In her chapter, Elizabeth Crooke examines the work of nineteenth-century antiquarian scholar George Petrie and the poet and archivist Samuel Ferguson, who were vital to the formation of a modern revivalist movement. The accumulation of knowledge about the Irish past is a condition of freedom, for it stands as a bulwark against false and degrading historical representations and frees Irish institutions to use the recovery of cultural artifacts to support the process of national Bildung. Museums connect the past, through present cultural activity, to the realization of Ireland’s national future. This connection motivates the early designers of museums and other cultural institutions charged with preserving cultural artifacts to regard authenticity as a quality of cultural objects, an aura that transcends historical conditions. During the Decade of Centenaries (2012–2022), Petrie and Ferguson became themselves a part of Ireland’s future in the form of commemorations, the visible signs of institutional memory.

The topographical section of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland (1824-1842) produced a monumental study of the language, history and culture of Ireland. This chapter argues that the Survey, while often derided as an act of colonial appropriation and criticised for its inelegant translations of place names, was a crucial institution in the formation of Irish literature and in the construction of history and memory. The Survey’s many afterlives shaped the course of literary production in the nineteenth century, and three of those afterlives are briefly sketched out in this chapter. From the Survey’s preservationist attitude to the Irish language, to its part in the growth of a positivistic school of historical research and its hand in establishing the Aran Islands as a fount of an imagined national culture, the impact of the Survey is not far to seek in Irish culture in the nineteenth century.