This is an extraordinary publication. It is lavishly produced in landscape format, replete with boards covered in marbled paper that has itself been specially commissioned to match the original covers of Designatio de Easton-Piers, no. 17 of the Aubrey manuscripts preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Inside is a facsimile of the entire manuscript of Aubrey’s visual account of his ancestral home, and his plans for it. This is beautifully produced in full colour and lovingly annotated with an apparatus that elucidates both the views delineated in ink and wash that the volume mainly comprises, and the quotations from the Latin poets with which these are embellished. There are also three essays: one by Kate Bennett, giving a general introduction (accompanied by a bibliographical note at the end of the volume); the second by Peter Davidson, placing the drawings in context; and the third by Kelsey Jackson Williams, giving a more discursive view of the work and its conception, in the context of a broader sketch of Aubrey’s life and aspirations.

It should perhaps be explained that the Designatio comprises a record that Aubrey appears to have compiled just as he was about to be dispossessed of Easton Piercy, the manor house in North Wiltshire where he had been born and where he spent his childhood years: two of the drawings are dated 12 April 1670, which was within a short while of his vacating the property. The views thus include ones of the house itself in its heavily wooded setting, including ‘My Grandfather Lyte’s chamber wherein I drew my first breath’; but to this Aubrey added a series of exquisite watercolours of landscapes around the house, which (as Peter Davidson points out in his essay) are among the earliest English landscapes known, and which give a wonderful sense of place. As Aubrey himself put it in his account of himself in Brief Lives, ‘If ever I had been good for any thing, ’twould have been a Painter. I could fancy a thing so strongly, and had so cleare an Idæa of it’. Aubrey also added drawings showing his slightly fanciful plans for a complete remodelling of the house, which never actually materialised. These are artistically more pedestrian than the landscapes that they accompany, which are truly evocative, echoing the sketches with which Aubrey also accompanied his topographical manuscripts on Surrey and Wiltshire. But, as both Davidson and Williams illustrate, Aubrey’s aspirations owe much to the influence of Sir Roger Platt’s Coleshill House, now sadly demolished; Aubrey even included what appear either to be views from the windows of his visionary house, including fountains and waterways, or designs for frescoes within it. All this is elucidated in the essays, which usefully fill in the background, including such facets of it as Aubrey’s visit to Lord Bacon’s house at Verulam in Hertfordshire in the 1650s: this clearly made a strong impression on him, as is evidenced by the careful record of it that he made in his Brief Lives.

What the annotations and commentary also bring out well is the vividness of Aubrey’s recollection of the Classics, and his sense almost of contemporaneity with poets like Ovid, Virgil and Horace, quotations from whom he used to encapsulate his own deep feelings about the views that he executed, and the associations of the places thus recorded. Apart from displaying Aubrey’s skill as a draughtsman, the illustrations show that he probably used a drawing device, as Davidson expounds in his essay, and the volume also includes maps that illustrate the exact orientation of the views depicted. In all, the book is a remarkable one, just slightly marred by a few careless pieces of proof-reading (a superfluous hyphen in Aubrey’s description of himself as ‘infortunatum’ in Bennett’s essay, and the unfortunate substitution of ‘Jane’ for ‘Joan’ twice in the account of Aubrey’s aborted marriage negotiations with Joan Sumner in Williams’s), but undoubtedly successful in giving a veritably tactile sense of Aubrey’s evocative compilation. It admirably illustrates facets of the author of Brief Lives that ought to be better known, while also (in the words of its preface) bringing us ‘the nearest we can get to an early modern individual’s engagement with a particular place’.