John Aubrey (12 March 1626 – 7 June 1697), English antiquary and writer
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John Aubrey
John Aubrey (12 March 1626 – 7 June 1697) was an English antiquary and
writer, best known as the author of the collection of short
biographical pieces usually referred to as Brief Lives and as the
discoverer of the Aubrey holes in Stonehenge.
Biography
He was born at Easton Piers or Percy, near Malmesbury, Wiltshire, of a
well-off gentry family of the Welsh Marches.
His grandfather, Isaac Lyte, lived at Lytes Cary Manor, Somerset, now
owned by the National Trust. Richard Aubrey, his father, owned lands
in Wiltshire and Herefordshire.
For many years an only child, he was educated at home, with a private
tutor, "melancholy" in his solitude. His father was not intellectual,
preferring field sports to learning.
Aubrey read such books as came his way, including Bacon's Essays, and
studied geometry in secret.
He was educated at the Malmesbury grammar school under Robert Latimer,
who had numbered Thomas Hobbes among his earlier pupils, and at
Latimer's house Aubrey first met the philosopher, whose biography he
was later to write.
He then studied at the grammar school at Blandford Forum, Dorset. He
entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1642, but his studies were
interrupted by the English Civil War. His earliest antiquarian work
dates from this period in Oxford. In 1646 he became a student of the
Middle Temple. He spent a pleasant time at Trinity in 1647, making
friends among his Oxford contemporaries, and collecting books.
He spent much of his time in the country, and in 1649 he first
'discovered' the megalithic remains at Avebury, which he later mapped
and discussed in his important antiquarian work Monumenta Britannica.
He was to show Avebury to Charles II at the King's request in 1663.
His father died in 1652, leaving Aubrey large estates, but with them
some complicated debts.
Career
Blessed with charm, generosity of spirit and enthusiasm, Aubrey went
on to become acquainted with many of the most celebrated writers,
scientists, politicians and aristocrats of his day, as well as an
extraordinary breadth of less well-placed individuals: booksellers,
merchants, the royal seamstress, mathematicians and instrument
makers.
He claimed that his memory was 'not tenacious' by seventeenth-century
standards, but from the early 1640s he kept thorough (if haphazard)
notes of observations in natural philosophy, his friends' ideas, and
antiquities.
He also began to write Lives of scientists in the 1650s. In 1660 he
proposed to several of his fellow-Wiltshiremen that they should
collaborate on a survey of Wiltshire. The others did nothing about it,
but Aubrey produced a huge 2-volume (if unfinished) collection, the
Wiltshire Antiquities, including some biographical material. Indeed,
Aubrey's erstwhile friend and fellow-antiquarian Anthony Wood
predicted that he would one day break his neck while running
downstairs in haste to interview some retreating guest or other.
Aubrey was an apolitical Royalist, who enjoyed the innovations
characteristic of the Interregnum period while deploring the rupture
in traditions and the destruction of ancient buildings brought about
by civil war and religious change. He drank the King's health in
Interregnum Herefordshire, but with equal enthusiasm attended meetings
in London of the republican Rota Club, founded by James Harrington
(the author of Oceana).
In 1663 Aubrey became a member of the Royal Society. He lost estate
after estate due to lawsuits, till in 1670 he parted with his last
piece of property and ancestral home, Easton Piers. From this time he
was dependent on the hospitality of his numerous friends; in
particular, Sir James Long, 2nd Baronet and his wife Lady Dorothy of
Draycot House, Wiltshire. In 1667 he had made the acquaintance of
Anthony Wood at Oxford, and when Wood began to gather materials for
his Athenae Oxonienses, Aubrey offered to collect information for him.
From time to time he forwarded memoranda in a uniquely casual,
epistolary style, and in 1680 he began to promise the work "Minutes
for Lives," which Wood was to use at his discretion.
