Sir Thomas Browne

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 June 2019

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 London

Jessica Wolfe Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

And

Kevin Killeen Professor of English at the University of York

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:05.0	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:07.4	There's a reading list to go with it on our website,
0:09.6	and you can get news about our programs
0:11.5	if you follow us on Twitter at BBC in our time.
0:14.7	I hope you enjoy the programs.
0:16.7	Hello Sir Thomas Brown 1605 to 1682 was a position and one of the most influential authors in English if not widely known.
0:25.2	According to Virginia Wolf, those who love his writing at the Salt of the Earth.
0:29.7	He was
0:34.3	attacked for his range of interests and the intelligence of his prose and was attacked
0:35.1	for pricing wit over faith and in a tumultuous time with polarized views on the
0:39.4	church and politics he had the confidence to reveal his uncertainty.
0:43.0	He explored his ideas in works on religious belief as a doctor,
0:47.0	on the transients of memorials and unpopular misconceptions in science,
0:50.0	co-opoeing new words which have outlasted his early fame, among them, electricity,
0:54.7	coma, medical, ferocious, carnivorous and migrant.
0:58.4	We'd me to discuss the works in life of Sir Thomas Brown are Jessica Wolf, professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of
1:04.7	North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kevin Killeen, Professor of English at the University of
1:09.1	York, and Claire Preston, Professor of Renesso's Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Claire Preston, Professor of Raneso's Literature, at Queen Mary, University of London.
1:14.3	Claire Preston, what was his background?
1:17.0	Thomas Brown was born in the city of London to a silk murcer, a merchant in silk,
1:22.3	so a relatively well-off family. He was sent to Winchester College and did the usual very
	...

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