Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall

‘a welcome complement to these scholarly projects. The text preserves original spelling and notes; a finely wrought, judicious introduction describes Browne’s wide-ranging curiosity, his influences, his self-fascination, his faith and doubts. A pocket edition of Browne is good to have not least because his aphoristic style rewards casual reading. Open it at any page and find a surprise.’ London Review of Books ‘Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici is one of the most significant literary achievements of the 17th century yet hardly anyone bothers to read it. This edition should change all that.’ The Glasgow Herald ‘Greenblatt and Targoff reveal the humanity, and even the familiarity, behind Browne’s work’ Times Literary Supplement ‘A thing of delightful rarity and strangeness’ Irish Times ‘hypnotic prose…like having an audience with Hamlet’ The Independent

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)

Sir Thomas Browne was the son of a prosperous London merchant who died while his son was still young. Browne attended Winchester College and Oxford, then spent several years studying medicine at Montpellier, Padua, and Leiden, before receiving his MD in 1633. In 1637 he settled in Norwich where he practiced medicine and lived for the rest of his life. Religio Medici was first published in 1642, without the author’s consent; a year later he approved a new printing (with some of the controversial material removed), and the book became a best seller, subsequently translated into several European languages. Browne’s encyclopedia, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, was first published in 1646 and went through six editions. His last work to be published in his lifetime, Urne-Buriall, appeared in 1658. Browne was knighted in 1671, when King Charles II, his queen, and his court came to Norwich.

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt is one of the founders of New Historicism, and the author of many books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize). He is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard.

Ramie Targoff

Ramie Targoff is the author of Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England; John Donne: Body and Soul; and the forthcoming Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England. She is the Jehuda Reinharz Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities and a professor of English at Brandeis.

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