Study of the Works and Reputation of John Aubrey (1626-1697) with emphasis on His Brief Lives

This monograph evaluates Aubrey's intellectual temper and accomplishments, and measures his posthumous reputation against that evaluation. His non-biographical works are studied against their contemporary background, and Brief Lives is critically examined and compared with other biographies of the seventeenth century. Assesses him as combining the modern scientific view of the mid-seventeenth century with the superstition of the Medieval and Renaissance past.