ABSTRACT
Browne’s reputation as a congenial if marginally eccentric figure bedevils him. He was, according to Coleridge, ‘fond of the curious, and a Hunter of Oddities and Strangenesses’, reading the world ‘by the light of the faery Glory around his own head’. Even while, at times, he was ‘a useful enquirer into physical Truth and Fundamental Science’, he was also, Coleridge asserts, ‘a quiet and sublime enthusiast with a strong tinge of the Fantast, the Humorist constantly mingling with and flashing across the Philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye’.1 This is an enticing view of Browne and one that has proved resilient. C.A. Patrides similarly depicts a tension in Pseudodoxia, characterising it as a ‘qualified despondency because fabulous yet enchanting beliefs … must be sacrificed on the altar of demanding truth’.2 The task of reluctantly dismissing fabulous errors underlies Browne’s elaborate occupatio, insisting at length that he will not mention certain errors, so as to avoid having to disprove them: ‘We are unwilling to question the Royall supporters of England, that is, the approved descriptions of the Lion and the Unicorne’, only to continue with an enquiry as to whether ‘in the Lion the position of the pizzle be proper … it will be hard to make out their retrocopulation, or their coupling and pissing backwards, according to the determination of Aristotle’.3
