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Sir Thomas Browne
 
 

The Thomas Browne Seminar

Birkbeck College, University of London

Saturday 8th April 2006

Clore Management Centre, Room GO1

Schedule

10.00-10.30   Claire Preston,
‘The Arena of the Unwell: Letter to a Friend as Medical Narrative’

10.30-11.00   Karen Edwards
‘Thomas Browne and the Absurdities of Melancholy’

11.00-11.30   Coffee

11.30-12.00   Stephen Clucas
‘Argument, authority and textual fragmentation in Natural Philosophy: Browne, Burton and Galileo’

12.00-12.30   Kathryn Murphy
‘“A man very well studyed”: Thomas Browne and the Hartlib circle’

12.30-1.30     Lunch

1.30-2.00       Kevin Faulkner
‘The Ghost of a Rose: Hermetic phantasmagoria and The Garden of Cyrus
           
2.00-2.30      Philip Major
Urn-Burial and the interregnum royalist’

2.30-3.00     Coffee

3.00-3.30       Kevin Killeen
‘The Politics of Painting in Pseudodoxia Epidemica

3.30-4.30       Browne & wine

Contact Kevin Killeen: k.killeen@reading.ac.uk

   
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Stephen Clucas, “Argument, authority and textual fragmentation in Natural Philosophy: Browne, Burton and Galileo”

In Galileo’sDialogo di … sopre i due massimi sistemi del mondo le ragioni filosofiche, e naturali (Florence, 1632), the argumentative techniques of seventeenth-century Aristotelian natural philosophy were subjected to a prolonged critique. Part of this critique was aimed at the Aristotelians’ habit of arguing by means of liberal quotation from different parts of the Aristotelian corpus. Salviati compares this selective culling of quotations ‘scattered here and there’ (disseminate in qua, e in là) in the works of Aristotle to now largely discredited cinquecento literary fashion for centonismo, and the piecemeal quotation of sententiae by humanist writers, which were increasingly scorned by the literati of the seicento:

But then, what you and other learned philosophers do with Aristotle’s texts, I will do with the verses of Virgil or Ovid, by making patchworks of passages [centoni] and explaining with them all the affairs of men and secrets of nature.

By contrast to these stale and bankrupt literary modes of argumentation, Galileo presents the dialogue as a vital and dynamic mode of logical investigation. After mocking the patchwork nature of Aristotelian discourse, Salviati exhorts Simplicio to ‘come freely with reasons and demonstrations … and not with textual passages or mere authorities because our discussions are about the sensible world and not about a world on paper.’ This use of Aristotle's works is – he says – philological, rather than philosophical. It is ‘shameful’ he says, when dealing with ‘demonstrable conclusions’ to use texts (rather than demonstrations) to ‘shut the mouth of an opponent’. These appeals to texts as inviolable authorities makes such scholars ‘historians or memory experts’ (ò Istorici, ò Dottori di memoria) rather than philosophers.

In this paper I will use Galileo’s remarks to cast retrospective light on the self-conscious and equivocal use of textual authorities in the works of Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. In their different ways Browne and Burton’s works bear witness to the waning confidence in the compilation of arguments ex auctoribus, and the development of new modes of argumentative rhetoric in natural philosophy. 

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Kathryn Murphy, ‘“A man very well studyed”: Thomas Browne and the Hartlib circle’

This paper will examine the connections between Thomas Browne and the circle of Samuel Hartlib, the archive of whose correspondence testifies to a network of intellectual exchange in the mid-seventeenth century covering a remarkable extent of geography and interests. Recent work on Browne (Preston, 2005) has sought to place him in a context of ‘civility’, of his participation in a community of learned gentlemen engaged in the pursuits of early modern science and antiquarianism. Though Browne himself never corresponded directly with Hartlib, examination of the traces of Browne in the archive reveals some surprising contexts for his works, and suggests that a consideration of the European reception and translation of Browne illuminates our understanding of Browne’s place in the intellectual tradition of his day. 

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Kevin Killeen, ‘The Politics of Painting in Pseudodoxia Epidemica

This paper will examine Thomas Browne (1605-1682) and argue that his central and most substantial work, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), should be seen as engaging in the cultural and polemical wars of the mid seventeenth century.  Brown’s reputation is by and large that of a tolerant and apolitical scholar and scientist, maintaining an irenic distance from the tumultuous events of the civil war.  The paper will explore the extent to which Pseudodoxia should be seen as a partisan intervention in the cultural politics of the period, and it will argue that Browne’s epidemic of error is a consummately political epidemic.  In particular it looks at the politics of painting and addresses the fact that Pseudodoxia includes, in its ‘epidemic’, a seventy page discussion of propriety in ‘pictures’, largely of religious subject matter. It seems somewhat remarkable that this has never been related to iconoclasm in the critical literature on Browne. This curious neglect is, however, in many ways a product of the text itself, in so far as Browne silently elides the existence of any controversy in his discussion of the images. He displays a consummate ability to ‘disinfect’ the context in which he is writing, to de-emphasise the political wrangles over church imagery, while insistently implying the legitimacy of church ornament. The paper explores Browne’s interpretative strategies in discussing pictures and views these in the light of his ideas on the faulty exegesis of the multitude.  Paying detailed textual attention to the painting errors of Pseuedodoxia, but also engaging with the culture of iconoclasm in the 1640s and Browne’s own account in Repetorium of the destruction of images in Norwich Cathedral, this chapter will depict Browne’s work as a sophisticated attack on Puritan and Republican England.

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Philip Major, ‘Urn-Burial and the interregnum royalist’

Comparatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the political sympathies of Thomas Browne during the Interregnum.  There appear to be two main reasons for this: the paucity of evidence available as to what his views actually were; and the perception, fuelled by his studious life in Norwich and by his remarkably disparate literary activities, that his life and work transcends the partisanship and turmoil of the English Revolution. 

Yet far from being disengaged with political and religious controversies of the day, in Urn Burial, written when the Restoration was still two years away, it can be argued that Browne is implicitly positioning himself within a milieu of Royalist and Anglican survivalist literature.  In particular, his use of the conceit of hidden potentiality, of subterranean survival, while typically ambivalent, seems to carry a metaphorical piquancy for repressed Anglicans.  This is mirrored in other subtly subversive works of the period, such as the devotional poetry of Henry Vaughan.  

In exploring political aspects of Urn Burial, my paper will seek to combine textual analysis with reflections on contemporary events and influences in Brown’s life; in particular, the experiences of the man to whom the essay was dedicated, Thomas Le Gros, and the death of his close friend, Joseph Hall, the latter prompting a tellingly anti-Puritan funeral sermon, fondly remembered by Browne in Repertorium over twenty years later.

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