DOCSLIB.ORG

Read Book the Hymns of Zoroaster: a New Translation of the Most Ancient Sacred Texts of Iran Ebook

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Read Book the Hymns of Zoroaster: a New Translation of the Most Ancient Sacred Texts of Iran Ebook THE HYMNS OF ZOROASTER: A NEW TRANSLATION OF THE MOST ANCIENT SACRED TEXTS OF IRAN PDF, EPUB, EBOOK M. L. West | 182 pages | 15 Dec 2010 | I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd | 9781848855052 | English | London, United Kingdom The Hymns of Zoroaster: A New Translation of the Most Ancient Sacred Texts of Iran PDF Book The earliest recorded references to Zoroaster in English literature occur in the writings of the physician-philosopher Sir Thomas Browne who asserted in his Religio Medici What we are seeing here are developments shaped by two factors: on the one hand the acceptance of some elements of traditional popular religion into Zoroastrian cult, and on the other the impulse to integrate and justify them. Often enough it is doubtful which word is to be construed with which, or where the boundaries of phrases and sentences lie. But may that man attain yet better than the good, who should teach us the straight paths of advancement in this material existence and that of thought, the true gradients that the Lord inhabits: a zealous follower of Thine, Mindful One, well-born, bounteous. How might piety spread to those to whom Thy religion, Mindful One, goes forth? To do so, they needed to establish when Zoroaster had lived, which they accomplished by erroneous, some even identified Cyrus with Vishtaspa [37] counting back the length of successive generations, until they concluded that Zoroaster must have lived " years before Alexander". She and her herdsman are meant to conduct a peaceful pastoral life, and yet they are continually beset by Wrong's violent followers. Description A new translation of the foundation texts of the Zoroastrian religion, the Gathas songs composed by Zoraster himself, together with the Liturgy in seven chapters composed shortly after his death some years ago. Its ethos and cultural matrix was likewise Hellenistic, and "the ascription of literature to sources beyond that political, cultural and temporal framework represents a bid for authority and a fount of legitimizing "alien wisdom". Zoroastrian priests have continued to recite them in the liturgy, but with very limited comprehension of the highly archaic language in which they are composed. One gains credit with the Mindful Lord for opposing the bad by any means, including physical encounter, or by showing others how to be good; 3 if one assists the righteous, not only those of one's own clan but across wider social networks, and looks after the cattle properly, one will be looked after oneself with equal care by Right and Good Thought. The Mindful Lord has begun to establish a realm of goodness in part of the earth, but what is the extent of its effectiveness? The revised theology was bound up with the i 2,year chronological scheme described earlier. March Learn how and when to remove this template message. And if he had been a forebear of Darius' father, Darius would have known it and would have included him in the line of his ancestors that he records in his great inscription at Bisitun. But what has been preserved is only a fraction of what once existed. Scripture and worship. He will consider the matter, as he considers everything, in the light of that; but it will be his decision, and it will have to be accepted, however it goes. In the light of our observations on the nature and occasion of Zoroaster's poems, it does not seem likely that he himself intended them to be memorized and perpetuated. They were composed at different dates, mainly before bce, in an Iranian language not oth- erwise documented and called by scholars Avestan. The 11th-century Cordoban Ibn Hazm Zahiri school contends that Kitabi "of the Book" cannot apply in light of the Zoroastrian assertion that their books were destroyed by Alexander. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. These designations avoid giving specific answers to the questions of who made the cow or created Wrong though in other passages Zoroaster is prepared to identify the cow' s maker as Ahura Mazda or the Bounteous Will. Such a preacher, as he widens his influence as Zoroaster hopes to, stanza 4 , builds up the Mindful One's dominion. The society reflected in the Gdthas is loosely structured. When that wrongdoer dies and comes to another cross- ing, the Arbiter's, and meets his own soul standing there on the path of Wrong because of the things he has said and done, then he will be sorry. As it is, the intention is to explain how he knows what the Positive Will said at the beginning. We cannot assume that this arrangement goes back to Zoroaster himself or that it corresponds to the order of composition. The Vendidad contain seventeen regional names, most of which are located in north-eastern and eastern Iran. The dualism inherent in Zoroaster's thought was thus made absolute: a good and an evil power had existed side by side from the beginning, in constant conflict. The Yashts are hymns of praise, mostly metrical, addressed to various divinities and holy entities. In other passages he addresses individuals, some of whom are of his own Spitama family. The Hymns of Zoroaster: A New Translation of the Most Ancient Sacred Texts of Iran Writer At every level of society — clan, village, tribe, province — I feel alienated; the land is ruled by men who practise the old religion and have little sympathy for mine. Such corruptions of the text as we can identify seem in nearly all cases to have arisen only during the period of written transmission. Right is here called 'sunny' or 