Methods
Aubrey approached the work of the biographer much as his contemporary
scientists had begun to approach the work of empirical research by the
assembly of vast museums and small collection cabinets. Collating as
much information as he could, he left the task of verification largely
to Wood, and thereafter to posterity.
As a hanger-on in great houses, he had little time and little
inclination for systematic work, and he wrote the "Lives" in the early
morning while his hosts were sleeping off the effects of the night
before. These texts were, as Aubrey entitled them, Schediasmata,
'pieces written extempore, on the spur of the moment'. Time after
time, he leaves marks of omission in the form of dashes and ellipses
for dates and facts, inserting fresh information whenever it is
presented to him. The margins of his notebooks are dotted with notes-
to-self, most frequently the Latin 'quaere'. This exhortation, to 'go
and find out' is often followed.
Aubrey himself valued the evidence of his own eyes above all, and he
took great pains to ensure that, where possible, he noted not only the
final resting places of people, but also of their portraits and
papers. Though his work has frequently been accused of inaccuracy,
this charge is somewhat misguided. In most cases, Aubrey simply wrote
what he had seen, or heard. When transcribing hearsay, he displays an
astonishingly meticulous approach to the ascription of sources.
Take the fascinating 'Life' of Thomas Chaloner (who, Aubrey notes
wryly, was fond of spreading rumours in the concourse of Westminster
Hall, and coming back after lunch to find them changed, as in a game
of Chinese whispers). When an inaccurate and bawdy anecdote about
Chaloner's death is found to be about James Chaloner, rather than
Thomas, Aubrey lets the initial story stand in the text, while marking
it as such in a marginal note. A number of similar occurrences suggest
that Aubrey was interested not only in the oral history he was noting
down, but in the very processes of transmission and corruption by
which it was formed[citation needed].
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Aubrey"
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John Aubrey
Works
As private, manuscript texts, the 'Lives' were able to contain the
richly controversial material which is their chief interest today, and
Aubrey's chief contribution to the formation of modern biographical
writing. When he allowed Anthony Wood to use the texts, however, he
entered the caveat that much of the content of the Lives was 'not fitt
to be let flie abroad' while the subjects, and the author, were still
living. He asked Wood to be 'my index expurgatorius': a reference to
the Church's list of banned books, which Wood seems to have taken not
as a warning, but as a licence to simply extract pages of notes to
paste into his own proofs.
Wood was eventually prosecuted for insinuations against the judicial
integrity of the school of Clarendon. One of the two statements called
in question was founded on information provided by Aubrey and this may
explain the estrangement between the two antiquaries and the
ungrateful account that Wood gives of the elder man's character. It is
now famous: "a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and
sometimes little better than crased. And being exceedingly credulous,
would stuff his many letters sent to A. W. with folliries and
misinformations, which would sometimes guid him into the paths of
errour."
Late in life, Aubrey began a History of Northern Wiltshire but,
feeling that he was too old to finish it properly, he made over his
material, around 1695, to Thomas Tanner, afterwards Bishop of St
Asaph. In the next year was published his only completed work, though
not his most valuable: the Miscellanies. Aubrey died of an apoplexy
while travelling, in June 1697, and was buried in the churchyard of St
Mary Magdalene, Oxford.
Besides the works already mentioned, his papers included:
"Architectonica Sacra" "Erin Is God" (notes on ecclesiastical
antiquities) and the "Life of Mr Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury," which
served as the basis for Dr. Blackburn's Latin life, and also for
Wood's account.
Some parts of his survey of Surrey were incorporated in R Rawlinson's
Natural History and Antiquities of Surrey (1719); some of his
antiquarian notes on Wiltshire were printed in Wiltshire: the
Topographical Collections, corrected and enlarged by J.E. Jackson
(Devizes: Henry Bull, 1862); part of another manuscript on "The
Natural History of Wiltshire" was printed by John Britton in 1847 for
the Wiltshire Topographical Society.
Literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote concerning Aubrey in his Foreword
to the 1962 edition of Aubreys's Brief Lives published by the
University of Oklahoma Press:
This edition is, indeed, the first one that has been faithful to
Aubrey's text and that has attempted to make a book from his
manuscripts. For what Aubrey left was not a book. He loved to compile
gossip about famous men and to note their peculiarities, and in
pursuit of this information he often went to considerable trouble. It
was said of him by one of his friends that he expected to hear of
Aubrey's breaking his neck someday as the result of dashing downstairs
to get a story from a departing guest. But he did not keep his records
in order. He would try to get things down on paper the morning after a
convivial evening - "Sot that I am!" is the apologetic cry that is
reiterated in his writings - when the people he was visiting were
still in bed and he himself was suffering from hangover. He sometimes
mixed anecdotes about different people, sometimes wrote the same story
several times, and sometimes noted down under a subject's name only a
few words or a mere list of dates and facts.
In 1967, English director Patrick Garland created a one-man show based
on the writings of John Aubrey. Starring Roy Dotrice, "Brief Lives"
became the most successful one-man production ever seen, with Dotrice
giving over 1800 performances across forty years. For many an audience
on both sides of the Atlantic, this play has become an essential means
of understanding a "vanished time" and one version of it.
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Aubrey
Works by John Aubrey at Project Gutenberg
Brief Lives full text at Google Books
Richard Colt Hoare's `Life of John Aubrey'
Biographical comments and a few of the Brief Lives can be found at
mym's Aubrey Shrine
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Aubrey"
Categories: 1626 births | 1697 deaths | English antiquarians | English
archaeologists | English biographers | English essayists | Fellows of
the Royal Society
elizabeth weir
Actually, Aubrey didn't write Brief Lives although
he did collect a trunk full of notes he jotted down
whenever he heard juicy rumors.
Aubrey had inherited a fortune which he quickly
blew away so he was forced to maintain himself
by traveling from great house to great house as
a "professional guest" I guess you would say.
He died at one of the great houses where his
trunk was discovred a couple of years later.
I can't recall the names of the two authors who
decided to use Aubrey's gossipy notes as the
basis for a book.
Aubrey was often in error, for example he tagged
Bacon a homosexual when Bacon was actually
a cuckhold. He produced several children under
the noses of some of his worst political enemies,
for example he had an affair with his cousin,
Lady Elizabeth Hatton who was married to Coke
at the time.
She produced a beautiful daughter whom she
provocatively named "Frances." Coke never got
over and spent the rest of his career trying to bring
Bacon down.
Sir Sidney Lee wrote about this affair in the DNB
and some British writer produced a book on it.
Chase scenes, Bacon denying Coke a warrant,
Coke taking his men from house to house kicking
it doors.
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Bodleian summer exhibition celebrates the Royal Society
28 May 2010
The Bodleian Libraries 2010 Summer exhibition
examines the intellectual world of John Aubrey (1626-97),
one of the Founding Fellows of the Royal Society of London, and a
major seventeenth-century scientific and cultural figure.
John Aubrey and the Development of Experimental Science presents all
of Aubrey’s varied interests and pursuits within the intellectual
context of his times. Coinciding with the nationwide celebrations of
the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society, this is the first
exhibition to feature Aubrey’s many diverse achievements as a
biographer, antiquary, mathematician, ‘natural philosopher’ and all-
round virtuoso.
Highlights of the exhibition include Aubrey’s own manuscripts for
Brief Lives; presentation books from fellow scientists Hobbes and
Newton; original 17-century mathematical instruments; fossil
specimens; and a working camera obscura.
Aubrey is best known for his Brief Lives, a collection of compelling
narratives of a generation of eminent thinkers including William
Harvey, Thomas Hobbes, and Robert Hooke. Nevertheless, he also had an
intellectual stake in the two different faces of late seventeenth-
century science – the mathematical and the natural. A keen
mathematician, pioneer biographer, natural philosopher and antiquary,
Aubrey had a broad and deep range of scholarly interests.
