What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (review)

The title of this newest contribution to Anthony Grafton's distinguished oeuvre on the late Renaissance is a deliberate riff on E. H. Carr's What is History? (1962), offered in Grafton's 2005 Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge. While Carr charted debates of his own time on how to write history, Grafton charts debates between ca. 1550 and 1700 on how to read history. His theme is the emergence of the ars historica from the historical criticism of the Quattrocento humanists to its new universalizing form in the sixteenth century; its religious, political, philosophical, scientific, and professional applications; and its decline in the early eighteenth century. The four chapters of his erudite and engagingly-written book explore how practitioners in successive stages of these developments drew on, even as they challenged, their immediate predecessors.

After an initial chapter stating his thesis and illustrating it succinctly with judgments on the veracity of Quintus Curtius by critics across his chosen centuries, Grafton next argues that earlier scholarship on sixteenth-century historical criticism has defined it too narrowly. The work of François Baudouin (1520–73) shows that, if the historical contextualization of Roman law inspired this enterprise, it scarcely exhausted it, for Baudouin's optique was interdisciplinary and multicultural. He advocated the study of art, coins, inscriptions, travelers' reports, and other para-historical texts, and included the histories of civilizations ancient and current, beyond classical Greece and Rome. He responded to the contemporary interest in chronology and church history. These common concerns, as well as their personal idiosyncrasies, informed the three authors studied in chapter 3. Of them, Francesco Patrizi (1529/30–97) and Jean Bodin (1530–96) are well known. Their companion, the Lutheran professor and court historian Reiner Reinich (1541–95), deserves the fresh and contextually sensitive appreciation that Grafton gives him.

Grafton's final chapter treats the demise of ars historica by the mid-eighteenth century, afflicted by internal weaknesses and by shifting interests and criteria. The very breadth of ars historica generated an information overload. Its devotees responded by culling maxims and commonplaces from their findings. On the one hand, this practice undermined the goal of historical contextualization. On the other, by subdividing maxims into those useful in private and public life from those useful simply for understanding the historians read, it seemed to be working at cross purposes. The vast expansion of European travel literature threatened to make travel trump history as a source for foreign cultures. The professionalization of the disciplines of numismatics, epigraphy, paleography, and diplomatics made the ars historica look inadequately scientific, even as the revival of narrative political history written by experienced statesmen made it look academic and irrelevant. Just as ars historica authors had absorbed from their Quattrocento predecessors the idea that history was the magistra vitae, while rejecting their rhetorical approach to it, so their successors, while raising the bar on some of their own methods, criticized them for being at the same time too abstract and too diffuse to be of practical political use.

In illuminating the rise, development, and supersession of ars historica, Grafton sheds light on a phenomenon and a host of figures deserving more attention. With this book he also strengthens a message which his earlier scholarship has made loud and clear, and which still needs stating: we need to broaden, lengthen, and add nuance to our understanding of Renaissance humanism as a movement in European intellectual history.