Lara Dodds

ART AND FALLACY OR THE NAKED OFFER? Style and science in Sir Thomas Brownes Pseudodoxia Epidemica

Sir Thomas Brownes Pseudodoxia Epidemica holds a unique place in the history of science and in the history of style. A catalogue of errors that seeks to rationalize natural knowledge while preserving traditional beliefs, Pseudodoxia Epidemica straddles Renaissance and modern approaches to rhetoric and nature. In this essay I suggest that Browne, by engaging the central Renaissance metaphor of rhetoric as clothing, playfully challenges the notion that style has moral and intellectual signicance as a marker of a reformed natural knowledge. I demonstrate Brownes specic debt to Bacons "idol of the tribe" in order to show how Brownes writing complicates the traditional understanding of the relationship between style and science in the seventeenth century. Pseudodoxia Epidemica is, I conclude, a sophisticated lesson in how to read. Keywords Thomas Browne; Pseudodoxia Epidemica; error; Francis Bacon; plain style; science and literature Natural philosophers of the seventeenth century were preoccupied with the relationship between style and error. Does rhetoric impede the advancement of learning? Can a pure style lead to a fuller and more accurate knowledge of nature? The locus classicus for these questions is Francis Bacons critique of excessive Ciceronianism in book 1 of The Advancement of Learning. Here Bacon identies one of the primary defects of the current state of learning to be the preference for words over matter. Bacon complains that men began to hunt more after words than matter, and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and gures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment (Bacon, The Major Works 139). In what is, of course, a remarkably well-turned period, words and matter become antagonists. Tropes and gures become incompatible with the commendable qualities of weight, worth, soundness, life, and depth. Although it would be a mistake to suggest that Bacons criticism of Ciceronianism means that he believes rhetoric could
Prose Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 August 2006, pp. 222-233 ISSN 0144-0357 print/ISSN 1743-9426 online q 2006 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/01440350600784750

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(or should) be rejected, this passage suggests the tie between his critique of style and experimental natural philosophys challenge to Aristotle. In both cases, attention to words, whether the tropes and gures of the poet or the authority of the schoolmaster, leads away from true comprehension of nature and toward error. These implications are made explicit by Thomas Sprat in his 1667 History of the Royal Society (originally published in 1667). Sprat describes a resolution to reject all the amplications, digressions, and swellings of style in favor of a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness. The former leads to error, while the latter allows the natural philosopher to approach an ideal knowledge of nature when men deliverd so many things, almost in an equal number of words (Sprat 113). Sprat, therefore, answers afrmatively both questions about the relationship between style and error. In these well-known passages, Bacon and Sprat provide an outline for what has become the standard narrative of the relations between seventeenth-century literature and science. In this story, science, with its objective and realist character, prunes away the aesthetic excess that is the space of the literary, leaving language (and hence literature) impoverished.1 As Brian Vickers, Catherine Martin, and others have argued, however, this narrative cannot account for either the complexities of style or even these authors discussions of rhetoric. Their anti-rhetoric combines epistemological concern with how form relates to content with a broader stylistic concern with establishing an authoritative and credible discourse for knowledge claims.2 In this essay I argue that Sir Thomas Brownes Pseudodoxia Epidemica is also an exploration of the questions posed by the relationship between style and error. Though Browne answers these questions differently from either Bacon or the later writers of the Royal Society, he is equally concerned with the representation of natural knowledge. Yet Browne does not rest on the side of the modern in any of the common taxonomies of seventeenth-century prose style. He has a rich, allusive style that is far from transparent and that favors, to use Thomas Sprats phrase, the amplication, digression and swelling of style over the terse word-thing. Brownes encyclopedia of disputed and uncertain knowledge is not a text in which natural philosophy can easily be assimilated to the modern paradigm in which clarity and objectivity are the hallmarks of scientic style. A contemporary critic, Alexander Ross, critiques Brownes extravagant style: Where there is most painting, there is least beauty3 (emphasis in original). Though hardly an advocate of the new science, Ross takes a page from their book when he traduces Brownes writing with the charge of painting, which, as the practice of excessive (and deceptive) female ornamentation, could signal any number of stylistic crimes.4 For modern critics of Brownes style as well, it has many of the qualities that Bacon identied as impediments to learning. As one recent scholar argues, such critics do not like what they see: an art that is too playful, too selfconscious, too proud of its own being (Post 57). In Stanley Fishs inuential formulation, Browne is the bad physician.5 From this perspective, Brownes representation of nature is beautiful and strange, but ultimately a digression in the development of science. It is precisely on the level of style, however, that Pseudodoxia Epidemica provides its most signicant contribution to the development of science. Brownes examination of the origin of error prompts a reevaluation of the signicance and meaning of the plain style. Browne transforms the problem of science and style from the question of how to

