Kevin Killeen, Ed.: Thomas Browne

Kevin Killeen, ed. Thomas Browne. Oxford Authors. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xlv + 995 pp. + 13 illus. $160.00. Review by JOSEPH L. BLACK, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST. Sir Thomas Browne is hot. Or, as Browne himself might have put it, excandescent, incalesecent, fervescent, adurent, calent, even salamandrous. The 2005 quatercentenary celebrations of Browne's birth generated two complementary essay collections that offer authoritative treatments of a full range of Browne's writings and their influence both in his time and over the centuries since: Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed, ed. Reid Barbour and Claire Preston (Oxford, 2008), and A man very well studied': New Contexts for Thomas Browne, ed. Kathryn Murphy and Richard Todd (Brill, 2008). More recently, Reid Barbour has produced a full and definitive biography: Sir Thomas Browne: A Life (Oxford, 2013). A Clarendon edition of the Complete Works is in progress, to be published in eight volumes under the general editorship of Claire Preston: www.thomasbrowne.qmul.ac.uk/index.html. Published in Oxford's recently launched 21st-Century Oxford Authors series, this new and substantial selection of Browne's works marks an important contribution to the revival of interest in a writer whose work, while long admired, had been largely relegated by the academy to the category of literary curiosity (according to the editors of Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed) and increasingly in danger of disappearing from the teaching canon. This volume's editor, Kevin Killeen, has played a prominent role in the Browne revival. Author of Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (Ashgate, 2009), he contributed essays to both of the 2008 essay collections and is on the editorial team of the forthcoming Complete Works, co-editing Pseudodoxia Epidemica (slated for vols. 2 and 3). This one-volume edition offers all of Browne's major printed works, almost, but not quite, in their entirety. Killeen bases his texts on the first or first authorized and includes all of Religio Medici (1643), Hydriotaphia or Urne-Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus (1658), and the posthumously published volumes Certain Miscellany Tracts (1683), Letter to a Friend (1690), and Christian Morals (1716). He also includes most (about 90%) of Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), with the addition of some chapters of particular interest from later editions (xli). The cuts from Pseudodoxia, by far Browne's longest publication, take the form of abbreviation of chapters 12 and 13 in Book 4 and excisions throughout Book 6, though every chapter of that book is at least partly represented, usually through the opening paragraphs, and chapters 10-13 are complete. The volume does not include any of the antiquarian writings printed in Miscellanies (1712), which include Brampton Urns and Repertorium, even though Repertorium, Browne's account of monuments in Norwich Cathedral, is the subject of strongly recuperative essays, one by Killeen himself, in both of the 2008 collections. Nor does the edition contain any of the manuscript material featured in earlier selections of Browne's work: no correspondence and none of the essays and observations from the notebooks, such as the meditation On Dreams. The inability to find room in an edition of over 1000 pages for any of Browne's letters seems unfortunate. The role of correspondence in the circulation of knowledge in the early modern period has received a great deal of recent scholarly attention, and many readers would likely be interested in seeing Browne's contributions to the genre. In an essay in Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed, for example, Brent Nelson draws on the correspondence for evidence of the kinds of knowledge Browne valued and for the role played by social networks across Europe in Browne's own training and in the training he provided for his sons. …

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