ABSTRACT
Browne is renowned, on the basis of a comment by John Evelyn, for his cabinet of curiosities, his ‘whole house and Garden a Paradise & Cabinet of rarities, & that of the best collection, especially Medails, books, Plants, natural things’.1 We might imagine drawer upon drawer of insect specimens or sparkling cases of unicorn horn and precious stones, bird eggs and bejewelled rarities from his travels. His notebooks and letters, however, suggest more abattoir than wunderkammer, a house of flayed skins, home-anatomy and vivisection. He writes himself memos: ‘To trie the experiment of killing of a frogge by dropping tarre upon his head & back’; ‘make gellies of bulls [and] boares pizzells’.2 To test if glass is poisonous, Browne grinds some up and feeds ‘dogs above a dram thereof, subtilly powdered in butter and paste, without any visible disturbance’. To confirm Henry Power’s finding that snails have eyes, Browne undertakes to ‘sindge the top thereof with Aqua Fortis, or other corrosive water’.3 Browne’s scientific reputation has largely consisted in these somewhat fitful experiments, which occupy his notebooks and his kitchen more than his published writings and which, in any case, hardly seem to be imbued with any philosophical centrality. This chapter explores an alternative set of concerns which more aptly characterise his place in seventeenth-century thought. It has what might seem an unlikely trajectory, arguing first that Browne engages in corpuscular debates and matter theory and that his detailed attention to seminality, electric and magnetic phenomena places him squarely within the terms of early-modern natural philosophy, with its recurrent interest in the relationship of matter and spirit. From here, the work looks at the links between theories of corporeality and early-modern witchcraft, arguing that the historiography of witchcraft has so successfully depicted it as a phenomenon driven by frenzied religious beliefs, and moreover, has so effectively cordoned it off as a ‘Puritan’
Fig. 4.1 Basilisk, from: Marco Aurelio Severino, Vipera Pythia (1650).
