John Aubrey: Brief Lives with An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writer

Edited by Kate Bennett

2 volume set
The first scholarly edition of Aubrey's Brief Lives since 1898
Offers a complete transcription of the text for the first time
The only annotated edition of the text
Annotations based on a vast amount of new manuscript evidence
Includes a detailed introduction

John Aubrey: Brief Lives with An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writer

Edited by Kate Bennett

Description

A 2015 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize

This is the first scholarly edition of Aubrey's Brief Lives since 1898, the first to include the complete text of the three Brief Lives manuscripts (including censored and deleted material, title-pages, antiquarian notes, and the indices), and the first to provide a full general and critical introduction and comprehensive commentary.

This edition is the first to respect the original arrangement of the Lives in Aubrey's manuscripts. Brief Lives is presented as an antiquarian and collaborative text, containing the autograph papers of biographical subjects, the annotations of those among whom the manuscripts circulated, and wax seals. As well as 25 facsimile pages, there are over 160 images, reproducing for the first time all Aubrey's horoscopes, pedigrees, coats of arms, and topographical sketches as they are found in the manuscripts. The text respects the mise-en-page of the manuscript and its status as an incomplete and heavily revised work-in-progress while presenting an edited, rather than a diplomatic, text.

The commentary presents extensive new research on manuscript sources including much material not previously known to be Aubrey's or associated with him. It also reflects the state of current scholarship. Each life is introduced by a headnote placing the life in context. This gives the dates and sequence of composition and an account of Aubrey's relationship with the biographical subject, the circulation of knowledge of that subject in Aubrey's circle, and a full account of Aubrey's notes on the subject of the life in other manuscripts and correspondence. Aubrey's biographical informants also have a long note, as do uncompleted or missing Lives.

John Aubrey: Brief Lives with An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writer

Edited by Kate Bennett

Index of the Lives in Volume I
Index of Biographical Commentaries and Headnotes in Volume I
General Introduction
1. Philosophical and Heartie Entertainment
2. Aubrey's Prety Collections
3. Collaborative Writing
4. Aubrey and Wood
TEXTUAL INTRODUCTION
1. The Making of Brief Lives
2. The Excised Lives
3. The Earlier Editions
4. The Present Edition
TEXTUAL CONVENTIONS
Brief Lives, Volume I
Brief Lives, Volume II
Brief Lives, Volume III
An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers

John Aubrey: Brief Lives with An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writer

Edited by Kate Bennett

Author Information

Kate Bennett had a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church, Oxford, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship; she was then Fellow in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She was a research fellow at New College, Oxford, and is now a Lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford.

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

John Aubrey: Brief Lives with An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writer

Edited by Kate Bennett

From Our Blog

Being defaced: John Aubrey and the literary sketch

John Aubrey might have made an excellent literary agent. When Charles II was restored, Aubrey told Thomas Hobbes to come down to London straight away to get his portrait painted. It was a successful bid for patronage. Aubrey correctly calculated that Hobbes would meet the King at the studio of Samuel Cooper, 'the prince' of miniaturists. Cooper painted two watercolour miniatures, 'as like as art could afford'. One the King took away for his 'closet' at Whitehall Palace, and another was not finished.

Posted on June 22, 2015

Read the blog post