Aubrey was one of the best-connected scholars in the great decades of
the British scientific revolution. He studied as an undergraduate at
Trinity College, Oxford but, like many gentlemen of his time, left
before gaining a degree. He maintained strong links with Oxford for
the rest of his life.
As a ‘gentleman amateur’, he gained a reputation as a pioneer
antiquary and archaeologist. He was acquainted with all the leading
scientists of the generation including Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley,
and Isaac Newton. Aubrey championed Hooke’s radical ideas on geology
and the origin of fossils, and he also worked with him on the
construction of a workable artificial language.
One of Aubrey’s more remarkable proposals was that educational reform
had to start in the schools before the universities, and nowhere more
so than in the teaching of mathematics in a an engaging way. Aubrey
proposed not only that pupils should be furnished with their own
personal mathematical tools, but also that the ideal classroom should
contain a set of instruments.
A pioneer archaeologist, Aubrey is also remembered for producing the
most profound analysis in his period of both the Avebury and
Stonehenge megaliths. He used mathematical tools in the service of
field archaeology for the first time. In addition, Aubrey was a donor
of books and manuscripts to the Bodleian, and he also gave books,
manuscripts, mathematical instruments, and other objects to the new
Ashmolean Museum, which opened in 1683.
William Poole, curator of the exhibition and Fellow of New College,
University of Oxford said: ‘John Aubrey is not only a fascinating
figure in his own right but also acts as the ideal lens onto his own
age. He was an antiquarian, a mathematician, a natural philosopher, an
archaeologist, an ethnologist, a biographer, a historian, an
astrologer, a botanist, a chemist, a collector, a folklorist; and he
knew the most learned men of his age and moved among them as a
respected equal, recording their achievements and foibles as well as
his own. His papers and extensive correspondence, today deposited in
the Bodleian Library, bring to life the world of Restoration learning
like no other comparable archive. If we did not have Aubrey, our
vision of the great age of Newton and Hooke would be dimmer and
duller.’
http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/news/2010_may_28
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Pete Wilton | 14 Jul 10
I’ve blogged before about the role Oxonians played in the founding of
the Royal Society 350 years ago. And, whilst he is most famous for his
rediscovery of the prehistoric monument at Avebury (and Stonehenge’s
Aubrey holes), Aubrey was also a founding fellow of the RS.
Aubrey was a friend to many of the great early scientists, an amateur
who was fascinated by their ideas and often joined in their
experiments, as well as recording their work for posterity.
William Poole of New College is the curator of an exhibition now on at
the Bodleian Library about Aubrey (‘My wit was always working’), he
tells me:
‘Aubrey attended Trinity College in the 1640s where there was a little
experimental community, particularly keen on learning practical
mathematics and doing chemical experiments. He later took personal
mathematical tutors. But most of his learning came through his own
reading - there was almost no formal instruction in anything we would
recognise as a science in his day.’
It was here that he was bitten by the experimental bug at that time
spreading like a fever through the city - which would erupt in the
1650s with Wadham’s ‘Experimental philosophy club’.
William reveals that at Oxford Aubrey indulged his - often dangerous -
chemical passions: ‘His Trinity friends and he, for instance, were
extremely taken with aurum fulminans, exploding gold.’
After entering Trinity in 1642 his studies were interrupted by the
English Civil War. According to the DNB’s Adam Fox, it was on a trip
from Oxford to Wiltshire in 1649 that Aubrey rediscovered the Avebury
megaliths. It would spark a lifelong interest in ancient monuments
that would later see him (re)discover the ring of ‘Aubrey’ holes at
Stonehenge in 1663.
It was also in 1663 that Aubrey was elected to the Royal Society,
William comments: ‘The early Royal Society was rather like a
gentleman's club, replete with its own internal factions, and we can
associate Aubrey with what we might call the 'Hooke faction', those
who worked, drank coffee, and gossiped with the great experimentalist
of the early Royal Society, Robert Hooke, and also his colleague and
friend Christopher Wren.’
