Letters Written by Eminent Persons in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
To Which Are Added, Hearne's Journeys to Reading, and to Whaddon Hall, the Seat of Browne Willis, Esq., and Lives of Eminent Men

This three-volume 1813 compilation contains the manuscript notes which later became famous as John Aubrey's Brief Lives.

John Walker (Edited by), John Aubrey (Author)

9781108079334, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 April 2015

334 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.9 cm, 0.43 kg

This three-volume compilation by the Oxford antiquary John Walker (1770–1831) consists mainly of manuscripts from the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum, but is significant because it contains the biographical notes on the 'lives of eminent men' furnished by John Aubrey (1626–97) to Anthony à Wood, who was at the time compiling his Athenae Oxonienses. Aubrey's subsequently famous Brief Lives were published for the first time in this 1813 work, and, although described as the fourth appendix to it, in fact comprise slightly less than half of the second volume and the entirety of the third. Volume 1 consist of letters between antiquaries including Kenelm Digby, John Cotton and William Dugdale, on topics ranging from the Cornish language and the cure for a bite from a mad dog to the visit of the Princess Anne to Oxford during the tumult of her father's deposition in 1688.

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Letters 1-110.

Subject Areas: British & Irish history [HBJD1]