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write into the question of how to read. Brownes playful use of a central Renaissance metaphor for style clothing undermines any simple association between style and error. Instead, Browne recognizes that the boundary between literal and metaphorical uses of language is not universal or absolute, but a result of shared practices of reading (and misreading). Pseudodoxia Epidemica challenges the moral and intellectual signicance of style and, above all, provides instructions on how to read the world and human beings awed representations of it.

I
First published in 1646 and appearing in ve revised and augmented editions by 1672, Pseudodoxia Epidemica is a negative catalogue of natural knowledge. Pseudodoxia Epidemica strives to demarcate what is known through its inverse: the many popular beliefs, mistakes, and downright falsehoods that impede the advancement of learning. Much of the book, therefore, records and debunks specic examples of error, but the rst chapter of the rst book, Of the causes of Common Errors, denes a general theory of error as well. At its base, error is the result of the common inrmity of human nature, or original sin (Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica 6). According to this view, error is innate and ineradicable even as the local causes of specic errors are multiple and difcult to dene. Browne sees error as communal shortcoming rather than individual mistake. In effect, what that means for an early modern Christian is that the origin of all error is the Fall. The rst chapter of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, therefore, is a reading of Genesis. Brownes account covers many of the typical questions: what is the relative culpability of Adam and Eve; what is the nature of Satans deception; what, nally, can account for their error? Browne ultimately concludes that their misapprehension was a failure of reasons control and discipline over the senses. Browne explains that Adam and Eve were deceived through the conduct of their senses, and by temptations from the object it selfe, whereby although their intellectualls had not failed in the theorie of truth, yet did the inservient and brutall faculties controle the suggestion of reason (Pseudodoxia Epidemica 7). Though human reason is essentially good, it did not overcome the inservient and brutall faculties that are subject to temptation and deception. Brownes analysis of errors origin, however, is preceded by a consideration of the (mis)representation of reality that initiated this imbalance of reason and sense. Browne describes Adam and Eves differing culpability in language that questions the relationship between rhetoric and error: Art and fallacy was used unto her, a naked offer proved sufcient unto him (Pseudodoxia Epidemica 6). On the face of it, this passage suggests that the language of temptation does not matter: Adam and Eve are equally fallen even if they reached that state by traveling different paths. The problem, in other words, is a problem of reading. Equally misled by art and fallacy or the naked offer, Brownes Adam and Eve provide an allegory of the failure of style to serve as a reliable signal. In this chapter, Browne poses explicitly the question of how style contributes to error. The terms in which he poses the problem echo language that is central to seventeenth-century treatments of poetry, rhetoric and science. Brownes characterization of Eves offer to Adam as naked alludes to a common metaphor

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for rhetoric: a woman dressed in garments decorated with owers that stand for the gures.6 In this analogy, rhetoric is understood as an essential ornament that clothes the naked content of speech. Eves naked offer, therefore, is distinguished from language clothed in rhetoric.7 She speaks to Adam with a plain style, while Satans art and fallacy are the amplications, digressions, and swellings of style. But if a naked style now seems obviously preferable for most purposes, for many writers of the Renaissance, the metaphor of clothing could indicate a celebration of human art and achievement. We see an example of this positive use of the metaphor in George Puttenhams Arte of English Poesy, which justies the utility and even necessity of rhetorical gures by an extended analogy with clothing and court fashion: And as we see in these great Madames of honour, be they for personage or otherwise never so comely and bewtifull, yet if they want their courtly habillements or at leastwise such other apparell as custome and civilitie have ordained to cover their naked bodies, would be halfe ashamed or greatly out of countenaunce to be seen in that sort, and perchance do then thinke themselves more amiable in every mans eye, when they be in their richest attire, suppose of silkes or tyssewes and costly embroderies. Even so cannot our vulgar Poesie shew it selfe either gallant or gorgious, if any lymme be left naked and bare and not clad in his kindly clothes and colours (Puttenham 137). Womens beauty cannot be recognized without the coverings mandated by custome and civilitie (at the least) or, preferably, the most luxurious and costly court fashions. An ornamented style is preferred not only because of the status associated with the court, but because the alternative, a plain style, is indecent, unnatural if not clad in its kindly clothes and colours. In this traditional use of the metaphor, clothing signals the essential decorum and decency of rhetoric. But if the metaphor of clothing constructs rhetoric as a positive achievement for poets, it can just as easily be turned to suggest the deceit inherent in a beautiful surface. The clothing in Puttenhams conceit is, after all, womens clothing: the beauty of such ornament could just as easily be marked (and frequently was) as a feminized excess. For experimental philosophers, as Sprats well-known description of the ideal scientic style suggests, the metaphors value is reversed: clothing is transformed from beautiful to deceptive while naked moves from indecent to pure. Puttenhams shameful naked limbs have become a positive attribute of a self-consciously plain style that resists ornament by Sprats 1667 announcement of the Royal Societys resolution to reject all the amplications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliverd so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits or Scholars (Sprat 113). Sprat describes this style both through what it is and what it is not. What it is not is the style inherited from centuries of ancient and Renaissance study of the art of rhetoric.

