NICOLAS K. KIESSLING (ed.), The Life of Anthony Wood in His Own Words.

Abstract

STUDENTS of early modern England should be well aware of the debt they owe to Anthony Wood (1632–95). A biographer, antiquarian, and bibliophile, Wood assembled a library of nearly 7,000 items, including many unique ephemeral publications, kept a minute diary recording the rhythms of Oxford life during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and in 1691–92 published the monumental Athenae Oxonienses, a biographical dictionary of the writers and bishops associated with Oxford from 1500 to his own time. Modern scholarship has largely neglected him, however, and Nicolas K. Kiessling’s study of The Library of Anthony Wood (Oxford, 2002) was the first to recognize the immense potential for a better understanding of seventeenth-century intellectual and popular culture latent in Wood’s books and manuscripts. The Life is Kiessling’s second book dealing with Wood and is an edition of the latter’s autobiography, the so-called ‘Secretum Antonii’. It includes a full edition and collation of the two surviving manuscript drafts of the autobiography, now British Library MS Harley 5409 and Bodleian MS Tanner 102. Furthermore, Kiessling provides detailed notes and a new biography of Wood dealing with the period from 1672, where the manuscripts end, to his death in 1695. This is not, however, the first time these manuscripts have been published. Previous editions include those by Thomas Hearne (1730), Philip Bliss (1813), and Andrew Clark (1891–1900); indeed, Wood’s autobiography has enjoyed more frequent and better editions than most other scholarly manuscripts of the period.