Sir Thomas Browne

Reid Barbour brings the historical evidence of Browne's life together for the first time, allowing readers to contextualise his most celebrated works.

A profound and delightful jeu d'esprit of a book, mixing biography, etymology, cultural history and quixotic scientific experiments. Aldersey-Williams pulls the unfairly neglected yet enormously influential writer Thomas Browne out of the obscure pages of Pseudodoxia Epidemica and into the 21st century, to apply his generous curiosity and rational intelligence to the vagaries and contradictions of life today. Browne has had some impressive fans (Sebald, Woolf, Borges, Poe, Marias) but this book will revive him, bringing his extraordinary genius to a whole new audience.

Excerpt from Works of Sir Thomas Browne After his return to England, Dr. Browne appears to have established himself in practice at Shipden Hall, near Halifax; and at this place, in the enforced leisure that generally falls to the lot of the young doctor, he doubtless wrote his first and most famous work, the Religio Medici. Internal evidences, derived from the references he makes to his age in the Religio Medici, almost certainly fix the actual year in which this unique 'piece of serene wisdom was written as 1635, when he was in his thirtieth year. He wrote: As yet I have not seen one revolution of Saturn, nor hath my pulse beat thirty years and again, in his preface to the edition of 1643: This, I confess, about seven years past, with some others of affinity thereto, for my private exercise and satisfaction, I had at leisure hours composed.' About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.