ABSTRACT
The antiquarian notes of John Aubrey show him living in a patriarchal world, conducting his researches in correspondence with other gentlemen of learning and leisure. As he casually mentions, most men he had met with spoke Latin “very well, and very readily” (Brief i, 120). When he collected titbits of history, it was mostly from male informants; in a short autobiography, he says about himself, “When a boy, he did ever love to converse with old men, as living histories” (Brief i, 43). Of old women the text makes no mention. Nevertheless, Aubrey is almost unique in the seventeenth century for his scholarly interest in the oral traditions of workingclass women. Such discourse was commonly known as “old wives’ tales,” a phrase that-except in feminist discourse-continues to be a term of scorn to this very day. Adam Fox gives a useful survey of this concept and its practice in the early modern period, showing that an interest in such tales was considered vulgar, unmanly, and unscientific (Oral and Literate 174-8). Unorthodox curiosity was Aubrey’s strength, but made it difficult for scholars of his time to take his work seriously, as even those who collaborated with him had to concede. The issue around which most of the discussion centered was his alleged credulity (Hunter 133-4, 229).
