Download or read book John Aubrey and the Advancement of Learning written by William Poole and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Aubrey (1626-97) was one of the best-connected scholars and antiquaries in the great decades of the British scientific revolution. Immersed in the intellectual fervour of the era, he is best remembered today for his Brief Lives, a collection of compelling portraits of a generation of eminent thinkers.While Aubrey gained a reputation in his own time as a pioneer antiquary and archaeologist, his full intellectual range was much broader. Sociable by nature, he was one of the Founding Fellows of the Royal Society of London and acquainted with all the leading scientists of the generation of Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton. Aubrey championed Hooke's radical ideas on geology and the origin of fossils, and with Hooke he also worked on the construction of a workable artificial language. A pioneer archaeologist too, Aubrey produced the most profound analysis of ancient megaliths undertaken at that time. In addition, Aubrey was an early donor of books, manuscripts, and many other items to both the Bodleian Library and the recently opened Ashmolean Museum.John Aubrey and the Advancement of Learning presents all of Aubrey's varied interests and pursuits within the intellectual context of his times. Published to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society, this is the first accessible and illustrated guide to Aubrey's many diverse achievements as a biographer, antiquary, mathematician, 'natural philosopher' and all-round virtuoso.
Download or read book John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning written by Michael Hunter and published by Science History Publications/USA. This book was released on 1975 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book John Aubrey My Own Life written by Ruth Scurr and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born on the brink of the modern world, John Aubrey was witness to the great intellectual and political upheavals of the seventeenth century. He knew everyone of note in England—writers, philosophers, mathematicians, doctors, astrologers, lawyers, statesmen—and wrote about them all, leaving behind a great gift to posterity: a compilation of biographical information titled Brief Lives, which in a strikingly modest and radical way invented the art of biography. Aubrey was born in Wiltshire, England, in 1626. The reign of Queen Elizabeth and, earlier, the dissolution of the monasteries were not too far distant in memory during his boyhood. He lived through England’s Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the brief rule of Oliver Cromwell and his son, and the restoration of Charles II. Experiencing these constitutional crises and regime changes, Aubrey was impassioned by the preservation of traces of Ancient Britain, of English monuments, manor houses, monasteries, abbeys, and churches. He was a natural philosopher, an antiquary, a book collector, and a chronicler of the world around him and of the lives of his friends, both men and women. His method of writing was characteristic of his manner: modest, self-deprecating, witty, and concerned above all with the collection of facts that would otherwise be lost to time. John Aubrey, My Own Life is an extraordinary book about the first modern biographer, which reimagines what biography can be. This intimate diary of Aubrey’s days is composed of his own words, collected, collated, and enlarged upon by Ruth Scurr in an act of meticulous scholarship and daring imagination. Scurr’s biography honors and echoes Aubrey’s own innovations in the art of biography. Rather than subject his life to a conventional narrative, Scurr has collected the evidence—the remnants of a life from manuscripts, letters, and books—and arranged it chronologically, modernizing words and spellings, and adding explanations when necessary, with sources provided in the extensive endnotes. Here are Aubrey’s intricate drawings of Stonehenge and the ancient Avebury stones; Aubrey on Charles I’s execution (“On this day, the King was executed. It was bitter cold, so he wore two heavy shirts, lest he should shiver and seem afraid”); and Aubrey on antiquity (“Matters of antiquity are like the light after sunset—clear at first—but by and by crepusculum—the twilight—comes—then total darkness”). From the darkness, Scurr has wrested a vibrant, intimate account of the life of an ingenious man.
Download or read book The Antiquary written by Kelsey Jackson Williams and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Aubrey (1626-1697), antiquary, natural philosopher, and virtuoso, is best-remembered today for his Brief Lives, biographies of his contemporaries filled with luminous detail which have been mined for anecdotes by generations of scholars. However, Aubrey was much more than merely the hand behind an invaluable source of biographical material; he was also the author of thousands of pages of manuscript notebooks covering everything from the origins of Stonehenge to the evolution of folklore. Kelsey Jackson Williams explores these manuscripts in full for the first time and in doing so illuminates the intricacies of Aubrey's investigations into Britain's past. The Antiquary is both a major new study of an important early modern writer and a significant intervention in the developing historiography of antiquarianism. It discusses the key aspects of Aubrey's work in a series of linked chapters on archaeology, architecture, biography, folklore, and philology, concluding with a revisionist interpretation of Aubrey's antiquarian writings. While covering a wide variety of scholarly territory, it remains rooted in the common thread of Aubrey's own intellectual development and the continual interaction between his texts as he studied, discovered, revised, and rewrote them across four decades. Its conclusions not only substantially reshape our understanding of Aubrey and his works, but also provide new understandings of the methodologies, ambitions, and achievements of antiquarianism across early modern Europe.
