ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on what the pre-eminent studies on early modern curiosity seem to have left untouched: the notions of curiosity informing Walter Pater and J. A. Symonds’s interest in Sir Thomas Browne within the framework of nineteenth-century studies. Matthew Arnold’s curiosity would throw a new, creative light on Pater’s more visually pro-curious preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, as well as his other essays, including “Sir Thomas Browne”, later collected in Appreciations. Pater’s “Preface” adroitly functioned as a subtly nuanced response to Arnold’s political plea not only for culture and criticism, but also for curiosity, which Arnold sensed had been long neglected since the French Revolution and disparaged throughout early-nineteenth-century Britain. Florian Deleal’s curiosity might have been doubly vivid to Pater’s contemporaries. Inseparably bound up with “Leonardo da Vinci” and “The Child in the House,” Pater’s lengthy yet neglected portrait of “Sir Thomas Browne” creates a firm basis for his literary cabinet of curiosities.
