This book was first published in England as The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century. Neither title describes the book very accurately. It is really an extended meditation on Browne’s life and interests as they strike a 21st-century science writer who likes to ride a bicycle and who, like Browne, lives in Norwich. In fact, the book begins with the author riding his bicycle from Bury St. Edmunds to Norwich because Browne made the same journey—not, of course, on a bicycle—350 years earlier after being called as an expert witness in a witchcraft trial. The trial ended badly for the two witches, and Browne’s noncommittal evidence had not discouraged the jury’s guilty verdict. “What was he thinking?” Aldersey-Williams asks himself as he pedals back to Norwich. This is a question to which there is no answer, but he is cheered up by seeing a kingfisher and remembering that Browne had rigged up a simple experiment to prove that dead kingfishers, contrary to popular belief, did not make good weathervanes.
Aldersey-Williams is obsessed, he says, with Browne, a fascinating combination of writer and protoscientist who, he believes, is “insufficiently known and unjustly neglected” by literary people and scientists alike. It is certainly true that Browne is not likely to appear in history-of-science courses, although until recently most American English majors would have encountered him. Unfortunately, now that college English departments have more or less stopped teaching English, that is probably no longer the case, and one understands why someone might wish to reintroduce Sir Thomas to a more general audience.
Sir Thomas Browne, physician and polymath, is indeed an important figure, though not quite in the ways that this author thinks. He wrote the most beautifully cadenced rhythmical prose in English: Anyone who wants to understand what George Saintsbury meant by “the trochaic hum of English” can do no better than read his work, his masterpiece Urn-Buriall especially. His mind was simultaneously receptive and creative, his range of reference and the ingenuity of his thinking continually surprising. Listen to him as he introduces his inquiry into burial urns dug up in a field in Old Walsingham:
The treasures of time lie high, in Urns, Coins, and Monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables. Time hath endless rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery. That great Antiquity America lay buried for thousands of years, and a large part of the earth is still in the Urn unto us.
Only Thomas Browne could think of America as an antique, but he expresses more generally accepted, grander truths with equal eloquence:
Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence: Art is the perfection of Nature: Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a Chaos: Nature hath made one world, and Art another. In brief, all things are artificial, for Nature is the Art of God.
It strikes me as important that literate people should know that a major English writer once wrote things like that. Aldersey-Williams, though, is not terribly interested in Browne’s thinking. Instead, he treats him as a scientific forerunner whom he hopes to enlist as a witness in favor of civility as against the “arrogant yet embattled, pious yet aggrieved” tone of contemporary advocates of scientific thinking—Richard Dawkins, for instance, or a group calling themselves “warriors against claptrap.”
His method is to give some account of Sir Thomas’s approach to a subject—animals, plants, science, toleration, faith, melancholy—then switch to the state of the subject today as if he were a 21st-century reincarnation of Browne.
Insofar as the approach works at all, it works best in the chapters on animals and plants. It turns out that Browne was the first person to record the appearance in England of a bird called the roller, so Aldersey-Williams tells us all about his own birdwatching activities, also that on his birthday he heard that a specimen of this rare bird had been spotted near the Edgefield dump in Norfolk, a disgusting place he describes rather mildly as “a blight on the landscape.” Another bird well known to Browne, the kite, also frequents the dump, having made a comeback from near extinction owing to “an astonishingly successful programme of reintroduction begun in 1989.” Then, just as Browne went to see a sperm whale washed up on the beach, so Aldersey-Williams goes to see one washed up at Christmastime 2011, though by the time he arrives no sign of the beached whale remains.
These chapters on birds, animals, and plants can be interesting, even mildly amusing, although they do not have much to do with Browne himself. In the chapters on toleration, faith, and melancholy, the author’s mingling of his own life and opinions with Browne’s produces less happy results because, unlike Thomas Browne, he is in thrall to the most conventional kinds of currently correct thinking: “In early 2014, anti-Semitism is on the rise across Europe. Islamophobia—a word that barely existed until the 1990s—is widespread.”
That is the opening sentence of a chapter on toleration. Pausing neither to wonder who the new European antisemites are, nor whether there might not be some connection with revived fears of Islam, he proceeds to put Browne through an examination in antisemitism, Islamophobia, and general racism. Browne, being an easygoing, sensible man of inquiring mind, passes this exam with only one failing answer: To Aldersey-Williams’s distress, he was guilty (like almost everyone else at the time) of belief in witchcraft.
