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

Until the later eighteenth century, however, the antiquary was a relative rarity in
fact and scarcely visible in literature, with two telling exceptions. Neither have, I believe,
previously been considered in this context, yet both were to resonate with the
antiquarianism of the romantic period. The first is Don Quixote published in 1605. The
distinguishing characteristic of Cervantes’s hero is of course his peculiar and obsessive
interest in chivalry. With his antique lance on the rack and his old shield to hand, he
spends his days and nights in his study absorbed in medieval romances while his estate is
neglected. His obsessive reading so exhausts him that ‘at last he lost the use of his
reason’. 23 In his delusion he seems to elide the division between past and present, to
enter into the world of his books until he actually inhabits history as a personal narrative.
His eccentricity is that he has failed to develop the proper sense of anachronism,
the fitfully dawning awareness of the past as separate from the present which, across
Europe, marked the waning of the Middle Ages. This kind of behaviour, so characteristic
of the romantic relationship with history, was not in the seventeenth century an aspect of
antiquarianism. Indeed it might be said that in his inability to understand the otherness of
history, to grasp the fact that the past was over, Quixote was to his contemporaries the
antithesis of an antiquary. Yet Scott’s Jonathan Oldbuck claims Quixote directly as an
ancestor ‘the most determined as well as earliest bibliomaniac on record’ and this chapter
will return to him. 24
Scott was also interested in a more obscure seventeenth-century predecessor, the
Perth poet Henry Adamson (1581-1637). Adamson’s posthumously published works
included two poems probably written in about 1620, ‘The Inventory of the Gabions in Mr
George Ruthven’s Cabinet’ and ‘The Muses Threnodie’. Both feature Ruthven, an
antiquarian friend of Adamson, apparently in his nineties by the time the poems were
written, who used the word ‘gabions’ to refer to the curiosities in his collection. 25 A
gabion is a wicker or wire basket filled with stones or earth and used to make an
23
Cervantes, Don Quixote, p.9.
24
Scott, The Antiquary, p.34.
25
‘Memoir of Henry Adamson’, in Marshall, History of Perth, pp. 489-495.
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