Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris/Bridgeman Art Library

The sixteenth-century historian Jean Bodin

Anthony Grafton is one of the world’s most gifted historical scholars. His field is the history of learning, particularly the learning embodied in the philological, historical, and scientific literature of Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. This is abstruse and difficult territory, partly because so much of it is locked up in huge volumes of densely printed Latin, partly because it is impossible to write illuminatingly about learned people without being equally learned oneself. Early-modern scholars were polymaths who were expected to know about more or less everything. A comparable amount of erudition is required by those who wish to interpret their work.

Fortunately, Grafton is well grounded in the Greek and Roman classics, fluent in modern European languages, and voraciously energetic. He brings to what might have been a merely antiquarian pursuit a keen historical intelligence, honed by his over thirty years as a member of the Princeton history department, for much of that time the most dynamic historical powerhouse in the US. As a prolific writer and an inspiring teacher, Grafton occupies a position at the very center of the modern republic of letters. His references to other scholars are invariably generous, even effusive. (In What Was History? their works are repeatedly described as “splendid,” “superb,” “brilliant,” “wonderful,” “magnificent.”) His large, bearded figure is familiar in many of the libraries and archives of Europe; his magnetic presence has graced the podiums of innumerable lecture halls; and his writings have achieved a far wider readership than their often arcane subject matter would have led anyone to predict.

Grafton’s particular strength is his ability to write vividly and wittily about remote and difficult subjects. He knows how to engage his readers in the recondite scholarship of the past, so that they share his exhilaration when he exposes a sixteenth-century forger or discovers a previously unnoticed marginal note by some long-dead scholar. Admittedly, this easy accessibility is not apparent in his magnum opus, an austere study of Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), the greatest classical scholar of the early-modern period.1 Only the most dedicated students can have read their way through those two crowded volumes, the first containing three hundred pages on Scaliger’s textual criticism and exegesis, the second 750 pages on his studies in historical chronology. But most of Grafton’s other writings are highly seductive.

What Was History? exhibits all his customary virtues of wit, learning, and literary sprightliness. It originated as a set of four Trevelyan lectures at Cambridge University, and its title is a deliberate reference to What is History?, an earlier series of Trevelyan lectures given in 1961 by E.H. Carr, author of a monumental (and, nowadays, unfashionably sympathetic) history of Soviet Russia. The published version of Carr’s lectures, still in print, has sold over a quarter of a million copies.2 It is an iconoclastic polemic against the supposed objectivity of the historical profession, and is particularly famous for its cautionary advice: before you study the history, study the historian. It offers highly controversial opinions on such topics as the extent to which individuals can make history, the claim of history to be a science, the nature of historical causation, and the idea of progress. It enjoyed a succès de scandale at the time because of its attack on the views of such eminences as Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper; and it has been widely read by generations of undergraduates.

Grafton’s lectures comprise reflections on the work of E.H. Carr’s forgotten predecessors, the early-modern theorists who wrote comparable essays on the nature of history. They too asked Quid sit historia? or, since many of them were Italian, Che cosa sia historia? Theirs was the genre of writing that came to be known as the ars historica (the art of history). It emerged at the end of the fifteenth century, flourished in the mid-sixteenth century, and was given canonical status in 1576–1579, when the Basel lawyer Johannes Wolf issued an anthology, containing seventeen of these treatises, under the title Artis Historicae Penus (Treasury of the Historical Art). This anthology, together with a modern one compiled by a German scholar,3 provides Grafton with the material for his book. His venture into what he calls “the rich, complex, and compelling history of historical thought in the centuries before historicism” is not polemical and it is unlikely to sell a quarter of a million copies. But it offers an illuminating perspective on the evolution of historical consciousness.

