Kelsey Jackson Williams – författare

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.

Traditional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment present the half-century or so before 1750 as, at best, a not-yet fully realised precursor to the era of Hume and Smith, at worst, a period of superstition and religious bigotry. This is the first book-length study to systematically challenge that notion. Instead, it argues that the era between approximately 1680 and 1745 was a 'First' Scottish Enlightenment, part of the continent-wide phenomenon of early Enlightenment and led by the Jacobites, Episcopalians, and Catholics of north-eastern Scotland. It makes this argument through an intensive study of the dramatic changes in historiographical practice which took place in Scotland during this era, showing how the documentary scholarship of Jean Mabillon and the Maurists was eagerly received and rapidly developed in Scottish historical circles, resulting in the wholesale demolition of the older, Humanist myths of Scottish origins and their replacement with the foundations of our modern understanding of early Scottish history.This volume accordingly challenges many of the truisms surrounding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish history, pushing back against notions of pre-Enlightenment Scotland as backward, insular, and intellectually impoverished and mapping a richly polymathic, erudite, and transnational web of scholars, readers, and polemicists. It highlights the enduring cultural links with France and argues for the central importance of Scotland's two principal religious minorities--Episcopalians and Catholics--in the growth of Enlightenment thinking. As such, it makes a major intervention in the intellectual and cultural histories of Scotland, early modern Europe, and the Enlightenment itself.

How a Europe torn apart by the Napoleonic Wars became the site of a book-collecting frenzy, laying the foundation for the Anglophone world's greatest collections of rare books.At the beginning of the nineteenth century, bibliomania ('book madness') swept the English upper classes. Vast sums of money were spent on books from the dawn of printing; fortunes were lost, families shattered, estates sold. By the end of the century most of the collections assembled had been sold or donated and had come to rest in national and research libraries across the UK and America, forming the groundwork on which almost all collections of early printed books in the Anglophone world have since been built.But where did these books come from? Who bought them and how? Portrait of an Obsession recovers this forgotten story by focusing on the obsessive and majestic collecting of George John Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer (1758-1834), the greatest of the Regency bibliomanes. Historian, librarian, and modern-day bibliophile Kelsey Jackson Williams explores how Spencer combed a Europe torn apart by the Napoleonic Wars for rare books, using agents and runners (including a British spy) to intimidate librarians, ransack monastic collections, and deal in stolen and looted goods to form his great library at Althorp. The catastrophes of war allowed for unparalleled opportunities, if one had the resources and drive to capitalise on them. Through Spencer's life and collection, which is now part of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library in Manchester and contains some of the rarest books in the world, Portrait of an Obsession unpicks the extraordinary psychology of Georgian book collecting. In so doing, it asks how Georgian collectors came to own such eye-watering arrays of rare items--and what that means for the Anglophone museums and libraries in which they sit today.