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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]; theological tracts incl. A Letter in answer to a book entitled Christianity not mysterious (1967), holding John Toland to be beyond the pale of toleration, and written at the instigation of Archbishop Narcissus Marsh; preferred to 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); condemned Williamite custom of drinking in remembrance of the dead, causing them to add ‘in spite of the bishop of Cork’ to their toasts; there is a short life in Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica, Irish Worthies (1821), vol. I, p.222. 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].
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References
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, gen. ed., Seamus Deane (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
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.’ (Cited in Muriel McCarthy and Caroline Sherwood-Smith, Hibernia Resurgens, Irish Books in Marsh’s Library [Exhibition Catalogue] (1994).
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