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The plain style shuns elaborate syntax and gures, which are to be excised as mere excess. Opposed to this excess is an ideal of primitive purity, an anti-style characterized by expression that is naked, natural rather than articial. As Brownes use of the phrase suggests, however, the idea of a naked style is freighted with Christian narratives of human sin and redemption. Sprat claims through a description of style that the discourse of experimental philosophy returns to a moment of linguistic purity associated with prelapsarian language. The naked offer derives its authority from a transparent relationship between language and its referent in the world. Nature is to be understood (and described) as it is rather than through conventional tropes or metaphors. Natural philosophers hoped that the new world of experiment achieved through a reformation of language would nally recover the world lost with Adams original sin. As Sprat argues, natural philosophy was the rst service, that Adam performd to his Creator, when he obeyd him in mustring, and naming, and looking into the Nature of all the Creatures. This had bin the only Religion, if men had continued innocent in Paradise, and had not wanted a Redemption (Sprat 349 50). In this revision of the traditional metaphor for rhetoric, naked indicates a purity that frees language from the corruption of human invention. The passage from Pseudodoxia Epidemica lies between Puttenhams Arte of English Poesy and Sprats History of the Royal Society chronologically, and it can also be seen to split the difference philosophically. All three writers share at least an implicit acknowledgement of two distinct styles of language: plain and gurative. But Browne does not share with Sprat the assumption of a superior ethical and epistemological value for the plain and he rejects Puttenhams elevation of art by linking it to fallacy. In fact, the ever-present possibility of puns and equivocations in Brownes language suggests further complications. Eve, of course, is naked when she makes her offer to Adam. Her nakedness at this moment is highly ambiguous. On the one hand, it retains a trace of its identity as a sign of prelapsarian innocence. As Milton writes of Adam and Eves nakedness, Then was not guilty shame, but simplicity and spotless innocence (Milton, Paradise Lost 4. 313, 318). Francis Bacon uses the same pair of words simplicity and innocence when he describes his plain and perspicuous style in the New Organon as naked: It being my design to set everything forth, as far as may be, plainly and perspicuously (for nakedness of the mind is still, as nakedness of the body once was, the companion of innocence and simplicity) (Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon 4: 22). Separating mind and body, Bacon suggests that writing retains an innocence that our actions have lost. On the other hand, Eves nakedness at this moment also initiates the widespread association of sin with sexuality and, more specically, female desire. In Paradise Lost, Eves nakedness incites carnal desire after she offers Adam the fruit (Milton, Paradise Lost 9. 1013). Browne, like many early modern commentators, interprets the Fall as the subordination of the higher rational faculties to the naked appetites, a disorder gured by a failure of the man to correct the woman. Eve is naked but, more importantly, in making her offer she acts outside of Adams control. The possibility of recovered and reformed knowledge in a plain style is compromised by this offer an offer that is sexual and an inversion of the proper relationship between reason and appetite. But Puttenhams courtly habillements and richest attire fare no better. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica Adams

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clothing is equivalent to death. Browne allows that animal skins were a naturall habit unto all, before the invention of Texture, but he is more interested in what such clothing might mean to a man formerly innocent in his nakedness. For him, clothing was something more unto Adam, who had newly learned to die; for unto him a garment from the dead, was but a Dictate of death, and an habit of mortalitie (Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica 408). Rather than a gure of the human makers control of and transcendence of nature, clothing is evidence of mans subjection to it.

