John Aubrey(1626–1697) was an antiquary, natural philosopher, biographer, folklorist, proto-anthropologist, travel writer, topographer, and experimental scientist. He had a vivid prose style, immense curiosity, intellectual originality, hundreds of friends, and an acute eye for visual detail. Without his sprawling, incomplete, and compelling manuscript remains, we would lose a unique means of contact with the material past and also the humanity of our ancestors. Both comic and melancholy, his writings offer a paper museum of people and things. Aubrey inherited the small estate of Lower Easton Piercy, near Chippenham, on the death of his father, but growing financial troubles led him into catastrophic debt and an enforced sale of his property. The present volume reproduces Bodleian Library MS Aubrey 17, a bound compilation of drawings and Latin verses relating to that estate, which Aubrey made over the course of twenty years. These drawings range from surprisingly engaged and loving depictions of English rural landscape to his unrealised projects for a virtuoso’s villa and gardens in the Italian style. This facsimile offers us many things: a visual souvenir, a record of disappointed hopes, and the nearest we can get to an early modern individual’s engagement with a particular place. The facsimile is prefaced by three essays by Aubrey scholars Kate Bennett, Peter Davidson and Kelsey Jackson Williams, and by annotations and supplementary information. Produced to commemorate 400 years since Aubrey’s birth on 12 March 1626.
