historiography

n.

1. The principles, theories, or methodology of scholarly historical research and presentation.
2. The writing of history based on a critical analysis, evaluation, and selection of authentic source materials and composition of these materials into a narrative subject to scholarly methods of criticism.
3. A body of historical literature.

[French historiographie, from Old French, from Greek historiographiā : historiā, history; see history + -graphiā, -graphy.]

historiographic his·to'ri·o·graph'ic (-ē-ə-grăf'ĭk) or his·to'ri·o·graph'i·cal (-ĭ-kəl) adj.
historiographically his·to'ri·o·graph'i·cal·ly adv.

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The term history is of Greek origin and means an investigation or inquiry, namely, of the actions of human beings in the past. The word is used nowadays to refer either to those past events themselves or to what is known of them. In the latter sense, it was the Greeks who invented the concept of "scientific" history concerned with the evidential grounds of historical knowledge. However, it is to the Hebrew Bible and Judaism that one should attribute the notion that the entire course of history is endowed with a goal or purpose which transcends the actual events themselves, that history or particular events within it are charged with great significance. Such is the case only when one brings to bear some nonempirical, transcendent point of view in which the entire historical process can be seen as a teleological development. The biblical God, who is the Lord of history, brings nations into existence, has plans for them, and is watchful and judgmental as their careers stretch out into time. History can likewise have significance for the Bible because of its "this-worldly" orientation, which consistently upholds the reality of events occurring in time.

While the Bible contains many different types of literary expression, such as poetry, laws, narratives, and exhortations, all of this is held together in a framework of history, albeit theocentric or sacred history. The Hebrew Bible exhibits the continuity of an unfolding plot, the realization of a purposive process in time; it is the story of the origins, formation, and subsequent career of a nation-people called Israel told against a universal backdrop.

Yet despite the centrality of Israel, the moral God of Scripture is---indeed, has to be---the Lord of universal history. The biblical narrator's perspective is universal; it reaches back to the origins of men, nations, and empires, to Creation itself; and it reaches into the far-distant future, to the ultimate realization of God's kingdom at the end of days.

However, it is with the people of Israel that God makes His covenant, demonstrating the Bible's inner connection with history. For the story of a nation whose career spans millennia and brings it into collision with world empires, whose migrations span continents, can only be understood within the framework of history. Hence the genealogical data, the allusions to pagan kingdoms and (lost) Israelite records, and the historical documents interspersed in the biblical Prophets and Hagiographa. While proclaiming the fact that God reveals Himself in nature (Ps. 19), the Bible emphasizes His manifestations in historical events such as the Exodus and the Revelation at Mount Sinai. These "mighty events" testify not only to His existence but also to His attributes of mercy and justice, as well as to His overall plan for Israel and mankind. In order to know God, therefore, it is essential to relive these events and understand the history of this people.

The literary prophets display an awareness of history that is much more explicit and distinctive. Jeremiah, who is called "a prophet to the nations" (Jer. 1:5), like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Amos, makes detailed prophecies concerning foreign nations such as Edom, Moab, Egypt, Babylon, Philistia, Elam, and Phoenicia (Sidon). Although the prophets address these peoples by name, their message in the first instance is for Israel. Sometimes they condemn the nations for their mistreatment of Israel; at other times they judge them for their neglect of basic moral values in their dealings with each other and for their practice of idolatry (Isa. 13-24; Jer. 46-51; Ezek. 25-28; Amos 1-2). Israel is urged to learn from history the disastrous fate of those nations that have proved morally incorrigible.

The prophet's view of history does not include a succession of recognizable eras. He sees essentially a present that he decries, a near future that will be destructive, and a redemptive distant future. Each of these time sequences is presented in monochromatic form. Only in the Book of Daniel is there the first glimpse of an idea (the vision of Four Kingdoms) suggesting that the long stretch of events prior to the final Redemption exhibits a historical pattern.

Despite the tradition of history-writing which the Jews developed -- including, after the Bible, the Books of the Maccabees and the works of Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish War)---the rabbis felt no need to write a systematic history of their times, although some of their works (e.g., Megillat Ta'Anit and the Seder Olam Rabbah chronology ascribed to Yosé Ben ḥalafta) contain much historical material.

In aggadic literature, the rabbis continued to discuss and develop many basic elements of the historiography found in Scripture: the concept of Israel as God's Chosen People and Israel's relationship to the other nations; the role of Providence in human affairs; the function of Jewish leaders within the context of their times; exile, the Messiah, and Redemption. A favorite theme of the rabbis was that of the Four Kingdoms (Babylon, Persia-Media, Greece, and Rome) to which Israel would be subject before the advent of God's messianic kingdom. This provided an overall schema within which to place the events of the recent past as well as to anticipate the future. Another influential schema can be found in the teaching that "the world will exist for 6,000 years: the first 2,000 will be chaos, followed by 2,000 years of Torah and 2,000 years of the messianic era" (Sanh. 97a). This seems to have derived its inspiration from the Genesis story portraying six days of Divine creative activity followed by a seventh day of rest. The implication here is that the six millennia of ongoing events will be followed by the Sabbath of history. These two schemata offer a perspective in which the various ages are related to each other both causally and sequentially.

The Book of Josippon, an anonymous Hebrew work of the mid-tenth century, written in Italy, bridges the gap between Near Eastern and European Jewish historiography. Though not in itself authoritative, relying on Josephus and the Apocrypha, Josippon's account of the Second Temple period was much quoted throughout the Middle Ages. Apart from Seder Olam Rabbah, the only chronological "histories" to appear before the 16th century form part of the genre known as "chain of tradition" literature. Such works, describing the way in which rabbinic law was transmitted down the ages, include the Epistle (Iggeret) of Sherira Gaon (987) and the Sefer ha-Kabbalah of Abraham Ibn Daud (c. 1160). A new and different genre of history writing, pioneered by Ashkenazim, was the martyrology: here, drawing upon the most recent accounts of massacre and persecution during the Crusades, medieval chroniclers such as Eliezer ben Nathan of Mainz and Ephraim ben Jacob of Bonn established a pattern that would be followed by Sephardim as well for centuries to come.

After 1492, the need to grapple with the meaning of virtually unprecedented disasters---first and foremost the Spanish Expulsion---promoted a more intensive and scholarly analysis of the Jewish fate, often in the context of general history. Thus, Elijah Capsali's work on the Ottoman Empire, Seder Eliyahu Zuta (written in 1523), became a major source of information regarding the Jewish communities in Spain and Portugal; while Shevet Yehudah ("The Scepter of Judah," 1554), an impressively detailed account of anti-Jewish persecution throughout the ages, served as the vehicle for Solomon Ibn Verga's bold defiance of traditional assumptions, pointing to life in exile as the real cause of Jewish misery.

Other 16th-century writers adhered to the older approach of tracing the development of religious tradition. In his Sefer ha-Yuḥasin ("Book of Genealogies," 1566), Abraham ben Samuel Zacuto updated the history of the Oral Law with many original touches, whereas Gedaliah ben Joseph Ibn Yabya injected much anecdotal, scientific, and legendary material into his popular Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah ("The Chain of Tradition," 1587).

Only when the Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft Des Judentums) made its appearance in the early 19th century did Jews begin writing systematic histories of their people. The pioneers in this field regarded the Jewish historical experience as centered around the evolving concept of Divine unity, no less valid in the modern age than it had been in the past. Among the German Reformers, Abraham Geiger defined that experience as the history of ethical monotheism. Isaac Marcus Jost, a more moderate Reformer, led the field with his voluminous and "scientific" history of the Jews from Maccabean to modern times (1820-47), but then proceeded to concentrate on Jewish religious history. Nachman Krochmal expounded a major philosophy of Jewish history, maintaining that only Jewish national existence is eternal and contrasting the uniquely religious spirit of the Jews---a full manifestation of the Absolute Spirit---with its no more than partial manifestation in other national cultures. Krochmal saw Israel's "mission" as bringing this AbsoIute Spirit to the rest of mankind.

