronological studies 67–8, 75 Church Fathers 56, 180 church, history of 7–8, 263 church monuments 77–8, 188–9, 197–205, 260–75 Church of England 7, 9, 39–62, 149–67, 204, 223, 241, 259–75, 295 church, views of 40–5, 196, 204–5, 269–75 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 310 civility 74, 92, 98, 196, 269, 270 civil war 5, 8, 100–18, 188–205, 223, 265, 267, 271–2, 287 Clark, Stuart 121 n classicism, see paganism Cleopatra 64 Clusius, Carolus 94 coins, see numismatics Coke, Sir Edward 121 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1, 2, 243, 244, 256 Colie, Rosalie 3 collecting and collections 9, 80–99, 259, 292–3 Collier, Thomas 225 Collinson, Patrick 198–9 colonization 69–74 Colonna, Francesco 319–20 community 42, 174, 175, 177, 182–3, 187, 219, 223, 224, 259

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conjecture 74, 78, 126, 127 Connor, Steven 280 consilium 209–21, see also medical consultation Constantine 67 constructionism 6, 184 Conti, Brooke 9 conversation 9, 112–13, 168–87 Cook, Harold 7 cookery 81 Copernicus, Nicolaus 38, 61 Corbett, Richard 263, 266, 289 Corcoran, M. I. 113 n Cordeliers, Vault of 284–6 Cornwallis, Charles, Baron of Eye 120, 125 Cotta, John 128 n, 140 Cotterill, Anne 177 n Court of Orphans 3 Courtauld and Warburg Institutes 322 Croll, Morris 14, 15 n, 33, 168, 170 Croll, Oswald 182 Cromwell, Oliver 224, 225, 227, 229 Cullender, Rose 119, 121–4, 126–7, 140, 143 Cunaeus, Petrus 232 Cunningham, William 102 curiosity 66, 73, 80–99, 149, 222, 279 Dante Alighieri 215, 219, 238 Davies, Julian 8, 36 Day, John 102 Debus, Allen G. 3 decorum 33, 191–205 Dee, Arthur 5 Dee, John 95 deism 50 Del Rio, Martin 143 Demerson, Guy 305 n Demiurge 245, 250, 254 Democritus 54 demonology, see witchcraft Denonain, Jean-Jacques 151 n Dering, Sir William 77 dermatology, see skin and diseases, skin Derrida, Jacques 173 n Descartes, Rene´, and Cartesianism 37, 53, 169, 172, 175, 177 determinism 46–8, 50 Dickinson, Emily 1, 2 Diderot, Denis 314

Dietrich, Marlene 322 Digby, Sir Kenelm 4, 14 n, 18, 37 n, 38, 44, 45–61, 129–30, 131, 133, 135, 137 Di Giovanni, Norman Thomas 309 Digressiveness, see under Browne, Thomas Dio Cassius 74 Diodorus Siculus 64 disease 9, 138–40, 282, 287–9 consumption 206–21 eating disorders 259 hysteria 138–40 measles 286 melancholy 138–40, 165, 214, 318, 320, 322, 326 morgellons 279, 282–4, 285 plague 234, 287, 290, 293 quartan ague 211 n, 263 rickets 211, 213, 290 scrofula 290, 295 skin 212 smallpox 279, 282, 283, 286–90 testicular cancer 218 venereal 218 n, 282, 292 Dissolution of the Monasteries 267 Dod, John 101, 102 Donne, John 7, 10, 23 n, 56–7 n Anatomy of the World 30 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions 21, 220 Satire III 241 Donovan, Dennis 4 Dorchester, Viscount (Dudley Carleton) 286 Dowsing, William 188–9 Drayton, Michael 111 n dreams 214–15 Droysen, Johann Gustav 315 Dryden, John 1 dualism 48–50, 54–5 Dugdale, William 5, 74, 75, 77, 80, 262, 273 Duny, Amy 119, 120–7, 140, 143 Durston, Gregory 128 n Dury, John 225, 229–30 Dutton, Sir Thomas 83 Ecclesiastes 30 Edwards, Karen 9 Edwards, Thomas 113 Egypt 31, 64, 65, 72, 75, 89, 108 n, 180, 181–2, 219, 234–5, 236, 246, 248, 250, 291, 326

