Antiquarian Writing

Roebuck, Thomas ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1791-6539 (2024) Antiquarian Writing. In: Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1640-1715. Oxford University Press, pp. 119-135.

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Abstract

What is distinctive about antiquarian prose in the period 1640–1714? The revised version of William Camden’s Britannia, edited by the Oxford scholar, Edmund Gibson (1669–1748), and published in 1695, offers us a way to begin to answer this question. Gibson assembled a team of scholars to adapt and update William Camden’s earlier antiquarian masterpiece, his account of all the counties of Britain, published in its final Latin form in 1607, and then translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1610. This chapter will show that Gibson’s approach to the project exposes many of the tensions within antiquarian prose writing, between the undisciplined, unfinished, digressive, and fragmentary, and the forces of coherence, unity, and completion. Using Gibson as a starting point, this chapter will then explore how these tensions are played out across a number of different instances, from the translation of Old English prose to Robert Plot’s natural historical writings. The chapter concludes by revisiting what the study of antiquarian prose can teach us about the fundamental question of the distinction between antiquarianism and history

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	3* ,/dk/atira/pure/researchoutput/REFrank/3_
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Medieval and Early Modern Research Group
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	10 Sep 2024 08:30
Last Modified:	29 Nov 2024 01:26
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/96629
DOI:

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