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De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 46 (2014)

De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 46

(2014)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Historical thought from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
Jacques Bos

Some authors claim that the first traces of modern historicism can already be found in the early modern period. This is, however, a questionable point of view. Early modern historical thought had its own specific nature, which can be described in terms of a continuous quarrel between ancients and moderns. Until the end of the eighteenth century the past was unproblematically used as a source of examples for the present. At the same time, however, several authors started to explore the distinct character of the past, and there were important developments in the field of historical method. Significant changes occurred in the way the past was approached between 1500 and 1800, but underneath these changes early modern historical thought retained the paradoxical trait of combining an appreciation of the differences between past and present with a belief in their basic similarity.

What is the past and how can we get to know it? To many of us these questions may seem examples of pointless philosophising, either because they have obvious answers or because they are fundamentally unanswerable. At some periods in history, however, these questions were vehemently contested; new answers emerged, and they mattered a lot, not just to people engaged in writing history, but to a significant part of the educated public. An example of such a period is the time around 1800, when the rise of historicism revolutionised the way Europeans approached the past. Other examples are the Renaissance and the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. In comparison with the emergence of historicism, there is less scholarly consensus about the extent to which thinking about history was really transformed in these periods. Yet, it cannot be denied that the Renaissance and the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns were highly concerned with the nature of the past, its relation to the present and the way to understand it.

When we ask what the past is and how we can know it, we are dealing with questions belonging to two different domains. The latter question is epistemological; it is about the methods with which we can obtain knowledge of the past and the way historical knowledge is to be evaluated. The first question is ontological; it is about the nature of the past and its relation to the present. The past may, for instance, be seen as fundamentally different

from the present, or basically identical with it, and the course of history may be regarded as a necessary process, or as a collection of contingent episodes. The ontological and the epistemological realm should not be regarded as completely isolated from each other; certain assumptions held in one domain may affect ideas in the other domain. A central ontological belief of historicism is, for instance, that the past is radically different from the present. When this is assumed, acquiring knowledge of the past becomes a problem; the epistemological question arises how we can say something about a past world that fundamentally differs from our present world. In the historicist answers to this question two main tendencies can be distinguished. The first approach tries to address the difficulties involved in getting to know the past by devising rigorous empirical methods. The second approach emphasises that bridging the gap between past and present is not primarily a matter of empirical research, but a matter of interpretation.1

This paper explores the development of thinking about history from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, with a view to constructing a conceptual framework for further study in this field. The scope of my analysis is broad: I intend to say something about historical thought in Europe, or perhaps more specifically in those parts of Europe intellectually shaped by the Latin tradition. In this geocultural region intellectual exchange across political boundaries was substantial, but there also was, of course, a huge variety in ways of dealing with the past. National and religious contexts were important in the creation of specific objects of memory and the formation of specific historical cultures. These differences are, however, primarily differences connected with ‘the social circulation of the past’, to use a term coined by Daniel Woolf.2 Despite the fact that they were often interested in quite different parts of the past and put historical knowledge to quite different social and political uses, on a more fundamental level Europeans had to deal with the same ontological and epistemological issues. Beneath the variety of historical cultures in Europe we find a common concern with the relation between past and present in general and with the problem of historical knowledge.

These issues will mainly be examined here by critically analysing the scholarly discussions in which they are addressed. An extensive analysis of primary material would require a book-length study instead of a journal article. Besides, the academic debate about early modern historical thought

is in need of some charting and analysis. Key episodes in the development of thinking about history, such as the Renaissance and the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, have mainly been studied in isolation, while synthesising interpretations of early modern historical thought are rare. Of course, there are notable exceptions to this rule, such as Zachary Schiffman's recent book The Birth of the Past (2011). Schiffman tries to give an integrated account of early modern thinking about history, but without a very extensive critical discussion of the views of other scholars. That seems to be typical of the state of affairs in this field: there is an abundance of analyses and perspectives, but not much of a systematic exchange of views. Furthermore, the shadow of historicism looms quite large over much work on early modern historical thought: a significant number of authors tend to regard the early modern period primarily as the prehistory of historicism, which often results in a rather problematic search for the roots of historicism in the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.