Index / 361 Ehrenberg, Ilya 318 eirenicism 8, 15, 41, 135, 271 Eliot, T. S. 316 Elizabeth I, queen of England 121, 267, 270 encyclopedism 168, 172, 174, 179, 185, 187 Endicott, Norman 3, 209, 219 n Epicurus and Epicureanism 164, 238 episcopacy 271 epistemology 4, 31, 41–5, 74, 114–15, 118–45, 168–87, 190–1, 244, 249, 264, 266, 271–4 equity 119, 141, 144 Erasmus and the Erasmian tradition 41, 58 error 61, 75, 107, 126, 142, 156–9, 171–2, 176–81, 185, 187, 189, 193–4, 200, 239, 291 essayistic writing 177 n, 263 ethics 183, 186 Euclid 169, 247 Euripides 165, 166 Eusebius 67, 69 n Evans, Arise 225 Evelyn, John 5, 75, 80, 81, 98, 191–2, 233, 268, 273, 274 n Everett, Barbara 117 n Ewen, C. L’Estrange 123 n, 124 n, 140, 144 experimentalism and experiments 5, 25, 123, 138, 141, 145, 171, 179, 183, 184, 210, 283, 293–4, 312 fairies 111, 115–16 fancy, see imagination Fell, Margaret 226 Fifth Monarchists 225 Filmer, Robert, 127 n Finch, Sir John 92 Fish, Stanley 4, 14 n, 15, 18, 21, 150, 168–9, 170, 241 Fisher, John 40–5 Flaubert, Gustave 305 n Flegen, Eva 135 Fleury, Claude 94 Fludd, Robert 6, 144–5 fossils 74–5, 95 Fowler, Alastair 117 Foxe, John 232, 265, 268–70 Fracastoro, Hieronymus 288 France, see Montpellier Frazer, Sir James George 131

Freárt, Roland 191 Freud, Sigmund 133, 324 Fuller, Thomas 232 Funkenstein, Amos 7, 37 Galen and Galenism 139, 206–7, 210, 212, 214, 279, 280, 287–8, 290 De Usu Partium, 279, see also naturals, nonnaturals Galileo Galilei 6, 38 Geis, Gilbert 119 n, 129 n, 140 n Genesis 254 Geoffrey of Monmouth 69 geometry 242–57, 291, 295 Gifford, George 128 n Gilbert, William 184–5 Gillespie, George 114 n Glanvill, Joseph 128, 179 Glover, Mary 125 n, 139 Godley, A. D. 108 n Godwin, Francis 268 Gogol’, Nikolaı 305 n Goldwell, James, Bishop 269 Goodier, Henry 36 Googe, Barnabe 220 Gosse, Edmund 243 Go¨ttingen, Historical Institute of 314 grammar 180 n Grass, Gu¨nter 318 Great Tew circle 45 n Green, Ian 152 Grey, Bishop John de 271 Grossman, Vassily 318 Grotius, Hugo 37, 61 n Gruter, Janus 314 Guazzo, Stefano 136 Guibbory, Achsah 4, 9, 16, 33 n, 36, 37, 39 Guillemeau, Jacques 283, 284 n Gunton, Symon 77 Gurnay, Edmund 199 Habermas, Ju¨rgen 183–4 Hactenus Inaudita 287 Hafenreffer, Samuel 281, 283–4, 288, 294 Hakewill, George 23 n Hale, Sir Matthew 119–20, 123, 124 n, 125, 126, 127, 129 n, 141 Hall, Anne D. 4 Hall, Joseph 8, 198, 271, 272

