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An Elusive Legacy: The Rediscovery of Roman Baths in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Abstract
In this paper, I investigate how eighteenth-century antiquarians engaged with the remains of Roman bath buildings in Britain and discuss their multifaceted attitude towards the ancient practice of bathing, with a focus on the city of Bath. I also examine the interests and priorities of Georgian scholars in studying Roman baths and their structure, highlighting their sometimes uncritical use of classical sources and tracking the origins of their misconceptions regarding the components and function of these facilities. Finally, I briefly address the elusive socio-cultural legacy of Roman baths and bathing in eighteenth-century Britain, stressing influences and differences in practice and architecture.
In this article, I follow the mixed fortunes of a woodcut depicting a cutaway view of a set of ancient baths, so far neglected by modern scholarship. First published in a mid-sixteenth-century treatise on balneology and based on a misinterpretation of Vitruvius (5.10.1), it reappeared as a copy of a Roman wall-painting in several eighteenth-century antiquarian works. The remarkable resonance enjoyed by this image in specialist and popular publications until the early twentieth century makes it one of the most influential and controversial sources in the history of Roman baths studies. In exploring the reasons behind the enduring, uncritical acceptance of this depiction, I raise broader questions concerning the nature and extent of intellectual networks in eighteenth-century Europe.
This paper addresses the myth of the Strand Lane cold bath’s Roman origins: it explains how this dream of Rome first emerged in the 1830s and became consolidated in the 1840s, and documents the means by which it was propagated, and the extent to which it was debated, between then and the 1890s. It is suggested that the origins of the idea were heavily indebted to popular awareness of the baths of Pompeii, spread both by archaeological publication and by Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days and its offshoots; that the consolidation was the work of Charles Knight and Charles Dickens; and that the vigorous survival of the mirage for the remainder of the century was down in part to the absence of any other large-scale standing Roman structure in the capital, and in part to the lack of any plausible alternative story of the bath’s real origins. The auxiliary myth of the ‘Essex’ bath is also discussed, and the whole argument illuminates not only the history of the monument itself, but also Victorian engagement with the Roman past and the historical fabric of London more generally.
This paper critically evaluates the social and intellectual influences which shaped Samuel Lysons’ (1763–1819) interests in the archaeological remains of Roman Britain, and assesses the extent to which his work was innovative. While Romano-British archaeologists have long admired his achievements, there has been no detailed examination of the factors influencing the development of his interests and approach. This paper will outline how Lysons’ social networks, his genuine concern for preserving and recording Romano-British remains, his broad scholarly interests, and the support of an intellectual elite involved with the expansion of national institutions during a period characterized by intense international rivalry, resulted in his exemplary approach to the excavation and publication of the remains of Roman Britain. Scrutiny of newspaper reports, diaries, correspondence, and the previously unpublished contents of his personal library, and an examination of his publications in relation to contemporary Classical and scientific scholarship, shows how and why his work was at the forefront of archaeological scholarship in this period. The results of this study support his reputation as a founding father of Romano-British archaeology and show that both he and his associates deserve far wider recognition of their contributions to the development of archaeology as a whole.
Illustration emerges from complex and diverse motives. The portrayal of an objective reality may seem to lie at its heart, but there are other subtle factors at work. Preconception guides many an illustrator's hand. A wish to project known realities onto nascent concepts distorts reality in its own ways, and the process of transmuting the subtle realism of nature into an engraver's line imposes constraints and conventions of its own. There is a general principle in artwork, often unrecognised: the culture of each era dictates its own arbitrary realities. Our experience of this is largely intuitive, but it explains why a specific image (a saint from a thirteenth-century psalter, or the countenance of the Statue of Liberty) is easier to relate to the time it was produced, than to the identity of the artist or the name of the subject. In just this way, a scientific illustration is a mirror of contemporaneous preoccupations, and a clue to current prejudice. It is more than a didactic symbol. Some illustrations create, and then perpetuate, icons which transcend reality and provide a synthesized convention which passes from one generation of books to the next. These icons are created for textbooks, and they populate their pages as decorative features which do little to reveal reality. FOONOTE Discussions on the relationship between reality and interpretation are found in: Ford, Brian J., Images of Science, a History of Scientific Illustration, London: British Library; New York: Oxford University Press (1992); also in the author's Images Imperfect, the Legacy of Scientific Illustration, Yearbook of Science and the Future: 134-157, Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica (1996). Early in the century, François Legaut's Voyages et Aventures (1708) featured a rhinoceros with a second horn projecting forward from its brow. This structure is never found in life. Why should it feature in an eighteenth-century illustrated textbook? The first published study of a rhinoceros (made by Albrecht Dürer in 1515), though powerful and realistic, boasts a small secondary horn on the shoulders, which projects forward. The image was repeatedly plagiarised and -with each generation of copying -this imaginary forward-projecting second horn increased in size. By the time it was included in Legaut's book the imaginary horn was equal in size to the real one.
