Hereditary error and popular culture in Pseudodoxia Epidemica

Abstract

AbstractThomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) is often described as a major landmark in the emergence of ‘popular culture’ as the object of scholarly scrutiny. This article argues, however, that the drift of Pseudodoxia's argument is to move away from taxonomies of social distinction, and towards a universal errancy. It suggests that Browne's understanding of error is fundamentally Christian and postlapsarian, and therefore also essentially genealogical. This leads him to prefer historical or philological explanations of error, occluding the contemporary and ephemeral, and underpins one of Pseudodoxia's most distinctive features, its persistent derivation of contemporary popular beliefs and practices from antiquity. While tradition is therefore central to the book's conception of popular errors, it is also problematic. It was a commonplace of seventeenth‐century Protestant culture that popular superstitions were relics of Catholicism: a conclusion which Browne, for intellectual and perhaps also personal reasons, was keen to resist. Pseudodoxia's insistent classicizing, therefore, can be seen as a way to evade these rhetorics, and seek a more nuanced and irenic language of preternatural belief. In severing superstition and Catholicism, Pseudodoxia insists on errancy as a shared human inheritance; a source of unity, rather than division.