For Heinrich Graetz, the best-known Jewish historian of the 19th century, Judaism's originality lay in its concept of God. Both the religious ideal and the political concept (including the Jewish people's institutions and devotion to the Land of Israel) are the warp and woof of Judaism, which is further distinguished by its messianic orientation to the future. A decidedly rationalist spirit pervades Graetz's much-translated History of the Jews (11 vols., 1853-76); this made him (unlike the Orthodox Ze'ev Jawitz, for example) neglect certain traditional factors and prejudiced him against everything connected with mysticism. Yet for all its manifestly scientific foundations, his work is permeated by the conviction that history in general---and Jewish history in particular---is Divinely ordained and conducted, with the Jewish people functioning as the instrument of God's will. Nations, like individuals, are free agents, but it is the Jewish people's commitment to a higher ethic that has determined its history.

Simon Dubnow, the foremost 20th-century Jewish historian, brought the social sciences to bear in his World History of the Jewish People (11 vols., 1923-40). Dubnow's viewpoint was a secular one, attributing Jewry's survival to its crystallization as a "spiritual people." He rejected the idea that any single concept represented the totality of Jewish history; in his view, the central determining factor was the Jewish people itself. Judaism, in the religious sense, had fulfilled its role in the past; Zionism, however interpreted, was a pseudo-messianic delusion; "Diaspora nationalism" alone guaranteed the Jewish future.

More recently, Zionist historians such as Benzion Dinur have emphasized the nationalist impulse and age-old links with Erets Israel as the two key factors in Jewish history. Others, including Salo W. Baron in the United States (A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 18 vols., 1952-83), believe that Israel and the Diaspora each has a vital role to play, and insist on the basic religious motivation that has ensured Jewish continuity.

In recent decades, Jewish historians have been faced with the challenges of the Holocaust and of the State of Israel. Religious Jews seek to reconcile the omnipotence of a benevolent God with the realities of Auschwitz (see Holocaust), while secular Jews wrestle with the nature of man and human morality. The establishment of the State has divided the Jewish world between Israel and the Diaspora, and the question of their interrelation, both in their commonalty and their separateness, is already exercising the Jewish historian.

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historiography 1. Greek. Greek prose history was first written in the late sixth century BC in Ionia. Coinciding with the development of early science and philosophy in that part of the Greek world, a rational and systematic approach was applied not only to local traditions and the more widespread myths of epic poetry, but also to the information gathered by seafaring people about the coastline and harbours, people, customs, and local history of the Mediterranean. These historians were the so-called logographers, ‘prose writers’, of whom the most influential was Hecataeus of Miletus (c.500 BC), but their work survives only in fragments. They wrote both local and general (not necessarily Greek) history. Local histories continued to be written throughout the fifth and fourth centuries; those of Attica for example (see ATTHIS) form much of the basis of Aristotle's Constitution of Athens. Lists of annual magistrates and similarly regular recurrences were also compiled with the aim of establishing a chronological framework, e.g. of eponymous archons at Athens, priestesses of Hera at Argos, and victors in the footrace at Olympia.

Greek history proper begins with the full-scale historiai, i.e. ‘inquiries’, of Herodotus (b. c.490 BC); the word soon acquired its more restricted meaning. Herodotus' work established the scale of history, and his all-embracing curiosity, which made him include in his work, as well as history in its restricted sense, archaeology, ethnography, geography, religion, and a fair amount of anecdote, might well have established also its scope. His intellectual successor is in some sense Aristotle, writing treatises over a wide range of historical and scientific subjects. Thucydides (b. c.460 BC) writing a generation later than Herodotus, and choosing to write on contemporary history in which he himself had played some part, was able to apply much more rigorous standards of factual accuracy than had been possible for the latter. He criticizes his immediate predecessors (left unnamed but certainly including Herodotus) for writing what is merely entertaining to listen to for the moment, rather than what is true and has permanent value. He did not only aim to relate what actually happened; his passion for generalization led him to write on such large matters as the underlying cause of the Peloponnesian War, the behaviour of oligarchs and democrats, and the dynamics of imperialism. His influence narrowed the scope of history, turning it in the direction of politics almost before it had set off along the path Herodotus had indicated. Thucydides' combination of generalization with factual accuracy was difficult to sustain and no later Greek historian made the attempt. The nearest approach to his analytical style is that of Polybius (b. c.200 BC).

In the fourth century BC a new type of history evolved under the direct influence both in style and moralistic outlook of Isocrates (b. c.436 BC), but affected too by Plato's preoccupation with moral education. History became the vehicle of moral instruction and political prejudice, and style became more important than content. Isocrates' pupil Ephorus (b. c.405 BC) wrote a universal history, now lost, in which he appears to have regarded it as one of his chief functions to apportion praise or blame. This school of thought had great influence on the Roman historians.

In the Hellenistic age (from c.300 BC), historians generally aimed less at being accurate than at being readable. Careful historians like Hieronymus of Cardia are the exception; the favoured style was rhetorical and romantic, and because history in this style gave prominence to outstanding individuals, it was the source for later biographers and ultimately Plutarch. Monographs on particular subjects continued to be written, along with histories of cities, memoirs, and other topics similarly limited in scope.

2. Roman. The earliest Roman historians, of whom Fabius Pictor is the most celebrated, working at the beginning of the second century BC, wrote in Greek, both because they wished to glorify Rome's foundation and justify her institutions and policy to the Hellenistic world, and because Latin prose had not yet developed as a literary medium. Thus they are primarily political writers in intent, within the tradition of Hellenistic Greek historiography; Polybius (b. c.200 BC) worked along the same lines to explore the rise of Rome, and this aim was further pursued but, for the first time in a work of this kind, in Latin, by Cato (1) in his Originēs, a history of Rome from its foundation, written between 168 and 149 BC. This great work, which survives only in fragments, inspired further historical study in Rome. The ‘old’ annalists (see ANNALS), Cassius Hemina and Calpurnius Piso, began the systematic study of Roman institutions which led to the publication after 130 BC of the annalēs maximi (‘the most important records’). Later writers who depended on this work for their chronological framework also tended to follow its method, describing events as they happened year by year. This basic form was elaborated by historians of the early first century BC, including Valerius Antias and Claudius Quadrigarius, who established in Rome the moralistic tone and especially the rhetorical style of writing history that harked back to Isocrates; this was the style accepted by Livy. On the whole the Romans were more interested in the literary merits of their histories than in giving an accurate report of what actually happened.

The various other kinds of historiography current in Hellenistic times had taken root in Rome by the beginning of the first century BC (see end of 1 above). This was the background against which Sallust and Cicero wrote, and the same tradition was later followed by Tacitus. Sallust's political thought is intensely moralistic, in the Isocratean manner, but his chief exemplar was Thucydides; his portraits of individuals go back through the biographical tradition to Thucydides, whose severe style he also imitated. He was influenced too by the concise and abrupt style of Cato, and he rejected the amplitude of the oratorical style of his own day. In marked contrast, Cicero ((1) 5), in his writings on the history of philosophy and oratory, kept to Isocratean standards, and although sincerely aiming at accuracy declared that his merits as a stylist compensated for his lack of philosophical knowledge, and that writing history was the province of orators. Tacitus (b. c. AD 56) in style and content resembled Sallust; and both have been criticized for political bias and inaccuracy. Tacitus, however, united the various traditions of historical writing into work of great power. The biographical tradition was continued with the Lives of Suetonius (b. c. AD 69), but degenerated after him into the Historia Augusta (fourth century AD). Tacitus' history was continued (from AD 96) and imitated by Ammianus Marcellinus (b. c. AD 330), a Greek writing in Latin for Roman readers. He is considered accurate in general and relatively free of bias, but his work was done in isolation. This was the age of epitomes and outlines of history, and, with the addition of Jewish history to that of Greece and Rome, the start of a tradition of Christian chronicles (see EUSEBIUS).