He clearly felt at home in this club-like atmosphere: in the 1660s he
would present papers on Wiltshire springs, a ‘cloudy star’ and winds,
before submitting his ‘Natural History of Wiltshire’ to the RS in
1675.
But it was in his drive to record both the evolution of science and
prehistory that Aubrey excelled.
William highlights the short biographies Aubrey wrote of many of his
contemporaries, including his friends in the scientific community:
'He believed Hooke that Newton had failed to acknowledge that the
inverse square law was suggested to him by Hooke, and Aubrey urged the
Oxford biographer Anthony Wood to record the theft for posterity. Wood
did not do so, but the letter from Aubrey to Wood, partially written
by Hooke, survives, and an image of it is displayed in the
exhibition.’
‘As we saw with Hooke and Newton, Aubrey also used his biographical
work to guard rights of priority - English authors did not own their
own copyrights until 1710, so who actually owned a scientific idea was
a murky territory.’
Aubrey brought his interests in practical mathematics to the study of
megaliths:
‘He was the first man to visit Stonehenge and Avebury with surveying
equipment and draw accurate representations of the positions of the
stones. He also correctly reasoned that they were far older structures
than was commonly believed. For this work he is regarded as one of the
fathers of English archaeology.’
So what might a survey of Aubrey’s life, with all its varied interests
and passions, teach us about the evolution of science?
William comments: ‘Scientists could learn that the history of science
is about what disparate activities came together to make the modern
institutional idea of science possible, what new activities science
has subsequently taken under its wing, and what old ones it has shed -
and why.’
http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/science_blog/100714.html
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John Aubrey
John Aubrey (March 12, 1626 - June, 1697) was an English antiquary and
writer, best known as the author of a work usually referred to as
Brief Lives.
He was born at Maston Pierse or Percy, near Malmesbury, Wiltshire, of
a wealthy and famous family of the border region. He was educated at
the Malmesbury grammar school under Robert Latimer, who had numbered
Thomas Hobbes among his earlier pupils, and at Latimer's house Aubrey
first met the philosopher about whom he was later to write. He entered
Trinity College, Oxford, in 1642, but his studies were interrupted by
the English Civil War. In 1646 he became a student of the Middle
Temple, but was never called to the bar. He spent much of his time in
the country, and in 1649 he drew attention to the megalithic remains
at Avebury. His father died in 1652, leaving Aubrey large estates, but
with them some complicated debts.
Aubrey nevertheless used his wealth to satisfy his passion for the
company of celebrities and for any interesting details he could learn
about them. Anthony Wood predicted that he would one day break his
neck while running downstairs after a retreating guest, in the hope of
finding out more about him. He played no active part in politics, but
from his description of a meeting of the Rotary Club, founded by James
Harrington, the author of Oceana, he appears to have had republican
beliefs. His reminiscences on this subject date from the Restoration,
and have been toned down accordingly.
In 1663 Aubrey became a member of the Royal Society, and in the next
year he met William Somner, "in an ill hour," he tells us. He lost
estate after estate due to lawsuits, till in 1670 he parted with his
last piece of property, Maston Pierse. From this time he was dependent
on the hospitality of his numerous friends. In 1667 he had made the
acquaintance of Anthony Wood at Oxford, and when Wood began to gather
materials for his invaluable Athenae Oxonienses, Aubrey offered to
collect information for him. From time to time he forwarded memoranda
to him, and in 1680 he began to promise the work "Minutes for Lives,"
which Wood was to use at his discretion.
He left the task of verification largely to Wood. As a hanger-on in
great houses he had little time for systematic work, and he wrote the
"Lives" in the early morning while his hosts were sleeping off the
effects of the night before. He constantly leaves blanks for dates and
facts and inserts fresh information at random. Although he made some
distinction between hearsay and authentic information, but had little
concern with accuracy, his retentive memory being the chief authority.
