Raining Mice and Russian Leather: The Production of Knowledge in the Early Royal Society and Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus

This essay outlines the close similarities between Thomas Browne and the early Royal Society’s visions of the known world--visions importantly shaped by the specific affective experiences of sociable conversation and peripatetic rumination. As a result of these associative and pleasurable experiences, Browne and Royal Society members saw before them a world populated recurrently and simultaneously by the ordinary and the bizarre--a natural world tessellated, strange, and yet increasingly discernible. In addition, however, these ephemeral exchanges and reveries also made clear the elusivity of any full and ordered vision of this endlessly variable reality.