Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800

One: Writing Antiquarianism: Prolegomenon to a History - Peter N. Miller

27 Fifty years ago Arnaldo Momigliano lamented, “I wish I could simply refer to a History of Antiquarian Studies. But none exists.”1 If there is still no single-volume history of antiquarianism, many, many pieces of this puzzle have been assembled. Already eight years ago Joseph Connors created an online bibliography of early modern antiquarianism of around 680 titles.2 Some of the heroes have gotten monographic treatment by now—Ligorio, Panvinio, Orsini, Scaliger, Cotton, Cassiano, Peiresc, Selden, Caylus—while the majority, of course, have not—Cyriac of Ancona, Camden, Pignoria, Worm, Mabillon, Bianchini, Barthélemy, to name but a few. We know something of who the antiquaries were, and something therefore of the history of antiquarian scholarship, but it is still far too early to write that monographic study. Even more, with all that we have learned, we still know almost nothing about the history of the history of antiquarian scholarship. Momigliano, whose “Ancient History and the Antiquarianism” was not a history of antiquarianism and did not generate any, did nevertheless succeed at inspiring a whole generation of scholars to work on the history of scholarship.3 But with all that there was to do, this question of the history of the history of history was, understandably perhaps, neglected . Some might not even have been aware of it as a question. But Momigliano surely would have been. For his own practice of the “history of historiography” brings to mind the image of the snake swallowing its tail: the historian of today writes about how historians of the past were shaped by what they read and where they lived—and his own work is necOne Writing Antiquarianism: Prolegomenon to a History Peter N. Miller 28 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China essarily transformed by the encounter. At what point does the one touch the other? At what point does the practice of antiquarianism shape the writing of the history of antiquarianism? And at what point does writing the history of antiquarianism affect the practice of history? These are questions we need to answer.4 Fifty years ago, when Momigliano wanted to underscore how neglected antiquarianism was, he signalled this by noting the absence of any ready-made history of it. Ironically—though, as ever, with an exquisite perspicuity—the volume that Momigliano pointed to as a secondbest answer to his question actually provides the best one to our own. a Morphology of antiquarianism Carl (or Karl) Bernard Stark’s Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst—whose first part only, Systematik und Geschichte der Archäologie der Kunst (1880), was completed before the author’s death—is not a well-known book.5 Nor is its author well-known, either. Both should change. Momigliano already hinted that this is an extraordinary work, providing not only a summary of how and who studied antiquities, but also a history of the study of those studies.6 Stark’s work, as the title suggests, also lies on that fascinating fault line separating and connecting the old “antiquarianism ” from the new “archaeology.” Since this semantic frontier is pregnant with implications for any modern grappling with the antiquarian past it is something that we will have to consider here as well. But as we plunge into Stark’s scholarship we also discover something very interesting , if not entirely surprising. For the first real historian of antiquarianism was almost perforce a historian of material culture and cultural history . How these fit together then suggests something, I think, of how they might fit together now. So, let us begin then with some first attempts to explain the meaning and history of antiquarianism. This situates us in the landscape of the Handbuch, a purely pedagogical genre that thrived in Germany and only in Germany (what it means that French schoolboys learned about antiquity from novels like Barthélemy’s Voyage du jeune Anacharse [1788] while Germans read things with titles like Lehrbuch der griechischen Antiquitäten [1858–75] cannot yet be gauged). But the advantage of working with this sort of text is clear: because its intent is to present to the beginning student a comprehensive survey of a field at a given moment, it affords the later inquirer with a ready-made guide to a whole scholarly world. Writing Antiquarianism 29 Stark wrote at least seven monographs on ancient Greek art and history and a thick collection of essays was posthumously published with...