That Universall and Publik Manuscript’: The Book of Nature and The Garden of Cyrus.”

摘要

These “two bookes” were known in the seventeenth century as the codex scriptus andthe codex vivus, but such an understanding of the world – as the book of nature, as atextual artefact – long predates Browne (Curtius 319). Ernst Robert Curtius finds thatthe metaphor derives “from the Latin Middle Ages” (319). “For the preacher”, he writesof this time, “the book of nature must figure with the Bible as a source of material”(319-20). Browne’s endorsement of this antique view evinces a system of thought thatsaw the natural world transcribed into a vividly textual form – a system of thought thatgains its fullest expression in Browne’s 1658 treatise The Garden of Cyrus. The purposeof this article is to demonstrate the way in which this system of thought relates closelyto those of early modern science. More particularly, I will trace the heretofore hiddenrelationship between Browne’s work on both The Garden of Cyrus (1658) and thesecond edition of Christopher Merrett’s Pinax Rerum Naturalium Britannicarum(1666-7), using the similarities and differences between these two books of nature tobetter explain how Browne conceived of his text.