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Title: Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Garden of Cyrus: And, the Garden of Cyrus by Thomas Browne, Thomas, Sir Browne, Robin Hugh A. Robbins, Thomas Hydriotaphia Browne, Thomas Garden of Cyrus Browne ISBN: 0-19-871064-X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1972 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: Great writer, awful edition (Robin Robbins, Oxford UP)
Comment: I'm leaving aside considerations of Browne's importance as a writer. There are plenty of appraisals of him on the net, and if you've found this page, you probably already know what you're looking for.

While this edition may be adequate for the casual reader, it's entirely unsuitable as a scholarly edition:

1) The editor has translated nearly all of Browne's notes without giving them in the original.

2) He has moved these notes from the margin to the foot of the page without bothering to number them. The reader will often find himself finishing a page, discovering a footnote and trying to backtrack to figure out where it fit in. Confusing to say the least, especially because Robbins intermingles his own commentary with Browne's, indicating the latter's with the initial B.

3) Protracted discussions of the text are confined to an appendix (and by protracted, I mean three or four sentences at most). They might as well be incorporated into the body of the text as footnotes, since he only provides six of these for Hydriotaphia, eight for the Garden of Cyrus.

4) The editor has modernized the spelling, despite Browne's well known preference for certain archaic forms. While updating the orthography is helpful (substituing 'j' for 'i,' 'v' for 'u,' etc.), Browne's occasionally unorthodox spelling should hardly present a problem to anyone with half a brain, and if you can't figure out that 'sceleton' means 'skeleton,' you probably won't understand why 'Man is a great and true amphibium.'

5) And obviously, modernizing the spelling vitiates the impact of Hydriotaphia, Browne's meditation on mutability, language and identity, and the anonymity of the grave.

6) Lastly, for such a shoddy edition, it's a pricey, slender paperback. The editor could at least have included Letter to a Friend or a selection from Christian Morals to round it out.

Unfortunately, there are no popular editions of Browne's work available at this time, and it's doubtful whether any shall be in the near future. Search out something used, and avoid this one if you can.

Rating: 5
Summary: What song the Syrens sang; meditations on time and eternity
Comment: Sir Thomas Browne's works from the first half of the seventeenth century remain worthy of your attention. He is an essayist, akin in spirit to his rough contemporary Montaigne. He was yet another prose stylist of those fine days of the Stuart period, when the sun of English prose approached its zenith, only to be eclipsed by the English cultivation of melancholia.

The -Hydriotaphia-, or Urn Burial, is perhaps the most celebrated of these works. Its nominal occasion is the discovery and opening of an ancient gravesite, about which Browne, a physician, writes with better archaeological method than most of his antiquarian contemporaries. But this discovery is merely the occasion for what turns into an extended meditation on the funerary monuments of antiquity, and of the great themes of time, eternity, and the frailty of memory and fame.

The -Religio Medici- is a meditation, quite humane and somewhat skeptical especially given his period, on the prevailing religious doctrines and teachings of his day. It is a prayer for peace in an age that was marked by a great deal of religious strife and contention; not surprisingly, it gave doubts to most of the warring parties as to Browne's orthodoxy. Despite its generally skeptical tenor, it seems Browne himself was prepared to accept alchemy, astrology, and witchcraft.

The -Garden of Cyrus- is the most curious of these works. Its nominal subject is the "quincunx," the arrangement of five units like the fives on dice, and its use in ancient horticulture. But it treats this slight subject with such various learning, finding quincunxes everywhere on earth and in the heavens, so that when it's over it seems that understanding the quincunx might be the key to the secrets of the universe.