Chapter 6 shows how Cicero establishes a normative framework for the writing of literary history. Across the dialogue and through the various speakers he offers a sustained critique of literary historiography. Several fundamental tensions and conflicts emerge: absolute versus relative criteria in assessing literature and building canons; presentism and antiquarianism; formalism and historicism; and the recognition that all literary histories are subject to their crafters’ emphases and agendas.

This chapter explores the recurring mourning and funereal rites – affectively charged moments of remembrance – in Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline. Focusing on the subplot in which Belarius, an exiled courtier, has abducted the king’s two sons and raised them as noble savages in the wilds of Wales, this chapter argues that these scenes invite a vision of ancient British primitive indigeneity precisely in order to transcend it. The princes’ obsequies for relatives and friends give voice to their own utter lack of familial and historical memory, thus echoing both antiquarian portrayals of the ancient British and colonial portrayals of natives in the Americas and Ireland as memoryless peoples. Engaging politically and ecologically oriented work in affect studies, I interpret the rustic princes’ mourning as a national and even imperial emotion that can illuminate how, and why, Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined ancient forebears as oblivious “primitives.” By ultimately staging an “improvement” from an ahistorical condition of homegrown indigeneity, it is argued, the play translates British savagery into a civilized condition suitable for English colonization, which was then gathering speed in Virginia and Ulster.

Historical time is a plural entity, not a singular one. Methodologicals rest on difficult ontological assumptions, which translate into four potential notions of history: cyclical, bounded, serial, and eventful. Cyclical history freezes history the most, by assuming that the present merely repeats the past, and thus makes history de facto reversible. It in effect freezes history, and CHA regards this notion of history as ahistorical. Bounded history freezes certain time intervals during which it assumes that history stands still and the past in effect repeats itself, at least for a limited period of time. It is not interested in how the bounded period is qualitatively different from the periods preceeding or following it. Serial history partially unfreezes history and uses time series data to track secular trends through time. Eventful history is the most unfrozen treatment of the past and tries to identify continuities and discontinuities, or distinct periods. Historical tourism refers to notions of history so static and so frozen that they cease to be historical in any meaningful sense of the word. It identifies variants of historical tourism in history proper and in CHA.

This chapter shows how the best-selling novelist Walter Scott turned the era’s rhetoric of excess to his own commercial ends. Scott’s novels were frequently and directly compared with those published by the Minerva Press in the previous two decades; Scott’s defenders marked the 1814 publication of Waverley as the death knell of Minerva, while his detractors habitually remarked upon the parallels between his numerous, voluminous novels and those produced in equally large quantities by the Press. In readings of Scott’s early novels and his self-conscious paratexts, the chapter shows how his novels explore an antiquarian system of valuation in which even the most uninteresting document becomes valuable to posterity as soon as it’s rare. Scott uses this logic to offer a unique defence of the ‘innumerable’ popular novels that flowed from his pen and from the Minerva’s printing presses: their great numbers, he suggests, increase their chance of long-term survival. As both Scott and the Minerva Press authors who wrote alongside him argue in various ways, prolificity may ultimately lead to literary prestige rather than undermine it.

Chapter 5 investigates the political uses of antiquity during wartime. It argues that the War of the Morea was a turning point in the reception of classical tradition that enacted the imperial topos of translatio imperii et studii. The mastery of Greek territories was also a mastery of archaeological sites and artifacts that renewed the culture of antiquity in Venice. The chapter shows that patrician collecting and the public display of antiquities as war trophies were inseparable from an aggressive military antiquarianism that supported the Republic’s new imperial regime with intellectual and cultural power from ancient Greece. Specifically, the occupation of Athens, with its famous history and symbolic potency, inspired strong associations between Venetian maritime supremacy and the fifth-century Athenian empire. But it also launched a new phase in the European rediscovery of Greek art and architecture through one of the darkest episodes of Venetian history: the bombardment and despoliation of the Parthenon.

