The Thomas Browne Seminar

Overview

Symposium, 29th May 2013: 'Poetics and Prose theory in Early Modern English'

9.30am-5.30pm, 29 May 2013, CREMS, University of York

Open to all – entrance free and no registration required. Feel free to attend parts.

Programme for the symposium

10.00-10.45 Poetic Treatises in Early Modern England

  • Gavin Alexander (Cambridge): 'The proportions of early modern poetics'

10.45-11.30

  • Hannah Leah Crummé (Kings College London): 'Theorizing English Rhetoric (Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike and Fernando de Herrera)'
  • Michael Hetherington (Cambridge):  'Remembering Lysias: The Coherence of the Text in Early Modern England'

Coffee 11.30-12.00

12.00-1.15 From Theory to Poetic Practice

  • Hannah Crawforth (Kings College, London): 'Richard Willes’ Poetic Theory and Practice'
  • Micha Lazarus (Oxford): 'Sidney and Vettori’s Aristotle'
  • Louise Wilson (St Andrews): 'Theories of pleasure in early modern literary criticism'

Lunch, 1.15-2.15

2.15-3.30

  • Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (King's College, London): 'A pause for thought?: Critical writing by women and men 1610-1660'
  • Katherine Acheson (University of Waterloo in Ontario): 'The 'Way of Dichotomy': Visual Rhetoric, Dichotomous Tables, and Paradise Lost'
  • John Roe (York): ''Besely seeking with a continuell chaunge': the poetics of indeterminacy in Petrarch and Wyatt'.

Coffee, 3.30-4.00

4.00-4.45 Prose Theory

  • Florence Hazrat (Cambridge): 'Poesy, Plot and Parenthesis: Rhetorical Figures as Structural and Narrative Strategy in Early Modern Prose Writing'
  • Stuart Farley (St Andrews): 'The Extemporary Method in Early Modern English Prose'

4.45-5.30

  • Jenny Richards (Newcastle): 'Appealing to 'the physical ear': Thomas Nashe on prose style'

Overview

The Thomas Browne Seminar is a forum for exploring the intellectual history of the seventeenth century, the relations between its apparently incompatible disciplines and the social, scientific and political contexts in which they arose. It is not, by any means, restricted to Thomas Browne himself, but also examines more broadly the intellectual culture in the mid-seventeenth century.

Papers are invited on any aspect of mid-century culture, the history of science and scholarship, religious and antiquarian thought, natural history, politics and the history of trivia, in particular, but not restricted to, those related to Browne. As the seminar will involve an ongoing series of meetings, ideas for future seminars are also invited.

The Thomas Browne Seminar will consider publications of its proceedings and the website will continue to grow. In particular, the bibliography of scholarly work will be expanded.

The TBS is run jointly by the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Thomas Browne was a significant figure in the scholarly and scientific community of the seventeenth century, who nevertheless defies categorisation and whose blend of humanism, scholasticism and natural philosophy is testament to the intellectual flux of the period.

News & events

News

AHRC award for Oxford Works of Sir Thomas Browne

The AHRC have awarded a grant of c. £946,000 to bring to completion a new 8 volume Oxford University Press edition of The Works of Sir Thomas Browne. The grant, which runs for 5 years, is a collaboration between Universities of Birmingham (Claire Preston, PI), York (Kevin Killeen) and Cambridge (Andrew Zurcher). The edition, under the general editorship of Claire Preston, will include authoritative editions of all Browne’s published works together with his correspondence and his voluminous notebooks. Critically and textually annotated, the edition will be available in print and in electronic formats. The grant includes provision for two postdoctoral research assistants and two Ph.D. studentships. This international collaboration involves a team of scholars, working on Thomas Browne. The editors are Reid Barbour (North Carolina), Brooke Conti (SUNY Brockport), Anne Dunan-Page (Aix), Felicity Henderson (Royal Society), Kevin Killeen (York), Antonia Moon (British Library), Kathryn Murphy (Oxford), Claire Preston (Cambridge), William West (Northwestern), Jessica Wolfe (North Carolina), and Andrew Zurcher (Cambridge).

The Complete Works project will be inaugurated with a single-volume Works of Browne, published in the new series, Oxford 21st Century Authors: Sir Thomas Browne (OUP, 2013) edited by Kevin Killeen (York). http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199640430.do

News on Browne and the project can be found on the website of the ‘Sir Thomas Browne Seminar’: http://www.york.ac.uk/english/news-events/browne/ 

 

The Oxford University Press Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne, gen. ed. Claire Preston

A major new edition of the complete works of Sir Thomas Browne has been commissioned by Oxford University Press, due to be published in 2017.

Publications

Recent publications

Kevin Killeen

Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (Ashgate, 2009)

From the blurb:

This book addresses one of the most enigmatic of seventeenth century writers, Thomas Browne (1605-1682), whose voracious intellectual pursuits provide an unparalleled insight into how early modern scholarly culture understood the relations between its disciplines. Browne's work encompasses biblical commentary, historiography, natural history, classical philology, artistic propriety and an encyclopaedic coverage of natural philosophy. This book traces the intellectual climate in which such disparate interests could cohere, locating Browne within the cultural and political matrices of his time. While Browne 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, this work argues that Browne's significance emerges most fully in the context of contemporary battles over interpretative authority, within the intricately linked fields of biblical exegesis, scientific thought, and politics. Killeen's work centres on a reassessment of the scope and importance of Browne's most elaborate text, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, his vast encyclopaedia of error with its mazy series of investigations and through this explores the multivalent nature of early-modern enquiry.

