SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Read together, Kenelm Digby's Observations upon "Religio Medici" and Sir Thomas Browne's responses to Digby in private correspondence and in his address "To the Reader" in the 1643 edition of Religio show how Browne's masterpiece becomes a public text that illuminates the dynamics of early modern critical reception and authorial defense and complicates the idealized performance of subjectivity in Religio itself. In the exchange between Browne and Digby, Religio is transformed into a collective enterprise produced by the activity of printers and readers as well as the author: a collaboration larger than the author can control and defined by a public reading that overrides authorial desires.