In Our Time - Sir Thomas Browne

Episode Date: June 6, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the range, depth and style of Browne (1605-82) , a medical doctor whose curious mind drew him to explore and confess his own religious views, challenge myths and errors in science and consider how humans respond to the transience of life. His Religio Medici became famous throughout Europe and his openness about his religion, in that work, was noted as rare when others either kept quiet or professed orthodox views. His Pseudodoxia Epidemica challenged popular ideas, whether about the existence of mermaids or if Adam had a navel, and his Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial was a meditation on what matters to humans when handling the dead. In 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote, "Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those that do are the salt of the earth." He also contributed more words to the English language than almost anyone, such as electricity, indigenous, medical, ferocious, carnivorous ambidextrous and migrant.With Claire Preston Professor of Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary University of LondonJessica Wolfe Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel HillAndKevin Killeen Professor of English at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, Sir Thomas Brown, 1605 to 1682, was a physician and one of the most influential authors in English, if not widely known. According to Virginia Woolf, those who love his writing are the salt of the earth.

He was celebrating his day for his range of interests and the intelligence of his prose and was attacked for prising wit over faith, and in a tumultuous time with polarised views on the church and politics, he had the confidence to reveal his uncertainty. He explored his ideas in works on religious belief as a doctor, on the transients of memorials and on popular misconceptions in science, coining new words which have outlasted his early fame, among them, electricity, coma, medical, ferocious, carnivorous and migrant.

with me to discuss the works and life of Sir Thomas Brown are Jessica Wolfe, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kevin Killeen, Professor of English at the University of York, and Claire Preston, Professor of Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Claire Preston, what was his background? Thomas Brown was born in the city of London

to a silk mercer, a merchant in silk, so a relatively well-off family. He was sent to Winchester College, and did the usual very rhetorically, elaborate, grammatically, sophisticated training of the humanist English grammar school. He later went to Oxford to what is now Pembroke College, and there he read the usual BA and M.A., which again, very, very literary. Before we go on further, because we're going on further later, because we're going on further later, tell us more about his background. We've got the stepping sense of education. Why did he end up being called Sir Thomas?

Oh, well, he was Sir Thomas very late in his life because somebody had to be knighted when King Charles II visited Norwich and the parliamentarian mayor refused to receive an honour from the king so they called on the second citizen of Norwich which was the famous Dr. Brown who became Sir Thomas but he was not born to any kind of noble or really gentry family at all although there were some nice connections in the background But there was apparently on the surface quite a disrupted childhood

which he seems to transform into an idyllic past His father died when he was about eight, and his mother remarried and ne'er-do-well with court connections, but also somebody who got into a lot of trouble, especially financially. And his mother and stepfather essentially tried to spend down the inheritance from the father until the court and other relatives intervened. And the money was restored, and that allowed Thomas to go to Winchester and later to Oxford and indeed later to. to study medicine. Is it true that his mother and this soldier of fortune went to Ireland and didn't come back? Yes, as far as we know. They certainly went to Ireland.

Whether they ever came back or not, we don't know. He doesn't seem to miss them, according to his own account of his childhood. I suspect that there was a lot of ill feeling between the stepfather who was grasping and Thomas, who was a very different sort of character. So I would imagine that he would not have felt kindly toward his stepfather or his mother for having chosen such a man. And you've alluded to the strictness of the curriculum at Winchester. So he had his own education. He called Simpling in Cheapside.

What did you mean by that? That's a very interesting question. I'd love to know the answer to that. He may have been referring to the fact that, of course, early 17th century London was not the built-up place it is now so that you could actually get out into the fields pretty easily from Cheapside, which is where he lived. He may also be referring to the stands and stalls

that were selling herbal remedies and just bales of vegetable matter that could be made into medicines, so it's simples, in other words. But as often with Brown, the word is the key and it's sometimes quite difficult to unlock it. What did he mean by simpling?

Simpling means in the period, it means to go out and to collect herbs in the fields that can be compounded into medicines. So to be as simpler or to simple is to collect medical herbal material. So this is when he was a boy before he'd gone to Winchester? Yes, yes. So it's there from the beginning?

It is indeed. And we also know from the records of Winchester when he was still a young boy, he went there when he was 10, that he was doing similar kinds of things in Hampshire outside the town. So he goes to Winchester, he goes to Oxford. He decides to be a doctor. Where did he get trained? You could be trained in medicine at Oxford,

but it was not a very advanced medical course. and most people who could afford it chose to go to the continent. So Brown did a sort of medical grand tour, and he went from Montpellier, which was very botanically sophisticated. With Arabic roots? Indeed, as the whole of the southern European coast would have been. He then went to Padua, which was the great center of anatomical learning, and again with Arab roots, because there was so much intellectual commerce with Venice.

