“Art And Fallacy” Or “The Naked Offer”?

Abstract

Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica holds a unique place in the history of science and in the history of style. A catalogue of errors that seeks to rationalize natural knowledge while preserving traditional beliefs, Pseudodoxia Epidemica straddles Renaissance and modern approaches to rhetoric and nature. In this essay I suggest that Browne, by engaging the central Renaissance metaphor of rhetoric as clothing, playfully challenges the notion that style has moral and intellectual significance as a marker of a reformed natural knowledge. I demonstrate Browne's specific debt to Bacon's "idol of the tribe" in order to show how Browne's writing complicates the traditional understanding of the relationship between style and science in the seventeenth century. Pseudodoxia Epidemica is, I conclude, a sophisticated lesson in how to read.

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