Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England

Abstract

In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England, by Angus Vine, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, 272 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19- 956619-8This fine book attests to the interest in and uses found for antiquarianism in early modern England, a culture re-discovering its past and newly defining the weight and worth of a variety of evidence, textual, material and archaeological. It deals with a portion of early modern enquiry that has received some, though not a great deal of attention, but which, Vine argues, was a 'dynamic, recuperative, resurrective response to the past', adding importantly 'And for this reason it was also an essentially imaginative response to the past'. Antiquarian objects were subject for literary speculation. Vine opens with an anecdote from The Pickwick Papers, on the fakery, enthusiasm and gullibility (and even the sheer harmless- ness) of antiquarianism, to address the satirical picture of the 'dusty dullard', that hangs over the profession or hobby. If at this point we might expect to hear of some early modern Indiana Jones dispelling the dust, it turns out that it is Petrarch, remembering Rome, perceiving it through Livy and Virgil, as much as his own eyes and that of the companion with whom he had walked its ruins. Petrarch, as in so many things, was there first, and epitomises the intellectual breadth of the subject in the Renaissance mind. Antiquarianism and creative reconstruction, the argument goes, is central to humanism's engagement with its past, and early modern England learned (though slowly) that its own past, and the relics that remained of it, were intriguing and mysterious.The figures who inhabit Vine's book are in part luminaries and worthies - Meric Casaubon, William Camden, John Stow and John Selden - writers whose presence in the scholarly landscape of early modern England is established, even while they are only fitfully read. However, the pleasure of this book is how widely it ranges into figures far less well known, a cornucopia of librarians, schoolmasters, numismatists, collectors, linguists, diar- ists, surveyors, both poetic and topographical, legal historians, a cast of many hundreds, obscure in their attempts to circumvent the tides of oblivion. The twin targets of antiquarian scrutiny were, firstly, material remains - unearthed objects, ancient monuments, urns and graves, tablets, wax seals, old coins - and secondly, a philological corpus - genealogies, pedigrees, etymologies, epigraphy, manuscript collections and monastical records. However, the antiquarian elephant in the room is always its failure to be history, to incorporate narrative and interpretation, settling instead for mere description, collection and survey. Vine deals with this in large part by disputing that antiquarianism in the period suffered any such inferiority complex, that its sense of its purpose was grandly humanist, in its reconstitution of a scrappy past.Its case is that antiquarianism was itself imaginative, that it constituted a privileged part of literary culture, not just in relation to the quite voluminous antiquarian poetry, but also within the broader sense of humanist endeavour and gentlemanly travel writing. The high point of poetic antiquarianism is Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612), about which In Defiance of Time is excellent in shaping out the polyphonic projects deemed necessary to characterise a land and landscape over time ('his topo-chron-graphicall poem' as George Wither put it), and the interpretative habits by which early modern readers would have negotiated a work dependent on the 'dynamics of glossing and annotation' alongside its babble of narrators, whose voices, brief as the histories they describe, emerge and disappear. …