Thomas Browne’s curious A Letter to a Friend (op. post. 1690) is an ars moriendi tract organized on early modern medical ideas about consumption, a disease understood as virtually pyral, a metabolic combustion of the body. Browne’s framing of mortality is more elaborately developed in his celebrated Urne-Buriall (1658), a virtuoso’s survey of worldwide mortuary custom throughout history, and a commentary on the impersonal state of human remains in cremation, inhumation, and other styles of corporeal disposal. Composed in the mid-1650s, these two works on the dust and ashes of mortal relics attend to humans' origin in dust in cognate varieties of burning: the reduction of flesh to dust by pyral and febrile flame, and the apocalyptic fires that will consume the world in ashes on the last day. Ash and dust represent the resistless anonymity of people's particulate fate, and produce anomalies of memory: in Urne-Buriall Browne is absorbed by the vagaries of identifiable remains, their random survival or effacement; in the Letter, however, although the disease itself leaves only wasted bodily fragments, the patient’s exemplary life is recorded and memorialized by Browne as a textual monument.

Chapter One studies how Rome figures in the murky processes by which individuals settled their relation to the world. In the process, it establishes something of the range of conditions under which medieval and early modern writers negotiated their own absorption into the matter of Rome. The chapter pursues at length medieval and early modern habits of attending not so much to the wonders of Rome, but rather to all that is most ordinary, obvious (in the word’s etymological reference to that which is encountered ‘in the way’), and ubiquitous in what Rome left in its wake when it relinquished its formal, administrative hold on the provinces of Britannia. These preoccupations open onto a wide span of time: from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the seventeenth century. The texts and problems that dominate the chapter range from Gildas andBede to Sir Thomas Browne in the late seventeenth century.