Are you feeling guilty yet for not having heard of Sir Thomas Browne? Or, if you have heard of him, for not spending more time savoring his greatest work, an essay on funerary rites alluringly titled “Urne-Buriall” — where, amid much verbiage that is (to my plain taste) cloyingly grandiloquent, lurk gorgeous phrases like “man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave”? You shouldn’t, really. You are hardly alone. Browne is a “forgotten” man — so concedes what must be his most obsessive contemporary champion, the English science writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams.

“In Search of Sir Thomas Browne” is Aldersey-Williams’s attempt to do something about this sad state of affairs. The book does not merely seek to revive Browne as a pivotal figure in the history of English prose: a minor writer with a major style. Its author also wants to convince us that Browne, with his intellectual curiosity, his good-humored skepticism, his civility and spirit of tolerance, stands as a model for us today. From Browne’s example we can learn “how to achieve a reconciliation between science and religion” and “how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs.”

This is a bold claim, but the author faces an obstacle in establishing it. For Browne harbored some foolish beliefs himself, even by the standards of his time. Notably, he believed in witches. Worse, he acted on this belief. In 1662, the supposed savant offered expert testimony at a trial in which two elderly widows were convicted of practicing witchcraft and hanged. The trial at which Browne testified cast a long shadow, serving as an exemplar for the infamous Salem witch trials in America 30 years later.

When Aldersey-Williams gets around to confronting this embarrassment, the apologia he offers for his hero is rather peculiar. But first he tells us the story of Browne’s life. And this presents another problem: That life was fairly uneventful. Browne was born in London in 1605, the son of a moderately prosperous silk merchant. He attended Oxford, and then studied medicine on the Continent at Montpellier, Padua and Leiden, picking up several languages and much cosmopolitan knowledge in the process. Returning to England around the age of 30, he married and settled down to practice medicine in the city of Norwich, in remote and marshy Norfolk. There he spent the remaining four-plus decades of his life engrossed in his dilettantish naturalistic and antiquarian investigations. His wife bore him 11 children, six of whom he saw perish. Otherwise his life was happy, although tinged with the “melancholy” that was fashionable at the time. He joined no faction in the English Civil War, and he seems not to have met any of his great coevals, like Milton, Boyle, Hobbes, Newton or Locke. He died in 1682.

Furnished with such unpromising biographical materials, Aldersey-Williams ends up working the “In Search of” angle pretty hard, to give the book extra narrative shape. He goes to the site of Browne’s house, and finds that it has been torn down and replaced by a Pret a Manger sandwich shop. He pedals his bicycle from the village where the witch trial took place to Browne’s home city of Norwich, wondering what Browne himself must have been thinking as he made the same trip after testifying at the trial 350 years earlier. He gazes at a plaster cast of Browne’s skull. He hangs out in a graveyard near a Norwich shopping center, hoping it will be “a good place to observe the reaction of passers-by confronted by reminders of mortality” — only to find that the shoppers are “unfazed by the headstones, entirely focused on their mission of retail therapy.” And, letting his fancy run free, he imagines the statue of Thomas Browne in the old Norwich town square coming to life, stepping down from the plinth, and having a strolling chat with the author about faith and skepticism in modern life. The pastiche of the Brownean style in this dialogue is sometimes jarring — as, for instance, when the make-believe Browne asks his besotted fan, “So, is this some kind of bromance?”