Antiquarianism is a term, and a relationship with the past, that fell severely out of fashion with the installation of history as a social science in the nineteenth century. In its derided version, it is an amateur's random fascination with the illegible remnants of a semi-forgotten past. But in its European heyday, this passionate engagement with ancient remains initiated standards for inquiring into the textual and material bases upon which European culture rested, provoking a radical reorientation to the past that, among other effects, replaced digging with archaeology, collecting with museology, and theology with history. It is antiquarianism in this original signification that the editors of this volume invoke in order to bring together for comparison the two humanist traditions of Europe and China. The editors are aware that, by invoking this term, they are initiating a comparison that starts from the European side. But they are also prepared to argue that the term, though coined in the European context, can provide a platform for setting early-modern European encounters with the past beside traditions of investigating the past in imperial China.

Both projects—recovering antiquarianism as a legitimate discipline in its own right, and aligning European and Asian approaches to the past—are developments of only the past decade. The first conference on comparative antiquarianism, out of which this book came, was held at the Bard Graduate Center in 2004. It was followed in 2006 by two conferences at the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago on antiquarianism and archaism in Asian art, and in 2010 by a symposium on world antiquarianism at the Getty Research Institute, all of which have recently published their proceedings. If this new subfield in the history of early-modern global history is congenial to current scholarship, it is because of the growing willingness of both Europeanists and Sinologists to bring their fields of study together under the single rubric of early modernity: to suspend the self-evident differences between these historical cultures in favor of discovering what light each might throw on the other. The joint interest in antiquarianism signals a deepening of this comparative habit.

For readers coming to antiquarianism for the first time, the editors provide a lucid and open-ended introduction to the subject, to the potentialities and constraints of the comparative approach, and to the particular contributions of the fifteen chapters brought together in this volume. The quality of the contributions is almost uniformly impressive. Although the chapters naturally range widely in terms of subject and approach, the editors have achieved a strong degree of thematic coherence. Throughout, the problem of how Europeans and Chinese managed their engagements with the past in the absence of the academic mechanisms and standards we now take for granted is kept more or less front and center.

As the format of this review does not allow for an evaluation of every chapter, I will risk unfairly slighting the other contributors by mentioning only five. Christopher Wood's chapter on the credulity to which European antiquarians were vulnerable when digging up the past exposes the inevitable tension between material and textual evidence. Bruce Rusk's beautifully crafted essay explores one of the inescapable consequences of the desire for authentic remnants: the forging of texts to sustain objects, and of objects to satisfy texts. Joan-Pau Rubiés' inquiry into Voltaire's reading of Indian history shows how deeply the influences could run between antiquarian controversies and shifts in philosophy before the distinction between history and philosophy was standardized. And Noel Malcolm's account of the obstacles to the study of Islam in early modern Europe offers a provocative glimpse of conflicted attitudes, though by stressing the negative influence of textual polemics to explain what he calls “the prolonged nonappearance of the Koran in print” (p. 272), I fear he may have underestimated the material difficulties of acquiring and reading Islamic sources in the seventeenth century.

Both Rubiés and Malcolm, as well as David Mungello in his insightful essay on the role of competing Jesuit and Chinese antiquarianisms during the Rites Controversy, point toward an issue the volume does not consider. Comparison, while instructive, must struggle with the difficulty of ensuring that the two epistemological frames are not mismatched. (Are the limits of comparing Marcus Terentius Varo and Sima Qian, as Miller does in his chapter, not too quickly reached?) It can be salutary to look for connections, in this case between antiquarian scholarship and the rise of studies of Asia in Europe. Antiquarianism gained a foothold in northern Europe in the sixteenth century in the context of recovering local (national) pasts. But with the ensuing boom in the collection of manuscripts, medals, and marbles, antiquarians understood the need to command not just Latin and Greek, and not just Hebrew as a third, but Syriac, Arabic, Chaldean, and any other Asian languages from which the claims of the Mediterranean ancients could be properly evaluated. From the ranks of antiquarianism thus emerged Europe's first Orientalists. I offer this comment not to chide the editors, but to attest that the new subfield of comparative antiquarianism they have inaugurated has a rich future.