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Crystal B. Lake

Previous articleNext article FreeAntiquarianism as a Vital Historiography for the Twenty-First CenturyCrystal B. LakeCrystal B. LakeWright State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn his famous essay from 1950, Arnold Momigliano countered the stereotype of eighteenth-century antiquaries and their modern successors as the “muddle-headed” collectors of old things and odd facts (297). Antiquarianism was not, Momigliano argued, the pastime of eccentric fetishists who hoarded old stuff just because it was old; rather, antiquarianism established the foundation of so-called “modern” history by making the study of primary source material, including physical remains, the bedrocks on which historians’ claims about the past should be based. As Momigliano explained, “religious and political disputations” in the seventeenth century swirled around the work of traditional historians (295). Wary that polemical biases had corrupted the writings of traditional historians, antiquaries bypassed secondary accounts of the past and went straight to examining primary, often nonliterary, sources instead. In so doing, they established archival documents and archaeological artifacts as the most reliable evidence for historical study—and future historians found themselves tasked with discovering and describing such evidence before they could proceed to interpreting it.Since 1950, scholars have followed Momigliano’s lead and examined how antiquaries disciplined historical inquiry.1 Antiquarianism, however, has come under fire again in the twenty-first century in two documents, both of which were collaboratively authored polemics published online that criticized the fields of history and Victorian literary studies. The V21 Collective’s “Manifesto” (2015) and The Wild on Collective’s “Theses on Theory and History” (2018) advocate for reforming the ways that academics study the past by censuring—in one case explicitly and in the other case implicitly—the antiquarianism that now operates under the guise of modern historiography. These twenty-first century dismissals of antiquarianism share the assumptions of Momigliano’s midcentury readers: that antiquaries collect the detritus of the past for its own sake. They also, however, accept the argument that Momigliano made: that antiquarianism constitutes a rigorous method of study that prioritizes the discovery of history’s bare facts over theories.Yet the work of two influential antiquaries, John Aubrey (1626–97) and John Britton (1771–1857), suggests that neither antiquarianism’s detractors nor its devotees have quite told the whole story about what antiquarianism as a methodology can entail. Antiquaries were not “muddle-headed” fetishists for objects or for facts who abjured from varieties of speculation. For antiquaries like Aubrey and Britton, old objects had the power to reveal facts about the past. Although this power meant that those old objects constrained interpretive possibilities, it just as often meant that those old objects enticed antiquaries into speculating about matters that exceeded the physical as well as the temporal boundedness of the objects themselves. In this way, antiquarianism was not the deadening methodology that twenty-first century academics who are eager to escape the tyranny of positivism should dismiss. Rather, antiquarianism is a method they might consider returning to for the ways it once offered scholars opportunities to translate their careful, close scrutiny of lively historical artifacts into theories that transcended the boundaries between the past and the present as well as between the personal and the political.In the process of leveling critiques of the “positivism” that they take to characterize contemporary historical research, both the V21 and the Wild on Collectives isolate antiquarianism as a methodology their readers should disavow. On the one hand, both collectives use antiquarianism to denote a fetish for primary sources and the facts they preserve; on the other hand, they use antiquarianism to signify an interpretive mode that turns the facts one finds in primary sources into constrained interpretations of sociocultural phenomena that render them as the mere effects of the specific historical contexts—particular slices of time in particular places—in which they occurred.The V21 and the Wild on Collectives claim that giving up what old antiquarian sensibilities persist in historical scholarship will lead scholars to welcome the opportunities their subjective points of view present for developing theories about their old objects of study that are relevant for today’s readers and their political concerns. The V21 Manifesto explicitly uses the phrase “bland antiquarianism” to denigrate what they describe as the “positivist historicism” that typifies the methods of nineteenth-century literary studies: “a mode of inquiry that aims to do little more than exhaustively describe, preserve, and display the past” (1).2 The most noxious “symptoms” of positivist historicism include “a fetishization of the archival” and “an endless accumulation of mere information” (1). “At its worst,” the V21 Collective maintains, “positivist historicism devolves into … bland antiquarianism,” the “primary affective mode” of which “is the amused chuckle” (1).In contrast to the limpid scholarship produced by bland antiquarianism, the V21 Collective implores their readers to practice “post-historicist interpretation” (7). Post-historicist interpretation entails embracing “presentism” and emphasizing “form” over facts (7–8). Presentist, formalist critics acknowledge that their research is “motivated by features of [their] own moment” and examine how “forms persist across artificially designated historical periods” (8, emphasis added). Consequently, the V21 Collective suggests that rejecting bland antiquarianism will produce more politicized as well as more germane studies of nineteenth-century literature for twenty-first century readers.The Wild on Collective does not explicitly single out antiquarianism for a bemused chuckle, but similarly attempts to convince contemporary historians to abandon what antiquarian sensibilities remain in the discipline of history. Specifically, the Wild on Collective calls for historians to relinquish their presumption that “past events are objectively available for discovering, description, and interpretation” (I.4) through “immediately observable, preferably archival, evidence” (I.2). The Wild on Collective, therefore, conflates “positivism” with the historiography that became popularized during the Enlightenment—the period when historians incorporated antiquarianism into their studies of the past, as Momigliano and others have shown (I.1). The first thesis tendered by the Wild on Collective declares, for example, that “[a]cademic history has never managed to transcend its eighteenth century origins as an empiricist enterprise” (I.1). The Wild on Collective spares a generous thought for David Hume’s skepticism but moves quickly to denounce all those other eighteenth-century historians who privileged a “scientistic [sic] method” for “gathering facts” about the past in the archives they fetish (I.1).Like the V21 Collective, the Wild on Collective proposes that abandoning the search for facts in archival sources will free contemporary historians to practice “critical” or “theorized history:” a method for studying the past in which historians can translate their subjective experiences of the present into politically relevant studies of the past as “structure” (III.2 and “Coda”). “Structure,” in the Wild on Collective’s manifesto, appears to be similar to “form” in the V21 Collective’s manifesto. For both collectives, forms or structures exist in dynamic relationships with their perceivers in the present. The study of archival materials, therefore, fails both to divulge and to produce a comprehensive understanding of forms or structures that must, to a degree, always be theorized.The emphasis on “theory” marks the telos in both the V21 and Wild on Collective’s manifestos: the final transformation of their rejection of antiquarianism’s imperative that knowledge about the past should be factual and derived from primary sources into a refutation of scholarship that aims to document historical “context.” In this regard, the two collectives enter as the chorus affirming Bruno Latour’s declaration that “context stinks.” Yet without perhaps realizing it, both collectives also thereby reintroduce antiquarian sensibilities about what historical objects of study are, and what they do, back into their reformist methodologies.Latour first declared that “context stinks” in his 2005 Reassembling the Social. In an imagined dialogue between Latour and a student struggling to practice his actor-network-theory (ANT), Latour attributes the quip to the architect Rem Koolhaas. Koolhaas actually said “fuck context” in 1995 as a way of ventriloquizing what really big buildings might have to say for themselves.3 Latour uses the more delicate phrasing to admonish the student who is about to turn to something conceptually “bigger” than the individual case studies that she has gathered for her dissertation in order to conclude what her research has illustrated. The student’s other advisors want her descriptive “case studies to ‘lead to some useful generalization,’” and so the student seeks to find “a frame” or a “typology” they can use to “compare, explain, [and] generalize” (149). For Latour, then, context names that which researchers presume to be prior to, bigger than, outside of their individual case studies.Latour’s dismissal of context reflects the core philosophical tenet from which the method of his ANT arises. That is, Latour argues that researchers should