historiographythe writing of history, especially the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particulars particular details from the authentic materials in those sources, and the synthesis of those particulars details into a narrative that will stand stands the test of critical methodsexamination. The term historiography also refers to the theory and history of historical writing.

Modern historians aim to reconstruct a record of human activities and to achieve a more profound understanding of them. This conception of their task is quite recent, dating from the development in the late 18th and early 19th centuries of scientific history, cultivated largely by professional historians“scientific” history and the simultaneous rise of history as an academic profession. It springs from an outlook that is very new in human experience: the assumption that the study of history is a natural, inevitable human activity. Before the late 18th century, historiography did not stand at the centre of any civilization. History was almost never an important part of regular education, and it never claimed to provide an interpretation of human life as a whole. This larger ambition was more appropriately the function of appropriate to religion, of philosophy, even and perhaps of poetry and other imaginative literature.

History of historiography
Ancient historiography
Greco-Roman era

The older, pre-18th-century outlook has been particularly well studied in the historiography of the ancient Greeks and Romans. But, although two of the most important ancient historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, wrote as early as the 5th century BC, when recorded Greek historiography was only just beginning, they had few successors of comparable quality. It is a symptom of the relative lack of importance attached in antiquity to this type of activity.

Ancient history was a branch of literature. The most appreciated historians were the writers who, like Thucydides, were able to touch on universal human problems or who, like the Roman author Tacitus (died c. AD 120), wrote in a dramatic way about important events or who, at least, attracted readers by their excellent style and skill in composition. Many of the works that lacked some of these literary qualities failed to survive.

About 1,000 ancient Greeks wrote in antiquity on historical subjects, but most of these writers are mere names. Many of the losses appear to have occurred in antiquity itself. Even historians of first rank have fared badly. Only in a few cases have complete texts of all their writings survived. Of the voluminous history of Polybius (covering originally the period 220–144 BC) only about one-third survives. Nearly half of Livy’s Roman history (originally covering the period 753–9 BC) is lost. The text that remains is reasonably good only through the efforts of a group of Roman aristocrats who, in about AD 500, were trying to salvage the chief glories of Roman literature. A considerable part of Tacitus is missing, and the surviving portions of his Annals and Histories (originally AD 14–96) derive from two unique manuscripts.

Herodotus, whom the Roman statesman Cicero called “the father of history,” came from the western coast of Asia Minor. The writers who preceded him were mainly Ionians from the Greek settlements in the same area. The origin of Greek historiography lies in the Ionian thought of the 6th century. The Ionian philosophers were doing something unprecedented: they were assuming that the universe is an intelligible whole and that through rational inquiries men might discover the general principles that govern it. Hecateus of Miletus, the most important Ionian predecessor of Herodotus, was applying the same critical spirit to the largely mythical Greek traditions when he wrote, early in the 5th century, “the stories of the Greeks are numerous and in my opinion ridiculous.” Herodotus was more of a traditionalist, but he introduced his work as an “inquiry” (historia).

Egyptian and Babylonian historiography

A glance at the older historiography of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the other peoples of the ancient Near East will heighten one’s appreciation of the novelty of the task undertaken by Herodotus. The kings of Egypt, of Babylonia and Assyria, and of the Hittites and the Persians all sought to preserve their glorious deeds for posterity in monumental inscriptions. The more important rulers also accumulated large archives, including both ordinary administrative documents and records specially commemorating their achievements. Some 20,000 clay tablets remain from the collections written for Ashurbanipal of Assyria (668–627 BC). Both in Egypt and in Babylonia lists of kings were kept in the temples, and these were sometimes supplemented by brief annals recording the principal events, though the hatred felt by certain rulers for their predecessors led to periodic destructions of older material. The exceptional meagreness of the narrative sources for Babylonian history before 747 BC seems due to the obliteration of the older annals by Nabonassar of Babylonia (ruled 747–734). Apart from changes in literary style, there was surprisingly little development over a period of more than 1,000 years in all these types of commemorative records. The inscriptions and temple records were normally intended to perpetuate the glory of the gods in whose service these rulers had accomplished great deeds. The names and dates of dynasties and of particular rulers can be reconstructed fairly adequately with the aid of these sources, but one cannot expect much accurate information about particular events. Nor, with rare exceptions, were those who had access to this material interested in using it to write continuous histories.

Herodotus and his immediate Ionian predecessors shared a very novel outlook. Its distinctive features were a lively curiosity and a capacity to treat sources in a critical spirit. Boundless curiosity about people and their diverse customs is one of the most endearing traits of Herodotus. Like other Greeks from western Asia Minor, he was particularly stimulated by contacts with the great Persian Empire, which offered opportunities for reasonably secure travel. The resultant immense widening of historical perspective is illustrated by a story told by Herodotus about Hecateus. When the latter assured the Egyptian priests at Thebes that he could trace his descent through 16 generations, the Egyptians showed him evidence of the descent of their high priests through 345 generations. Herodotus was the first to link his geographic inquiries with true history. His descriptions of the barbarian world that confronted the Greeks provided an introduction to the epic of the successful Greek resistance to the Persians.

