Sir Thomas Browne

Il volume propone una panoramica della fortuna e dell'evoluzione del saggio in Inghilterra a partire dalle origini fino alla fine del Settecento, prediligendo un percorso che mette in risalto la complessità di questa forma letteraria spesso miscono-sciuta e trascurata. Nodo cruciale è la riflessione sul genere portata avanti in primo luogo dai saggisti. La prima parte mira, da un lato, a ricostruire un'archeologia sintetica della letteratura saggistica in Inghilterra, a partire dalla traduzione dei saggi di Michel de Montaigne da parte di John Florio; e, dall'altro, a discutere le caratteristiche peculiari del genere, anche e soprattutto a livello formale. La seconda parte offre al lettore un'antologia di saggi sul saggio, corredata da schede introduttive e note.

A very short account of my discovery of Thoreau's famous "castles in the air" sentences as being a revisiting of Sir Thomas Browne's "castles in the air" sentence to be found in his "A Letter to a Friend." A full "uncensored" version of this article can be found in the "Articles" section of my Academia.edu profile (see below). For more discussion on this source study, see my essay "Thoreau: uno, nessuno e centomila," in Henry David Thoreau, "Le tentazioni del paradiso" [Paradise (To Be) Regained], ed. and trans. Stefano Paolucci (Prato, Italy: Piano B, 2014), 74-87.

Abraham van Berkel (1639-1686), who was probably the closest friend and companion of the much more famous Koerbagh brothers, is still a lesser known figure in the history of the Dutch Radical Enlightenment. One indication of this is that, although Van Berkel did make it into the pages of Jonathan Israel’s authoritative survey, his 2001 Radical Enlightenment, he is only mentioned in passing on account of his involvement with the aborted publication of Adriaan Koerbagh’s A Light Shining in Dark Places (1668) and as the translator of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan into Dutch. Though aptly described as a ‘precocious youth and a forceful personality  with a quick wit’, Van Berkel’s own efforts as a translator are left unexamined. This is to be regretted, since the two translations that Van Berkel published in 1665 and 1667, the first of Religio Medici by Thomas Browne, the second of Leviathan, can certainly enrich our understanding of the early phase of the Dutch Enlightenment, the decade or so before Spinoza’s work would become the dominant factor. To his Browne translation, Van Berkel added a large number of explanatory and digressive footnotes, expressing his personal opinions on many controversial subjects and showing the wide range of his reading in classical and modern authors, some of whom definitely belonged to the libertine tradition (Vanini, La Peyrère). For his Hobbes translation he wrote an important preface explicitly stating the political aims of publishing his Dutch Leviathan at that particular moment in Dutch history. A close reading of the Dutch text, moreover, brings to light a number of telling deviations from the English version, one of which may well be a deliberate distortion of Hobbes’s meaning, presumably intended to better adapt Hobbesian ideas to a Dutch context. Neither the footnotes to Browne nor the translation of Leviathan have so far been thoroughly examined.

Spanish abstract: Reseño aquí el capítulo "In the Wilderness of Forms: Ideas and Things in Thomas Browne's Cabinets of Curiosity", de Claire Preston, publicado en el libro de estudios mediáticos retrofuturistas 'The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print' (ed. Neil Rhodes y Jonathan Sawday, 2000). Los sabios y estudiosos renacentistas buscaban en libros y colecciones revelar el 'orden originario del mundo', desvelar y exhibir la coherencia oculta de la Creación. (Retropost, 2011).

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English abstract: A review of the chapter "In the Wilderness of Forms: Ideas and Things in Thomas Browne's Cabinets of Curiosity", published in the book of retrofuturistic media studies 'The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print' (ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, 2000). Renaissance scholars and learned men tried to reveal in their books and collections the 'original order of the world'—unveiling and exhibiting the hidden coherence of Creation. (A retropost from 2011).
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Thomas Browne jest nie tylko jednym z najoryginalniejszych autorów
piszących w języku angielskim, ale również osobnym zjawiskiem na
mapie angielskiej kultury siedemnastego wieku. Browne’a szczególnie pociąga to, co osobliwe, jednostkowe, to, co wymyka się klasyfikacji. Ta fascynacja doprowadzi go do stworzenia katalogu
fikcyjnych książek, dzieł sztuki i osobliwości natury, stanowiących eksponaty wyobrażonego muzeum60. To muzeum, czy raczej gabinet osobliwości, istniejący tylko w wyobraźni Browne’a w postaci owego katalogu,
zyskuje miano Musæum Clausum: Muzeum Zamkniętego.