Thinking about history in the Renaissance

The shadow of historicism over the interpretation of early modern historical thought extends as far back as the Renaissance, and is possibly even stronger there than in the analysis of later developments in thinking about history. This might be the effect of another shadow looming over the field of Renaissance studies, that of Jacob Burckhardt's nineteenth-century interpretation of the Renaissance as the beginning of modernity, the birth ground of modern individualism, modern secularism and modern politics. Burckhardt did not pay much attention to Renaissance historical thought, but among later generations of Renaissance scholars there is a strong tendency to see the Renaissance attitude towards the past as one of the signs of its modernity. This typically involves an assessment of Renaissance thinking about the past as an early form of historicism, since historicism is the dominant set of beliefs about history in the modern world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A very outspoken example of this interpretation of Renaissance historical thought is Peter Burke's analysis in his small book The Renaissance Sense of the Past (1969). Although elsewhere Burke strongly rejects the Burckhardtian emphasis on the modernity of the Renaissance, he regards the Renaissance view of the past as quintessentially modern - and thus historicist - in practically all its aspects. In his opinion, Renaissance authors discovered the distinctness of the past, which made them wary of anachronistic interpretations of history. The historical methods they used mirrored this concern; Burke suggests that the Renaissance

view on historical method did not fundamentally differ from the critical approach to sources that lies at the heart of the historicist paradigm. Burke is absolutely not the only author claiming that the Renaissance perspective on the past is to be seen as historicist to all intents and purposes. In the past decades this seems to have been the dominant interpretation of Renaissance historical thought; a mass of uncritical references to Burke in many studies is a clear indication of the large scholarly consensus in this field.

That there was a renewed interest in history, and especially in the classical past, in the Renaissance is beyond dispute, but what this renewed interest in the past exactly involved is less clear. Erwin Panofsky argues that there is a fundamental difference between the medieval and the modern attitude towards classical antiquity. The Middle Ages had ‘a sense of unbroken continuity with classical antiquity’, despite being wary of its pagan nature. In the Renaissance classical antiquity came to be experienced as a distant reality, as ‘a totality cut off from the present; and, therefore, as an ideal to be longed for instead of a reality to be both utilized and feared’.3 Quentin Skinner closely follows Panofsky's analysis of the Renaissance perspective on the classical past, claiming that Renaissance authors regarded the ancient world as ‘a wholly separate culture’ to be understood ‘on its own distinctive terms’. This appreciation of the classical past involved ‘a new sense of historical distance’ that Skinner regards as ‘genuinely historical’.4

When Panofsky and Skinner assert that Renaissance authors discovered the distinctness between the classical past and the present, they are implicitly attributing a historicist point of view to the Renaissance. J.G.A. Pocock is more explicit about this, labelling the historical consciousness of the Renaissance as ‘an early form of historicism’.5 According to Pocock the Renaissance sense of historicity is closely connected with the reappraisal of political activity in the Renaissance. Since they assumed that human action was the central factor in shaping social and political life, Renaissance authors came to see the historical process as essentially contingent. Here, Pocock draws a sharp contrast with medieval thought, which tended to see history as a necessary process, ultimately shaped by God, and resulting in the redemption of man at the end of time. In The Limits of History Constantin Fasolt makes a similar claim.6 According to Fasolt, the Renaissance discovered the most

fundamental assumption of modern historical consciousness, the distinction between past and present. Underlying this discovery is the view that history is the product of time-bound human actions; therefore, the past cannot be understood in terms of the present. Just as Pocock, Fasolt emphasises the political relevance of history in the Renaissance. He even regards this political dimension of the Renaissance sense of history as the central characteristic distinguishing it from modern historicism, which focuses on the disinterested accumulation of objective historical knowledge.

The claim that the Renaissance perspective on the past was essentially historicist seems hard to maintain when we consider the degree to which Renaissance authors regarded the past as a collection of examples or parallels that could directly be applied to the present. This is what Reinhart Koselleck means when he argues that the Ciceronian dictum historia magistra vitae is the focal point of early modern historical consciousness. According to Koselleck, the early modern emphasis on the use of historical examples implies that different periods in the past can be discussed in essentially the same terms and that nothing substantially new will happen in the future. It was not before the late eighteenth century that the future came to be seen as open and unpredictable and that different eras in the past came to be regarded as fundamentally incommensurable. Koselleck describes this shift of perception of the past as a fundamental change in the experience of historical time.7 Koselleck's thesis has been elaborated upon by François Hartog, who has coined the term régimes d'historicité as an analytical tool to describe attitudes towards past, present and future in various periods and cultures. Just as Koselleck, Hartog claims that a fundamental shift in Western historical thought occurred around the end of the eighteenth century, when the idea that the past could serve as a source of examples lost its appeal.8 Strikingly, the analyses by Koselleck and Hartog of the changing conception of historical time are highly similar to Pocock's discussion of the transformation of historical consciousness in the Renaissance, even to the extent that Pocock also uses the term ‘historical time’ to explicate his views. The main difference is, of course, that Pocock observes a decisive shift around 1500, while Koselleck and Hartog regard the decades preceding 1800 as crucial.