In this article, I follow the mixed fortunes of a woodcut depicting a cutaway view of a set of ancient baths, so far neglected by modern scholarship. First published in a mid-sixteenth-century treatise on balneology and based on a misinterpretation of Vitruvius (5.10.1), it reappeared as a copy of a Roman wall-painting in several eighteenth-century antiquarian works. The remarkable resonance enjoyed by this image in specialist and popular publications until the early twentieth century makes it one of the most influential and controversial sources in the history of Roman baths studies. In exploring the reasons behind the enduring, uncritical acceptance of this depiction, I raise broader questions concerning the nature and extent of intellectual networks in eighteenth-century Europe.
I am happy in having the honor to communicate to the Society an account, illustrated with drawings, of some very curious remains of Roman antiquities in this neighbourhood. These, with some specimens of painted stucco, and cubes of tessellated pavements, are inclosed in a box, which goes from Mansfield to-morrow by the Leeds Fly, directed for you at Somerset Place.
When I had the pleasure of meeting you last, our conversation turned upon the form of the buildings of the ancients, the nature of the cement, and the variety of materials made use of by them in their different structures, particularly in their baths. I mentioned that soon after I came to this town, I discovered the remains of a Roman structure at the West end of the parish church of St. Mary the Virgin; which remains have since repeatedly been laid open for the purposes of interment. You requested me to give you an accurate description of every part of this fabric, with my conjectures at what æra it was built, and for what use I conceived it was intended: I now sit down to comply with your request, but that I may give you as just an idea as I can of this ancient piece of masonry, by a minute description of its several parts, I have annexed a drawing, where A, B, C, D, E, F, represent the ichnography of the West end of the church.
Having visited the remains of Roman antiquity lately discovered at Bath, I beg leave to present to the Society the following account of them.
The remains in question were brought to light by digging the foundation of a new pump room and baths between the present pump room and Stall-street.
CLEAN is a history of the ideas and practices of personal cleansing and purity. It starts with world and Eurasian history, then focuses on Europe and finally, Britain. It takes a multidimensional and multi-temporal view of historical change, arguing that our universal bio-physical or animal cleansing mechanisms and grooming behaviour were gradually overlaid, on the different continents, by the human social history that began to emerge in the late Neolithic period. A developing culture and technology of cleansing can be found in the very early history of domestic habits, the early history of luxurious cosmetic adornments, the history of religious ascetic philosophy, and in later Greco-Roman medical science. In Europe after the fall of Rome, these different strands of thought and activity were resurrected via neo-classical science and health education, and via a radical Protestant, puritan, interpretation of physiology that underlaid the ‘gospel of cleanliness’ r
eform movements in the 19th century. Cosmetic beauty care had a more chequered career, in the face of ascetic disapproval, but the skin-cleansing warm bath finally became widely available in the mid 19th century. The microbiological and macrobiological sciences of hygiene were fully incorporated into personal and public health-care during the first half of the twentieth century\; but as the MRSA outbreaks show, old-style hygienic technology is still required, while the so-called ‘hygiene theory’ suggests it may be possible to be too clean for our own good. The moral psychology of hygiene suffered an ideological post-war eclipse after the puritanical eugenics of Nazism, but has since been embraced by the global public in new forms – personal health regimes, green pollution ecology, food purity scares and ascetic religious fundamentalism. Meanwhile cosmetic care is one of the fastest-expanding areas of investment in the late 20th-early 21st century luxury trades. \
Some years have now elapsed since any paper has been read before this Society upon Silchester, which is without doubt the most interesting Roman city in this country. Comparatively speaking, very little has been done there since the death of the Rev. James Gerald Joyce, F.S.A., the rector of Stratfieldsaye, whose elaborate and valuable papers upon Silchester, amply illustrated with plans and drawings, published in vols. xl. and xlvi. of Archaeologia , are well known to you all. Had it not been for him we should probably have remained in ignorance of the existence of the city, as it was he who inspired the late Duke of Wellington with such a keen interest in the place that he authorised excavations to be undertaken.
