SOURCE: Caldwell, Mark L. “The Transfigured ‘I’: Browne's Religio Medici.” Thought: A Review of Culture and Ideas 57, no. 226 (September 1982): 332-44.

In the following essay, Caldwell observes that the Religio Medici derives its sense of unity from its fine melding of the personal and the eccentric, in terms of Browne's thoughts and ideas.

Browne was once revered for a quaint willingness to share with his reader the aimless, eccentric privacies of his informal thought. The ellipses and protean divagations of his style, the chatty asides and apparent confessions of endearing prejudice, were thus viewed as inevitable marks of a personality escaping the restrictive boundaries of rational discourse. “Fond of the curious,” Coleridge said, “he loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found … that they, too, were curiosities; and so, with a perfectly graceful interesting ease, he put them, too, into his museum and cabinet...