It is not easy to establish who is right here, especially since there does not really seem to be a sustained scholarly debate in this field - the views of Pocock and Koselleck on the transformation of historical time are,

for instance, rarely discussed in conjunction. Yet, the thesis that Renaissance historical thought was already essentially historicist appears to be the weaker one, because it cannot really account for the quite unproblematic application of past examples to the present by Renaissance authors. Scholars claiming that the Renaissance discovered a fundamental difference between past and present clearly seem to be overstating their case. Does that mean, however, that we should conclude that the Renaissance attitude towards the past did not involve any appreciation of the historicity of the world at all?

There is a middle ground in this discussion, describing Renaissance historical thought as historicist in some respects, though nevertheless fundamentally different from modern historicism. This is, in a nutshell, the position defended by Schiffman in The Birth of the Past. Schiffman emphasises the importance of the emerging awareness of anachronism in the Renaissance for the development of a view of the past as distinct from the present, but describes the Renaissance sense of anachronism as ‘local’. This means that it only involved an awareness of the specific differences between the present and the classical past, without paying attention to historical relativity in general. At the same time, however, Schiffman argues that the Renaissance regarded the past as a ‘living past’, to be used as an example for the present.9 In the end, Schiffman seems to regard the historical consciousness of the Renaissance as a paradoxical phenomenon, involving both a sense of difference between past and present and a sense of similarity that makes it possible to use the past as a source of examples for the present.

Ronald Witt also emphasises the contradictions in Renaissance historical thought. One of the most important effects of the humanist engagement with classical texts is, according to Witt, the rise of a new sense of temporality, the core of which is already visible before Petrarch. The central element in this new conception of time is a form of perspectivism, which means that authors orient themselves temporally by relating past events to their own position in time. The Renaissance perception of time remains, however, caught in a tension between, on the one hand, the idea of a temporal distance between the ancient past and the present, and, on the other hand, the assimilation of the ancient past as an example that is to be imitated. Witt claims that around 1400 the humanist sense of temporality became more pronounced; classical texts ‘gradually assumed the appearance of historical artefacts’, which involved a growing awareness of anachronism. Yet, the Renaissance sense of

the past did not lose its paradoxical nature. As Witt puts it, the effort to imitate ancient authors entailed ‘cultivating a complex, almost oxymoronic sense of accessibility and historical distance’. The intensified historical awareness of the fifteenth century ‘initially nourished a buoyant confidence in the power of human reason, informed by knowledge of the past, to construct the future’.10 This analysis of fifteenth-century historical thought echoes Koselleck's view that early modern historical thought regarded past, present and future as one continuous space. Witt subsequently points out that early sixteenth-century Italian authors, such as Machiavelli, had a less optimistic view on the possibility of rationally shaping the future. Although Witt does not explicitly draw this conclusion, his observation suggests that the decisive shift in thinking about the past might not have occurred around 1400, but later, in the early sixteenth century.

Elsewhere I have argued that the historical work of Machiavelli and Guicciardini is strongly informed by a sense of rupture caused by the disastrous political events taking place in Italy in their days.11 Yet, although we can observe a greater sense of historical distance in the works of Machiavelli and Guicciardini than in the writings of their predecessors, we do not see a historicist dismissal of the idea that the past can be used as a source of examples for the present. Especially Machiavelli tends to regard past and present as a continuous space in which actions and events can be described in the same terms without significant contextualisation. In the Discourses he explicitly defends the use of the classical past as a source of inspiration for the present, arguing that the amount of virtue and vice in past and present is essentially the same and that men act on the basis of essentially the same passions, despite the fact that changing customs create the impression that there are substantial differences between past and present. Guicciardini is more hesitant about the use of past examples, even criticising his friend Machiavelli for endlessly talking about the Romans.12 If we would want to point out an example of a more or less historicist point of view in Renaissance historiography, Guicciardini would be one of the first authors to take into consideration, also because of his interest in historical method. Yet, in many respects Guicciardini remains quite a traditional Renaissance historian, who may be critical of Machiavelli's use of Roman examples, but does not reject the use of the past as an example for the

present on principle.13

In his recent (2013) book on the concept of historical distance Mark Phillips also indicates that Machiavelli and Guicciardini appear to have a different kind of relation to the past. To Machiavelli, the past is not a distant phenomenon, but quite an unproblematic source of parallels and examples to acquire knowledge about political life. In Guicciardini's work, on the other hand, Phillips observes a rather strong sense of distance between past and present. In the end, Phillips explains the contrast between Machiavelli and Guicciardini as an effect of a difference in personal temperament.14 To some, such an explanation on the basis of personal characteristics and preferences might seem somewhat unsatisfactory, but it might also be hard to make sense of the contrast between Machiavelli and Guicciardini in another way. Anyhow, it is important to note that awareness of historical distance and of the distinct character of the past became an intellectual option in the sixteenth century, though not a widely shared attitude. In some passages in his work, Machiavelli too seems to consider the possibility that past and present are fundamentally distinct, but only to discard it.

