The Birth of the Past

Gestation

xiii Gestation T he intuition that inspired this book occurred to me more than thirty years ago, while I was crossing a quadrangle at the University of Chicago, trudging along in my customary state of graduate-student befuddlement. Somewhere around Botany Pond I experienced a brief moment of intellectual clarity, the memory of which has stayed with me ever since. I had been musing about the Renaissance “attitude toward the past”—the ever-elusive subject of my dissertation—when I suddenly found myself questioning the very appropriateness of that formulation, which assumed the existence of “the past” as an object of thought. This assumption now began to trouble me deeply, and at the farthest reach of my mind there flitted the barest hint of an idea: that the conceptual entity we call “the past” didn’t exist in the Renaissance. At the time, though, I was hardly capable of expressing this idea, let alone substantiating it; and as I struggled to make sense of it, a sea of confusion closed over me, diffusing the light. My subsequent academic career has been like one long in-held breath, as I have fought my way back toward the surface and the light of that intuition. In my first book, on the problem of relativism in the French Renaissance, I finally succeeded in describing a fundamental difference between Renaissance and modern attitudes toward the past, but in a way that still took the idea of the past for granted, despite my already having begun to question this assumption openly in my teaching. While completing that book, I had the good fortune to meet Leonard Barkan, who was studying similar issues from an interdisciplinary perspective that combined literary criticism and art history, an approach that would eventually bear fruit in his magisterial work on Renaissance archaeology and aesthetics, Unearthing the Past. In the course of our many discussions about how to conceptualize the past, some during a highly illuminating NEH summer seminar he directed , I began to acquire the means of making sense of my insight back at Botany Pond. These means have been augmented by my long association, nurtured over xiv Gestation many a luncheon, with Constantin Fasolt, an early modern historian who trained as a medievalist with a distinctly philosophical bent. Constantin and I talked our way through several drafts of his Limits of History, an exploration of the nature of modern historical consciousness that has profoundly influenced my own thinking on the topic and on which I have relied heavily in the present volume. At the same time Constantin was working on his book, I was coauthoring a history of information with another friend and early modern historian, Michael E. Hobart, who studies the “analytical temper” that accompanied the rise of modern science and mathematics. Michael and I had long debates over the role of this temper in the formation of modern historical thought—in which I defended nineteenth-century historicism against the claims of eighteenth-century rationalism—and these debates subtly shaped my thinking on this subject, without my even having realized it. Finally, I owe to another friend and colleague, Susan E. Rosa, a more nuanced appreciation of the role of Enlightenment in the emergence of a new conception of history. Indeed, she encouraged me toward the study of Montesquieu, which revealed to me the full extent of the early modern analytical temper, whose influence Michael Hobart had championed against my own initial resistance. These friends and scholars offered me critical lifelines as I struggled to regain the surface and the light first glimpsed at Botany Pond, and I confess a deep and abiding debt to them. But my greatest debt is to my teachers at the University of Chicago, who (though I didn’t realize it at the time) were very much with me as I trudged my befuddled way across the university quadrangle. Hanna Holborn Gray had first introduced me to the study of Renaissance historiography and directed me toward the topic that would become my dissertation. Her wealth of insights into Renaissance historical thought was almost too rich for me to digest, and the present volume stands as paltry testimony to some comments she tossed off in passing decades ago. If she embarked me on my dissertation, Karl Joachim Weintraub saw me safely to port, and in the process showed me how to navigate my way as a self-avowed historicist. He also tried to inculcate the highest standards of intellectual responsibility by which scholars should...