This article shows how the eminent antiquary Samuel Lysons (1763-1819) used his publications of Romano-British remains, which were aimed at a British and Continental audience, to challenge the widely held view that Britain's climate and national characteristics were incompatible with artistic excellence and that Britain was culturally inferior to its Continental neighbours, most notably France, in both past and present. In particular, it shows how he depicted villas and mosaics as some of the finest examples of British cultural achievement under Roman rule, in a period when Roman Britain was largely seen as a military province and cultural backwater, and when aristocratic tastes were predominantly cosmopolitan. He asserted a dramatic improvement from former barbarism and placed Britain firmly within a pan-European classical tradition. The publications also showcased British achievements in the recording of Roman remains and antiquities and in landscape painting, serving as an impressive statement of intellectual and artistic superiority. Samuel Lysons and his associates were working collaboratively to an international agenda, celebrating Britain's cultural leadership in Europe. Their efforts, most notably in the recording of Romano-British mosaics, have underpinned an exemplary tradition of mosaic scholarship in Britain, and merit far greater recognition.
The study of Roman domestic space, which has greatly expanded in the last years of this millennium, is an area of research into the classical world where both material and written sources provide important evidence. This paper outlines the types of evidence and examines several recent studies for a critical perspective on current methodological and theoretical approaches to Roman material culture. While this study demonstrates that more rigorous research is needed, it also highlights that this burgeoning interest has made substantial contributions to research on Roman domestic behavior.
As the Ottoman state emerged in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it encountered the contemporary, medieval cultures of Western Europe and Byzantium, as well as the past, classical cultures of northwest Asia Minor. An examination of early Ottoman architecture, including the construction of new works, adaptation of existing buildings, and attitudes expressed toward older monuments, helps to clarify the nature of the encounter. The Ottoman appropriation of the past may be understood as a part of their symbolic control of the land and as an attempt to position themselves within the larger context of world history as the rightful heirs of the Roman/Byzantine Empire.
This essay examines drawings of antiquities in the context of the history of early modern scientific illustration. The role of illustrations in the establishment of archaeology as a discipline is assessed, and the emergence of a graphic style for representing artifacts is shown to be closely connected to the development of scientific illustration in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The essay argues that the production of conventionalized drawings of antiquities during this period represents a fundamental shift in the approach to ancient material culture, signifying the recognition of objects as evidence. As has been demonstrated in other scientific fields, the creation of a visual system for recording objects was central to the acceptance of artifacts as "data" that could be organized into groups, classified as types, and analyzed to gain knowledge of the past.
This article examines Charles Lucas's Essay on Waters (1756) as a polemic that illuminates the Bath waters as a subject enmeshed as much in politics as in medicine. It shows how Lucas styled himself a ‘political knight errant’ in his treatise to portray the local medical fraternity at the spa as a corrupt oligarchy intent on monopolising and stifling research into the famous mineral springs out of commercial self-interest and greed. It further considers the critical response to the treatise by Tobias Smollett and Samuel Johnson, who were both forced to address the author's libertarian concerns.
italic>Sir , I Humbly beg pardon for so long delaying to absolve the promise I formerly made of presenting you with an account of another Roman Station in the County of Durham , at a Village call'd Ebchester : but tho I was born near that place, and since my promise have often carefully view’d it, I cou’d not till very lately satisfie my self so far as to beable to reduce my mind from the vulgar opinion, that this has never been more than a Place nam’d from that Pious Virgin St Ebba , which is all Mr Cambden says of it.
Sir , The first notice I had of the Hypocaust discover’d at Wroxeter , was from a Letter Mr Baxter communicated to me, which he received from the Reverend Mr Markham , the present worthy Incumbent of that place; which gave me occasion of making farther enquiry, by writing to the Reverend Mr Richard Lloyd of Salop ; who, at my request, was so obliging as to take a journey and view it.
The national narrative restructures the experience of time, presenting the nation as an active historical agent that, through the narrative, acquires a new historical identity. The Mediterranean nations have undertaken the difficult task of combining different significant pasts. The appropriation and resignification of these pasts involve adjustment of different perceptions of the structure of time. This article explores the making of modern Greek national history through this process.
Recent scholarship has claimed that the history of Roman Britain has been discussed in terms of ‘Romanization’ since the beginning of the seventeenth century. In fact, it is wrong to think that there is a single tradition in the understanding of Roman Britain. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Camden and his followers were primarily interested in the bringing of ‘civility’ to England, with only a minimal consciousness of material culture (coins, inscriptions and sites). Discussion of Roman Britain was already overshadowed by an emphasis on military identity, viewing Roman soldiers and civilian subjects as essentially separate, the latter little influenced by the former. Only in the later nineteenth century, and particularly in the work of Francis Haverfield, did an idea of cultural ‘Romanization’ find its way to the centre of scholarly discussions. Far from there being a single scholarly understanding of the history of Roman Britain, accounts have been continually rewritten to reflect the nature of the relationship between the English and their empire.
antiquity;politics of appropriation;morality of appropriation;reception studies;classical scholarship
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oxford, 1993.
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