The varieties of historical method in the early modern period: philology, antiquarianism, and the analytics of history

The views on Renaissance historical thought discussed in the previous section mainly deal with ontological assumptions about the nature of the past in works of traditional historiography, dealing with political events. There were, however, also other forms of engagement with the past in early modern Europe, such as philology, antiquarianism and legal history. Characteristically, the most significant early modern innovations of what we would call historical method occurred in these fields, and not in traditional historiography. Probably the most frequently mentioned example of the impact of applying new methods to examine the past is Lorenzo Valla's unmasking of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery. Valla's arguments were primarily philological: he showed that the document in which emperor Constantine granted worldly authority to the Pope could not possibly have been written in the fourth century, because the Latin used in the text was of a later date. Humanist philology is often credited with discovering the historical relativity of language, connecting differences in grammar and style with different contexts. Janet Coleman has convincingly

argued, however, that in essence this idea was already present in the nominalist philosophies of the Middle Ages.15 Yet, the range of its applications and its critical force seem to be much larger in the Renaissance, as is shown by Valla's example, and by the historical acumen present in the work of other philologists. In numerous books Anthony Grafton has shown how humanist textual analysis was the foundation for significant advances in historical scholarship in the early modern period.16 Grafton does not just discuss the role of philology in the Italian Renaissance, but also draws attention to the work of later authors working in northern Europe, such as Joseph Scaliger. Scaliger, a French scholar who became professor at the newly founded University of Leiden in the late sixteenth century, revolutionised the science of chronology by employing critical philological methods to establish the exact date of historical events.17

In the 1970s Donald Kelley published a study on the historical approach to Roman law by sixteenth-century French humanist scholars. By applying philological methods to the text of the Corpus iuris civilis these scholars came to the conclusion that Roman law was not a timeless and universal legal system, but the product of a specific historical context. Kelley claims that this insight implied an appreciation of historical relativity that is usually assumed not to have emerged before the nineteenth century. Thus, French philological scholarship inaugurated ‘the first stage of European historicism’.18 A related thesis is defended by George Huppert, who argues that sixteenth-century French historians developed the techniques that ‘provided the foundation upon which modern historical scholarship was built’ and had a ‘historical-mindedness’ that could be described as historicist.19 Nevertheless, it should be noted that the humanist legal scholars studied by Kelley never really doubted the relevance of Roman law for their own time. Similarly, the historians studied by Huppert continued to emphasise that historical knowledge should have a philosophical application in the present. Therefore, it is highly questionable whether the application of philological methods to the study of history in sixteenth-century France can be said to have undermined the ontological assumption of a basic similarity between past and present.

Arnaldo Momigliano has played a decisive role in turning scholarly attention to the antiquarian tradition. Early modern antiquarians studied relics from the past, such as archaeological monuments, inscriptions, statues

and coins. According to Momigliano, the difference between historians and antiquarians is that the first write in a chronological order and try to explain certain events or situations, while antiquarians write in a systematic order and try to discuss all items connected with a certain subject. There already existed an antiquarian tradition in classical antiquity; an important author was Varro, who systematically charted all the aspects of Roman life in the past. In the Middle Ages archaeological remains and inscriptions continued to be noticed and studied, but the Varronian ideal of a systematic survey of all aspects of a civilization no longer existed. It was revived in the Renaissance, for instance in the work of Flavio Biondo, who tried to evoke a comprehensive image of ancient Rome by studying its ruins, until then largely ignored. While Renaissance antiquarians were actively engaged in uncovering new sources of historical knowledge, historians of the time did not question the truth and completeness of the classical historical works that served as an example to them. History was mainly aimed at commenting on classical authorities such as Livy and Tacitus, not on trying to replace their accounts of the past with better ones.20

Momigliano claims that the early modern antiquarian tradition was of pivotal importance for the development of modern historical methods - and thus for the rise of modern historiography. More than traditional historians, antiquarians were capable of resisting the challenge of historical pyrrhonism. This term indicates a fundamental scepticism concerning historical knowledge that started to emerge in the late seventeenth century. Antiquarians had developed a set of techniques for the critical analysis of non-literary evidence that were highly useful to counter this scepticism. These techniques, together with philological methods, were the basis for Mabillon's De re diplomatica, which quickly after its publication in 1681 became an authoritative manual for the study of documentary evidence. From the late seventeenth century onwards, as a way of countering historical pyrrhonism, historians increasingly turned to the methods and objects of antiquarianism to establish historical truth. The so-called auxiliary sciences of history started to develop on an antiquarian foundation.21 It should be noted, however, that this fusion of history and antiquarianism was not a development that immediately and irrevocably transformed European historical writing. Especially in France, Enlightened historians tended to be quite critical of the use of antiquarian

erudition in understanding the past, regarding it as an approach focusing on mostly irrelevant details. Blandine Kriegel even speaks about ‘la défaite de l'érudition’ in eighteenth-century France.22 Yet, the antinomy between Enlightened historical analysis and antiquarian erudition was not inevitable. The most notable illustration of this fact is Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which combines an Enlightened perspective on history with a meticulous use of primary source, rooted in the antiquarian tradition.23

