Charles Townley's (1737-1805) love for classical antiquities began during his Grand Tour of Italy in 1767 and the items that he purchased were the start of a much larger collection that he amassed. After his death, the Townley collection of antiquities, as well as Townley's diaries, accounts, letters and correspondence with friends and family, agents and other collectors, reverted to the British Museum. This is a catalogue of all records relating to Charles Townley and includes much important source material for the second half of the 18th century.

Ancient finds from the Maltese islands are rare, and those held in the British Museum form an important collection. Represented is a wide cultural range, spanning the Early and Late Neolithic, the Bronze Age, Roman and more recent historic periods.

This is an illustrated study of the reception of classical sculptures in the early modern period. Viccy Coltman contrasts the culture of British 18th century collecting, which integrated sculpture into the domestic interior, with the focus upon individual specimens by archaeologists like Adolf Michaelis a century later.

This book investigates the wide-ranging connections between sculpture, sexuality, and history in Western culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Sculpture has offered a privileged site for the articulation of sexual experience and the formation of sexual knowledge. As historical objects, sculptures also draw attention to the different ways in which knowledge about sexuality is facilitated through an engagement with the past. Bringing together contributors from across disciplines, including art history, classics, film studies, gender studies, history, literary studies, museum studies, queer theory and reception studies, the volume presents original readings of sculptural art in relation to antiquarianism, aesthetics, collecting cultures, censorship and obscenity, psychoanalysis, sexology, and the experience and regulation of museum spaces. It examines how sculptural encounters were imagined and articulated in literature, painting, film and science. As a whole, the book opens up a new understanding of the ways in which sculptures, as real or imagined objects, have fundamentally shaped approaches to and receptions of the past in relation to sex, gender and sexuality. Chapters 8 and 10 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

This volume represents the first move towards a comprehensive overview of the place of antiquity in Enlightenment Europe. Eschewing a narrow focus on any one theme, it seeks to understand eighteenth-century engagements with antiquity on their own terms, focusing on the contexts, questions, and agendas that led people to turn to the ancient past. The contributors show that a profound interest in antiquity permeated all spheres of intellectual and creative endeavour, from antiquarianism to political discourse, travel writing to portraiture, theology to education. They offer new perspectives on familiar figures, such as Rousseau and Hume, as well as insights into hitherto obscure antiquarians and scholars. What emerges is a richer, more textured understanding of the substantial eighteenth-century engagement with antiquity.

Archives and Excavations aims to stimulate a new approach to the history of excavation by drawing attention to a vast and important area of research that has been neglected for almost a century.

Georgian London evokes images of elegant mannered buildings, but it was also a city where prostitution was rife and houses of ill repute widespread in a sex trade that employed thousands. In London's Sinful Secret, Dan Cruickshank explores this erotic Georgian underworld and shows how it affected almost every aspect of life and culture in the city from the smart new streets that sprang up in Marylebone, to the squalid alleys around Charing Cross to the coffee houses, where prostitutes plied their trade, to the work of artists such as William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds. Cruickshank uses memoirs, newspaper accounts and court records to create a surprisingly bawdy portrait of London at its most-mannered and, for the first time, exposes its secret, sinful underside. "A lively work of social history, full of surprises and memorable characters." - Kirkus Reviews

In Ancient Marbles in Naples in the Eighteenth Century Eloisa Dodero aims at documenting the history of numerous private collections formed in Naples during the 18th century, with particular concern for the “Neapolitan marbles” and the circumstances of their dispersal. Research has thus made it possible to formulate a synthesis of the collecting dynamics of Naples in the 18th century, to define the interest of the great European collectors, especially British, in the antiquities of the city and its territory and to draw up a catalogue which for the first time brings together the nucleus of sculptures reported in the Neapolitan collections or coming from irregular excavations, most of which shared the destiny of dispersal, in some cases here traced in definitive fashion.

The Caucasus region, sandwiched between the Black Sea to the west and the Caspian Sea to the east, traditionally marks the boundary between Europe to the north and Asia to the south. This catalogue gathers together ancient Caucasian and related material in the British Museum, most of which is now in the Department of the Ancient Near East. The objects include items of jewellery, weapons, pottery, figurines and other miscellaneous artefacts, but it does not include Greek and Roman objects, coins, or material of early Christian date. The catalogue has been divided into four parts, covering the Central Caucasus (and The Koban Culture), Transcaucasia, objects of general Caucasian type, and objects that may be loosely associated with the Scythians. An introduction offers a short overview of the geography and history of the region, from prehistory to the advent of the Christianity.