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Sir Thomas Browne

A Life

Reid Barbour author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:30th Jun '16

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Sir Thomas Browne cover

Sir Thomas Browne: A Life is the first full-scale biography of the extraordinary prose artist, physician, and polymath. With the help of recent archival discoveries, the biography recasts each phase of Browne's life (1605-82) and situates his incomparable writings within the diverse intellectual and social contexts in which he lived, including London, Winchester, Oxford, Montpellier, Padua, Leiden, Halifax, and Norwich. The book makes the case that, as his contemporaries fervently believed, Browne influenced the intellectual and religious direction of seventeenth-century England in singularly rich and dynamic ways. 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.

Barbours piquant recounting of Brownes time at Winchester are an enticing hors doeuvre to his life story, and will have you rolling in clover at the richness of the text...This biography is a gargantuan medical-biopic of War and Peace dimensions, where to travel is more enjoyable than arriving. * Jim Young, Glycosmedia *
[A book] about the eccentric and brilliant Sir Thomas Browne, which I heartily recommend. * Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman *
Fragments of biography and autobiography and intellectual history are woven together under the conceptual generosity of eight thematic chapters and two letters to its subject...Francis is well suited to write about Thomas Browne. * Georgina Wilson, Times Literary Supplement *

ISBN: 9780198778356

Dimensions: 232mm x 157mm x 30mm

Weight: 824g

550 pages