Brief Lives, with An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writes by John Aubrey (review)

John Aubrey is perhaps the archetype of the Renaissance man. In a brilliant essay on early modern eclectic learning and how it can inform our own methodologies of scholarship, William Poole draws attention to the multifaceted character of Aubrey’s own erudition:

Aubrey … was an undeniably ‘literary’ character, but [he was also] one whose intellectual life was rich and broad in ways that transcend single categories. Not only this, but his complexity was in important ways the complexity of his age: Aubrey’s intellectual life was an expression of changes in the educational philosophy of later seventeenth-century England, and Aubrey exploited those changes too, even if his achievements were partially obscured until last century. For Aubrey was a member of a generation that was starting to query the dominance of humanistic philology and grammar in education, and to suggest instead that mathematics was to be the proper base of mature reasoning, and that experimental philosophy should certainly accompany and in some areas replace the older natural philosophy learned principally from textbooks. William Poole, “Early modern eclecticism,” Critical Quarterly 52.4 (2010) 13.

With interests ranging from archaeology to folklore, history to toponymy, astrology to religion, Aubrey was a man whose learning spanned a multitude of disciplines. Moreover, he was never afraid of adopting what we now describe as interdisciplinary approach: as Poole notes, Aubrey “was really an interested eclectic, a man who was an amateur in most of his interests, profound in a few of them, and always exercised by how one kind of discussion might lead on to another” (Poole 13).

Because of these twin factors—a multiplicity of intellectual pursuits allied to an interdisciplinary approach—Aubrey remains a fascinating figure for scholars of the early modern period. In addition, his writing style—deceptively unadorned, humorous, candid—understandably retains an attraction for modern readers. Such stylistic characteristics are in abundance in his most famous work, the biographical anthology entitled Brief Lives. Revitalised in a new edition by Kate Bennett, this collection provides some of the most vivid pen portraits of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figures. It is here, for example, that we discover that William Shakespeare was “a handsome well shap’t man: very good company, and of a very pleasant smooth wit” (365); that Edward Coke “shewed himself too clownish, and bitter in his carriage” (85–86) during his prosecution of Walter Raleigh that led to the latter’s execution for treason; and Robert Hooke was “the greatest Mechanick this day in the world … [whose] head lies much more to geometry, then to Arithmetique” (99).

Yet Aubrey’s biographical pen, as Bennett is careful to point out in an elucidatory editorial introduction to the twin-volume set, was not restricted to the most famed of his contemporaries. His gossipy inclinations were brought to bear on a wide range of subjects, and he also recorded for posterity less renowned figures such as the Lord High Treasurer Sidney Godolphin’s mistress Jane Berkeley; Sylvanus Scory, dissolute court wit and son of the robust bishop of Hereford John Scory; and the doctor of divinity, educationalist, and informant during the so-called Popish Plot of 1678–1681 Israel Tonge.

In keeping with the multidisciplinarity of the author, this is a sociological as well as a literary work. By collating in a comprehensive edition Aubrey’s profiles, Bennett allows for a panoramic survey of the variety of ways in which noted early modern intellectuals approached the more quotidian aspects of life. One such example of this is the consumption of alcohol—overindulgence coexisted with ascetic self-denial. While Jonson, prone to “exceed[ing] many times in drink,” was the acme of the voluptuary, the Puritan Milton is described as a “Temperate” individual who frequently demurred from drink between meals.

Sex lives are also, sometimes scurrilously, detailed, showing that the prying eyes of our own age are by no means...