The artes historicae were part of the much larger attempt by Renaissance scholars to organize the ever-growing amount of knowledge and to prescribe rules for its systematic study. Grafton suggests that their appearance in such numbers was a “response to the crisis in information management and assessment” precipitated by the floods of information pouring into sixteenth- century Europe from travelers, navigators, and missionaries. But it is likely that the artes historicae would have come into existence even without that crisis, for in the early-modern period the compilation of such guides was a necessary accompaniment of almost any branch of study. The artes historicae had their parallels in a host of other artes —the ars anatomica, the ars grammatica, the ars medica, the ars mnemonica, the ars rhetorica, and so on. The genre went back to classical times, when an ars was a treatise or handbook, usually on grammar or rhetoric.


Horace’s Ars Poetica was the most famous of these, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria the most flippant. But there was no Greek or Roman ars historica, unless one counts a brief essay by Lucian of Samosata (second century AD) on “How to Write History.” None of the great classical historians from Herodotus to Tacitus devoted much space to reflections on the nature of their art. History was not part of the ancient educational curriculum. It was regarded as an essentially literary activity, a branch of persuasive oratory rather than a form of scientific investigation. It preserved great deeds from oblivion, provided examples of good and bad behavior to be followed or avoided, and offered practical guidance for life. It was inseparable from rhetoric, and historians were judged primarily by their style.

The prefaces to medieval chronicles sometimes contained reflections on the nature of history, but there were no separate treatises on the subject before the fifteenth century. In the medieval universities history was not regarded as a distinct liberal art; there were no professional historians, and no obvious pressure for a discussion of the nature and methods of history. What stimulated reflection on the ars historica was the appearance in Renaissance Italy of great works of humanist historiography, like Leonardo Bruni’s history of Florence (circa 1444) and the writings of Flavio Biondo (1392–1463) on Italian antiquities and on European history since the decline of Rome. In the fifteenth century many Italian humanists expressed their views on history in letters, orations, and literary prefaces. But it was the publication in 1499 by the Neapolitan Giovanni Gioviano Pontanus of his dialogue Actius that is normally taken to mark the beginning of the new genre of works devoted exclusively to the theory of history.

These treatises signaled the recognition by the humanists that historical composition was too important a matter to be left for individual authors to work out for themselves. There was a technique to be learned and rules to be followed. The new ars historica was pioneered by Italian authors, but from the mid-sixteenth century onward, it was taken up in other parts of Europe, first by the Germans and the French, later by the English and the Dutch. By 1600 over forty such works had been published. The genre would have a long subsequent history, culminating in the mass of late-twentieth-century writing on how, why, and whether history should be written. But essentially the ars historica was the invention of the sixteenth century—“the greatest age of capital-T theory before our own proud epoch,” remarks Grafton.

It was not until relatively modern times that historians began to give these early-modern artes historicae more than sporadic attention. In 1939, when the American scholar John Lackey Brown published an excellent thesis on the greatest and most influential of the artes historicae, the French philosopher Jean Bodin’s Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, 1566), he remarked that the artes historicae constituted an unpromising field of study: “Tiresome in their repetitiousness, unavailable in convenient form, and often trivial in content, they have not attracted many students.”4 In the ensuing seventy years, however, as the discipline of intellectual history has expanded, these treatises have been intensively studied by American, Italian, Swiss, and German scholars.5

As a result of their work, the evolution of the ars historica is nowadays a reasonably familiar story. Initially, it treated history as just another branch of rhetoric. Its rules were literary rules and its models were the classical historians, particularly Livy and Sallust, whose subject matter was politics and military affairs. By composing imaginary speeches to put in the mouths of the participants, historians could show their literary virtuosity. History, however, could never aspire to the status of poetry, because the poet’s imagination was unrestrained, whereas historians had to confine themselves to what had actually happened.

As for the purpose of history, that seemed obvious in an age when the justification of all learning was that it enabled people to live better lives. History was exemplary: it supplied instances of good and bad behavior in the past, thus illustrating and confirming the ethical precepts of the present. As a way of teaching morality and prudence, history was thought more effective than philosophy, because memorable examples that engaged the reader’s sympathies were more persuasive than mere precepts. History was accordingly regarded as an essential guide to the conduct of life. In the words of the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “the principal and proper work of history” was “to instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present, and providently towards the future.” It was particularly recommended for politicians, courtiers, generals, and all those who aspired to get on in the world.