Charles Lamb spent two periods working at the library of the British Museum, in 1804–1807 and 1826–1827, as preparation for a volume of extracts from old plays in the Garrick collection entitled Specimens of English Dramatick Poets (published 1808) and latterly a series of contributions based on the same collection that appeared in William Hone’s Table Book (1827). In the roughly twenty years separating these two periods both the library itself and Lamb’s working life changed significantly, Lamb having left the employment in the East India Office to become a ‘superannuated man’ in 1825. This chapter examines these changes in the context of the emergence of scientific and literary Institutions in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In tandem with the British Museum, the libraries of these Institutions facilitated the emergence of institutionalized reading or professional literary ‘research’, with long-term implications for the emerging literary field in the Romantic period. Lamb’s two sojourns working on the Garrick plays offer a perspective from which to gauge diversification in reading practices in the early nineteenth century, who could read in institutional contexts, and what, ultimately, such reading might be for.

In this chapter, we explore the concept of purity and the processes of purification in their archaeological as well as broader national expressions. The discussion touches on aesthetic and religious conceptions of a pure, sacralized past, on the removal of living people from archaeological landscapes, and on the modernist separation of past from present, science from culture, and of the rational from the affective.

Chapter 21, “Byzantium in Early Modern Istanbul,” highlights the multiple ways in which the Byzantine past was present in and had a bearing on the lives and imaginations of Istanbulites in the post-Byzantine city within the framework of four topics: rupture and ruin, structures of longue durée, translation and notions of antiquarianism, and, finally, the lives and the reflections of Byzantine monuments and spolia.

The third part of the book, on “Place”, is made up of chapters grouped by their relation to matters of space and geography. Chapter 9 analyses the use of topographic, cartographic and antiquarian sources, amplifying the study made by the cartographic historian J.H. Andrews in 1960, which has never been supplanted. It extends Andrews’ coverage, which omitted the Scottish portions of the Tour, and considers its relation to other topographers not previously mentioned in this context, as well as the products of mapmakers such as Herman Moll and John Senex. The chapter supplies new evidence on the use Defoe made of maps, and offers a fuller comparison with the works of his principal rival, the Journey of John Macky (1714-23). Finally, this section endorses the verdict of Andrews, that “In spite of its weaknesses the ‘Tour’ remains a great pioneer work of economic geography.”

Chapter 3 focuses on space and the visual dimensions of the memory of the dissolution. Concentrating on the period between the late sixteenth century and the late seventeenth century, it examines the work of a number of antiquaries who produced topographies and images of former monastic sites. Taking previous scholarship on the ‘nostalgic’ element in antiquarian topographies of the dissolution as its main point of departure, this chapter addresses the role of monastic ruins together with those sites that were converted to new uses, both spiritual and secular, in shaping changing perspectives on the suppression. It argues that we should pay more attention to converted spaces – whether parish churches or private homes – which could function to reinforce the project to forget the dissolution across the generations. To support this argument, this chapter also features a substantial discussion of the visual afterlives of the dissolution. It illuminates what recent scholarship has described as a seventeenth-century visual culture of ‘pastness’, but also hypothesises the emergence of a parallel and equally powerful visual culture of the present. Ultimately, it suggests that topographical writing and images were genres in which senses of loss could converge with gain, past with present, and remembering with forgetting.

This chapter turns to the memory of the dissolution in the communities that had been built around monasteries and in the families who occupied them. In order to access the local and oral dimensions of this memory culture, it uses antiquarian writing to throw a sidelight onto the traditions and stories that antiquaries encountered as they traversed the country. This chapter suggests that the key concept to unlocking this memory culture is sacrilege. Stories of ghostly hauntings and strange happenings preoccupied local people living in or near former monastic places. It has sometimes been suggested that English Protestantism was hostile to oral and local cultures, but this chapter argues that, far from being the harbinger of their decline, the Reformation in fact generated and invigorated local traditions. By exploring sacrilege narratives connected to the dissolution, this chapter also makes a case for the vibrancy and longevity of local memory cultures across the seventeenth century and into the early eighteenth century and beyond. In doing so, it seeks to erode and collapse the distinctions between ‘popular’ and ‘learned’, ‘local’ and ‘national’ cultures of history and memory that continue to influence scholarship on early modern historical consciousness

