The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century’s Most Inquiring Mind. By Hugh Aldersey-Williams. W.W. Norton; 330 pages; $26.95. Granta; £20.
THOMAS BROWNE was a 17th-century Norwich doctor who wrote mysterious-sounding books such as “Religio Medici” and “Pseudodoxia Epidemica”. Few read him now, but some will know of him from “The Rings of Saturn”, a novel by W.G. Sebald, a German author who died in 2001. Browne has long been a writer’s writer, and Sebald is one of a line to be stirred by the “ceremonial lavishness”, as he put it, of Browne’s “labyrinthine sentences”.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams also admires Browne’s labyrinths, but as a science writer himself he is particularly interested in Browne’s understanding of science. Browne was a medical man, but he was also, in an age before specialisms, a naturalist, an archaeologist, an anthropologist, a linguist and an inventor of words—“medical” itself being among the 784 he coined.
“The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century” is not a conventional biography. It is more a conversation with an old friend. In one of the best chapters in this engaging and often funny book, the author imagines the statue of Browne climbing off its plinth in Norwich and walking with him through the city as they discuss the...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1H3wL4x
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