The principal charm of his work lies in the amusing details he
recounts about his subjects, and the lack of respect he shows for
established reputations. In 1592 he complained bitterly that Wood had
destroyed forty pages of his manuscript, probably for fear of a libel
case.
Wood was eventually prosecuted for insinuations against the judicial
integrity of the school of Clarendon. One of the two statements called
in question are founded on information provided by Aubrey and this may
explain the estrangement between the two antiquaries and the
ungrateful account that Wood gives of the elder man's character. "He
was a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes
little better than crased. And being exceedingly credulous, would
stuff his many letters sent A. W. with follies and misinformations,
which sometimes began his "Perambulation" or "Survey" of the county of
Surrey, which was the result of many years' labour in collecting
descriptions and traditions in the country. He began a "History his
Native District of Northern Wiltshire," but, feeling that was too old
to finish it as he would wish, he made over his material, about 1695,
to Thomas Tanner, afterwards Bishop of St Asaph. In the next year he
published his only completed, though certainly not his most valuable
work, the Miscellanies.
Aubrey died in June 1697, and was buried in the church of St Mary
Magdalene.
Beside the works already mentioned, his papers included:
"Architectonica Sacra," notes on ecclesiastical antiquities; and "Life
of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury," which served as the basis Dr
Blackburn's Latin life, and also of Wood's account. His survey of
Surrey was incorporated in R Rawlinson's Natural History and
Antiquities of Surrey (1719); his antiquarian notes on Wiltshire were
printed in Wiltshire: the Topographical Collections John Aubrey,
corrected and enlarged by JE Jackson (Devizes, 52); part of another
manuscript on "The Natural History of Wiltshire" was printed by John
Britton in 1847 for the Wiltshire Topographical Society; the
Miscellanies were edited in 1890 for the Library of Old Authors; the
"Minutes for Lives" were partially edited in 1813. A complete
transcript, Brief Lives chiefly of Contemporaries set down John Aubrey
between the Years 1669 and 1696, was edited for the Clarendon Press in
1898 by the Rev. Andrew Clark from manuscripts in the Bodleian
Library, Oxford. This is still the best edition available, despite a
number of excisions to spare late-Victorian blushes. More readily
available is John Buchanan-Brown's serviceable Penguin paperback
(Harmondsworth, 2000). This edition incorporates an excellent short
introduction by Michael Hunter, whose John Aubrey and the Realm of
Learning (London: Duckworth, 1975) is indispensable.
See also John Britton, Memoir of John Aubrey (1845); David Masson, in
the British Quarterly Review, July 1856; Jean-Baptiste Joseph Émile
Montégut, Heures de lecture d'un critique (1891); and a catalogue of
Aubrey's selections in The Life and Times of Anthony Wood ..., by
Andrew Clark (Oxford, 1891-1900, vol. iv. pp. 191-193), which contains
many other references to Aubrey. For a more recent biography, see John
Aubrey and his Friends by Anthony Powell (1948). Excellent articles by
Kate Bennett on Aubrey's methods, and on the task of editing the
'Lives', have appeared in the Bodleian Quarterly
Portrait, ref. NPG D573, in the National Portrait Gallery.
The John Aubrey reference articles from the English Wikipedia and the
Explore Dictionary of Writers
Revised 9 June 2005
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/aubrey_biog.htm
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Brief Lives
Brief Lives is a collection of short biographies written by John
Aubrey in the last decades of the seventeenth century. Aubrey
initially began collecting biographical material to assist the Oxford
scholar Anthony Wood, who was working on his own collection of
biographies. With time, Aubrey's biographical researches went beyond
mere assistance to Wood and became a project in its own right.
Aubrey was careful, wherever possible, to seek out and talk with those
who had been acquainted with his subjects. His sociable nature and his
wide circle of friends helped him in this pursuit. At his death,
Aubrey left his biographical writings in chaotic order. It has been
the task of later editors to organize the manuscripts (held at the
Bodleian Library) into readable form.