As in other parts of Europe, French historical writing has gone through a number of more or less distinct phases since the Middle Ages, of which it may be useful to distinguish seven. The labels are ones of convenience, and the phases should be viewed as overlapping, with periods of transition in which rival styles of historiography appealed to different readers and writers.

1. Chronicles

The chronicle was essentially a narrative of events, political, military, or ecclesiastical. Earlier medieval chronicles were usually written in Latin by monks (notably Raoul Glaber, c.985-c.1046), and concentrated either on local or on ‘universal’ history (i.e. the history of the world from Adam onwards). Later chronicles were more often written in a vivid and colloquial vernacular by secular priests or laymen (including the nobles Joinville and Villehardouin), and emphasized the history of France. The most famous examples of the latter type are Froissart's Chroniques, which told the story of the main feats of arms in France, England, and Spain from 1325 to c.1400, and the Mémoires of Commynes, on the period 1464-95. However, the first book printed in French, in 1477, was the Grandes Chroniques de France, a collective work by the Benedictine monks of Saint-Denis, the custodians of the memory of the deeds of the French kings.

2. Humanist History

The dominant form of history written in the 16th c. was the work of the humanists, and it followed classical models much more closely than the chroniclers had done, gaining in clarity and losing in immediacy in the process. Narratives such as the Gesta Francorum (c.1520) by the Italian humanist Paulus Aemilius were combined with literary portraits of the protagonists and put speeches into their mouths in order to explain their motives, in the manner of Livy. Even memoirs, like the Commentaires (1592) of the soldier Blaise de Monluc, owed something to the classical tradition (in this case, to Caesar). Another important form of humanist history was the study of the history of institutions, well exemplified by the Recherches de la France (1560) by the lawyer Étienne Pasquier, and the reflections on the development of the various forms of government in Bodin's Methodus (1566), a treatise concerned with ‘the easy comprehension of history’.

3. Pragmatic History

In reaction against what he considered the rhetorical excesses of some of the humanists, notably the invention of speeches, the magistrate Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1533-1617) wrote a Latin history of his own time, the age of the Wars of Religion, in a plain style and an impartial tone. An equally detached treatment of a controversial problem was the methodological treatise De re diplomatica (1681) by the Benedictine scholar Mabillon, a study in the antiquarian tradition of the humanists, which laid down the principles on which genuine documents (medieval charters, for the most part) could be distinguished from forgeries. Historical reference books began to appear, notably Moreri's Grand Dictionnaire historique (1674). Pragmatic in a more political sense of the term were the works funded by the government, such as the Histoire de France (1643-51) by François Mézeray, and Maimbourg's hostile Histoire du calvinisme (1682), which was part of the campaign leading to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

4. Philosophical History

The famous Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) by Bayle was intended to give the impression of an impartial scholarly work as well as to demolish Moreri, but it was as much the expression, indeed the vehicle, of a world-view as the historical works of Bossuet, the Discours sur l'histoire universelle (1681) and the Histoire des variations des églises protestantes (1688). Philosophical history, in the sense of history informed by general ideas and attempting to persuade the reader of their validity, was the dominant genre in the 18th c. It was wide-ranging, taking the world as its province and concerned with economic, social, and cultural developments over the long term as well as with the narrative of events or the growth of political, legal, and ecclesiastical institutions. It was also a reaction against what the philosophical historians considered as the myopia of the antiquarians, their preoccupation with petty details. Meanwhile the Benedictines of St Maur (Maurists) in particular were carrying on the antiquarian tradition, publishing collections of sources like the Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France (1738-52) and reference books such as L'Art de vérifier les dates (1750). The four outstanding examples of French philosophical history are the Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734) by Montesquieu, the Essai sur les mœurs (1756) by Voltaire, the Histoire des deux Indes (1770-80) by Raynal, and the Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1795) by Condorcet.

5. Romantic History

Romantic history was written in conscious reaction against the philosophical history of the Enlightenment, which was increasingly considered too cosmopolitan and too bloodless. There was a revival of narrative, under the influence of novels such as Scott's Quentin Durward (1823) and Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). The focus shifted from society to the nation or even the ‘race’. There was a growing interest in medieval history, formerly dismissed by ‘enlightened’ scholars as an age of darkness. Prosper de Barante's Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne (1824-6) was concerned to tell a story, and above all to paint a picture of the late Middle Ages, full of ‘local colour’, rather than to explain or to judge. The Histoire de la conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands (1825) of Thierry interpreted medieval English history as a story of conflict between two races, Normans and Saxons. The II-volume Histoire de France (1833-67) of Michelet was a story told in a highly dramatic fashion, the hero of the drama being ‘France’ rather than any individual person. His seven-volume La Révolution française (1847-53) had a similar focus on ‘the People’. Closer to the tradition of philosophical history were the Histoire de la civilisation en France (1829-32) by Guizot, better known as a statesman; Thierry's Essai sur l'histoire de la formation et des progrès du Tiers État (1853); and Tocqueville's still more famous L'Ancien Régime et la révolution (1856).

6. Positivist History

A reaction against Romantic history was not long in coming. According to some critics, the concentration on events and picturesque details took the ideas out of history. They wanted a grand narrative of the type offered by the philosophical historians and by the sociologist Auguste Comte, charting the progress of humanity from religion to ‘positive philosophy’ and revealing the operation of the laws of history. According to others, what was wrong with Romantic historians was their reliance on narrative sources (‘chronicles’) rather than official documents (‘records’). They wanted historiography to become ‘positivist’ in the sense of adopting a more scientific method. The struggle between these two tendencies dominates the later 19th c. In the centre we may situate Fustel de Coulanges, whose masterpiece La Cité antique (1864) discussed the function of pagan religion in ensuring the cohesion of the family and the state. The philosophical wing of positivist history is exemplified by Taine, whose Origines de la France contemporaine (1875-93) viewed French history as the field of interaction between three forces: ‘race’, ‘milieu’, and ‘moment’. The empiricist wing included Gabriel Monod, who founded the Revue historique (1876) to promote a more scientific and a more professional approach to history in the manner of Leopold von Ranke and his followers, and Ernest Lavisse, best known as the editor of a multivolume history of France (1900-11). The positivist approach, documentary and evolutionist, can also be seen in the history of science practised by Pierre Duhem, the history of French literature by Ferdinand Brunetière, and the history of the French language by Ferdinand Brunot. The achievements and limitations of positivist history are revealed most clearly by the methodological textbook of Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques (1898).

7. Annales History

Seignobos in particular came to symbolize traditional historiography in the eyes of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch when they launched their campaign for its renewal at the University of Strasbourg following World War I, a campaign which culminated in the foundation of the journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale in 1929. Bloch and Febvre opposed the dominance of the history of political events and they preached and practised the history of economic and social structures and also of what they called ‘historical psychology’ or ‘the history of collective mentalities’. This ‘new history’, drawing on the ideas of economists and sociologists, was a minority movement in their day, but it became the dominant tendency after World War II, under the leadership of Fernand Braudel, whose wideranging study La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II was published in 1949, and of Ernest Labrousse, whose work on economic cycles in the 18th c. inspired generations of research students. The so-called ‘Annales school’ still exercises intellectual hegemony over French historical writing today, and includes scholars of the distinction of Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. However, it has diversified to the point of fragmentation in the process of incorporating new ideas (notably those of Lévi-Strauss and Foucault) and of finding new objects such as the history of women, the history of reading, and the history of the body.

8. Authors and Readers

The history of historical writing requires a social dimension, a concern not only with writers but also with publishers and readers, indeed with the ‘historical culture’ of the French, the changing place of history in their everyday life. Looking back over the centuries, changes in the role and functions of French historians are clearly visible. In the first place, secularization. The history of the French was largely written by the clergy not only in the Middle Ages but also in the early modern period (to the Benedictines mentioned above one might add the Jesuit Gabriel Daniel, whose Histoire de France of 1713 remained authoritative till the later 18th c., when it was replaced by that of another Jesuit, Paul-François Velly). Only after the Revolution was historical writing dominated by the laity. The second major change was the professionalization of history in the 19th c., with the foundation of the École des Chartes (1821) to train students in the study of the sources, and with the foundation of chairs of history in the universities. Today, professional historians are among the leading intellectuals of a country where the role of intellectual is still taken very seriously.