The question the examiner then asks is, why did Browne believe such a thing? Being a scientific atheist, he has an answer: Browne was a Christian, and the whole sad story of Browne’s belief, including his evidence at that witch trial, tells us how dangerous it is to allow Christian doctrine to dictate a judicial proceeding.
Yet there was a real legal problem in Browne’s time. Among the people who believed in witchcraft, some claimed to be witches, and acted on their belief. To say that they were merely deluded, and ignore them, required a degree of skepticism of which most people then were incapable. One such person, however, was the great archbishop of Browne’s childhood, Richard Bancroft. No less a person than Chief Justice Anderson rebuked Archbishop Bancroft in open court for mocking the evidence in a witch trial, and that interesting confrontation reminds us of something that Aldersey-Williams seems not to know, that in Browne’s England witchcraft was a felony under statute law, prosecuted in the secular courts. The Church had nothing to do with it, and a judge in his court could rebuke a powerful archbishop for his disbelief. Christian doctrine may provide an explanation for evil, but it requires no one to believe in witches.
Nonetheless, having diagnosed Browne’s failing to his satisfaction, Aldersey-Williams concludes with a lecture on the dangers of today’s moral panics and hysterias, focusing on child abuse and pedophilia:
How do we learn to tolerate, say, paedophiles? . . . We need to understand that paedophilia is not an evil, nor even an illness . . . but a species of human behaviour, however hard that is to accept, and then to limit our sanctions against paedophiles to curtailing harm rather than exacting retribution that is fueled by fears of our own subconscious.
In other words, to approach this problem we should first analyze ourselves. Then we should bring in the psychologist and the social worker instead of the policeman. It does not sound very helpful, and in any case none of it has anything to do with Thomas Browne, in whose works no sign of moral panic or hysteria will be found, and of course no hint of pedophilia.
We learn even more about the author in the chapters on faith and melancholy. He has no faith, and knows virtually nothing about the subject, but suggests that a contemporary equivalent of the decisions of faith—choosing a sect and a church—might be to buy a computer and select an operating system. And if he’s trying to be funny, it’s not at the expense of Microsoft and Apple. He then constructs a long dialogue on faith and science between himself and Browne, the implication being that he considers himself Browne’s equal as writer and thinker. In fact, since his adjective for Browne’s style is “delirious,” he probably thinks his methods are better.
Browne’s masterpiece is the twinned pair Hydriotaphia or Urn-Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus, the first an inquiry and meditation upon funerary practices prompted by the discovery of those urns at Walsingham, the second a meditation upon The Quincunxial, Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered. In short, the first is about death, the second about life, and they are arranged as a diptych, each with five chapters, a symbolically important number. Aldersey-Williams, uninterested in the workings of Browne’s mind, divides the pair, treating The Garden early on in a chapter on plants, and coming last to Hydriotaphia under the heading Melancholy because he thinks the reason Browne wrote it was that he was depressed.
That approach takes one back to the days when Victorian critics thought that Shakespeare must have been in the dumps to write King Lear. The mere idea that writers like Shakespeare or Thomas Browne produced masterpieces out of self-pity should not bear thinking about for two minutes, but as usual Aldersey-Williams is more interested in himself than in Browne. “I reserve the right to feel melancholic as the mood takes me,” he writes.
What makes me melancholic? Plenty: The inability of our civilization to rise above religious conflict. The inability of our civilization to take effective measures against climate change. Pygmy politicians. Apparently inexorably increasing social inequality. UKIP.
Oh dear. These are not the kind of feelings or ideas that produced Hydriotaphia.
Thomas Browne is a magnificent prose writer and a fascinating thinker who is well worth reading, and my recommendation is that people should read the man himself. His major works are available in print, and secondhand in good editions. The present book is not really about Browne at all, and it strikes me as an act of impertinence that Hugh Aldersey-Williams should have published a slice of his own autobiography under Browne’s name. Considered as one of Sir Thomas’s adventures in the 21st century, this one looks like a kidnapping.
[In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century’s Most Inquiring Mind, Hugh Aldersey-Williams (New York: W.W. Norton & Company) 330 pp., $26.95]
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