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

306 Pages·2015·4.54 MB·English

by  Hugh Aldersey-Williams

In Search
of
Sir Thomas Browne
The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth
Century’s Most Inquiring Mind
HUGH ALDERSEY-WILLIAMS
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON
To Moira
who understood all along
Contents
Prologue
Introduction
1. Biography
2. Physic
3. Animals
4. Plants
5. Science
6. Tolerance
7. Faith
8. Melancholy
9. Objects
10. The End
Timelines
Major Works of Thomas Browne
References and Further Reading
Illustration Credits
Acknowledgements
Index
Prologue
W
HAT WAS HE thinking?
What was he thinking that morning in 1662 as he set out from the spring
assizes at Bury St Edmunds towards his home in the city of Norwich? It was a
full day’s ride in fair conditions, and all the more arduous in this season when
the road was liable to be churned to mud or sheathed in ice. He would have
many hours to reflect, if he chose, on what he had said and its consequences.
A few days before, his words had done nothing to prevent two women from
being sent to their deaths.
He had been present at a trial of two witches. Six girls and an infant boy, all
of Lowestoft in Suffolk, were said to have been bewitched. The girls were a
mute presence in the court, perhaps intimidated by the formality of the
proceedings, or too scarred by their experience to speak up. Parents gave zealous
testimony on their behalf. Each of the children had suffered fits and bouts of
lameness and was said to have vomited up pins and nails. They had accused two
widows, Amy Denny and Rose Cullender, of afflicting them. Amy Denny was
the main culprit. She was a quarrelsome old woman, well known to the
townspeople of Lowestoft, occasionally used by some of the parents for
childcare, but had been put in the stocks the previous year by one of them for
some unrecorded misdemeanour. Rose Cullender seems to have had less direct
association with the children, and may simply have been fingered as another
awkward old crone who would add weight to claims of witchcraft. The accused
women were present in the courtroom, with Amy in particular shouting out in
violent rebuttal of the denunciations made against her.
His name was Thomas Browne, and he was a physician by profession,
trained at the best European schools of anatomy and medicine. He was also a
philosopher and writer, a coiner of words, a Christian moralist, a naturalist, an
antiquarian, an experimenter and a myth-buster. Called before the Bury assize as
‘a Person of great knowledge’, he was asked by the three serjeants-at-law for his
opinion of the evidence they had heard.
What he said next was brief and was not in itself pivotal to the verdict
handed down, but it can only have helped send the women on their way to the
gallows. Browne recounted news of a ‘Great Discovery of Witches’ lately in
Denmark, who had stuck pins into ‘Afflicted Persons’ in just the same way that
Denny and Cullender were accused of doing. He offered his physician’s opinion
that the fits and other symptoms exhibited by the children were natural. Almost
gratuitously, it seems, he then added the thought that this very naturalness was
evidence of the ‘subtilty’ of the devil, who was controlling the witches’ actions.
The serjeants had been divided before Browne spoke, uncertain they had
heard enough to convict the women. Now his casual anecdote, which might have
been taken as hearsay but for his learned reputation, made them think again. As
for Browne, duty done, he probably did not remain in Bury for long after the
trial to see the women hanged. He had patients waiting to see him in Norwich.
I decide to pursue Thomas Browne on his journey from Bury to Norwich.
The Shire Hall where the 1662 assizes were held no longer stands. The site
where Honey Hill runs down to the watermeadows of the rivers Lark and Linnet
has been redeveloped with modern council offices. But other parts of the town
have changed little, and it is obvious what route Browne would have taken. In
order to approximate the scale and texture of Browne’s journey, to match its pace
and to be able to see what Browne would have seen, I go by bicycle. I want time
to think about what was going through Browne’s head.
