In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century's Most Inquiring Mind

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Overview

The extraordinary life and ideas of one of the greatest—and most neglected—minds in history.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure like Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind.

Mixing botany, etymology, medicine, and literary history, Aldersey-Williams journeys in his hero's footsteps to introduce us to witches, zealots, natural wonders, and fabulous creatures of Browne's time and ours. We meet Browne the master prose stylist, responsible for introducing hundreds of words into English, including electricity, hallucination, and suicide. Aldersey-Williams reveals how Browne’s preoccupations—how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs, what to make of order in nature, how to unite science and religion—are relevant today.

In Search of Sir Thomas Browne is more than just a biography—it is a cabinet of wonders and an argument that Browne, standing at the very gates of modern science, remains an inquiring mind for our own time. As Stephen Greenblatt has written, Browne is "unnervingly one of our most adventurous contemporaries."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393241648
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/15/2015
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is the author of many books, including The Tide, Anatomies, Periodic Tales, and The Most Beautiful Molecule, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in Norfolk, England.

Table of Contents

Prologue ix

Introduction 1

1 Biography 26

2 Physic 49

3 Animals 78

4 Plants 112

5 Science 143

6 Tolerance 170

7 Faith 200

8 Melancholy 228

9 Objects 255

10 The End 282

Timelines 293

Major Works of Thomas Browne 299

References and Further Reading 301

Illustration Credits 313

Acknowledgements 317

Index 319

Editorial Reviews

04/13/2015
In this delightful study, part biography and part history of both science and literature, English science writer Aldersey-Williams (Anatomies) revives the thought of Sir Thomas Browne, a 17th-century writer, physician, and philosopher, for modern readers. Browne studied medicine at Montpellier, Padua, and Leiden, eventually opening a practice in Norwich. Over the next 50 years, his insatiable curiosity and his wide-ranging interests led him to produce studies about a diverse array of topics. Aldersey-Williams leads the reader through Browne’s works, illuminating his innovative ideas as well as the philosophical outlook that motivated him. Religio Medici, Browne’s first and perhaps most famous work, was a rationalist discussion of religion that ended up on the papal index of prohibited books and put Browne “in the excellent company of Rabelais, Galileo, Bacon, Hobbes and Spinoza.” He later examined plants, hoping to discover signs of the original Garden of Eden, and dabbled in natural history, collecting notes about animals as varied as bitterns, owls, sperm whales, and moles. Browne, like a scientific Shakespeare, also introduced many neologisms that remain in the English language today, such as medical, precarious, insecurity, and hallucination. Aldersey-Williams’s brilliant reflections encourage us to pick up Browne and read him for ourselves. Illus. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Superb…. Aldersey-Williams has produced not a standard biography but a fascinating genre-bending melange of life story, medicine, science and human culture…. With luck this fine tribute will bring Browne the wider readership he richly deserves."

Sunday Herald (UK)

"A wonderfully erratic, promenading book, in which we see how different, yet how similar we still are today to that most serene, most enigmatic science pioneer and literary master, Sir Thomas Browne, whose prose style is one of the highest peaks in English literature, according to Borges and to my humble self."

Javier Marías

"Engaging and thoughtful…. Like some of the most compelling biographers, Aldersey-Williams partly inhabits his subject."

Literary Review (UK)

"A triumph. With humour, humility and intelligent generosity, Aldersey-Williams brings Sir Thomas Browne splendidly to life, urns and all."

Financial Times (UK)

"This is just the kind of celebration Sir Thomas Browne needs and deserves: not a conventional biography but a meditation filled with intellectual curiosity, tolerance, humane observation, and gentle wit. It shows Browne as a man caught in the currents of his times while musing on timeless questions—and, like Aldersey-Williams, determined to weigh up the evidence without dogmatism, and to enjoy the richness of the world."

Philip Ball

"[T]he intellectual equivalent of a buddy road trip."

Starred Review Shelf Awareness

"A delightful portrait."

Jim Holt

"[F]ascinating…. [A] cleverly constructed and amusing book, on a subject deserving of fresh attention."

