‘Speake, that I may see thee’: The Styles of Sir Thomas Browne

Abstract

Abstract ‘Language most shewes a man: speake, that I may see thee’.1 So wrote Ben Jonson, in words that come to mind when we think of Sir Thomas Browne. Yet the picture that emerges from Browne’s writing is not that of a single individual, but a veritable chorus, so diverse are the styles of the early Religio Medici, with its dramatic, often paradoxical boldness; the careful inquiry of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which examines and refutes popular and scholarly errors; the somber Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall, which ranges from the careful (if misguided) examination of a group of funerary urns found in a field in Norfolk to considerations of the transitory nature of all life; and the Garden of Cyrus, which finds patterns in all of nature.

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