Aubrey's Brief Lives has been loved for generations for its colorful
gossipy tone and for the glimpses it provides of the unofficial sides
of its subjects. Aubrey's use of informants and his eye for the
unusual provides much more vivid pictures than a biography based on
documents could. He is frank but never malicious.
The Brief Lives includes biographies of such figures as Francis Bacon,
Robert Boyle, John Dee, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Halley, Ben Jonson,
Thomas Hobbes, and William Shakespeare. There have been many modern
editions.
Patrick Garland wrote and directed a play Brief Lives based on
Aubrey's work of the same title; featuring Roy Dotrice in the title
role, the production has been performed worldwide since 1969.
In 2008, Aubrey's Brief Lives [1] was a five part drama serial on
Radio 4. Writer Nick Warburton intertwined some of Aubrey's
biographical sketches with the story of the turbulent friendship
between Aubrey and Anthony Wood. Abigail le Fleming produced and
directed.
External links
Brief Lives at Google Books
A few "Lives" from Brief Lives" at Druidic.org (Thomas Allen,
Elizabeth Broughton, Thomas Harcourt, Mary Herbert, William
Shakespeare, and Thomas Hobbes)
Mathematician biographies in John Aubrey's Brief Lives
Julia Trevelyan Oman Archive University of Bristol Theatre Collection,
University of Bristol
This England-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by
expanding it.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_Lives"
Categories: Biographies (books) | English non-fiction literature |
17th-century books | England stubs | Biography book stubs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_Lives
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John Aubrey (1626-03-12 – 1697-06-07) was an English biographer,
antiquary and folklorist.
He is best known for his gossipy and uncritical Brief Lives,
a collection of thumbnail biographical sketches.
(for quotes,see the page following ->)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Aubrey
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Aubrey, John, 1626-1697
(links)
Wikipedia
Miscellanies Upon Various Subjects (English) (as Author)
The Natural History of Wiltshire (English) (as Author)
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/a#a1419
"How these curiosities would be quite forgott, did not such idle
fellowes as I am putt them down..."
John Aubrey 1626 - 1697
http://www.druidic.org/aubrey.htm
a small selection of some of the
LIVES
THOMAS ALLEN
ELIZABETH BROUGHTON
THOMAS HARCOURT
MARY HERBERT
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
and the, less
brief, life of
THOMAS HOBBES
In the first flush of composition, too, his mind raced so far beyond
his pen that he frequently resorted to a sort of involved shorthand
and made use of signs instead of words.
He then read over what he had just written, and put in any stories
that he thought were even vaguely relevant, wrote alternatives to
words and phrases, inserted queries, numbered words; sentences, and
paragraphs for transposition, and disarranged everything. Any facts
that occurred to him later were jotted down quite at random, in the
margin if there was still room, otherwise on another page or in the
middle of another life, often in a different volume, sometimes even in
a letter to a friend.
And there the text was left, for he rarely made a fair copy of
anything that he had written, because, as he confessed, he "wanted
patience to go thorough Knotty Studies". Even the optimistic author
despaired at last of ever reducing his life's work to a manageable
shape.
"Considering therefore that if I should not finish and publish what I
had begun. My Papers might either perish, or be sold in an Auction,
and some body else (as is not uncommon) put his name to my Paines: and
not knowing any one that would undertake this Design whilst I live, I
have tumultuarily stitcht up what I have many yeares since collected:
I hope, hereafter it may be an Incitement to some Ingeniose and
publick-spirited young Man, to polish and compleat, what I have
delivered rough hewen: For I have not Leisure to heighten my Stile."
I for one disagree - Aubrey's Brief Lives speak across the centuries
with their small but telling details - as he put it in the quote on
the preceeding page : "How these curiosities would be quite forgott,
did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them down."
http://www.druidic.org/aubrey2.htm
High Perl Lynx
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(quote, excerpts)
(from Oliver Lawson Dick's biography:)
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> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_Lives- Hide quoted text -