This book defines and examines some of the most important forms of eighteenth-century English Anglo-Saxonism in the century separating the publication of George Hickes’s Thesaurus (1703–5) and the publication of Sharon Turner’s The History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799–1805), two works now recognised as milestones in the development of the modern understanding of Anglo-Saxon England. Hickes’s monumental multi-language grammar and antiquarian treatise, along with the catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts compiled by Humfrey Wanley that appears in the second volume of the Thesaurus, is often represented as the culmination of early modern Old English studies. Turner’s History, on the other hand, is frequently regarded as signalling a shift in English Anglo-Saxon studies away from the antiquarian mode (with all that term’s pejorative connotations) to a more academic, disciplinarily defined and increasingly scientific mode of historical, literary and material enquiry. Turner is therefore associated, in Hans Aarsleff’s words, with the nineteenth-century ‘revival of interest in early English history, culture, language, and literature’ and with philologists such as John Josias Conybeare, John Bosworth, John Mitchell Kemble or Frederic Madden. Yet neither Turner’s introduction nor his footnotes speak to a sudden surge in Anglo-Saxonist enthusiasm at the turn of the century, but look back to a largely ignored tradition of eighteenth-century scholarship. Turner acknowledges numerous eighteenth-century editors, linguists, numismatists, art and architectural historians, literary scholars, and local and national historians who used the work of Hickes and fellow members of the Oxford School to undertake research and offer their own insights. These provided the raw materials with which Turner composed his account of Anglo-Saxon history, society, daily life, manners, government and trade that readers found ‘pleasing and expressive’ as well as ‘extremely interesting’. It is these scholars whose work I seek to restore to view. Working in the largely pre-disciplinary environment of the Enlightenment republic of letters, they engaged with a wide range of subjects including literary and linguistic studies, palaeography, codicology and diplomatic, ecclesiastical and political history, art history, archaeology and the study of food, dress and everyday life.