362

/ Index

Halley, Janet E. 4, 246 Harington, Sir John 270–1 Hart, Walter, Bishop 269 Hartlib circle 5 Hartlib, Samuel 229, 242 Harvey, Gideon 7 Harvey, William 6, 38, 247 n, 293 Havenstein, Daniela 3, 14, 178 n heaven, the place of 52–5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 328 Heinsius, Daniel 313 hell, the place of 52–5 Henrietta Maria, queen of England 62 Henry II of England 228 Henry VII of England 268 Henry VIII of England 268 Herbert of Cherbury, Lord Edward 38, 41, 44, 45, 48–61 Herbert, George 38, 53 n Herbert, William, Bishop 267 Hercules 110 heresy 42, 51–62, 113–14, 121, 149–67 hermeneutics 190, 201–2, 253, see also reading Hermes Trismegistus and hermeticism 19, 130–1, 135, 144, 160, 161, 162 Herodotus 74, 100 n, 104, 108 heroism 110, 117, 216, 270, 271 Heydon, John 295 hieroglyphs 65, 75, 180, 181–2, 186, 194, 199, 236, 253, 279, 280, 290, 291, 292, 295 Hippocrates 206, 210, 212, 214 historical accuracy 191–205 history, see antiquarianism Hobbes, Thomas 13, 37 n, 38, 48, 61 n, 131 Hoffman, Moritz 95 Holdsworth, William 120 Holinshed, Raphael 232 n Holland, Henry 77 Holland, Philemon 100, 105 Hollar, Wenceslaus 77 Homer 100, 104–5, 106, 109, 111, 116, 207, 234 Honigmann, E. A. J. 114 n Hooke, Robert 274 n, 294–5 Hookes, Nicholas 207, 220 Hopkins, Matthew 120, 123, 144 Horace 192 Huebert, Ronald 14

Hughes, William 228, 232 Huizinga, Johan 131–4 humanism 76, 82, 153, 158, 192, 211, 279 humours and humoral theory 206–7, 212, 280, 281, 282, 288, see also disease, melancholy Huntley, F. L. 3, 31, 208 n, 246, 254 n Hutchinson, Francis 129 n hylomorphism 49 iconoclasm 70, 77–8, 188–205, 223, 264–6 identity 48–52, 176, 236, 239, 281–2, 290, 291–2 idols and idolatry 111, 116, 174, 179, 188–205, 223 imagination 83, 116, 124, 125, 139, 296 n Imperato, Ferrante 87 n Independency 189 India 68, 69 intellectual history 4–5, 9 internalization 52–5 Ireland 83 Isaac, depictions of 194 Isidore of Seville 107 n, 299 Islam 239–40 Israel, Menasseh ben 224–9, 232, 235 n Italy, see Padua Jackson, Elizabeth 139 Jacobsen, Dan 327 James I of England 110 Jefferson, Thomas 322 Jerome 109–10 Jessey, Henry 225–6, 227, 229 Jesuits 36, 39–45 Jesus Christ, depictions of 162, 193, 200, 203–5, 249–52, see also Christology Jews and Judaism 65, 67, 69, 111–12, 222–41, 248, 295, 305 n, 317–18, 323–8 John the Baptist 193 Johnson, Samuel 1, 2, 27, 83, 243 Jones, Inigo 71, 74 Jonson, Ben 10, 13, 110–11, 115 Jorden, Edward 125 n, 139–40 Josephus 232 Jovius, Paulus 106 n Julian, Emperor of Rome 165, 166 Julius Caesar 68, 70, 212 Jung, C. G. 145 n

Index / 363 Justin 64 Justin Martyr 249–50, 253 Juvenal 104, 108–9, 114 Katz, David 224, 226, 229 n Keeling, Sir John 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 138 Kellett, C. E. 286 Kelly, Edward 95 Kennet, White 10 Kenny, Neil 81 n Kepler, Johannes 144–5 Keynes, Sir Geoffrey 3, 213 n, 258, 261, 262, 302, 306–7, 310 Killeen, Kevin 4, 9 King, Daniel 74, 75 Kircher, Athanasius 83, 87 Kirk, G. S. 105 Klibansky, Raymond 256 Koerner, Joseph 199 Kramer, Heinrich, see Malleus Malificarum Kristal, Efraıń 303, 305, 307 Krook, Dorothea 55 n La Calprene`de, Gaultier de Coste, Seigneur de 208, 219 Lactantius 185 Lake, Peter 36, 204 Lamb, Charles 1 Lambarde, William 74 Lambecius, Petrus, imperial librarian 91, 92, 97 La Mothe le Vayer, François de 321 language 75 Laplace’s demon 46 n Larbaud, Valery 308 n Lateran Council, fifth 157 Latini, Brunetto 299 Latitudinarianism 156 n Laud, William, and Laudianism 8, 9, 16, 36–45, 53, 60–2, 152, 155, 189, 196–7, 201, 204 Conference with Fisher 37–45 Laurence, Thomas 42, 45 law 118–45 Lee, Rensselaer 192 Lee, Solomon 232–3 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von 37 Leiden 83, 95 n, 153, 265, 279, 280, 286, 288 n, 293, 313