The early Italian artes historicae were primarily concerned with narrative style and presentation. They prescribed the order in which events should be treated and stressed the need for brevity, gravity, and eloquence. But in the 1560s, particularly in France, the emphasis changed. The new concern was with “method,” that is, the appropriate intellectual procedure not just for writing history but for reading and understanding it. This greatly extended the scope of the debate. Indeed, several scholars have described it as “a Copernican revolution.” Instead of being seen as a branch of rhetoric, designed to persuade and to please, history was now treated as an independent discipline, a kind of social science, involving an inquiry into the underlying causes of things. This ambitious objective ran counter to the early-sixteenth-century revival of the skepticism about the very possibility of certain knowledge that had been expressed by the ancient Greek Pyrrhon of Elis, and expounded in the second century AD by the doctor Sextus Empiricus. Pyrrhonist skepticism could be invoked to deny the validity of the entire historical enterprise. Most historians were liars, claimed the German writer Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in 1526.

In response, the authors of the artes historicae admitted that historical narratives could seldom aspire to more than a reasonable degree of probability. But they buttressed the authority of historical writing by developing rules for assessing the reliability of ancient sources and their modern interpreters, an issue to which the Protestant Reformation, with its intense arguments about the nature of the early church and how it could be ascertained, gave a new urgency. In this process of clarifying the authenticity of historical evidence, the now-familar distinction between “primary” and “secondary” sources came to be clearly formulated.

New attention was also given to periodization in history. The German treatises were much concerned with biblical history and with the role of divine providence. They cited the Book of Daniel to support the theory that four great monarchies or empires would rule in succession, to be followed by the kingdom of God. These empires were usually identified as those of the Assyrians, the Medes and Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans, including their modern successors in the Holy Roman Empire, which thus became the culmination of human history. In France, where historical consciousness owed much to the work of the jurists, the artes historicae were legal and constitutional in their approach, but they too sought to provide their readers with a scheme of universal history, most ambitiously in the Methodus of Jean Bodin.

By the end of the sixteenth century, a conventional agenda had thus emerged for the writer of an ars historica. He was expected to define history, to demonstrate its moral and practical utility, and to make prescriptions about how it should be written. He should provide an abridgement or epitome of universal history, set in a chronological frame. He needed to discuss the credibility of history and to provide rules for assessing evidence. He should also comment on the reliability of previous historians and propose an order in which they should be studied. Finally, he might advise the student to make a commonplace book into which extracts from the histories he had read could be placed under the appropriate didactic headings.

In choosing to write on the artes historicae, therefore, Anthony Grafton is embarking upon an already much-studied subject. But he approaches it with a fresh and independent mind. Unfortunately, he does not make the focus of his book immediately obvious. He opens with an account of the debate around 1700 between two scholars based in Holland: Jacob Perizonius, professor of history at Franeker and Leiden, and Jean Le Clerc, encyclopedist and biblical scholar at Amsterdam. In 1697 Le Clerc had published his Ars Critica, a manual on philology and history that urged the application of the principles of “right reason” to ancient texts. In it, Le Clerc dismissed Quintus Curtius, the first-century Roman author of a history of Alexander the Great, previously much admired for his invented speeches, as a mere rhetorician whose testimony was not to be relied upon. Perizonius sprang to Curtius’s defense, urging that his work should be judged by the standards of his own time, not by those of the late seventeenth century. This was a historicist argument, as “modern” in its way as Le Clerc’s faith in reason.

Both scholars were departing from the older view of history as a branch of rhetoric and arguing for a new kind of history as a critical, intellectual discipline. From being a narrative of past deeds (res gestae), it was to become the scientific reconstruction of a past that was assumed to be qualitatively different from the present. “The point of this short book,” Grafton explains,

is to argue that the battles over history of the years around 1700 rivalled those of the 1950s and 1960s in seriousness as well as in sheer, wild eccentricity—and that they too were the culmination of long decades of challenge and debate.

