Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Chapter 6: “Procreate Like Trees”, Generation and Society in Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici

chapter six “Procreate Like Trees” Generation and Society in Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici Marjorie Swann At one point in his meditative prose work Religio Medici, the Norfolk physician Thomas Browne takes on the role of sexologist— with deeply angst-ridden results. “I could be content,” Browne says ruefully, “that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this triviall and vulgar way of coition; It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there any thing that will more deject his coold imagination , when hee shall consider what an odde and unworthy piece of folly hee hath committed.”1 For more than three centuries, this passage has scandalized and embarrassed many of Browne’s readers. In 1643 the earliest commentator on Religio Medici, Sir Kenelm Digby, expressed incredulity that Browne yearned to “beget Children without the helpe of women or without any conjunction or commerce with that sweete, and bewitching Sex,” and most later critics have likewise found Browne’s sentiments “risible.”2 In his preface to Religio Medici, Browne carefully evades responsibility 137 for any opinions his reader might find objectionable by cautioning, “There are many things delivered Rhetorically, many expressions therein meerely Tropicall, and as they best illustrate my intention; and therefore also there are many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason” (60). Some commentators find in this disclaimer a license to ignore Browne’s tree-envy: the sentiment must be meant as a joke.3 In a similar vein, one scholar has recently argued that Browne’s “bizarre” statements about sexual intercourse are best understood as the “juvenilities” of “a young man’s book.”4 But Browne was not just a lad when he produced Religio Medici. The text was, it seems, written sometime between 1633 and 1635. Thus Browne, born in 1605, composed Religio Medici when he was in his late twenties, by which age he had graduated from Oxford, received his M.D. on the continent, and returned to England to serve his medical apprenticeship.5 Moreover, Browne did not see fit to remove his praise of arboreal reproduction when he published the work about a decade later. Two unauthorized editions of Religio Medici appeared in print in 1642; in response, Browne published a slightly revised version of his text in 1643. Since first writing Religio Medici, Browne had married and become a father. Nonetheless, as he prepared Religio Medici for publication , Browne neither overlooked nor omitted his wistful comments about botanical procreation: aside from tweaking one verb, he let the controversial passage stand as originally written. This biographical context perturbs many of Browne’s critics and shapes their response to Religio Medici. Readers often feel compelled to create narratives—featuring Dorothy Mileham, who married Thomas Browne in 1641, and the couple’s twelve children—to discredit the author ’s remarks about conjunction-free generation. One distinguished scholar divines that “[n]o slight was intended to [Browne’s] young wife, just then expecting her first child, and we can be confident that none was taken,” while another insists that we must not take Browne’s ostensible distaste for copulation seriously, since “[t]his did not, in fact, affect the size of his family when he subsequently married, and it is clear that an extravagant literary style did not indicate an abnormal personality .”6 Another critic recently joined this chorus of biographical speculation by suggesting that Browne’s minor revision of the passage— changing “I wish” to “I could be content that we might procreate like trees”—indicates Browne’s increased enthusiasm for sexual intercourse: 138 Marjorie Swann “Does it mean that coition is a great pleasure to him (and to Dorothy Mileham), but he thinks they could live without it if required?”7 Such comments usefully reveal the extent to which the critical response to Religio Medici has been informed—and limited—by readers’ unspoken assumptions about human sexuality. Although the early modern church insisted “that all sexuality should be heterosexual, genital, and con- fined to marriage,”8 we should consider that Browne’s ideas may not be readily aligned with such norms. In twitting Browne’s distaste for copulation, one author wrote in 1691, “I wonder at the unnatural Phancy of such as could wish we might procreate like...