Despite the appeal of chronicles to medieval nobles, it is likely that the readership of historical works was mainly clerical until about 1600. As for the laity, library inventories suggest that lawyers (including the magistrates of the parlements) were the main consumers of history during the old regime. In the 18th c., the rise of social history coincided with the rise of women readers and the possibility of making a profit from publishing. Voltaire's Essai went through 15 editions between 1756 and 1784, while Velly was paid 1, 500 francs a volume for his history of France. The vogue of historical painting in the 18th and 19th c. made the past more vivid to thousands of spectators. In the later 19th c. the textbook-reading public became important for the first time, as the government encouraged the study of the history of the nation in order to legitimate the Third Republic and transform ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. In the course of the recent shift from the book to the screen, history has retained an important place, and the faces of Duby and Le Goff, for example, are familiar on French television.

[Peter Burke]

Bibliography

• P. Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. 2 (1969)
• D. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (1970)
• P. Archambault, Seven French Chroniclers (1974)
• C.-O. Carbonell, Histoire et historiens 1865-85 (1976)
• S. Bann, The Clothing of Clio (1984)
• P. Burke, The French Historical Revolution (1990)

Historiography is the writing of history, the aggregation of historical compositions. The establishment of history as a modern scholarly discipline in Russia dates back to the end of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. At the order of Peter the Great, the accumulation of historical sources began with the translation of works of Western European historians such as Samuel Pufendorf. Compositions that justified the tsar's activity and, in particular, the reasons behind the Northern War were recounted by Peter's companions, including Feofan Prokopovich and Petr Shafirov. The eminent Russian statesman and Historian of the first half of the eighteenth century, Vassily Tatischev, was influenced by rationalism. He understood history as a political history of the country. In Istoriia Rossiiskaia (Russian History, published after his death), he provided, for the first time, the classification of the periods of Russian history.

German historians were invited to work at the Academy of Sciences in the 1730s and 1740s, and they had a great impact on Russian historiography. Three of these Germans were particularly important: Gerhard Friedrich Müller and Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer, who formulated what is known as Norman theory, and August Ludwig Schlözer, who tried to reconstruct the original text of the earliest Russian chronicle, Povest Vremennykh Let (The Primary Russian Chronicle), in his work titled Nestor.

Also important were the works of Major General Ivan Boltin, written in the 1780s and 1790s. Boltin proposed the idea of a comparative method of studying history, an approach that would take into account the cause-and-effect connection between historical events. A great impact on social conscience was made by Nikolai Karamzin's Istoriia Gosudarstva Rossiiskogo (The history of the Russian state), published in twelve volumes between 1816 and 1829. This work was sold in enormous quantities, according to the time's standards. While working on the History, Karamzin developed the modern Russian language. According to Alexander Pushkin, Russia was discovered by Karamzin, like America was discovered by Columbus. Methodologically, however, the belles-lettres style of Karamzin's work did not suit the standards of historical science of the time. Karamzin proved that autocracy was vital for Russia, having proposed the thesis that the history of the people belongs to the tsar.

As a counterweight to Karamzin's history of the state, publisher and journalist Nikolai Polevoi tried to create Istoriia Russkogo Naroda (A History of the Russian People), but he could not cope with the task. Instead of the history of society, his six-volume work, published between 1829 and 1833, was yet another version of the history of state power. He was unable to break away from the convention of organizing the material by ruling periods.

In the nineteenth century, historiography became professional, and a majority of historical works were now created by scholars at universities. The development of Russian historiography was greatly affected by the philosophy of Georg Hegel and the works of German historians, especially the representatives of the German historical law school. From 1840 through the 1860s, in the works of Konstantin Kavelin, Sergei Soloviev, and Boris Chicherin, the Russian state (judicial) school of historiography was formed. According to the views of the historians of the Russian state school, Russia differed markedly from the West, where social development came from the bottom. In Russia, according to this view, the organizer of society, classes, and the relations between classes was the state. The society was typically weak, unorganized, and movable, which was supported by the geographical distribution of Russian people on the Western European plain, a circumstance that provided for no natural borders. For Kavelin, the state acted as a creator of history.

The theoretical views of historians of the state school were most fully embodied in the IstoriiaRossii S Drevneishikh Vremen (History of Russia from Ancient Times), published in twenty-nine volumes between 1851 and 1879. This work was written by the greatest Russian historian, Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev. His conception was characterized by the perception of the inner organic pattern of the historical process, defined by objective, primarily geographical, factors and of the state, as the supreme embodiment of the history of the people. He believed the most important factor of Russian history to be its colonization, and he saw the breakthrough in Russian history to be the reign of Peter the Great, who put Russia on the path to Europeanization.

As a counterweight to the members of the state school, referred to as Westernizers, who believed that Russia was developing the same way as Western Europe, Slavophiles (among them Ivan and Konstantin Aksakov and Ivan and Petr Kireyevsky) believed that Russia's development was independent and self-directed, and that Peter the Great's reforms were artificial. They believed that it was necessary to return to the policies of the seventeenth century, when the tsar had the power of rule and the people had the power of opinion. They were influenced by German Romanticism, especially as expressed in Friedrich Schelling's philosophy. Slavophiles did not create any significant historical works other than Ivan Belyaev's Krestiane na Rusi (Peasants in Russia), published in 1860.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, more and more works of Russian historians concerned the socioeconomic problems, the history of peasants and serfdom, and peasant communes. The eminent historian of this time period was Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky, who replaced his teacher, Soloviev, in the Department of Russian History at the Moscow University. Klyuchevsky believed that Russian history developed under the influence of various factors, geographical, economic, social, and political. Klyuchevsky's great influence is partly explained by the brilliant style of his works, especially his lectures Kurs Russkoii Istorii (A Course of Russian History), first printed in 1880 as lithographs, appearing in five bound volumes between 1904 and 1921. He was known for his deeply psychological approach, and his portraits of Russian historical figures are still unmatched. Klyuchevsky was skeptical of Peter the Great's reforms, believing them to be chaotically organized and prompted by the needs of the Northern War.

Klyuchevsky's school became the leading school in Russian historiography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The members of this school included Paul Milyukov, Alexander Kizevetter, Mikhail Lubavsky, Mikhail Bogoslovsky, and others. Methodological searches were typical for Russian historians of that time: they were affected by ideas of neopositivism (Miliukov), neokantianism (Alexander Lappo-Danilevsky), and Marxism (Mikhail Tugan-Baranovksy, Petr Struve). The more popular general work on the history of Russia published in this period was Milyukov's Ocherki Po Istorii Russkoii Kultury (Essays on the History of Russian Culture), which came out in several parts from 1896 to 1903. Milyukov formed a thesis about the simplicity and slowness of Russia's historical process, and of the structure of Russian history as having been built from the top down. Standing apart from the supporters of Russia's independent historical process, Nikolai Pavlov-Silvansky tried to prove its similarity to the Western European experience, postulating the presence of feudalism in medieval Russia in his Feodalizm v Drevnei Rusi (Feudalism in Old Russia) published in 1907.

For the Moscow school generalizations were typical, but the historians of the St. Petersburg school (Konstantin Bestuzhev-Riumin, Sergei Platonov, Lappo-Danilevsky, and others) paid special attention to publication and the analysis of earlier historical sources.

In general, Russian historiography of the early twentieth century blossomed early, but this ended abruptly with the October Revolution of 1917. After the Bolsheviks prohibited the teaching of history in schools and dismantled the historical departments in universities, the last citadel of non-Marxist historiography was the Academy of Sciences, but after the so-called Academic Affair and mass repressions against historians from 1929 to 1931, the Marxist-Leninist school of historiography became supreme in the USSR.

Bibliography

Byrnes, Robert F. (1995). V. O. Kliuchevsky: Historian of Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mazour, Anatole. (1975). Modern Russian Historiography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Sanders, Tomas, ed. (1999). Historiography of Imperial Russia. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharp.

Vernadsky, George. (1978). Russian Historiography: A History. Belmont, MA: Nordland.

—OLEG BUDNITSKII

Trends in historical writing about the Middle East.

Academic history-writing about the Middle East took shape during the first half of the twentieth century. European-style universities were founded in the early 1900s in Istanbul and Cairo, and state education, museums, historical associations, and journals expanded between the wars, alongside state-building. History-writing became a profession. Long-established forms - dynastic chronicles, political biographies, and historical topographies - were slowly displaced. History (taʾrikh) took on its ambivalent, modern meaning, referring not just to a form of knowledge, but also to the actual course of past events. In Europe, scholars working in Oriental Studies and trained in language, philology, and the study of Islam increasingly produced work recognizable as modern historiography. The amateur histories of colonial officials and travelers became much-trawled primary source material to complement chronicles and literary texts.

Civilization and Nationalism

Before 1945, historians from Europe and the Middle East formulated the past in terms of the flowering of an Islamic civilization that achieved its zenith at some point during the Middle Ages and subsequently entered a lengthy decline. The last centuries of Ottoman rule in particular were depicted as years of decay and oppression. Exemplary historians in this period were the prolific and popular Ottoman-Syrian Christian Jurji Zaydan (1861 - 1914), who wrote Taʾrikh al-Tamaddun al-Islami (1902 - 1906; History of Islamic civilization), and the British Orientalists Hamilton Gibb and Harold Bowen, who did more than anyone else in English to set afoot the historical study of the modern Middle East, particularly in Islamic Society and the West (1950). Such work measured civilization by great men and their battles, politics, and high cultural production. Nationalist historians such as the Egyptian Abd al-Rahman al-Rafiʾi (1889 - 1966) and Palestinian George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening (1938), chronicled the recent past in terms of the triumphant rise of the new nation, led by a new elite, who disseminated enlightened ideas in a backward land, and thus drew their fellow citizens toward freedom.

Modernization

With the beginning of the Cold War, national independence in the region, and the emergence of Area Studies, academics trained as historians started to multiply in and outside the region. They added to the older sources colonial reports, state correspondence and statistics, and the tracts of modernizing elites. Borrowing from conventional currents in Europe, the field divided into political, intellectual, economic, and social history. Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw, and others wrote political histories of the Ottoman Empire, European colonial rule, and the high politics of nationalism. Albert Hourani wrote a seminal work of intellectual history, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798 - 1939 (1962). Charles Issawi did most to chart what he saw as the decline and rise of Middle Eastern economies. Influenced by the Annales School, Ömer Lutfi Barkan and Halil Inalcik pioneered Ottoman socioeconomic history, which was taken up also at Cairo University by students of Muhammad Anis. Gabriel Baer studied guilds, town and country, and André Raymond transformed historians' understanding of socioeconomic change in eighteenth-century Egypt.

The achievements of these decades were very real, but assumptions left over from Oriental Studies, entrenched by bourgeois-nationalism and introduced by modernization theory, were pervasive. The object of study was often Islamic society, which was still often assumed to be in long-term decay. Many judged the region according to a linear and idealized notion of European modernization, seeing the Middle East as laggard mainly as a result of local failings that were often linked to psychology. Europe's impact, typically marked off as commencing with Napoléon Bonaparte's brief occupation of Egypt (1798 - 1801), still signified the beginnings of progress in the region.

The drastically limited success of state-led projects of modernization and development, underlined by the Arab defeat in the Arab - Israel War of 1967 and the rise of more radical currents in Third World socialism and nationalism, gave increasing currency - inside and outside the region - to more critical scholarship. Rigid boundaries dividing politics, economics, and society started to blur, and history drew increasingly on other disciplines.

Marxism

Particularly influential during the 1970s was the broad current of Marxism: dependencia, world systems theory, and analysis based on social class. These ideas gave rise to numerous groundbreaking studies. Samir Amin, Resat Kasaba, and Roger Owen situated the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East within the world economy. Hanna Batatu's monumental study, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, remains without peer. Ervand Abrahamian's seminal history of twentieth-century Iran, Iran Between Two Revolutions, owed much to notions of uneven development and social class. Anwar Abd al-Malik, Mahmud Hussein, and Eric Davis understood Egyptian history in terms of different fractions within the bourgeoisie in interaction with the state. Amin Izz al-Din, Raʾuf Abbas, Joel Beinin, and Zachary Lockman chronicled the rise of the working class in Egypt from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s.

Instead of depicting an Islamic society in decline, these scholars detailed the incorporation of a part of the periphery into a world economy with its core in Europe. Instead of seeing backwardness as the result of local cultural and political failings, backwardness was seen as the systemic result of a process of world capitalist development. Instead of viewing transformation as a process of elite-driven, ideas-based modernization that remained laggard, society and change were freshly understood as internally structured by state and class.

Social History

Critiques of Marxist determinism, not least from Edward Said, who depicted Karl Marx as an Orientalist in Orientalism (1978), formed the background to increased interest in more grounded social history, which took a critical distance from grand meta-narratives of modernity. Social history particularly benefited from increasingly accessible national archives, especially the use of Islamic court records. Kenneth Cuno, Beshara Doumani, Suraiya Faroqhi, André Raymond, and others transformed understandings of the period 1600 to 1800, showing dynamism, market forms, urban change, social stratification, and changing patterns of social reproduction instead of backwardness and decline. Their work, along with that of Juan Cole, Zachary Lock-man, Donald Quataert, and others has greatly diversified understandings of socioeconomic change and popular protest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: The deindustrialization thesis has been challenged; the end of the guilds appears to be far more complicated than it did; and the rise of the working class is no longer seen econometrically, and workers outside the factory, from artisans to migrants, are also seen as playing active roles in popular politics and world economic incorporation. F. Robert Hunter, Eugene Rogan, and others have given a far more embedded sense of state formation in Egypt and Jordan, respectively. Edmund Burke's Struggle and Survival in the Middle East (1993) made groundbreaking use of popular social biography.

Such work has opened the door to new forms of cultural history, in which culture is no longer an elite preserve, and constitutes (rather than simply reflects) the social process. Exemplary here are Abbas Amanat on the beginnings of the Bahaʾi movement in Iran, Ussama Makdisi on the modernity of sectarianism in Lebanon, and Ella Shohat on Israeli cinema. Work by historically minded anthropologists such as Michael Gilsenan, who studies violence and narrative in rural Lebanon, is highly suggestive for new directions.

Nationalism

Another important body of work has challenged the verities of idealist, elite-centered, and teleological nationalism. Rashid Khalidi, C. Ernest Dawn, James Gelvin, and others have given more heterogeneous and less emancipatory histories of the rise of Arab and regional nationalism, and have pointed to the agency of previously ignored social groups. Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, Benny Morris, and others, working with newly released archival material, have presented a dramatic and far-reaching challenge to the conventional Zionist account of the events of 1948.

Women and Gender

Feminist historiographical influence, and growing criticism of male-centered history, gave impetus from the 1970s onward to research on women and gender. Leila Ahmed, Lila Abu-Lughod, Judith Tucker, and others have paid systematic attention to the place of women in society and to constructions of gender, and they write the social, cultural, and political histories of women. Patriarchy, seclusion, and veiling are no longer understood as simply vestigial backwardness or as the expression of some essential Islamic essence, but as cultural practices grounded in processes of political and cultural contestation. The hypocrisy of colonial feminism has been exposed, as well as the pitfalls of simple nationalist assertion as an unwitting defense of patriarchy. After 1990 scholars successfully made the social construction of gender - masculinity as well as femininity - an integral part of larger accounts of social change. Elizabeth Thompson's work on Mandate Syria, for example, has argued that forms of colonial citizenship were forged in part from an interwar crisis of paternity, which had much to do with changing gender practices and norms.

