John Aubrey: Brief Lives with An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writer
Edited by Kate Bennett
Reviews and Awards
A 2015 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize
"Brief Lives is undoubtedly John Aubrey's most significant work. It is for this that he has become widely known in modern times." -- Michael Hunter, The Seventeenth Century.
"One of the most astonishing feats of scholarly editing in recent decades...extensive, painstakingly exact, and omnisciently annotated...altogether stupendous." --Noel Malcolm, The New York Review of Books
"Kate Bennet...has achieved the apparently impossible in producing a full and accurately formatted edition of Aubrey's Lives--a splendid achievement, on which the Oxford University Press is also to be congratulated." --Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
"Kate Bennett's edition is a welcome and dramatic change in [the publication of the Brief Lives]. Edited with impeccable fidelity to the text, it joins a fine edition to an essential, monograph-length introduction setting the Brief Lives in context, and over a thousand pages of erudite commentary which alone would ensure the work's lasting importance in the study of Aubrey and his milieu. ...Bennett has succeeded in creating an aesthetically pleasing, readable text which retains the subtleties of the work in its original form. It is and should be a model for the editing of complicated manuscript material. ... In sum, this is an outstanding achievement and will undoubtedly be the standard edition of the Brief Lives for the foreseeable future. ... Aubrey himself was acutely concerned that his works should be satisfactorily edited and made use of after his death; in this edition he is luckier than he could have hoped for." --Reviews in History
"...the publication of Bennett's wonderful edition of the Brief Lives, in two volumes as handsome as they are typographically responsive to the extraordinary artefact which they contain, is a cause for unreserved celebration in the academy and far beyond." -- The English Historical Review
"This splendid edition gives us, perhaps for the first time, a true "life" of the first English biographer." --Milton Quarterly