ABSTRACT
Pseudodoxia Epidemica is Browne’s most multifaceted work, and the book that engages most enticingly with contemporary scholarship, science and politics. The Garden of Cyrus is a masterpiece of literary architecture and Urn Burial is an incomparable account of fragmentation and dissolution. They epitomise the prose brilliance and meditative poise of Browne at his discursive best, and while they no doubt have a certain oblique relationship to their interregnum circumstances, their style of philosophical rumination on death and dissolution, transience and traces has proved more enduringly amenable to the tastes of subsequent eras. Pseudodoxia, by contrast, engages what have proved to be a more time-bound set of subjects. It is thoroughly rooted in both its scholarly and its political moment and many of its underlying presumptions were soon to be undercut. Subsequent decades saw the Bible toppled from its pivotal intellectual position, though not as quickly as is often thought. Its political centrality remains till at least the end of the seventeenth century. However, exegetical priorities in the restoration narrowed considerably, while natural philosophy drew itself up a new set of coordinates and natural history developed revised taxonomies. Most importantly, later centuries created intellectual lineages, into which Pseudodoxia did not fit.