treat all of their objects of study—even, literally, the objects that they study—as actors, or, “things that do things”: entities vested with varieties of autonomous agency to influence “states of affairs” (We Have Never Been Modern 104). ANT is therefore a method whereby the task of the researcher is simply to “follow the actors” and describe what it is that they do. Applied to studies of the past, in other words, context stinks when a scholar presumes that old ideas, events, or institutions determine the existence and significance of her objects of study.Latour, therefore, doesn’t think that historical contexts stink. If an object of study refers to or wanders through an old idea, event, or institution, then it has led an ANT researcher to follow it into those historical contexts. Consequently, had Latour’s dialogue in Reassembling the Social occurred between him and V21 and Wild on Collectives, Latour would likely have insisted that their objects of study did not need to be theorized; they theorize themselves. Likewise, Latour would likely have pointed out that the critic as well as the historian have always been “presentist” (“Manifesto” 8) or “psychically, epistemologically, ethically, and politically implicated in their objects of study” (“Theses” III.6). Such realizations are borne, in fact, out of practicing Latour’s actor-network-theory. If an actor doesn’t act, Latour might say, then an ANT researcher has nothing to describe or theorize. This means that the critics’ or historians’ objects of study act by existing as objects of study in the present—and as such, they remain capable of not only revealing facts and inviting researchers to exploring historical contexts but also of leading researchers to theorize about forms as well as structures.Noah Heringman and I have suggested elsewhere that Romantic antiquarianism was akin to Latour’s ANT.4 Beginning in the seventeenth century, antiquaries like John Aubrey granted antiquities the power “to speak” or “give evidence for themselves” (Monumenta 1.32). In so doing, antiquarianism developed in ways that anticipated Latour’s rendering of objects as “actors” or things that do things. The antiquaries’ task was to find, follow, and describe old objects, which they understood to be vested with the agency to preserve and make manifest facts about the past. Once antiquities were understood to be things that could do things, however, they proved capable of doing a lot of things—including affecting the antiquaries who encountered them personally and inciting those antiquaries to engage in varieties of speculation.Aubrey’s antiquarian research offers one representative example of how antiquarianism could yield political, personal, and theoretical interpretations about the past while still keeping such interpretations tethered to the antiquaries’ objects of study and the facts they also yielded. In 1845, John Britton published the first comprehensive biography of Aubrey. Britton learned about Aubrey’s antiquarianism four decades earlier while writing the first volume of what would become Britton and Edward Wedlake Brayley’s (1773–1854) The Beauties of England and Wales (1800–1820): a county-by-county survey of the notable sites, including especially the antiquities, to be seen in England and Wales. The first volume Britton tackled was the volume on Wiltshire county, famous for its henges and the place that Britton himself called home. Britton read Aubrey’s seventeenth-century manuscript notes on Wiltshire in 1800 and discovered a kindred spirit. The two men had grown up nearly a century and half apart in the same region, and “[w]hat Aubrey wrote of himself … applie[d] in many respects to myself,” Britton affirmed. (Autobiography 1.40).Britton’s biography of Aubrey honored the kinship he felt for the early antiquary by attempting to rehabilitate Aubrey’s posthumous reputation. Britton lamented that few of his “general” readers in 1845 were likely to recognize the name John Aubrey—unless, that is, they knew about Aubrey’s Miscellanies (1696). The only work that Aubrey managed to see through to publication in his lifetime, the Miscellanies had unfortunately focused on documenting evidence of supernatural phenomena: “a subject long since trodden down by the ‘march of intellect’” (Britton, Memoir 1). Organized under twenty-one headings such as “Omens,” “Apparitions,” “Blows Invisible,” and “Converse with Angels and Spirits,” Aubrey’s Miscellanies struck many readers as superstitious hogwash. As Anthony Wood (1632–95)—Aubrey’s sometime collaborator and accused plagiarizer—put it, the Miscellanies showed that Aubrey had not pursued serious inquiries into serious matters of historical fact; rather, he had “addicted himself to the whimseys and conceits of astrologers, soothsayers, and such like ignorant and superstitious writers” (quoted in Britton, Memoir 6).In his Memoir of John Aubrey, Britton maintained that