Though its use declined after the Middle Ages, the chronicle long remained the genre of choice for those unsatisfied with conventional histories. John Galt, a Scottish Romantic author currently enjoying renewed critical interest, demonstrates the political applications of the chronicle, in both form and content, as a means of harnessing Britain’s distant past to come to terms with the material and philosophical developments of the long eighteenth century. In particular, Galt’s adaptation of the chronicle offers an alternate reading of the past in which history is not something from which society must escape, nor something uniformly primitive, but rather something to be harnessed in buttressing political systems, an expression