The Antiquary: John Aubrey's Historical Scholarship

by Kelsey Jackson Williams

Overview

John Aubrey (1626-1697), antiquary, natural philosopher, and virtuoso, is best-remembered today for his Brief Lives, biographies of his contemporaries filled with luminous detail which have been mined for anecdotes by generations of scholars. However, Aubrey was much more than merely the hand behind an invaluable source of biographical material; he was also the author of thousands of pages of manuscript notebooks covering everything from the origins of Stonehenge to the evolution of folklore. Kelsey Jackson Williams explores these manuscripts in full for the first time and in doing so illuminates the intricacies of Aubrey's investigations into Britain's past. The Antiquary is both a major new study of an important early modern writer and a significant intervention in the developing historiography of antiquarianism. It discusses the key aspects of Aubrey's work in a series of linked chapters on archaeology, architecture, biography, folklore, and philology, concluding with a revisionist interpretation of Aubrey's antiquarian writings. While covering a wide variety of scholarly territory, it remains rooted in the common thread of Aubrey's own intellectual development and the continual interaction between his texts as he studied, discovered, revised, and rewrote them across four decades. Its conclusions not only substantially reshape our understanding of Aubrey and his works, but also provide new understandings of the methodologies, ambitions, and achievements of antiquarianism across early modern Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191087134
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	07/28/2016
Series:	Oxford English Monographs
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Kelsey Jackson Williams is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on antiquarianism and learned culture in early modern Scotland, England, and Scandinavia. He was educated at Balliol College, University of Oxford (MSt, DPhil) and was a lecturer at Jesus College, University of Oxford, before taking up his British Academy fellowship.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Stonehenge and the Druids: Antiquarian Controversy in Restoration England
2. Monumenta Britannica: Ancient Traces in the British Landscape
3. The Old Roman Fashion: Architecture and Its Histories
4. Writing Lives: Aubrey, Anthony Wood, and Antiquarian Biography
5. Ovid in the West Country: The Ancient Origins of Folk Custom
6. A New Philology: Toponyms and Comparative Linguistics in Aubrey's Late Works
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Williams's book is never dry but is eloquent, economical, and highly enjoyable, garnished with incisive aphorisms and-as always with Aubrey-those minute but humanizing details that vivify the whole picture...Such future work will need to draw carefully on Williams's rich scholarship." — Niall Allsopp, University of Exeter, Notes and Queries

"This book prioritizes depth over breadth, drawing on close study of the Aubrey manuscripts (and much besides) in the Bodleian Library. While this archive has been mined before, the sustained attention lavished on individual manuscripts, especially the Monumenta Britannica, opens up valuable new insights into Aubrey's scholarly contexts, working methods, and habits of mind" — Niall Allsopp, University of Exeter, Notes and Queries

"The Antiquary earns its place on the reading list of anyone interested in Aubrey's antiquarian writings and the Brief Lives, his undisputed masterpiece. And it invites, too, a wider readership of those now committed, as Aubrey once was, to the material, archeological, and imaginative recovery of how people thought and spoke, fought and lived." — Andrea Walkden, Project Muse

"both highly readable and refreshingly judicious" —Stewart Mottram, Renaissance Quarterly

"The Antiquary constitutes a major and very welcome reassessment not only of a significant (and extremely well connected) seventeenth century scholar, but also of the whole antiquarian project itself." — Angus Vine, The Seventeenth Century

"Written with wit, verve, and not a little erudition, The Antiquary constitutes a major and very welcome reassessment not only of a significant (and extremely well connected) seventeenth century scholar, but also of the whole antiquarian project itself - in terms of methodology and discipline, but also, just as importantly, narrative and style." —Angus Vine, The Seventeenth Century

"In a compact and concise volume, Williams manages to survey and analyze a remarkable range of Aubrey's scholarship on physical and textual historical evidence alike ... Above all, Williams shows, the understanding of antiquarians, their worldviews, and practices is ill served by a one-size-fits-all approach, as well as by the isolation of any one nation's antiquaries from the republic of letters." —Reid Barbour, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"Kelsey Williams's book enables us to appreciate how extensive the antiquarian researches of an industrious scholar could become in the second half of the seventeenth century. It helps us to understand how a new way of looking at the past grew to possess the imagination of a generation of well-educated men through the experience of a single remarkable individual." —Graham Parry, Spenser Review

From the Publisher