Postfazione estratta dal volume: Henry David Thoreau, "Le tentazioni del paradiso" (tit. orig. "Paradise (To Be) Regained"), traduzione e cura di Stefano Paolucci, Piano B, Prato 2014, pp. 55-119.

La postfazione si suddivide in tre capitoli, ciascuno dedicato a un argomento:

Capitolo "Uno": Thoreau e la pubblicazione di "Paradise (To Be) Regained".

Capitolo "Nessuno": Resoconto della scoperta della fonte letteraria (Sir Thomas Browne, "A Letter to a Friend") a cui Thoreau si ispirò per le sue frasi sui "castelli in aria".

Capitolo "Centomila": Considerazioni sulla "appropriazione indebita" di Thoreau da parte dell'ateologo Michel Onfray. Con riferimenti a Bertrand Russell e alla sua opera "Perché non sono cristiano".

This was a very early piece, written before I had started graduate work at Buffalo, so take it as you might a high school photograph. Still, I think there's some merit here: Covers early modern race theory and then attempts to think through what the cultural and psychological "payoff" would be for developing such theories. Also includes a very early analysis of Peele's The Battle of Alcazar.

The aim of this paper is to isolate personal passages in Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and put forward some hypotheses as to their function in the general design of the work. As a devotional text, Religio Medici would seem an unlikely site for life-writing. However, when placed in the tradition of Augustine's Confessions and Montaigne's Essais, its autobiographical asides acquire a further level of significance within the general framework of Browne's idea of human consciousness

o anche il recentissimo Rethinking the Other in Antiquity, Princeton 2011. 4 Si veda ad es., per un quadro generale, U. Fabietti, L'identità etnica. Storia e critica di un concetto equivoco, Roma 1998. Ma si veda anche, sulle dinamiche culturali e artificiali della costruzione dell'identità, F. Remotti, Contro l'identità, Roma-Bari 2001. Costantino Simonidis, o la pietas del falsario cosTAnTino siMonidis, Opere greche, I. Eulyros di Cefalonia, Ἐθνικά / Ἀνθρώπινα. Liste di manoscritti greci (1848-1864), a c. di luciAno cAnForA-MAriA rosAriA AcquAFrEddA-MArco cArATozzolo-vAlEnTinA cuoMo («Ekdosis», 9), Bari (Edizioni di Pagina) 2012, 424 pp., ↬ 22,00, ISBN 9788874702176.

This chapter deals with Thomas Browne’s most famous work, Religio Medici (written between 1635 and 1640 and published in 1642), and especially with his account of Charity. The first paragraph focuses on Browne’s specific account of the relationship between natural and supernatural. This view is inspired by Bacon, Sebunde, and Montaigne, and is crucial to understand the background of Browne’s view about the virtue of Charity. The second paragraph is about Browne’s specific understanding of Charity, which seems to be a middle stage between the traditional, Scholastic doctrine, and the Kantian idea of moral law, independent from the practical law and the desire of the subject. The third paragraph deals with Religio Medici’s reversal of the traditional “order” of Charity, as well as Browne’s accounts of abnegation and friendship as an effective way for a charity to the self which meets many aspects of Foucault’s ἑπιμέλεια έαuτου. The fourth paragraph is about Browne’s analogical understanding of medicine and morality, as well as his use of the meditatio mortis.

This poem is a sestina, a complex medieval verse form, invented by the Provençal troubadours, then further developed by medieval Italian and French poets. The sestina follows a strict pattern of six unrhymed six-line stanzas, concluded by a three-line envoy. The six end-words of the first stanza are repeated, in a different order, in the subsequent five six-line stanzas, with the closing envoy containing all six end-words, two per line.

W. G. Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn” resists genre classification: Neither novel nor mere travel literature, it com-bines report with fiction, historical anecdotes with melancholy musings, explanations of economic and political facts with accounts of personal anxieties. This vast material, however, is joined by a semiotic regard, a way of looking at the world attentive on signs and their use. Hence, some of the far-ranging narratives, observations and reflections, often barely connected by associations of the narrator, can be systematically linked by a semiotic methodology. In this article, semiotic categories like index, icon and symbol, encoding, decoding and recoding, change of meaning and pattern recognition are applied to different levels of the text. The semiotic approach thus integrates the disparate episodes in The Rings of Saturn, revealing them as linked by their interest in signs and signification. Along the way, semiotics proves itself as a method of literary studies.

