ISBN10: 0199566194, ISBN13: 9780199566198, [publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford] Hardcover Hardcover. In Defiance of Time explores the emergence of antiquarianism in early modern England, from its first flourishing in the mid-Tudor period through to its seventeenth-century heyday. A vibrant antiquarian culture emerged, which reached beyond scholarly and historical circles, and had a profound influence on the literature and thought of the period. Examining the influences on that development of that culture, this book argues that the origins of Englishantiquarianism need to be found in the methods and practices of continental (and especially Italian) humanism. It shows that, like the humanists, the early antiquaries had the essentially imaginative aim ofresurrecting and recomposing the past and past societies 'in defiance of time'. The antiquaries conceived of themselves and their activities as bridging the gap between past and present, affording 'olden time' presence in this way so that it might speak to and inform present circumstances. At the heart of this book is the argument that the antiquarian project depended on the antiquaries' capacity to restore-in their imagination at least-the fragments of the past, to imagine those remnants ofhistory 'which have casually escaped the shipwrack of time' made whole once again. In Defiance of Time traces these arguments through a range of authors and material, both printed and in ...
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