SOURCE: Breiner, Laurence A. “The Generation of Metaphor in Thomas Browne.” Modern Language Quarterly 38, no. 3 (September 1977): 261-75.

In the following essay, Breiner contends that Browne consistently uses metaphors to convey the principles and ideas contained in his works, and that there is a commonality in the images he uses in most of his prose works.

Thomas Browne has been variously treated as a scientist, a religious writer, and a prose stylist. But largely because of seventeenth-century tensions between science and religion, even between plain honesty and literary style, studies along these lines tend to diverge in their conclusions, and produce incompatible versions of the man and his work. It seems possible to resolve these discrepancies by isolating an element that literally informs all three aspects of his work: speculation, faith, and style. The fact is that in Browne's most personal essays—Religio Medici, Urn Burial, The Garden of...