Call for Papers (Brill)

The Leiden Conference “400 Years of Sir Thomas Browne” was held in late October 2005. Some of the papers are being included in a proposal, editors Clair Preston and Reid Barbour, under consideration with OUP. It is intended that some of the Leiden papers, together with papers from the Birkbeck Thomas Browne seminar to be held on 8 April 2006, will form the basis of a proposal to be submitted to the distinguished Leiden publisher E.J. Brill, in the series “Intersections”. If you are interested in being a part of this proposal, whether or not you are giving a paper at the 2006 Birkbeck seminar, please contact Richard Todd (University of Leiden) r.k.todd@let.leidenuniv.nl, who is planning to attend the Birkbeck seminar on 8 April.

Click here to view Brill's “Intersections” information

Recent Winner of the 2005 British Academy Crawshay Prize

Dr Claire Preston’s Book, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2005) is the recipient of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize 2005, awarded by the British Academy.

From the British Academy citation:

'Behind Claire Preston’s Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science, and informing it throughout, lies a rich background of reading and research, some of it – as with her investigation of the Renaissance obsession with collections (so-called 'cabinets of curiosities') - published previously in their own right as articles. Browne is of course, one of the great English prose stylists. That has long been recognized. Dr. Preston pays due and discriminating attention to the way Browne writes, and those characteristics of his prose that make him so strikingly individual and memorable in a period (after all) of other great prose writers. But she has been able as well and with consummate skill to establish and clarify his position as a man striving for encyclopaedic knowledge while simultaneously despairing of ever being able to attain it.

Central to her book is the concept of 'civility', in the sense of 'civil behaviour', as a key to Browne’s work and thinking: an ideal that extends far beyond its ordinary social sense to encompass intellectual collaboration and exchange, selfless investigation, and the bringing to bear upon all the varied spheres of human enquiry, whether scientific or otherwise, of such fundamental values as courtesy, modesty, honesty and generosity.

Refreshingly, Dr. Preston focuses less upon Browne’s early book Religio Medici (although she writes excellently about it) as upon the later and more important but less well-known Pseudodoxia Epidemica (or, Vulgar Errors), Urn-Burial, and the magnificent Garden of Cyrus. Andrew Hadfield, reviewing Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science recently in the TLS described it there as an 'engaging, intelligent and often Brownian study', 'learned and witty', 'a fitting tribute to its subject'. It is certainly a book eminently deserving of the Academy’s Crawshay prize.

Forthcoming Browne Publications

Kevin Killeen, The Thorny Place of Knowledge: Thomas Browne and Early Modern Intellectual Culture (Ashgate, 2007)

Reid Barbour, preparing an intellectual biography, provisionally entitled "The Education of Sir Thomas Browne"

Clarie Preston and Reid Barbour (eds), a collection of essays on Thomas Browne

Recent Events

'Four Centuries of Thomas Browne'
Department of English, University of Leiden
Thursday and Friday, 27- 28 October 2005

Organised by Professor Richard Todd and Dr Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen (University of Leiden)

Conference speakers:
Keynotes

• Professor Brooke Conti, Yale University/Temple University, PA, “‘The Rhetoricke Wherewith I Perswade Another I Cannot Persuade Myself’: The Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith”
• Dr Claire Preston, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, “Of Cyder and Sallets: Browne and the Hortulan Saints”
• Professor Reid Barbour, University of North Carolina, “Atheists, Monsters, and Plague: Weeds and Tares in the Garden of Thomas Browne’s Padova, 1632”

Conference Papers:

• Ms Kathryn Murphy, Balliol College, Oxford, “‘A Likely Story’: Plato’s Timaeus in The Garden of Cyrus”
• Professor Roy Rosenstein, American University of Paris, “Browne, Borges, and Back:  The Phantasmagories of Imaginative Learning”
• Professor Brent Nelson, University of Saskatchewan, “Sir Thomas and Son, Collectors”
• Professor Richard Todd, University of Leiden, “Some bibliographical considerations on Browne’s use of “promiscuity” in the 1633 edition of John Donne’s Poems, “Elegies to the Author”
• Dr Mary Ann Lund, Wadham College, Oxford, “Spiritual Physicians?: Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne on religion and medicine” 
• Mr Kees Verduin, University of Leiden, “Under the leaden planet: Thomas Browne, black bile and seventeenth-century time travel”
• Dr Hugh Adlington, King’s College London, “Sir Thomas Browne and Divination”
• Dr Ingo Berendsmeyer, University of Siegen, “The Politics of Sir Thomas Browne”
• Dr Kevin Killeen, University of Reading, “‘The community of this fruit’: Commentary and curiosa in Pseudodoxia Epidemica”
• Professor Dawn Morgan, St Thomas University, “Reparation of ‘our Primarie ruines’: Thomas Browne’s Resistance to Allegory.”
  
  
• Panel: “Sir Thomas Browne, Leiden and medicine in the seventeenth century”: Professor Harm Beukers, Dr Manfred Horstmanshoff (University of Leiden).