Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed

by Reid Barbour (Editor), Claire Preston (Editor)

Overview

Doctor, linguist, scientist, natural historian, and writer of what is probably the most stunning prose in the English language, Sir Thomas Browne was a virtuoso in learning whose many interests form a representative portrait of his age. To understand the period which we more usually refer to as the Civil War, the Restoration, or the Scientific Revolution, we need to understand parts of the intellectual and spiritual background that are often neglected and which Browne magnificently figures forth.

This collection of essays about all aspects of Thomas Browne's work and thought is the first such volume to appear in 25 years. It offers the specialist and the student a wide-ranging array of essays by an international team of leading scholars in seventeenth-century literary studies who extend our understanding of this extremely influential and representative early-modern polymath by embracing recent developments in the field, including literary-scientific relations, the development of Anglican spirituality, civil networks of intellectual exchange, the rise of antiquarianism, and Browne's own legacy in modern literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199236213
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/09/2009
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Introduction: 'Browne at 400', Claire Preston and Reid BarbourPart I: Habits of Thought1. 'Speake that I may see thee': the styles of Sir Thomas Browne, Sharon Seelig2. The Laudian Idiot, Debora Shuger3. Thomas Browne and the Uses of Antiquity, Graham Parry4. The Browne Family's Culture of Curiosity, Brent Nelson5. Engaging with Pygmies: Thomas Browne and John Milton, Karen Edwards6. 'Wonders of the Invisible World': The Bury St. Edmunds Witchcraft Trial Redux, Victoria SilverPart II: Works7. Religio Medici's Profession of Faith, Brooke Conti8. Brownean Motion: Conversation within Pseudodoxia Epidemica's 'Sober Circumference of Knowledge', William N. West9. The Politics of Painting: Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm, Kevin Killeen10. 'An Incomium of Consumptions': A Letter to a Friend as Medical Narrative, Claire Preston11. Urne -Buriall, Cultural Difference, and the Question of Jewish Readmission, Achsah Guibbory12. 'A Likely Story': Plato's Timaeus in the Garden of Cyrus, Kathryn Murphy13. Miscellaneous Browne Among the Tombs of Norwich Cathedral, Jonathan F.S. PostPart III: (After)Lives14. The Hieroglyphics of Skin, Reid Barbour15. Browne, Borges, and Back: Phantasmagories of Imaginative Learning, Roy Rosenstein16. Thinking with Thomas Browne: Sebald and the Nachleben of the Antiquarian, Peter N. MillerBibliographyThe Contributors