Antiquaries of the Georgian through the Victorian periods were aware that nostalgia could be used to interrupt and rewrite memory as well as construct it, and that disinterment was an important tool for such a task. They believed that their efforts would energise their ideals of the past and make those ideals newly relevant for the present. In this sense the idea of ‘The English Renaissance’ as a Golden Age is located in stereotypes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that revolve around the dead. By disinterring important figures from this era (if ‘the English Renaissance’ can be called an era in and of itself) the antiquaries discussed in this book, and many of their colleagues, constructed texts of a Golden Age that could, in part, be read via the bodies of its celebrated dead. By ‘reading’ the corpse in this way one could argue, for example, that Shakespeare had always enjoyed god-like status; that Henry VIII had always been a grotesque tyrant; that Oliver Cromwell had always been a champion of religious tolerance; that Catherine Parr had always been a bold Protestant heroine, and that Anne Boleyn was a femme fatale from the start. One could argue that long-held scepticisms about the legends of King John and Thomas Becket could be upheld. When antiquaries looked into the tombs and graves of kings, queens, poets, and churchmen, they expected to read these truths in the bodies of the dead.

The idealism for the Middle Ages during the period 1700–1900 (including the Tudor and Stuart eras in the popular imagination) reflects more than an attachment to the aesthetic of art, literature, or legend. It relates to innovations of urban governance, to ideas of patriotism and the expansion of the Empire, and to what Billie Melman calls ‘the civilising process’. For many there was a real desire to project the ideals of ‘Medieval’ England onto Imperial urbanised London, while at the same time making continual distinctions between the present and the past. The result was what Melman calls a ‘mixed modernity’, as the desire to draw the past closer to the present was met with a desire to appropriate and redefine it via scientific investigation, academic enquiry, and political rhetoric. The result is a series of well-constructed fictions of which society is conscious and which people accept willingly.