This fascinating portrait of the Society of Antiquaries of London,
founded in 1707, assesses the impact that individual Fellows and the
Society as a whole have had in influencing the way we visualise and
understand the past. There are, for example, essays on the Society's
pioneering role in recording monuments and antiquities for posterity, in
establishing the scientific and empirical basis of archaeological
studies, in replacing Biblically based timeframes with a clearer
understanding of deep time measured in millions of years, in drawing up
the first legislation protecting ancient monuments, and in funding and
publishing the great excavations of the last one hundred years, from
Stonehenge, Maiden Castle, Richborough and Sutton Hoo to Aksum
(Ethiopia) and Mons Porphyrites (Egypt). All the papers represent fresh
and original scholarship and they tell us much about the Society's
achievements (and some of the accompanying conflicts between
personalities and ideas) over three hundred years. They are based on
diaries, letters, minute books and confidential government papers and on
portraits that chart the changing image of the antiquary from a figure
of fun to heroic seeker of forgotten people and civilizations. Visions
of Antiquity reveals astonishing echoes across time - from the repeated
and continuing attempts to record all ancient buildings and monuments to
the continuity of the title 'antiquary' to describe scholars who build
bridges between different branches of knowledge based on the study of
material remains of the past and of a Fellowship whose numbers have
included prime ministers, bishops, peers and parliamentarians, as well
as radicals and free thinkers, such as William Morris and many of the
founders of modern conservation.