In fact, Grafton has little more to say about the battles over history around 1700. Instead, a little later on, he gives a rather different account of his objective:

This short book will set out some of the ways in which tradition and innovation fused and interacted in the artes historicae, Italian and northern. It will trace the larger contours of the ars historica and its fate from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. And it will work out, in detail, some of the ways in which the artes historicae shaped, and the ways in which they reflected, the practices of contemporary readers and writers of history.

This is nearer the mark, but once again Grafton promises rather more than he delivers. He discusses only a few of the many extant artes historicae, and he has relatively little to say about their relationship to the reading and writing of history in the period. Indeed, then as now, it is doubtful whether the writers of historical theory influenced many of the leading historians of their own day. The greatest histories written in the period, like Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent (1619) or Edward, Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702–1704) owed nothing to the artes historicae.

In the preface to his Histoire d’Angleterre (1724), the French Huguenot historian Paul de Rapin-Thoyras dismissed the prescriptions of the theorists as too vague and too contradictory to be of any practical use. The only rules followed by the best historians were those of reason and common sense. (In the same spirit Rapin’s modern counterparts ignore the epistemological problems raised by such postmodernist writers as Jacques Derrida as irrelevant to the actual writing of history.) Grafton, however, maintains that the artes historicae deserve what he calls “another history,” one that places the emphasis on their connection with “the practices of cutting-edge scholarship.”

His argument has three main components. First, he points out that fifteenth-century humanists—at the court of Leonello d’Este at Ferrara in the 1440s, for example—

began to pose new questions about history—questions about source criticism, about internal consistency, about the problems inherent in rhetoric as the central discipline of historical writing, about the relation between natural and technical knowledge and historical texts, and about the general status of ancient writers.

They did so “before anyone began to draw up even the first, relatively traditional treatises on the subject.”

Secondly, Grafton offers four illuminating case studies of mid-sixteenth-century authors who advanced the cause of critical history. François Baudouin, an erudite French jurist and author of a Prolegomena on law and history (1561), believed that history should unite the study of texts with that of objects, such as coins, medals, and archaeological remains. He saw it as an interdisciplinary subject, a historia integra, which would range far beyond battles and politics and would include the history of non-European peoples. Baudouin recognized the importance for the historian of the newly burgeoning literature of travel (an activity that also had its own handbooks, the ars peregrinandi), and he showed his critical acumen by rejecting the spurious histories of ancient kingdoms forged in the late fifteenth century by the Dominican Giovanni Nanni of Viterbo and attributed to such authors as the third-century-BC Chaldean priest Berosus, whose history of Babylon survives only in fragmentary citations by other classical writers.

The Dalmatian-born Francesco Patrizi, in his Della historia diece dialoghi (Ten Dialogues on History, 1560), also recognized the importance of antiquarian studies of the material remains of the past, whether weapons, clothing, or buildings. He was very hostile to the use of invented speeches, dismissing them as unacceptable fictions; though others would defend them as intellectually demanding exercises that required an awareness of the “decorum” of historical characters and their situations—what later generations would call “empathy.” In one of his dialogues Patrizi expounded a highly skeptical view of the credibility of history, denying that it could be written in a way that was both impartial and informed. Elsewhere he was more optimistic, calling for a perfect history, which would combine the precise use and citation of evidence with formal narrative.

Reiner Reineck, who taught at various places in Protestant North Germany, was unlike most of the authors of the artes historicae in that he engaged in historical scholarship as well as pronouncing upon it. A careful editor of medieval chronicles, he expounded his views on history in an Oratio de historia (1580) and a Methodus (1583). For him, the central purpose of history was not pragmatic instruction but genealogy, the compilation of the pedigrees of ruling families, “a vast adumbration of the Almanach de Gotha,” as Grafton puts it. In an age when birth order could determine the destiny of states, such tables were an essential buttress to the legitimacy of the established order and a necessary antidote to the fantastic genealogies that circulated in profusion. Like the editing of texts, they called for learning and the rigorous exercise of critical intelligence.