The seventeenth century was a time of great change in Western thinking. Not least, alchemy and natural philosophy were being replaced by chemistry and reductionist science. One man, Sir Thomas Browne, stood between the two worlds and was a nexus in alchemical and scientific discourse, particularly in the dissemination of the legacy of Dr John Dee, via the latter's son, Arthur, leaving seeds in literature, art and the fabric of England's then second city of Norwich.

Intervista sulla scoperta letteraria riguardante i celebri "castelli in aria" di Henry D. Thoreau, già ampiamente trattata nella postfazione a Henry D. Thoreau, "Le tentazioni del paradiso", trad. e cura di Stefano Paolucci, Piano B, Prato 2014 e, più sinteticamente, in Stefano Paolucci, "The Foundations of Thoreau's 'Castles in the Air'", "Thoreau Society Bulletin" 290 (Summer 2015), 10.

Francis Bacon realizó una fuerte crítica de la tradición de la historia natural y trató de convertirla en la base de una investigación científica rigurosa y metódica. Su crítica declaraba la necesidad de confeccionar un catálogo de los errores populares contenidos en las historias naturales. Poco más de cuarenta años después, su compatriota, el médico Thomas Browne, llevó a cabo esta tarea en Pseudodoxia Epidemica, obra en la cual recopila los errores populares con respecto a las diferentes esferas del mundo natural a lo largo de la historia.  En ella se incluyen hechos que formaban parte del canon de “hechos extraños” o maravillas comúnmente aceptado en el siglo XVII.  Pseudodoxia Epidemica no sólo ofrece un fascinante catálogo de los errores y maravillas más difundidos sino que reflexiona sobre sus causas. En mi trabajo comparo las posiciones de Bacon y Browne sobre los errores populares y sus causas. Con ello, intento contribuir a los estudios actuales en torno a la producción de historias naturales durante la Modernidad al focalizar sobre uno de sus aspectos: la valoración de la cultura popular.

Thomas Browne - angielski lekarz, pisarz i myśliciel -  jest osobnym zjawiskiem na mapie kultury XVII wieku. Jego dzieło pozostaje na pograniczu dwóch tradycji: angielskiej myśli hermetycznej, reprezentowanej przez Johna Dee czy Roberta Fludda, oraz kształtującej się postawy naukowej spod znaku Francisa Bacona.
Jego pisarstwo – pełne paradoksów, osobliwości, niespodziewanych dygresji i analogii – chce ogarnąć cały świat.

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo desenvolver uma análise interna do livro Os Anéis de Saturno (1995), de W.G. Sebald, no qual o autor propõe uma análise aprofundada da dialética entre progresso científico e barbárie na modernidade. Observando especialmente o modo através do qual opera uma síntese entre a forma ensaio e a prosa ficcional - permitindo uma forma particular que tornaria mais contundente a crítica ao pensamento cartesiano, à Aufklärung e à ideologia do progresso - procuro mostrar como o livro funcionaria como um local privilegiado para refletir sobre a relação entre os discursos literário e científico, assim como para observar como a literatura contemporânea vem desenvolvendo seus próprios recursos teórico-metodológicos de investigação e crítica.

In 1646 Sir Thomas Browne published his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a broad, somewhat encyclopedic catalogue of errors divided into seven books. Browne intended his work as “Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors” to help discourage “radicated beliefs” – that is, received opinions based on popular credulity and the unchallenged authority of tradition. Far from being dogmatic and assertive, the treatise engages the modern reader for its defence of open debate and of the value of contradiction; actually, Pseudodoxia appears deeply in tune with the epistemological uncertainty of our times for its complex, relativising and even dubitative approach to all things human. Browne endorses the idea that uncritical acceptance of received notions about the world hinders the advancement of learning; at the same time, though, a rigidly straight path – a unique, simplified method to decipher reality – equally perverts knowledge and is the cradle of misapprehension and mystification. Building on recent studies on his style and his connection with a culturally and politically convulsed historical period, the present contribution discusses Browne’s notion of complexity and highlights exemplary passages in which he discusses the main source of error: the human tendency to simplify what is complex, thus reducing the interpretation of notions, signs and phenomena to a one-sided and necessarily inadequate undertaking.

This article investigates the nature of Thomas Browne’s method of scientific enquiry. It will make comparisons between Bacon’s experimental method and the theological and patristic traditions, with particular regard to the problem and definition of error. Browne was convinced that reason and faith, and nature and religion, were in a relation of cooperation, and shared not only the same origin but the same end, that of God and truth. In light of this, Browne’s use of mutually integrated theological and scientific sources is analyzed to shed some light on the problem of his idiosyncratic notion of experimentalism. The article ultimately attempts to demonstrate that Browne’s method for enquiry was indeed experimental because of the way he investigated theological issues through the collection of data from nature and traditional scriptural materials.

