In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century's Most Inquiring Mind

In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century's Most Inquiring Mind PDF

Author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2015-06-15

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0393243117

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The extraordinary life and ideas of one of the greatest—and most neglected—minds in history. Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure like Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind. Mixing botany, etymology, medicine, and literary history, Aldersey-Williams journeys in his hero's footsteps to introduce us to witches, zealots, natural wonders, and fabulous creatures of Browne's time and ours. We meet Browne the master prose stylist, responsible for introducing hundreds of words into English, including electricity, hallucination, and suicide. Aldersey-Williams reveals how Browne’s preoccupations—how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs, what to make of order in nature, how to unite science and religion—are relevant today. In Search of Sir Thomas Browne is more than just a biography—it is a cabinet of wonders and an argument that Browne, standing at the very gates of modern science, remains an inquiring mind for our own time. As Stephen Greenblatt has written, Browne is "unnervingly one of our most adventurous contemporaries."

In Search of Sir Thomas Browne

In Search of Sir Thomas Browne PDF

Author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2015-06-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0393241645

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The extraordinary life and ideas of one of the greatest—and most neglected—minds in history. Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure like Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind. Mixing botany, etymology, medicine, and literary history, Aldersey-Williams journeys in his hero's footsteps to introduce us to witches, zealots, natural wonders, and fabulous creatures of Browne's time and ours. We meet Browne the master prose stylist, responsible for introducing hundreds of words into English, including electricity, hallucination, and suicide. Aldersey-Williams reveals how Browne’s preoccupations—how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs, what to make of order in nature, how to unite science and religion—are relevant today. In Search of Sir Thomas Browne is more than just a biography—it is a cabinet of wonders and an argument that Browne, standing at the very gates of modern science, remains an inquiring mind for our own time. As Stephen Greenblatt has written, Browne is "unnervingly one of our most adventurous contemporaries."

Quality of Life and Mortality in Seventeenth Century London and Dublin

Quality of Life and Mortality in Seventeenth Century London and Dublin PDF

Author: Thomas E. Jordan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-08-29

Total Pages: 76

ISBN-13: 3319443682

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This book provides an examination of the quantitative and qualitative factors affecting mortality in two major cities of the British Isles: London and Dublin. It covers a scale from individuals mentioned by name to aggregates of mortality data in the Bills of Mortality. Focusing on the Seventeenth Century, the book pays attention to the Great Plague of 1665, and to earlier years in which epidemics decimated populations. To the average person living in the seventeenth century, life was a series of challenges. Mortality among the young was high, and for those who survived early childhood, death in their fifties was fairly typical. Men and women might aspire to a longer life span, but even the healthiest practices were no guarantee when the overall quality of life was low. With fatal illnesses exemplified by typhoid fever on the one hand, and the arrival of yersinia pestis – plague through ports on the Mediterranean at regular intervals of several years, on the other, mortality became a foreseeable event.

The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England

The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England PDF

Author: James Dougal Fleming

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-10-26

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 331940301X

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This book examines the seventeenth-century project for a "real" or "universal" character: a scientific and objective code. Focusing on the Essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language (1668) of the polymath John Wilkins, Fleming provides a detailed explanation of how a real character actually was supposed to work. He argues that the period movement should not be understood as a curious episode in the history of language, but as an illuminating avatar of information technology. A non-oral code, supposedly amounting to a script of things, the character was to support scientific discourse through a universal database, in alignment with cosmic truths. In all these ways, J.D. Fleming argues, the world of the character bears phenomenological comparison to the world of modern digital information—what has been called the infosphere.

The Anthology of Babel

The Anthology of Babel PDF

Author: Ed Simon

Publisher: punctum books

Published: 2020-01-21

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1950192474

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Why should there only be literary scholarship about authors who actually lived, and texts which exist? Where are the articles on Enoch Campion, Linus Withold, Redondo Panza, Darshan Singh, or Heidi B. Morton? That none of these are real authors should be no impediment to interpreting their invented writings. In the first collection of its kind, The Anthology of Babel publishes academic articles by scholars on authors, books, and movements that are completely invented. Blurring the lines between scholarship and creative writing, The Anthology of Babel inaugurates a completely new literary genre perfectly attuned to the era we live in, a project evocative of Jorge-Louis Borges, Umberto Eco, and Italo Calvino.

Why?

Why? PDF

Author: Mario Livio

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-07-11

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1476792097

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Livio investigates curiosity through the lives of paragons of inquisitiveness as Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Feynman. He interviewed a range of exceptionally curious people from an astronaut with degrees in statistics, medicine, and literature to a rock guitarist with a PhD in astrophysics

The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century

The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century PDF

Author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Publisher: Granta Books

Published: 2015-05-07

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1847089011

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A profound and delightful jeu d'esprit of a book, mixing biography, etymology, cultural history and quixotic scientific experiments. Aldersey-Williams pulls the unfairly neglected yet enormously influential writer Thomas Browne out of the obscure pages of Pseudodoxia Epidemica and into the 21st century, to apply his generous curiosity and rational intelligence to the vagaries and contradictions of life today. Browne has had some impressive fans (Sebald, Woolf, Borges, Poe, Marias) but this book will revive him, bringing his extraordinary genius to a whole new audience.

The Most Influential Works by Sir Thomas Browne

The Most Influential Works by Sir Thomas Browne PDF

Author: Thomas Browne

Publisher: DigiCat

Published: 2023-12-25

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13:

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This carefully crafted book contains the most influential works of Sir Thomas Browne, including a spiritual testament and an early psychological self-portrait, "Religio Medici" and a work about the discovery of a Roman urn burial in Norfolk, Hydriotaphia. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was an English polymath and author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including science and medicine, religion and the esoteric. Browne's writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural world, influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian enquiry.

Sir Thomas Browne

Sir Thomas Browne PDF

Author: Reid Barbour

Publisher:

Published: 2013-08

Total Pages: 549

ISBN-13: 0199679886

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Reid Barbour brings the historical evidence of Browne's life together for the first time, allowing readers to contextualise his most celebrated works.

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