Contrary to some accounts, particularly older ones, which portray Clare as a lonely, isolated, and somewhat misanthropic figure, he was a man with a rich social life who had many friends, including literary figures, antiquarians, ornithologists, entomologists, botanists, and artists. Through these friendships, he was abreast of contemporary thought and techniques, and, if only at second hand, he was in touch with the activities of some of the leading naturalists in this country and abroad. This obviously led to an increased knowledge and sophistication in Clare’s understanding of nature, as well as leading to subtle changes in his attitude to the natural world. In particular, it meant that he no longer regarded a love of nature as something to be rather ashamed of, but instead as something which he was able to celebrate.

Chapter 1 begins with the problem of conflicting timescales in antiquarianism. At Pompeii, the question of human significance at the scale of geological deep time inspired writers to reconsider the material past and explore alternatives to traditional timelines. This chapter shows how Charles Dickens in particular experiments with nonlinear temporal forms in his travel narrative Pictures from Italy, which I argue uses a fractal temporal form to nest infinite pasts in present sites. A fractal is a nonlinear shape that repeats its structure even when viewed at fine scales. When Dickens deploys it as a temporal form, he necessarily changes the shape of history, offering alternative possibilities for Italian politics. Chapter 1 ends by considering the ethical ramifications of linear and nonlinear temporal forms in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage. This poem, depicting the Roman Republic of 1849, dramatizes English tourists’ attempts to reassert the historicism that casts Italy as past despite the Risorgimento. Ultimately, Chapter 1 shows how both Dickens and Clough respond to political potential in Italy by reconfiguring time.

This chapter outlines a profile of Cicero as a literary historian, starting from the idea that his interest in the historical development of literature relates to a broader and more comprehensive interest in history and historiography. The analysis of some digressions about literary history in the dialogues of the fifties (De oratore and De legibus) and forties (Brutus and Tusculanae disputationes) shows that Cicero is interested in placing literary figures on a timeline according to a chronology that he constructs on the basis of synchronisms and other chronological schemes. His method is influenced by contemporary intellectual debates, in which he engages, that led to the production of antiquarian and chronographic works. Therefore, in addition to discussing Cicero’s literary history in light of his intellectual and historiographical interests, this chapter shows how the literary-historical dimension of his oeuvre attests to a lively contemporary context in which various forms of historical knowledge and writing flourished.

This chapter deals with onomastic homonymy as a phenomenon of ancient Greek literary history. Focusing first on early Greek poets about whom ancient testimonies claim there were doublets (Euenus, Xenophanes, Alcman and Sappho), the chapter moves on to examine doublets of poets emerging in the Parian Chronicle (Simonides, Sosiphanes, Stesichorus, Melanippides), to conclude with the Phocian Homer of Byzantine scholarship (Tzetzes). After distinguishing between historical homonyms and scholarly constructs, the chapter examines the possible reasons behind the duplication of poets, most particularly the need to deal with conflicting details in the transmitted biographies while preserving the textual tradition.

Understanding the past requires understanding how it has been created. This is not simply about improving methodologies, but also the theoretical approaches employed and the broader socio-political framework within which they are applied. This chapter therefore delineates major developments in southern African archaeology from its nineteenth-century origins to the present, situating them with respect to the region’s wider history and the broader social and political context in which they emerged. It also considers how archaeological research was constrained by, but simultaneously challenged, structures of racial oppression during the twentieth century, differences in the experience of southern Africa’s states (including research disparities within and between them), some of the key paradigms within which archaeological research is currently conducted, and the problems encountered in making archaeology accessible to all sections of society. Another theme concerns the theoretical and methodological challenges that archaeologists face when invoking the ethnographies of southern Africa’s recent or contemporary inhabitants to help understand the past revealed by their research.

