Brief Lives is undoubtedly John Aubrey's most significant work. It is for this that he has become widely known in modern times.
Michael Hunter, The Seventeenth Century.
It is not an exaggeration to claim that until Kate Bennett came along, no one properly understood what the Brief Lives are ... Bennett's edition [...] marks a new beginning for ... Read moreAubrey scholarship ... It is fitting that such scholarly devotion, extending over two decades, should have given rise to an edition that is an innovation in its own right. Nothing like it has appeared before, and it will last, if not forever, for a very long time.
Ruth Scurr, Times Literary Supplement
One of the most astonishing feats of scholarly editing in recent decades ... extensive, painstakingly exact, and omnisciently annotated ... altogether stupendous.
Noel Malcolm, The New York Review of Books
Kate Bennett ... has achieved the apparently impossible in producing a full and accurately formatted edition of Aubrey's Lives - a splendid achievement, on which the Oxford University Press is also to be congratulated
Katherine Duncan-Jones, TLS Books of the Year 2015
It is no small credit to Bennett that her massive commentary is also replete with fascinating material and memorable moments. With material drawn intensively from Aubrey's own papers but also very widely from print and manuscript material.
Reid Barbour, Renaissance Quarterly
This is an outstanding achievement and will undoubtedly be the standard edition of the Brief Lives for the foreseeable future. Moreover, in its rich and varied content it is of interest to more than just the rarefied field of Aubreyists, but to anyone studying English learned culture in the seventeenth century, particularly historians of the Royal Society, of mathematics and of antiquarianism. Aubrey himself was acutely concerned that his works should be satisfactorily edited and made use of after his death; in this edition he is luckier than he could have hoped for.
Kelsey Jackson Williams, History
The publication of Bennett's wonderful edition of the Brief Lives, in two volumes as handsome as they are typographically responsive to the extraordinary artefact which they contain, is a cause for unreserved celebration in the academy and far beyond ... it is an exceptional achievement and the resulting work will stand as the text of the Brief Lives for the foreseeable future.
Peter Davidson, English Historical Review
This splendid edition gives us, perhaps for the first time, a true life of the first English biographer.
Milton Quarterly
the edition is based on exemplary scholarly principles ... a labour of love ... a landmark edition that changes how we understand the roots of modern biography.
Andrew Hadfield, Renaissance Studies
[T]his edition is unsurpassed for its scholarly rigour ... This monumental edition is a triumph and has been well worth waiting for. Aubrey will never seem quite the same again.
Michael Hunter, The Seventeenth Century
[A] remarkable edition ... Kate Bennett is not the first accomplished editor of the Lives, but she is much the most ambitious ... Bennett reproduces the text of the manuscripts as it stands, with resourceful conventions of presentation that make her two volumes a joy to handle as well as to read. It is an extraordinary feat of scholarly assiduity ... [Bennett] brings him alive as never before.
Blair Worden, Literary Review
extraordinary ... Bennett has produced a work of enormous value for all students and readers of biography.
C. Rollyson, CHOICE
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