What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe [Anglais] [Broché]

When the late Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield proposed "whether it would not be worth while to dig deeper in our quest for `origins," he opened the door to the antecedents of Niebuhr and Ranke to reveal the powerful influences of Gatterer, Schlözer and Rühs. Through his study of the Göttengen School of History, Butterfield rescued these eighteenth-century philosophic historians from the charge of being "essentially unhistorical." In this way, Butterfield pushed back the accepted origins of modern scientific historical writing a full century: from the middle of the nineteenth century to that of the eighteenth. It's no coincidence, then, that Anthony Grafton, in his book What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe, has used a similar formula to push the discipline's origins back even further--indeed to show how Gatterer, Schlözer and Rühs were in fact standing on the shoulders of Baudouin, Bodin and Patrizi.

In What Was History?, Grafton's most recent edition to a lifetime of work on Early Modern European historical scholarship, he explores the boundaries of the Ars Historica--a unique period in the development of form and source criticism roughly corresponding to the two centuries between 1500 and 1700. By way of an examination of the individual practitioners of the historical arts--their methods, motives, and bee-infested bonnets--Grafton demonstrates how this genre represents a clear departure from the classical commitment to florilegium and exempla that was so common in previous centuries. Before this genre, traditional humanist had been content to view history as the sum of its desiccated chunks and cautionary tales. Curtius, Tacitus, and Polybius were invaluable to these humanists as stylistically kempt, elegantly witty examples of rhetorical excellence, not for the geographic or chronological exactitude they lacked. The errors in the works of these great men--products of closely followed ancient sources--were to be expected, and detracted little from their overall elegance.

To practitioners of the ars historica, however, the fact that these errors existed warranted the development of specific methods for reading the past. They emphasized the need to comprehensively distinguish between primary and secondary sources. They developed a hermeneutical discipline, anchored to that critical distinction, which emphasized sets of rules and guidelines for reading history. In a way that continues to appeal to modern sensibilities, these men "insisted that history could not be found in any single narrative, but must be reconstructed by collecting all the information yielded by all potentially relevant sources." In this way, people like Bodin, Patrizi and Reineck showed readers how to weave these tales and examples into a fabric that emphasized causation over the cautionary, made polish secondary to process.

Grafton explores the emergence of this genre through the work and personality of François Baudouin (1520-73). A jurist by profession, he exemplifies the connection between the appearance of the ars historica and "a new humanistic approach to Roman Law"--an approach based on a re-division of the Corpus into its concentric parts according to their respective periods of origin. He was not simply concerned with what decisions the individual Emperors had made; rather, his over-arching concern was with the circumstances surrounding and directing these decisions. Thus, Baudouin perceptively drew a connection between varying types of laws and corresponding variations in historical context.

Baudouin spoke of producing a historia integra that necessarily should combine the study of ancient historians with the study of geography and chronology. It had to include oral histories as well as travelers' accounts; textual evidence along with material evidence; ecclesiastical history as well as political, martial and barbarian histories. As Grafton explains, the ars historica was "cosmopolitan." It developed out of the "intellectual crossroads laid out on coordinates drawn from both the humanistic and the legal traditions" where "antiquarianism intersected with ecclesiastical history, both collided with law, and all of them in turn experienced the shock of the new as travelers described unknown worlds to the east and, even more surprising, the west."

Grafton's mastery of the pertinent sources (no doubt the result of years spent completing his two-volume work on Joseph Scaliger) allows him to reduce the erudite philological contortions of these historians to manageable intellectual biographies that render them both refreshingly approachable and shockingly modern. He effortlessly guides the reader through the genealogies of Reineck, the skepticism of Patrizi, and the "radical modernity" of Bodin. In one prototypical example, he demonstrates how Jean Bodin used common sense along with contemporary illustrations and metaphors to discredit the related notions of a golden age and Daniel's four empires. Why should all the world's great empires be reduced to only four divinely inspired ones, he asked. And why should the glory of ages past relegate the demonstrably superior inventions of modern times to an inferior position? To believe such things required a "willful refusal to look up from one's desk and examine the world as it was, Bodin argued."