Contents: Introduction: culture, scholarship and politics in Pseudoxia Epidemica; 'The inconsiderable salarie of Judas': Biblical historiography and law; 'The community of this fruit': commentary, curiosa and chronology; Subtle seeds and agile emanations: natural philosophy, religion and witchcraft; 'The doctor quarrels with some pictures': Browne's fabulous animals; The politics of painting; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Reid Barbour and Claire Preston (eds)

Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed (Oxford University Press, 2008)

From the blurb:

Doctor, linguist, scientist, natural historian, and writer of what is probably the most stunning prose in the English language, Sir Thomas Browne was a virtuoso in learning whose many interests form a representative portrait of his age. To understand the period which we more usually refer to as the Civil War, the Restoration, or the Scientific Revolution, we need to understand parts of the intellectual and spiritual background that are often neglected and which Browne magnificently figures forth.

This collection of essays about all aspects of Thomas Browne's work and thought is the first such volume to appear in 25 years. It offers the specialist and the student a wide-ranging array of essays by an international team of leading scholars in seventeenth-century literary studies who extend our understanding of this extremely influential and representative early-modern polymath by embracing recent developments in the field, including literary-scientific relations, the development of Anglican spirituality, civil networks of intellectual exchange, the rise of antiquarianism, and Browne's own legacy in modern literature.

For the Contents, please see the Browne bibliography under Resources.

Kathryn Murphy and Richard Todd (eds)

"A man very well studyed": New Contexts for Thomas Browne (Brill, 2008)

From the blurb:

For many years, scholarship on Thomas Browne (1605-1682) saw him as tangential to his period’s thought and writing: an obscure and quaint stylist, detached from the turbulence of mid-17th century England. This volume contributes to the current reevalution of Browne’s involvement in his times: identifying his political commitments, milieu, reading, and readers. The essays collected in this volume place Browne’s works in unexpected contexts - in Holland, Poland and Germany, in Restoration politics, in publishing history and medical theory. It presents new research into his reputation in the later 17th century, his manuscripts, medical dissertation, association with the Hartlib circle and habits of revision. Essays on familiar works place them in new light, while readings of his letters, notebooks, and lesser works broaden our understanding of Browne as a writer. The result is a fuller picture of Browne’s significance in 17th-century European culture.

Contributors include: Eric Achermann, Hugh Adlington, Reid Barbour, Harm Beukers, Siobhán Collins, Louise Denmead, Karen Edwards, Doris Einsiedel, Kevin Killeen, Mary Ann Lund, Philip Major, Antonia Moon, Kathryn Murphy, Brent Nelson, and Claire Preston.

For the Contents , please see the Browne bibliography under Resources .

Claire Preston

Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science(Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Winner of the 2005 British Academy Crawshay Prize

From the British Academy citation:

Behind Claire Preston’s Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science, and informing it throughout, lies a rich background of reading and research, some of it – as with her investigation of the Renaissance obsession with collections (so-called 'cabinets of curiosities') - published previously in their own right as articles. Browne is of course, one of the great English prose stylists. That has long been recognized. Dr. Preston pays due and discriminating attention to the way Browne writes, and those characteristics of his prose that make him so strikingly individual and memorable in a period (after all) of other great prose writers. But she has been able as well and with consummate skill to establish and clarify his position as a man striving for encyclopaedic knowledge while simultaneously despairing of ever being able to attain it.

Central to her book is the concept of 'civility', in the sense of 'civil behaviour', as a key to Browne’s work and thinking: an ideal that extends far beyond its ordinary social sense to encompass intellectual collaboration and exchange, selfless investigation, and the bringing to bear upon all the varied spheres of human enquiry, whether scientific or otherwise, of such fundamental values as courtesy, modesty, honesty and generosity.

Refreshingly, Dr. Preston focuses less upon Browne’s early book Religio Medici (although she writes excellently about it) as upon the later and more important but less well-known Pseudodoxia Epidemica (or, Vulgar Errors), Urn-Burial, and the magnificent Garden of Cyrus. Andrew Hadfield, reviewing Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science recently in the TLS described it there as an 'engaging, intelligent and often Brownian study', 'learned and witty', 'a fitting tribute to its subject'. It is certainly a book eminently deserving of the Academy’s Crawshay prize.

Bibliography

Browne bibliography

This bibliography consists of scholarly works on Browne, although it is by no means complete and will be updated at intervals. Titles may appear in more than one category. News of publications or notable omissions gratefully received: kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk.

Resources

Resources

About Browne

Browne's work online

Useful editions of Browne’s work are available online at James Eason’s University of Chicago site. However he does warn that the texts have only been partially proof-read. It also includes contemporary responses to Religio Medici and Pseudodoxia Epidemica and much else besides.

Also of use are the following:

Related links

Legal statements disclaimer

The Thomas Browne Seminar makes every practical effort to ensure that the information it provides on this website is accurate and up-to-date. This website contains hypertext links to external websites controlled or maintained by parties other than the Thomas Browne Seminar, for which it is not responsible.

Copyright

Copyright of the contents of these web pages is controlled by the Thomas Browne Seminar, except where noted (such as Book announcements). Please feel free to view, copy and print documents within this website, but we would appreciate it if you would acknowledge the source of the material. Please contact Dr Kevin Killeen in case of any query.

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Contacts

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