Life of the Lord Keeper North by Roger North

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Year:
Pages:652
ISBN:0-7734-8972-X
978-0-7734-8972-1
Price:$359.95 + shipping
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Roger North, author of Life of the Lord Keeper North, has long been familiar to readers of early 18th-century literature. The first edition was published in 1742, after North's death, by his son Montagu North and has been popular throughout the last two centuries. What was not realized, until Mary Chan's recent work on the manuscripts for the Life, is that Montagu's published version was not the work Roger North wrote, but rather a pastiche of several versions, based on the second-to-last. This edition offers the Life as Roger North conceived of it. Assessment of North's place in the history of life-writing based on the evidence of the 1742 version inevitably has misrepresented and underestimated North's achievment. This edition allows a new assessment. North worked out early in the 18th century a "new" form of biographical writing, significant despite its having been largely unknown, requiring us to readjust our "history". North's work is itself a mirror of contemporary concerns with historiography and draws attention particularly to late seventeenth-century notions of historical truth and its presentation.

Reviews

"Ms. Chan has provided many helpful explanations of arcane legal terms and translations of law Latin and French in her notes and Glossary, but her notes give too little on historical figures or incidents. . . . such criticisms pale when set against the achievement of this impressive edition and the importance of the text itself. Ms. Chan's gives us much of North's work that has never appeared in print before, and her Introducation makes an important contribution to understanding the style and sophistication of early biography." - The Scriblerian

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