This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, the edition demonstrates the breadth of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature. Lauded by writers ranging from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf, from Borges to W.G. Sebald, Browne's distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne's range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct. His writings include the hauntingly meditative Urn-Burial, and the elaborate The Garden of Cyrus, a work that borders on a madness of infinite pattern. Religio Medici, probably Browne's most famous work, is at once autobiography, intricate religious-scientific paradox, and a monument of tolerance in the era of the English civil war. This volume also includes his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, an encyclopaedia of error which contains within its vast remit the entire intellectual landscape of the seventeenth century-its science, its natural history, its painting, its history, its geography and its biblical oddities. The volume enables students to experience the ways in which Browne brings his lucid, baroque and stylish prose to bear across this range of diverse material, together with a carefully poised wit. This volume contains almost all of the author's work that was published in his lifetime, as well as a selection of writings published after his death. Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Browne.

Sir Thomas Browne was one of the greatest English prose stylists--a physician by vocation, a theologian by inclination, and a writer of great elegance and erudition. This edition of his works, with Introduction, Notes, Comments, and Bibliography, includes all Browne's major pieces and selections from his minor papers and letters. The Notes are designed to help the student understand Browne's references, and the Introduction provides an account of his life and an analysis of his baroque style against the background of seventeenth-century literature.

A profound and delightful jeu d'esprit of a book, mixing biography, etymology, cultural history and quixotic scientific experiments. Aldersey-Williams pulls the unfairly neglected yet enormously influential writer Thomas Browne out of the obscure pages of Pseudodoxia Epidemica and into the 21st century, to apply his generous curiosity and rational intelligence to the vagaries and contradictions of life today. Browne has had some impressive fans (Sebald, Woolf, Borges, Poe, Marias) but this book will revive him, bringing his extraordinary genius to a whole new audience.

This book is a study of Sir Thomas Browne and his work as a whole: of the thinker as he appears in the context of contemporary prejudice on the one hand and the growth of science and scepticism on the other: of the rational man who was at the same time deeply religious, capable of 'being in uncertainties' in a dogmatic age. From this appreciation of Browne's personality, Mrs Bennett leads us to a fresh understanding of his writings. She examines each work in detail, with commentary and quotation where these seem needed. What emerges most clearly from this treatment is the consistency of his thinking, the internal logic of all he wrote; and because Browne wrote to enlighten rather than to entertain, a just appreciation of his style depends on understanding what he was expressing and Mrs Bennett leads us to the central issues of Browne's work.