Conveners:
Lucy Peltz (University of Manchester) and Martin Myrone (Courtauld Institute of Art).

Antiquarianism was a popular and increasingly widespread activity throughout the early modern period. Although it encompassed a heterogeneous and shifting set of practices and discourses for dealing with the past, it has long been considered marginal by cultural historians. The session starts from the belief that it had a significant role in shaping modern culture and social relations. By considering its diverse visual and literary products and their impact upon both public and private spheres, the session will reassess the importance of antiquarianism and evaluate its socio-political implications.
It is hoped that some of the following questions will be addressed. Who were antiquarians, and why? How did antiquarianism package the past? Is there a specific antiquarian aesthetic? How did market forces and entrepreneurs shape the antiquarian project? What relationship did antiquarian texts have with 'high' art? Did antiquarianism lay the foundations for modern art history and museum culture?

• David Alexander (York): Trumpeting the Findings: Antiquarians and Printmakers
• Stephen Bending (Leeds University): The True Rust of the Barons' Wars: Gardens, Ruins, and the National Landscape
• Alexandrina Buchanan (University of York): Science and Sensibility: Architectural Antiquarianism in the Early Nineteenth Century
• David Haycock (Birkbeck College): William Stukeley, Avebury and Stonehenge
• Ralph Hyde (Keeper of Prints & Maps, Guildhall Library): Artists and Antiquaries: The Recording of English and Welsh Towns, Early to Mid-Eighteenth Century Susan A Crane (University of Arizona):
• Story, History and the Passionate Collector
• Maria Grazia Lolla (Wesleyan University): 'Ceci n'est pas un monument'
• Heather MacLennan (Cheltenham & Gloucester College of Higher Education): Antiquarian and Connoisseurial Interest in the Northern Renaissance Print in the Early Nineteenth century
• Annagret Pelz (Universität de Paderborn): The Desk: Excavation Site and Depository of Memory