What was definitely not a foundation for the emergence of a critical engagement with textual and material sources was the genre of texts known as artes historicae, which emerged in the sixteenth century and gained a significant popularity, to fade away again at the end of the seventeenth century. Although the term ars historicae suggests that we are dealing with manuals of historical method, these texts are mainly about the uses of history and the rhetorical techniques involved in historical writing. The explanation of classical precepts played an important role in the genre - most notably Cicero's historia magistra vitae. In a way, the genre of the ars historica can be said to elaborate on the principles of traditional historiography, which was mainly interested in the exemplary function of the past and was not too concerned with critical methods. As Anthony Grafton has pointed out in a recent book about the genre, around 1700 it quickly lost its appeal. Grafton is not very explicit about the causes of this development, but by contrasting the traditional artes historicae with the new critical methods of philology and antiquarianism he suggests that the latter won the plea.24

Yet, some texts belonging to the tradition of the artes historicae are more than merely a repetition of classical commonplaces. In the French artes historicae of the later sixteenth century we also find explorations of the nature of historical knowledge and efforts to develop methods of establishing historical truth by critically analysing sources. Jean Bodin's Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566), one of the most widely read treatises in the genre of the ars historica, is an attempt to organise historical knowledge in a systematic fashion, along the lines of Petrus Ramus's schematic arrangement of knowledge in general. Typical of Bodin's approach is, for instance, the idea that the history of a nation can be explained on the basis of its character, which,

in its turn, strongly depends on environmental circumstances.25 Authors such as Kelley and Huppert have interpreted Bodin's approach to history as an early form of historicism, discovering the specific and distinct character of the past by applying philological methods. Yet, this does not seem to be an accurate view of what Bodin is doing. I would suggest describing his perspective on the past as an ‘analytics of history’, which approaches phenomena in the past by systematically comparing them with and relating them to other phenomena.

In the eighteenth century Montesquieu turned to the past in a manner that is quite comparable to Bodin's analytics of history. According to Schiffman, Montesquieu brought about a revolution in historical thought by applying the analytical methods of seventeenth-century science and philosophy to the study of the past. As a result, Schiffman claims, it became possible to speak of the past as radically distinct from the present.26 This is, however, a rather questionable claim. In the first place, it fails to recognise the undeniable continuity between Bodin and Montesquieu, who not only have a very similar analytical approach to the past, but even say comparable things about, for instance, the role of national character in history. It is hard to see the fundamental difference between an analytics of history on a Ramist foundation and one based on the new science and philosophy of the seventeenth century.

Ancients and moderns

The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns is much less part of the prevailing narrative of the development of historical consciousness than the Renaissance or the years around 1800. This might be explained by the fact that the Quarrel was in the first place a literary dispute, which puts it beyond the horizon of most historians of historiography. Furthermore, it was not concerned with methods of historical research. Instead, the dispute was mainly ontological, addressing the extent to which classical literature could be regarded as exemplary, and thus exploring the nature of the relation between past and present. It is because of this that the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns could be seen as a crucial episode in the development of European historical thought, rethinking the central points of the debate on the past of the Renaissance, while preparing the ground for certain key aspects of Enlightenment thought.

In older scholarly literature, the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns - and its British counterpart, known as the Battle of the Books -

tended to be interpreted as a victory for the perspective of the Moderns.27 The basic argument of the Moderns was that classical literature could not unequivocally be used as a model for present-day literature, because the social and cultural environment of the present was fundamentally different from that of the past. They attributed this difference to factors such as the rise of modern science and the development of more rational forms of government than existed in the ancient world. Because of these distinctive features the present age could even be seen as superior to the classical past. According to the traditional interpretation of the Quarrel, this argument of the Moderns gave rise to a sense of historical distance that did not exist before. Their view that the present was better than the past developed into one of the central tenets of Enlightenment thought, the idea that the historical process was essentially progressive. Thus, the conventional understanding of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns turns it into an intermediate stage in a Whig account of the development of modern historical consciousness. Whereas the Renaissance hesitantly discovered anachronism, the Moderns in the Quarrel discovered a more fundamental distinction between the past and the present, but without holding the historicist view that the past is so radically different from the present that it can only be understood in its own terms. Just as their intellectual successors in the Enlightenment, the Moderns evaluated the past with the norms and values of the present - a perspective explicitly rejected by nineteenth-century historicists.