In this chapter five main themes emerge with respect to the historiographical side of Grotius' works: (1) the polarity between constitutionalism and patriotism on the one hand, and reason of state and Scepticism on the other; (2) Grotius’ ‘secularising’ reading of history; (3) the close correlation between scholarship and politics; (4) Grotius’ use of sources and his relation to contemporary developments in Antiquarianism; and (5) the important role of historical perspectives in his other works such as De Jure Belli and the Annotationes on the New Testament.

Chapter 6 shows how Cicero establishes a normative framework for the writing of literary history. Across the dialogue and through the various speakers he offers a sustained critique of literary historiography. Several fundamental tensions and conflicts emerge: absolute versus relative criteria in assessing literature and building canons; presentism and antiquarianism; formalism and historicism; and the recognition that all literary histories are subject to their crafters’ emphases and agendas.

The chapter argues against recent attempts to analyse religious aspects of Latin literature without paying attention to the question of genre. History, antiquarianism, epic are all very different ways of representing the divine, and the specificity of each genre is crucial for understanding how the texts function.

The British Enlightenment grappled with the concept of “modern history”: what it should contain and what kind of guide to the world it should be. This chapter examines the decline of neoclassical assumptions about history writing in the context of Britain’s rapid social transformation and the emergence of its robust commercial society. A new pressure for historiography to acknowledge this modern world led historians to profound questions about the relation between present and past. How was the eighteenth-century world different from what came before it? When and where did its modernity begin? Asking and answering these questions produced not only new kinds of history writing but also new readers and writers of history. Setting aside the history of great men, new kinds of histories made clear that everyone is a historical actor, opening the door for women and men who would never be statesmen to tell their stories. New histories took many forms, and the chapter’s sections focus on the different answers to questions about the past—and how to represent it-- provided by philosophical history writing, antiquarianism, and the novel.

This chapter discusses the continuities and contrasts between ‘Romantic Gothic’ and ‘Victorian medievalism’, focusing on the figures of Robert Southey and William Morris. Bringing together the perspectives developed in Morris’s conservationist activities with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and his utopian romance, and Southey’s ‘black letter’ works of 1817, it argues for the early and late nineteenth-century presence of an alternative ‘history of the Gothic’. This is Gothic as what Morris called a ‘style historic’, articulated either side of the 1840s and the rise of historicism in architecture and ‘medievalism’ in literature. Where Morris ultimately chose a harder-edged Nordic ‘Gothic’ over the ‘maundering medievalism’ of Tennyson and Rossetti, Southey consistently avoided the category, despite being present at its inception with his review of the 1817 work in which the word ‘medieval’ first appeared. Revising received critical and semantic histories of ‘Gothic’ being subsumed by the medieval, the chapter explores the articulation and the ongoing significance of a more granular, aphasic and rhizomatic approach to the art and culture of the Middle Ages.

This chapter examines the numerous meanings of ‘Gothic’ in the period before 1800 to explain how it was understood in a variety of contexts, from politics and Protestantism to architectural heritage and literary style. The ancient Goths were simultaneously seen as the barbarian destroyers of Classical civilisation, and as the northern champions of liberty against Roman tyranny and corruption. The reputed organisation of ancient Gothic society was understood to have provided the foundations for post-Roman English and later British systems of government, so influencing both the constitution and contemporary politics, especially among Whigs. The perceived links between the Goths of antiquity and the history and society of the Middle Ages and the Reformation in turn provided the basis of a national cultural identity that was increasingly celebrated and revived in the eighteenth century, and the term was adopted in broader debates on governance, cultural values, national character and the environment. The literary dimensions of Gothicism, inspired by medieval romances, added further characteristics of the supernatural and the mysterious to the term's changing meanings.