Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall [Paperback]

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 MediciandUrne-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-sellingWill in the Worldand the National Book Award–winningThe Swerve). InReligio MediciBrowne 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.“The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppy seed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten. These are the circles Browne’s thought’s describe.” —W. G. Sebald, author of The Rings of Saturn

“Sir Thomas Browne, the wonderful 17th century baroque prose stylist and Borgesian speculative essayist whose works (such as Urne-Burial and Religio Medici) are inimitable idiosyncratic classics on the order of theAnatomy of MelancholyandTristram Shandy.” —New York Observer
 
“How does one recommend to the modern reader a writer whose two masterpieces are a rambling mediation abolc