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  • Home
    • About
    • A Thomas Browne Society?
    • Contact
    • Funding support
    • Anthony Batty Shaw
  • His Life
  • His works
    • Letter to a Friend
  • Public Art
    • Public Art : Thomas Browne by henry Pegram
    • Public Art : Homage to Sir Thomas Browne
    • Talking Statues
    • Tazro Niscino installation
  • Events
    • Sir Thomas Browne Day 2019
    • Thomas Browne Day 2018
    • Thomas Browne Day archive
  • Links
    • In Our Time
    • Articles
  • Publications
    • Adventures of STB in 21st C
  • Gallery
  • How Thomas Browne are you?
  • Thomas Browne Blog
  • Thomas Browne around Norwich
  • Stories and anecdotes
    • A Cabinet of Rarities
    • A humorous take on STB
  • Thomas Browne Day 2018

Blogging Browne

About Sir Thomas Browne's writing - an opinion

3/30/2017

1 Comment

 
Sir Thomas is the Johann Sebastian Bach of English prose. Like other major authors such as Jonathan Swift and  Horace Walpole, he was an amateur who wrote to amuse himself.

Though Sir Thomas did not do a lot of writing, the stylistic range is impressive. It is no big deal for him to go from the organ tones of the closing section of the Urn Burial to the Pliny like compilations of the Pseudodoxia and the miscellaneous scientific treatises. Sir Thomas at times wrote in a lurid purple prose which has long since gone out of fashion though some later writers have been able to imitate and extend it, e g Thomas De Quincey in the three part account of his drug addiction and Melville in Moby Dick. Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) has also written some tolerable purple prose in Look Homeward Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935). In general, purple prose runs the risk of bombast and embarrassing pomposity.

The canon of Sir Thomas' writings can be best appreciated in the context of the seventeenth century which was the age of Baroque prose. The prose of the late sixteenth century e g Sidney's Arcadia and Lyly's Euphues,  had been highly mannered and contorted. These writers as well as Shakespeare in the prose parts of the plays were influenced by the Italian, Spanish, and Dutch painters (including Michelangelo and El Greco) who thrived on the distortion of form whereas the early Baroque painters like Caravaggio and Rubens restored the integrity of form. The prose writers of the seventeenth century - Bacon, Burton, Taylor, Donne, Milton, Browne, the early Swift, Pascal, Descartes, Moliere - likewise aimed at three dimensional effects. They used the verbal equivalent of foreshortening and light and shadow.

Sir Thomas' work needs to be seen in the light of Baroque art-- like "Areopagita" and Paradise Lost, the plays of Corneille and Racine and the satires of Dryden.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams has shown how Sir Thomas was as much a believer in witchcraft as James I or the authors of the Malleus Malificarum-- or Montague Summers in the first half of the twentieth century! This is helpful and important, because it reminds us that an author's environment can be both formative and limiting.

Sent in by Steve Harvy
1 Comment
Kevin Michael Faulkner link
3/31/2017 06:32:50 am

Probably one of the most perceptive if short, observations I've read about Browne in quite a long time. however, its worth remembering that without Browne's attendance at Bury St. Edmund's in 1662 (one of the very few biographical details known about his later life) it would not be possible to cast aspersions on his intellect. It is therefore unfortunate that this frequently misunderstood biographical detail is revived and highlighted in the opening pages of Hugh Aldersey-Williams otherwise good book, when so many other aspects of Browne's humanity and intellect remain unappreciated, little-known and unexplored.

We too, are far from immune from the prejudices of our own age, with our own intellectual environment being both formative and limiting, not least in misconceptions of the term 'occult'' less pejorative termed as 'esoteric'.

Understanding the pervasive influence of the esoteric upon 17th c. science is far greater than commonly imagined, (Penelope Gouk's book 'Music, Science and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England' clarifies many misconceptions) many of the foremost exponents of the English scientific revolution had an interest in magical thinking, the precursor to scientific thinking, such as can be found in the works of Plato and Pythagoras including 'the harmony of the spheres' , 'sacred geometry' and alternative Creations myths such as Atlantis, as well as those of the Renaissance such as Della Porta, Van Helmont and Browne's contemporary Athanasius Kircher (one of browne's favourite authors) all of which are a far cry from popular imaginings of witches and broomsticks, potions and vampires.

But anyway a neat understanding of Browne's place in intellectual history and placing in context of his place in literary history, leaving one with a wish to read more of Mr. Harvy's perceptive interpretation of the Janus-faced sage of Norwich..

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This site is part of the Thomas Browne Project with the aim to collate information and contributions about Sir Thomas Browne, his work, life and times in Norwich and make them accessible to the public,  edited and published by Marion Catlin of The Shift Norwich
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