Is it true they played music once? Well, they did anatomy. I don't know. Does anybody else know that? You're being nodded at on your own. Okay, that's just a little trivial remark. I mean, I'm ready. And thank you for nodding, yes, right?

Oh, well done. I didn't know that. And then he went to Leiden. Then he went to Leiden. And Leiden was, in a way, the new boy on the block. Leiden was a relatively modern, a new medical school, and it had a particular emphasis on clinical training, bedside practice and so on,

which was less and less unusual but was still a new thing. And that's where he got his DM. Yes. Thank you very much. Kevin, he's living in a time of turmoil. Can you tell the listeners what that turmoil was, the principal point, peaks of the turmoil? Well, by the 1640s, Brown has moved to Norwich, and the 30-year-s war, which has been boiling away on the continent for 20 years or so,

makes its way over to Britain, to England, Ireland and Scotland. In the early 1640s, the country is essentially up in arms for various reasons, for constitutional reasons, a set of cultural disputes, but in particular a set of religious battles that are playing back and forth between the king and parliament. So we're talking about the civil war? The civil war starts at this point. Norwich is essentially the second city. in Britain at this point in England

and it's solidly parliamentarian Brown is out of step with this he's royalist by incarnation but not particularly political in many ways it's hard to over-emphasise just how fractious everything has been come by the early 1640s

everyone is taking hardline positions on their religious positions and so on. Brown in this sense comes across as quite odd in that he's so tolerant. He's quite unusual in this situation. But a royalist-leaning person

in a strict parliamentary city didn't necessarily have a comfortable future, did he? So why did he go to Norwich? Well, he went to Norwich in the late 1630s before the Civil War. He started up a medical practice there. It seems quite quickly to have become

a popular medical practice. He treats a lot of the civic leaders of the city, both in Norwich and around as well. So he's somebody who will be travelling around the environs and quickly makes, I think, quite a lot of contacts and quite a reputation as a doctor. Early on then in the 1630s, he produces the first of his quite enigmatic texts that establishes. the complexity of his reputation. But let's talk a little bit more about him in Norwich. He's in Norwich. The civil war does start.

It is a parliamentary pace. The civil war, more losses per capita given the state of the race than anything, including the First World War. So ferocity was going on there. He managed to rise above it, stand aside from it. How did he cope? It's a little hard to tell.

In one way he stands aside from it. and there is quite a lot of the royalist figures at the time, including bishops who are ejected, clergy who are rejected from their positions, take the scholarship. And Brown can be allied with a group of royalist scholars who emerge in the 1640s, who produce quite detailed, quite scholarly, work. Why they're exempted? It's a bit like Isaac Walton going fishing, is it?

It is like Isaac Water. And a sense of which they're excluded from the political duties, the civic duties that they might otherwise undertake and take it upon themselves to produce this reasonably arcane set of studies. Jessica Wolfe, can you tell us about his first work, Religio Medici? Sure. Brown wrote the work in 1635 or so when he was around 30, had just recently returned from his travels abroad and was a newly minted physician. The religion of the doctor.

The religion of the doctor, a title meant as a kind of witty paradox because physicians were not altogether regarded as being particularly devout in the period. Many of them, as students of anatomy, were seen to disbelieve in the immortality of the soul, a subject that Brown takes up in the religio-Medici. and it was a profession that was, whether rightly or wrongly, seen to attract those who doubted in an afterlife. So, and the work stays in manuscript. What is thought to be interfering with God's work, and they were just embaling people and stuff like that? I don't believe so.

I mean, I think that Brown discusses his own activities as an anatomist without a sense of any responsibility for that. But he does actually say in religio, that he has been able to, as you say, rake over men's bones without becoming inured to the inevitability of mortality. So perhaps that was a secondary concern that he might become inured to the pervasiveness of death by seeing it as a physician. But you were talking about the book when I interrupted you?

Yes, the book. The book stays in manuscript for its first seven years, and it circulates quite widely. We've got eight extant manuscripts. spread out across the UK and the U.S. and elsewhere. And in 1642, so after the outbreak of the Civil War, a London printer named Andrew Crook prints a surreptitious, unauthorized copy of it, actually two copies, not under Brown's name.

