Antiquaries and Archaists: The Past in the Past, the Past in the Present (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Antiquaries and Archaists: The Past in the Past, the Past in the Present
Eight essays explore the shape-shifting nature of the past as its material remains are used and reused in various presents. This takes us from medieval people populating prehistoric barrows with dragons and giants, to contemporary Chinese artists filling their work with archaic motifs. At stake is not the unremarkable fact that "the past is mediated across and between cultures" but what to do with a label that is archaic in itself: antiquarianism. What turns a material remain—a landscape, a monument, a memorial—into an antiquity? Presumably, only its fitness to be studied by an antiquarian. And what today is that? As one of its fellows, Aldrich may be too close to the Society of Antiquaries to want to abandon these terms altogether. But what she has helped to edit falls—if unwittingly—into what many now call simply the history of material culture. [End Page 557]
Stuart Clark, the author of Thinking with Demons and Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture, is a fellow of the British Academy and professor of cultural and intellectual history at the University of Wales, Swansea.
