Final Report Summary - BIBLANT (The Bible and Antiquity in the 19th-Century.)
This project has been investigating the role of the Bible and the role of classical antiquity as privileged models of the past – both on their own and in their interconnections – for 19th-century culture. It has been able to show the profound reach of such models in the education system, in architecture, in art, in fiction, in music, in intellectual life, and, especially, in the framework of expectations of explanatory models – that is, as a way in which Victorian thinkers conceptualized not just the past, but also the past as an explanatory paradigm for the present: it was, for the Victorians, extremely hard to think about how a person might be related to his or her own history – a sense of historical self-placement – without the bible and antiquity as interlinked models providing for them necessary and integral frameworks. In an age characterized by a heightened historical self-consciousness, the bible and classical antiquity were royal roads to self-formation. It is particularly important to recover this fundamental structuring of Victorian thought in all its richness, because modern disciplinary formations on the one hand, and self-serving, teleological histories of science and secularism on the other have conspired to obscure it from a more general view. While Darwin’s Origin of Species is a familiar icon of Victorian progress, it is worth remembering that Prime Minister Gladstone short book, attempting to show how Homer and the Bible offered parallel and interlinked notions of divine providence outsold it by many tens of thousands of copies, and gives a far clearer insight into the concerns of the era. Indeed, our project has shown in detail the extraordinary degree to which the linked images and ideals of biblical and classical pasts were integral to the self-formation of the Victorian citizen – from the stained glass of the newly established Truro Cathedral to Bengali translations of the bible, from intense theological rows to the redesign of civic architecture, from stories of self-understanding and belief to public displays of cultural value, from the self-understanding of imperialism to the self-understanding of sexuality. The rich and intricate pervasiveness of antiquity’s legacy is a constant, formative factor in the imagination and material culture of Victorian Britain. It has been particularly interesting to see how not just for historiographical sense (central though that is to Victorian self-understanding) but also for new technological sciences such as photography, their development is inconceivable without the classical world and biblical lands as subjects and forms of representation. For the team on this project, coming from a range of backgrounds, perhaps the most important lesson has been the need for a fully interdisciplinary understanding of how such a discourse of the past develops – through scholarship, popular fiction, art, music, technology, politics and so forth in dynamic interaction with each other.