Wall Street Journal - Jeffrey Collins

05/01/2015
Aldersey-Williams (Anatomies) thinks readers should familiarize themselves with the writings of Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82). And understandably so, since Browne remains relatively unknown, yet offers some of the poignancy of Montaigne, the expressive creativity of language of Shakespeare, the skeptical tolerance of a modern, and the empirical outlook of a scientist. The author suggests that Browne has relevance to our generation because of his thoughts on life and death, order in nature, religion and science, and more. Examining his subject's key works, Aldersey-Williams launches into meditations driven by geography (both authors sharing Norfolk, England as a home), personal experiences, and the modern world. The book is our world looked at through the lens of Browne via Aldersey-Williams in a way that takes the reader for a ride across the borders of modernity and back in examination of the intellectual and cultural tensions between the 17th and 21st centuries. VERDICT Aldersey-Williams's passion will make the reader intrigued by this often overlooked writer. This exploration of his interests will attract readers of biography, medicine, natural history, religion, and English literature.—Scott Vieira, Rive Univ. Lib., Houston, TX

Library Journal

2015-03-15
A biography of the peerless 17th-century English writer and scientist that finds new relevance in his deeply observant, encyclopedic writings about man and nature. Living in the same county as his subject, physician and philosopher Thomas Browne (1605-1682), English science writer Aldersey-Williams (Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body, 2013, etc.) became fascinated by Browne's poise on the cusp of the modern, while still "happily in thrall to the ancient world and its mysteries." His study of Browne's work attempts to bring his subject back to engage current disputes about the place of religion in science, how to recognize and dispel "vulgar beliefs," and how to face death. (Indeed, there is an imagined, somewhat corny interview between Browne and the author.) Browne's sentences, borne of careful deliberation, natural observation, and personal confession, are masterpieces in themselves. They gained the admiration of an elite cadre of writers, such as Herman Melville (whose chapter on "Cetology" from Moby-Dick owes a great debt to Browne's best-known opus Pseudodoxia Epidemica), Jorge Luis Borges, and W.G. Sebald (Aldersey-Williams' ambulatory digressions, punctuated with curious photographs, are distinctly Sebald-ian). While Browne's scientific work, steeped in the ancient writers, was too mysterious or wacky to be considered modern-day science (exceptions were his discovery of "Morgellons" disease and his obsession with the quincunx form in nature), his explorations of plants and animals produced all kinds of discoveries and, most importantly, words. Browne coined nearly 800 new words, which essentially opened a whole new way of speaking about the natural world—e.g., "electricity," "medical," "amphibious," "incontrovertible," and "ferocious." In reintroducing this singular thinker and writer, which Aldersey-Williams calls his "obsession," the author finds fresh insight. An elegant, pleasantly obsessive study of a "life of tolerance, humour, serenity and untiring curiosity."

Kirkus Reviews

This fine audio production illustrates the great appeal of audiobooks today, not just for mainstream titles but also for those pockets of interest that seemingly target only a narrow range of listeners. Essayist, stylist, and prolific word-maker Sir Thomas Browne is almost forgotten in literature today, but he’s a fascinating personality, and his life and writings prove highly illustrative of his age, especially its medical practices and beliefs. Simon Vance is adept at balancing the author’s contemporary approach with Browne’s famously baroque style. This reflective biography is probably not for everyone, but for those who love the unique and obscure and odd, as Browne did, this title offers many pleasures. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2016 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2015 - AudioFile

This fine audio production illustrates the great appeal of audiobooks today, not just for mainstream titles but also for those pockets of interest that seemingly target only a narrow range of listeners. Essayist, stylist, and prolific word-maker Sir Thomas Browne is almost forgotten in literature today, but he’s a fascinating personality, and his life and writings prove highly illustrative of his age, especially its medical practices and beliefs. Simon Vance is adept at balancing the author’s contemporary approach with Browne’s famously baroque style. This reflective biography is probably not for everyone, but for those who love the unique and obscure and odd, as Browne did, this title offers many pleasures. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2016 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2015 - AudioFile