By deconstructing the history according to Daniel and encouraging the incorporation of unorthodox information into the study of history, Bodin and Baudouin, whether they recognized it or not, stumbled across something both new and grand: a sense of progress. Through the study of law, they both recognized the utility of historical contextualization. By observing contemporary examples of innovation and social organization, Bodin disposed of the notion of a golden age as an illusion akin to old men waxing nostalgia over the times of their youth. And by incorporating travel writing and the observations of new-found cultures across the seas, Baudouin could make comparisons between ancient Europeans and stone-age peoples in the Americas. The ars historica these thinkers espoused "offered nothing less than a reevaluation and reconfiguration of time itself," one that "opened up the possibility that human enterprise was changing and improving the world."

In Grafton's explanation of the "death of the genre," he attempts to find the answer to how later historians like Gatterer and Heyne were blind to the seemingly obvious connection between their methods and those of the artes historicae. Grafton's conclusion is that the ars historica collapsed from the twin pressures of external overload and internal strain. By external overload Grafton means that the discipline, itself only a "part of a much larger effort to master and use the floods of information pouring into Europe from travelers, navigators, and missionaries," was simply unable to cope with the growing mass of information. The explosion of marmoreal narratives, pamphlets, corantoes, and broadsheets that "scampered like mice around the feet of the vast official and critical narratives, offering subversively entertaining accounts of battles, reports or monsters, and gossip about the private lives of the good and the great" was simply too vast for the techniques of the ars historica to control and organize. The methods of Bodin and Baudouin were, therefore, simply made obsolete.

By internal strain Grafton means that the genre--in his estimation apparently a mere unrefined step toward a more fully developed form of historical speculation--collapsed due to an innate inability to mange the delicate balance between the present and the past. All of the most prominent actors in this movement, Patrizi, Bodin, and Baudouin, encouraged the readers of history to "embrace the known world in all its immense variety;" yet they neglected to provide the tools to do so effectively. As Keckermann and others noted, the notebook method championed by Bodin did little to help readers flesh out the various historical processes he thought were so important. Vast collections of examples did not facilitate the recognition of connections between historical examples and practical application. In Keckermann's opinion, Bodin's methods were lopsided; he "had paid too much attention to the judgment of his examples, far too little to the method for storing them." The claim made by the practitioners of the ars historica that they could manage the delicate balance "between practical application and pure historicism," was showing itself to be demonstrably false. Furthermore, the artes historicae tradition was methodologically incapable of coping with the dynamic theological conflict between a previously acceptable form of Catholic biblical exegesis and a new protestant literalism promoted by Buxtorf and Quenstedt. The fires of these controversies forged new and increasingly more sophisticated devices for evaluating primary sources. The development of "elaborate formal manuals of diplomatics, palaeography, [and] numismatics" represents a "sea change in historical method," and effectively and unfairly relegated the methods of the artes historicae to the level of antiquarians and chroniclers.

A century and a half after the deaths of Reineck, Bodin and Patrizi, historians had all but forgotten their many achievements. Bodin would likely have been surprised by the similarity between the methods advocated by Heyne as original and those Bodin himself developed over a hundred and fifty years earlier. Yet if Bodin would have been shocked by this, he surely would have been perplexed after hearing Bolingbroke characterize his work as "a huge common-place book" with little useful information for the modern reader. Bodin simply could not have anticipated the dynamic political upheavals that surrounded and altered the discipline during the years between his death and the careers of Bolingbroke or Heyne. Neither Gatterer nor Heyne were able to see through the "genuine novelty" of their projects to recognize the continuity between them and the writers and practitioners of the ars historica. As Professor Butterfield so aptly put it, "one of the paradoxes in the history of historical method is the fact that sometimes the world learns a lesson and then forgets it, so that the same experience has to be gone through more than once." And, as Grafton has so cleverly demonstrated, this surely seems to be a case with the ars historica.