Aubrey Burl – författare

William Stukeley (1667-1765), one of the first to conduct fieldwork at Stonehenge and to recognize its historic importance, meticulously recorded his findings in a manuscript that has remained unpublished for hundreds of years. That manuscript is transcribed here, accompanied by detailed annotations that confirm the value of Stukeley’s archaeological research and set it apart from his later unsustainable theories and obsessions with Druids.Trained as a medical doctor, Stukeley’s interests were antiquarian and archaeological, with a particular enthusiasm for evidence of early sacred ritual. His Stonehenge field notes include careful measurements, drawings, and plans as well as original analyses and remarkable discoveries, among them the enigmatic cursus which no one before him had seen. Stukeley’s manuscript provides a fascinating review of what could be said of the stone circle and its landscape in the early eighteenth century.

This little book has become a classic. Re-issued yet again with revisions and colour pictures, it provides an excellent introduction to stone circles, including Stonehenge, and shows how we are gradually coming to an understanding of their significance.

Stonehenge was not an observatory used by druidical astronomer-priests. It was, instead, a monument in which the moon and the sun and the dead were joined together. In this book the author explains how people in the British Isles, four thousand or more years ago, identified life and death with the cycle of midwinter and midsummer and with the risings and settings of the sun and moon. This is why so many megalithic monuments have astronomical sightlines built into them. This book describes how astronomical customs developed in the British Isles. Unlike other works about 'megalithic astronomy' technical explanations about azimuths and declinations are kept to their simplest. The emphasis here is upon people rather than pertrubations and eclipses.

The figure of the Troubadour combines the ideals of knighthood with the inspiration of the poet and musician and created a cultural explosion which influenced the whole course of Western art and civilisation. Burl traces the story from the birth of the first Troubadour in 1071 to the execution of the last Cathar Good Man in 1231 and the close of the distinctive southern French culture that had given rise to it. The tale incorporates the Crusades to the Holy Lands and the Albigensian Crusades through the Languedoc and the regular incursions from the English. In telling his story of the Troubadours and their song he brings to life the world of medieval Languedoc. The author is acknowledged as an authority on the Troubadours, one of the most evocative subjects in history.

The career of eminent archaeologist John Aubrey and his revolutionary work on stone circles. John Aubrey is best known for his gossipy Brief Lives, but Aubrey Burl, the world expert on stone circles, argues he should be equally celebrated for his discovery of the age and wonders of prehistory, Britain's stone circles. In 1649, out hunting he chanced upon the wonders of Avebury. They fascinated him. The stones were clearly some form of temple, and as they were found in places where neither Roman, Saxon nor Dane had been they must have been erected before them when the only priesthood were the Druids. Aubrey was the first to have that heretical insight. Over the years John Aubrey compiled the first, objective compilation of pre-Roman monuments in Britain from the Merry Maidens in Cornwall to the moon aligned recumbent circles of Northern Scotland. Between lay famous rings like the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire and Long Meg and her Daughters in the Lake District. For years her was 'never off horseback', searching. His scribbled notes formed the foundation of stone circle studies.

The years when she brought delight, desire and disgust to Shakespeare came after the Spanish Armada of 1588 and before the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a long, unsettled period of theatre, music, warfare and brutal death. Those years were dramatically rich. Shakespeare wrote plays including Romeo & Juliet, Twelfth Night, and King Lear. And he met the ‘Dark Lady’. She was musical, alluring, married and faithless. Shakespeare never identified her. Scholars have – but for different women. She was well-born, or a slut, or a housewife, even a phantom of Shakespeare’s poetical mind. She was an anchor and agony to him. His sonnets sang of her loveliness and cursed her for her infidelity. The quest to discover her name began in Elizabeth I’s reign, became an obsession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and continues today. Card-sharps challenge passers by to ‘find the lady’ from one of the three playing-cards shown, turned upside-down and shuffled. Take your pick. Aubrey Burl’s challenge also is to find her. But there is no deception. The ‘Dark Lady’ can be found in Shakespeare’s unshuffled sonnets.