The birth of the past

Author:

Schiffman, Zachary Sayre

Format:

Book

Language:

English

Imprint:

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011

Subject:

History - Philosophy
Historiography - Philosophy
Historiography - Western countries
Western countries - Intellectual life
Civilization, Western

ISBN:

9781421402789, 1421402785, 9781421402789 (hardcover : alk. paper), and 1421402785 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Description:

xvi, 316 p. ; 24 cm

Bibliographic Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Contents:

Introduction: The past defined -- Pt. I. Antiquity : Flatland ; Pasts present ; The Herodotean achievement ; Thucydides and the refashionings of linear time ; Hellenistic Innovations -- Pt. II. Christianity : Can't get here from there ; The power of prayer ; Breakthrough to the now ; The idea of the saeculum ; The saeculum reconfigured ; Gregory of Tours and the saeculum ; Back from the future: Bede and the figural view of reality -- Pt. III. Renaissance : The living past ; The birth of anachronism ; Petrarch's "Copernican leap" ; The commonplace view of the world ; Jean Bodin and the unity of history -- Pt. IV. Enlightenment : Presence and distance ; Biography as a form of history -- The politics of history ; The relations of truth/the truth of relations ; Montesquieu and the relations of things ; The past emerges --Epilogue: The past historicized

Summary:

From the publisher. How did people learn to distinguish between past and present? How did they come to see the past as existing in its own distinctive context? Zachary Sayre Schiffman explores these questions in The Birth of the Past, his sweeping survey of historical thinking in the Western world. Today we automatically distinguish between past and present, labeling things taken out of context as "anachronisms." Schiffman shows how this tendency did not always exist, and how the past as such was born of the perceived difference between past and present. Schiffman takes readers on a grand tour of historical thinking from antiquity to modernity. He shows how ancient historians could not distinguish between past and present because they conceived of multiple pasts. Christian theologians coalesced these multiple pasts into a single temporal space where past merged with present and future. Renaissance humanists began to disentangle these temporal states in their desire to resurrect classical culture, creating a "living past." French enlighteners killed off this living past when they engendered a form of social scientific thinking that measured the relations between historical entities, thus sustaining the distance between past and present and relegating each culture to its own distinctive context. Including a foreword by the eminent historian Anthony Grafton, this fascinating book draws upon a diverse range of sources -- ancient histories, medieval theology, Renaissance art, literature, legal thought, and early modern mathematics and social science -- to uncover the very meaning of the past and its relationship to the present

Collection:

BGC Monograph Stacks

Call Number:

D16.8 .S268 2011

Available

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