Charity, Halifax, and Utopia: The Disadvantageous Setting of Thomas Browne's Religio Medici

Summary

THIS paper reduces to three main points: the evidence that Thomas Browne lived in Halifax, West Yorkshire, from 1634 to around 1637 and drafted his Religio Medici there; a brief account of Halifax both in fact and, crucially, in legend in the period in question; and some of the reasons why all this matters to an understanding of Browne's work. As a setting, Halifax helps us account for crucial shifts in Religio. On the one hand, Religio Medici investigates theological and philosophical concerns developed by Browne at Oxford and on the Continent, all in a carnival spirit of improvisation within a ritualized framework. These concerns include matters such as nature's monstrosities and hieroglyphs, atheism, and heresy. On the other hand, Browne's work ponders potentially more mundane, if still vexing, social problems such as poverty, and social virtues such as charity.

Far from providing Browne with a bland or neutral setting for the composition of the Religio, Halifax offered him experiments in charity and in social engineering as he crossed the threshold between the intellectually transformative Continent and the practical life of vocation and family matters in Norwich. In this remote place without books, Browne took stock of a mind at once haunted by its own singular brand of skeptical melancholy yet lightened by an orientation to his world that was charitable and sociable. In West Yorkshire, he found a mode of utopianism that tempered carnival inversions with a powerful, reformist commitment to ripping the masks off contemporary customs and habits.