ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 32.2 (December 2010):155–160 ISSN 0210-6124 Monica Santini 2010: The Impetus of Amateur Scholarship: Discussing and Editing Medieval Romances in Late-Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Bern: Peter Lang. 255pp. ISBN 978-3-0343-0328-6 Jordi Sánchez-Martí University of Alicante Jordi.Sanchez@ua.es Since the mid-eighteenth century and during the best part of the nineteenth, a movement interested in the recovery of the medieval past developed in Britain. It found expression in various artistic activities, including architecture, the most visible example being the Houses of Parliament rebuilt in Gothic style in 1835, but it also influenced other creative arts such as painting, best illustrated by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and literature, as in the case of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819). 1 The monograph under review examines one of the lesser known aspects of this cultural movement, namely “[t]the formative phase of the modern study of Middle English romance”, which “began in the 1760s and continued until the 1860s” (9). During the intervening century the foundations of the academic discipline we now call Middle English studies were laid. Significantly, those responsible for this disciplinal advance were not professional academics working under the auspices of a university or any other public institution, but instead amateur scholars who on their own initiative created private clubs with scholarly aspirations. This book is testimony to the commitment and achievements of these pioneer medievalists and presents “a history of tentative and often inaccurate scholarship, in which enthusiastic impetus and nationalist impulses are more important than expertise” (11). In ‘The Key Words of Amateur Scholarship’, the first of the four chapters in the book, Santini discusses the terms used to describe the protagonists of the movement and the scholarly activities they carried out. The word by which they preferred to define themselves was antiquarian or ‘antiquary’, which referred specifically to “one who investigates the relics and monuments of the more recent past” (OED, s.v. antiquary n. 3). This kind of antiquarianism provides in fact the best definition of their approach to the Middle English romances, which were of interest to them not because of their literary merits but as witness to the customs and manners of the British medieval past. These antiquarians, less frequently described as scholars and rarely called philologists, wanted to draw a distinction with the so-called ‘austere Antiquaries’, whose only goal was to find delight in the texts preserved in medieval manuscripts and early printed books, as Santini explains (17). In addition, she also informs us that these early medievalists used the terms metrical romances, early romances, and romances of chivalry to describe their object of study (which we designate as Middle English romances both in prose and in verse), but “neither the word ‘Middle English’ nor ‘medieval’ occur in the writings of the scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (24). 2 1 See Alexander (2007) for a richly illustrated overview of this cultural trend. 2 Note, however, that the first occurrence of the word mediæval is recorded as early as 1827 (q.v. OED).