‘Chrystalline Talk’
Thomas Browne's Poetics of Concretion and Mineral Plain Style
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19219115 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jess Dunmore (0000-0002-1866-6287, University of Cambridge Cambridge UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-05 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Renaissance Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0269-1213 • E-ISSN: 1477-4658 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/rest.70053 |
| OpenAlex | W7163703369 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 22 |
This article charts the figuration, both material and rhetorical, of mineral bodies in early modern natural philosophy, paying particular attention to the second book of Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646). It argues that concretions (stony calculi and crystals formed through the aggregation of physical matter) make manifest a mineral autopoesis in seventeenth‐century natural philosophy whereby mineral matter, believed to be imbued with a divinely implanted impulse, coalesces into the complex structures that so fascinate Browne. As Browne probes the process and products of concretion, this article claims that the ‘principle of concretion’ he observes in lithic bodies also inflects his prose ( Pseudodoxia , 76). Here, observing the mineral structures figured through concretion solicits in Pseudodoxia a poetics of concretion: rhetorical devices such as synathroesmus that have a similarly conjoining effect, or that emulate through the syntactical proportion of compar the formal coherence achieved in crystalline bodies. By highlighting how writers such as Robert Boyle likewise adopt a poetics of concretion in their depiction of lithic and crystalline bodies, this essay reconsiders the transparent plain style of the Royal Society as the product of a mineral ecopoetics
Concretion · Mineral · Poetics · Rhetorical question · Historical Philosophy and Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Science and Natural History
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |