Zachary Schiffman, "Historicizing History, Contextualizing Context" (NLH 2011)

+LVWRULFL]LQJ+LVWRU\&RQWH[WXDOL]LQJ&RQWH[WZachary Sayre Schiffman

New Literary History, Volume 42, Number 3, Summer 2011, pp. 477-498(Article)

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New Literary History, 2011, 42: 477498

Historicizing History/Contextualizing Context

Zachary Sayre Schiffman

In 1983, the mcdonalds corporation licensed its flagship res-taurant in downtown Chicago. Christened the Rock N Roll Mc-Donalds, it was originally a one-story structure divided into a 1950s half and a 1960s half. The 50s sectionemblazoned with portraits of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, James Dean, and the likeresembled a malt shop straight out of the early TV sitcom Ozzie and Harriet, with For-mica countertops, red and white checkered tiles, stainless-steel-framed seating with glossy red and white plastic upholstery, and a jukebox featuring classics by Bill Haley, Ricky Nelson, and Jan & Dean. The 60s sectionfrescoed with Jimi Hendrix, the Supremes, the Beatles, and othershad a more frenetic ambience, with colorful posters bearing Lichtensteinesque logos in homage to cartoon culture (Pow! Crash!), hippie slogans in bright neon lights (Groovy!), a more futuristic use of plastic furniture and laminated surfaces, and a jukebox loaded with Motown, folk, and acid rock. (In 2005, the franchise owners tore down the original Rock N Roll McDonalds and replaced it with the new Rock N Roll McDonaldsa glitzy, two-story structure of glass and steel, suspended between two giant golden archeswhich houses rock memorabilia in an attached museum.)

The original Rock N Roll McDonalds epitomizes the intimate con-nection between our sense of history and our sense of context. The former manifests itself in our perception of the past as an objective space lying back there in time; the latter manifests itself in our idea of anachronism, in a sensitivity to context so acute that we can routinely distinguish a 50s from a 60s aesthetic. Indeed, the sense of anachronism so pervades our historical consciousness that it constitutes our idea of the past as a temporal space, which we can hardly conceive of apart from this ingrained sense of the difference between past and present. The pervasive awareness of anachronism at every level of our culturefrom McDonalds to academeconfirms the intersection between our historicizing and contextualizing habits of mind.1

This reflexive contextualization of the past originated fairly recently, germinating in the Renaissance and maturing in the eighteenth century. In making this assertion, I am saying nothing new to students of early

new literary history478

modern history and literature, who have long regarded the emergence of an idea of anachronism as one of the defining features of the Renais-sance, a feature contributing to the subsequent development of modern historical thought. But the consequences of this insight have not been fully explored, both for ancient and medieval conceptions of the past and for the nature of Enlightenment historiography. The Renaissance origin of our sense of anachronism raises questions about the status of this idea earlier, in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Although we tend to assume that people have always regarded the past as a temporal space different from the present, would ancient Greeks and Romans and medieval Europeans have experienced this reflex, absent our idea of anachronism? The Renaissance origin of this idea also raises questions about the emergence of modern historical thought in the eighteenth century. Although we tend to assume that the idea of anachronism entails a sense of history, does an awareness of historical and cultural context necessarily generate a perception of the past as lying back there in time? These questions cast new light upon a fundamental category of thoughtnamely the pastwhose commonsense status we can no longer take for granted.

In order to explore the origins of the past as an object of thought, we should begin by rigorously distinguishing between the perception of priority in time and the perception of the difference between past and present, notions that tend to become fused in our colloquial us-age of the term, the past. Priority in time does not necessarily entail a sense of the difference between past and present; in other words, it does not entail our idea of anachronism. To grasp this point, one need only consider the chief form of historical record keeping in the Middle Ages, the chronicle. For example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicleversions of which were compiled by generations of monks starting in the late ninth centurycovers the thousand-year expanse from the birth of Christ to 1154 virtually year-by-year, with (for all practical purposes) no qualita-tive distinction between entries, which simply list the doings of assorted kings, bishops, abbots, and abbesses, along with eclipses and other por-tents. In this cumulative form of historical record keeping, the death of Charlemagne receives the same kind of attention as the travels of an English bishop or an eclipse of the moon. The chronological slotting of events leaves them undifferentiated; it does not entail a sustained sense of the difference between past and present, without which one could not conceive of the past as a conceptual entity. The simple, fundamental distinction between temporal priority and temporal differ-ence thus opens a window onto Western historical thought, from which vantage point we can historicize our sense of history and contextualize our sense of context.

479historicizing history/contextualizing context

* * *

Ever since the publication of Jacob Burckhardts Civilization of the Re-naissance in Italy over 150 years ago, scholars have commonly regarded an awareness of anachronism as one of the defining features of the Re-naissance. Burckhardts Development of the Individualthe famously entitled second part of his bookspeaks to an enlivened sense of oneself as an individual (geistiges Individuum), which entailed a perception of the world as full of distinct entities (die Flle des Individuellen), encom-passing the uniqueness of both people and things.2 In his Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Erwin Panofsky further expanded upon this development in his description of the reintegration of form and content in art, whereby Renaissance artists came to render classical figures in classical rather than medieval form, thus restoring them to their appropriate contexts, which established their personal and histori-cal distinctiveness.3 What Panofsky did for the study of Renaissance art history, Myron Gilmore (among others) did for the study of Renaissance historiography, and Thomas M. Greene (among others) for the study of Renaissance literature.4 All have detailed various aspects of a height-ened sense of anachronism, which sought either to establish antiquity in its historical context or to play off of the perceived tension between antiquity and modernity.

The Renaissance birth of anachronism, however, raises the issue of the status of this idea in antiquity. We have overlooked this issue until now because we regard the perception of temporal difference as so commonsensical that we naturally tend to assume it had always existed. A glance at ancient literature would seemingly confirm this impression. Although he lived in an Iron Age culture, Homer sings of past heroes hefting bronze weapons, as they would have done in the olden days; likewise, Thucydides refers to antiquated customs no longer in use, such as the carrying of arms for self-defense or the wearing of belts during athletic contests rather than contending naked like modern Hellenes. The awareness of anachronism apparent in the writings of these and other early Greek authors culminates in the second century BC with the scholarship of Aristarchus of Samothrace, whose thorough-going stylistic knowledge of the Homeric epics enabled him to determine whenever a word or usage seemed out of place. And one can find equivalent ex-amples of this sensibility in Roman literature and scholarship.

The ancients, though, employed the idea of anachronism in an oc-casional and instrumentalist fashion. They used it to set a scene or make a logical point, after which they promptly forgot about it until needed again. Aside from his bronze weapons, Achilles is indistinguishable in


word and deed from Homers contemporaries; and after Thucydides references ancient practices to prove a point about modern progress, he drops the subject entirely. Similarly, the philological achievements of Hellenistic scholars remained isolated and occasional rather than entering the cultural mainstream. In antiquity, the fashion of literary eclecticismthe urge to draw inspiration from as many different sources as possibleprecluded a more systematic and sustained idea of anach-ronism. Greek and Roman authors thus did not distinguish clearly and consistently between past and present; and without such a distinction, the past did not emerge as an object of thought, despite the invention in antiquity of the literary genre known as history.

Instead of an idea of the pastwhatever kind of entity it might en-compassancient historians conceived of multiple pasts characterized by different time frames, each disassociated from the next, without privi-leging any particular one. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, for example, Thucydides begins (in the so-called Archaeology) in a kind of macrotime that describes the centuries-long progress toward sea power in the Hellenic world, switches to a kind of microtime to describe the immediate events leading up to the war, then to an intermediate time frame (in the so-called Pentecontaetia, for the fifty years between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars) to describe the underlying cause of the warnamely, Spartan fear of growing Athenian powerand then to another kind of microtime to describe the circumstances surrounding the actual declaration of war. All these time frames and more coexist in the first book of his history, which leads to an entirely new time frame in Book Two, the time of the war as measured by summers and winters.

Modern readers naturally tend to assume that these diverse frames represent different perspectives on the same continuum, but they actu-ally partake of two general conceptions of time, linear and episodic. Linear time establishes a directional, causal linkage between events, whereby their outcome depends on their sequencing. Episodic time discloses the operation of immutable patterns, historical processes that might be catalyzed by specific occurrences but whose outcomes are inevitable, regardless of any intervening sequence of events. The Archaeology exemplifies linear time, charting the material progress that accompanies the development of Hellenic naval power. The Pen-tecontaetia, too, exemplifies linear timetracing the steady growth of the Athenian empire in the interwar periodbut it also segues into a prime instance of episodic time, describing how Spartan jealousy and fear of Athens lead inevitably to war.

Ancient historians from Herodotus to Livy (and beyond) manifest these different kinds of time in a wide variety of ways. Episodic time takes


many forms, such as cycles of injury and revenge, of metabol (whereby great states become small and small ones great), and of tragedy (whereby hubris leads inevitably to nemesis), to name only a few. Instances of linear time are even more varied, as we can see from Thucydides, where the broad brush millennial frame of the Archaeology gives way to a mind-numbingly minute sequence of events in the immediate run up to the war, which (in turn) gives way to a retrospective, medium-scale analysis of the intermediate decades between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. In Book Two, these different kinds of linear time yield to the seasonal one of summers and winters, a linear frame cross-cut by various other linear and episodic schemes. These discordant frames dont add up to a continuum, at least not in Thucydides mind, for they differ not only in degree but in kind.

Amid this plethora of incommensurable pasts, there could be no conception of the past as a place back there in time. Such a concep-tion was not only inconceivable but also undesirable, for it would have precluded the interplay of pasts in which the ancients found the pri-mary lessons of history, lessons subsequently squeezed out of the literary genre by the crushing weight of the past, which has (by comparison) rendered our understanding of events one-dimensional. Perceptions of the past chiefly derive from linear, cause-and-effect explanations of events that tend to crowd out other kinds of explanation, such as those disclosing recurrent historical patterns. Instead of our flattened, linear perspective, the ancients maintained a supple, multidimensional one that permitted them to explore complex themes emerging from resonances between temporal frames, themes that recurred in unexpected variations.

In the third book of his history, for example, Thucydides explores the relationship between justice and expediency in politics by highlighting a series of episodes within a linear account. The book begins with the demagogue Cleon and the orator Diodotus debating the role of justice versus expediency before the Athenian Assembly, which sat in judgment of the fate of the Mitylenians, inhabitants of a city that had revolted against Athens (3.3550). Modern readers typically root for Diodotus as he uses arguments from expediency to overrule Cleonthe most violent man in Athenswho had previously convinced the Assembly of the righteousness of executing all the Mitylenians for the crime of having betrayed Athens. The full implications of Diodotuss position, however, only become apparent as this episode begins to resonate with subse-quent ones, revealing unanticipated aspects of the rule of expediency that emerge from the interplay of different instances of episodic time.

In the next instancethe trial of the Plataeans before a Spartan kangaroo courtSpartan judges curry the favor of their Theban allies


by ordering the execution of the courageous Plataeans for the crime of having defended their city against a Theban sneak attack (3.5268). And, by the end of Book Three, extremism in the defense of faction leads to unstoppable civil war and to the unraveling of social consensus in Thucydides account of the Corcyraean revolution, when words had to change their ordinary meanings and to take those which were now given themwhen the imperatives of expediency subverted the language of justice itself (3.7084). Episodes in subsequent bookssuch as the famous Melian dialogueresonate with the theme of the breakdown of language and reason in the face of political expediency. This theme also reflects back upon the ostensibly optimistic tone of the Archaeol-ogywith its account of material progress through sea poweras if Thucydides were cautioning his readers not to have too much faith in their own cleverness. His greatness as a writer and a thinker resides in the interplay of multiple pasts defined by different conceptions of time. This interplay occurs within the linear frame of the time of the war, but it does not structure that frame; the diverse forms of linear and episodic time remain incommensurable.

Not even Polybiuss subsequent universal history, which used a seemingly all-encompassing scheme of Olympiads to chart the linear development of Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean, could escape the hold that multiple pasts exerted on the ancient imagination. His most decisive explanation of Roman power and resiliency occurs in the famous sixth book of his history, which interrupts the linear account of Romes defeats at the hands of Hannibal with a foray into episodic time detailing the nature of Romes mixed constitution. Strikingly, he does not incorporate this explanation of Roman strength into his subsequent linear account of Romes revivalthe two remain in entirely separate frames. Indigenous Roman historians would later adopt Polybiuss vision of universal history, substituting the sequence of Roman kingly and con-sular reigns for Olympiads. This annalistic form, however, had the effect of emphasizing episodic time. Recurring moral themessuch as Livys parallels between the young Tarquins rape of Lucretia and the lustful Appius Claudiuss abduction of Verginia, or between Brutuss execution of his sons for treason, Horatios killing of his sister for disloyalty, and Manliuss execution of his son for disobediencestand out amid an otherwise flat series of (largely annual) office holders.

Amid the crowd of multiple pasts, not even nostalgia for the old Roman ways could engender an idea of the past. Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus mourn the loss of ancient Roman virtue and yearn for a return to the good old days of pietas, fides, disciplina, and gravitasthe simple, peasant virtues that had made Rome great. But they write as if these


virtues were not so much lost as buried, awaiting reactivation through the good offices of the historian. As Livy famously notes, The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind (1.1). The episodic ad-ministration of this remedy precluded any perception of the past as a continuum extending back to remote times.

* * *

Before such an idea could even begin to emerge, it was necessary to transcend the incommensurability of multiple pasts, creating a single arena encompassing all human activity. The first step in this direction came not in the field of historiography but in that of theology, as classical culture became Christianized. Augustines Confessions marks a great tran-sition in Western thought, away from the classical idea of philosophical transcendence and toward a more existential stance in the world, one that regards our consciousness as embedded in our earthy circumstances. In his indispensable commentary on the Confessions, James ODonnell likens the effect of its opening lineswhich evoke Augustines yearn-ing for a seemingly remote Godto that of coming into a room and chancing upon a man speaking to someone who isnt there, a man so intent on reaching for the unreachable that he scarcely notices us.5 Augustines very act of speaking so intently to God sweeps the reader up into a novel inner reality far removed from the conventions of classical literature and the multiple pasts they enshrined.

The intimacy of the Confessions roots us firmly in the present, in the here and now of ongoing prayer. Of course, Augustine still recounts the events of his life in linear and episodic time, with special emphasis on the latter. The most reverberant instance of episodic time is the famous pear-stealing scene, which resonates with other incidents reminiscent of the Fall. While recounting these episodes, however, Augustine emphasizes the time he is in now, as we witness him confessing to God. He intends by this literary effect to confront his readers with the reality of their existential situation. Augustine regards all humanity as condemned to live in the timeand worldof Gods creation, which separates us from Him. The only way toward God lies from withinthrough the soulby means of prayer, in a confessing that rediscovers and bears witness to Gods omnipresence.

In the Confessions, Augustine emphasizes the act of recollection more than the things rememberedthe past was not an object of thought for him. Instead, he remained rooted in the now, in a radically reflexive state that he termed attentioan attending to his own awareness


which served as the portal though which he sought God.6 Of course, he does not deny that in his boyhood he once stole some pears, but he nonetheless insists that the time of his boyhood has ceased to exist: My own childhood, which no longer exists, is in past time, which also no longer exists (11.18). The past is merely an instance of recollecting in the present: It might be correct to say that there are three times, a present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of fu-ture things (11.20). Only through the ambiguities of everyday language does the past acquire a referent outside the moment.

Our consciousness is an attending in, and to, the moment, an inef-fable point distended between memory of what has gone before and expectation of what is to come, between a past and a future that have no intrinsic reality outside the attentive mind. By reducing all time to the now, Augustine seeks to overturn our mundane sense of times passage, which obscures the presence of times Creator. Indeed, Augustine sees intimations of divinity in the minds trinity of memory, perception, and expectation. Delving into the soul, he finds God in the now of ongoing prayer, in the very act of confessing.

Ultimately, though, Augustine denies the possibility of transcending time through prayer. The way to God is blocked. Despite our intense yearning for wholeness with him, we remain fragmented beings stranded in time. Our distentio animi (which Garry Wills freely translates as a tugged-about-soul) is pulled between past and futureit is a flitting awareness that shuttles ceaselessly from memory to expectationknow-ing no rest and finding no purchase for ascent toward God.7 Augustine likens us to pilgrimsperegriniliterally aliens cut off from God and mired in time. Once we recognize our earthly alienation, our unfulfilled longing cannot but manifest itself in the process of confessing, as we lovingly bear witness to our Creator. This act naturally becomes an ongoing exercise of the soul (exercitatio animi) that progressively strips away the illusions of the mundane world, sharpens our awareness of our existential condition, and readies us for the final reward beyond time, when yearning will yield to fulfillment.

This existential stance in the now is reinforced by Augustines idea of the saeculum, as expressed in his great historico-theological treatise, The City of God.8 Strictly speaking, the city of God and its counterpoint, the city of the Devil, are not of this world; they exist as eschatological entities, becoming fully manifest only at the end of time, when the citizenry of each will become known by its eternal reward. We can thus distinguish the city of the Devil from what Augustine loosely terms the earthly city or city of men, which is best conceived of as the temporal arena where the saved and the damned enact their divinely allotted fates. The


saeculum constitutes the space where this activity occurs, where sacred and secular intertwine. It is the space of our alienation, distended between God and the Devil, where the right kind of love transforms distention into intention, leading to the beata vita.

Early medieval historians transformed Augustines saeculum from a spatial to a temporal entity. Augustine himself played an unwitting role in this development by introducing an important innovation in the fig-ural mode of scriptural analysis. The widespread technique of figural analysiswhich traces back to Paulsought parallels between the Old and New Testaments, interpreting all of scripture from the perspective of the Incarnation: Adam (regarded as a real historical actor) prefigures Christ (also a real historical actor), who stands as the fulfillment of Adam, the reality of whom cannot be grasped apart from this linkage. The Incarnation heralded the end of time; by the early fifth century, however, the unexpected persistence of the world after the coming of Christ led Augustine to extend the figural mode beyond the Incarnation to encompass the Parousia, or Second Coming, thus confirming the still-unfulfilled promise of the Incarnation. With Augustines innovation, the figural mode of analysis came to circumscribe the saeculum from its beginning to its end.9

Whereas Augustine clearly distinguished between biblical and post-biblical events, maintaining that one could only know Gods will as reflected in scripture, his early medieval successorsmen like Gregory of Tours and the Venerable Bedesaw the revelation of Gods will in figural parallels between biblical and contemporary events. The structure of Gregorys sixth-century History of the Franks is thoroughly figural, as Martin Heinzelmann has shown in his exhaustive study of the text.10 Gregorys figural pairing of the Franks and their kings with the Hebrews and theirs informs the entire work, thus linking biblical to postbiblical events. Writing two-hundred years later in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Venerable Bede goes even farther, not only establish-ing figural parallels between biblical and postbiblical events but also establishing figural relations between chains of postbiblical events.11 This extension of the figural view of reality into the postbiblical world had the effect of sacralizing the saeculum, transforming it from an arena where sacred and secular intertwined to the arena where God worked His will in human affairs.

The resulting emphasis on Gods purposive action in the world trans-formed the saeculum from a spatial to a temporal entity, but one defined by an eschatological perspectivethat is, by a perspective that looked back from the future. This quality is especially apparent in Bedes narra-tive, which creates the impression of a linear, chronological flow of events,


characterized by a principle of historical causation. Yet this appearance is deceptive, for Bede freely plays with chronology in the Ecclesiastical History, sometimes inverting the order of events or linking those that occurred many years apart, as if one were the immediate cause of the other. The author of two chronological treatises, On Times and On the Reckoning of Time, Bede always knew when he was taking these liberties, as indicated by the vague temporal circumlocutionsmeanwhile, at about this timewith which he stitched such events together. But for Bede the figural view of reality trumped chronology, enabling him to link widely spaced events and even, if necessary, to invert their chronological order so as to reveal their figural relation. In Bedes historical imagina-tion, effects can precede causes because all earthly events prefigure Gods final judgment, in whose mind past, present, and future were as one.

* * *

The Christian notion of the simultaneity of time in the omnipres-ence of Gods mind precluded the emergence of the past as an object of thought in the Middle Ages; but the figural view of reality began to break down in the Renaissance, paving the way for a sustained idea of anachronism that would eventually distinguish past from present. Although the importance of rhetoric had declined in northern Eu-rope, it remained an essential art in medieval Italian city republics, where the demands of civic life nurtured the ability to express oneself effectively in both speech and writing. During the fourteenth century, Italians awakened to the expressive power of classical Latin, a language more subtle and sophisticated than its cruder (though more vigorous) medieval offspring. Along with the resurrection of classical Latin came the revival of classical authors and the culture they conveyed, chiefly as excerpted in manuscript and print collections of commonplaces. These collections, and the classical rhetoric that underlay them, fostered a shift from a figural to an exemplary view of the world.

Scholastic philosophers devalued examples as a weak form of proof, but the humanists relied on them to buttress their program of imitatiothe emulation of classical Latin literary modelswhich sought to resurrect the glory of Roman civilization along with its literature and language. Although examples served a host of descriptive as well as prescriptive functions, they ultimately modeled not only literary but political, social, and moral norms. These, in turn, fed back into the commonplace themes around which collections of examples were organized, redoubling the norms that sustained the exemplary view of the world. Recall, though,


that commonplace collections facilitated a program of imitatio based on a fundamental awareness of the differences between classical and modern culturehence the desire to imitate, and thereby to resurrect, what had been lost. This act of resurrection created a paradoxa living past that was, at one and the same time, different from the present and of vital importance to it as a model. The paradoxical nature of the living past became ever more apparent as the growing awareness of the differences between past and present increasingly undermined the relevance of classical models. Ironically, then, the emergence of the idea of anachronism in the Renaissance served to circumscribeand ultimately to underminethe exemplarity it fostered.

The fourteenth-century Italian poet/scholar, Francesco Petrarcaor Petrarch, as he is known in Englishepitomizes the Renaissance discov-ery of anachronism. Minor precursors aside, it was Petrarch who first conceived of the program of imitatio, as if by a Copernican leap from the figural to a more contextual reading of classical authors, a reading informed by the apprehension of differences between antiquity and modernity.12 Nowhere does the gap between past and present yawn more widely for Petrarch than in his first letter to Cicero, written on the oc-casion of his discovery of Ciceros own letters to Atticus, Quintus, and Brutus in the cathedral library of Verona in 1345. Petrarch had revered Cicero as the great father of Roman eloquence, but these letters re-vealed a hypocritical side of the golden-tongued sage, who in retirement forsook philosophical withdrawal for political engagement, only to suffer an ignoble death.13 In response, Petrarch put pen to paper in an effort to reconcile the universal ideal of the sage espoused by Cicero with the historical reality of the man, who nonetheless immersed himself in poli-tics; but this effort only served to reveal the unbridgeable gulf separating the modern Italian from the ancient Roman he so desperately sought to reach: But these words indeed are all in vain. Farewell forever, my Cicero. From the land of the living, on the right bank of the Adige, in the city of Verona in transpadane Italy, on 16 June in the year 1345 from the birth of that Lord whom you never knew (24.3).

This coda recalls Erwin Panofskys famous caricature of the Renais-sance: The Middle Ages had left antiquity unburied and alternately galvanized and exorcised its corpse. The Renaissance stood weeping at its grave and tried to resurrect its soul.14 Petrarchs letter seems to present us with a nascent sense of historical perspective, born of the authors bereavement. But appearances are deceiving, for the loss Petrarch feels does not engender a sense of the past as something dead and buried; rather, it serves to inspire an exercise in imitatio that brings the past to life in the present. Petrarchs sense of anachronism thus constitutes,


at one and the same time, his perception of the differences between past and present and his jumping of that gap. The living past born of imitation becomes apparent when we examine Petrarchs bereavement a little more closely.

Petrarch addresses Cicero not without tears [non sine lacrimis]tears of anger at the would-be sages hypocrisy and tears of frustration at his inaccessibility. But these lamentations obscure the presence of another tearful emotionjoy. Petrarchs discovery in the cathedral library re-vealed to a man initially schooled in medieval notarial arts a whole new dimension of letter writing: that lettersfar from being mundane missives or desiccated legal documentsmight constitute a separate literary genre, a vehicle for revealing the personality of their author. And how did he respond to this discovery? He wrote a letter, not to its ostensible addressee (who, after all, couldnt receive it) but to poster-ity, communicating his spontaneous feelings to us, just as Cicero had communicated his to Petrarch. (Needless to say, such intensely literary productions were rarely spontaneous.) The letter is part of a gallery of letters to classical authors that concludes one of Western literatures great epistolary collections, the 350 letterssome fictitiouscomprising Petrarchs Familiarium rerum libri XXIV, his 24 books of familiar letters. This monument to the authors inner and outer life might never have existed, were it not for that fateful day in Verona, when he discovered his hero had feet of clay.

In Petrarchs letter the past has no objective existence outside the imitative urge, the creative tension where the awareness of anachronism subverts itself. Historians tend to overlook this tension because they seize upon the content of the letter while ignoring its epistolary form. Of course, one can hardly overestimate the importance of Petrarchs insight into the differences between antiquity and modernity. Yet this Copernican leap entails that other one, the heartfelt desire to jump over the middle age that had lost the light of classical eloquence and tap directly in the (ancient) wellspring of culture. The sense of distance and the desire to vault it constitute different sides of the same coinPetrarch did not perceive the past per se, independent of imitatio. Indeed, what made the past conceivable for him was its living quality, its existence not in a temporal realm but in a symbolic one that annihilates time, where the awareness of differences between past and present occasions their commingling.

Raphaels famous fresco, the School of Athens, best illustrates the peculiar nature of the living past in the Renaissance, where the idea of anachronism served to contextualize entities without historicizing them, without relegating them to a place back there in time.15 In this


painting, Raphael suitably archaicizes the great sages of antiquity, with each figure clothed in the manner appropriate to him and bearing the book, instrument, or object that best characterizes his work. At the cen-ter stand Plato and Aristotle, the teacher bearing a copy of his Timaeus and pointing upward toward the eternal Ideas that inform the corpo-real world, the pupil holding his Ethics and gesturing outward toward the corporeal world from which all knowledge derives. Peering closer, though, Raphaels contemporaries might have noticed that Platos face bore Leonardos likenessand that Euclids (or is it Archimedes?) bore Donato Bramantes, Heraclituss Michelangelos, and Apelles Raphaels own (staring straight out at us). This commingling of past and present is not mere flattery, for it accentuates a more general tendency toward mixing figures from diverse times and places. As ones eye moves from the center of the painting, the geographical and chronological prox-imity of teacher to student gives way to more improbable groupings: a be-turbaned Averros stands near the shoulder of Pythagoras, despite the thousand-plus yearsand thousand-plus milesseparating the me-dieval Spanish-Arabian from the (presumed) pre-Socratic Greek; and besides Apelles/Raphael stand Zoroaster and Ptolemythree figures (or should we say four?) separated by a considerable expanse of time and space. Raphaels great fresco provides us with a visual analogue to the living past born of imitatio, where suitably contextualized ancient figures/models dwell in a symbolic space beyond time.

A similar vision of the past informs the jurist Jean Bodins historio-graphical treatise, the Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1566). Among other things, Bodins treatise shows how to derive the essence of universal law from a systematic reading of history. He was prompted to undertake this task in response to humanist legal scholars, whose attempts to purify the text of Roman lawJustinians Corpus juris civilisonly served to reveal that the once-revered model of universal jurisprudence was not even properly Roman but a sixth-century Byzantine distillation of a millenniums worth of laws, each of which had been promulgated in response to its own distinctive circumstances. Rather than succumb to legal and cultural relativism, Bodin sought to reconstitute universal law, distilling it from the best laws of the most noteworthy peoples by means of a vast historical commonplace book.

Bodins reintegrative effort, however, was undercut by the sheer diversity of historical information he had to manage, about not only the Greeks as well as the Romans but other ancient peoples (Persians, Egyptians, Hebrews) and modern ones too (British, Turks, and Germans, to name only a few). Much like Raphael, Bodin contextualized this information without historicizing it. Insisting that in history the best


part of universal law lies hidden, he outlined a systematic program of reading that began with an overview of universal history, within which he located each individual people, before studying its history in detail.16 In typical humanist fashion, he proposed reading with pen and notebook at hand, creating a liber locorum rerum structured according to analytical principles concerning the nature and purpose of human activity. These he further reduced to commonplace moral norms, the exemplary themes that embodied the living past. Unlike Raphaels symbolic space, however, Bodins is immensely cluttered, a quality reflecting not only the impact of printing but also the simple fact that, in the living past, nothing ever dieseach state, each institution, each law (along with all its historical variants) exists on the same plane, in the same horizontal space, with every other state, institution, and law. Bodins attempts to organize this space only serve to reveal its unmanageability, as the exemplary catego-ries filled to bursting with too much information.

* * *

A tendency to historicize entities while contextualizing themto dis-tinguish systematically between past and presentbegan to emerge from the clutter of humanistic scholarship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In part, this tendency evolved as a natural consequence of the humanist habit of reading, which encouraged an empathic engage-ment with the great heroes of antiquity. Already in Petrarchs letters to Cicero and other classical authors, we can see the stirrings of this empathic urge, a desire to understand the ancients as men of flesh and blood. Petrarch thus puts Cicero in the dock, cross-examining him for his political actions in an effort to comprehend his personal motiva-tions. This tendency becomes ever more refined during the course of the Renaissance, reaching its apogee in the Essays of Michel de Mon-taigne, where he sought to insinuate himself into the minds of ancients like Socrates, Alexander, Cato the Younger, and Julius Caesar; he even tried to imagine the Aztec reaction to the arrival of the Conquistadors, seeing the Old World through the eyes of the New in his famous essay, Of coaches.17 But he did not sustain these instances of historical and cultural imagination, viewing others from a consistent perspective that established his distance from them; such an outlook would have belied his sense of the enduring flux of reality, which afforded the mind no fixed, Archimedean vantage point. Instead, he regarded each instance of empathy as a mini essay, as a test of his judgment, by which he came to know his mutable, fluctuating self, his only point of orientation amid complexity. In this regard, Montaigne accentuated a general tendency


in humanism, where empathic engagement with historical and cultural differences served as a literary device, a strategy of self-presentation, rather than a systematic outlook on the world.

The development of philological and antiquarian scholarship in the seventeenth century made possible more precise distinctions between past and present, but it still did not entirely privilege and sanction the historicizing viewpoint, as we can see from the furor excited in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by the French Querelle des an-ciens et des modernes and its English carry-over, the Battle of the Books.18 This quarrel, which originated as a dispute over the relative merits of ancient versus modern poetry, evolved into a struggle about the nature and purpose of classical learning. Its stormiest clash occurred over the authenticity of the so-called epistles of Phalaris, supposedly composed by a Sicilian ruler of the sixth century BC. The champion of polite learning, Sir William Temple, lauded them as exemplars of ancient wisdom, while the avatar of philological scholarship, Richard Bentley, exposed them as obvious forgeries. Bentleys Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris (1699) is a landmark in the history of scholarship. Despite our modern assumption that the expert should triumph over the dilettante, however, the battle of the books ended in a draw, with Temple and the ancientschampioned by his secretary, Jonathan Swiftnearly driving Bentley and the moderns from the field in disgrace with accusations of soulless pedantry.19 In and of itself, the historicizing viewpoint could not carry the day. It required support from outside itself to gain in as-surance, and this it acquired (ironically) from a Cartesian, relational view of truth.

In the Discourse on the Method (1637), Ren Descartes had dismissed history as little more than a collection of fables; and he once reputedly quipped that classical philology offered no knowledge beyond that pos-sessed by Ciceros servant girl. Despite his antipathy to history, however, he pioneered a relational view of truth that ultimately served to sustain a systematic distinction between past and present. Underlying Descartess epochal invention of analytical geometryby which he correlated lines and numberswas his realization that every point on a line was the ratio of two numbers, and that each ratio implied an ordered series of numbers in the same relation (for example, 1/2, 2/4, 3/6, and so on). In the Discourse on the Method, Descartes expanded on this relational insight when he detailed a method of thinking that extended outward from clear and distinct ideas via chains of reasoning that measured the intervals between objects of thought, intervals described as greater than, less than, and equal to. He regarded this activity as the chief task of reason, which used such comparisons to derive new knowledge from existing relations.


Descartess greatest disciple and popularizer, Nicolas Malebranche, expanded on this relational vision of knowledge in his foundational Search after Truth (167475), distilling from it the essence of the cardinal and ordinal principles of number that underlie modern mathematics.20 Cardinality implies a one-to-one correspondence between any two col-lections of things (say, between theatergoers and seats in an auditorium) and ordinality posits that members of a collection constitute a countable, ordered series (thus one counts the seats in an auditorium by regular intervals1, 2, 3, and so on). Although Malebranche never referred to these principles by their modern names, they underlie the notion of unit at the core of his relational vision of truth.21 He conceived of truths as real relations [rapports], whether of equality or inequality; thus all relations, including those between ideas, reduce to relations of magnitude (rapports de grandeur), with magnitude itself being nothing but a relation, a relative measure of size. One can readily perceive the identity inherent in relations of equality but not in those of inequality; in order to compare unequal things, we need an exact measure, a commonality underlying their relation, by which we can reduce them to equality. Malebranche termed this exact measure unit. The French term encompasses two meanings in Englishunit and unitycorrespond-ing to the cardinal and ordinal principles of number, with a unit being a discrete countable thing, which presumes a unity, an ordered series of things. By means of these principles, Malebranche sought to access all sorts of ideasembracing moral as well as natural philosophysimply by measuring the relations between them.

In his seminal Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu transposed Mal-ebranches relational vision of truth into a view of historical entities. In so doing, he fixed these entitiescustoms, laws, institutions, moresin networks of relations that established the particular context for under-standing each entity in question. The systematic and sustained distinction between past and present derives from this process of contextualization. A vast synthetic workthe product of a lifetime of readingthe Spirit of the Laws betrays many influences, but that of Malebranche leaps out as us from the very title: De lesprit des lois, ou du rapport que les lois doivent avoir avec la constitution de chaque gouvernment, les moeurs, le climat, la religion, le commerce, etc. The term rapport is conspicuous andlest one miss its significancerecurs at least eleven times within the brief span of the first chapter, starting with the very first line of the work: Laws, taken in the broadest meaning, are the necessary relations [rapports] deriving from the nature of things.22 Overt references to an esprit gomtrique occur mostly in Book One of the Spirit of the Laws, but everywhere else in the text one encounters expressions evoking the mathematical/relational


imagery of ratios and inverse ratios, proportions and inverse proportions, and equivalencies expressing such mathematical properties as symmetry and transitivity. The ubiquity of these expressions is not merely rhetori-cal but reflects a deeply Cartesian habit of mind, especially as mediated by Malebranche.

Montesquieu fashioned from Malebranches relational vision of truth the prototype of a modern social science. In the Spirit of the Laws he defined laws as relations, and he took as his proper subject not the laws themselves but the relations they represented, and the relations of these relations. This approach reflects the order of knowledge in Malebranches Search after Truth, which distinguishes relations between ideas (corresponding to the operations of arithmetic) from relations between relations (corresponding to algebra) from relations between relations of these collections of relations (corresponding to the calcu-lus).23 Montesquieus integrative vision does not aspire to Malebranches level of abstraction and generality; instead of ordering of all knowledge, he seeks only to order knowledge of historical entities. But his more circumscribed vision emphasizes the order of the relations between enti-ties rather than that of the entities themselves: I do not treat laws but the spirit of the laws, and . . . this spirit consists in the various relations [rapports] that laws may have with various things [choses].24

Montesquieu uses the nondescript term choses everywhere throughout the text, starting with the opening line of Book 1, where he declares that laws are the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things. Perhaps we can detect here a faint echo of Descartess res cogitans and res extensa, the thinking and extended things that form the basis of his ontology. But Descartes still conceived of these things as substances in the Aristotelian sense, whereas Montesquieufollowing Malebranchehas replaced the Aristotelian hierarchical ordering of knowledge with a mathematical ordering of intellectual operations. He regards things as measurable natural phenomena, embodied by geography, climate, wealth, and population, which in their myriad combinations factored into more general relations governing politics, culture, and religion. The term chose reflects the more tangible nature of his existants, and its lack of specificity highlights their relations, for things in and of themselves matter less to him than the magnitude of the spaces between them. The spirit of the laws expressly embodies the order of these magnitudes, an order whose coherence derives from the structure of mathematics.

Montesquieus perception of order engendered a form of ideal-type thinking fully one hundred and fifty years before Max Weber popular-ized this intellectual strategy. Writing of the three principles (virtue, honor, and fear) that underlie Montesquieus three kinds of govern-


ment (republican, monarchical, and despotic), Ernst Cassirer concludes that Montesquieu was the first thinker to grasp and to express clearly the concept of ideal types in history.25 In the manner of ideal-type thinking, Montesquieu used the principles of virtue, honor, and fear to abstract the republican, monarchical, and despotic forms of govern-ment from the immense variety of history, and then he imposed these principles and forms back on history as an interpretative grid. This tactic derives from Malebranches relational vision of truth. Recall that he had described real relations as relations of magnitude, and that he had reduced relations of magnitude to those of equality or inequality. Whenever Malebranche encountered relations of unequal magnitude, he sought the exact measure common to both, which he termed unit. In his nascent version of number-thinking, each magnitude was a unit (akin to the cardinal principle of number) and the exact measure common to them was a unity (akin to the ordinal principle). In his relational vision of law, Montesquieu regarded the three principles of governmentand, by extension, the types of government they identi-fiedas unities underlying the seemingly random diversity of customs, laws, and institutions, which were themselves akin to units, indivisible entities that shared an exact measure. The republican, monarchical, and despotic principles each identify and stand for a given range of concrete social and political relations, with each range characterized by its own particular kind of order. Although one would search in vain through the Spirit of the Laws for the kinds of formulas and equations we nowadays associate with mathematics, Montesquieus thought is at its deepest level shaped by a submerged model of number thinking.

Montesquieus relational vision enabled him fully to perceive and sustain the contextual order of all things human. This order neither denies nor transcends the elemental diversity of the world but rather dwells within it as its fundamental feature. When one focuses on the profusion of entities themselves, one seems to see a confusion spawned by chance; but when one focuses on the relations between entities, pat-terns emerge that bespeak an underlying unity, a unity that exists within diversity rather than despite it. Unity derives not from the imposition of philosophical orderfrom the paring away of accident from sub-stancebut from the operations of mathematical analysis, emerging as a feature of diversity itself, wherein entities exist in relations of greater than, less than, and equal to. This analytical perspective establishes a sustained distance between the observer and the things observed, providing the Archimedean vantage point that transformed instances of humanistic empathy into a systematic outlook on the world. Relativism thus yielded to relations, and flux to stability.


Changes in relations track changes in time as well as space, account-ing for the rise and fall of nations. Rome provides the great test case for Montesquieus insights about historical causation, as detailed throughout the Spirit of the Laws, as well as in his earlier Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734). Romes balance of predatory and republican featureswhere booty and the opportunities for obtaining it were shared equallycreated a stable, well-managed, warrior state, the success of which spelled its doom, as imperial luxury undermined the republican virtue that had facilitated world domination. The fate of Rome reveals that long-term forces underlie the accidents of history. Although these forces originate in the general principles of government (republican virtue, monarchical honor, despotic fear), they conform to the unique circumstances of each particular state (climate, religion, laws, mores) that combine to form its esprit gnral, the qual-ity determining its trajectory through time. The relational vision thus reveals the vectors governing the magnitude and direction of historical change. In Cassirers estimation, the Spirit of the Laws constitutes the Enlightenments first decisive attempt at the foundation of a philoso-phy of history.26

* * *

Ironically, this philosophy of history ignores the dimension of temporal causation in its search for the esprit gnral of each nation. Instead of viewing entities chronologicallyas developing through timeMon-tesquieu regards them from a comparative perspective. He arrays them side by side in the Spirit of the Laws; and in the Considerations, where he charts the rise and fall of Rome without recourse to a single date, he begins (strikingly) by comparing early Rome to the cities of the Crimean Khanate. His resolutely nonchronological and nondevelopmental view of historical entities appears anomalous to us because we are all (wittingly or unwittingly) children of German historicism, which emerged in the early nineteenth century, especially in the wake of Johann Gottfried Herders philosophy of history.

In his Another Philosophy of History (1774), Herder likened the develop-ment of humanity to the development of the individualfrom infancy to childhood to youth to maturitybut he insisted that each stage had to be understood in its own terms, as evidencing its own internal coher-ence and system of meaning.27 Viewed from without, for example, the earliest patriarchal societies might appear despotic, governed by fear; but viewed from within, they take on a different hue, in which human-


ity in its infancynot yet capable of reasonlearned to raise itself up by the power of example, being nurtured rather than oppressed by authority. Thus does Herder historicize one of Montesquieus key ideal types of government.

For Herder, the development of humanity is not a simple process of unfolding, as one predetermined stage of life gives way to the next, but a genuine evolution, in which change leads to novelty. Thus, in his interpretation, the slash-and-burn destruction of the Roman empire in the West unexpectedly fertilized the wild growth of the Germanic peoples, whose emergence cannot be understood apart from these circumstances. In effect, the developmental thrust of Herders thinking historicized the sense of anachronism. Recall that when Renaissance humanists exploited this sense, they did so in ways that encouraged the creative mixing of past and present. Montesquieu rendered this kind of mixing inappropriate, for it threatened to conceal the spirit of each people, which could emerge only from a consideration of its distinctive context, its own special web of relations. Although consistently separating past from present, the contextualizing urge did not privilege a temporal perspective over any other. Herder now privileged this perspective by portraying the diversity of human forms as the product of their process of development in relation to their circumstances. Thereafter the sense of anachronism lost its purely comparative aspect and acquired a wholly temporal one, and the resulting form of historical understanding inex-tricably fused the past as different from the present with the past as prior to the present. The past now became the space back there in time.

We have so internalized this historicist perception that it has become the standard of common sense. If we were to ask ourselves whether we would be different had we been born ten years earlier or later, most of us would automatically answer in the affirmativewhile dismissing the question as too obvious. Yet it wouldnt have been so obvious for a Petrarch or a Montaigne, who would have answered in the negative, regarding their uniqueness as unfolding from a predetermined form or essence rather than developing in relation to their experience.28 They still lived in an Aristotelian world of substances. The humanists unwit-tingly undermined this mentality by implicitly questioning the universalist assumptions on which it was based. Instead of affirming universals, they revealed a world full of historical contingencies, which they nonethe-less blithely attempted to organize in the normative categories of their commonplace books. They did not succeed, as Bodins congested efforts demonstrate. Descartes and Malebranche then sought to tame this rela-tivism by mathematical means, an ambition that Montesquieu brought to fruition. Relational thinking enabled him to order the profusion of


entities born of humanistic scholarship by fully contextualizing them. In so doing, he established the fundamental difference between past and present necessary for the existence of the past as a conceptual entity.

At its inception, the past was defined as such from without, through a comparative method that differentiated any given entity in relation to other such entities. Following in Herders footsteps, historicists would subsequently view the past from within, seeing each entity as the prod-uct of its own unique process of development. Before they could do so, however, the past had to emerge in all its distinctiveness from the network of relations that defined it. The past had to be contextualized before it could be historicized.

Northeastern Illinois University

NOTES

1 The argument in this article derives from Zachary Sayre Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2011).2 Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Vienna: Phaidon, n.d.), 7677.3 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), esp. 82113.4 Myron P. Gilmore, The Renaissance Conception of the Lessons of History, in Facets of the Renaissance, ed. William H. Werkmeister (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 73101; Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), esp. 453. See also Thomas M. Greene, History and Anachronism, in his The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), 21835.5 Augustine, Confessions, ed. James J. ODonnell (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 2:89.6 For the notion of radical reflexivity and its application to Augustine, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), chap. 7. Augustines idea of attentio emerges most clearly in the eleventh book of the Confessionsthe book devoted to the issue of timeespecially in 11.28. All translations are from Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961).7 Augustine, Confessions, 11.29; Garry Wills, Saint Augustine (New York: Viking, 1999), 95.8 In general, see Robert Markuss magisterial work, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988).9 The best treatment of the figural view of reality remains Erich Auerbachs Figura, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 1176.10 Martin Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century, trans. Christopher Carroll (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).11 For Bedes figural treatment of history, see Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), esp. 7590.


12 The expression is from Thomas Greenes Light in Troy, 35; I have based my discussion of Renaissance imitatio and anachronism chiefly on this work.13 Francesco Petrarca, Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols. (New York: Italica Press, 2005), book 24, letter 4 (hereafter, 24.4); also see the Latin edition, Familiarium Rerum Libri, ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco, 4 vols. (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 193342).14 Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, 113.15 For this insight, and for my analysis of Raphael, I am indebted to Leonard Barkan, Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), 1019. 16 Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Norton, 1969), 8; the Latin edition is in Oeuvres philosophiques de Jean Bodin, ed. Pierre Mesnard, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951). For a more extended analysis of Bodin, see Zachary Sayre Schiffman, Jean Bodin, Roman Law, and the Renaissance Conception of the Past, in Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture, eds. Penny Schine Gold and Benjamin C. Sax (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 27187.17 For an analysis of this essay, see Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001), chap. 6.18 My treatment of the French and English phases of the Quarrel is based chiefly on Joseph M. Levines masterful analysis, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991).19 Levine, The Battle of the Books, 414.20 On the relational vision of truth in Descartes and Malebranche, and on the cardinal and ordinal principles of number, see Michael E. Hobart, Science and Religion in the Thought of Nicolas Malebranche (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982), especially chaps. 1 and 3.21 For Malebranches notion of unit, see Hobart, Malebranche, chap. 3; also see Nicholas Malebranche, De la recherche de la vrit, ed. Genevive Rodis-Lewis, 3 vols. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1945), book 6, part 1, chap. 5: 18088.22 All translations of the Spirit of the Laws are from the English translation by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 3; for a standard, French edition of Montesquieus writings, see Montesquieu, Oeuvres compltes, ed. Roger Caillois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 194951).23 Hobart, Malebranche, 66.24 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 9.25 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1951), 210.26 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 209.27 See Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings, trans. Ioannis Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004).28 For the development of the modern perception of selfhood, see Karl J. Weintraub, Autobiography and Historical Consciousness, Critical Inquiry 1, no. 4 (1975): 82148.

Zachary Schiffman, "Historicizing History, Contextualizing Context" (NLH 2011)

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