Graham Parry. 1995. The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 320 pp. 16 illus. ISBN 0-19-812962-9. £40.

1. In 1656, the Oxford scholar and budding antiquary Anthony Wood greeted the appearance of Sir William Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire with rapturous enthusiasm as "the best book of its kind that hitherto was made extant". A few weeks after reading Dugdale, Wood was inspired to undertake his own systematic survey of the monumental inscriptions and armours in various Oxford churches and college chapels, and by the following summer he was studying John Leland's manuscript Collectanea, then a much used guide to the nation's antiquities.

2. Wood's infection with antiquarian ardour is well-known, and he and Dugdale are only two of the many seventeenth-century students of the British past to come under close scrutiny in Graham Parry's book, The Trophies of Time. Parry's seventeenth century is elongated at the front and truncated at the end: his decision to begin with the publication of Camden's Britannia in 1586, makes good sense; the decision to stop in 1695 with the famous Gibson re-translation and revision of Camden, is somewhat more troublesome: explicable in literary terms, it rather cuts out of the account some scholars, careers just beginning in the 1690s, who would go on to great success in the next century or so: William Stukeley and Thomas Hearne are perhaps the most prominent examples, though even these two pop up on occasion throughout Parry's account.

3. Antiquarianism has in fact been much studied over the past three decades or so. There are durable older accounts of Tudor and Stuart antiquarian and philological scholarship by May McKisack, Arthur B. Ferguson, Joseph M. Levine, and the prolific Stuart Piggott; the Augustan era, especially the reigns of Anne and George I, was dealt with thoroughly in David Douglas's classic English Scholars 1660-1730. Many works on early modern narrative historiography also deal to some degree with antiquarianism.

4. What none of these works offers, and Parry largely succeeds in providing, is an overview of the development of antiquarianism over an extended period, one that bridges the chasm of the civil wars: 1640 has for too long marked either the starting or finishing points of many works in this (and other) areas, because that year saw the end of both Charles I's personal rule and of the run of printed books listed in Pollard and Redgrave's Short-title Catalogue. So the appearance of a study that covers nearly the entire seventeenth century is welcome, not least because it can point out continuities of interest, thought and method over a somewhat longer durée.

5. Parry's work is organized into intellectual-biographical chapters centering on major figures, beginning with William Camden, Parry's magnus fundator, who assumes here a role akin to Moses, leading his antiquarian readers through a wilderness of ignorance in Britannia while never quite reaching the promised land of modern method more firmly grasped in the ensuing century. After Camden, principal subjects include Cotton, Selden, Ussher, Spelman, Dugdale and Aubrey. A few more uncoventional figures also merit chapters, such as Richard Verstegan, Aylett Sammes and John Weever. Others are tacked on as "add-ons" (for instance, James Ware, the Anglo-Irish antiquary and editor, here attached to his master Ussher's chapter; or William Somner, who is linked up with Sir Henry Spelman on the basis of their Anglo-Saxon interests; and Robert Plot, joined at the hip to John Aubrey); there is one grab-baggish chapter, a "mid-century miscellany" consisting of disparate figures such as Thomas Browne, William Burton, and Thomas Fuller.

6. Doing justice to all these antiquaries is an ambitious task, and Parry largely pulls it off in a good book that is well-illustrated and gracefully written. One could have few reservations in assigning this work to students as an introduction to the topic, and there is much information to be gleaned from Parry's close reading of many of the printed texts he discusses, and from his working out of relationships between those texts' authors. This latter feature is the book's greatest strength, specifically Parry's emphasis on the development of antiquarianism from an activity by a few Elizabethan and Jacobean eccentrics (brutally satirized at the time by the likes of Donne, Earle and Marmion) into a commonplace leisure activity for the educated elite, all within rather less than a century. In studying this phenomenon, Parry rightly pays great attention to the development of networks of connection among the scholars (for example, at p. 203), both within and outside the British Isles.

7. Having said this, there are some problems with the treatment of antiquarianism offered here. One or two are peculiar to the book; others are limitations imposed by the "history of history" genre itself and its hitherto exclusive focus on antiquarianism as an activity by a small subsection of the gentry and clergy, often inspired by primarily political and religious concerns. Among the former, one might question such bold statements as one made in reference to Cotton, the magpie manuscript collector and documentary Maecenas (Selden's and Jonson's terms) whose Westminster house functioned as library, museum and early salon--an "antiquary's cavern" (93.). Of Cotton Parry remarks, "Had he lived, Cotton would no doubt have sided with Parliament (18)." Perhaps. But perhaps not. Selden, who was younger and much less a strict devotee of tradition and custom (as opposed to a nascent theory of natural rights) certainly did, while others such as Dugdale went in the other direction toward a hard royalism, and still others like Kent's Sir Edward Dering and Sir Roger Twysden were plagued by conscience into a doomed semineutralism with little sympathy for either side. There is certainly enough of the constitutional royalist evident in Cotton's brief Bildungsroman on the life of Henry III (probably written in 1614, but read on its publication in the 1620s as a commentary on overmighty favourites like the duke of Buckingham) to make one wonder about lumping Cotton with the kites rather than the crows. It is possible to read Cotton's work as a good deal less "oppositional", than Parry would have it, but that is a matter of interpretation, not fact--certainly Cotton was read differently in 1627 than he would be when republished in 1642--a republication for explicitly polemical purposes that, Parry himself notes, Cotton would not have liked (89).