Foucault

A number of historians have been inspired by the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose oeuvre suggests a radically critical genealogy of modernity. Timothy Mitchell's groundbreaking work sees Egypt's nineteenth-century history in terms of the inscription of modern disciplinary practices, which gave rise to and were ordered by a new metaphysics of modern representation - the "world-as-exhibition." Khaled Fahmy on nineteenth-century Egyptian state-building and Joseph Massad on Jordanian national identity have undertaken rich archival research to pursue such insights in productive ways.

Overall, the historiography of the region has become less vulnerable to the charge of being outmoded. It presents a diversity of approaches, a more developed theoretical awareness than before, and an increasingly rich resource for those trying to understand the past, present, and future of the region.

Bibliography

Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of aModern Debate. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1992.

Antonius, George. The Arab Awakening. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938.

Batatu, Hanna. The Old Social Classes and the RevolutionaryMovements of Iraq. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Beinin, Joel. Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Burke, Edmund III, ed. Struggle and Survival in the Modern MiddleEast. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Gibb, Hamilton A. R., and Bowen, Harold. Islamic Society and the West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950.

Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience andHistory in a World Civilization, Vols. 1 - 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books, 1978.

— JOHN T. CHALCRAFT

The early modern era witnessed enormous changes in historiography, both in the quantity and variety of works written about the past and in the status of history within intellectual and social life. At the dawn of the Reformation, history was still a minor genre, read principally in manuscript or in small printed editions. The Renaissance had enriched the medieval chronicle tradition, especially in Italy, by revisioning selected periods and subjects (the history of particular city-states first and foremost) according to humanist principles and in Latin that aspired to Ciceronian purity, while also focusing on the political lessons to be gleaned from the past, as done most famously by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). The changes of the next two centuries would be considerably more profound and would be driven by two engines: ideology (both religious and political), which sought to make command over the interpretation of the past a weapon in present struggles, and print, which enabled the replication and dissemination of historical works in ever-increasing numbers and, especially in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in forms accessible to an expanding readership below the level of the most affluent classes.

Reformation, Catholic, and National Traditions

In the German Reformation, Martin Luther's vision of a medieval past that was not simply that of a dark time of poor learning and bad Latin (the humanist position) but of a church corrupted and led astray by unwritten traditions and papal monarchy, set the polemical tone of much sixteenth-century historical writing. Among the most noteworthy books to be produced by German Reformation scholars was Commentaries on the State of Religion and the Empire under Charles V by Johannes Sleidanus (1506–1556), which made use of documentary sources and information from reformers. Sleidanus's later Chronicle of World Empires popularized the idea, derived from the Book of Daniel, that history had unfolded in an apocalyptic series of four major "empires," of which the Roman would be the last. Johann Carion (1499–1537 or 1538) also produced a chronicle that would be completed by Luther's adherent Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560). Most significant and influential, though riddled with error, was the vast Magdeburg Centuries, a multivolume effort initiated by the Croatian Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–1575), one of Luther's more radical disciples.

With some variation according to doctrine, this reinterpretation of the past was taken up by Protestant (Calvinist, Anglican, and Reformed) churches elsewhere in Europe. In England, where Sleidanus's works were issued in translation, the divorce of King Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547) from Catherine of Aragon and his break with Rome were both defended through historical research, while a series of Protestant chroniclers from Edward Hall (d. 1547) through Richard Grafton (d. 1572) and Raphael Holinshed (d. 1580?) rewrote England's past to establish its adherence to "primitive" or pure Christianity prior to the corruption of the medieval church. The fires of persecution in several parts of Europe also ignited a new genre, the Protestant martyrology: John Foxe in England (1516–1587), Heinrich Pantaleon (1522–1595) in Basel, Adriaan Cornelis van Haemstede (1526–1562) in the Netherlands, and Jean Crespin (d. 1572) in France were among its major practitioners, their accounts of the deaths of Protestant martyrs at the hands of popish persecutors creating a strongly anti-Catholic version of history for subsequent generations.

Protestants held no monopoly on historical writing. Catholic Europe responded to the challenge of the Reformation in different ways. The Italian tradition of urban and official historiography continued through the sixteenth century, surviving the collapse of the medieval and early Renaissance city-state regime in the era of grand duchies and Spanish rule over much of the peninsula. Spain itself produced a series of able historians such as the Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1536–1624). Though many of these reflected a Castilian perspective, other parts of the monarchy also developed historiographically, in particular Aragon, represented by the Annals of Jerónimo de Zurita y Castro (1512–1580), and Catalonia, by Francisco de Moncada (1586–1635). The mid-seventeenth-century Spanish crisis served as a further stimulus to the development of rival traditions there and in the Basque region. Perhaps most significant in the longer run were the works of Spanish missionaries abroad, since they introduced to European readers lands and pasts previously unknown. Following earlier works by Portuguese visitors to South and Southeast Asia such as João de Barros (c. 1496–1570) and Fernão Lopes de Castenheda (c. 1500–1559), Spaniards now wrote accounts of the Americas, in particular the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566) and the Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600). One of the first indigenous writers, Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca (1539–1616), son of an Inca princess and a Spanish soldier, contributed Royal Commentaries of the Incas, which provided a valuable corrective to earlier Spanish representations of the Inca Empire.

In Italy, Counter-Reformation scholars such as Cardinal Cesare Baronio (1538–1607) sought to repudiate Protestant historical writing through scholarship as well as rhetoric. Baronio's Ecclesiastical Annals, which reverted to the year-by-year format favored by medieval chroniclers, repudiated the Magdeburg Centuries only to be attacked in turn by a Huguenot scholar, Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), who had significantly greater philological skills than Baronio. In Venice, which was one of the few cities to retain its independence and was itself under a papal interdict in the early seventeenth century, a moderate priest named Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623) captured, in his History of the Council of Trent, the lost moment in the mid-sixteenth century when Christendom might have been put back together. Himself nearly the victim of assassination, Sarpi's critical stance toward Rome and his shrewd, Tacitean appreciation of the motives of political behavior led to his book having to be published pseudonymously in London, where it was well received by Protestant readers.

In Bohemia, early Czech nationalism was integrated with a Catholic perspective in the Czech Chronicle by the priest Vaclav Hajek (d. 1553); a century later he was followed by Bohuslav Balbín (1621–1688), another Catholic but one who regretted the decline in Czech culture since the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. Elsewhere, Latin historiography was initiated in the Hungarian Renaissance by the Italian Antonio Bonfini (1427–1502) and followed in the sixteenth century by István Szamosközy (c. 1565–1612), a contemporary historian of his own semi-independent Transylvania, and by Miklós Istvánffy (1538–1615), who covered events from the late fifteenth to the early sixteenth century in the Habsburg-controlled parts of Hungary.

There were significant contributions to historical writing in parts of Europe relatively unaffected by the main conflicts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In Poland, for instance, the heirs of the late medieval chronicler Jan Długosz (1415–1480), who had written in Latin, eventually included some vernacular authors, for instance Maciej Stryjkowski (1547–c. 1582) and Reinhold Heidenstein (1556–1620); a full synthesis of Polish history would first be produced by Marcin Kromer (1512–1589) in the late sixteenth century. Romanian and Moldavian historiography emerged slightly later in the work of Romanian-language aristocratic exponents such as the executed boyar conspirator Miron Costin (1633–1691). Further east, Russian historiography began to mature in Andrei Mikhailovich Kniaz Kurbskii's (1528–1583) History of the Muscovite Grand Prince, written in the 1560s and largely an account of the reign of Ivan IV the Terrible (1530–1584). Seventeenth-century Russian historians were faced with a new challenge, that of integrating their own history with that of the newly absorbed Ukraine, a task accomplished by Innokentii Gizel (d. 1683) in his Synopsis (1674). Finally, altogether outside Christian Europe, Ottoman historiography also developed during this period in the hands of Ibrahim Peçevi (1574–1649 or 1650), a historian of the era since Suleiman the Magnificent (d. 1566), and Mustafa Naima (1655–1716), whose Annals of the Turkish Empire from 1591 to 1659 of the Christian Era is the outstanding record of the Ottomans during that period.