II
As his account of errors origin suggests, Brownes precise relationship to the new science of the seventeenth century is complicated by the problem of style. The naked offer is dangerous, but art does not offer amelioration of the human propensity for error. Brownes study of error exposes the naivety of the assumption that any kind of style naked or otherwise can guarantee reliable knowledge. He turns, therefore, to the problem of perception and lack of perception. Browne interprets the temptation of Eve as, specically, a failure to detect the working of rhetoric a failure, in other words, of reading. In a pattern that is repeated frequently in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Eve is tripped into error when she cannot penetrate Satans equivocation, a fallacy Browne describes as converting Metaphors into proprieties, and receiving as litterall expressions, obscure and involved truths (Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica 24, 23). Though Browne catalogues ve distinct sources of error (misapprehension, fallacy, credulity, supinity and adherence to antiquity, tradition and authority), numerous chapters describe errors that come down to some kind of misreading.8 Primary among these errors are what Browne calls the verbal fallacies. Browne identies the two primary verbal fallacies as aequivocation and amphibologie, which conclude from the ambiguity of some one word, or the ambiguous syntaxis of many put together (Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica 22). This fallacy has many guises. It encompasses all Ironicall mistakes; for intended expressions receiving inverted signications, all deductions from metaphors, parables, allegories, unto reall and rigid interpretations (24). As this explanation suggests, the problem is not the naked offer or art and fallacy, but the inability to distinguish between one and the other. Brownes errors of misreading are numerous and drawn from many areas of knowledge: natural history lore, myth, history, art. In chapter after chapter, Browne traces a commonly held belief to an original moment of misreading. Pseudodoxia Epidemica is not so much a handbook or encyclopedia of errors, as it is a collection of instructions for reading.9 Browne does provide answers to such pressing questions as: does the bear lick her cub into shape? (178); does the unicorn, grifn or phoenix exist? (156, 199, 202); what does a mandrake root look like and will it be fatal to dig it up? (141). Yet the answers Browne provides to these questions are less important than the methods he provides for reading the evidence both textual and material and for interpreting this evidence according to philosophical, moral, religious or medical regimes of knowledge. Brownes interest in verbal fallacies suggests that he is engaged with the question of what status metaphor and, more broadly, analogy, has as knowledge. This interest has bearing on the question of Brownes debt to the new science and, in particular, the works of Francis Bacon. For some critics, Brownes interest in analogical systems of

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meaning represents his greatest weakness as a scientist. His acknowledged observational and empirical bent is overshadowed by an old-fashioned way of reading the world. Leonard Nathansons description of the balance of old and new in Brownes thought is typical. He states that: Everywhere in his writings there is evidence of a dedication to scientic observation, to disclosing natures secrets, and to unraveling apparent contradictions. But his conviction that nature is no mere series of phenomena but a vast network of meaningsPlatonic and Christian in their nal implicationsappears even stronger (Nathanson 12). Brownes most recent editor, however, argues that Pseudodoxia Epidemica works to synthesize ancient and modern opinions, performing that intermediate task desiderated by Bacon of clearing the path for subsequent investigations10 and Pseudodoxia Epidemica is undoubtedly a response to one of Bacons specic recommendations for the reform of learning.11 What has not been recognized, however, is that Brownes interest in verbal fallacies represents a more specic debt to Bacons idols of human learning. Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I argue, is an extended meditation on and reconsideration of Bacons idols of the tribe. Bacons distrust of rhetoric is not merely a critique of the potential temptation of style, but part of a broader reconsideration of metaphorical or analogical models of understanding man and nature.12 In book 2 of The Advancement of Learning, Bacon identies belief in the correspondence between body, world, and universe as one of the most signicant impediments to the advancement of philosophy. When we interpret nature through analogies with the human mind or human body, we reveal not nature, but ourselves: what a number of ctions and fancies the similitude of human actions and arts, together with the making of man communis mensura, have brought into Natural Philosophy (Bacon, The Major Works 227). In other words, Bacon challenges the explanatory and persuasive force of the metaphor of the microcosm. Bacon distrusts analogies that distract attention from nature to the human observer. Dened as the idols of the tribe, Bacon illustrates the ctions and fallacies of such analogies by demonstrating the many ways in which nature exceeds and escapes a human desire for order. The disposition of the heavens is offered as exemplary of the mismatch between human priorities for interpretation and the disposition of nature itself. He states that: For if that great work-master had been of an human disposition, he would have cast the stars into some pleasant and beautiful works and orders, like the frets in the roofs of houses; whereas one can scarce nd a posture in square or triangle or straight line amongst such an innite number; so differing an harmony there is between the spirit of Man and the spirit of Nature (Bacon, The Major Works 227). Bacon recognizes that the human desire for order can distort our perception of nature. Moving from an investigation of minerals to plants, animals, and man, Pseudodoxia Epidemica is structured as a direct meditation on Bacons idols of the tribe. Ascending the scale of creation, Brownes rst four books culminate in a chapter called Of the Erectnesse of Man (Guibbory 489). In this chapter Browne asks whether the unique circumstances of mans anatomy have as a corollary a unique philosophical, moral, and