As Szentkuthy confesses in section 1 of Towards the One and Only Metaphor, his “most primeval” desire is to produce “a Catalogus Rerum, an ‘Index of Entities’”. His chosen material is – impossibly – “the all”. In section 28, he then bisects his index into entities that “time beautifies, crystallizes” and entities that time “distorts and spoils”. Miklós Szentkuthy is still crystallizing.

EDITION 15-2 Hydriotaphia -Urnenbestattung und andere Schriften / Thomas Browne. Hrsg., übers. und kommentiert von Manfred Pfister. -[Dozwil] : Edition SIGNAThUR, 2014. -471 S. : Ill. ; 22 cm. -ISBN 978-3-906273-00-6 : SFr. 42.00, EUR 33.75 [#3996] Der englische Arzt Sir Thomas Browne (1605 -1682) ist heute vermutlich nur noch wenigen ein geläufiger Autor. Seine Doppelexistenz als Mediziner und Schriftsteller macht ihn indes zu einem reizvollen Studienobjekt. Seine Kritik am Pseudowissen seiner Zeit dient sogar noch heutigen Autoren als Anregung. 1 In der Anglistik steht Browne sicher nicht im Zentrum des Kanons, doch erscheinen immer wieder einmal Monographien oder es werden Browne zumindest einzelne Kapitel in Büchern über die Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts gewidmet. 2

Er(r)go…,
... czas zajrzeć do wnętrz(a), choć to pojęcie dziś niemal wstydliwe, przywołujące widma binaryzmów. Zaglądajmy jednak, nie zważając na teoretyczne fobie. Do wnętrza muzeum, którego nie ma, potem zaś do szkatułkowego wnętrza siedemnastowiecznego katalogu muzealnych osobliwości. I jeszcze głębiej, do wnętrza przestrzeni między katalogowym opisem a jego przedmiotem, w której to przestrzeni tworzy się Osobliwość. A zaraz dalej inne wnętrza. Autorytarne wnętrze katedry gotyckiej jako esencja dogmatu i istoty transcedentnego, a zapożyczone przez wiktoriańskie muzeum, jako środek dydaktyczny i edukacyjny majestatu wiedzy. Wnętrze Słowa – owego „katalogu katalogów”; wnętrze Biblioteki – Uniwersum; wreszcie oksymoroniczne wnętrze internetu. Wnętrze głowy bez wnętrza, czyli fonograf wśród Buszmenów. Wnętrze sparaliżowanego ciała jako więzienie i wnętrze czasu jako wszechobecnego labiryntu. Akt poznawczo-somatyczny: wnętrze ciała imperialnej przestrzeni i wnikające weń ciało podróżnika; zatem wnętrze jako niezbędny warunek inności, obcości i obcej inności. Nieuchwytne wnętrze kobiety jako maska; zewnętrze chudej kobiety jako skorupa ciała. Wnętrze jaźni jako poznawcza i etyczna  przestrzeń wyboru i odpowiedzialności. Wnętrze konsumerystycznej wegetacji we wnętrzu zmediatyzowanej rzeczywistości jako ersatz wewnętrznej egzystencji. Wnętrze Manuskryptu jako chór głosów i zagadka o naturze rzeczywistości. Wnętrze jako istota gotyku; gotyckie wnętrze jako wnętrze umysłu; wnętrze krypty jako przestrzeń między innym wnętrzem a zewnętrzem. Wnętrze tego numeru jako intelektualne interiory uzewnętrzniające potrzebę zgłębienia wnętrza.

A do tego Amiri Baraka we wnętrzu Ars Cameralis Silesiae Superioris.

„Interiory/Eksteriory” to podwójny numer „Er(r)go” gościnnie przygotowany przez Zbigniewa Białasa i Pawła Jędrzejkę z Instytutu Kultur i Literatur Anglojęzycznych Uniwersytetu Śląskiego.