It's anonymous. And Brown instantly distances himself in letters to friends and fellow scholars from the publication. And the following year in 1643, he participates in the production of an author, edition of Religio Medici, printed oddly enough by the same printer, Andrew Crook. And in it we have a new preface that makes very clear Brown's discomfort with this unauthorized edition of the previous year. He says that the work was printed imperfectly and surreptitiously and that it was meant as a private exercise, so meant to be seen by friends, by close associates,

not to be read by the general public. Why did they then decide to make it a public exercise? I think he must have felt that a corrected copy, a bit cleaned up of some of the more irregular ideas, would be the copy of record rather than the unauthorized edition. And this was a common concern with things making it into print when the author didn't want them to make it into print. He had no choice, I think, but to own it once it did appear in print in 1642. And the work was an immediate sensation. We have lots of documentation of early readers, not just reading it. or eagerly trying to get their hands on it, but also reacting to it with printed and also manuscript, observations, commentaries, animate versions, and so forth.

As the background to what you were saying so clearly, there was no idea of copyright at that time, so people would rip off other people whenever they wanted to. There was some idea of copyright, and in the sense that printers would have copyrights, not authors. So printers would get copyrights for things like atlases and Bibles and ensure that they would make a lot of money, but author copyright was still very much in development. Thank you. Claire Preston, what surprised the early readers of Religio Medici? Well, I think as Jessica says, it's a very interesting time to be writing in the way that he writes. It's a work of great latitude, a work of great tolerance.

He's very willing to entertain the beliefs and practices of other religious sects, not just other Protestant sex, but Catholicism and even Judaism and Islam. And this is a period when, you know, all those groups were likely to get, to be very offended by anything you said one way or the other in favor or against them or anybody else. So you can see why he was quite nervous about its having been published irregularly. But I think one of the things that most interests his early readers is not merely the virtual. of style, but the way that the essayistic format of the work allows one almost to see a mind at work. Now, this is something I think we're more used to because the essay has come a long way since Brown's Day.

But there's a kind of immediacy about listening to Brown work through an idea. It's a work of short chapters, very short segments. And so he'll take an idea and revolve it and not be particularly, committed to a conclusion. It's not a treatise. It's not emphatic. It's very, it's very loose in a way, which I think was not only unusual, but also I think very attractive. It could also, I suppose, have been very upsetting to some people, but, and disturbing. Well, I would add that this is probably one of the reasons why he was so discomfort with the unauthorized printing is that he confesses in religio medici to certain youthful indiscretions of a heretical variety, the ideas

that are heterodox, but that he's not committed to in any kind of permanent way. And I think he fears that people will not take him in what he calls a soft and flexible sense, that he will be pigeonholed as embracing certain doctrines forever and ever that he's simply entertained and then discarded as a young man. Yeah, because it is a kind of spiritual autobiography. He's talking about, in a way, the history of his own beliefs and how those have developed. You talked about it words to the fact that it was a surprising great success. Can you give us any evidence for that? Yeah, I mean, I suppose attention is always success in one way. And some of the more immediate reactions include the courtier and diplomat and natural philosopher Kenel Digby, who writes a series of observations on the work that are printed alongside it.

then Brown receives some less positive attention in the form of Alexander Ross, who's a chaplain of Charles I, the first, and he writes a series of what are called animate versions, a kind of running censorious comment on Religio Medici and on Digby's observations. So he takes two of them at once. And I think there's a lot that's very provocative about religio Medici, I mean, both in what it says about the author's own vulnerabilities and quirks and ex-exec. but also perhaps provocative for being so uncontentious at such a contentious time. Kevin, can we talk about his qualities as a scientist? The word scientist wasn't invented. It was a few centuries off, but let's call him a scientist just to get through the program. What did he do that we would say, ah, that makes him a scientist? He was, as Claire was saying earlier, not Sir Thomas Brown during his life, who was Dr. Thomas Brown

and the medical is pervasive in his thought in all his writings. He has a richly developed sense of the anatomical of the embryological of any number

of frames of reference that relate to the body. And he includes these in more or less all his writing, whether or not they're ostensibly scientific. He's reckoned as a scientist as well in the empirical sense and he's empirical with the best of them.

He produces any number of experiments that he records in his notebooks, some in public, and he's rated by his contemporaries. There are references to him by Robert Boyle, by John Ray, by John Evelyn. He's on the peripheries of the Royal Society. Is it surprised you that he didn't get elected into the Royal Society? No, it doesn't.

surprised me because while he's rated at the same time, he is not part of the same conversation. There's a sense in which the empirical fact for Brown remains something of a merely dull, sober fact. And the thing that makes Brown Brown is the fact that he relentlessly wants to transpose his science into something else. He wants to produce a religious correlate to everything that he does, all the science that he engages in. And Brown has a real rich sense of the interconnectedness of things. He talks about the strange and mystical transformations or transmigrations of a silkworm and how seeing these transformed his philosophy into divinity.

