Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (review)

Claire Preston locates the writings of the seventeenth-century author and physician Thomas Browne within the construction of natural philosophical civil discourse, particularly in relation to the growing trend toward empiricism. Preston is to be commended for her close readings of Browne and for attempting to reconcile the methodologies and questions of several too-frequently-disparate academic disciplines, namely literary analysis, cultural history, and the history of science. The book, however, depends too heavily on a single school of thought about the development of civil discourse within natural philosophy, and it fails to examine the limitations of that school. This limits the power of Preston's central claims, all of which apply to the history of science: first, that Browne is a contributor to what she terms the "Baconian project" (3); second, that he participates in anemerging form of civil discourse; and, finally, that his works represent a "link between the early form of essay writing and the post-Restoration scientific report" (3).

The strongest part of this book is Preston's clear commitment to a careful and thoughtful reading of Thomas Browne's works. She begins with his problematic Religio Medici (1642, 1643). This work, which Preston characterizes as "a series of claims, remarks, and enquiries based on Browne's faith and its application to worldly conduct" (11), is, as she notes, representative of an emerging intellectual's nascent efforts to come to terms with difficult questions about his place in the world. She concludes with Browne's last major work, The Garden of Cyrus (1658), which she describes as "Browne in his most rigorously scientific mode" (175). In the process of reviewing his major books, she makes two arguments: first, that his work mirrors a shift in natural philosophical discourse toward the empirical; second, that it parallels the emergence of a new definition of civility within the natural philosophical community.

Both claims are well represented within the history of science, with the first made most memorably by Keith Thomas and the second by Steven Shapin. Preston's work extends existing scholarship by examining the limits of this intellectual transition, particularly in regards to social class. She writes, "For Browne, writing made promiscuous (indiscriminately mixed) through publication is akin to sexual disorder" (25). She goes on to contend that he considers both intellectual and sexual transgression as the result of class transgressions by common people into elite knowledge and space. Had she moved on to connect this preoccupation with social position to the emergence of a particular kind of civil discourse, the book would have contributed something new to the field. Instead, it falls into the same trap that has caught other works on the construction of early modern civility, especially Shapin's The Social History of Truth, which generalizes the behavior of a few privileged men into a thesis about change in all of seventeenth-century natural-philosophical practice.

This problem can be attributed to Preston's reluctance to address the limitations of Shapin's claims, particularly her excellent point about the prevailing anxiety over disorder expressed by privileged gentlemen. Nor does she define the characteristics of the very limited audience about which Shapin was writing, which makes her inclusion of Browne — who was neither a member of the Royal Society nor, as far as she presents, an active experimentalist in the eyes of the Royal Society — distinctly problematic. Finally, she takes for granted that Francis Bacon was the author of a specific type of empirical investigation that met general acceptance among other practitioners. While this might be true for Shapin's small group of gentlemen, a closer examination of the multitude of approaches to mid-seventeenth-century natural philosophy makes this position difficult to maintain.

This limited conception of the seventeenth-century natural-philosophical community also limits her attempts to locate and contextualize Browne's work. Browne's interesting and flexibly structured writings, which Preston brings to life...