ANGUS VINE, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England.

Abstract

THE stereotypical view of the early modern antiquary as a pedant obsessed with rescuing random fragments from the wreckage of the past is increasingly being challenged, as scholars explore their role in the construction of English nationhood and the articulation of imagined communities that traversed time. This study, which focuses on the imaginative reconstruction of the past by early modern English antiquarian writers, reflects this growing trend and argues that antiquarianism played an important role within literary and intellectual culture. Although Vine uses the terms antiquary and antiquarian writing as though his subject includes the whole gamut of scholars that might be covered by them, he is really concerned with a subset of ‘literary’ antiquaries and poets and predominantly with published authors. There is a welcome emphasis on the European context, which is frequently overlooked or only perfunctorily sketched in studies of antiquarianism in early modern England. This context was palpably of more immediate significance to Vine’s subjects than to the lawyers, genealogy obsessed gentlemen, topographers and town chroniclers who composed the wider antiquarian community.