Academic literature on the topic 'Antiquarianism'

Antiquarianism, the early modern study of the past, occupies a central role in modern studies of humanist and post-humanist scholarship. Its relationship to modern disciplines such as archaeology is widely acknowledged, and at least some antiquaries—such as John Aubrey, William Camden, and William Dugdale—are well-known to Anglophone historians. But what was antiquarianism and how can twenty-first century scholars begin to make sense of it? To answer these questions, the article begins with a survey of recent scholarship, outlining how our understanding of antiquarianism has developed since the ground-breaking work of Arnaldo Momigliano in the mid-twentieth century. It then explores the definition and scope of antiquarian practice through close attention to contemporaneous accounts and actors’ categories before turning to three case-studies of antiquaries in Denmark, Scotland, and England. By way of conclusion, it develops a series of propositions for reassessing our understanding of antiquarianism. It reaffirms antiquarianism’s central role in the learned culture of the early modern world and offers suggestions for avenues which might be taken in future research on the discipline.

Christopher Witmore (2014: 215) recently observed that “things go on perturbing one another when humans cease to be part of the picture. A former house may be transformed through relations with bacteria, hedgehogs, water, compaction”; and if the materials that archaeologists confront are material memories (cf. Olivier 2011) from which a past is to be recalled in the future, then The kind of memory that things hold often tells us little of whether materials strewn across an abandonment level resulted from the reuse of a structure as a sheepfold, a series of exceptional snow storms, the collapse of a roof made of olive wood after many years of exposure to the weather (rapports between microbes, fungi, water and wood), the cumulative labors of generations of badgers, children playing a game in a ruin, or the probing roots of oak trees (Witmore 2014: 215). In other words, the things that archaeologists confront bear the memories of their own formation without the necessity of a human presence, and the traditional and often exclusive priority given to a human agency in the making of those things and in giving them meaning is simply misplaced. Things get on “just fine” without the benefit of human intervention and interpretation (Witmore 2014: 217). Should archaeology therefore allow that it is not a discipline concerned with excavating the indications of the various past human labours that once acted upon things, and should it eschew the demand to “look beyond the pot, the awl or a stone enclosure for explanations concerning the reasons for their existence” (Witmore 2014: 204)? Consequently, is archaeology now a matter of following the things themselves to wherever they might lead—what Witmore characterises as the New Materialisms—and if so, are we now to practise archaeology “not as the study of the human past through its material remains, but as the discipline of things” (Witmore 2014: 203)?

Arnaldo Momigliano, the most influential modern student of antiquarianism, advanced the view that there was a late antique antiquarianism, but also lamented the absence of study of the history of antiquarianism in this period. Part of the challenge, however, has been to define the object of such a study. Rather than “finding” antiquarianism in late antiquity as Momigliano did, this article argues that a history that offers explicit analogies between late antique evidence and the avowed antiquarianism of early modern Europe allows a more self-conscious and critical history of late antique engagement with the past. The article offers three examples of this form of analysis, comparing practices of statue collecting in Renaissance Rome and the late Roman West, learned treatises on the Roman army by Vegetius and Justus Lipsius, and feelings of attachment to a local past as a modern antiquarian stereotype and in a pair of letters to and from Augustine of Hippo.

Antikvarer og oldforskning på Grundtvigs tid[Antiquarians and the Study of Antiquity during Grundtvig’s Lifetime]By Christian AdamsenWhile the 17th and 18th centuries were dominated by the so-called antiquarianism, the 19th century saw the dawn of scientific archaeology. The Danish Royal Commission of Antiquities in Copenhagen, established 1807 (much later to become the National Museum), sent out a questionnaire to every clerk in the country in order to collect information about various antiquities. The answers, recently published in full text, reflect not only the local perception of Antiquity all over the country, but also the amount of knowledge available to the commission members in Copenhagen. Central persons in the Danish development are Frederik Munter, Rasmus Nyerup, Christian Jurgensen Thomsen and J. J. A. Worsaae. The relations between Grundtvig and the professional antiquarians were however distant but heartful, still Grundtvig’s lifelong efforts probably constitute the most important contribution to the 20th century status of archaeology as the most widespread Danish hobby.

The study of antiquarianism and particularly of the use of Anglo-Saxon precedents in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has belonged primarily to historians of Protestantism and parliament, to their studies of English Protestant antiquarians and English Protestant theories of common law, royal absolutism, constitutionalism, Laudian Anglicanism, and non-conforming Protestant resistance. Although it has been clear to everyone that Protestant interest in Saxonism was part and parcel of an anti-Catholic agenda, the Catholic side of this discourse has been virtually unexamined. The focus almost exclusively on Protestant Saxonism has isolated even Protestant thought from some of the contexts within which it developed and, more obviously, has all but occluded the importance of Saxonism to a range of Catholic arguments.

The nineteenth century is often seen as the period in which old-fashioned antiquarianism gave way to modern archaeological science. Whilst that is certainly the case, this article argues that in Scotland that new emphasis on material evidence and prehistory remained part of a broad antiquarian sphere until the early twentieth century. Even towards the end of the 1800s, antiquarianism continued to encompass the study of both material culture and documentary sources. It was also, for a time at least, a major influence on narrative history-writing. Throughout this period, it was primarily in Scotland's antiquarian community, rather than its academic or professional institutions, that collective understandings of the nation's history were advanced. The article thus uses the Scottish case study to question common assumptions about the decline of polymathic antiquarianism and the rise of specialist disciplinarity in the later part of the nineteenth century.