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Reviewed by:
  • Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed
  • Natalie Kaoukji
Reid Barbour and Claire Preston, eds. Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xii + 368 pp. Ill. $120.00 (978-0-19-923621-3).

This collection of sixteen essays on the physician and author Thomas Browne (1605-82) is framed by its editors as a contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of science and literature in the early modern period. There is much here that will be of interest to historians of science and medicine: many of these essays offer significant recontextualizations of Browne's works and, at their best, [End Page 126] provide exemplary cases of what an interdisciplinary study of science and literature can offer methodologically.

The collection is loosely structured in three sections on "Habits of Thought," "Works," and "Lives and Afterlives." "Habits of Thought" comprises essays offering historicized readings of Browne's style (Sharon Cadman Seelig), Laudianism (Debora Shuger), engagement with classical sources (Graham Parry, Karen Edwards), culture of curiosity (Brent Nelson), and treatments of the occult (Victoria Silver). The second section offers treatments of major works (contributions by Brooke Conti on Religio Medici, William West and Kevin Killeen on Pseudodoxia Epidemica, and Achsah Guibbory on Urne-Buriall) together with essays on less canonical works (Claire Preston on A Letter to a Friend, Kathryn Murphy on the Garden of Cyrus, and Jonathan Post on Browne's Repertorium). The final section on the afterlife of Browne's works contains essays on skin as a medium of preservation (Reid Barbour), on reading and authorship in Borges and Browne (Roy Rosenstein), and on Browne's place in the history of antiquarianism (Peter Miller).

Several themes run across these sections, and of particular interest to historians of early modern science and medicine will be the discussions of Browne's place within cultures of antiquarianism, collecting, and communications. Jonathan Post relates travel writing to antiquarianism in his study of Browne's Repertorium, and Miller situates Browne's work within a discussion of the motives for and fate of antiquarianism, connecting Browne's interest with his training in medicine at Montpellier, Padua, and Leiden. Several of the essays dwell on the relationship between mediums of communication and their relationship to Browne's study of nature: Nelson's treatment of the relationships between travel, collecting, and letter writing; Preston's treatment of the relationship between patient and literary monument; and Barbour's treatment of skin as a medium of communication all provide insights into the role of such mediations.

Methodologically, essays by Preston ("A Letter to a Friend as Medical Narrative") and Barbour ("The Hieroglyphics of Skin") are of particular interest. Preston's article on A Letter to a Friend ("An Incomium of Consumptions"), dwelling on the "literary reanimation" of a dying patient, draws out the relationship between the amplification of his subject through writing and the wasting away of the young man. Preston shows that Browne's transformation of the report of the dying man into general truths and good maxims reveals a preoccupation with the mortality of the individual and the prosthetic reanimation of the young man achieved by Browne's letter. Barbour's treatment of Browne's "Hieroglyphics of Skin" is likewise an exemplary case of an interdisciplinary approach. Weaving together medical debates on the status of skin with contemporary cultural and literary significances, Barbour reflects on the relationship between literary and empirical knowledge—the skin as both the binding of the book of anatomical knowledge and an object of knowledge in its own right. [End Page 127]

Natalie Kaoukji
University of Cambridge
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