In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century's Most Inquiring Mind
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
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."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
