Providence in Browne

This chapter situates the providential rhetoric of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1642/43) amidst the ‘war of words’ in which the Norwich physician’s essay adventitiously appeared but in which it nevertheless took part. More briefly, the chapter explores the continuities and discontinuities of Browne’s traffic in the language and doctrine of providence across his publications of the 1640s as compared to those of the later 1650s, to see if we might learn something of how Browne, a royalist and a lover of the established Church, made sense of the upheavals and dislocations of these decades. To do so, it considers the ways in which the doctrine of providence traversed and transected the fields of medicine, natural philosophy, politics, and religion in seventeenth-century England.