Meetings & Events: Annual Lecture Series
‘The Antonine Itinerary and the Invention of Roman Britain’
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries the Antonine Itinerary played a vital role in the antiquarian reconstruction of the Roman Empire. A compilation of 256 routes within the Empire, including fifteen routes within Britain, the Itinerary not only filled gaps in classical geography, it offered a record of Roman settlement, military history, and fleeting glimpses of the peoples subjected to Roman rule. This paper will consider the long history of the reception of the Antonine Itinerary in England and Wales, from the medieval period through to the eighteenth century. What evidence is there for the medieval reception of the Itinerary; and why did the text come to matter to scholars such as John Leland, William Harrison, William Camden, William Burton, Thomas Gale and John Horsley, all of whom in one way or another strove to construct ‘Britannia Romana’?