Defamiliarizing The Past

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." The famous opening line of L.P. Hartley's novel, The Go-Between, has come to epitomize our sense of anachronism, of the difference between past and present. The modern study of history teaches us to respect this difference; it seeks to make us good travelers, ever mindful of the manners and mores of the places we visit. To be gauche tourists—noisily judging everything by the standards "back home"— would be as unpardonable for travelers in time as it is for travelers in space. This desire to behave appropriately (as it were) orients us in time. No matter how remote or exotic the locales we visit, we always maintain our bearings and our composure. We may not know exactly where we are going, but we trust our sense of anachronism to lead us to interesting destinations.

Might there be something just a tad smug about this attitude of ours? While I don't deny the benefits of time travel, I have begun to wonder whether the compass of anachronism and the composure it affords actually serve to limit our vista. Indeed, I have begun to suspect that there is an anachronism underlying our sense of anachronism. By this statement I do not mean that all views of the past are anachronistic; of course they are, otherwise each generation would not be able to write history afresh. Rather, I question our conviction that a sense of the difference between past and present is "right" and "proper," that it is commonsensical. Perhaps the time has come for us to examine this assumption and, thereby, to see the world through fresh eyes.

The gratuitousness of our assumption becomes apparent when we examine the history of the idea of anachronism. Ever since the publication of Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy over 150 years ago, the emergence of a sense of anachronism has been widely regarded as one of the defining features of the Renaissance. Burckhardt's famous thesis about "the development of the individual" concerns not only the flourishing of distinctive personalities (des Individuums) but also their perception of the wealth of individuality (die Fülle des Individuellen) in the world around them, a world overflowing with unique people and things.¹ Erwin Panofsky elaborated on this broader conception of individuality in his seminal study Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, where he attributed the distinctiveness of Renaissance art—and of the entire historical period—to its reintegration of classical form and content, whereby the ancients came to be seen in a classical rather than medieval context. Myron Gilmore's influential essay "The Renaissance Conception of the Lessons of History" extended this sense of anachronism to humanism in general and to Petrarch in particular, whose letters to Cicero express a profound awareness of the distance between past and present.² Gilmore also sketched the ramifications of this sense of anachronism for the humanist study of Roman law, which undermined its status as universal law by revealing it as the law of a past society. Subsequent scholars—John Pocock, Julian Franklin, Donald Kelley, and George Huppert, to name only a few— further elaborated upon the consequences of humanist legal philology, which introduced a discontinuity between past and present that laid the foundation for modern historicism.³ And, drawing their inspiration from Arnaldo Momigliano, recent scholars, including Anthony Grafton, Joseph Levine, and Peter Miller, have begun to explore the schools of early modern philology and antiquarianism that emerged in the wake of Renaissance humanism, schools that served to fill out our knowledge of the past in ever greater detail, until it finally popped, so to speak, into three dimensions.⁴

A photograph of Jacob Burckhardt, from Jacob Burckhardt, Heinrich von Geymüller, Carl Neumann, Jakob Burckhardt Briefwechsel mit Heinrich von Geymüller (Georg Müller und Eugen Rentsch, 1914).

This research has refashioned our understanding of the origins of modern historical scholarship and its central role in our culture. All these studies, however, treat the awareness of anachronism as a commonsense notion, assuming that once it emerged...