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religious status. This chapter is concerned with two questions. The rst, which Browne represents as strictly anatomical, is whether human beings are the only creatures with erect gures, a concept dened by Galen to apply to those creatures whose spine and thigh bone are carried in right lines (Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica 291). The second has to do with the interpretation of the rst: if mans anatomy is unique, what is its function? Brownes answers to these questions model the practices of reading that are ultimately his most important defense against error. Considered strictly from the perspective of comparative anatomy, Browne is able to answer the rst question unambiguously in the afrmative. Through citations of Galen and Aristotle, Browne is quickly able to discount other candidates for erectness. Through successive readings of various types of evidence, however, Browne introduces greater degrees of uncertainty. He rst runs into difculty when forced to consider erectness as popularly taken, which he describes more generally as largely opposed unto proneness (Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica 292). This denition replaces the geometrical precision of Galens anatomy with a category that now includes quadrupeds such as horses, oxen and camels; birds such as the penguin; and even insects such as the praying mantis. All of these share in some part of erectnesse (292). From this broadened category, Browne moves on to the second of his questions, which produces even greater uncertainty. He sets out the evidence on both sides. The evidence for the idea that the function of mans erectness is to look up to heaven includes Greek etymology, severall testimonies, popular and vaine conceit (293). These arguments are all, not coincidentally, the type Bacon warns against in the interpretation of nature. Arguments against this popular belief include Galens authority, arguments from anatomy (that is, that the eyelid blocks any convenient line of sight), that other animals such as the sh uranoscopus, birds with long necks, and even a frog with his head above water have better views of the heavens than man does. For Browne this problem again comes down to an original instance of misreading, of the mistaking of a gurative expression for a literal. Readers misunderstood Plato, when he said that man doth Sursum aspicere, for thereby was not meant to gape or looke upward with the eye, but to have his thoughts sublime, and not onely to behold, but speculate their nature with the eye of the understanding (Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica 293). Browne accepts the unique status of mankinds thoughts sublime, but will not assent to the literal or metaphorical connection between mans upright body and upright thoughts. The two may coincide, but their relationship is not causal, nor a basis for further argument. The signicance of this discussion is most clearly demonstrated by its placement as the rst chapter of the fourth book, which is concerned entirely with errors concerning man. By challenging this popular belief about the correspondence between mans unique anatomy and mans unique status in creation, Browne is setting out an interpretive strategy in which, following Bacon, human beings are not to be interpreted according to fancies and ctions of correspondence, but according to the same natural and anatomical regimes that direct our reading of all animals.

III
Brownes instructions in reading teach us how to detect the dangers of equivocation, but do not, nally, replace its every use. The verbal fallacies that are so common in his

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catalogue of error are also central to Brownes style. His Baconian project in Pseudodoxia Epidemica privileges naturalistic interpretations, but the lasting legacy of Brownes writing is not the conrmation of a Baconian discourse of science, but an extended meditation on its consequent losses and gains. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the fallacies of amphibology and equivocation are revealed in great detail, but in Brownes inuential Religio Medici (1642), Browne himself is guilty of converting Metaphors into proprieties (Pseudodoxia Epidemica 23) when he uses the same gure to dene mankind: but to call our selves a Microcosme, or little world, I thought it onely a pleasant trope of Rhetorick, till my neare judgement and second thoughts told me there was a reall truth therein: for rst wee are a rude masse, and in the ranke of creatures, which onely are, and have a dull kinde of being not yet priviledged with life, or preferrred to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those ve kinds of existences, which comprehend the creatures not onely of the world, but of the Universe; thus is man that great and true Amphibium (Browne, The Major Works 103). (emphasis in original) This passage begins with the same reservations Browne expresses in Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Following Bacon, Browne describes the idea of man as a microcosm as merely a pleasant trope of Rhetorick. Yet when Browne worries further at this traditional and highly conventional trope, he nds a reall truth in an exact correspondence between the stages of mans life and the primary divisions of the world. Then, in a remarkable instance of analogical thinking, Browne builds another pleasant trope out of the gure he himself has literalized. As an Amphibium, mankind is both physical and spiritual. Like the tropes Browne warns against, mankind looks two ways. Brownes denition of mans nature, then, moves us through several stages of the literal and the gurative: a common and traditional metaphor, which is itself an emblem for the pre-modern worldview and analogical thinking; through an observation that literalizes the gure through observations of the stages in mans life; and nally transforms that into yet another gure that accommodates human life within the Christian universe. Misreading, error, and the misuse of language are all part of the legacy of the Fall for early modern readers and writers. It is not surprising, then, that amphibology is both a dangerous source of error and an important method for the generation of meaning in Brownes works. The plain-style polemic of the later seventeenth century and projects such as Wilkinss universal language were attempts to return to an original purity of language through the suppression of the rhetorical tradition. For Browne, however, the plain style is an ideal already compromised by Eves naked offer. Later in the century, reformers like Wilkins would look for a new language to solve the problems of the naked offer and of art and fallacy, but for Browne, the only way to avoid the error propagated through language was through a transcendence of its human origin. In a near-contemporary text, also preoccupied with how to read, John Donne praises a deity who is may I not say, a literall God, a God that wouldest bee understood literally, and according to the plaine sense of all that thou saiest? But thou art also (Lord I intend it

