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the early eighteenth century, a new kind of domestic travelogue had begun to be published, notable examples of which included Daniel Defoe's Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain ( 1724–1727 ) and later Samuel Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). In parallel there was a dramatic upsurge of interest in antiquarianism. Both were intellectual and often political enterprises – deploying eye-witness, empirical accounts of landscapes and sites of historical, cultural or economic interest to bolster a fragile sense of British unity in
Chapter 11 . John Stow and nostalgic antiquarianism J ohn Stow might have anticipated Peter Laslett by 350 years, calling his Survey of London The World We Have Lost. While Stow never employed the expression ‘Merry England’, his preoccupation with ‘that declining time of charity’1 makes his book the most extended treatment of the Merry England refrain in all English literature: a mythical story about a world enjoying plenty, but attentive to want, a socially harmonious world consolidated and sweetened by charity, a festive world, in which generosity spilled
Antiquarian efforts to revive Old Norse poetry brought about an interest in Germanic superstition that could be exploited by literary writers. This article examines a subspecies of terror writing which took inspiration from Norse literature. Compared to the Catholic settings of many Gothic novels, Norse-inflected writing provided an alternative. It is a little known fact that the Old Norse religion and literature was used as a prism through which Britains ethnically Gothic past could be viewed and negotiated. The article discusses some examples of how the fashion for thrills was combined with a national project to recover a sense of ancestral heroism.
Marcantonio Raimondis so-called Caryatid Façade has received scant attention, yet it occupies an important place in the printmakers oeuvre and was widely admired and imitated in the sixteenth century. The image, which features an architectural façade adorned with Caryatid and Persian porticoes and an oversized female capital, does not fit easily with the usual narrative about Raimondis career in Rome, summed up in Vasaris account that he collaborated with Raphael to publicise the masters storie. Rather than being an illustration of a religious or mythological subject, it brings together architectural fantasia, archaeology and Vitruvian studies, reflecting on the origins of the orders and the nature of architectural ornament. Arguably, it is also an indirect trace of Raphaels unfinished projects to reconstruct Rome and to collaborate with humanist Fabio Calvo and others on a new, illustrated edition of Vitruvius.
The history of the Allan Library is here told systematically for the first time. This antiquarian collection of substantially foreign-language books and some manuscripts was formed by barrister Thomas Robinson Allan (1799-1886) during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. His stated intention was to create a Methodist rival to Sion College Library (Church of England) and Dr Williamss Library (Old Dissent). Allan donated it to the Wesleyan Methodist Conference in 1884, which funded the erection of purpose-built Allan Library premises opening in London in 1891. However, the Wesleyans struggled to make a success of the enterprise as a subscription library, and the collection was in storage between 1899 and 1920, before being sold by Conference to the London Library (where most of it still remains). The Allan Library Trust was established with the proceeds of the sale. The reasons for the relative failure of Allans great library project are fully explored.
In 1807, the Duchess of Bedford and several of her circle attended a performance of the opera The First Attempt at Dublin‘s Theatre Royal. Their hair was not coifed in the style of the day but rather swept up and fastened with golden bodkins in the ancient Irish manner. Soon this became all the rage in polite Irish society, and Dublin jewellers, struggling to compete, took out advertisements to accuse other firms of making less than authentic replicas. Indeed, the great demand in Dublin for these golden bodkins inflated the price of gold in Ireland. Drapers soon saw a business opportunity in this Celtic fashion renaissance and started producing the `Glorvina Mantle, a flowing scarlet cape, ideally secured with golden replicas of Celtic broaches. Eventually these ancient Gaelic styles made their way to London and became fashionable among ladies from the upper class. The popularity of this exotic dress resulted from a confluence of factors. While the growing interest in Irish antiquarianism, the European fascination with orientalism and the popularity of Gothic romance fed the fire, the spark that ignited the blaze was The Wild Irish Girl, a novel written by a young Irish governess. Not only does this fashion craze bear witness to the popularity of the text, but so do the sales figures. This popular novel, first published in 1806, went through seven editions in two years, and was even successful on the Continent, especially in Germany, where the young authors popularity almost eclipsed Scott‘s and Byron‘s and her sales figures surpassed those of her fellow Irish writers, Maria Edgeworth and Charles Maturin. In fact, the great Gothic writer Maturin openly borrowed from The Wild Irish Girl in his own work.
