A new edition of Thomas Browne's works

Eighty years after it was last attempted by Geoffrey Keynes, Oxford University Press has commissioned a much-desired and long-needed new edition of the complete works of Browne, an edition which will stand alongside other their other important editions of seventeenth-century prose currently in progress or recently published (for example, Bacon, Donne, Burton, and Hobbes).

This edition, under the general editorship of Claire Preston, will comprise eight volumes and, unlike the Keynes Works (1928-31; 2nd edition, 1964), it will include all Browne’s published works together with all his known manuscripts and correspondence.

Publication

The complete edition should be fully published by 2017.

What will the edition contain?

The edition will offer actual rather than composite texts of each work, the full correspondence in chronological order, and the notebooks, where the volumes are discrete rather than hybrid gatherings, in their original work-in-progress condition. The edition as a whole aims, as well as providing an authoritative and reliable version of all Browne’s major and minor works, to show him at work through his redraftings, revisions, and corrections. Critically and textually annotated, this edition will eventually be available in print and in electronic formats.

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 N. West (Northwestern), Jessica Wolfe (North Carolina), and Andrew Zurcher (Cambridge).

Structure

The structure of the edition is as follows:

  • Volume One: Religio Medici (Reid Barbour and Brooke Conti)
  • Volumes Two and Three: Pseudodoxia Epidemica [vol two: text; vol three: annotations] (Kevin Killeen, William N. West, and Jessica Wolfe)
  • Volume Four: Urne-Buriall, The Garden of Cyrus, A Letter to a Friend, Christian Morals (Kathryn Murphy and Claire Preston)
  • Volume Five: Tracts and minor essays (the whole editorial team)
  • Volumes Six and Seven: Notebooks (Felicity Henderson and Antonia Moon)
  • Volume Eight: Correspondence (Anne Dunan-Page and Andrew Zurcher)

The editorial team will be delighted to hear from anyone who has questions or can contribute information which might be of interest and use during the editing process. The editors can be reached at thomasbrowne@camtools.cam.ac.uk.

Contacts

For information about the Thomas Browne Seminar, please contact: