About the author

Thomas Browne (1605–82) studied medicine throughout the continent, his travels nurturing a cosmopolitan outlook on religion and the world expressed in his Religio medici (1643). After returning to England, he settled down to a country practice in Norwich, occupying himself in his spare time with the pursuits of a collector, antiquarian and naturalist.

About the text

Occasioned by the local discovery and exhumation of the Walsingham burial urns, this text begins as an antiquarian inquiry into the history of funeral rituals in order to ascertain the artefacts’ origins but gradually transposes itself to a solemn theo-philosophical key, in which the uncertainty of reviving the past and the futility of domesticating temporality haunt mortality. Here Browne is famed for his demanding magniloquent style; his aureate diction and marmoreal allusions aspire to a gravitas verging on orotund engorgement. The first two chapters consider the archaeological facets of burial, while the fourth and final chapters rise to speculative heights, the third pivoting between the two sections. The fifth chapter, from which the excerpts come, spins out a baroque fantasia on the utter vanity of commemoration. Hydriotaphia, derived from the Greek words for water-urn (hydria) and burial (taphe), was published with the Garden of Cyrus, a companion piece that conversely thematises living creation – the surprisingly omnipresent ‘quincunx’ pattern of five points disclosed in the botanical and horticultural spheres.

The arts of memory

Browne sets himself apart from humanists and antiquarians who serve a ‘resurrective memory’, which revivifies the remnants of dead culture for present purposes. Antiquarianism makes, in the words of Camden, the stones speak for themselves, whereas Browne's painstaking archaeological method might be said to smother its artefacts in muteness. He aporetically voids memory devices. What colours his thinking is his particular brand of fideistic scepticism developed in Religio medici, but while Browne in that intellectual memoir sought to erect a ‘memorial unto me’, Hydriotaphia intones a canticle to oblivion. Browne's most pressing irony concerns his grandiloquent, even baroquely antiquated language, which strikes a kind of elegiac note. Urn-Burial paradoxically attempts to engrave the final word on humanity's failure to come up with an enduring epitaph.

Textual notes

Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, urne-buriall, or, a discourse of the sepulchrall urnes lately found in Norfolk (London, 1658), F4r–F5v.