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to thy glory, and let no prophane mis-interpreter abuse it to thy diminution) thou art a gurative, a metaphoricall God too (Donne 99). (emphasis in original). In the absence of such a divine style, Brownes contribution to the problem of style and science is a constant reappraisal of the naked offer and of art and fallacy as ways of reading the world.

Notes
1. For the conventional narrative of the development of seventeenth-century prose, see Jones, The Attack on Pulpit Eloquence in the Restoration: An Episode in the Development of the Neo-Classical Standard for Prose; Jones, Science and Language in England of the Mid-Seventeenth Century (originally published in 1930); Jones, Science and English Prose Style, 1650 75. 2. See Vickers. As Catherine Gimelli Martin argues, whereas historia ns have long since discredited Jones and his followers for offering a simplistically linear, triumphalist, or Whig version of scientic progress, or all three, the dark version of their paradigm not only survives but in fact thrives in the new historicists Foucauldian account of epistemic break (25). 3. Alexander Ross, Medicus Medicatus (London, 1645) quoted in Post (95). 4. See Dolan. 5. See Fish (353 73). Fish titles his chapter on Browne The Bad Physician: The Case of Sir Thomas Browne. 6. Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figs. in Science (18). 7. Marion Trousdale and others have warned that modern understandings of rhetoric often serve to obscure this key point of early modern rhetoric. Rhetorical gures cannot be dismissed as merely superuous: although ornament is added onto matter, it is not thereby to the Elizabethan mind synonymous with the frivolous or useless. It is synonymous rather with pleasure and efcacy, and as such it is as essential to their poetic (Trousdale 88). On this point, the clothing analogy is apt: we may think of clothing as ornament, but we do not often want to be without it. 8. Karen Edwards also makes this observation: Repeatedly he nds that an erroneous notion about the natural world has arisen because a classical or biblical trope has been taken literally, a word has been mistranslated, or a verbal ambiguity has been improperly resolved (51). 9. I focus on readings of nature, but Browne also chronicles acts of misreading that arise from pictures and other visual representations. The results are surprisingly literal readings of familiar images of biblical and classical texts that suggest, as Alexander Ross argues in his contemporary critique of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, that Browne himself is also susceptible to the misreadings he diagnoses in others. Ross suggests that Brownes method will not eradicate error, but rather, will collapse truth and ction: He wrastles shadows: for he may as well question all the Poeticall ctions, all the sacred Parables, all tropicall speeches; also Scutchions, or Coats of Armes, signes hanging out of dores, where he will nd blew Boars, white Lions, black Swans, double-headed Eagles, and such like, devised only for distinction (Ross, Arcana Microcosmi 163).

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10. Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (xxxvii). 11. In the category of natural history, Bacon identies a need for a substantial and severe collection of the Heteroclites or Irregulars of nature, well examined and described that includes a due rejection of fables and popular errors (Bacon, The Works 6: 184). Brownes catalogue of errors attempts to ll this need. See Robbinss introduction to Pseudodoxia Epidemica for an account of Brownes specic debts to The Advancement of Learning. 12. See Timothy Reisss description of the development of analytico-referential discourse.

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Lara Dodds is an Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University. She is currently working on a book project about Margaret Cavendish and literary history.