Brief Lives, by John Aubrey, ed. Kate Bennett John Aubrey: My Own Life, by Ruth Scurr

Abstract

John Aubrey maintains an extraordinary position among English writers of the seventeenth century: the interest which he holds for the academy is proverbially matched by the affection in which he is held by the general reader. His range and his immediacy give him a particular claim on the attention of an unusually wide community of topographers, historians and (in the best sense) amateurs. There is a haunting quality to this immediacy, the seductive illusion of almost hearing the voice of a person long dead, and, through him, the voices of a circle of mid-seventeenth-century clerics, virtuosi, artisans and scholars. His range, his friendships, his improvisations, and his attachments to particular English places give him a complex status as forerunner of many kinds of writing which are now practised and admired. His sprawling, largely-unfinished manuscript works are in no known genre (only his supernatural collections, the Miscellanies , saw print in his lifetime) and this incompleteness is part of the seduction—although, to some degree, it masks his acuity as a forerunner in the disciplines which were later to become archaeology and anthropology.