Urn Burial (New Directions Pearls)

Thomas Browne

Oct 2010 · New Directions Pearls Book 10 · New Directions Publishing

About this ebook

Urn Burial, one of the most influential essays in Western literature, is now available as a New Directions Pearl. Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, is one of the pinnacles of Renaissance scholarship and without doubt one of the great essays in English literature. Beginning with observations on the recent discovery of Roman antiquities in the form of burial urns, Browne’s associative mind wanders to elephant graveyards, to pre-Christian cremation ceremonies, and finally to the idea of Christian burial. Browne then explores, with a more melancholic meditation, man’s struggles with mortality and the uncertainty of his fate and fame in the living world. This edition includes a magisterial discourse on Sir Thomas Browne taken from the first chapter of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

About the author

Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English Renaissance author and physician. He wrote extensively about medicine, geography, philosophy, and Christian spirituality.

W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and died in 2001. He is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Unrecounted and Campo Santo.