The Debate Over National Myths

The establishment of national churches and of state-supported confessional regimes stimulated a tendency to promote national and ethnic myths (many of which had medieval or classical origins) and then to produce debate over their veracity. In Germany, humanists such as Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547) seized on the ancient historian Tacitus's Germania, a text that had praised primitive German virtue while criticizing imperial corruption. In Scotland Presbyterian scholars such as George Buchanan (1506–1582) wrote accounts of their national past fiercely defending that realm's independence from its wealthier southern neighbor, England; the myth of an ancient line of Scottish kings going back to pre-Christian times would prove durable until undermined by the relentless scholarship of a much later Scot, the emigré Catholic priest Thomas Innes (1662–1744). In Sweden, the Vasa regime produced Olof Petersson's (Olaus Petri, 1493–1552) Swedish Chronicle in the 1530s (though King Gustav Vasa disliked this and prevented its publication), while Catholic Swedish exiles such as Archbishop Johannes Magnus (1488–1544) wrote the anti-Vasa History of the Gothic Kingdom of Sweden. The particular role of the Goths as European and especially Swedish ancestors was foregrounded by Magnus's brother Olaus or Olof (1490–1557) in his History of the Nordic People; it was given new life in the late seventeenth century in Atlantica, a peculiar work by Olof Rudbeck (1630–1702) that identified Sweden with the lost kingdom of Atlantis. The old medieval myth of the founding of Rome and other states by Trojan refugees was reenergized in western Europe during the sixteenth century, as Gallican French writers argued for a foundation of their country by Francus or Francio, and English writers theirs by Brutus or Brute (a Trojan foundation being preferable to a medieval one since it would precede the establishment of the city and empire of Rome).

Most of these accounts did not stand up to scrutiny. In England, an émigré Italian named Polydore Vergil (c. 1470–1555) wrote the first full-length history of England in humanist Latin, evincing skepticism both about Brutus and about the historicity of a late-Romano-British hero, King Arthur; he was widely criticized by Welsh and English writers, including able scholars such as John Leland (c. 1506–1552) and John Bale (1495–1563). The French attack on myth was much more formidable and, for a time, decisive. The end of the sixteenth century witnessed a flourishing of scholarly activity on the past, much of it affiliated with study of the law, and Estienne Pasquier (1529–1615), among others, expressed considerable doubt about the Trojan descent and many other venerable mythsinhisseriesof Researches on France. Pasquier's own teacher, the Huguenot lawyer François Hotman (1524–1590), argued for the national affiliation of the Franks and the Germans (an unpopular position in the absolutist France of the next century), his position reached by a combination of comparative legal scholarship and hatred of the royalist regime that had committed the atrocity of St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572. It is significant that Hotman's and Pasquier's findings were endorsed by the Catholic antiquaries Jean du Tillet (d. 1570) and Nicolas Vignier (1530–1596): by 1600 the Trojan myth seemed all but demolished in France, and even English scholars were now handling it with cautious skepticism.

Antiquarianism, Skepticism, and the Theory of History

As the work of these French érudits suggests, one of the most significant developments in historical writing at this time was the advent of antiquarianism. This had several origins, and its practitioners often had little to do with the writing of history as a formal genre; they were thus not bound by the prescribed rules for the writing of history laid down in classical and Renaissance artes historicae (see below). Many antiquaries approached the past through study of the law: in France, a long tradition of legal scholars from Guillaume Budé (1468–1540) and François Baudouin (1520–1573) to Hotman and Jean Bodin (1530–1596) applied the humanist concern for accurate editing of texts to the study of the law (the so-called mos gallicus or French method). Bodin in particular was able to rise above his sources to achieve a philosophical perspective on history, most clearly articulated in his Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1566). A work that was widely read elsewhere in Europe, the Method attacked well-worn schemes for interpreting the past such as the "four empires" propagated by earlier historians like Sleidanus.

Other antiquaries focused on the study of words, of objects, and of places: a prominent genre from the late sixteenth century was chorography, which studied the history of particular regions or towns but used place rather than time as the organizing principle. Continental chorographers included the Brescian Ottavio Rossi (1570–1630), Guillaume Catel of Toulouse (1560–1626), and the Provençal Cesar de Nostredame (1553–1629). Their contemporary William Camden (1551–1623), the greatest English practitioner of this genre, followed the lead of his predecessor John Leland, who had journeyed about England in the 1530s and 1540s and recorded his observations in a series of unpublished Itineraries. Camden's own Britannia (1586) was a much-reprinted work in Latin and English editions. The group of scholars of whom he was a leading member, including a short-lived Society of Antiquaries, had close ties with Continental scholars, both Protestant and Catholic, such as the numismatist and librarian Janus Gruter (1560–1627), the chronologer and philologist Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), the Dutch writer Gerhard Vossius (1577–1649), and the French contemporary historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553–1617). The wealth of Latin and vernacular correspondence, a good deal of which was published at the time, and which is now held by European and English libraries, testifies to the existence of a western European "republic of letters" that could transcend confessional divisions in the pursuit of an accurate understanding of the past.

The multiplication of forms of historical writing and the tension between a belief in the unity of truth and the inescapable fact of disagreement about the past produced in the late sixteenth century a series of attempts to make some sense of historical genres and to prescribe principles for the writing, or at least the reading, of history. A variety of works of uneven sophistication, collectively known as artes historicae ('arts of history') were produced all across Europe by authors such as the Spaniard Melchor Cano (1509–1560) and the German Bartholomew Keckerman (c. 1571–c. 1608). Many, following the ancient writer Dionysius of Halicarnassus, were little more than summaries of what had been written from antiquity to the current era, with critical comments. A number of such works were published together by the Swiss printer Johann Wolf in 1579. A few, such as Bodin's Method, Francesco Patrizi's (1529–1597) Ten Dialogues on History, and Francis Bacon's (1561–1626) somewhat later Advancement of Learning (which dealt with many other subjects than history), aspired to a more systematic view and borrowed from educational theorists such as the Frenchman Petrus Ramus (1515–1572). Among the most interesting products of this time was the History of Histories, with the Idea of Perfect History and the Design for a New History of France (1599) by the Frenchman Henri Lancelot Voisin de la Popelinière (1541–1608). La Popelinière espoused the goal of an accurate history that would be "perfect" or complete in the sense of resting on firm scholarly foundations and would not be subject to constant revision. This notion seems foreign today, but in La Popelinière's time it amounted to a bulwark against confessional polemic and unjustified nationalist myth. It was also an answer to credulity's opposite extreme, a rising "pyrrhonist" doubt (associated with the followers of the ancient skeptic Pyrrho) that the past could ever actually be known with any accuracy.