Because of they turning to mottrami? The fecundity of nature, the way in which relentlessly, the things that he observes in his science, in the natural world, have for him a set of meanings beyond them. One trope that he refers to very frequently is that the microcosm, that looking at the body, that gazing at the body, provide you with a set of interpreters of tools to think about the cosmos beyond and the divine beyond it.

I was going to add to what Kevin's saying, a really good example of Brown at his height, making those connections in Religio Medici, where he says, I believe in resurrection because when I mess around with blobs of mercury in the lab, I can make it separate into lots of little tiny blobs. You know, we all know that mercury does that at room temperature,

but then I can put it back together by, you know, sort of playing with it. And so if I can do this in the lab, you know, who's to say that God can't resurrect the whole body of every man after death into heaven? And that's an absolutely quintessentially Brownian observation about an empirical fact, which he then extrapolates into a spiritual fact. Jessica, Wolf, I mentioned the word polymouth. Can you give the listener some idea of the range of his interests and that on which he wrote? Absolutely.

And I think pseudodoxia Epidemica is a great place to start, because that work is an encyclopedia of errors and falsehoods and myths about magnetism and botany and animals, about human anatomy and physiology and anthropology, geography, religion, and even art. Astronomy? Less interested in astronomy, but certainly has some things to say, most of them, quite negative, about predictive astrology. and he is very interested in some of the cosmographical discoveries of the 17th century. So we can see him following along as he keeps revising this work, new discoveries about the planets, about sunspots and so forth.

So in pseudodoxia, which became, as I understand it, his most famous book, what's the thrust of it? The thrust is really twofold. One is to debunk myths both within the realm of scientific discourse and various kinds of popular error. So, for instance, a belief in the magical medical properties of unicorn horn or the belief that a mandrake screams when you pull it out of the ground and kills the person who pulls it. But I think particularly when we look at the opening book of it, it's really a much more somber meditation on the origin and the source. spread of error and the difficulty of trying to correct errors once they enter into the popular imagination. And Brown can seem awfully contemptuous of what he sometimes refers to as the vulgar

rabble, whether people practicing medicine without a license or people who simply embrace superstitions for which there's no fact. But I think that he, one also gets a sense in the text, that he cares very deeply about the advancement of truth. the correction of error. And again, he cares about that from a scientific standpoint, but also from a theological standpoint. I mean, he sees the origin of error as absolutely consonant with the entrance of sin into the world, and that error is spread all the more powerfully for him by the participation of the devil. So it's, you know, it's Satan's work that people believe in unicorns. It's the interconnectedness of things that marks him. Claire, as I read, Claire Preston,

So what was his view of knowledge? We imagine this man in Norwich sitting in his house. When people go there, discover it's a mini museum with bivisections and stuff this and stopped that all over the place. And it sounds like a tremendously, sounds just a sort of clotto you'd like to live in, really. Anyway, never mind. He's there. And what's his view of knowledge? Well, like a lot of the scientists of the 17th century, he believes that, in the theological fact,

that when man fell, man's intellect and ability to understand was damaged. And that the, especially following Francis Bacon, the most important articulator of this idea, he felt that it is the project of science to recover either damaged knowledge or lost knowledge. So he says in pseudodoxia, he says, in order to purchase a clear and warrantable body of truth, in other words, something we can actually rely on. We must forget and part with much we know. So he's like a lot of scientists, is saying let's start almost with a tabular rasa

and let's build from the ground up again. What's his ground? From which he builds? The ground of observation experience. And vitamin Eves, is it there? It is Adam and Eve's fall and then, of course, the various things at the Tower of Babel and so on

that contribute to a general intellectual debility, a debility of understanding. and indeed an ability to understand what we're looking at. One of the things that a lot of the scientists are doing in this period is naming things, which is a very Adamic task, because they don't have words for the things that they've discovered. So he's thinking of knowledge is something that either has to be recovered from damage or has to be invented anew.

And that's typical of the period. And he goes, I mean, in Adam, he discusses the point, does Adam have a neighbour or not because he was not born, so we probably wouldn't, but where does that take us? Where does it take you? Well, that's in pseudodoxia, and there's a very interesting chapter in pseudodoxia, which is mostly about natural historical things,

but this chapter is about errors in painting. And, I mean, the whole notion that you put together in error dictionary, it's a kind of dictionary of urban myth, if you like, that's something that one sees, and one would have seen, you know, in every art collection in Europe, a picture of Adam and Eve with navels.

So he's actually taking his embryological knowledge and saying, well, you know, I've delivered babies. I know what happens in the womb. There could not possibly be a navel because there was no delivery of Adam and Eve. And so that's a way of kind of scouring out the debased edifice of Western knowledge and saying, let's get back to basics. It was a bit of the idea of taking trivial things seriously and seriously things trivial that endeared him to people.

