Description
Book SynopsisFeaturing a foreword by the eminent historian Anthony Grafton, this fascinating book draws upon a diverse range of sources-ancient histories, medieval theology, Renaissance art, literature, legal thought, and early modern mathematics and social science-to uncover the meaning of the past and its relationship to the present.
Trade ReviewComplex and erudite, confident and controversial. As Schiffman's brilliant argument suggests, anachronism not only helps define the past but becomes its doppelganger. Times Literary Supplement Lively, brilliant, and erudite. [Schiffman's] learned and engaging style [and] fresh, stimulating ideas provide a intellectual feast not only for students of Western civilization, but for those of us seeking to understand other traditions. Essential. Choice This ambitious, lucid book chronicles European methods of imagining and representing the past from the ancient Greeks to the French Enlightenment. Schiffman provides a masterful account of the emergence of modern notions of historical causation that begins with Thucydides and ends more than two thousand years later with Montesquieu and Herder. Sixteenth Century Journal Anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, or the history of historiography for that matter, will find that this book repays close attention. Reviews in History Thought-provoking. History Wire - Where the Past Comes Alive This is an important book, and deserves to be widely read. The Sun News Network Schiffman has given us a 'historiographical essay' by his own admission, and an excellent one at that: not the whole truth, but, more valuably, a new foothold for serious engagement. -- Anthony Ossa-Richardson Intellectual History Review It is refreshing to read a book with a clear, even bold, thesis that forces readers to reexamine the authority and applicability of basic historical concepts... The strength of this engaging study is not simply that it historicizes and thus defamiliarizes what passes for common sense in the present but also that it reconstructs what had been regarded as common sense in previous epochs in the Western tradition, from antiquity to the Christian era, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Journal of Modern History
Table of ContentsForeword, by Anthony Grafton
Gestation
Introduction The Past Defined
part one
Antiquity
Flatland
Pasts Present
The Herodotean Achievement
Thucydides and the Refashionings
Linear Time
Hellenistic Innovations
part two
Christianity
Can't Get Here from There
The Power of Prayer
Breakthrough to the Now
The Idea of the Sæculum
The Sæculum Reconfigured
Gregory of Tours and the Sæculum
Back from the Future
part three
Renaissance
The Living Past
The Birth of Anachronism
Petrarch's "Copernican Leap"
The Commonplace View of the World
Jean Bodin and the Unity of History
part four
Enlightenment
Presence and Distance
Biography as a Form of History
The Politics of History
The Relations of Truth / The Truth of Relations
Montesquieu and the Relations of Things
The Past Emerges
Epilogue The Past Historicized
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