the superstitious whimseys of Aubrey’s Miscellanies were simply a by-product of the historical moment in which Aubrey had lived. Everyone in the seventeenth century believed in “ghosts, in haunted houses, in witchcraft, in necromancy, in fairies, and their manufactory of grass rings, in the supernatural influence of jack-o-lanterns, or will-o’-the-wisps, and many other visionary vagaries,” Britton upheld, especially if they were from Wiltshire (Memoir 8). Even Britton had believed such things himself as a young boy and still did, sometimes.In Britton’s estimation, then, the Miscellanies was a “failing incidental,” but it was still important as a historical record of seventeenth-century beliefs that persisted into the nineteenth-century present. Since the publication of Britton’s Memoir, however, it has been commonplace for scholars to set Aubrey’s Miscellanies aside as an anomaly and proceed to rescue Aubrey’s contributions to historical studies by focusing on his unpublished manuscript materials, which include the report on England’s stone henges and extensive notes he prepared for writing county histories of Wiltshire and Surrey that Britton also prized.5Although the Miscellanies has not featured prominently in accounts of Aubrey’s or his contemporaries’ antiquarianism since Britton published his Memoir, it should have. The Miscellanies preserves aspects of antiquarianism that have been lost in the disciplinary and disciplining histories that cast early antiquaries in the role of archaeologists in spirit, if not yet in name. Specifically, the Miscellanies illustrates how an antiquary’s careful examination of old objects could produce more than just dry-as-dust facts; it could also yield personal, political, and theoretical engagements with the past that were relevant for the present. These features of antiquarianism not only compelled Britton to appreciate Aubrey and his life’s work; they also speak to the reformist demands of the V21 and Wild on Collectives.As a collection of first- and secondhand accounts of strange phenomena, Aubrey’s Miscellanies does not initially appear to be an antiquarian publication. Yet on closer inspection, Aubrey’s interest in objects and the histories they alone have the power to convey are hard to miss. The evidence that Aubrey presents throughout the Miscellanies—which suggests to him that there is an “Invisible World” that exists and “knows what we do, or incline to”—derives from observing and describing things, and such evidence assembles into a curious political history of seventeenth-century England (Miscellanies vi). The Miscellanies describes, over and over again, things that break at untimely but auspicious moments in ceremonies of state, items that fall off the walls during conspiratorial tête-à-têtes, prophecies about treachery written on old parchments that turned out to be true. Aubrey’s catalogue of strange things, therefore, also documents the English civil the the and the readers of the Miscellanies of the and that at all the and of antiquarianism and antiquities that Aubrey in his other writings to how his method for studying the past through its objects could produce the of subjective and that the more readers of the Aubrey of antiquities as objects from the past that had the of but he of his own to were often those objects that had not only the of time but also the of (Miscellanies through the of the seventeenth century, Aubrey knew that often old things in order to work of and describing the objects that had managed their escape from the past was often a Aubrey and one that with that his own research had often been (Miscellanies Aubrey his search for antiquities with “a of and he appears to have understood that antiquarianism was more as a methodology because it was capable of As Aubrey in his manuscript notes on stone an antiquary simply meant the objects that to or “give evidence for antiquities could only speak and so (Monumenta 1.32). Although the antiquities that had and an antiquary’s from they still always some to (Miscellanies is what the Miscellanies for many of Aubrey’s Although Aubrey suggests that the he had gathered in the Miscellanies the existence of an “Invisible which what we do, or incline he never more than that (Miscellanies vi). Aubrey that the in the Miscellanies was and that he as well as his readers remain in the as to what the phenomena the objects proved (Miscellanies vi). Aubrey’s to on of the he in the Miscellanies marks an moment of in the context of the over of and in the that in the seventeenth can never quite be what all those objects that and on their own were really to say about the political events that they had and to the objects in Aubrey’s Miscellanies and antiquarian imperative to to the agency of things in the to interpretation was in and of a political As Momigliano antiquaries to the of things that could speak or evidence for themselves once it became