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The birth of the past / Zachary Sayre Schiffman ; foreword by Anthony Grafton.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Schiffman, Zachary Sayre.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- History--Philosophy.
- History.
- Historiography--Philosophy.
- Historiography.
- Historiography--Western countries.
- Intellectual life.
- Western countries--Intellectual life.
- Western countries.
- Civilization, Western.
- Physical Description:
- xvi, 316 pages ; 24 cm
- Place of Publication:
- Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
- Summary:
- When did Western intellectuals first begin to think about the past in the distinctive terms we use today? Schiffman (history, Northeastern Illinois U) surveys the development of the concept of history and historical thinking in the West focusing on thinkers of ancient Greece, early Christianity, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, such as Herodotus, Petrarch, Jean Bodin, Montaigne, Lorenzo Valla, and especially Montesquieu. The author argues that Montesquieu, using a new epistemology deriving from Malebranche and applying it to the realm of human science, first managed to see in the past both the individuality of particular places and times and the general social rules that made different places and times comparable to one another. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
- Contents:
- Part 1 Antiquity 15
- Flatland 16
- Pasts Present 25
- The Herodotean Achievement 35
- Thucydides and the Refashionings of Linear Time 50
- Hellenistic Innovations 63
- Part 2 Christianity 77
- Can't Get Here from There 78
- The Power of Prayer 81
- Breakthrough to the Now 88
- The Idea of the Sæculum 103
- The Sæculum Reconfigured 111
- Gregory of Tours and the Sæculum 119
- Back from the Future: Bede and the Figural View of Reality 126
- Part 3 Renaissance 137
- The Living Past 138
- The Birth of Anachronism 144
- Petrarch's "Copernican Leap" 152
- The Commonplace View of the World 172
- Jean Bodin and the Unity of History 183
- Part 4 Enlightenment 201
- Presence and Distance 202
- Biography as a Form of History 210
- The Politics of History 217
- The Relations of Truth/The Truth of Relations 226
- Montesquieu and the Relations of Things 234
- The Past Emerges 245.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- ISBN:
- 9781421402789
- 1421402785
- OCLC:
- 705568277
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