Download or read book John Aubrey Stone Circles written by Aubrey Burl and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The career of eminent archaeologist John Aubrey and his revolutionary work on stone circles.
Download or read book Memoir of John Aubrey F R S Embracing His Auto Biographical Sketches a Brief Review of His Personal and Literary Merits and an Account of His Works written by John Britton and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2024-04-20 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Memoir of John Aubrey F R S Embracing His Auto biographical Sketches a Brief Review of His Personal and Literary Merits and an Account of His Works written by John Britton and published by . This book was released on 1845 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Britain Begins written by Barry Cunliffe and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the origins of the British and the Irish peoples, from the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000BC to the eve of the Norman Conquest - who they were, where they came from, and how they related to one another.
Download or read book Inky Fingers written by Anthony Grafton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Open Letters Review Best Book of the Year “Grafton presents largely unfamiliar material...in a clear, even breezy style...Erudite.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post In this celebration of bookmaking in all its messy and intricate detail, Anthony Grafton captures both the physical and mental labors that went into the golden age of the book—compiling notebooks, copying and correcting proofs, preparing copy—and shows us how scribes and scholars shaped influential treatises and forgeries. Inky Fingers ranges widely, from the theological polemics of the early days of printing to the pathbreaking works of Jean Mabillon and Baruch Spinoza. Grafton draws new connections between humanistic traditions and intellectual innovations, textual learning and the delicate, arduous, error-riddled craft of making books. Through it all, he reminds us that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands, and the nitty gritty labor of printmakers has had a profound impact on the history of ideas. “Describes magnificent achievements, storms of controversy, and sometimes the pure devilment of scholars and printers...Captivating and often amusing.” —Wall Street Journal “Ideas, in this vivid telling, emerge not just from minds but from hands, not to mention the biceps that crank a press or heft a ream of paper.” —New York Review of Books “Grafton upends idealized understandings of early modern scholarship and blurs distinctions between the physical and mental labor that made the remarkable works of this period possible.” —Christine Jacobson, Book Post “Scholarship is a kind of heroism in Grafton’s account, his nine protagonists’ aching backs and tired eyes evidence of their valiant dedication to the pursuit of knowledge.” —London Review of Books
Download or read book Aubrey s Brief Lives written by John Aubrey and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-04-07 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RUTH SCURR John Aubrey was a modest man, a self-styled antiquarian and the man who invented modern biography. His ‘lives’ of the prominent figures of his generation and the Elizabethan era, including Shakespeare, Milton and Sir Walter Raleigh, have been plundered by historians for centuries for their frankness and fascinating detail. Collected here are all of Aubrey’s biographical writings, a series of unforgettable portraits of the characters of his day, still more alive and kicking than in any conventional work of history.
Download or read book British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century written by Sarah Hutton and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-06-04 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Hutton presents a rich historical study of one of the most fertile periods in modern philosophy. It was in the seventeenth century that Britain's first philosophers of international stature and lasting influence emerged. Its most famous names, Hobbes and Locke, rank alongside the greatest names in the European philosophical canon. Bacon too belongs with this constellation of great thinkers, although his status as a philosopher tends to be obscured by his status as father of modern science. The seventeenth century is normally regarded as the dawn of modernity following the breakdown of the Aristotelian synthesis which had dominated intellectual life since the middle ages. In this period of transformational change, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke are acknowledged to have contributed significantly to the shape of European philosophy from their own time to the present day. But these figures did not work in isolation. Sarah Hutton places them in their intellectual context, including the social, political and religious conditions in which philosophy was practised. She treats seventeenth-century philosophy as an ongoing conversation: like all conversations, some voices will dominate, some will be more persuasive than others and there will be enormous variations in tone from the polite to polemical, matter-of-fact, intemperate. The conversation model allows voices to be heard which would otherwise be discounted. Hutton shows the importance of figures normally regarded as 'minor' players in philosophy (e.g. Herbert of Cherbury, Cudworth, More, Burthogge, Norris, Toland) as well as others who have been completely overlooked, notably female philosophers. Crucially, instead of emphasizing the break between seventeenth-century philosophy and its past, the conversation model makes it possible to trace continuities between the Renaissance and seventeenth century, across the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century, while at the same time acknowledging the major changes which occurred.
Download or read book The Oxford History of Life writing written by Alan Stewart and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages' explores the richness and variety of life writing in the Middle Ages, ranging from Anglo-Latin lives of missionaries, prelates, and princes to high medieval lives of scholars and visionaries to late medieval lives of authors and laypeople.