that the historians who for the past often the of Aubrey’s lifetime, historical as in about the as well as the of As the case is now with the that have been by Latour’s so it was in the first of antiquarianism’s in the seventeenth a to an in the of the The power of objects, antiquaries like Aubrey might one not the power of political who declared for themselves the to determine what the facts really a to the political imperative to or historical antiquarianism offers the V21 and the Wild on Collectives a methodology that they might than a methodology that has for politically scholarship as well as for scholarship that finds its objects of study not only capable of affecting their present but also capable of opportunities for their to engage with forms or structures and theories in the of or Aubrey’s Miscellanies is just this of and it as a record Aubrey prepared for future a collection of things that might to speak and evidence for themselves. They are still about the political that Aubrey and the of time he knew he would not They to about the of personal and that can as Aubrey the Miscellanies would always its readers with to Consequently, the antiquarianism that Aubrey’s Miscellanies can the V21 and Wild on Collectives a methodology they might than it can also them more than a few of The posthumous of Aubrey how the antiquaries’ that things from the past could and should be to speak for that they would speak without to be antiquarianism’s Aubrey was to to it was that the objects he encountered had to say with the understanding that they could only say so however, before historian to that they had and the of old things, as Momigliano has historians turned out to the same or the that antiquities for to the that they Aubrey’s readers of his Miscellanies on the personal as well as the that it they its descriptive mode and political Although Aubrey’s readers at the on the the that antiquaries for the two often to around the of political that antiquarianism was to not only Aubrey’s Miscellanies but also on other antiquaries’ claim that their of primary sources the of that had of their critics could be the eighteenth century, antiquaries to their critics’ that their own research could be politically by evidence as for and that they had from the objects they In other words, as critics into the that interpreting the past and its objects antiquaries down on their first that old objects did speak for themselves by that those objects always told the As Wiltshire wrote in all at the and at the of his of Wiltshire for example, he and his antiquaries from facts not that the study of primary evidence really did in the of facts turned however, to be a in the The of the of antiquarianism into the study of history was one in which historian could that they were ventriloquizing the facts that historical objects and because those same objects always for interpretations could always be as mere The of of Wiltshire for the to declaration by out that his of in was theoretical Britton the Beauties in he antiquarian histories for the first time and that the research antiquaries had produced in the century was and (Autobiography Britton would on to describe himself as a of an and he was the to describe Aubrey as an (Memoir Aubrey, to Britton, was the who his studies and to in its of (Memoir Aubrey’s antiquarianism as Britton to rehabilitate Aubrey’s reputation. also, however, to aspects of Aubrey’s antiquarianism that had been lost in the of hard facts in archival sources that had come to characterize the of historical study in the other words, Britton’s to describe Aubrey as an and himself as a not as his and Aubrey’s work in of nineteenth-century Britton also aspects of Aubrey’s antiquarianism, including the of its objects of study and the political, personal, and theoretical their could For example, in his Britton what it was like when he and first their in the antiquarian Once they their of county, in and up close the antiquities that they had read about and would on to describe in ways for the Britton was to of descriptive of objects of of of and of of as a of a a a to his of an and and on the produce of the like a was and of the and who not only their own and but their in and of a who the the the and to the and also the of of and he moves from observing antiquities to observing a a a and a Britton the work of earlier antiquaries who their research in the of the of and proved to and moves to antiquarianism’s for a of the the the the the V21 and Wild on Collectives, then, Britton to of there is in be which would never be or Britton believed (Autobiography The publication of Britton’s Memoir of John Aubrey was by the Wiltshire which Britton himself had to with a of young Britton from and of Antiquaries in in order to the study of antiquities in (Autobiography For Britton, the of the as well as the

Beniamin Noga

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