2. Literary Cabinets of Wonder: The ‘Paper Kingdomes’ of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne

Abstract

The writings of Robert Burton (1577–1640) and Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) are usually discussed as canonic examples of early modern English non-fictional prose, but they are rarely read comparatively. Yet they share a number of characteristics that can make such a comparison meaningful. Under the influence of continental humanism, most notably the Erasmian ideal of copia and Montaigne’s introspective skepticism (see Cave 1979, Kahn 1985, Lobsien 1999), their texts are highly rhetorical and often playful. In Browne, such linguistic fireworks seem even to increase from one text to the next until they almost become the focus of attention. Their writings exceed any conventional boundaries of genre. What makes them highly literary are the ways in which they address and deal with the problem of the contingency of writing in the age of print. Their coping strategies, their literary epistemologies, are very different, almost contrary, and yet related. In Burton’s case, the problem of contingency leads to a quasi-theatrical staging of the author-image, accompanied by an overt distrust of the reader’s capacity for understanding. Browne’s solution, as we shall see, is the exploration of the new possibilities opened up by print culture. Both writers are transitional figures on the threshold of a new configuration of discourse. Burton can be seen as the culmination point of a long tradition of medieval and humanist literature, a copious compiler whose compulsive urge towards inflationary writing is incapable of stopping the erosion of the order of knowledge that he wishes to generate. Similarly, Browne’s writing no longer fits the mould of a late medieval, Aristotelian scholasticism. In spite of his “expansive curiosity” (Willey 1965, 42) and his familiarity with the scientific achievements of his time, he is no experimental scientist in the modern sense; when he performs an experiment, it is merely to replicate what others have tried before, and he would never be a member of the Royal Society. Among Browne’s “divided and distinguished worlds” (Browne 2012, 40, Religio 1.34) are allusions to Neoplatonic solar mysticism but also a professed belief in the geocentric world picture; a rather liberal understanding of religion combined with an unbroken belief in the existence of witches. Coleridge once described him as a “dramatic” rather than a “metaphysical” writer (Coleridge 1955, 438). Both are provincial figures: Burton as an Oxford theologian, Browne as a physician in Norwich. Both devote their lives to the almost perpetual writing and rewriting of a single gargantuan work of natural philosophy: in Burton’s case, the famous Anatomy of Melancholy (first ed. 1621, five subsequent editions 1623, 1628, 1632,