Imagining Roman Britain

Victorian Responses to a Roman Past

Bibliographic Data

ID9736820
AuthorsNorman Vance (0000-0001-7843-1562, University of Sussex, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume125
Issue512
Pages212-213
Publication date2010-01-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe English Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ehr/cep369
OpenAlexW2010313082
LanguageEN
Citations received8

This is a useful and competent study of archaeological engagement with Roman remains in Victorian Britain. It draws on the personal letters and papers of individual antiquarians, the accessions list, minute-books and correspondence files of local archaeological bodies, and a range of archaeological journals and publications, to explore how one society engaged with another. As Dr Hoselitz observes, there is at least as much to discover about class-ridden Victorian society as about Roman settlement from this conjunction. The enquiry is prefaced by survey-chapters which range across the country from Silchester to Hadrian's Wall, touching on literary and visual representations, social issues (‘Gentlemen and scientists’) and the politics of colonisation and national identity. But it is mainly concerned with four sites of exploration in the 1840s and 1850s, in Caerleon, Cirencester, Colchester and Chester. Such drastic selectivity is perhaps unavoidable as a way of controlling an unruly mass of evidence. For the best results, historians of archaeology, like archaeologists themselves, need to start in the right place, clear the site of extraneous matter and isolate and identify the specific objects of enquiry. Then they face the additional challenge of incorporating evidence from individual finds and scattered sites into some more general picture. As Hoselitz shows us in relation to Colchester, Roman remains were often used as a basis for subsequent, particularly Norman and medieval, building: it took some time for it to be established that, while Colchester Castle is an essentially Norman keep, it rests on what was originally the plinth of the Roman Temple of Claudius

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Face (sociological concept · Identity (music · Politics · Relation (database · Settlement (finance · Social science · Sociology · Archaeological Research and Protection · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Law

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