This chapter traces the concept of an “Irish race” as it appeared and developed in historical writing. It opens with a brief survey of the legacy of medieval and early-modern tropes of otherness in English descriptions of the Irish population, as well as in vernacular Gaelic poetry that responded to colonization, and in antiquarian writings about national origins. It then charts the influences of enlightenment discourse on racial differences and the formulation of nineteenth century anthropological concepts of race. Distinctions between Anglo-Saxons and Celts, championed by eminent English historians, were inverted in popular Irish histories, in which ahistorical notions of a distinct “Irish race” were a marker for innate national uniqueness. Whereas racial prejudice was prevalent in Victorian political writing, Irish nationalist histories showed a fluid approach to race, which was used to forward claims for a distinguished ancient pedigree worthy of sovereignty and to foster a transnational bond with diaspora communities worldwide. Having played a prominent role in the Irish Revival through to the early years of independence, the language of race was practically expunged from Irish historiography in the mid-twentieth century, and yet the appeal of racial distinctiveness has not entirely vanished.

Chapter One shows how intersections between science and antiquarianism in the eighteenth century renewed Europeans’ awareness of the hidden depths of history. This re-discovery of deep time contributed to Romanticism’s modern, historicist consciousness by expanding the time scale, secularising and destabilising fixed chronologies, and providing writers with a rich array of source materials from pre-history, Classical and Eastern Antiquity, and the Middle Ages. Using late-Romantic poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s’ ‘The Marl Pit’ as a guiding thread, it addresses Baron d’Hancarville’s archaeological work in Naples, the Comte de Buffon’s natural history, the Forsters’ travel accounts of their tour around the world, and early volumes of Herder’s Ideas Toward a Philosophy of the History of Humanity. The chapter then evokes the meeting in Rome of Nicolas Desmarest and J.J. Winckelmann to demonstrate how natural historians and antiquaries joined forces to understand the past. Contrasting William Blake’s imaginative interpretation of medieval history as a source of national identity with Horace Walpole’s sceptical view, it concludes by addressing the growing rift between a Romantic and more rigorously scientific apprehension of the past.

Chapter Eighteen introduces us to Scandinavian Romanticism, which helped Denmark, Sweden, and Norway imagine themselves as independent nations by drawing on Old Norse and medieval sources, contributing to a shared sense of identity. The chapter explores its origins in Mallet and eighteenth-century antiquarianism, drawing parallels with Ossian and Percy, and discussing Ewald’s Rolf Krage. It then looks at some of the defining features of Scandinavian ballads, including the figures of elf and shield maiden. Sweden’s loss of Finland led to an ‘Old Scandinavian’ turn in which the Viking became a common topos, as we discover in works by Tegnér and Wergeland. It also led to calls for a new mythology, answered among others by Ewald, Grundtvig, and Oehlenschläger. Other writers include the young Ibsen, who began his career with plays about Norse mythology, and Erik Gustaf Geiger whose stories idealise Nordic liberty. Fairy tales were also an important Romantic genre. Möller discusses the motif of the Isle of Felicity in works by Almqvist and Atterbom before turning to the characteristic features of Andersen’s tales. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of Scandinavian Romantic fiction, including male-authored historical romances but also domestic novels written by women that look towards realism.

Giovanni Baptista Morgagni (1682–1771), Professor of Anatomy at Padua, produced the most important studies in the eighteenth century on the De Medicina of the Roman encyclopediast A. Cornelius Celsus.  Morgagni’s intensive reading of Celsus combined his own medical experience with philological emendation.  Morgagni contextualized Celsus’ text within a theoretical framework of an empirically ordered transhistorical investigation of the structure, function, and pathology of the human body.  Here ancient and modern disciplinary authorities engaged with the same evidence available to the senses.  Morgagni’s argument in part contrasted Celsus’ humoralist evidence that bladder stones originate in the substance of the urine with Friedrich Hoffmann’s (1660–1742) argument that bladder stones originate in the iatromechanist action of the kidneys.  Morgagni’s emendations continue to mark our own contemporary editions of Celsus’ Latin text.

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.

This chapter shows how, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Norse gods and the Scandinavian Viking were reimagined and refashioned in poetry, visual art, and music drama in accordance with Burke’s ideas of the sublime. Coinciding temporally with Burke’s Enquiry, the revival of interest in Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian poetry furnished poets and artists with a new mythology as an alternative to classical Greek and Roman mythology. This chapter argues that the aesthetics of the sublime, as a challenge to neoclassical standards, encouraged an expansion of the poetical canon, allowing for the inclusion of ancient Scandinavian poetry, which the previous generation had scorned as rough and barbaric, and furthermore provided a new verbal and visual idiom in which this poetry could be recreated for a contemporary audience.

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.

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.