Wojciech Kalaga


Er(r)go…,
... it is time to look into the interior(s), although the concept itself seems almost shameful nowadays, evoking the specters of binarity. Let us look, nevertheless, heedless of the phobias of theory. Inside a museum which does not exist, then inside the casket interior of the seventeenth century catalogue of the cabinet of curiosities. And deeper, into the space between the object and its catalogue description, where the Curious is created. And, a little further, other interiors. The authoritarian interior of a gothic cathedral, the essence of the dogmatic and the transcendental, appropriated by the Victorian museum as a didactic and educational illustration of the majesty of knowledge. The interior of the Word, this “catalogue of catalogues”; the interior of the Library – Universum; and finally, the oxymoronic interior of the Web. The interior of a head without the interior, or the phonograph amongst Bushmen. The incarcerating interior of a paralyzed body and the interior of time as a ubiquitous labyrinth. The somatic act of cognition: the interior of the imperial space and the traveler’s body that infiltrates it; thus, the interior as the necessary condition for the other, the alien, and the alien other. The elusive interior of a woman as a mask; the exterior of a skeletal woman as a bodily shell. The interior of the self as the cognitive and ethical space of choice and responsibility. The interior of the consumerized vegetation in the media-framed reality as the ersatz of the interior existence. The interior of the Manuscript as a polyphony of voices and a riddle about the nature of reality. The interior as the essence of the Gothic; the gothic interior as the interior of the mind; the interior of the crypt as a space between the other interior and the exterior. The interior of this issue as the intellectual interiors exteriorizing the necessity of exploring interiors.

And also Amiri Baraka in the interior of Ars Cameralis Silesiae Superioris.

Interiors-Exteriors is a double issue of Er(r)go guest-edited by Zbigniew Białas and Paweł Jędrzejko from the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures of the University of Silesia.

Wojciech Kalaga

In my paper I offer a preliminary investigation into a reference in the preface of Miklós Bethlen’s autobiography to Sir Thomas Browne’s immensely popular work, the Religio medici. While even the best editions of the text tend to pass over this reference with a brief mention of Browne’s work, I argue that it deserves further examination. The Latin text is so unique in terms of both style and content that some regard it as the initiator of a distinct religio-philosophical genre in the 17th century (labelled by D. Havenstein simply as ‘religio’). Importantly, it triggered a host of imitations by various English authors in the 17th century, and many of these texts investigate the relationship between reason and faith. On the other hand, the Continental popularity of the text is testified by numerous editions and translations, and there are hints at an almost cultic admiration of the book in 17th century Vienna as well. In the wake of these observations, I try to take a look at Bethlen’s complicated preface with the help of Browne’s work, suggesting that Browne’s Religio medici might have served as an important generic model for this part of Bethlen’s text. The generic affinity, at the same time, might not be restricted to the form of the text, as there are obvious similarities between some of the ideas expressed by the two authors, too. While Bethlen’s work has recently been read as a work stemming from the world of Puritan literature, the reliance on Browne might suggest that other religio-ideological trends might also have to be taken into account when evaluating the preface.

« Sui generis » est une locution latine utilisée dans la plupart des langues occidentales afin de désigner un objet, un procès, un phénomène que l’on ne peut classer dans aucun genre. Sorte de monstres socio-culturels, les signes, les textes, les discours sui generis relèvent d’un statut paradoxal : toute en nécessitant d’une référence aux genres établis de sorte à pouvoir définir leur propre identité par négation, ils édifient néanmoins, par leur propre existence, un genre à eux, unique, absolu, dont on ne pourrait ni trouver des précédents ni élaborer des imitations.
La notion de « sui generis », voire de « monstruosité textuelle », demande une investigation théorétique et analytique urgente. Non seulement est-il nécessaire de se demander quelles sont les caractéristiques sémiotiques des genres qui ne sont pas tels (les hapax legomena de la culture) de façon à en saisir structurellement l’unicité (mais ce qui est unique et incomparable est-il vraiment intelligible ?), mais également de façon à caractériser, par le biais de la sémiotique, ce moment mystérieux (du point de vue à la fois génétique et génératif) qui est la naissance d’un nouveau genre (c’est-à-dire d’un genre avant qu’il ne le devienne, ou d’un genre potentiel).
L’hypothèse vers laquelle s’oriente la communication est quelque peu désolante pour la sémiotique et les autres disciplines structurales du sens : obligée d’interpréter le sens comme occurrence de (ou à la limite comme déviation de) un genre, la sémiotique n’a pas les moyens de saisir l’unicité du sens (dans la synchronie), voire son originalité (dans la diachronie). Est-elle donc condamnée à négliger, voire banaliser, tous les phénomènes les plus fondamentaux d’une « existence sémiotique » : l’amour, la poésie, la mort, et d’autres monstruosités du sens ?