Download or read book Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost written by William Poole and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-09 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An authoritative, and accessible, introduction to Milton’s life and an engaging examination of the process of composing Paradise Lost” (Choice). In early 1642 Milton promised English readers a work of literature so great that “they should not willingly let it die.” Twenty-five years later, the epic poem Paradise Lost appeared in print. In the interim, however, the poet had gone totally blind and had also become a controversial public figure―a man who had argued for the abolition of bishops, freedom of the press, the right to divorce, and the prerogative of a nation to depose and put to death an unsatisfactory ruler. These views had rendered him an outcast. William Poole devotes particular attention to Milton’s personal life: his reading and education, his ambitions and anxieties, and the way he presented himself to the world. Although always a poet first, Milton was also a theologian and civil servant, vocations that informed the composition of his masterpiece. At the emotional center of this narrative is the astounding fact that Milton lost his sight in 1652. How did a blind man compose this intensely visual work? Poole opens up the world of Milton’s masterpiece to modern readers, first by exploring Milton’s life and intellectual preoccupations and then by explaining the poem itself―its structure, content, and meaning. “Poole’s book may well become what he shows Paradise Lost soon became: a classic.” —Times Literary Supplement “Smart and original . . . Demonstrates with astonishing exactitude how Milton’s life and―most impressively of all―his reading enabled this epic.” ―The Spectator “This deeply learned and lucidly written book . . . makes this most ambitious of early modern poets accessible to his modern readers.” ―Journal of British Studies
Download or read book Aubrey on Education written by John Aubrey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1699 John Aubrey began to compile notes for a scheme for the education of young gentlemen. The manuscript he left has never been published. The editor of the volume organized and re-arranged the text and has provided an historical Introduction and detailed notes. Aubrey gives a graphic account of education at the time. He displays a remarkable breadth of knowledge of the broad issues of history, law, mechanics, science and pedagogy and he was intensely curious about the practicalities of teaching language and number, the effects of puberty, diet, travel, games and music.
Download or read book The Instrumental University written by Ethan Schrum and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Instrumental University, Ethan Schrum provides an illuminating genealogy of the educational environment in which administrators, professors, and students live and work today. After World War II, research universities in the United States underwent a profound mission change. The Instrumental University combines intellectual, institutional, and political history to reinterpret postwar American life through the changes in higher education. Acknowledging but rejecting the prevailing conception of the Cold War university largely dedicated to supporting national security, Schrum provides a more complete and contextualized account of the American research university between 1945 and 1970. Uncovering a pervasive instrumental understanding of higher education during that era, The Instrumental University shows that universities framed their mission around solving social problems and promoting economic development as central institutions in what would soon be called the knowledge economy. In so doing, these institutions took on more capitalistic and managerial tendencies and, as a result, marginalized founding ideals, such as pursuit of knowledge in academic disciplines and freedom of individual investigators. The technocratic turn eroded some practices that made the American university special. Yet, as Schrum suggests, the instrumental university was not yet the neoliberal university of the 1970s and onwards in which market considerations trumped all others. University of California president Clark Kerr and other innovators in higher education were driven by a progressive impulse that drew on an earlier tradition grounded in a concern for the common good and social welfare.
Download or read book Faith Medical Alchemy and Natural Philosophy written by John T. Young and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 1998, this is a fundamental re-assessment of the world-view of the alchemists, natural philosophers and intelligencers of the mid 17th century. Based almost entirely upon the extensive and hitherto little-researched manuscript archive of Samuel Hartlib, it charts and contextualises the personal and intellectual history of Johann Moriaen (c.1592-1668), a Dutch-German alchemist and natural philosopher. Moriaen was closely acquainted with many of the leading thinkers and experimenters of his time, including René Descartes, J.A. Comenius, J.R. Glauber and J.S. Küffler. His detailed reports of relations with these figures and his response to their work provide a uniquely informed insight into the world of alchemy and natural philosophy. This study also illuminates the nature and mechanisms of intellectual and technological exchanges between Germany, The Netherlands and England.
Download or read book Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought written by Catherine Gimelli Martin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), this collection examines Bacon's recasting of proto-scientific philosophies and practices into early modern discourses of knowledge. Like Bacon, all of the contributors to this volume confront an essential question: how to integrate intellectual traditions with emergent knowledges to forge new intellectual futures. The volume's main theme is Bacon's core interest in identifying and conceptualizing coherent intellectual disciplines, including the central question of whether Bacon succeeded in creating unified discourses about learning. Bacon's interests in natural philosophy, politics, ethics, law, medicine, religion, neoplatonic magic, technology and humanistic learning are here mirrored in the contributors' varied intellectual backgrounds and diverse approaches to Bacon's thought.
