Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall
  • Published: 15 March 2012
  • ISBN: 9781590174883
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $32.99

Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall

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Sir Thomas Browne is one of the supreme stylists of the English language: a coiner of words and spinner of phrases to rival Shakespeare; the wielder of a weird and wonderful erudition; an  inquiring spirit in the mold of Montaigne. Browne was an inspiration to the Romantics as well as to W.G. Sebald, and his work is quirky, sonorous, and enchanting.

Here this baroque master’s two most enduring and admired works, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, appear in a new edition that has been annotated and introduced by the distinguished scholars Ramie Targoff and Stephen Greenblatt (author of the best-selling Will in the World and the National Book Award–winning The Swerve). In Religio Medici Browne mulls over the relation between his medical profession and his profession of the Christian faith, pondering the respective claims of science and religion, questions that are still very much alive today. The discovery of an ancient burial site in an English field prompted Browne to write Urne-Buriall, which is both an early  anthropological examination of different practices of interment and a profound meditation on mortality. Its grave and exquisite music has resounded for generations.
  • Published: 15 March 2012
  • ISBN: 9781590174883
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $32.99
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Praise for Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall

  • "Sir Thomas Browne, the wonderful 17th century baroque prose stylist and Borgesian speculative essayist whose works (such as Urne Buriall and Religio Medici) are inimitable idiosyncratic classics on the order of the Anatomy of Melancholy and Tristram Shandy." --New York Observer
    • Praise for Urne-Burial:
  • "One of the most celebrated examples of 17th century prose." --The New York Times
  • "Like Hamlet, it is full of quotes . . . Browne is a miniaturist, and elegant raiser of ideas and a provoker of ideas in others: it was in a long note made in his copy by Coleridge that the very word 'marginalia' was invented. You can dip in and out of Urne-Burial's: 'genially ambling prose,' as Terry Eagleton characterized Browne's generous, inquisitive style. It is the most soothing of memento mori." --The Guardian (London)
    • Praise for Religio Medici:
  • "A literary and medical classic." --Irish Times
  • "Perhaps the two greatest meditations on ageing in English, Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy." --Sunday Times (London)
  • "One of the masterworks of English prose" --Sunday Times (London)

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