Aubrey's Brief Lives: Omnibus Edition - Softcover

Aubrey, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0993598226 ISBN 13: 9780993598227

Publisher: The Langley Press, 2017

Synopsis

This book combines the complete contents of all three of the Langley Press Brief Lives books into one volume. It includes all the Lives published as Aubrey’s Brief Lives: A Selection, Aubrey’s Brief Lives: The Elizabethans and Aubrey’s Brief Lives: Thomas Hobbes. The introductions of all three books are published here in full, as are the explanatory introductions to each Life. This volume also includes William Duggan's translation of Thomas Hobbes' Latin prose autobiography, which Aubrey included among his Brief Lives.

About this title

About the Author:

John Aubrey (1626-1697) was the Bystander of his age, a hanger-on and hanger-out at great houses, a country gentleman of lively intellectual curiosity and unsteady character who left not a book to history but a random, sprawling collection of notes, anecdotes, scribbles and morsels of gossip that have been looted and quoted by scholars ever since. So, alongside prostitutes, soldiers, impostors and scholars stand, fully in the round of their humanity, such historical figures as Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Wolsey, Sidney, Sir Thomas Moore and Milton. These men and women flawed, vain, ambitious, vulnerable are more alive here than in any formal history; these giants of an age are brought to a human scale, making it possible for the modern reader to feel, in the words of Edmund Wilson who contributes a foreword, what it must have been like to live then, to find oneself a part of an England that was venturesome, unsettled and eager, that was opening new horizons.

Review:

Reading Aubrey's Brief Lives is like sitting in a 17th century ale house and listening into the gossip of the day about the dings of both ordinary folk and the gentry alike. This reprint edition of a "time lost classic" is very strongly recommended for personal reading lists, as well as both community and academic library 17th century Biography & History reference collections and supplemental studies lists. --Able Greenspan, Midwest Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: The Langley Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0993598226
• ISBN 13: 9780993598227
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 178
• Editor: Webb Simon