This book highlights the growing divide in nineteenth-century intellectual circles between amateur and professional interest, and explores the institutional means whereby professional ascendancy was achieved in the broad field of studies of the past. It is concerned with how antiquarian 'gentlemen of leisure', pursuing their interests through local archaeological societies, were, by the end of the century, relegated to the sidelines of the now university-based discipline of history. At the same time it explores the theological as well as technical barriers which arrested the development of...