Eighteenth-century Antiquarianism Research Articles

WILLIAM GELL'S ENCOUNTERS WITH ISLAMIC SPAIN, 1808–36

The British antiquary William Gell (1777–1836) is known for his work on ancient Greece and Rome, which he based on a lifetime of Mediterranean travel and two decades of residence in Italy. This article uses a remarkable notebook held at the British School at Rome to explore his unheralded interest in Islamic Spain (al-Andalus), which emerged from his Iberian travels of 1808–11 and took up much of his energy in the early 1830s, the final years of his life. As such, the notebook shows how engagement with other cultures might continue well beyond an initial encounter through travel. It brings together Gell's on-the-spot sketches and descriptions of the Alhambra, his copious later reading on the Emirate of Granada and evidence that he was teaching himself Arabic, offering a case study of early nineteenth-century scholarship that straddles the transition between eighteenth-century antiquarianism and Romantic, Orientalist approaches. The materiality and the contents of Gell's notebook chart the changing ways in which British travellers and writers incorporated al-Andalus into their understandings of Europe and the Mediterranean.

Artifacts: How We Think and Write About Found Objects by Crystal B. Lake

Reviewed by: Artifacts: How We Think and Write About Found Objects by Crystal B. Lake Megan L. Cook Crystal B. Lake. Artifacts: How We Think and Write About Found Objects. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 272 pp., 4 black and white photos. $34.95. ISBN: 978-1-4214-3650-0. The central thesis of Lake’s work is twofold: first, that her titular category, the artifact, exists as a specific and specifically meaningful category of object, and second, that in the long eighteenth century, that meaning had a distinct political valence that animated writing about artifacts across a wide range of genres and contexts. Both of these arguments derive from the premise that, as historical objects, “artifacts could [End Page 212] communicate matters of fact that no living person could know for themselves” (12). This ability to communicate the past comes with both affordances and limitations. Lake defines an artifact as “a fragment, but one that remains sufficiently intact to support reconstruction of the object’s full shape and history” (6). Its relationship to its moment of origin or use is therefore a vexed one: while the artifact may, as a primary source, appear to offer neutral evidence about the past, “never enough of an artifact persists for either the reconstructions or the resulting interpretations of the object to be conclusive” (6). For Lake, this incompleteness may derive from an artifact’s fragmented state or, more generally, from its detachment from its historical moment. It is in its incompleteness, Lake argues, that the artifact becomes a profoundly generative category of object. Without a doubt, the objects considered in Artifacts are engines of textual production, inviting study, analysis, and speculation in outsize relation to their relatively modest physical dimensions. This book is divided into two parts, the first establishing a broad conceptual and historical framework for the idea of the artifact and the second consisting of case studies on four specific artifactual categories: coins and medals, manuscripts, weapons, and grave goods. While the book’s subtitle characterizes artifacts as “found objects,” the discovery of such objects is not a major consideration here (exceptions occur mostly in fiction, such as the ostensible found manuscript containing the story of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto or the statue in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”). Instead, the writers in Lake’s study tend to focus on the interpretation of these objects, bringing them to bear on the era’s most intractable philosophical and political conflicts about history, governance, sovereignty, and the explanatory power of physical evidence. Lake’s first chapter, following the work of Arnaldo Momigliano and a host of more recent thinkers, including Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Carlo Ginzburg, and Rita Felksi, establishes eighteenth-century antiquarianism and the study of artifacts as a discourse keyed into the central political concerns of the day. Depending on the way it was interpreted, an artifact might support a royalist or republican position, and might offer evidence in favor of either vitalist or materialist understandings of matter. In such a [End Page 213] context, artifacts function as vibrant, networked objects that invite interpretation and reinterpretation, Felski’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” brought to bear on Ginzburg’s “clues.” In her second chapter, Lake delves more deeply into the intellectual and social contexts in which artifacts circulated during the eighteenth century, focusing on the objects displayed in the famous Don Saltero’s coffeeshop in Chelsea and references to them in periodicals like Richard Steele’s Tatler and Joseph Addison’s The Spectator. The perspective cultivated in these publications, Lake argues, was deeply invested in qualities that anticipate Sianne Ngai’s category of the “interesting,” a category to which artifacts must certainly also belong. Thus, while the case studies of artifacts that follow explore writing across a range of eighteenth-century genres, periodical culture and its sensibilities remain a mainstay throughout. In each of four case studies, Lake combines consideration of texts that seek to understand or document artifacts in their material particularity with those that treat them in a more fictive or literary way. The first explores numismatics, including both coins and medals, in the work of John Evelyn, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, and Charles Johnstone’s popular satire Chrysal...

Professional Actors as Royal Drama Coaches, 1674–81

Abstract This article explores the history of several anecdotes relating to the theatrical coaching and training of members of the royal family, particularly Princess Anne, the future queen, by professional actors during the last decade of Charles II's reign. These anecdotes are not found in any contemporary archival or printed sources; rather, they were first published in the 1740s in a variety of memoirs and encyclopedic compendia relating to the history of the Restoration stage. The article compares and evaluates these anecdotes, investigating their veracity and seeking to uncover their pre-publication sources in the writings of a number of eighteenth-century antiquarians who annotated their personal copies of earlier printed accounts of the Restoration theatre and monarchy.

The Ballad and Its Pasts: Literary Histories and the Play of Memory. David Atkinson. Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2018. Pp. xvi+226.

<i>The Ballad and Its Pasts: Literary Histories and the Play of Memory</i>. David Atkinson. Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2018. Pp. xvi+226.

An Elusive Legacy: The Rediscovery of Roman Baths in Eighteenth-Century Britain

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I investigate how eighteenth-century antiquarians engaged with the remains of Roman bath buildings in Britain and discuss their multifaceted attitude towards the ancient practice of bathing, with a focus on the city of Bath. I also examine the interests and priorities of Georgian scholars in studying Roman baths and their structure, highlighting their sometimes uncritical use of Classical sources and tracking the origins of their misconceptions regarding the components and function of these facilities. Finally, I briefly address the elusive socio-cultural legacy of Roman baths and bathing in eighteenth-century Britain, stressing influences and differences in practice and architecture.

Memory and identity: the influence of early preservation practices on English culture

Until the nineteenth century, written records were often considered an adequate form of preservation for historic monuments, buildings, and landscapes. The shift from written to physical preservation was a gradual one that was pioneered by seventeenth century chorographers, eighteenth century antiquarians, and nineteenth century archaeological and architectural societies. Drawing on the work of historians who have examined these eras of amateur historical study, this paper will examine how chorographers and antiquarians who have not always been given serious consideration by historians of the modern preservation movement were, in fact instrumental in popularising heritage and advocating for early protectionist measures.

Illustrating phallic worship: uses of material objects and the production of sexual knowledge in eighteenth-century antiquarianism and early twentieth-century sexual science

This article reveals previously overlooked connections between eighteenth-century antiquarianism and early twentieth-century sexual science by presenting a comparative reading of two illustrated books: An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus, by British antiquarian scholar Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824), and Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers (The World Journey of a Sexologist), by German sexual scientist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). A close analysis of these publications demonstrates the special status of material artefacts and the strategic engagement with visual evidence in antiquarian and scientific writings about sex. Through its exploration of the similarities between antiquarian and sexual scientific thought, the article demonstrates the centrality of material culture to the production of sexual knowledge in the Western world. It also opens up new perspectives on Western intellectual history and on the intellectual origins of sexual science. While previous scholarship has traced the beginnings of sexual science back to nineteenth-century medical disciplines, this article shows that sexual scientists drew upon different forms of evidence and varied methodologies to produce sexual knowledge and secure scientific authority. As such, sexual science needs to be understood as a field with diverse intellectual roots that can be traced back (at least) to the eighteenth century.

The Story of a Stone: Mi Fu’s Ink-Grinding Stone and its Eighteenth-Century Replications

In 1790, a prodigious ink-grinding stone (yanshan) in the shape of a hand resurfaced in Beijing, attracting the curiosity of local antiquarians. Its shape was as exceptional as its provenance: designed for Li Yu (937–978), it was among the treasures of Mi Fu’s (1051–1107) legendary collection. Weng Fanggang (1738–1818) studied the stone first-hand and shared his discoveries in an essay written on a long scroll made up of four representations of the stone, two paintings and two rubbings. Guided by the new principle of objectivity, Weng sought to discard all apocryphal accounts of its history and properties in favour of fresh, empirically grounded evidence. Why then present this material in a painting? This essay reconstructs the efforts made by Weng Fanggang and his artists to capture the most authentic image of the stone, examining the many ways academic rigour became inextricable from artistic imagination in the late eighteenth-century antiquarians’ pursuit of the past.

THE PRESERVATION OF CROSBY HALL, c. 1830–1850

ABSTRACTThis article offers a case-study of an early preservation campaign to save the remains of the fifteenth-century Crosby Hall in Bishopsgate, London, threatened with demolition in 1830, in a period before the emergence of national bodies dedicated to the preservation of historic monuments. It is an unusual and early example of a successful campaign to save a secular building. The reasons why the Hall's fate attracted the interest of antiquaries, architects, and campaigners are analysed in the context of the emergence of historical awareness of the domestic architecture of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as wider recognition of the importance of this period for Britain's urban and commercial development. The Hall's associations with Richard III and other historic figures, including Thomas More and Thomas Gresham, are shown to have been particularly important in generating wider public interest, thereby allowing the campaigners to articulate the importance of the Hall in national terms. The history of Crosby Hall illuminates how a discourse of national heritage emerged from the inherited tradition of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and highlights the importance of the social, professional, and familial networks that sustained proactive attempts to preserve the nation's monuments and antiquities.

WILLIAM GELL ANDPOMPEIANA(1817–19 AND 1832)

This article offers an analysis of the preparation, publication and reception of the two separate versions of William Gell'sPompeiana,texts that exercised a formative influence over Victorian understanding of not just Roman Pompeii, but of domestic Roman life more broadly throughout the nineteenth century, and that highlight a transition from eighteenth-century antiquarianism to a more ‘archaeological’ approach to the past in the nineteenth century. Using unpublished correspondence that has been overlooked by other scholarship on Gell, it argues that the form and content of the volumes responded to both contemporary fascination with the history of domestic life and the need for an affordable volume on Pompeii. But the volumes also reflected many of Gell's more personal interests, developed in a career of travelling in Greece, Asia Minor and Spain, and were a product of his circumstances: they were conceived in order that Gell (and his coadjutor John Peter Gandy in the first edition) might earn much-needed additional income, and were a means through which Gell could consolidate his social position in Naples by establishing his authoritative expertise on Pompeii.

A paradox of eighteenth-century antiquarianism

A paradox of eighteenth-century antiquarianism

David Duff Romanticism and the Uses of GenreRomanticism and the Uses of Genre. David Duff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv+256.

<i>David Duff</i> Romanticism and the Uses of Genre<i>Romanticism and the Uses of Genre</i>. David Duff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv+256.

Commentaries: II: The Italian and European context of Neapolitan eighteenth-century antiquarianism

The essays presented here are the outcome of a colloquium on Neapolitan antiquarianism held at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris in 2004. The idea behind this initiative is fully in tune with the growing tendency in recent years to favour a regional approach to Italian antiquarian studies in the eighteenth century.1 Gone are the days when the activities of antiquaries and their findings were dismissed as futile without considering their bearing on the political contexts in which they operated.2 Nor can these activities continue to be viewed in terms of such general issues as the antiquaries’ lack of interest in – or indeed hostility towards – ancient Rome or reducing them to a merely technical and classificatory perspective. The current approach, which stresses the political and intellectual dimension of Italian antiquarian studies in the eighteenth century, does well to focus on regional characteristics; there...

Commentaries: I: Some afterthoughts on Naples and antiquarian culture in the eighteenth century

IS it appropriate to speak of a specific Neapolitan approach when studying eighteenth-century antiquarianism? If one thinks of the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, the answer will of course be in the affirmative. Three centuries on, the material discovered in those early investigations continues to inspire research of international significance. The contribution to these essays by Paola D’Alconzo, on restoration and the presentation of the Vesuvian wall paintings bears this out most explicitly. There is equally no doubt about the originality and importance of the Neapolitan collections of ancient vases formed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the past ten years, Claire Lyons and Maria Emilia Masci have demonstrated their precursory role, forcing us to reconsider how novel the collections assembled by Sir William Hamilton in the second half of the century really were. More generally, vases have been accorded a new status in the field of antiquarian...

Nineveh sails for the New World: Assyria envisioned by nineteenth-century America