The last of Grafton’s case studies concerns the greatest author of them all, Jean Bodin, whose Methodus for understanding history dominated the field; it was as fashionable in its time, suggests Grafton, as Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses in the 1960s and 1970s. The Methodus is an extraordinary compilation, often acutely original, occasionally bizarre. The Walloons, Bodin tells us, were so-called because once, when their ancestors were lost in a primeval forest, they cried out, ” Où allons-nous? ” (Where are we going?). In Grafton’s words, Bodin “composed his book not as a beaver builds his dam, but as a magpie makes a nest.” Nevertheless, his Methodus was momentous for its secular conception of universal history, its demolition of the theory of the Four Monarchies, its rejection of divine providence as the explanation of historical change, and its belief in the possibility of human progress.

Bodin drew on contemporary travel writing in order to argue that climate and geography helped to explain national character; and he pioneered the comparative study of political institutions. A historical sociologist avant la lettre, he departed totally from the rhetorical tradition, articulating a sharp distinction between history as literature and history as fact. In severe words, which Grafton does not quote, but which should be engraved on the wall of every historian’s study, he wrote: “It is practically an impossibility for the man who writes to give pleasure, to impart the truth of the matter.”6

The third part of Grafton’s argument is that the radical methodological innovations pioneered by Patrizi, Baudouin, Bodin, et al., “intellectual earthquakes,” as he calls them, bore a close resemblance to the tenets of the new critical history propounded by Le Clerc and Perizonius at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and subsequently enshrined in the University of Göttingen’s school of history, which, under the leadership of Johann Christian Gatterer, laid the foundations for the great nineteenth-century German tradition of disciplined historical research exemplified by giants like Leopold von Ranke and Theodor Mommsen. “Bodin by himself,” Grafton claims, “adumbrated almost every element of Gatterer’s new method.” For what was the idea of a broad-based inquiry into all aspects of past societies, drawing on law, geography, and other adjacent disciplines, and based on original research, if not the message of the more advanced artes historicae of the 1560s? This is a point that has been well made by several of Grafton’s predecessors. As one historian put it in 1963, “The methodological thinking of the eighteenth century, on which the present is itself dependent, is the fruit of a continuous tradition which arises in the later sixteenth century.”7 Or as another wrote a little later, “The modern method of exploring the past was created in the sixteenth century.”8

Why then, asks Grafton, was the contribution of the artes historicae to modern historical method not recognized by their eighteenth-century successors? The answer, he thinks, is that during the seventeenth century, the visibility of the artes historicae had gradually diminished. As guides to truth, they were damaged by the rise of Cartesianism, for Descartes was disparaging about the value of history by contrast with that of pure reason. As helps to investigating the past, they were eclipsed by the new sciences of paleography, numismatics, and diplomatic (the study of ancient documents). As sources of information about the world, they were superseded by the new media—travel literature, journalism, networks of correspondence. As repositories of practical wisdom, they became increasingly unconvincing. The genre was discredited because of the failure of its later authors to keep up with the progress of knowledge.

The belief that history had a practical utility was also in decline. There was too great a tension between trying to draw lessons from the past and studying it historically in its own right. One could set an ancient text in its historical context or one could make it relevant to the present. But one could not do both. Degory Wheare, who became Camden Professor of History at Oxford in 1623, published his lectures as a successful ars historica, which was frequently reprinted. He did not deny the relevance of the classical historians to present-day problems, but he drew a distinction between the “philosophical” study of history, which was concerned to learn lessons and draw morals, and the “philological,” which studied the ancient world for its own sake. By showing that the past was fundamentally different from the present, the early-modern antiquarians were undermining the potential usefulness of their subject.

