SOURCE: Warnke, Frank J. “A Hook for Amphibium: Some Reflections on Fish.” In Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne: The Ann Arbor Tercentenary Lectures and Essays, edited by C. A. Patrides, pp. 49-59. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1982.

In the following essay, Warnke refutes Stanley Fish's critique of Browne's work, stressing that a common religious background is not a necessity when trying to appreciate the artistic or religious ideas in a work of prose.

It was in some ways refreshing when, in his Self-Consuming Artifacts of 1972, Stanley Fish attacked Sir Thomas Browne as being “the bad physician.”¹ Not since Sir Kenelm Digby's contemporaneous Observations had the worthy doctor been really strenuously condemned, and, after some three centuries of laudatory appreciations and respectful analyses, the bristling rejection was stimulating. It gave one the warm feeling one gets on hearing motherhood maligned, or patriotism, or apple pie. Yet, unless one...