REID BARBOUR and CLAIRE PRESTON (eds), Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed. KATHRYN MURPHY and RICHARD TODD (eds), 'A man very well studyed': New Contexts For Thomas Browne

Citation

Jackson Williams K (2010) REID BARBOUR and CLAIRE PRESTON (eds), Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed. KATHRYN MURPHY and RICHARD TODD (eds), 'A man very well studyed': New Contexts For Thomas Browne. Review of: Reid Barbour and Claire Preston (eds), Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed. Pp. xii + 368. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 (ISBN 9780199236213). Kathryn Murphy and Richard Todd (eds), ‘A man very well studyed’: New Contexts For Thomas Browne. Pp. xviii + 314 (Intersections 10). Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008. Hardback (ISBN 9789004171732).. Notes and Queries, 57 (3), pp. 437-440. https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjq088

Abstract
SIR THOMAS BROWNE: The World Proposed begins with a spirited ‘state of the field’ introduction by its editors. Barbour and Preston lament the relative paucity of Browne studies in the twentieth century and note the extent to which much of what has been written has been implicit or explicit polemic against Stanley Fish’s damning assessment of Browne as ‘the Bad Physician’. This, they suggest, is changing and they point to the legacies of Skinnerian historical thought, and newer, more nuanced theories of the histories of science and religion as theoretical frameworks within which the essays collected in The World Proposed operate. These are laudable goals and the collection does succeed in furthering the study of Browne and his works, but it does not uniformly measure up to the scholarly ideal that Barbour...

Keywords
Linguistics and Language; Literature and Literary Theory; Library and Information Sciences; Language and Linguistics

Journal
Notes and Queries: Volume 57, Issue 3

People

Dr Kelsey Williams

Associate Professor, English Studies