Is that right? That's Osco Wild, isn't it? But people apply to Brown. Indeed. Well, I think so, but maybe my friends will agree. It's also Socrates, isn't it? Yeah, indeed, indeed. Confuting your enemy's seriousness with jest and their jest with seriousness.

Absolutely. I mean, one of the extraordinary things about Brown is that he has a very, very wry wit. He puns a lot. He's very attentive to the multiple and even conflictive meanings of a given word, such that it only at the third or fourth read. does one finally realize that he's using a word in multiple ways. There's also an added complexity that on the one hand,

this may be a joke, you can never quite tell with Brown, whether he's hovering on the edge of a wit. But at the same time, in dealing with religious pictures, he's writing in the middle of an iconoclastic crisis. The churches around him in Norwich are having their windows broken at this time. So there's a political kind of undertone to, to, all these discussions of pictures that he has there. It never quite rises to the surface,

but it wouldn't be missed by contemporaries. If you had to say what made his writing stand out in a few words on this programme, what would you say? Well, we've been talking mainly about Brown as a scientist and Brown as a religious thinker, but he's remembered far more within literary history. And it's something of the quality of his prose, I think, that stands out about him, that constitutes his place in history as a literary writer.

And he writes this symphonic prose. He writes this immense sentences, immensely powerful, long, labyrinthine gush of ideas that flow together. He can be at one of the same time, hair splitting and orchestral. He can be whimsical and he can be very serious at the same time. And this is something that I think writers after Brown have responded to, the games he plays with languages, with whimsicality, with something else that's quite important about Brown. as well is that he is immensely learned.

He does produce any number of classical, biblical, scientific, antiquarian, historical facts and jams them into this surge of ideas. Jessica and Jessica, why do you think that he adopted this complex language? I think there are a combination of factors. I think, first of all, we have to remember that he was steeped in Latin all throughout his education. and often what seems most difficult to us about his prose style is that it's very, very latinate in syntax, in diction, but may have seemed quite less difficult for someone in the 17th century

who was also reading tons and tons of Latin prose and poetry. He obviously delights in language. He's someone who's very interested in the operation of tropes and figures and metaphorical language, particularly in the scriptures, but I think everywhere else as well. And he's also, as a natural philosopher or a scientist, very attuned to the importance of coining new words when they need to be coined for things that don't have names or things that have names that also belong to other things. So many of his coinages

are Matrix and Helix or two that come to mind. A lot of them refer to natural processes in crassation, for instance, are coined because scientific language in English and the vernacular is still quite impoverished. And so he's importing these words from Latin in order to make distinctions that are necessary for the understanding of nature. Claire Preston,

what inspired Brown to write urn-Beriel or hydropia, as it might be known? What inspired in writing? Could you take a sentence or so from that to give the list of some idea of this style? Yes, I'll do that first, actually.

I think, and that will illustrate what Kevin and Jessica has been saying. This is from very near the end of Earned Burial where he says, But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who knows whether the best of men be known?

Or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of time Without the favor of the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle. Isn't that wonderful? That's fantastic. I think that's my favorite passage of all in all of Brown. And this was received well?

It was. Not only then, but since we're talking about Sheridan and then Melville and Boghez and Virginia Woolf and on it goes. At the risk of offending other lovers of Brown. to me it's his greatest work because he, all brown is there for a start in the way, in what he's doing, and it summons his most gorgeous style. I think what I just read gives you

a sense of that. But also the range, you know, in Berers, he's talking about death practices, across the range of Romans, Middle East and death practices, 70th century death practices, and so on. From biblical times, in fact, that he's talking, yeah, and, you know, all across

Asia as well. So it's a kind of almost an anthropological work Yeah, what I love about Earn Burial so much are the modulations of tone and mood as he moves back and forth between this very learned scholarly account of ancient and contemporary burial practices and attitudes towards death in the afterlife. And then these incredible meditations on mortality that almost make you feel like you're staring at a Vonitas painting, you know, and the profound combination of a powerful intellect with this really emotional, engagement with the confrontation with our mortality. And it's also that sense of, that sense of, it's an antiquarian tract. He's convening facts about burial, which antiquarianism is a process of remembering and recording. And that is in tension with the fact that it is about forgetting. It is about

how we forget everything that we think is going to last. So that in itself builds a terrific kind of, kind of cordal quality to the work. Kevin, was this, the way that he was writing, adopted by other people, were other people trying this thing at the same time, or was he, as it were, a harbinger or a forward forager? I think, um, burial surprises, um, early readers. Nobody quite knows what to make of it. And it, it bears resemblance to some other writing of the time.

