No Things but in Thought: Traherne’s Poetic Realism
July 2016
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Chapter
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Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth-Century Thought
Michel de Montaigne, Robert Burton, and the Problem of Idiosyncrasy
January 2016
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Chapter
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Montaigne in Transit: Essays for Ian Maclean
Fulke Greville's Figures of Repetition
January 2015
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Journal article
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Essays in Criticism
At the midpoint of his Treatie of Humane Learning, a long poem on the scope of human knowledge and the branches of the arts, Fulke Greville issues a self-scuppering precept: For Sciences from Nature should be drawne, As Arts from practise, neuer out of Bookes. This appears shortly after a turn from a sceptical catalogue of the failures of human intellection in a fallen world, and the inadequacy and futility of art, to a more constructive vision of the possibilities of pragmatic action and limited knowledge. The epistemological pessimism of the first sixty-one stanzas is partially salved by a turn from theory to practice. But Greville's spurning of what can be learned from literature is of course a paradox. His overt rejection of theory appears within a didactic treatise. That rules should not be drawn from books is itself a rule in a book.
SBTMR
The Physician’s Religion and salus populi: The Manuscript Circulation and Print Publication of Religio Medici
October 2014
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Journal article
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Studies in Philology
Some notes in the diary of the London intelligencer Samuel Hartlib constitute the first and hitherto only evidence we have, beyond the extant manuscripts themselves, for the manuscript circulation of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici. This article explores the implications of these recently uncovered notes, which place the manuscript in the milieu of Hartlib, of the Puritan Essex noblewoman Lady Judith Barrington, and of the clergyman John Gauden, and allow consideration of who may have wished to publish Religio Medici, and why, and in particular whether Gauden may have been involved. After developing the implications of Browne’s connections with the individuals who we now know were involved in circulating the manuscript, the article turns to what these connections suggest about the significance of the first edition of Religio Medici, especially its engraved title page; the association of Religio Medici with contemporary political debates over the meaning of the Ciceronian tag salus populi suprema lex; and what this contributes to our understanding of the contemporary reception and potential political application of Religio Medici.
SBTMR
Robert Burton and the problems of polymathy
March 2014
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Journal article
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Renaissance Studies
Robert Burton called his period ‘this scribling age’, in which the copiousness of printed matter and the multitude of authors caused problems both of discernment – how to distinguish true scholars from intellectual quacks? – and of quantity: how can the scholar hope to master the ‘vast Chaos and confusion of Bookes’? This article addresses Burton's engagement with these questions, and examines both his attempt to establish a polymathic persona, and the relationship of the Anatomy to other compendious genres of the period. Section II of this essay compares Burton's versions of polymathy with Johannes Wower's De polymathia tractatio (1603), showing how, in both the Anatomy and his academic play, Philosophaster, Burton contrasts the true polymath with the figure of the ‘polypragmatist’, representing a kind of miscellaneous learning which is shallow, deceptive, and mercenary. The third section examines Burton's relationship to another model of disciplinary multifariousness: the encyclopaedia, understood by Burton not as a genre, but as an ethos. In the fourth section, attention turns to polyantheas and other compendious literary genres. Burton's complaints about such shortcuts to learning are shown to participate in the controversy over the scholarly method which followed the publication of John Selden's Historie of Tithes (1618). The final section addresses polymathic style: Burton's ambiguous relationship to Erasmian copia, and the struggle to find a voice amid the clamour of citations demanded of the scholar.
Robert Burton, polymathy, SBTMR, encyclopaedism, John Selden, Anatomy of Melancholy
Thomas Traherne, Thomas Hobbes, and the Rhetoric of Realism
December 2013
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Journal article
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The Seventeenth Century
43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4303 Historical Studies, 4705 Literary Studies
The Emergence of Impartiality
October 2013
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Book
Tracing its emergence in various fields, the contributions in this volume demonstrate how the notion of impartiality is intimately implicated in epochal early modern shifts in epistemology and science, religious and political discourse, ...
History
Geoffrey Hill and Confession
June 2012
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Chapter
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Geoffrey Hill Essays on His Later Work
A collection of scholarly essays on Geoffrey Hill, including pioneering work by Rowan Williams and Christopher Ricks, which provides insights into the cultural, literary, political, and theological complexities of a figure thought by many ...
Literary Criticism
Geoffrey Hill's Conversions
January 2011
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Chapter
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Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts
The Anxiety of Variety: Knowledge and Experience in Montaigne, Burton, and Bacon
January 2011
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Chapter
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Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt
A Likely Story: Plato’s Timaeus in The Garden of Cyrus
January 2008
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Chapter
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Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed
The Best Pillar of the Order of Sir Francis: Thomas Browne, Samuel Hartlib, and Communities in Learning
January 2008
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Chapter
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’A Man Very Well Studyed’: New Contexts for Thomas Browne
"A Man Very Well Studyed" New Contexts for Thomas Browne
January 2008
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Book
This volume of essays on Thomas Browne aims to set the man and his works in new contexts.
Literary Criticism
‘The Best Pillar of the Order of Sir Francis’: Thomas Browne, Samuel Hartlib, and Communities of Learning
January 2008
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Chapter
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"A Man Very Well Studyed" New Contexts for Thomas Browne
This volume of essays on Thomas Browne aims to set the man and his works in new contexts.