Abstract
Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus is one of the most opaque seventeenth-century prose texts. This essay attempts to understand it by suggesting that its central aesthetic strategy is that of literary sprezzatura: a rhetorical equivalent to the technique of self-presentation fundamental to early modern courtliness. It can be shown that the figure of paralepsis is a major structuring device in The Garden of Cyrus. Like sprezzatura, this corresponds to a broadly neoplatonic mind-set, which dissimulates, but ultimately gestures towards, an invisible order based on a transcendence which cannot otherwise be articulated or performed. Thus, Browne's writing appears to be related to certain habits of mind typical of Renaissance culture, which still retain their imaginative attraction as well as their efficacy well into the seventeenth century. From this point of view, it can also be appreciated in which respects new, ‘scientific’ mentalities are indebted to, and inseparably linked with, older, metaphysical modes of thought and feeling.