'sunlit' from its association with the light of day; cf. In the last line he switches from third to second person as he resumes his address to the Mindful Lord. Criticism of Zoroastrianism. All we can say is that there is a strong tendency for words of three or more syllables to be put at the end of a colon. These may also indicate the vast influence of the Achaemenid Empire on the development of either religion. Who set the path of the sun and stars? The Daevas themselves are misled by the Evil Will, who makes them think evil; and hence comes the evil speech with which that Evil Will induces the wrongdoer to take over responsibility for the evil deed. For him sec also He describes how they tussle for a man's soul, making their voices heard in his mind, and how his choice between them determines his ultimate fate. They are all composed in stanzas of three, four, or five lines. Al- ready in the fifth century if not the sixth Zoroastrian theologians had constructed a chronological scheme according to which the struggle between the good and evil principles, Ahura Mazda and Angra Manyu, was being played out over a period of twelve thousand years, divided into four equal parts. According to a Zoroastrian tradition that may go back to one of the lost books of the Avesta, he came from a district called Ragha, apparently to be located in Badakhshan in the north-eastern corner of Afghanistan, or in ancient terms eastern Bactria. I know none such other than You, with Right; so protect us! The surviving manuscripts of the Yasna come partly from Iran and partly from India. I with them am the first to find my way to Thee : all others I regard with hostile spirit. The powerful man is guilty of many offences against peace in his efforts to win a name for himself as a warrior, or as a patron of great sacrificial banquets. By insisting on these principles Zoroaster has the best hope of persuading the oppressors to mend their ways. His aims are to oppose the wrongful and support the righteous, in the hope of obtaining the good offices of 'Him who rules at will' the title adapted from stanza 1 , with no special point here and of enjoying them for as long as he goes on praising him, by which he no doubt intends 'all my life'. He needs protection for his holding of livestock and for his own safety, and for this he relies on his trinity, the Mindful Lord, Right, and Good Thought. The original Zoroastrian world view interprets being essentially on a moralistic basis and depicts the world as an arena for the struggle of the two fundamentals of being, Good and Evil, represented in two antagonistic divine figures. He created this world, or at any rate what is good in it, by means of his thought. West The right of M. It is possible that some Avestan texts could have been written down in such a script. Manichaeism considered Zoroaster to be a figure along with the Buddha and Jesus in a line of prophets of which Mani — was the culmination. The emphasis is on divine and human sapience and on man's responsibility for the choices he makes between good and bad. He seems to be a traditional hgurc, as the Avcstan frfiorastar corresponds to the Vedic creator Tvastr. This section needs additional citations for verification. A complementary element of the good world, besides the purification of humanity, is the breeding and welfare of the cow, which the Mindful Lord has created to provide us with nourishment. The Lord replies: the enemy is the one who deliberately opposes and obstructs the progress that Zoroaster makes in promoting the Mindful One. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. In interpreting individual sentences the translator must try to cultivate a sense for natural word groupings and typical struc- tural patterns, and a sense of the relationship between phrase and verse.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) and Life Before Birth
    Archives ofDisease in Childhood 1994; 70: F75-F76 F75 Arch Dis Child Fetal Neonatal Ed: first published as 10.1136/fn.70.1.F75 on 1 January 1994. Downloaded from PERINATAL LESSONS FROM THE PAST Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) and life before birth Peter M Dunn Thomas Browne was born in 1605. His father was a London merchant about whom little is known. His mother married a second time and Thomas's stepfather, Sit Thomas Dutton, gave him an excellent education, first at Winchester and then at Bradgate Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford. His undergraduate career was distinguished and he acquired a BA in 1626, followed by a MA in 1629. After a visit to Ireland with his stepfather, he went on the grand tour, visiting the famous medical centres of Montpellier, Padua and, finally, Leyden, where he obtained a medical degree in 1633. The following year he returned to England and then settled at Shibden Hall, near Halifax in Yorkshire, in order to recover his health which had been impaired by shipwreck on the jour- ney home. While recuperating during 1634-5 he occupied himself in writing a book, Religio Medici, which was to make him famous.' He had not at first intended it for publication but, on an imperfect unauthorised version appear- ing in 1642, he agreed to the printing of a cor- rected edition the following year. It at once became and remained a best seller passing through many editions and being translated into Latin, Dutch, French, and German. frogs, snails and toadstools; nor at the Jews for http://fn.bmj.com/ Browne had a brilliant and cultured mind; he locusts and grasshoppers; but being amongst was a scholar who spoke most European them, make them my common viands, and I languages as well as Latin, Greek and Hebrew, find they agree with my stomach as well as and who had studied and travelled widely.
    [Show full text]
  • Metaphorical Imagery in the Prose Works of Sir Thomas Browne. Pinkie Gordon Lane Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College
    Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1967 Metaphorical Imagery in the Prose Works of Sir Thomas Browne. Pinkie Gordon Lane Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Lane, Pinkie Gordon, "Metaphorical Imagery in the Prose Works of Sir Thomas Browne." (1967). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 1346. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/1346 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 67-17,329 LANE, Pinkie Gordon, 1923- METAPHORICAL IMAGERY IN THE PROSE WORKS OF SIR THOMAS BROWNE. Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Ph.D., 1967 Language and Literature, general University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan PINKIE GORDON LANE 1968 All Rights Reserved METAPHORICAL IMAGERY IN THE PROSE WORKS OF SIR THOMAS BROWNE A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Pinkie Gordon Lane B .A ., Spelman C o lleg e, 1949 M.A., Atlanta University, 1956 A ugust, 1967 i i ACKNOWLEDGMENT I should lik e to thank the members of my committee, Drs. William J. Olive, Lawrence A. Sasek, and John H.
    [Show full text]
  • Thomas Browne (1605-1682)
    The Complete Works of THOMAS BROWNE (1605-1682) Contents The Books Religio Medici (1643) Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658) The Garden of Cyrus (1658) Brampton Urnes (1712) The Miscellany Tracts (1684) A Letter to a Friend (1690) Christian Morals (1716) Common Place Books (1846) Miscellaneous Works The Criticism Sir Thomas Browne by Leslie Stephen (1892) Sir Thomas Browne and his ‘Religio Medici’: An Appreciation by Alexander Whyte (1898) Sir Thomas Browne by Walter Pater (1899) Sir Thomas Browne by Lytton Strachey (1906) Sir Thomas Browne by Peter Eade (1908) Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Kenelm Digby by John Cordy Jeaffreson (1919) The Biographies Life of Browne by Anthony Wood (1692) Life of Browne by Samuel Johnson (1756) Thomas Browne by Arthur Henry Bullen (1900) The Delphi Classics Catalogue © Delphi Classics 2020 Version 1 The Complete Works of THOMAS BROWNE By Delphi Classics, 2020 COPYRIGHT Complete Works of Thomas Browne First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Delphi Classics. © Delphi Classics, 2020. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published. ISBN: 978 1 91348 737 9 Delphi Classics is an imprint of Delphi Publishing Ltd Hastings, East Sussex United Kingdom Contact: [email protected] www.delphiclassics.com Explore Philosophy at Delphi Classics… The Books St Michael-le-Querne, Cheapside, in 1585 — Browne’s birthplace. The church was destroyed in the Great Fire of London of 1666.
    [Show full text]
  • PDF Download Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall
    RELIGIO MEDICI AND URNE-BURIALL PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Sir Thomas Browne,Stephen Greenblatt,Ramie Targoff | 232 pages | 03 Sep 2012 | The New York Review of Books, Inc | 9781590174883 | English | New York, United States Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall PDF Book Browne attended Winchester College and Oxford, then spent several years studying medicine at Montpellier, Padua, and Leiden, before receiving his MD in Cancel Save settings. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with introducing more than a hundred words into modern English. Read an excerpt of this book! There's a modernist concept of "negative capability" which Browne delights in. Language and Equilibrium. He then attended the Universities of Montpellier and Padua, and in he was graduated M. Its grave and exquisite music has resounded for generations. Andre Nusselder. Carving Nature at Its Joints. But there are other criteria by which a book may be judged as a classic, and in at least one of these, these books fail to meet the mark. Browne is a superb writer, an English Montaigne. I would suggest imagining that you are reading it aloud. Browne was an inspiration to the Romantics as well as to W. The text preserves original spelling and notes; a finely wrought, judicious introduction describes Browne's wide-ranging curiosity, his influences, his self-fascination, his faith and doubts. These are wonderful, and deserve their place as classics of seventeenth-century English literature. Essential We use cookies to provide our services , for example, to keep track of items stored in your shopping basket, prevent fraudulent activity, improve the security of our services, keep track of your specific preferences e.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Cambridge University Press 0521837944 - Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science Claire Preston Excerpt More information Introduction The City of Norwich’s handsome bronze monument to its most famous man of letters was erected in 1905, the tercentenary of Browne’s birth. The large effigy is seated in a chair contemplating the fragment of a funeral urn in its outstretched right hand, its head resting thoughtfully in its left. On a summer’s day early in the twenty-first century, this memorial was in the middle of a large flock of little boys furiously skateboarding in the Haymarket; a few yards beyond them the outdoor market stalls were doing a brisk trade; and Sir Thomas himself was wearing an orange plastic traffic cone on his head. In the midst of business and pleasure, no one was paying the slightest attention to this grave figure, even with its unusual headgear. The scene is so quintessentially Brownean that it defies comedy and even irony: time makes pyramids pillars of snow, and monuments, he concludes in Urne-Buriall, are ‘but the irregularities of vainglory, and wilde enormities of ancient magnanimity’. To be apparently derelict and unknown in the bustle of future ages is no more than the fate of Methusaleh, whose long life has become his only chronicle; by the same token, a day-glow plastic traffic cone is no more than the cold consolation of eternity. This monument is not Browne’s tomb. His bones lie nearby, under the floor in the chancel of St Peter Mancroft, the large, incomparably beautiful parish church which dominates the Haymarket.
    [Show full text]
  • Sir Thomas Browne: His Skull, Portraits, and Ancestry Author(S): M
    Biometrika Trust Sir Thomas Browne: His Skull, Portraits, and Ancestry Author(s): M. L. Tildesley Source: Biometrika, Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (Aug., 1923), pp. 1-76 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Biometrika Trust Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2331889 Accessed: 02-09-2016 15:08 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press, Biometrika Trust are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Biometrika This content downloaded from 159.178.22.27 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 15:08:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Biometrika, Vol. XV, Parts I and II Frontispiece Tildesley, Sir Thomnas Browzne *\~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. ; .. ... tS *; j~~~~~~~~~~N . 4 . i *.--. ^.a !_ The L.'Estrange Portrait. (By Permis8sion.) This content downloaded from 159.178.22.27 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 15:08:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms VOLUME XV AUGUST, 1923 No. 1 BIOM-ETRIKA SIR THOMAS BROWNE: HIS SKULL, PORTRAITS, AND ANCESTRY. BY M. L. TILDESLEY. INTRODUCTORY NOTE. BY PROF. SIR ARTHUR KEITH, M.D., F.R.S., Conservator of the Museam, Royal College of Surgeons, England.
    [Show full text]
  • Making the “Round of Knowledge” in Bacon's Wake: Naudé, Comenius, and Browne1
    MAKING THE “ROUND OF KNOWLEDGE” IN BACON’S WAKE: NAUDÉ, COMENIUS, AND BROWNE 1 ∗ Christopher D. JOHNSON ∗∗ Abstract. This paper examines how three of Francis Bacon’s readers, Gabriel Naudé, Jan Amos Comenius, and Thomas Browne, rethink the humanist library, the genre of the silva , and Bacon’s call for a new kind of encyclopedism. Naudé adumbrates the organization and contents of the ideal library so that judicious readers may integrate the old and new learning. In calling for a single pansophist book, Comenius heralds Bacon’s inductive method and yet would restore metaphysics to the encyclopedia. And after his own efforts in Baconian encyclopedism in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica , Thomas Browne writes a catalogue of books and artifacts that is at once an elegy to the republic of letters and a ludic plea to include admiratio in “the round of knowledge.” This diverse reception history emblemizes the rich, often contradictory potential of Bacon’s encyclopedic vision. Keywords: Francis Bacon, Gabriel Naudé, John Evelyn, Jan Amos Comenius, Thomas Browne, library, encyclopedia Introduction When we contemplate Bacon’s largely unacknowledged debts to humanists like Giambattista della Porta and Girolamo Cardano in many of the thousand paragraphs comprising the Sylva Sylvarum (1626) questions about what and how Bacon read in order to undertake his natural histories, his experiments solitary and experiments in consort , rightly come to the fore. These become more urgent still if we seek to understand Bacon’s ambivalent use of humanism’s textual legacy to forge his grand encyclopedic vision, the Instauratio magna , or what he calls in the 1605 Advancement , “this general Cabynet of knowledge” which would heed “the divisions of the Nature of things” (as opposed to a “secretary of Estate” who, smelling of the lamp, sorts items into the pigeon-holes of his desk).
    [Show full text]
  • Sir Thomas Browne Against Error
    Sir Thomas Browne Against Error: An Apology for Complexity by Giuliana Iannaccaro The “People”, writes Thomas Browne in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, are “the most deceptable part of Mankind and ready with open armes to receive the encroachments of Error” (Browne 1964: 25).1 They are exposed unto error because their intellect is unequal to the task of discerning the truth; their “uncultivated understandings” cannot distinguish true tenets from false and are prevailed upon by sensations, which hold sway because the People’s weak reason is incapable of judging things correctly. In the first book of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne makes clear what he means by “People”: […] the greater part of Mankind [who] having but one eye of Sense and Reason, conceive the Earth far bigger than the Sun, the fixed Stars lesser than the Moon, their figures plain, and their spaces from Earth equidistant. For thus their Sense informeth them, and herein their reason cannot Rectifie them; and therefore hopelessly continuing in mistakes, they live and die in their absurdities; passing their days in perverted apprehensions, and conceptions of the World, derogatory unto God, and the wisdom of the Creation. (Browne 1964: 26) 1 Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or Enquiries into very many received Tenents, and commonly presumed Truths (London, first edition 1646). All quotations are taken from The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, Vol. II, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, Faber & Faber Limited, London, 1964. There were six editions of Browne’s treatise during his lifetime (the first, in 1646, was revised and enlarged from 1650 to 1672). Keynes bases his edition on the last version of the text revised by Browne in 1672.
    [Show full text]
  • Sir Thomas Browne in Borges's
    A Certain Melancholy Vanity: Sir Thomas Browne in Borges’s “El Aleph” Pablo Maurette From his youth until the end of his life, Jorge Luis Borges cultivated with Sir Thomas Browne a unique form of friendship that one could label me- tempsychotic. Unlike those English friendships that first do away with in- timacy and eventually with dialogue, such as that held by Herbert Ashe and the narrator’s father in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges never ceased to converse with Browne. Impervious to the constrictions of time and space (for Borges, friendship is a bond stronger than romantic love precisely because it can dispense both with frequency and with physi- cal presence), the kinship that the Argentine writer established with the seventeenth-century English physician was based on intellectual and tem- peramental affinities, something one can appreciate in their shared wit, an exquisite sense of style, and a common love for extravagant notions. Browne, a man who in Coleridge’s words had “a little twist in the brains,” was responsible for many ingenious conceits. He speculated, for example, that just like for some ancient pagans there was a transmigration of souls, there is also a transmigration of ideas. Borges was particularly fond of this Variaciones Borges 51 » 2021 notion. In “La esfera de Pascal,” he rephrases it: “Quizá la historia univer- sal es la historia de unas cuantas metáforas” (OC 636). It is not outlandish to propose that he saw himself as a fitting vessel for Browne’s ideas to reincarnate.1 Borges first came across the work of Browne in 1919, or 1920, while he was living in Spain.
    [Show full text]
  • From Family to Philosophy
    From Family to Philosophy Letter-Writers from the Pastons to Elizabeth Barrett Browning Henry Summerfield FROM FAMILY TO PHILOSOPHY FROM FAMILY TO PHILOSOPHY LETTER-WRITERS FROM THE PASTONS TO ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING Henry Summerfield 2019 © Henry Summerfield 2019 Published by ePublishing Services, University of Victoria Libraries Victoria, British Columbia V8P 5C2 Canada [email protected] Book design by Yenny Lim, ePublishing Services, University of Victoria Libraries. Cover image: Alfred Walter Bays. 1889. Image from page 638 of “Stories for the house- hold”. Courtesy of Internet Archive on flikr, flic.kr/p/ovpvxp. No known copyright restrictions. This publication, unless otherwise indicated, is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License. This means that you may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, and make derivative works and remixes based on it only for non-commercial purposes. Distribution of derivative works may only be made under an identical license that governs the original work. Properly attribute the book as follows: Summerfield, Henry. From Family to Philosophy: Letter-Writers from the Pastons to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. University of Victoria Libraries, 2019. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Download this book: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/3859 References to Internet website URLs were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the authors nor the University of Victoria is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The publisher and contributor make no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that it may contain.
    [Show full text]
  • LANGUAGE, GENERATION and ALCHEMY in BROWNE's EXPLICATION of BLACKNESS Siobhán Co
    ‘THERE IS ALL AFRICA [. .] WITHIN US’: LANGUAGE, GENERATION AND ALCHEMY IN BROWNE’S EXPLICATION OF BLACKNESS Siobhán Collins and Louise Denmead [. .] the mind of Man is farre from the Nature of a cleare and equall glasse, wherein the beames of things should refl ect according to their true incidence.1 Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia epidemica: or, Enquiries into very many Received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths, more commonly known as Vulgar Errors, was published in 1646 and reissued in fi ve successive editions in the author’s lifetime. Within Pseudodoxia’s “cabinet of curiosity”, three chapters are devoted to the discussion of blackness (book VI, chapters X “Of the Blacknesse of Negroes”, XI “Of the same” and XII “A digression concerning Blacknesse”) which, though at times ‘plundered for choice quotations’,2 have yet to receive full exposition and analysis.3 Mary Baine Campbell offers the most detailed study of these chapters to date, but limits her analysis of Browne’s representation of black- ness to eight pages.4 Moreover, in keeping with Joan Bennett’s note that only two chapters in Pseudodoxia discuss the blackness of Negroes, Campbell also discounts Chapter XII; she says that in this chapter Browne ‘addresses the general referent of “Blackness”, separating it 1 Bacon F., The Advancement of Learning, ed. M. Kiernan (Oxford: 2000) 116. 2 Killeen K., “ ‘Three pounds and fi fteen shillings; the inconsiderable salary of Judas’: Seventeenth-century Exegesis, Cultural Historiography and Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica”, Renaissance Studies 20 (2006) 502–519, here 509. 3 References to Pseudodoxia are taken throughout from Browne T., Pseudodoxia Epi- demica, ed.
    [Show full text]
  • Religio Medici
    This is (more or less) a facsimile version of the 1645 edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici. Page and line breaks follow that edition exactly. Some changes have been made to the text: long esses are now short (I don’t own a proper typeface); a few typos have been corrected; some text has been changed to accord with the errata of the 1643 edition; a missing marginal note has been supplied; and pages misnumbered have been corrected. All these corrections and changes are noted as footnotes. Incorrect section numbers have not been changed. Some variant readings have been noted, where they’re of general interest; this is not, nor is it intended to be, even a precursor of a critical edition. Superscript of the form “K100” refer the reader to Keck’s Annotations on Religio Medici, giving their numbers as they are currently numbered on my web site (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/relmed/annotations.html). In editions following 1645, these notes accom- panied Religio Medici and were referred to in the text by bracketing the text being annotated; for example, the annotation I have numbered K2 appears thus: *There are many things delivered Rhetorically]. This is obviously not practical when the notes do not accompany the printed edition. James Eason ([email protected]) 2001 To such as have, or shall peruse the Observations upon a for- mer corrupt Copy of this Book. Here are some men that Politian speaks of, Cui quam recta ma- nus, tam fuit & facilis: and it seems the Author to the Obser- vations upon this book, would arrogate as much to
    [Show full text]