SOURCE: Post, Jonathan F. S. “Elements of Style and The Politics of Laughter: Comic Autobiography in Religio Medici.” In Sir Thomas Browne, pp. 57-94. Boston, Mass.: Twayne Publishers, 1987.

In the following essays, Post outlines the main elements of Browne's style, focusing on his Religio Medici and characterizing it as a text that lends itself to loose interpretation due to Browne's use of wit and comic improvisation.

Whatever Browne's achievements were as a scientist and an Anglican apologist, he is best known today as a stylist who created one of the most distinctive and recognizable voices in the history of English prose. The “stylist,” Austin Warren reminds us in his valuable essay on Browne, is someone “whose originality lies not in his big ideas (his major concepts, often philosophically derivative and ‘eclectic’) but in his little ideas, his discriminations and nuances, his intellectual sensibility.”¹ Warren is not arguing that...