Leland, John 74, 77 Leopold I, Emperor 80, 94 Le Gros, Sir Charles 212–13, 218 Le Gros, Thomas 75–6 Le Neve, Peter 76 n Le Spencer, Henry, Bishop 270–1 Lichtenstein, Erwin 318 literalness 182, 191–205 local history 70–6, 259–75 Loveday, Robert 206–21 Lucan 84, 239, 299 Lucian 165, 166 Ludolf, Hiob 273 n Lushington, Thomas 254 n Luther, Martin 56, 157 Lyttleton, Elizabeth, neé Browne 10, 81, 273 Mabillon, Jean 312, 328 Macauley, John S. 264 Macfarlane, Alan 128 n, 134 MacKenzie, George 1 magic 120–45, 161, 162, 170, 180 Malleus Maleficarum 132, 134–5, 136–7 Mantuan (Giovan Battista Spagnoli) 104 manuscripts 3, 8–9, 149–67, 193–4, 211–12, 217, 221, 262, 264–5, 307 Maplet, John 211, 213, 214 Marcus Aurelius 71–2 Marıás, Javier 1, 308 Marsyas 282 Martin, L. C. 3, 307 masques 71, 110–11, 115 mathematics 68, 84, 130–2, 144–5, 162, 186 Mather, Cotton 124 n, 258 Maximilian II, Emperor 94 mechanism 46–8 medical consultation 98, 210–14, 218–19, 279, see also consilium medical education 87, 91, 94, 99, 279–95, 313 medical practice 66, 73, 76, 82, 88, 143, 206–21, 268, 281–2 medicine, gynecology 287–8, 290, see also disease, hysteria medicine, history of 6, 9, 65, 206–21, 279–95 medicine, pediatrics 282–4, 285, 286–90 Mela, Pomponius 104, 105 melancholy, see disease Melanchthon, Philipp 56 n Melville, Herman 1, 2, 305 n

364

/ Index

memory 1, 28, 30, 73, 79, 86, 173, 219, 220, 270, 318–28 Mercuriale, Girolamo 281, 282, 287–8, 294 Merrill, James 259 Mersenne, Marin 61 n Merton, Stephen 3 Mesopotamia 326 metaphysical wit 21 method 73, 118–45, 168–87, 283 Meursius, Johannes 246 n, 254 n microscopes 97, 294–5 middling ranks 9 millenarianism, see apocalypse Milton, Anthony 7 Milton, John 1, 8, 9, 13, 104, 113–17 Animadversions upon the Remonstrants’ Defense 114–15 Areopagitica 241 ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience’ 113–14 Paradise Lost 114–17 Second Defence 115 n Minadoi, Giovanni 288 Minadoi, Thomas 282, 294 misogyny 134 Modena, Leo 232 modernism 9 Momigliano, Arnaldo 312–13, 325, 328 monsters and monstrosity 103, 106, 107, 108, 295 Montagu, Richard 42, 44, 60, 263–5 Montaigne, Michel de 321 Montpellier 66, 83, 86, 87, 153, 279, 282–4, 286, 313 Montuus, Hieronymus 283, 284 n More, Henry 128–9 mortalism 51, 158, 165, 238 Munday, Anthony 77 Murison, W. 309 Murphy, Kathryn 4, 9 Murray, Gilbert 1 museums, see cabinets of curiosity Nabokov, Vladimir 299 Nansius, Franciscus 288 n Nardo, Anna K. 18 Nashe, Thomas 207 Nathanson, Leonard 3, 162, 183, 244 n national origins 68–71