The practice of extracting general principles from historical examples had always been questionable. In the early modern period, the term historia (history) was still used in its original Greek sense, to mean an inquiry that involved the description of individual objects or events (“particulars”) as a way of arriving at general principles (“universals”). Hence the idea of “natural history” as a term for the study of subjects like botany or zoology. The ars historica, as Grafton puts it, was “part of a massive early modern effort to capture and use the whole world of particulars.” But this empirical approach to knowledge grew unfashionable in the age of Descartes and Newton, for whom the deductive procedures of mathematics provided a better model. Bartholomäus Keckermann, who published an important ars historica in 1610, pointed out that history provided raw materials, but could never supply its readers with rules for life. It could corroborate them, but the rules themselves had to be arrived at by other means.

For all these reasons, Grafton concludes, the eighteenth-century proponents of critical historical research, like Gatterer, saw no connection between their work and the artes historicae of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which were left to languish until resurrected by historians in modern times. They had become, in the words of Donald Kelley, America’s leading historian of historiography, “a barren genre, divorced in large part from the practice of history.”9 Only when history became professionalized would the tradition of the ars historica be revivified in the inaugural lectures of history professors and the innumerable modern ventures into the philosophy and methodology of history, of which Carr’s What Is History? is so successful an example.

Grafton adorns his lively essay in intellectual history with an abundance of striking phrases and colorful imagery. He recalls

Tacitus’s grim frescos of the Empire in the throes of corruption, thronged with monstrous Mussolinian rulers, their foreheads engorged with choleric humor and their eyes glaring at the virtuous aristocrats and rebels who would die for challenging them.

He evokes the “Gormenghast-like courts of the Holy Roman Empire” and the “erudite spiders, crouched in their dark dens from Uppsala to Naples [who] spun gossamer webs of genealogical conjecture.” He describes Bodin’s Methodus as “a vast Watts Tower of found objects drawn from every imaginable source, ancient and modern”; and he writes of “the shiny new methods and questions that gleamed like brand-new tungsten steel drill bits in the toolboxes of Le Clerc and Perizonius.”

At their best, his metaphors are genuinely illuminating. How better to put the case against the humanist practice of compiling commonplace books full of decontextualized quotations than to say that

like a good sausage machine, it rendered all texts, however dissimilar in origin or style, into a uniform body of spicy links that could add flavor to any meal—and whose origins did not always bear thinking about when one consumed them.

But sometimes Grafton’s inventive language reminds one of a teacher desperate to retain the attention of his less dedicated students. So we have self-deprecating references to “the complex and rebarbative realm of chronology” and repeated attempts to clothe past learning in contemporary dress. He translates the Latin mirificus (wonderful or extraordinary) as “wacky” and mirificissimus as “wackier still.” He describes Paul Hazard’s La Crise de la conscience européenne, a scholarly essay in intellectual history, as “that sly black-and-white masterpiece filmed in the 1930s”; and he pictures seventeenth-century readers approaching contemporary Venetian propaganda “with all the wincing, minefield-exploring caution of a modern political junky examining rival bloggers on the web.” Yet a third of his book is taken up by huge footnotes containing long, often untranslated passages in Latin, French, and Italian, frequently crawling more than halfway up the page. In such a context, this dogged determination to translate ancient learning into twenty-first-century argot seems somehow out of place.

What Was History? has been produced with great elegance by Cambridge University Press, but its text shows signs of haste by author and copy editor alike. Grafton can be forgiven for referring to “the war of Malta” when he means the war of Morea, and for leaving some key figures in his story, like Keckermann and the sixteenth-century French historian La Popelinière, unidentified. More disturbing are the repetitions. “Patrizi and Bodin forged the sharpest tools that Le Clerc and Perizonius wielded,” Grafton declares; and eight lines later he says it again. Even more embarrassingly, no less than a whole page of text has been allowed to appear verbatim at two separate points in the book—a chilling reminder that the word processor can be a dangerous tool when wielded by an author in a hurry. These are trivial blemishes, barely worth mentioning when assessing so illuminating a book, were it not that Anthony Grafton is the acknowledged master of his craft. We look to him to set standards for the rest of us to follow.

This Issue

December 3, 2009