More recent discussions of the Quarrel are less one-dimensional than the traditional interpretation. In The Shock of the Ancient (2011) Larry Norman emphasises that the positions of the Ancients and the Moderns in the Quarrel were in reality not as clear-cut as usually assumed. Norman agrees with the conventional view of the Quarrel that developments such as the rise of modern science and modern forms of government brought about a sense of distance between past and present. Furthermore, and this is not a novel analysis either, he points to the engagement with the classical world of Renaissance humanism and the discovery of the Americas as reasons why authors in the late seventeenth century came to see the classical past as different from the present. Norman does not, however, attribute this new sense of historical distance exclusively to the party of the Moderns. In his opinion, the Ancients were just as aware of the distance between the present and the classical past as the Moderns, but drew different conclusions from this awareness. Unlike the

Moderns, the Ancients did not reject the use of classical literary models in the present. According to the traditional interpretation of the Quarrel, this view was rooted in an ahistorical perception of the classical past and the present as being essentially similar. Norman, however, shows that the Ancients' emphasis on the exemplary character of classical literature was strongly driven by their sensitivity to its otherness. Still, this otherness could not be so radical as to preclude all understanding of the ancient past. As Norman puts it, the perspective of the Ancients presupposes that classical works of literature ‘must be at the same time alien enough to provide alternative models, and yet relevant enough to provide at least partially accessible models’.28

This description of the Ancients' attitude towards the classical past does not seem to differ much from the analysis earlier in this article of the paradoxical nature of the Renaissance sense of the past. That would point to a significant continuity between the Renaissance and the Quarrel. In the 1950s Hans Baron already drew attention to this continuity, in an article in which he described the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns as ‘a problem for Renaissance scholarship’.29 More recently, Marc Fumaroli has also emphasised the continuity between the Renaissance and the Quarrel.30 According to Baron and Fumaroli, the relation between the classical past and the modern world was already disputed in the Italian Renaissance, and this dispute continued in the early seventeenth century, both in Italy and in France.31 Seen from this perspective, the Quarrel is rather an episode in an ongoing debate than a unique and radical shift in the perception of the past, contrary to both the traditional interpretation of the Quarrel and Norman's revisionist view.

Norman acknowledges that there is some truth to the reading of the Quarrel as ‘one in a series in which ancient and modern are variants whose meaning is to be assigned according to the historical situation in question’.32 In his opinion, the late seventeenth century should nevertheless be seen as an exceptional period of rupture and transition because of its intense engagement with questions of historical identity and otherness. In Norman's account, what ultimately seems to distinguish the attitude towards the past of the Quarrel - both among Ancients and Moderns - from that of the Renaissance is the kind of experience involved in it. In the late seventeenth century the ancient

past began to be experienced as alienatingly strange; historical consciousness was shaped by a ‘shock of the ancient’ that the Renaissance did not know in a comparably penetrating form. Furthermore, the idea of the classical past in the Quarrel was more historically differentiated than in the Renaissance. This is, according to Norman, ‘the true interest’ of the Quarrel. Partially because of the idea of the Moderns that the historical process should be seen as progressive, distinctions began to be made between the more ‘primitive’ Homeric age, and the more ‘modern’ eras of classical Athens and especially imperial Rome. The Moderns frequently identified the Augustan age as the most modern period of the ancient world, drawing parallels between the reign of Augustus and that of Louis XIV. For the Ancients, the Homeric period was fascinatingly different. Anne Dacier, translator of Homer and prominent polemicist in the party of the Ancients, clearly expressed the nature of this fascination when she wrote: ‘I find those ancient times all the more beautiful in that they so little resemble our own’.33

Rethinking the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns might also affect our understanding of the attitude towards the past of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment sense of the past has long been interpreted in the negative light shed over it by nineteenth-century historicism. The proponents of historicism in the nineteenth century condemned the historical writing of their Enlightenment predecessors for explicitly judging the past from the perspective of the present and not understanding it in its own terms. In a sense, the traditional interpretation of the Quarrel complements the historicist critique of the Enlightenment. The failure of Enlightenment historians to understand the past in its own terms could be explained by their view, inherited from the Moderns in the Quarrel, that the historical process is essentially progressive. Since the present is supposed to be better than the past, especially in the sense of being more rational, it can serve as a legitimate starting point for evaluating the past. In an extreme version of this view, the Enlightenment becomes an utterly ahistorical age, lacking even the most elementary form of historical consciousness.

This one-dimensional interpretation of Enlightenment historical thought has increasingly been criticised. On the one hand, students of historicism have dismissed the caricatural image of the Enlightenment as a fundamentally ahistorical era, pointing out that nineteenth-century historicism is rooted in the methods and standards of eighteenth-century historical

writing.34 On the other hand, the view of Enlightenment thought as exclusively or primarily a celebration of modernity has been questioned as well. In a substantial stream of studies published in the last few years the role of antiquity in Enlightenment thought has been reappraised.35 Besides, rethinking the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns also compels us to reconsider its connection to the Enlightenment. Marc Fumaroli not only sketches the prehistory of the Quarrel in the Renaissance and the early seventeenth century, but also the continuing concern with the relation between the ancient and the modern world until the end of the eighteenth century. In the middle of the eighteenth century Fumaroli observes a ‘return to antiquity’, especially in the field of aesthetics. Winckelmann's classicism is perhaps the best known example of this development, but Fumaroli shows that many more authors and artists rediscovered antiquity and opposed it to the flaws they perceived in the modern world.36 An enigmatic author such as Vico could also be understood much better by connecting his thought with the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. In Isaiah Berlin's influential reading Vico is an early historicist, whose views seemingly come up from nowhere.37 This reading overlooks, however, that in creating his ‘new science’ Vico was directly responding to issues raised in the Quarrel.38 In Dan Edelstein's recent (2011) interpretation of the Enlightenment the Quarrel occupies a central place, as ‘the catalyst that precipitated the Enlightenment narrative’.39 According to Edelstein, who rather traditionally focuses on France in his account of the Enlightenment, the Quarrel provided the philosophes with a conceptual framework to think about knowledge, history, politics, religion and society, and to reflect on their own position in the history of thought. This did not mean, however, that their debates were still shaped by the partisan distinction between Ancients and Moderns. The philosophes praised modernity, but did not hesitate to use classical authors to underpin their own views and to extol the intellectual virtues of antiquity.

Conclusion and outlook

On the basis of the preceding analysis of the scholarly debate on the development of historical thought from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

several conclusions can be drawn. These conclusions should not be seen as merely summarising the results of scholarly work done in the past. In my opinion, they could also serve as a conceptual framework for further research. Taking this framework into account might clarify some conceptual mistakes and confusions, and will hopefully result in new questions and perspectives. I started this article by making a distinction between the ontological and the methodological dimension of historical thought. Although there might be important interrelations between these two dimensions, they are not necessarily connected. Carefully distinguishing ontological and methodological issues will help us to avoid rash and confused analyses. Illustrative of what can go wrong in this respect is the way Kelley and Huppert conclude that sixteenth-century French humanists held early historicist views because of their use of philological methods. Of course, the use of philological methods might induce a certain awareness of anachronism, but it need not and does not result in a historicist awareness of the fundamental difference between past and present. In a similar vein, Schiffman concludes on the basis of Montesquieu's method of historical analysis - which might not even be as novel as he claims - that Montesquieu was a key figure in the ontological discovery of the past. Speaking from a more general perspective, there is much more continuity between the philological and antiquarian methods of the early modern period and the methods of historical research of the nineteenth century than between early modern and historicist ontological assumptions. We should not conclude from continuity in the one field that there is continuity in the other field as well.

Looking at early modern ideas about the relation between the past and the present, it does not make sense to speak of a decisive breakthrough of a historicist conception of this relation at any moment before the end of the eighteenth century. As we have seen, characterising Renaissance historical thought as an early form of historicism is highly problematic. It is much more useful to approach Renaissance debates about the relation between past and present as an exploration of the relation between ancients and moderns. This would explain the paradoxical nature of the Renaissance sense of the past and of historical time, which is not only visible within the work of individual Renaissance authors, but also in the unresolved discussion between Machiavelli and Guicciardini about the use of the model of Rome. There is much truth in Baron's thesis that the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns should be seen as a problem for Renaissance scholarship. It would make a lot of sense to regard the Quarrel as a problem for Enlightenment scholarship too. Edelstein's

recent reinterpretation of the Enlightenment illustrates this point quite clearly.

The conclusion emerging from these observations is that early modern historical thought can best be characterised as a continuous quarrel between ancients and moderns. This conclusion points both to an important continuity within the early modern period and to discontinuity with the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. The comparison between ancients and moderns already existed as a rhetorical topos in antiquity and in the Middle Ages,40 but it did not involve the paradoxical perception of the past as both similar and distinct characteristic of the early modern period. When classical and medieval authors asserted that the past was superior to the present, they assumed an unproblematic space of comparison. The past was, so to say, immediately present. In the nineteenth century, after the rise of historicism, the opposite was the case: the early modern quarrel between ancients and moderns had lost its meaning, because the past was regarded as fundamentally absent, as unquestionably and completely distinct from the present.