natural history 5, 32, 76, 86, 87, 88, 89–90, 96–7, 216, 217, 247, 255–6, 259, 267, 272, 275, 284, 291, 293 natural philosophy 135–7, 210, 242–57 naturals 210–11 natural theology 253–4 nature 44, 58, 88–9, 161, 184, 242–57, 280, 295 Naude´, Gabriel 311 Nedham, Marchamont 207, 286 Nelson, Brent 9 New Historicism 2, 4 New Critics 2 Newton, Isaac 5, 37 Nicks, Richard, Bishop 267–9 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 315 Noah 159 non-naturals 210–11, 213 Norfolk Assizes 119–20 Norwich 7, 8, 10, 90, 188–205, 190, 231–2, 262–3, 272, 273–5, 287, 290 Norwich Cathedral 8, 76–8, 189, 198, 260–75 Nowell, Alexander 152 numismatics 66, 73, 75, 77 n, 85, 89, 93, 96, 97, 236, 319 Nye, Philip 228 Ocampo, Victoria 298 n Olaus Magnus 106 n Oldenburg, Henry 91–2 oneirocriticism, see dreams Opitz, Martin 313–14, 326 Oppian 104 order 32, 46, 120, 121, 131–45, 174, 182, 202, 242–57 Origen 158, 160, 216 Orpheus 65 Ortelius, Abraham 94 Ovid 106 n, 234, 282 Oxford 83, 86, 151, 263, 280, 289 Pacy, Elizabeth 124–5 Pacy, Samuel 122, 125 Padua 66, 83, 86, 87, 89, 92, 96, 153, 157–8, 231, 313 paganism 9, 55–61, 63–79, 100–18, 134, 158, 160, 164–6, 192, 226, 234–9, 242–57, 280, 288

Index / 365 Panofsky, Erwin 324 Paracelsus 170 paradox 2, 13, 20, 21, 24, 27, 30, 31, 44–5, 110, 149, 160, 182, 220, 224, 231, 244, 250, 252, 253, 281, 282, 283, 284 paralipsis 178, 250, 253 Parker, John Henry 320 Parry, Graham 9, 223, 262 n Paston collection 93 Paston, Robert 76, 84, 85 Pater, Walter 2, 209 Patin, Guy 92 Patrides, C. A. 3, 4 Paul, the Apostle 44, 52, 63, 64, 229 Pauli, Wolfgang 145 n Pausanias 64 Peasants’s Revolt 270–1 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 311–12, 313, 328 Pelagianism 55, 57 Pelling, Margaret 7 Pembroke College, Oxford 151 Pepys, Samuel 274 n Perkins, William 127 n, 136 Petavius, Dionysius 67–8 Peterhouse College, Cambridge 208 Peters, Hugh 225 Petit, Pierre 92 Petrarch 219 Pettus, Sir John 208, 217 Phillips, Edward 93 Phillips, John 197 n Philostratus 104, 106, 110, 114 Phoenicians 69, 108 photography 320–1, 327 physiognomy 279, 281, 290, 291 Pigafetta, Antonio 106 n Plato and Platonism 3, 19, 22, 23, 63, 64, 113, 130–1, 133, 158, 173, 174, 187, 207, 242–57, 282, 310 Phaedo 249 Timaeus 242–57 Pliny the Elder 23, 100–1, 104, 105, 106 n, 108 n, 299 Pomian, Krzysztof 81 n, 82 Pomponazzi, Pietro 158 Porphyry 246 Porta, G. B. della 182 Post, Jonathan 9, 166 n, 189 n, 240

post-modernism 9 Power, Henry 279 prayer for the dead 158 Praz, Mario 1 predestinarianism 46–8 Presbyterians 5, 37, 189, 226, 239 Preston, Claire 3, 4, 9, 16, 32, 75 n, 98, 150 n, 170 n, 222, 223, 244, 247 n, 262 n Priestley, J. B. 1 Primrose, James 208, 213–14, 215 probability 41, 68, 74, 170, 186, 272 Proclus 246, 250, 253, 254 n professions, history of 9 providence 46–8, 54, 143, 235, 251, 252, 253–7, 279, 291–2, 295 Prynne, William 8, 37, 203–4, 224, 226, 228–9, 232, 235 Psalms 291 psychoanalysis 133, 145 n psychosomnolence 157–8 Ptolemy 254 n Puritanism 78, 155, 189 n, 190–1, 203–4, 223, 265 pygmies 100–17 Pythagoras 160–1, 162 Quakers 5, 8, 225, 226 Quevedo, Francisco de 297, 298, 299, 300, 304–5, 308, 309 quincunx 242–57, 262, 299 Rabelais, François 283, 298 n, 305 n race 106–7, 111–12, 227, 290, 292, 295 Radbill, Samuel X. 284 n radical religion 62, 157, 164, 197, 202, 205, 223–30, 240, 295 Rado´, Sańdor 322 Ralegh, Sir Walter 38 Ranchin, François 286 Ranke, Leopold von 315 Ray, John 5, 86, 88, 89, 96 reading 252–5, see also hermeneutics realism, see Plato and Platonism reason and rationalism 43–4, 50, 131, 133–4, 149, 154, 155, 156–7, 160, 167, 172, 183, 186, 249, 256, 283 relics 87–8, 285 Remy, Nicolaus 136