8. A second concern arises from the author's exclusive reliance on printed sources. This, too, is defensible given the book's aim to provide a synthesis, though copious archival materials exist for nearly all the figures here discussed; and Parry's sensitive handling of most of his figures' books and printed correspondence makes up for this . One has to wonder, however, whether a net cast somewhat wider might have caught a few smaller fish, and thereby sharpened Parry's major point about the expansion of antiquarian activity over the century.

9. Greater limitations, however, arise out of the structure of the book and of the literature to which it contributes, though these are not of the author's fault. Because it is both useful (when well done, as here) and relatively straightforward to deal with a single author's career and work, whether the relatively easily readable Camden, or the more complex Spelman and Selden. The price of this is that the focus remains on the contributions of individual antiquaries (or antiquarians, the eighteenth-century term here adopted by Parry to embrace both itinerant gazers at church monuments like Weever, and more sedentary armchair philologists of the Ussher or Selden variety) rather than on the social motives underlying and driving antiquarianism and, more broadly, the enormous expansion of historical interests generally during the seventeenth century.

10. By this I do not mean to suggest that individual scholars are unimportant, which would be harshly and perhaps absurdly deconstructive, nor to argue that a term such as "antiquarianism" should itself be reified into an entity like "puritanism". Rather, it might be suggested that the questions which Parry himself poses may be answered from a rather different angle, one that does not privilege a dozen or so outstanding examples over the hundreds of relatively obscure figures who may not have had Camden's erudition, Spelman's insight, or Selden's sharp intellect, but who nevertheless read Camden, Selden and Spelman and were thus inspired into their own domestic imitations of those authors. If nothing else, the seventeenth century saw the advent of an informal, parlor-and-closet (and later coffee-house) sort of scholarship: the historiographical equivalent of a DIY shop. Two instances from opposite ends of the century come to mind. The first, William Blundell, was a Lancashire squire and notorious Jacobean recusant who saw the Anglo-Saxon silver coins discovered on his land in 1611 as a divine reward for his family's steadfastness in persecution, and who attempted to reconstruct their meaning, in a cheese-and-wormsy kind of way, from his smattering of antiquarian and old-English knowledge, glued together with what in another place might be called an almost fanatical devotion to the pope. The second, Abraham de la Pryme, was a Yorkshire curate of the reign of William III who intermixed his activities on behalf of the Royal Society with an insatiable curiosity about the personal lives, ancient myths, and recent history of the parishes over which he had charge. One need not extend this list in order to make the point that antiquarianism, like Topsy, "growed" in the seventeenth century as much because of a bullish market among the general literate public for books and artifacts as because of the accomplishments of Messrs Selden, Dugdale et Cie.

11. A related but separate issue is Parry's sporadic subscription--in spite of himself--to what might be called "retroactive historiographical positivism," whereby authors are evaluated on the basis of the contribution to those interpretations now deemed correct, or those methods of research in documentary sources that have been canonized since the day of Ranke but which were far from clear-cut in the early modern period. This is a charge that can be levied at most previous books on the subject, all attempting to reconstuct a period in the development of geschichteswissenschaft; and in the main Parry avoids a simplistic teleology better than most. The very good chapter on Aylett Sammes is a good example. Sammes's Britannica Antiqua Illustrata (1676) was a bizarre attempt, rejected by most of its contemporary readers, to establish Stonehenge as the work of Phoenician settlers, and it stands as one of the great wrong books of the Restoration--the antiquarian Erich von Daniken of its time; here, Parry is quick to note that Sammes's eccentricity of interpretation was far from exceptional for his time. In other places, however, Parry is less guarded in judging our illustrious disciplinary ancestors according to Eltonian strictures. Dugdale, the magisterial explorer of monastic antiquities, is said to have possessed a historical sense that was conventional in being "mildly preposterous," because he traced the history of St. Paul's back to Paradise and included legendary figures like King Lucius (who, incidentally, was not exposed as a myth until the time of Bishop Stubbes [p. 239]). The ascription of the foundation of Glastonbury Abbey to Joseph of Arimathaea (Dugdale again) is held unworthy of "a serious historian in the 1650s" (231), but Joseph was then not in the category of Brutus the Trojan, who was indeed no longer taken seriously by most antiquaries of Dugdale's vintage; moreover, as Parry himself concedes, the Anglican belief in an apostolic and pre-Gregorian origin for the Church of England remained important, not least to a frustrated royalist sympathizer such as Sir William.

12. This all may sound a bit like a grouchy and ungrateful suggestion for a different book, but that is not the intent of this review; nor would such be fair to the author. There are indeed many further avenues available for exploring the topic, and several have now been well-signposted by Parry's immensely enjoyable, learned and sympathetic account. The study of early modern English historical thought appears to be attracting renewed interest, and in providing an illuminating synthesis of our knowledge to date, The Trophies of Time will undoubtedly assist further endeavors. Camden's Britannia provided such a service four centuries ago, and in tracing the influence of that important book and its imitators here, Parry puts us under a similar obligation.