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Sir Thomas Browne: A Life
Author(s): Reid Barbour (Author)
- Publisher: OUP Oxford
- Publication Date: 1 Aug. 2013
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 550 pages
- ISBN-10: 0199679886
- ISBN-13: 9780199679881
Book Description
Special attention is paid in the biography to Browne’s medical vocation but also to his place within the scientific revolution. New information is offered regarding his childhood in London, his European travels and medical studies, the setting in which he first wrote
Religio Medici, his impact on readers during the English civil wars, and the contemporary view of his medical practice. Overall, the image of Browne that emerges is far bolder and more cosmopolitan, less complacent and provincial, than biographers have assumed ever since Samuel Johnson doubted Browne’s claim that his life up to age thirty resembled a romantic fiction filled with miracles and fables.The biography has extensive material for anyone interested in the histories of religion, education, science and medicine, seventeenth-century England, and early modern philosophy and literature.
Editorial Reviews
Review
This biography is almost unimprovable: assiduous in scholarship, lucid in exposition, its author makes controversy comprehensible. Barbour aimed to show how remarkable Browne’s life was; in the achievement of that aim his success is triumphant. ―
C. D. C. Armstrong, Church TimesBarbour’s determination to echo Browne’s openness to the full spectrum of natural phenomena…provides [His] biography with many of its strengths. It is written with great sympathy and verve and – all too rare a commodity in scholarly writing – a sense of humour. ―
The Times Literary SupplementBrowne has struggled for intellectual as distinct from literary recognition. Reid Barbour belongs to an impressive group of scholars bent on repairing the omission … Barbour’s enterprising and tenacious scholarship succeeds, against many odds, in supplying a series of rounded local contexts. ―
Blair Worden, Literary ReviewBarbour’s
Life sets all of [Browne’s] wavering reputation in meticulous context. ― Brian Dillon, The Guardian
