The recovery and reinvention of the past were fundamental to the conception of the modern in England during the long eighteenth century. Scholars then forged connections between linear time and empirical evidence that transformed historical consciousness. Chronologers, textual critics, and antiquaries constructed the notion of a material past, which spread through the cultures of print and consumption to a broader public, offering powerful--and for that reason, contested--ways of perceiving temporality and change, the historicity of objects, and the relation between fact and imagination. But...
The recovery and reinvention of the past were fundamental to the conception of the modern in England during the long eighteenth century. Scholars then...