In order to understand the unique reception of ancient Assyria in nineteenth-century America, it is necessary to describe the British public's own reception of the earliest British Museum exhibits, together with the marketing of publications of Layard and others. And, in order to grasp something of both Britain's and America's keen fascination with the earliest images of Assyria, I must introduce you briefly to the changing perceptions and tastes in admissible historical representation that, I believe, drove this fascination.The British public's breathless enthusiasm for the monuments from Bible lands had radical origins in English soil. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians surveyed, sketched and wove theories about the prehistoric relics that dot the English landscape, occasionally linking them with a mythical Christian past. William Stukeley, for example, student and first biographer of Sir Isaac Newton, made something of a career out of surveying Avebury and Stonehenge, in an early eighteenth-century quest for evidence that could link the Britons of Celtic fame with the peoples and the received timeline of the Bible. By the early nineteenth century, the Gothic Revival movement had begun in earnest. Its proponents saw this project as a moral mainstay in the revitalization of English society and culture. English prehistoric and medieval monuments would be measured, drawn, catalogued, published, and ultimately by so doing, laid at the feet of the British public. The Napoleonic wars accelerated this movement, for Continental sightseeing was impossible, so the classic Grand Tour evaporated down to an insular walking tour. This of course fuelled the sense of British national destiny:Works on topography… tend to make us better acquainte d with every thing which exists in our native land, and are therefore conducive to the progress of real knowledge, to the diffusion of rational patriotism, and to virtuous sentiments and propensities …

The meaning of ceraunia: archaeology, natural history and the interpretation of prehistoric stone artefacts in the eighteenth century

Historians of archaeology have noted that prehistoric stone artefacts were first identified as such during the seventeenth century, and a great deal has been written about the formulation of the idea of a Stone Age in the nineteenth century. Much less attention has been devoted to the study of prehistoric artefacts during the eighteenth century. Yet it was during this time that researchers first began systematically to collect, classify and interpret the cultural and historical meaning of these objects as archaeological specimens rather than geological specimens. These investigations were conducted within the broader context of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and natural history. As a result, they offer an opportunity to trace the interrelationships that existed between the natural sciences and the science of prehistoric archaeology, which demonstrates that geological theories of the history of the earth, ethnographic observations of ‘savage peoples’ and natural history museums all played important roles in the interpretation of prehistoric stone implements during the eighteenth century.

The Musaeum of Alexandria and the Formation of the Muséum in Eighteenth-Century France

The Hellenistic Musaeum of Alexandria became a subject of sustained interest for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians and architects. What little documentation remained indicated that the Musaeum had been an élite group of scholars, supported by a library, housing, and other research facilities. In 1793 the French Revolutionary government gave its newly public collections of rare objects the name muséum in reference to the Alexandrian project. However, only one muséum in Paris could sustain the comparison: the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. By 1797 it alone retained the name of muséum after the ancient Musaeum; the rest carried the modern title musée.

British Romans and Irish Carthaginians: Anticolonial Metaphor in Heaney, Friel, and McGuinness

Frank McGuinness'sCarthaginians(1988) uses the historical relation between Rome and Carthage as a metaphor for the contemporary struggles between Britain and the nationalist community in the North of Ireland. The play, an elegy for thirteen Irish civilians murdered by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday (30 Jan. 1972) in Derry, draws subversive power from a trope that since the eighteenth century has focused imaginative Irish resistance to British colonial rule. I first explore the history and the gendering of the trope, from early English myths of Trojan descent and medieval Irish genealogies through eighteenth-century antiquarians and philologists, nineteenth-century novelists, Matthew Arnold, and James Joyce. I then examine poems from Seamus Heaney'sNorth, Brian Friel's playTranslations, and McGuinness'sCarthaginiansto show how the pressure of history has revitalized the Rome-Carthage trope, which functions as origin myth, colonial parable, and site of intersection between nationalism and sexuality.

Early Gothic Saint-Denis: restorations and survivals (review)

Reviews 229 with the subsequent legend of 'The maid of Week' is one example, as is also Anne F. Sutton's retracing of the many roles of Lady Joan Bradbury. Sutton's investigation of the silkwoman Alice Claver, while sketchy concerning her life before widowhood, offers insights into the functioning of female business and social networks. The interest of other chapters lies in their ability to demonstrate the variety of economic and legal activites undertaken by women, such as the essays by Elspeth Veale and Caroline Barron which show widows working in crafts dominated by men. Similarly, those by Stephen O'Connor and Jenny Stratford offer examples of the extensive legal and business responsibilities shouldered by medieval women. Significandy, in some cases the widows studied appear to be overshadowed by their husbands and families, as in Kay Lacey's study of Margaret Croke. However, the essays by Jennifer C. Ward, Helen Bradley, and Carole Rawcliffe offer intimations of how these women perceived their identities. While the life of Margaret Stodeye is presented largely in relation to those of her father and husbands, Rawcliffe's chapter shows clearly how civic politics and marital strategies could intertwine. Readers may suffer from 'will fatigue' reading this volume and disagree with the more optimistic assumptions about the lives of medieval women. For instance, should the expectation that widows' would continue their husbands' businesses after their death be interpreted as an 'opportunity', or as an indicator of women's relative status and freedom? Nonetheless, this collection of essays represents a valuable contribution to our knowledge about medieval women's lives, taking women as historical subjects and showing their range of activity and agency. Stephanie Tarbin Department of History University of Western Australia Blum, Pamela Z., Early Gothic Saint-Denis: restorations and survivals, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1994; paper; pp. xii, 187; 23 monochrome plates, 35 monochrome figures; R.R.P. US$25.00. This is a fascinating book for students or scholars who know generally of the pivotal role of the church of Saint-Denis in the development of the style known as 'Gothic' and want to know more. The title is, however, a misnomer, since Blum is concerned exclusively with the sculpture of the 230 Reviews central western portal of the church. This limited focus is actually a strength, since general discussions of Saint-Denis' architectural innovations are common, whereas precise details of ornamentation are rare. Blum's analysis is refreshingly enthusiastic and easy to follow. Chapter One, 'Saint-Denis in history', reviews the history of the church and the development of the cult of St Denis in France, concentrating on Suger's rebuilding which was dedicated on 9 June 1140. The subsequent damage to the structure due to the Hundred Years' War and the later Wars of Religion is briefly alluded to, and the chapter concludes with the work of eighteenth century antiquarians and the devastation of the church during the French Revolution. The result of this damage was pitiable: 'the church, stripped of its golden altar frontals, costiy altar furnishings, royal regalia, and centuries of accumulated treasure, servedfirstas a temple for the Cult of Reason and subsequendy as a granary. By April 1794 the building had become uninhabitable' (p. 9). Blum's opinion in Chapter Two, 'Nineteenth-century restorations', of the attempts made during the nineteenth century to 'restore' Saint-Denis is highly critical and the chapter reads as a catalogue of complaints. In Chapter Three, 'The great tympanum of the central portal', the book hits its stride and its real value becomes apparent. The writing treads comfortably between highly technical descriptions of details of carving and accessible general comments. The fine illustrations which are at the back of the volume assist the reader in identifying not only which figures are being discussed but also which sections of the figures have been restored and by what techniques. The 'A' plates give the figures and die 'B' plates have the restored areas marked by the author. Sections of the detailed analysis are fascinating. W h o , even amongst those of us who have seen the portal ourselves, has noticed the artist's striving to depict 'individual types' in the...

The Saint as Secular Ruler: Aspects of Welsh Hagiography

WELSH saints were, in the main, real men and women living in the fifth and sixth centuries, whose lives took on traditional patterns and who served not simply as the protagonists of religious narrative, but rather as Christianized folk heroes.' The traditions which grew up around them have been recorded in a wide variety of forms, ranging from twelfth-century prose vitae, through the medieval verse of the Gogynfeirdd (the poets of the independent Welsh courts) and the Cywyddwyr (the later fourteenth to sixteenthcentury poets of the Welsh gentry), on through seventeenth and eighteenth-century antiquarians' reports, to modern field collections. Examination of the biographical pattern which emerges in these traditions, particularly when compared with that of the secular hero, reveals that the hagiographical pattern is essentially the same as the basic IndoEuropean heroic pattern, though there are certain differences necessitated by the requirements of both Welsh culture and the sanctity of the hero.2 The basic stages of the pattern are conception and birth; childhood; demonstrating maturity; going out in the world; conflict with secular powers; ruling a territory; and death. Several of these stages involve the saint with the concerns of secular rule, and it is this aspect of the saint's life which will be examined in this study. The Welsh saint has a very ambiguous relationship to secular power. He comes of royal lineage, but as a sanctified figure concerned with the next world, he must shun secular power and the trappings of this world. Saintly children turn away from the affairs of their fathers' courts and berate their elders for continuing their earthly practices; heirs flee their fathers' kingdoms; kings abandon their thrones. For example, Cadog, from earliest childhood, turns from the secular cares of his father's court, desiring to serve God rather than rule men.3 And later, when his uncle Paul Penychen asks him to set aside the service of religion and take on his rightful role as ruler of the kingdom, Cadog refuses, asking only for enough land for a single hut.4 Tatheus, called to his father's deathbed by the court in order to take over the care of govermnent, refuses the kingdom and embarks for Wales.5 Lewis Glyn Cothi records the same decision for Lleuddad: Gwrthodes a gwyrth ydoedd dyrnas ei dad, erns Duw oedd.6