Editing Antiquarian (section)

===Antiquaries and historians===
From the 16th to the 19th centuries, a clear distinction was perceived to exist between the interests and activities of the antiquary and the [[historian]].<ref name="Levine, Battle of the Books"/><ref>Woolf, "Erudition and the Idea of History".</ref><ref>Levine, ''Humanism and History'', pp.&nbsp;54–72.</ref><ref>Levine, ''Amateur and Professional'', pp.&nbsp;28–30, 80–81.</ref> The antiquary was concerned with the relics of the past (whether [[document]]s, [[Artifact (archaeology)|artefacts]] or [[Archaeological site|monuments]]), whereas the historian was concerned with the [[Narrative history|narrative]] of the past, and its political or moral lessons for the present. The skills of the antiquary tended to be those of the critical examination and interrogation of his sources, whereas those of the historian were those of the philosophical and literary reinterpretation of received narratives. Jan Broadway defines an antiquary as "someone who studied the past on a thematic rather than a chronological basis".<ref>Broadway, ''"No Historie So Meete"'', p. 4.</ref> [[Francis Bacon]] in 1605 described readings of the past based on antiquities (which he defined as "Monuments, Names, Wordes, Proverbes, Traditions, Private Recordes, and Evidences, Fragments of stories, Passages of Bookes, that concerne not storie, and the like") as "unperfect Histories".<ref>{{cite book |first=Francis |last=Bacon |author-link=Francis Bacon |title=[[The Advancement of Learning]] |editor-first=Michael |editor-last=Kiernan |series=Oxford Francis Bacon |volume=4 |place=Oxford |publisher=Clarendon Press |year=2000 |orig-year=1605 |isbn=0-19-812348-5 |page=66 }}</ref> Such distinctions began to be eroded in the second half of the 19th century as the school of [[empirical]] source-based history championed by [[Leopold von Ranke]] began to find widespread acceptance, and today's historians employ the full range of techniques pioneered by the early antiquaries. Rosemary Sweet suggests that 18th-century antiquaries
{{blockquote|... probably had more in common with the professional historian of the twenty-first century, in terms of methodology, approach to sources and the struggle to reconcile erudition with style, than did the authors of the grand narratives of national history.<ref>Sweet, ''Antiquaries'', p. xiv.</ref>}}