1 Kenelm Digby, Observations Upon Religio Medici, 2nd edn. (1644), 75, 99, 116.

² Digby, Observations, 9–11.

³ Kenelm Digby, Two treatises in the one of which the nature of bodies, in the other, the nature of mans soule is looked into in way of discovery of the immortality of reasonable soules (1644); James N. Wise, Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Religio Medici’ and Two Seventeenth-Century Critics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973); Ronald Huebert, ‘The Private Opinions of Sir Thomas Browne’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 45.1 (2005): 117–34 (118).

⁴ Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643) 1.37.

⁵ Samuel Johnson’s ‘Life of Sir Thomas Browne’, in Browne, Christian Morals (1756), i–lxi, at ix.

⁶ The religious politics of Religio Medici receives interesting treatment in Debora Shuger, ‘The Laudian Idiot’, in Reid Barbour and Claire Preston, eds., Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 36–62.

⁷ Digby, Observations, 29, 38–9, 75. Among recent works on Religio Medici as autobiography, see Ladina Bezzola Lambert, ‘Moving in Circles: The Dialectics of Selfhood in Religio Medici’, Renaissance Studies, 19.3 (2005): 364–79.

⁸ Claire Preston tells the story of the discovery of Bram Stoker’s notes for Dracula, as well as providing an account of the afterlife and reception of Religio Medici. Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4–9.

⁹ Tony Kushner, Hydiotaphia, or The Death of Dr Browne: An Epic Farce about Death and Private Capital Accumulation, in Death and Taxes, Hydriotphia & Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000), 34.

¹⁰ Norton Tempest, ‘Rhythm in the Prose of Sir Thomas Browne’, Review of English Studies, 3 (1927): 308–18; William Whallon, ‘Hebraic Synonymy in Sir Thomas Browne’, English Literary History, 28 (1961): 335–52; see, in particular, the articles of Morris Croll in Stanley Fish, ed., Seventeenth-Century Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Morris Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); and Daniela Havenstein, Democratizing Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici and its Imitators (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

¹¹ Austin Warren, ‘The Style of Sir Thomas Browne’, Kenyon Review, 13 (1951): 674–87 (680).

¹² Peter Dear, ed., The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 137; Margaret J. Osler, ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), preface; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

¹³ Preston, Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science, passim.

¹⁴ Alexander Ross, Medicus Medicatus (1645); Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

¹⁵ Tertullian, De Carne Christi 5.4 in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1885); Religio Medici 1.9.

¹⁶ Religio Medici 1.10.

¹⁷ Religio Medici 1.21.

¹⁸ Religio Medici 1.16.

¹⁹ Brooke Conti, ‘Religio Medici’s Profession of Faith’, in Barbour and Preston, eds., The World Proposed, 149–67 (157).

²⁰ Religio Medici, 1.11.

²¹ This element of Relgio Medici, its relationship to Laudian ecclesiastical politics, has received a large amount of attention and I will not discuss it here. It occupies only a relatively small, if important, part of the text.

²² William Hazlitt, Complete Works, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1931), VI, 333, 335.

²³ Noah Webster, ‘Letter to Dr David Ramsay’ (Oct. 1807), in James Boulton, ed., Samuel Johnson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1971), 129.

²⁴ Religio Medici 1.5.

²⁵ Religio Medici 1.13.

²⁶ Religio Medici 1.23.

²⁷ Religio Medici 1.23–4.

²⁸ Kushner, Hydiotaphia, 34.

²⁹ A recent and excellent essay on this topic is Sharon Cadman Seelig, ‘ “Speake that I may see thee”: The Styles of Sir Thomas Browne’, in Barbour and Preston, eds., Sir Thomas Browne, 13–35.

³⁰ John Smith, The mysterie of rhetorique unveil’ d (1665), 136.

³¹ Religio Medici 1.16.

³² Religio Medici 1.12; Exodus 33:23.

³³ 1 Corinthians 13:12.

³⁴ Religio Medici 1.49.

³⁵ Religio Medici 1.38.

³⁶ Religio Medici 1.39.

³⁷ Religio Medici 1.39.

³⁸ Religio Medici 1.44.

³⁹ See, however, Mary Ann Lund, ‘The Christian Physician: Thomas Browne and the Role of Religion in Medical Practice’, in Kathryn Murphy and Richard Todd, eds., ‘A man very well studyed’: New Contexts for Thomas Browne (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 229–46, and Andrew Cunningham, ‘Sir Thomas Browne and his Religio Medici: Reason, Nature and Religion’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, eds., Religio Medici, Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth Century England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 12–61.

⁴⁰ Much of the scholarship around this has centred on Milton; see, in particular, two excellent recent works: Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and N. K. Sugimura, ‘Matter of glorious trial’: Spiritual and Material Substance in Paradise Lost (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

⁴¹ Religio Medici 1.35.

⁴² Religio Medici 1.36. Descartes’s location of the soul in the pineal gland occurs in print in The Passions of the Soul (1649), though the idea was mooted earlier in an unpublished Treatise on Man (c.1637, published 1662) and in letters. See René Descartes, Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 230.

⁴³ Religio Medici 1.48.

⁴⁴ Religio Medici 1.48.

⁴⁵ Religio Medici 1.48.

⁴⁶ Religio Medici 1.48.

⁴⁷ A related report of such an experiment occurs in Transactions of the Royal Society, 3 November 1674.

⁴⁸ Thomas Bartholin, Bartholinus anatomy (1668), 347. The patristic sources are widespread, but include Augustine, City of God, 20.20; Tertullian, Contra Marcion, 5.9–10; and On the Resurrection of the Flesh, 35, the latter being Bartholin’s source on teeth.

⁴⁹ Joseph Glanvill, The vanity of dogmatizing (1661), 46–7.

⁵⁰ Robert Boyle, Some Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection (c.1675), in The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, 12 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), VIII, 295–313 (302–3). Kircher’s demonstration was performed to Queen Christina of Sweden in 1656.

⁵¹ Ezekiel 37:7–10.

⁵² Guy Holland, Grand Prerogative of Humane Nature (1653), 6–7.

⁵³ Peter Heylyn, Theologia veterum, or, The summe of Christian theologie (1654), 471.

⁵⁴ Joseph Beaumont, Some observations upon the apologie of Dr. Henry More for his mystery of godliness (1665), 10; Henry More, An explanation of the grand mystery of godliness (1660).

⁵⁵ Religio Medici, 1.48.

⁵⁶ James Howell, Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ: familiar letters domestic and forren (1645), 55.

⁵⁷ Religio Medici, 1.50.

⁵⁸ Religio Medici, 1.50.