This book brings together essays on the burgeoning array of local antiquarian practices that developed across Europe in the early modern era (c. 1400–1700). Adopting an interdisciplinary and comparative method it investigates how individuals, communities and regions invented their own ancient pasts according to the concerns they faced in the present. A wide range of ‘antiquities’ – real or fictive, Roman or pre-Roman, unintentionally confused or deliberately forged – emerged through archaeological investigations, new works of art and architecture, collections, history-writing and literature. This book is the first to explore the concept of local concepts of antiquity across Europe in a period that has been defined as a uniform ‘Renaissance’. Contributions take a new novel approach to the revival of the antique in different parts of Italy and also extend to other, less widely studied antiquarian traditions in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Britain and Poland. They examine how ruins, inscriptions and literary works were used to provide evidence of a particular idea of local origins, rewrite history or vaunt civic pride. They consider municipal antiquities collections in southern Italy and southern France, the antiquarian response to the pagan, Christian and Islamic past on the Iberian peninsula, and Netherlandish interest in megalithic ruins thought to be traces of a prehistoric race of giants. This interdisciplinary book is of interest for students and scholars of early modern art history, architectural history, literary studies and history, as well as classics and the reception of antiquity.
The enduring controversy about the nature of parliament informs nearly all debates about the momentous religious, political and governmental changes in early modern England – most significantly, the character of the Reformation and the causes of the Revolution. Meanwhile, scholars of ideas have emphasised the historicist turn that shaped the period’s political culture. Religious and intellectual imperatives from the sixteenth century onwards evoked a new interest in the evolution of parliament, shaping the ways that contemporaries interpreted, legitimised and contested Church, state and political hierarchies. For much of the last century, scholarship on parliament focused on its role in high politics, or adopted an administrative perspective. The major exception was J. G. A. Pocock’s brilliant The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957), which argued that competing conceptions about the antiquity of England’s parliamentary constitution – particularly its common law – were a defining element of early Stuart political mentalities and set in motion a continuing debate about the role of historical thought in early seventeenth-century England. The purpose of this volume is to explore contemporary views of parliament’s history/histories over a broader canvas. Historical culture is defined widely to encompass the study of chronicles, more overtly ‘literary’ texts, antiquarian scholarship, religious polemic, political pamphlets, and of the intricate processes that forge memory and tradition. Over half of the essays explore Tudor historical thought, showing that Stuart debates about parliament cannot be divorced from their sixteenth-century prelude. The volume restates the crucial role of institutions for the study of political culture and thought.
The dynamic processes of knowledge production in archaeology and elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences are increasingly viewed within the context of negotiation, cooperation and exchange, as the collaborative effort of groups, clusters and communities of scholars. Shifting focus from the individual scholar to the wider social contexts of her work, this volume investigates the importance of informal networks and conversation in the creation of knowledge about the past, and takes a closer look at the dynamic interaction and exchange that takes place between individuals, groups and clusters of scholars in the wider social settings of scientific work. Various aspects of and mechanisms at work behind the interaction and exchange that takes place between the individual scholar and her community, and the creative processes that such encounters trigger, are critically examined in eleven chapters which draw on a wide spectrum of examples from Europe and North America: from early modern antiquarians to archaeological societies and practitioners at work during the formative years of the modern archaeological disciplines and more recent examples from the twentieth century. The individual chapters engage with theoretical approaches to scientific creativity, knowledge production and interaction such as sociology and geographies of science, and actor-network theory (ANT) in their examination of individual–collective interplay. The book caters to readers both from within and outside the archaeological disciplines; primarily intended for researchers, teachers and students in archaeology, anthropology, classics and the history of science, it will also be of interest to the general reader.