366

/ Index

Restoration 1, 8, 10, 75, 76, 77, 120, 189, 264–5, 269, 274 revisionist history 9, 36 Reynolds, Edward 8, 265, 271, 272 Rhazes 287 Richetti, John J. 305 n Riolan, Jean the Elder 281 Rivie`re, Lazare 283, 286 ritualism, see ceremony Robbins, Robin 3, 22, 106 n, 111 n, 195, 307 Rosenblatt, Jason P. 222 n Rosenheim, James 208 n Ross, Alexander 4, 14 n, 18, 38, 40–1, 45–61, 106 n, 239–40 Royal College of Physicians 7, 87, 90, 212, 213 royal prerogative 58–60 Royal Society 80, 83, 86, 90, 91–2, 96, 98, 128, 137, 259, 275 Rudolf II, Emperor 95, 327 Russell, Bertrand 131, 134 Sabellianism 161–2 sacred space 195–6 Saenredam, Pieter 265 Saint Andrew 250 St Germain, Christopher 119 Saint Michael’s in the Corn 10 Saint Paul’s Cathedral 77, 260, 262, 285 Saint Peter Mancroft 10, 193, 197–8 Saintsbury, George 14, 296 n Salisbury Cathedral 274 Salteren, George 199–200 Samson, depictions of 204 Sandlin, John 270, 273 Sandys, George 106 n Sanna, Vittoria 3 Santorio, Santorio 292 Satan 116–17, 134–7, 142–3, 159 Saumaise, Claude 311 Savile, Henry 263 Savile, Thomas 289 Saxl, Fritz 324 Scaliger, Joseph 67 scepticism 24, 26, 28–9, 37, 42, 53, 66, 68, 103, 104, 128, 129, 135, 139–40, 142, 153, 157–8, 222, 239, 240, 250, 255, 271, 312 Schlo¨gel, Kark 321–2 Schnapp, Alain 326

Schoneveld, C. W. 83 Schwob, Marcel 298, 304–5 science, history of 5–6, 9 Scot, Reginald 124 n, 139–40 Scottowe, Nathan 211–12 Scudamore, John, first Viscount Scudamore 61 n Sebald, W. G. 1, 9, 315–28 secular theology 37–8, 46–62 Sedgwick, William 77 n Seelig, Sharon 9 Selden, John 222 n, 232 Seneca 164, 165, 271 Sennert, Daniel 288 sententiae 209, 219 Servetus, Michael 37, 153 n Seznec, Jean 314 Shakespeare, William 1, 111, 227 n, 298, 299, 300, 304, 305 n, 309 n Shapiro, James 226 Sharpe, Kevin 8, 36 Sherfield, Henry 201–2 Shirley, James 220–1 Shuger, Debora 9 Silver, Victoria 4, 9, 16, 17, 156 Singer, Thomas 244, 247 n singularity 37, 49, 59, 176–7, 182–3, 290 Siraisi, Nancy 7, 210 skin 212, 279–95 Skinner, Quentin 4–5 Skippon, Philip 86, 89 Socinianism 153 n Socrates 57, 58, 113, 249, 321 Solinus 104 Somner, William 71, 77 Song of Songs 250 Sontag, Susan 319, 324 soteriology 36–45, 55–60 soul 48–52, 54, 157–8, 163, 239, 245–50 spectral evidence 124–5, 140 Speed, John 71 Spelman, Sir Henry 76 n Spencer, Miles 267–8 Spinoza, Benedictus de 37 Spraggon, Julie 199 n Sprat, Thomas 179 Sprenger, James, see Malleus Maleficarum Stalin, Joseph 322 Stanford, Donald 258

