Religio Medici by Thomas Browne

Religio Medici by Thomas Browne

The proverb Where there are three physicians there are two atheists summed up the public perception of seventeenth century physicians. But, as the reader of Religio Medici will testify, Sir Thomas Browne, M.D., was anything but an atheist.

Browne qualified as a doctor in Europe and travelled widely across the continent, living among many different Christian sects. At the age of thirty, he set down his thoughts on religion, a work that was meant for private circulation only, but when a critically annotated version was printed without his permission in 1642, Browne felt obliged to publish an authorised edition the following year. As a singularly candid piece of introspection, Religio Medici broke the mould of seventeenth century works on religion and catapulted its author to fame across Europe.

The book analyses what faith and Church doctrine mean to a post-reformation Christian heavily influenced by the rationalists of the 1600s. Divided into two parts, the first looks at faith and the second at charity, but much ground is covered within these two concepts - death, heaven, hell, judgement, resurrection and even music. Browne refutes the cavil of the day about physicians by arguing that reason and religious faith are perfectly compatible. God, after all, is the immanent power behind all things, both those that man has worked out and those that are beyond his reasoning powers. When the limits of rational thought are reached, Browne is happy to rely on faith and to revel in God's mysteries and uncertainties - although he points out that his views will change over time (according to the dictates of my own reason) as new facts and perspectives come to light. It is this refreshing approach that sets Religio Medici apart as a work that continues to delight and inform the modern debate on religion and science.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) 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 (and placed on the Papal Index). Browne's eccentric 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 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 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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781911405894
ISBN 10	1911405896
Title	Religio Medici
Author	Thomas Browne
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Aziloth Books
Year published	2019-07-09
Number of pages	88
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.