This point of view concurs with Koselleck's analysis that the modern conception of historical time, centred around the difference between past and present, did not emerge before the late eighteenth century. Koselleck also emphasises the specificity of the early modern period, though in a different manner than I do in this paper. According to Koselleck, the main difference between the Middle Ages and the early modern period is that the former had a Christian eschatological conception of historical time, which gradually disappeared between the late fifteenth and mid seventeenth century, to be replaced by a rational prognosis of political developments and a philosophical view of the historical process. Yet, Koselleck argues that this did not yet involve a fundamental rupture with the Christian perspective, which was characterised by an intimate connection between past and future. In early modern historical thought past and future were not radically separated either, because the future was predicted in terms of what had happened in the past.41 In the end, Koselleck seems to regard the development of historical thought in early modern Europe as a linear process of modernisation, decisively accelerating at the end of the eighteenth century. What I would like to emphasise, on the other hand, is the essentially paradoxical and inconclusive nature of early modern thinking about history.

Of course, analysing early modern historical thought as a continuous

quarrel between ancients and moderns does not mean that there were no significant changes and transformations in the way the past was perceived. There are definitely differences between the Renaissance, the Quarrel of the late seventeenth century and the Enlightenment; the latter two should not be regarded as the mere afterlife of the Renaissance. This leaves us with many questions to answer and hypotheses to test. Is, for instance, Norman right when he claims that the historical differentiation within the classical past is the crucial innovation of the Quarrel? Or should we seek the difference between the Quarrel and in the Renaissance in the intense ‘shock of the ancient’ that authors in the Quarrel claimed to experience, unlike their Renaissance predecessors? And what does it mean that the Quarrel is barely concerned with ways of knowing the past, while philological and antiquarian methods went through a significant development in the late seventeenth century? It might also be the case that there was more at stake in the Quarrel than just the relation between past and present. According to Joan DeJean, the Quarrel was a profound intellectual crisis, in which ideas about literature, culture and identity were violently contested, not unlike the culture wars of the late twentieth century.42 Similar questions can be asked about the Enlightenment and its approach to the past. Edelstein rightly points out that Enlightenment thought was shaped by the problems raised in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, but the idea of the distinctness of the past nevertheless does not play a major role in his analysis. Instead, he regards the redescription of the present as a modern epoch and the expectation of an even brighter future as central aspects of the Enlightened view of the historical process.43 This did not preclude an appreciation of the classical past, which was usually seen as an early period of intellectual flourishing. In the end, Edelstein's interpretation of the historical thought of the Enlightenment remains fairly traditional, centred around the modernisation narrative of the philosophes. Rather than emphasising the paradoxical dialectic between the ancient and the modern, between the distinctness and the similarity of the past, Edelstein resolves this tension in an account of historical progress that mirrors the self-description of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, the epistemological dimension of the Enlightenment perspective on the past remains largely out of sight in Edelstein's analysis.

A topic that I have not discussed in this paper is the specific use made

of the past in various political or religious contexts. In general, early modern Europeans regarded the study of the past as morally and politically useful. This is in line with their ontological view of the past as somehow similar to the present, despite their awareness of historical difference and historical distance. Moreover, early modern historical epistemology often involved a sense of practical application, quite distinct from the historicist ideal of a disinterested accumulation of objective historical knowledge. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, for instance, antiquarian and philological methods were frequently used to defend religious beliefs and practices and to legitimate political power by anchoring them in the past.44 The relation between the ontological and epistemological assumptions in early modern historical thought and the social circumstances in which they emerged is a topic that definitely deserves further research. In The Social Circulation of the Past (2003) Daniel Woolf argues that in England in the course of the seventeenth century the past became a ‘socially circulated commodity’; this means that much more historical knowledge was disseminated among many more people. According to Woolf, the effect of this development was a marked shift in the ontological view about the nature of the past. In the sixteenth century the past was regarded as a collection of separate events, connected by relations of analogy. After 1700, the past was seen as a process, in which events were connected in causal chains. This also involved a stronger awareness of the difference between past and present, although the past remained ‘a boundless sea from which could be fished limitless examples for imitation’.45 Thus, the result of Woolf's social analysis of historical knowledge is very comparable to the view defended in this paper that early modern historical thought should be seen as a paradoxical phenomenon, combining an appreciation of the differences between past and present with a belief in their basic similarity.

About the author:

Jacques Bos (1971) studied history, political science and philosophy at the University of Leiden. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the same university. He teaches philosophy of science (with an emphasis on the humanities and the social sciences) and history of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. His main research interests are the history of historical thought and the history of ideas on the self, especially in the early modern period. Email: j.bos@uva.nl.

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