In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England

Antiquarianism, in both academic and popular parlance, has long been misunderstood. In Defiance of Time argues that, contrary to modern stereotypes of the bumbling amateur and infatuated collector, the early modern antiquary was an innovative and influential scholar. Poets such as Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton all betray the importance of antiquarianism, whilst travellers’ reports, cartography, and architectural surveys from the period were also shaped by its interests and concerns. Angus Vine both traces this intellectual context in which antiquarian works were produced and consumed and explores the works, literary and historical, which were written in response to it. What connects all these works, it argues, was an attempt to resurrect the past, to restore its fragments and remains ‘in defiance of time’.