Afterword: Dismiss the Antiquary at Your Peril

This special issue eruditely demonstrates the deep interconnections between British antiquarianism, natural philosophy and medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These stimulating papers, representing the state of the field, include: analysis of classical antecedents for balneology; Sir Isaac Newton’s attempts to restore the prisca sapientia and use of mathematics to reform knowledge of antiquity; editors and autograph collectors who preserved the still extant correspondence (and hence the intellectual geography and networks) of early modern antiquaries; and the re‐enactment of ancient landscapes and relics using geological theory and three‐dimensional museum exhibits. As Susan Pearce pointed out, Jeremiah Milles, in his presidential address to the Society of Antiquaries in 1781, remarked that ‘History, Science and Art may claim an equal share in the Attention and Labour of the Antiquary’. Antiquarianism also involved something more: inspired discernment. William Stukeley, the famous eighteenth‐century antiquary, observed that ‘[i]n the study of Antiquities, as in all others, judgment, genius is necessary’. As genius and interdisciplinarity were often inherent to antiquarian pursuits, I will discuss more generally antiquarianism and what it constituted in this period, before analysing its particular relationship to natural philosophy in the Royal Society. Two impulses or practices were at the heart of early modern English antiquarianism. The first stemmed from the humanist tradition, inherited from continental philologists like Guillaume Budé (1467‐1540) and their Italian predecessors such as Lorenzo Valla (1406‐ 1457). English intellectuals in this group, such as John Leland (1502‐1552), analysed the etymology of words and sought linguistic and verbal remains to understand the historical record. The second form of antiquarianism, which became more prevalent by the end of the seventeenth century, was practised by those scholars who considered the landscape in their analysis of ancient objects and buried artefacts. The early Royal Society was also involved in projects that integrated natural history and antiquarianism, particularly before the establishment of the Society of Antiquaries in1717. Antiquarianism was ‘cognate with natural history at the very least in the sense that the type of activity involved (field work, collection, display, classification) was of a similar character’. For Robert Hooke (1635‐1703) the work of a natural historian was similar to that of an antiquary who studies man‐made objects. For instance, he remarked that: