Sir Thomas Browne's Religio medici and two seventeenth century critics

Browne has become so traditionally a part of the history and texture of classic English prose style that we sometimes unconsciously undervalue his ideas and their power to arouse dispute in his time. The primary purpose of this study is to assert his significant, albeit ambivalent, position in the history of ideas in seventeenth-century Europe. Only minimal attention will be paid to Browne's stylistic excellence as such-a matter forcefully and definitively analyzed by other critics, including Coleridge, whose superb comments were collected as recently as 1955.