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

Deploying the anecdotal approach and conversational style that have helped him to maintain his rhythm of a book a year for the last decade or so, Anthony Grafton has now produced an interesting and informative survey of the genre of the ars historica in early modern Europe, on the basis of a series of lectures which he delivered at Cambridge University in 2005. In this new work, Grafton has synthesized a great deal of austere Latin prose from largely forgotten (though now briefly remembered) authors in order to bring to life an important episode not only in the history of historical thought but also in the history of reading and the history of higher education. One of his characteristic methods, familiar to his legion of fans, is to transcribe marginal notes left by readers of early printed books so as to illuminate the critical faculties and intellectual habits of a bygone era, while insinuating his own enviable access to rare books collections. Grafton is a specialist at reading books which remain, for the rest of us, "incommunicable."

The ambition of What was History?, whose title alludes to E.H. Carr's What is History? from the same Trevalyn lecture series, is variously stated as an attempt to revise the "basic story" or the "standard account" of the rise and fall of the ars historica in European vernacular and Latin prose from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. However, it is not likely that readers will bring many preconceptions to the study of an obscure and inaccessible topic of which even the "standard account" has rather limited currency. To recapitulate the pre-Grafton bibliography, summed was constituted by the two volume anthology Artis historicae penus published by Johann Wolf in Basel, Switzerland in 1579, of which a complete table of contents is available both in Astrid Witschi-Bernz's bibliographical survey in the journal History and Theory 12 (1972) and in the bibliography to Claude-Gilbert Dubois' 1977 thesis La conception de l'histoire en France au XVIe siècle. Beatrice Reynolds focused modern attention on the topic with her very competent survey article published in the Journal of the History of Ideas in 1953, and Julian Franklin made an important contribution, as Grafton readily acknowledges, in his 1963 study of Jean Bodin. In 1972 Rudiger Landfester compiled a maniacally exhaustive anthology of clichés from the artes historicae, which leaves the impression that all sixty of the authors included in his list of primary sources just wrote the same book over and over again. In 1971 Eckhard Kessler published his own anthology of sixteenth-century treatises on history to which he added an important introductory essay. These are the works for a revisionist to rebut. However, Grafton is not really interested in arguing with other scholars, especially now that he has the field largely to himself. Instead, his ambition is simply to tell a good story and to maintain our interest for 250 pages of text and footnotes. In this respect he succeeds completely. What was History? was fun to read.

The book is divided into four chapters followed by an extensive bibliography and a comprehensive index. The first chapter documents a widely divergent range of responses among early modern readers to Quintus Curtius' history of Alexander the Great, including some precociously historicist readings, in order to substantiate the claim that "this tradition needs another history" (60). Since most of us are innocent of the old history, we're not likely to argue the point. Chapter two proposes a new genealogy for the ars historica, in order to update prior scholarship and to broaden the context, beyond humanist jurisprudence, in which the genre evolved. Chapter three considers three case studies, involving Francesco Patrizi, Reiner Reineck, and Jean Bodin, who bring honor to this "cosmopolitan" genre. Chapter four tries to explain the "death of a genre." I found Grafton's argument to be consistently stimulating and informative, enough to cover the gaps in his...