"A School Boy's Guide to Infidelity": Religion, Politics, and Poetry in Jacob Bryant's Trojan War

In 1796 the venerable English mythographer Jacob Bryant declared that Troy and the Trojan War as related by Homer had no direct historical basis. Bryant, hitherto considered an (albeit idiosyncratic) defender of orthodoxy, was accused of a skeptical Jacobinism that threatened to undermine the established religious and intellectual order. This essay explores Bryant's religious and political apostasy in the eyes of fellow Loyalists to establish the relationship between religious apologetics, antiquarian philology, political ideology and Romantic poetics during the French revolutionary era; and to identify ways in which those relationships continue to shape critical responses to the period's mythographical debates.