ABSTRACT
In his classic short study The Renaissance Sense of the Past (1969), Peter Burke outlined the new historical thinking that the rediscovery of the culture and writings of classical Greece and Rome had indirectly occasioned. A sense of historical change and a more critical approach to sources and to myths, when allied to a new recognition that ‘all sorts of things – buildings, clothes, words, laws’ had a history, gave rise to antiquarian scholarship.1 For a time, the antiquary was a highly respected member of the republic of letters, as demonstrated in Peter Miller’s skilful examination of the milieu and reputation of Nicolas de Peiresc (1580-1637), the Provençal scholar and parlementaire, ‘one of Europe’s most famous men’, who was at the centre of a network of European antiquarian and scientific writers and researchers in the early seventeenth century. On his death, a memorial meeting in Rome was attended by ten cardinals and dozens of antiquaries and philologists, a volume of elegiac poetry in 40 languages was published and he was the subject of ‘the most important biography of a scholar in the seventeenth century’.2 Yet it was at precisely this time that the image of the antiquary also came under satirical attack. In Shackerley Marmion’s play The Antiquary (1641), for example, he was mocked as a ‘credulous collector of absurd bogus antiquities’, his erudition derided as unworldly and incompatible with the mores of a civilized gentleman.3 In the following century it was the French encyclopédists who, as Arnaldo Momigliano put it, ‘declared war upon erudition’, and rejected that kind of detailed scholarship as a prerequisite for cultural authority.4 The new ‘philosophical’ history of the
(New Haven and London, 2000), pp. 1-2. 3 Stuart Piggott, Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination (London, 1989), pp.
