John Aubrey saw only one slim volume through press in his lifetime, although as Williams notes in The Antiquary, Aubrey’s “intellectual stocktaking” (68) late in life also saw frantic, if ultimately fruitless, attempts to publish the two folio volumes of Monumenta Britannica, Aubrey’s study of Romano-British remains. Also included within Monumenta was Aubrey’s earlier work, Templa Druidum, with its “seminal” (21) claim that Stonehenge and other British megaliths had been designed as Druidic temples. Discussion of the various parts of Monumenta occupies the first two chapters of The Antiquary—a welcome reassessment of Aubrey’s antiquarian writings. The Antiquary positions itself alongside recent work on Aubrey’s antiquarianism by Graham Parry, William Poole, and Kate Bennett, offering a broadly chronological survey of Aubrey’s encounters with Britain’s physical and textual past. It makes the particular claim that Aubrey’s unique contribution to seventeenth-century studies of physical culture lay in his “comparative antiquitie” (155), a process whereby Aubrey arrived at an understanding of the unknown or unfamiliar “by relating them back to more familiar monuments and using those perceived relationships as a way of reconstructing the cultures which had produced them” (48).

This comparatism, Williams argues, was responsible for many of Aubrey’s most ingenious discoveries. We learn, for example, that Aubrey arrived at his understanding of Stonehenge through comparison with recent scholarship on Scandinavian megaliths by Ole Worm. In chapter 3, Williams develops Aubrey’s analogic method through a focus on one work, the Chronologica Architectonica, which used comparisons between different medieval architectural styles to draw conclusions about the relative date of a building’s construction. Williams’s discussion of this “handbook for the dating of buildings” (86) is, like his chapters on Monumenta Britannica, both highly readable and refreshingly judicious. While Williams is keen to reassess Aubrey’s antiquarian writings, and the methods he employed to arrive at his conclusions, what emerges from these pages is as much a study of Aubrey’s intellectual ingenuity as his intellectual limitations. These limitations include Aubrey’s humanist preference for the classical over the medieval, his particular prejudice against the Anglo-Saxons, and his biblical understanding of human culture as “a postdiluvian construct with an origin a few thousand years in the past” (91).

Williams turns in this study’s final three chapters from Aubrey’s encounters with monuments and megaliths to his attempts to preserve the lives, lore, and languages of the past—a move from physical to textual cultures for which Williams prepares us in his introduction, which discusses the humanist origins of antiquarianism as a study, less of old things, as of “olde and auncient words” (5). It is in this vein that chapter 4 tackles Aubrey’s most well-known work, Brief Lives. Chapter 5 extends the focus on Aubrey’s “comparative antiquitie” to the Remaines of Gentilisme, a comparison between classical and contemporary folklore, from Ovid to old wives’ tales. The final chapter, on Aubrey’s little-known philological interests, focuses on Aubrey’s collaborations with Thomas Gale and Edward Lhuyd and their mutual interest in the etymology of British place names. In so doing, the final chapter returns us to Williams’s discussion in chapter 1 on Aubrey’s scholarly interests in, and self-identification with, Welsh history and culture.

It is an irony that a writer so bound up with the need to preserve a past fast fading from memory should today be remembered for only a fraction of his total antiquarian output. Aubrey himself had feared that his writing would be lost to oblivion—consigned, Williams writes, “into the wrapper of a fresh pork pie” (94)—and while most, if by no means all, of Aubrey’s antiquarian writings survive in the Bodleian and British Library, most remain unprinted, unread, and underresearched. The Antiquary is therefore an important and illuminating contribution to scholarship on a writer ripe for further investigation. It makes no claims to offer an exhaustive survey of Aubrey’s antiquarian writing, and there are some notable omissions here. But a unifying analysis of Aubrey’s broader antiquarian methodologies nevertheless emerges from Williams’s detailed focus on a selection of texts, and this enables assessment of Aubrey’s larger contribution to seventeenth-century antiquarianism in both its British and Northern European contexts.