Renaissance collections and the culture of curiosity: A context for the curious writings of Sir Thomas Browne

This dissertation argues that Renaissance collecting and the culture of curiosity provide the best framework for understanding the writings of Sir Thomas Browne. Browne was fascinated with collections and the curiosities they contained---visiting collections on the Continent and in England; acquiring museum catalogues; assembling his own "paradise of rarities;" exchanging specimens with fellow naturalists and antiquaries; and contributing to the repositories of the Royal Society and the College of Physicians. Collecting provides the subject matter and inspiration for Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Urn Burial, Garden of Cyrus and Musaeum Clausum. Browne' primary motivation for collecting is articulated in Religio Medici: to study the "Book of Nature" and return a "devout and learned admiration" unto God.;The Introduction provides an overview of Renaissance collecting. Chapter One documents Browne's own introduction to collecting through the many botanic gardens, anatomy theaters, and university museums that he was exposed to during his medical training on the Continent.;Chapter Two opens with Religio Medici and Browne's channeling of collecting and the emotion of "wonder" into religious faith. Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica is discussed in the context of natural history and Baconianism, and Browne's status as an encyclopedic collector of facts and specimens is highlighted. Chapter Two concludes that seventeenth-century collecting and the pursuit of science coalesced under a Baconian rubric, and places Browne squarely in this inquisitive climate.;Chapter Three draws links between Urn Burial, the antiquarian movement, and virtuoso collecting. Yet Urn Burial also betrays Browne's increasing skepticism about the ultimate value of collecting. Browne questions the type of knowledge that collecting offers in the light of Christian consolations. Garden of Cyrus is seen as a companion piece and counterpoint to Urn Burial, putting Browne's collecting practices into the service of a mystical celebration of Creation and Creator.;Chapter Four discusses the late work Musaeum Clausum as an ironic commentary on museum collections and as further evidence of Browne's growing disenchantment with the fragmentary knowledge that collecting provides. However, the care with which Browne describes the objects in this fictional museum betrays his life-long fascination with the seventeenth-century collecting enterprise.