We could think of, um, Robert Burton's anatomy of melancholy, for example. there is a sense in which Brown's writing produces this cathedral-esque frame of reference, a vast quality in which he manages to pack any number of minute facts and stories. And the thing about urn burial is the funereal pace of it. That it's a work that's at one and the same time very solemn. and that zips and zigzags between one fact and another, all passing quickly into dust and away. I think about a stand-up melancholy is my sense of it.

It's hard to tell how seriously, exactly, he's being. In terms of other writers as well, who he bears comparison with, death is a major subject in the 17th century. Death is a subject that occupies sermon after sermons, It's something that the metaphysical writers, John Donner in particular, writes about relentlessly. It's an ever-present fact. It's a part of the fabric of life

is the terrible surprise and brevity of death. Is it too banal to say this is connected with so many deaths going on in Europe and England at the time? I think that's no doubt a part of it. he talks towards the end of her burial about there having been more people who have died than will live after him a sense of, there's an apocalyptic

overtone to that. Brown, for all that he's quite genial, sees the end of times approaching. Jessica, well, if we mentioned that he managed to hold his bishnan and keep his feet and keep his head when all around we're losing as he were. How'd you do that? I think in large part, through that geniality that Kevin just mentioned, he says in religio Medici that he has no genius for disputes in religion and he acts that way pretty much throughout his entire life. And it's in fact, it's that temperament, that character

of being very moderate, being flexible, being able to adapt himself to. different surroundings, different religions, that I think helped him survive, although I think he was never at risk of not surviving in the Civil Wars, but also makes him such an amiable writer to read today. He is, you know, so uncontentious. And to read those lines in religio medici where he talks about, you know, and not every man can be, you know, fighting for the army of truth. if I can remember the exact lines. He's implicitly there positioning himself very much as a contrast to someone like John Milton, who of course spends the 1640s writing political tract after tract against adversaries.

And it's telling that Brown never responds in print, at least, to the Annabod versions, the running commentary on religio-Medici. He lets it wash over him. Craig Preston, we're talking about a man who, in knowledge at the time, despite all the civil war and executions and the imminent execution of a king who had been appointed by divine writer and the shockwaves that sent through everyone,

who was very famous. You went to Norwich who said to see the cathedral and to see Dr. Brown. How did it get to be quite so famous, Claire? Relia Medici, as we've already been suggesting, was a very celebrated work. It was particularly in England, of course, but it was translated and known throughout Europe

and the great libraries of Europe had copies. It was banned by the Pope as being seditious and anti-Catholic, which isn't really, which is quite interesting. And the Puritans didn't like it either. Puritans didn't like it because it was too tolerant. It didn't come crashing down on people who were, you know, bowing before the altar and wearing vestments and the sort of things that the Puritans didn't like.

So it had the capacity to offend everyone, but in fact more people liked. it, then were offended by it. But the other thing is that once he writes, well, I should add also that there was within his lifetime, and certainly for another hundred years, there was a kind of what I was called the religio craze. And everybody started writing books of self-revelation called Religio something or other. So Dryden wrote religio leici, and there's religio clericry and religio miletus and religio, you know, there are loads of these. They go on and on and on. So why is that?

I think it's because religio medici becomes a byword for a kind of almost confessional essay or confessional account of the self, and often in terms of one's profession. But the other thing, of course, that makes him so famous is pseudodoxia epidemica, which was a huge bestseller. It went through six editions in his own life. Four of them he very heavily revised, so there was clearly a market for that. And it remained an encyclopedic work of reference for decades after that, even when some of his science was getting to be a bit old-fashioned. Do we have much evidence for the direct effect they had on his contemporaries or near contemporaries? I think he baffles but intrigues his contemporaries. I think the main effect he has on his contemporaries. contemporaries is on the way he fuses his religion and his scientific thought. And there is in Brown a sense in which he's constantly pushing for a hit of enigma or a hit of mysticism. And I think this is

quite appealing to a lot of his contemporaries in Robert Boyle, in Walter Charlton. They very often combine this sense of the natural studies trying to reveal a religious corolles. relit. And that God had shown himself in two ways in the scriptures and in nature, two books. Yeah, and this is a trope Brown mentions, and that is, I think, appealing to his contemporaries. And yet when we look at the final revisions that he does to pseudodoxy epidemica in the late 1660s and early 1670s, he's interested in many of the exact same questions that interest the rural society, as we can tell through their philosophical transactions, I mean, everything from what is treasap to what exactly is how when a caterpillar turns into a moth. And all of them are following various European developments

