Moving in circles: the dialectics of selfhood in Religio Medici

This essay analyses Browne's definition of selfhood in Religio Medici. It argues that Browne's autobiography betrays the speaker's anxiety to define a space for the self and his spiritual and intellectual existence. The self is presented both as a voracious maw consuming everything around him and as a being beleaguered by a world threatening to consume him. Browne's concept of selfhood therefore rests on a fragile dialectic between the self's integration in and his separation from a religious and social context. This dialectic is illustrated by means of the symbolic use of the figure of the circle and (by extension) that of the sphere in Browne's text. Throughout Religio Medici, Browne refers to a system of circles in which smaller circles are contained within larger ones to illustrate social and political orders. As such, this system expresses hierarchy and dependence. However, Browne also draws a circle around the self, thus isolating it from the world. The figure of the circle thus illustrates both the subject's position in a larger order and its separation from it. Within the circle of the self yet more circles are drawn so as to compartmentalize the subject into autonomous domains. This essay traces the moments of disturbance pervading this system, the moments when the neat categorization of circles is unsettled, when circles start to leak and give access to outer influences, and the dynamics this creates. These moments keep returning in Browne's rhetoric, suggesting both the danger of contagion and corrup‐tion of the self and a threat to the hierarchical order in which the self participates. At the same time, they suggest the idea of an exchange taking place between the inner and the outer, the self and the other, the material and the spiritual world.