I am grateful for a mild and dry day as I set off, 350 years to the month after
Browne. Weather records for 1662 show the spring to have been kind that year
too, and perhaps in the end Browne made good speed. I pedal up Honey Hill,
and turn right at the vast parish church of St Mary’s to head down the broad
sweep of Angel Hill past the extensive complex of St Edmund’s Abbey, much of
it as Browne would have seen it, in ruins since the dissolution of the
monasteries, its stones ransacked for godless new buildings. I skirt the great
marketplace where Denny and Cullender were briefly imprisoned before they
were hanged, and turn right again onto Eastgate, crossing over the river past the
old Edward VI grammar school. Then it’s up the long, slow incline onto the
exposed road east.
To the shepherd or woodsman who chanced to see him pass by, Browne
would not have cut an imposing figure. He was in his fifties, of slight build and
habitually plainly dressed for a man of his standing. The bystander would have
gleaned nothing from this unpromising exterior about the man’s remarkable
heart and mind. Browne was loved by his patients, who admired his readiness to
treat rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant alike. He was more widely
renowned, too, as the author of philosophical essays. The earliest of these
contentiously sought to reconcile his rationalism as a physician with his
Christian faith. Others, more in the spirit of the age, discuss antiquities and the
meaning of death or the significance of pattern and number in nature. His
greatest and most popular work, though, was a vast catalogue of ‘vulgar errors’,
seven volumes of foolish common beliefs of the seventeenth century, each in
turn set out and then learnedly, scientifically, gently and humorously debunked.
He could write this humane and sceptical work, and yet he believed in
witches. He freely gave his opinion on the existence of witches before and after
the incident at Bury. But of the trial itself, he seems to have had no further
thought. Was it for him simply a matter of course? Was it an episode to forget?
I settle to a steady pace as I cycle through the ancient villages of Ixworth and
Stanton and the Rickinghalls Inferior and Superior, and then run across the
heaths and commons of Wortham and Palgrave to skirt the marshes south of
Diss. The blackthorn is coming out. Perhaps Browne was able to immerse
himself in the details of awakening life as he rode on. Perhaps his horse flushed
up skylarks from the Breckland scrub and he caught the scent of herbs familiar
from his own physic garden. On my journey, though, I see mainly flattened
drinks bottles, hubcaps in the hedgerows, and dead pigeons batted aside by the
speeding traffic.
He may have smiled when he reached the Dolphin Inn at Wortham. At the
time he was in the middle of gathering observations that would go towards the
compilation of Notes and Letters on the Natural History of Norfolk, a catalogue
of the birds and fishes found in the county. He offers a clear description of the
common dolphin, so as to distinguish it from the porpoise. The animal has a
‘very good taste to most palates’, he adds.
The inn has a forlorn air that its pink paint is unable to lift. A young couple
nurse their ciders, at a loss for conversation at its single picnic table on the
green. Its sign is simple gold lettering on black with a token squiggle of
ornamentation. Perhaps there was once a painting of a dolphin, not as accurate as
that given by the French naturalist Rondelet, which Browne took as his guide for
identification, more likely the stylized version of heraldry, a leaping arch of
muscle. Browne devotes an entire volume of Pseudodoxia Epidemica to ‘things
questionable as they are commonly described in Pictures’, and one of his
subjects is the dolphin. He worries that people will think they actually occur in
nature as they are habitually depicted, in this scoliotic way rather than lithe and
flexible of spine. Such an argument might seem pedantic, like the person today
who points out that a cartoon figure is unrealistic, but it matters in an age when
uncritical belief in images frequently triumphs over observation and reason.
Occasionally, amid the prairie-like fields, there are orchards of budding apple
trees, and I look over to see if they are arranged in the manner celebrated by
Browne in his essay on horticulture, The Garden of Cyrus. Browne was
captivated by the ancient custom of planting orchards in overlapping
quincunxes, modules of five trees set out in an X like the five dots on a die. The
essay revels in the subtitle The Quincunciall, Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations
of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered. It is a work of
skilled scientific observation rooted in the East Anglian landscape, but also a
disquisition of quite startling breadth, taking into its ambit the origins of gardens,
the shapes of various crosses, ornament in classical architecture and the art of the
lapidary. Holding it all loosely together is the number five, the generator of so
many patterns and repetitions in nature.
I recall the moment when Thomas Browne invaded my life. It happened
when I was writing a book about the discovery in 1985 of a new form of carbon
called buckminsterfullerene. This form of the element has atoms bonded to one
another in such a way as to form a curved pattern of hexagons and pentagons
like the stitching on the surface of a soccer ball. The pentagons that punctuate
the surface of the buckminsterfullerene molecule would make a fine addition to
Browne’s miscellany of the five-fold.
As I travel on, I cannot help seeing Browne’s mysterious signs of natural
order everywhere I look. They are visible in fallen pine cones and the wind-dried
heads of teasels, and in the ‘catkins, or pendulous excrescencies of severall
Trees, of Wallnuts, Alders and Hazels, which hanging all the Winter, and
maintaining their Net-worke close, by the expansion thereof are the early
foretellers of the Spring’. I think of the starfish and viruses that also exhibit five-
fold symmetry. It is clear that this number really does have a special place in
nature. It is even strangely evident in the man-made world, I realize. Most of the
hubcaps in the hedges are perforated with five holes and have the same
pentagonal symmetry as Browne’s flowers and seeds.
The words of the trial echo through my head. I see that in his own mind, if
not in the view of the judge and complainants determined to return a guilty
verdict, Browne’s contribution was carefully equivocal. He had called the
children’s affliction natural, and had added that their malady was merely
heightened by the agency of the devil. He had never said they were caused
directly by witches, nor that those witches were the women in the court. Such
equivocation is characteristic of Browne and marks him apart from most men of
his time. He could always see both sides of the argument. Sometimes, this was a
virtue – it was not easy to keep a level head and maintain an attitude of tolerance
during the English Civil War. At other times, he is equivocal to a fault,
marshalling the arguments for and against some dubious phenomenon in nature
or metaphysical nicety with the greatest eloquence, yet never coming down on
one side himself.
Did he feel that his medical view that the children’s suffering could be
regarded as entirely natural had been given due weight? Or did he regret that it
had been swept aside by more melodramatic testimony, by the impassioned pleas
of the parents, by the pitiful appearance of the silent children, and by his own
careless afterthought about the Danish case? Did he consider what he could have
said that might have led to a more humane outcome? Did it ever occur to him to
suggest that a belief in witches, while still perfectly respectable and perfectly
tenable in 1662, was actually rather old fashioned, and in fact well on the way to
becoming superstition, another ‘vulgar error’?
Of course, we cannot know. Indeed, we cannot even be sure exactly what
Browne said in court. The only record of the trial was made twenty years later.
We cannot be sure, therefore, that its account of Browne’s evidence is accurate
or complete, just as we cannot be sure that the judge was as impartial as he is
made to appear, or that the women really were given the opportunity to
‘confess’.
I have not withheld facts for the sake of spinning out this yarn. I would really
like to know what Browne said and thought – about the case, about the medical
and bedevilled condition of the defendants, about witches in general, and for that
matter about the plaintiffs and their motives. But the suspect nature of the trial
record, and the absence of any discussion in Browne’s own hand, forces me to
reflect on our own time. It makes me realize we cannot be sure even of what
goes on in today’s criminal justice proceedings and inquiries into strange
practices. All records, however authoritative, are necessarily incomplete and
approximate. The words in print do not represent exactly what was said and what
was said never represents exactly what was meant or taken as meant.
How Browne would have smiled at my difficulty. Uncertainty was his stock
in trade, and judging between uncertainty and unknowability his unique talent.
This readiness to mark out a realm for the mysterious no doubt stems from a
proper God-fearing humility, but I think it also shows that Browne has identified
an arena for delight. He recognizes, as many, especially scientists, do not, that
description is not the key to understanding all. Words cannot transmit the truth;
in fact, they put layers between us and the truth. Browne’s genius was not only
to accept this, but also to revel in it, finding in language not a constricting cage
but a bird ready to take flight.
At Scole I turn northward and cross the River Waveney into Norfolk. Still
scarcely halfway to Norwich, my legs ache and my knuckles are chilled. I note