Justin Erik Halldór Smith:

Surveys of what is often called 'Gothic' literature (surely one of the most malleable labels in the history of style), generally begin with Coleridge and Byron in the early 19th century. I would argue that the Urtext of the genre, at least in its English expression, appeared two centuries earlier, and was not a work of literary fiction at all, but a straightforward scholarly treatise on the practical problems of dealing with and disposing of dead bodies, the variety of burial practices in different times and places, with especial attention to cremation.

I have in mind Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia, urn-burial, or, A discours of the sepulchral urns lately found in Norfolk together with the Garden of Cyrus, or, The quincuncial lozenge, or network of plantations of the ancients, artificially, naturally, mystically considered (London, 1658 [repr. 1669]). As the title implies, it is also an archaeological treatise, impressed with "the Treasures of Time," which "lie high, in Urns, Coyns, and Monuments, scarce below the Roots of some Vegetables." It is a philosophical treatise, too, subtly chastising the authors of the more canonical works in this genre for focusing upon the wrong sort of question: "Many have taken voluminous pains to determine the state of the Soul upon Dis-union, but men have been most phantastical in the singular contrivances of their Corporal dissolution."

The philosophical subtlety extends through Browne's vast ethnographic observations. One of his core preoccupations has to do with the difference between the barbarism and civilization. The barbarians, as represented par excellence by the Scythians of northern Asia, he notes, are legendary for the cruel sacrifices of slaves and horses that accompany the funerals of great men. The Chinese, by contrast, well-known in the early modern period for their civility, had managed to replace the sacrificial victims with textual representations: "And the Chinois," he writes, "without Cremation or urnal Interrment of their Bodies... burn great numbers of printed draughts of Slaves and Horses over it; civilly content with their companies in effigie, which barbarous Nationes exact unto reality." The purpose of the treatise is to defend cremation against the view that it is, in some absolute sense, morally abhorrent, and to do so by drawing on the vast diversity of the ethnographic record. In this respect, the treatise serves something of the same rhetorical purpose as Montaigne's famous essay from the previous century, 'On Cannibals'.

Cremation was remarkable to Browne in part for what it revealed about the human being qua corporeal entity, namely, that there is really not much there. "How the bulk of a man should sink into so few pounds of Bones and Ashes," he writes, "may seem strange unto any who considers not its Constitution, and how slender a mass will remain, upon an open and urging Fire, of the carnal composition. Even Bones themselves reduced into Ashes do abate a notable proportion; and, consisting much of a volatile Salt, when that is fired out, make a light kinde of Cinders."

Not all bodies decay or burn in the same way, however. "Some Bones make best Skeletons, some Bodies quick and speediest Ashes." Bodies identified by Browne as 'hydropical', in particular, neither burn nor decay easily. Drawing on some pre-Socratic lore I have yet to decipher, he asks: "Who would expect a quick flame from Hydropical Heraclitus?" Surely the most vividly macabre passage of the treatise concerns the 'defiance to Corruption' in bodies of this sort:

Urnal Interrments and burnt Reliques lie not in fear of Worms, or to be an Heritage for Serpents: In carnal Sepulture Corruptions seem peculiar unto parts, and some speak of Snakes out of the Spinal Marrow. But while we suppose common Worms in Graves, 'tis not easie to finde any [snakes] there; few in Church-yards above a foot deep, fewer or none in Churches... Teeth, Bones and Hair give the most lasting defiance to Corruption. In an Hydropical Body ten years buried in a Church-yard we met with a fat concretion, where the Nitre of the Earth and the salt and lixivious Liquour of the Body had coagulated large lumps of Fat into the consistence of the hardest Castle-soap; whereof part remaineth with use.

In passing, we also see what to my knowledge is the earliest occurrence of the sort of craniometric physical anthropology that would become familiar at the end of the 18th century with authors such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. "[H]andsome-formed Sculls," Browne writes, "give some Analogy of Flesh-resemblance; a critical view of Bones makes a good distinction of Sexes. Even Colour is not beyond conjecture; since it is hard to be deceived in the distinction of Negro's Sculls."

Very much as in his more famous work, the Pseudodoxia epidemica of 1646, Browne offers a sequence of refutations of beliefs and practices so peculiar that it's hard to imagine he does not relish the very mention of them, even as he insists upon their abhorrence. He disapproves, for example, of the cultural practice whereby an "Archimime or Jester attend[s] the Funeral Train, and imitat[es] the speeches, gesture and manners of the deceased." He also wants to know, as if for him there could be any practical purpose in knowing, "[w]hether unto eight or ten Bodies of Men to adde one of a Woman, as being more inflammable, and unctuously constituted for the better pyrall Combustion, were any rational practice[?]"

But the Gothic quality of the work (and the same quality that ultimately makes all Gothic writing a variety of Christian devotional literature), lies in the contrast between the fate of the damned and the fate of the blessed, a contrast that always enjoys lingering in the sepulchral shadows and stench rather longer than do the hymns and parables, long enough to experience a proper charge of titillating horror. Browne invites us to "meet with Tombs enclosing Souls which denied their Immortalities," such as that of Epicurus and other heathen philosophers. And here we come back to that central philosophical problem: the fate of the soul after death. Browne complains that it is "the heaviest stone that Melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at then end of his Nature; or that there is no farther State to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain." But if the farther state is just a dank tomb, doesn't this still give some kind of comfort, if not as a glimmer of hope for our own souls, then at least as a source of dark fantasies that please the imagination even as they leave the supposedly more divine part of the soul unconsoled? Isn't that what the genre is really all about?

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the Hydriotaphia that "it smells in every word of the sepulchre." It does that, even as it remains in conversation with Montaigne and Descartes, and even as it anticipates figures as far apart as Byron and Blumenbach.