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Life
?1665-1735; b. Co. Dublin; ed. TCD, from 1682; fellow, 1692; Provost of TCD, 1699; bishop of Cork and Ross, 1710 [var. 1709]; wote theological tracts incl. A Letter in answer to a book entitled Christianity not mysterious (1967), written at the express request of Archbishop Narcissus Marsh [q.v.] who sent him a copy of Toland’s book for the purpose; Brown place Toland to be beyond the pale of religious toleration; he was then preferred to the see of Cork by Marsh’s influence, giving rise to Toland’s boast that he had ‘made Browne a bishop’; later issued full statement of his position in Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding (1728) - a rebuttal of Locke; condemned Williamite custom of drinking in remembrance of the dead, causing them to add ‘in spite of the bishop of Cork’ to their toasts; . ODNB RR FDA
Works
The Procedure, Extent and Limits of Human Understanding (1728); Things Divine and Supernatural conceived by Analogy with things Natural and Human (1733); A Letter in answer to a book entitled Christianity not mysterious (Dublin: Joseph Ray for John North 1697), 8o [Wing B5134].
[ There is a short life in Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica, Irish Worthies (1821), Vol. I, pp.222-25 - as attached. ]
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 1, selects The Procedure, Extent and Limits of Human Understanding (1728); Things Divine and Supernatural conceived by Analogy with things Natural and Human (1733). See also Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica, Irish Worthies (1821), vol. I, p.222. Note, FDA1 gives the year of his accession to see of Cork and Ross as 1709.
Notes
Swift’s advice: Jonathan Swift wrote to Dr. Thomas Sheridan: ‘if you are under the bishop of Cork [Browne]], he is a capricious gentleman; but you must flatter him monstrously upon his learning and his writings; that you have read his book against Toland a hundred times and his sermons, if he has printed any, have been always your model, &c.’ (Quoted in Muriel McCarthy and Caroline Sherwood-Smith, Hibernia Resurgens, Irish Books in Marsh’s Library [Exhibition Catalogue] (1994).
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