The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne

The exceptionally diverse writings of the physician and essayist Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) are in some way involved in almost every major intellectual trend of the 17th century. As a medic, embryologist, natural historian, and experimenter, and as an essayist and prose stylist of the first rank, he mediates between early-modern humane and empirical writing, and is central to the interdisciplinary study of literature and science in the early-modern period which is at the forefront of interest in this area. His work is being assessed along with that of major scientists such as Newton and Boyle; with polemical and literary writers like Margaret Cavendish, John Evelyn, and Thomas Sprat; with Milton; and in synoptic work on scientific civility, the nature of truth-claims, the basis of evidence, the development of the scientific report, and the mutual influences of literary styles and scientific investigation. Browne is equally significant to the current revitalisation of interest in 17th-century Anglican and Catholic spirituality, to curiosity as a literary, scientific, and historical phenomenon, and to early-modern encyclopaedism, antiquarianism, and the technologies of printed knowledge. The wide variety of his surviving work - a spiritual autobiography, an encyclopaedia, essays on life and death, tracts ranging over garlands and burial mounds, dreams and verse-forms - marks him as generically the most diverse of writers, one who strongly interests specialists in prose studies and rhetorical analysis.

Surprisingly, this canonical writer has never been fully edited, and no earlier edition is in print. The recently commissioned 8-volume critical edition of his works, for which the proposal seeks support, is designed to remedy this fundamental need with a team of 12 specialists working collaboratively to produce an authoritative version of his print and manuscript works, invaluable to scholars and students of the period who are without a reliable or consistent source for the material. The edition's scope and ambition is groundbreaking: it will for the first time offer all Browne's printed works and all his manuscript remains (much of which has never been reproduced). No edition of Browne has ever met modern requirements of accuracy, accessibility, or complete commentary; the new edition will adopt the most ambitious modern standards of critical and textual editing. It is intended that it will become the standard reading edition for students and specialists alike. With rigorous but rich annotations and extensive introductions, it will consolidate and extend our understanding of Browne's importance to early-modern literary, scientific, and cultural studies, and will serve as a key resource for early-modern studies for this century.

Browne, a renowned polymath, makes unusually stringent editorial and intellectual demands. Each volume is co-edited by 2 or 3 specialists who bring a range of complementary but distinct skills (literary, linguistic, natural-historical, classical, biblical, antiquarian, palaeographic, and theological) to their own volumes and to the profoundly collaborative undertaking of the wider editorial project. Earlier editions of Browne were the work of a single scholar; this concerted approach will yield the first edition of his work ever to have recruited such a range of scholarship and specialisation, and will produce a distinctive and uniquely ambitious work of wide scholarly interest. In addition to 2 post-doctoral researchers, 2 PhD students will work on an intellectual map of Browne's library, and on his epistolary networks and compositional habits, thus contributing to the whole edition and emerging equipped for scholarly careers with multiple research skills. There will be a conference in 2014 on methodologies in the rapidly changing print and electronic publication spheres; and an exhibition on the culture of early-modern curiosity at the Royal Society to mark the launch of the edition in 2015.

Education
The editors all know from experience that the enthusiasm of their undergraduate students for Thomas Browne's writing, when it is made available to them, produces thoughtful reflection, puzzlement, disagreement, and recognition. They are highly responsive to Browne, who speaks often in the first person and writes, in Religio Medici, what amounts to a young man's manifesto. His questions are often their questions - about the purpose of study, the ethics of science, progress, and discovery, the ideal of toleration, and the reconciliation of reason and faith. Browne's 'amphibious' ability to ask but not always to answer such questions prompts them to think about their own attitudes to belief and to their political roles. An easily accessible Browne for the classroom, in print and in an electronic edition, will open up this attractive and complex writer to those to whom the concerns of the past, and their relation to modern post-Enlightenment thought, have often been opaque.

Medicine
Browne has always fascinated modern physicians, among whom were two of his most important 20th-century editors. Medical interest in Browne flourishes, recently in new medical syllabuses that insist on ethical study in relation to medical practice, and in 'narrative medicine' and medical humanities, where medical and literary study are combined as pragmatic rather than purely academic elements. Here Browne has an obvious place, not only with Religio Medici, but also A Letter to a Friend, a work already used in narrative medicine to train practitioners in how to listen to their patients as a diagnostic skill. His notebooks and correspondence, currently unavailable, will in edited form offer further medical-ethical insights.

Cultural and Intellectual Heritage
The intellectual capital of a society is preserved and augmented in its writings. In the past fifteen years, scholarly editorial practice has produced landmark editions of major early-modern English writers, and these are ultimately works of retrieval, conservation, and enhancement of national heritage that preserve essential elements of that birthright. The edition of Browne will tell us a great deal about the slow emergence of a liberal national polity, and about the circulation of knowledge, both issues ever-current and ever more significant. A conference hosted by the Browne editors and including editors from other projects will consolidate their advances, make account of technological change, predict future innovations, and solve current problems in a practice-led set of discussions that emphasises experience and method, in aid of intellectual conservation and progress. Their findings will be available on the open-access Cambridge Centre for Material Texts website as a service to future editors.

Local (mainly amateur) historians have offered important material to the Browne edition; and some of his writings, so far mostly inaccessible to them (letters, travel notes, experiments, medical jottings, and natural history observations), offer in return material for their own equally specialised work. The edition will, in other words, allow crucial knowledge-exchange and outreach between the academy and unaffiliated scholars. The City of Norwich, Browne's home for nearly 50 years, will find material like Repertorium invaluable for its heritage and conservation programmes.

An exhibition at the Royal Society will introduce non-specialists to the early-modern culture of curiosity, collecting, and networks of intellectual exchange through artefacts that demonstrate ideas about the structure of knowledge and how we think about what we know of the world. In this important venue, the interactive exhibition will connect Browne to modern and early-modern cultural understanding of science in society.

Through the work of edition, Browne's manuscripts and printed works in library collections will be better understood within their local and national contexts and heritage.