on subjects ranging from the study of insects, entomology, to investigations into the nervous system. So, you know, there are times that he certainly seems like much more of a mystic than a natural philosopher. But my sense is that he's very much keeping tabs on and also, you know, the Royal Society is also keeping tabs on him. I mean, one thing is interesting is the number of books he reads, and we talked about it several centuries ago, and yet knowledge is flowing very quickly around Europe, isn't it? He's got hold of, he's sending out new messages, new messages coming to him in this amazing city as it then was of Norwich. Yes, and I think he's very interestingly part of the rapidly expanding networks, I should say, it wasn't a single network, networks, which we might be. broadly describe as the Republic of Learning, which spans all of Europe, even into the new world and Asia. It's usually epistolary, but people are swapping publications. I mean, he would

have loved the internet, you can imagine, the ability to get information from Farfong places and to send it out himself. Finally, does he still have a direct influence today, Jessica? I would say that religio-Medici and Earnbarriel have some kind of attention amongst a popular readership. There's been a resurgence of scholarly interest in him in the last decade or so, including a new biography and a lot of new work that I think is placing him more front and center in 17th century intellectual and literary culture. Finally, Kevin. There's another strand of interest, I think, in his whimsical indirection, and it's the interest of Sebald and the interest of Borges as well. that loves Brown because he is so labyrinthine, because he does attend to the orphaned fact.

He is so curious in his intellectual burrowing. Well, thank you very much, Kevin Killeen, Claire Preston and Jessica Woolf. For next week, the building of a great empire, the Inca based high in the Andes in South America, Undone, by the Spanish conquistadors. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

I wanted to mention when we were talking about his reading that he loved travel literature. I mean, here's a man who travels as a young man, is obviously deeply affected by it, doesn't travel much in later life, but he continues to read travel literature, both for the scientific import, you know, the Nile River and plants from the new world, but also because I think he was a great armchair traveler. He didn't travel because he couldn't travel because of the wars, I presume. couldn't or chose not to. Certainly, I mean, many English were traveling during the wars to get away from the wars,

but his sons. Later, yeah, I was going to say his son Edward, who was also a doctor and was a member of the Royal Society, traveled very extensively, especially in eastern and central Europe, on behalf of the Royal Society, just, you know, looking at things and reporting. So that travel was sort of in the family, and yet it is interesting how Brown stays very, put. It's as though he travels in imagination rather than needing actually to go anywhere.

One thing we didn't mention was your quote at the start of the program about Brown being the salt of the earth, as Virginia Woolf puts it. Nobody quite knows what that means, really. In the same quotation, she's talking. It doesn't mean something like as good as it gets,

or? Maybe. Maybe. She's also talking. There's probably something different from that. I apologize to those who have a more accurate idea of what the of the earth means. What do you think salt of the earth means? Well, it sounds to me as though it's somebody who's very down to earth,

very, who's almost the opposite of Brown. Virginia Walt speaks of him in that same quotation as about his sublime imagination and she's speaking as though she's walking about in his brain as being the finest lumber

room in the world, stuffed from floor to ceiling with old urns and objects. There is a sense in which Brown is this repository of useless knowledge that any number of old enigmatic ideas are stuffed in there in his works

and kind of curious But would he have called it useless? No, he loves them. He loves the orphaned fact. He loves the ancient encyclopedists and there are a lot of classical encyclopedists,

Athanas, Plutarch. He raids them relentlessly. and he lards his works with these strange, curious facts. But you know it's really interesting how modern, well, relatively modern writers have received Brown. Wolf thinks that he is, that he's a magisterial lumber room. But Melville called him a cracked archangel. And Poe thinks of him as a kind of...

What do you mean by a croct-art angel? Well, it's a good question. I mean, what does Melville mean by anything? It's a little difficult to tell. I think he's probably referring to that rather what can seem a rather undisciplined or perhaps to put it more accurately a very easy moving between sometimes apparently unlike things. It is related, I think, to the way that Dunn writes a poem, that Dunn will see one thing in an unlike other thing, you know, a marriage bed and a flee. for example. And I think that Brown attracts because he seems

metaphysical in that sense. And so when Melville, who writes very much as a cracked archangel, I think reads Brown, he kind of sees a mirror of himself in the way that Melville and Brown both move around in that apparently random way, which isn't really

random. Well, again, I don't know exactly what Melville meant by the cracked part of cracked archangel, but I always think of George Herbert. with his brittle crazy glass, that there's something entirely pious and entirely heterodox about Brown at the same time, and I think that attracts a lot of like-minded thinkers.

Coleridge speaks of him having a little twist in his brain. There's a copy of pseudodoxy Epidemica that Coleridge owned, and on the fly leaf it has wordsworth having scribbled his name, and inside it's got Charles Lamb's names, and it seems to have been passed round amongst the romantics who evidently love this little twist of Brown's absurdity. But I also think that it's Brown's very epigrammatic, you know, lapidary quality.

