ABSTRACT
At the death of Thomas Browne in 1682, Horatio, Lord Townshend of Raynam Hall in norfolk received the news together with a eulogistic lament from Browne’s ‘cosen’, Thomas Townshend:
Such a reputation has proved both enduring and alluring; a tranquil and largely imperturbable scholar, who registers the various revolutions around him – political, religious and scientific – only through the wide vistas of his humanist learning and humour, only by retreat to a gentlemanly interest in science or the patient practice of medicine. His scholarship has been accounted as impressively idiosyncratic, viewing the world askew, with high-minded indifference to and defiance of its contemporary tumult. If there is some truth in such a picture, it also neglects the extent to which his voluminous ragbag of learning – his wideranging natural philosophy and natural history, his extensive attention to the Bible and its commentators, his antiquarianism and his picture theory – emerges from the cultural parameters and the political circumstances of his day. Though neither rebarbative nor overly partisan, Thomas Browne’s encyclopaedic scholarship is wholly engaged with the intellectual frameworks and arguments of midseventeenth-century England, embroiled as it was in both civil and scientific upheavals. While he is most frequently remembered for the magnificence of his prose and his temperamental poise, qualities that knit well with the picture of a detached, apolitical figure, The Thorny Place of Knowledge argues that Browne’s significance emerges most fully in the context of contemporary controversy over biblical interpretation and the loss of interpretative authority that so preoccupied
his contemporaries. Browne’s rhetorical subtlety, this work argues, consists in his interlacing of apparently disinterested scholarship and exegetical controversy.