Index / 367 Star Chamber 201–2 Stearne, John 144 Stevenson, Robert Louis 297 Stoicism 158, 164, 165 Stow, John 77, 232 n Strabo 64, 74 Strier, Richard 53 n Strode, William 289 Styron, William 1 Sua´rez, Francisco 279 Suetonius 74, 108 n suicide 165 Sununu, Andrea 4 Suthfield, Bishop Walter de 272 Swales, Martin 319 symbolism 53, 131–45, 180, 200, 219, 237, 242–57, 270 Symonds, John Addington 209 Synod of Dort 153 Swammerdam, Jan 95 Swan, John 125 n Swift, Jonathan 274 n Tacitus 70, 74 Taylor, Jeremy 13, 30, 156–7 Taylor, John, the Water Poet 195 technology 136 Tenison, Thomas 259–62, 272–3, 274 Terne, Dr Christopher 292 Tertullian 44, 45, 149, 160 Tesauro, Emmanuele 21 Thatcher, Peter 201 Theophrastus 64 Thirty-nine Articles, the 42, 152 Thomas Browne Seminar 4 Thomas, Keith 120, 124 n, 128 n Thoreau, Henry David 1, 22 Thornton, Alice 289 Thucydides 288, 290 Todd, Richard 4 toleration and tolerance 21, 74, 150, 153, 155, 168, 178, 184, 187, 196, 222–41 Tomlins Lectureship 280 Toppes, Robert, Norwich merchant 193 Topsell, Edward 110 Tories 265 n Toulouse 279, 284–6, 293 Townshend, Aurelian 71

Townshend, Lady Mary 208 translation 169 n, 296–310 travel 66, 76, 81–98, 273, 275 n, 279, 282–7, 294, 321–2, 325 treason 128 Trinity, depictions of 202, see also antitrinitarianism Trojans 104–5 True Newes from Norwich 196 Trumbull, William 86 Tryal of Witches, A 119, 122–7, 138, 140–1 Tuke, Samuel 86 Tyacke, Nicholas 38 n Tyler, E. B. 129, 133 typology 194, 216, 249–50 urns 70–5, 85, 219–20, 233, 236, 249, 259, 262, 326 Vergil 64, 106 Vesalius, Andreas Vicars, John 203 Virbius 221 virtuosi and virtuosity 82, 86, 99, 137 visual arts 188–205 Vizzanius, Emanuel 312 voluntarism 54, 58 Von Aldershelm, Christian Lorentz 95 Wagenseil, Johann Christoph 95 Wall, Cynthia 274 n Wall, Moses 225, 226–7 Warburg, Aby 321, 324 Ward, Seth 6 n Warnke, Frank 18 Warren, Austin 33, 170 n Watt, Tessa 199 n, 204–5 Webber, Joan 3 Webster,Charles 3, 129 Weever, John 77, 260, 262, 264, 266–73 Wentworth, Thomas 285 West, William N. 9 Westfall, Richard 137, 145 n Westminster Abbey 77 Weyer, Johannes 139–40 Whigs 265 n Whitaker, Tobias 287 White, Francis 54 White, Thomas 55 n

368

/ Index

Whitefoot, John 79, 81, 84, 271 Wickham, Chris 328 Wilde, Oscar 299–300 Wilding, Michael 4, 14 n, 16, 197 Wilkin, Simon 302, 306–7, 309–10 Williams, Roger 224, 227, 229 Williamson, George 15 Wilson, Edward O. 174 n Wilson, Philip K. 281 Windam, Sir Thomas 267 Wise, James N. 4 witchcraft 5, 9, 118–45, 281 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 131, 133–4, 173 n

Wolf, Lucien 229 Woolf, Virginia 168 n Wonder and wonders 44, 55, 115, 143, 171, 243, 256 Wood, Anthony a` 262 world soul 245–8, 250 Worm, Ole 83, 327 Wren, Christopher 86, 260 Wren, Matthew 8, 37 n Yates, Frances 6 zoological specimens 90, 95, 96, 103

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