I mean, his prose always feels to me like the sort of the source of practically everything you would ever want to put on a gravestone. It has that majesty to it. and the epigram as well as one of his great talents. And people like Thorough particularly, but a lot of the Transcendentalists are extremely interested in that. And if you ever read Walden, having read a little bit of Brown, you can immediately hear Thorough kind of channeling Brown. Or, you know, I won't say pastishing him, but really imitating him in a certain way. And so there are various parts of Brown's voice that I think attract and manner.

that attract very different kinds of writers who were, in fact, in touch with each other and know each other. Well, it's a little surprise that he was beloved both by the English Romantics and the American Transcendentalists because he so adores nature. I mean, you know, the one reason why I think

he could be incredibly compelling to a wide popular readership is that he's constantly celebrating the intricacy and the variety of animals and plants and delighting in what he sees. And, of course, delighting because he sees all of nature as divine. finally created, but even for readers who don't agree with that assessment, his utter delight

in the shape of an elephant or the intricacy of an ant is, just makes reading him such a pleasure. Well, one of the works that we didn't discuss, which was published in tandem with Earned Burial is the Garden of Cyrus, which is also known as the Quincunx. And it's a bizarre work, very wonderful, but it's about figures of five in nature. And he, or not just in nature, but nature especially, figures of five and everything from artificial objects to, to natural objects. So, you know, how seeds are placed in seed pods, but also how the Greeks put springs in their, in their bed frames, you know, to make this diamond shape, um, conunctial, um, figure that he looks for. And I mean, that's, it's, it's a, it's a kind of signature of, it's a kind of, the idea of

the divine signature in nature gone to an extreme, which one can't help feeling that he's being slightly playful with that. But also he believes that those things are there for a reason, that we've been given tidings in nature, and that's what these kinds of figures are. Do you think being a polymouth was one of the reasons the Royal Society did not elect him to be one of their members? I don't think he was particularly interested in having that acclaim.

he was a generation older than many of the founding members and again not particularly I can't imagine that he would have been too keen to trek down to London for meetings but but certainly many of them were as polymathic as he was Boyle especially yeah indeed and Hook and Evelyn and Evelyn and all those people you know I don't I think certainly in more recent years there's a tendency to classify Brown as rather quaint both for his style and for his ideas,

but I don't think he was seen that way by his own contemporaries or even by the next generation of natural philosophers and doctors who very much admired him and didn't see him as obsolete. And I think there's a very prosaic reason as well. You know, he lives in Norwich.

It's a long way it's two or three days to get to London. You pay a subscription fee for what? He's hardly going to go very often. He's getting old by 1660. He takes the Philist's, philosophical transactions and corresponds with all those people. He doesn't really need to be a fellow of the Royal Society. It might be as simple as that.

His son is a member of the Royal College of Physicians, and I think he's quite proud of that. We have a vast correspondence between him and his son, and he is immensely proud of him, and they discuss medicine in intricate detail. He has this one letter in which he says, I enclose the uterus of a carp which we had for supper, and it's still there in the British Library, thin and stringy. Did he make any advances in medicine? I believe that the only scientific discovery he actually made

was actually on the subject of electricity. In a chapter of pseudodoxy epidemica that deals electrical friction, he, in fact, discovers two sources of electrical friction that weren't known, but I'm not sure he makes any medical discoveries at all. It's not really a medical discovery, but does he not make an adequate explanation of the phenomenon of adiposeer, which is also known as grave wax? It's the kind of gelification of the fat in a buried body. And it's just something that people notice in certain earths after a body's been buried for a number of years.

And he explains it. I mean, I don't know if that counts as science, but it's a kind of, it's very much an observational brownian thing to do. He's explaining the causes of something is science. Yeah, indeed, exactly. Yeah. Well, I think, unfortunately, you're about to be interrupted by the producer. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. I'm Simon Mundy, host of Don't Tell Me the Score, the podcast that uses sport to explore life's bigger questions,

covering topics like resilience, tribalism, and fear with people like this. We keep talking about fear, and to me, I always want to bring it back to, Are You Actually in Danger? That's Alex Honnold, star of, the Oscar winning film Free Solo in which he climbed a 3,000 foot sheer cliff without ropes. So, I mean, a lot of those social anxiety things, and certainly I've had a lot of issues with talking to attractive people in my life from like, oh no, like I could never do that. And it certainly feels like you're going to die, but realistically you're not going to die.

And that's all practice too. Have a listen to Don't Tell Me the score full of useful everyday tips from incredible people on BBC Sounds.