SOURCE: Wilding, Michael. “Religio Medici in the English Revolution.” In Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution, pp. 89-113. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Wilding offers a critical reading of Browne's Religio Medici in the context of the English Revolution, especially as it relates to the breakdown of censorship during the time the work was composed.

I

Not only radicals wrote in a coded, careful, cautious way. Sir Thomas Browne, generally deemed to offer an escape from the political strife of his age, emerges upon analysis, as so many supposedly apolitical figures so often do emerge, as deeply, committedly, and indeed polemically, conservative. Commentator after commentator has accepted Browne's statement ‘To the Reader’, which prefaces the authorized edition of Religio Medici (1643), that the work was written ‘about seven yeares past’ and thus has read it as a product of the 1630s, as a late metaphysical...