Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

It was a change of emphasis that was closely related to the determining
characteristic of antiquarianism in the romantic period, which was that it became self-
conscious, self-critical and self-referential. The romantic antiquary, like the romantic
poet, was understood to be to some extent his own subject, implicated whether he liked it
or not, and men such as Robert Willis and John Lingard disliked it very much indeed,
in a narrative view of the past in which the teller was part of the tale. Also like the
romantic poet the antiquary was more often than not an outsider. The study of local
antiquities did not require a university education or funds for extensive travel or the
acquisition of objets de vertu. All of my subjects, with the significant exception of Willis
and the arguable but not absolute exception of Walter Scott, were placed at one remove
from the mainstream of intellectual life either by class, religion or sex.
Antiquarianism before 1789
The history of antiquarianism is part of what Keith Thomas has called the
growing awareness of anachronism, that ‘evolving consciousness’ of the difference
between ourselves and our ancestors. 11 One of the recurring themes of my thesis is this
shift in sensibility towards the past, but it is a shift which is, as Thomas notes, ‘not
possible to date precisely…its development seems to have been fitful and uneven’. 12
Hence it is not possible to fix a moment for a beginning to antiquarianism. The first
antiquary has traditionally been identified, according to Rosemary Sweet, as the Roman
Marcus Terrentius Varro. 13 In England and Scotland there was, as Stuart Piggott writes,
‘a certain amount of conscious antiquarianism’ in the later Middle Ages. 14 Yet it is not
unreasonable to identify the first major ‘fit’ of British antiquarianism with the
Reformation. In England, between 1535 and 1539, the dissolution of the monasteries that
‘unparalleled catastrophe’, recast the landscape, destroyed buildings and shattered
11 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 509.
12 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 509.
13 Sweet, Antiquaries, p.1.
14 Piggott, Ruins in a Landscape, p.6.
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