The Seventeenth Century: Erudition and Ideology

Ideology continued to influence the writing of history in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, for instance in Scotland, where rival Presbyterian and Episcopalian interpretations of the ecclesiastical past were represented respectively by David Calderwood (1575–1650) and Archbishop John Spottiswoode (1565–1637). But though religion remained the preeminent point of difference, ideological disagreements were not always exclusively religious, especially as the century wore on and the era of confessional warfare was displaced by one of contending commercial empires. In England, a period of bloody civil strife and regicide in the middle of the century led to a virtual explosion of historical writing from various points of view ranging from the absolutist position of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) to the republicanism of the Machiavellian-influenced James Harrington (1611–1677) to the radicalism of the Leveller and Digger movements, with their view that England had been enslaved not by a Roman but by a Norman yoke at the Conquest of 1066. On the Continent, the solidification of absolutist regimes, especially in France, led to a retreat from the kind of open-ended inquiry practiced in Bodin's and Pasquier's day, as a series of crown-sponsored historiographers royal became instead "artisans of glory." The Trojan myth, once thoroughly discredited, returned in full force, and the scholar Nicolas Fréret (1688–1749) went to the Bastille in 1714 for the crime of maintaining the ancient connection between the Franks and the Germans. Despite such instances of persecution, however, the "erudite" tradition remained strong in Europe, assisted by the establishment of national academies of learning and by early examples of scholarly journals. Cultural exchange between scholars of different religions and countries continued after the end of the religious wars by about the middle of the seventeenth century and into the early eighteenth. This scholarly community was not always as civilized and friendly as it has often been portrayed; the language of scholarly dispute was often heated and rhetorical to a degree that would embarrass even a scathing modern book reviewer. In this the later seventeenth-century érudits were simply following the lead of some of their illustrious predecessors, in particular the polymath Scaliger, possibly the most learned scholar of his own day, and John Selden (1584–1654), his younger English admirer, both of whom were also vituperative critics of those they perceived as guilty of willful error.

A century of publication and a much more widespread interest in the past meant that by the late seventeenth century, history had established itself as a printed genre much in demand: publishers in the next decades would use devices such as serial publication and advance subscription to extend history's readership far beyond its previous social bounds. At the same time, the youth of Europe acquired both an understanding of the past (thought to be useful both in civilized discourse and in future political or legal careers, or even in the mundane matter of running estates), and a sensitivity to its difference from the present. Many students followed the grand tour that took in famous historic sites and monuments across Europe. Along the way, they collected coins and artifacts, for which a vigorous market had developed, a virtual "archaeological economy" that saw the trade and export of ancient and medieval curiosities. By the end of the century this interest had extended to natural remains such as fossils, and many scholars were shifting their attention from the explanation of physical objects according to ancient texts toward their systematic observation, collection, and comparison. Although still constrained by a scriptural chronological framework that ran no further back than six thousand years, the study of fossils and the conclusion to which it led, that there might once have lived species no longer extant, when put together with a century of awareness of New World and East Asian societies, produced a renewed wave of skepticism. Among the products of this "crisis" in belief was some searching criticism of the literal truth of the Old Testament account of the Creation, Patriarchal descent, and the Flood, especially by the Frenchman Richard Simon (1638–1712) and the Englishman Thomas Burnet (1635–1715). The skepticism and anticlericalism of Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire would be built on such foundations as these.

As the eighteenth century dawned, historiography flourished in a number of different traditions. The erudite tradition, associated with the republic of letters, continued to mix philological scholarship (the continuous improvement of editions of earlier writers) with antiquarian observation, the latter now blending with natural philosophy or science, as it did notably in the work of the Welshman Edward Lhuyd (1660–1709) and the Scot Sir Robert Sibbald (1641–1722). The polymathic ideal of seamless learning was represented perhaps most strikingly by the mathematician, philosopher, and scholar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Within this broad erudite tradition, the activity of producing precise, learned texts ruled by rigorous scholarship remained prominent, and in several different spheres. These included sacred history, best represented in the activities of the seventeenth-century Bollandists (whose Acta Sanctorum continues to this day) and Maurists, especially the founder of systematic paleography and diplomatics, Jean Mabillon (1632–1707). Late antique history was set on a new critical footing by the likes of Louis-Sebastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637–1698). Further strides were made in administrative and legal history—the Polish Volumina Legum of the first half of the eighteenth century, for instance, or the studies and texts of two English antiquaries, Thomas Rymer (1641–1713) and Thomas Madox (1666–1727). National collections of historical documents were printed and annotated by a number of scholars, for instance the medieval sources of Italian history published by Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) and the Hungarian records produced by his slightly younger contemporary, Matthias or Matyas Bél (1684–1749).

The second grand tradition, mainstream political history writing, continued to produce accounts of the national past in each land, with a few outstanding examples setting the pace, for instance Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon's (1609–1674) History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars, modeled on an earlier account of the French religious wars by the Italian Arrigo Caterino Davila (1576–1631) and François Eudes de Mézeray's (1610–1683) History of France. The first Russian history to be based on detailed analysis and critical annotation of medieval sources was Vasilii Nikitich Tatishchev's (1686–1750) Russian History from Antiquity, though it remained in manuscript until the late eighteenth century. Full-length national histories such as this were much in vogue, perhaps the most durable being the Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume's (1711–1776) mid-eighteenth-century History of England.

Finally, the third tradition, a more philosophical one (though often based on learning as sophisticated as that of the érudits) stretches back to Bodin and forward to Voltaire and Herder in the Enlightenment proper. The Moldavian prince Dmitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), whose History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire combines deep knowledge of Ottoman society with a cyclical view of history, belongs to this tradition, as does the Croatian proto-nationalist Pavao Vitezovic (1652–1713). Perhaps the greatest practitioners of erudite philosophical history were two Italians, the jurist Pietro Giannone (1676–1748), who wrote a Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples combining profound learning with an understanding of the development of culture and society, and Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), author of New Science. Vico conceived of three major ages of history, each with a distinctive mode of knowledge and communication, and of a series of recurring cycles in civilization. The originality and innovative perspective of his book would largely be ignored until its rediscovery in the nineteenth century, but the New Science now stands as the climactic achievement of early modern historical thought on the eve of the Enlightenment.

Bibliography

Allan, David. Virtue, Learning, and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History. Edinburgh, 1993.

Cochrane, Eric W. Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance. Chicago, 1981. Mainly on the Renaissance, but extends into the seventeenth century.

Franklin, Julian H. Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History. New York, 1963.

Goldgar, Anne. Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750. New Haven, 1995.

Gregory, Brad S. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 1999. Useful material on the martyrologies.

Huppert, George. The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France. Urbana, Ill., 1970.

Johannesson, Kurt. The Renaissance of the Goths in Sixteenth- Century Sweden: Johannes and Olaus Magnus as Politicians and Historians. Translated and edited by James Larson. Berkeley, 1991.

Kelley, Donald R. Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder. New Haven, 1998.

——. Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance. New York, 1970.

Knowles, David. Great Historical Enterprises. Problems in Monastic History. London and New York, 1963. Essential account of Bollandists and Maurists.

Mc Cuaig, William. Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the Late Renaissance. Princeton, 1989.

Momigliano, Arnaldo. "Ancient History and the Antiquarian." In his Studies in Historiography. New York, 1966. Seminal article on the division between erudition and narrative history writing.

Pocock, J. G. A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1987. Revised edition of classic 1957 study of English legal historical thought.

Pompa, Leon. Vico: A Study of the "New Science." 2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.

Ranum, Orest A. Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-Century France. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980.

Schiffman, Zachary. On the Threshold of Modernity: Relativism in the French Renaissance. Baltimore, 1991.

Woolf, D. R. The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and "The Light of the Truth" from the Accession of James I to the Civil War. Toronto, 1990.

Woolf, D. R., ed. A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing. 2 vols. New York, 1998. Includes survey articles by various authors on a variety of national historical traditions and biographical entries on representative historians.

—D. R. WOOLF

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - historieskrivning

Nederlands (Dutch)
geschiedschrijving

Français (French)
n. - historiographie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Geschichtsschreibung, Historiographie

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ιστοριογραφία

Italiano (Italian)
storiografia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - historiografia (f)

Русский (Russian)
историография

Español (Spanish)
n. - historiografía

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - historiografi, historieskrivning

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
编史, 历史之编纂, 史料编纂学

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 編史, 歷史之編纂, 史料編纂學

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 사료 편찬, 관에서 편찬한 역사

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 史料編集, 正史

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‏(الاسم) كتابه وتدوين التاريخ, نظريات وأساليب ومناهج دراسه علم التاريخ, مجموعه معينه من الكتابات عن التاريخ‏

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n. - ‮כתיבת ההיסטוריה, היסטוריוגרפיה‬

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