Ancient history and biography

The types of history written by the ancient Greeks and Romans influenced profoundly all subsequent historiography down to the 18th century. In order to interpret sympathetically this classical historiography, it is necessary to bear in mind the literary conventions that governed this branch of literature. The ancient Greeks distinguished between history and biography. The origin of both forms can be traced back to at least the 5th century BC, and the differences between them were observed throughout antiquity. The writer of history was supposed to aim at giving a true story, but the biographer was entitled to treat historical personages in a manner that resembled legend. There existed, of course, some exceptions. The lives of the early Roman emperors written by Suetonius in the 2nd century AD, while conforming to the traditional, topical arrangement of biographies, constitute an unusually valuable historical source, especially for Augustus, whose correspondence is repeatedly quoted. Yet another distinction was drawn between history and the study of “antiquities,” to use a term employed by Varro (116–27 BC), perhaps the greatest of all the ancient Roman scholars. This distinction was already implicit in Aristotle’s contemptuous dismissal of history (in his Poetics) as a branch of literature dealing with the particular rather than with things of general significance. The histories he condemned provided chronological narratives of wars and political events. Aristotle and his disciples were engaged in several enterprises that they regarded as something quite different from history. For example, they embarked on the study of the constitutions of all the Greek states. Such work was to be based on systematic inquiries. The student of the “antiquities” tried to use a wider range of evidence than the sources normally consulted by the ancient historians, and he arranged his results systematically by topics.

In antiquity a writer of history was usually preoccupied at least as much with style as with content. A generation before Aristotle, the rules of rhetoric, as they might be applied to history, were fully elaborated by Isocrates, a teacher of rhetoric at Athens. Cicero tried (especially in his De oratore, 55 BC) to familiarize the Romans with these Isocratean precepts. History was to be written in a clear but solemn style, akin to fine oratory. The historian was to introduce all manner of literary embellishments but was also to stress the moral lessons of his story. At its worst this type of historiography could lead to serious misrepresentations of the past. Among the Roman historians, Livy (died AD 17) was an important practitioner of this kind of writing, which was particularly well suited to the patriotic myths that he was trying to immortalize, of a Rome that owed its magnificent destiny to the unique virtues of its citizens and the perfection of its antique institutions. Some outstanding historians, such as Polybius (2nd century BC) and Caesar (died 44 BC), eschewed these rhetorical precepts, but in all the ancient writers an important element of literary artifice was always present. This is one of the reasons why they offend modern standards, which demand absolute accuracy in the presentation of evidence. One of the most striking contrasts is the reluctance of the ancient historians to quote documents. Tacitus might rely heavily on the archives of the Roman Senate, but he never mentions his documentary sources. An inscription discovered at Lyons, France, preserves a speech delivered by the emperor Claudius to the Senate in AD 48, and it is clear that Tacitus utilized another version of the same text. His skill in using it is matched by the freedom with which he adapts it to suit his purpose.

Methods of Thucydides

The greatest and the most original achievement of the best Greek historians lay in their clear grasp of the need to distinguish truth from fiction and their conscious preoccupation with the methods of achieving this. This is admirably conveyed in a famous passage of Thucydides.


His practice did not fully live up to this ideal, however. The greatest of his Greek successors, Polybius, is reasonably impartial, except in his treatment of some of the events in Greece. Among the Romans, the writing of history was chiefly the preserve of members of the senatorial class, who almost invariably had some personal axes to grind. But the correctness of the rules formulated by Thucydides was accepted, in principle, by most ancient historians.

Thucydides had deliberately restricted himself to the history of his own time, and many of the subsequent ancient historians did likewise. They could depend on their own experience or could question well-informed contemporaries. The surviving fragments of Livy relating to his own lifetime (64/59 BCAD 17) are much more vivid and convincing than the earlier books of his history (surviving today only down to 167 BC). The tendency to prefer contemporary history was strengthened by the practical bent of many of these writers. Several ancient historians were men of action familiar with warfare and politics. Interested in history as a source of instruction for statesmen, they could write with authority only about wars and political transactions of their own time. Polybius, the exiled Achaean general and a great traveller, derides unpractical, sedentary historians such as Timaeus, who had been writing about the peoples of the western Mediterranean without stirring for 50 years from Athens.

The historians of antiquity were much less skillful in dealing with noncontemporary history, for which they relied on older historians. Where none was to be found, they felt lost, as Livy complains in the early portions of his Roman history. The modern recourse to non-narrative sources was alien to the habits of most ancient historians. They were usually incapable of doing this successfully, just as they were ill equipped to discuss critically the sources used by the older writers.

Herodotus chose for his theme the successful resistance of the Greeks against the Persians at the beginning of the 5th century BC. Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War, in which virtually all the Greek states became involved in the last decades of that century. These were limited subjects of obvious importance for which it was possible to find ample evidence. The strength of the ancient historians lay precisely in imposing an interesting pattern on the events of a selected period, usually contemporary or fairly recent, for which they had manageable sources. The best of them could thereby achieve a sense of dramatic unity and produce literary masterpieces. The speeches that Thucydides invented for some of the main protagonists in his story are artistically the most satisfying parts of his work, and at times they even seem to recapture the spirit of what might have been said on these occasions. In a superb writer like Tacitus, whose political career had included long periods of frustration and insecurity, one does not look for impartiality or for scrupulous truthfulness but, rather, for fascinating insights into what the development of Roman imperial power from Augustus to Domitian (the period AD 14–96) meant to the proud, sophisticated Roman aristocracy for whom he was writing.

Classical study of “antiquities”

The study of “antiquities,” as opposed to narrative history, did not normally produce works of literary merit, and this is probably the main reason why most of them disappeared. One important group of such writings originated with Aristotle and his collaborators, writing in the third quarter of the 4th century BC. They were interested in both literary “antiquities” and in the systematic study of the constitutions of Greek states. They had described 158 different constitutions, though only their account of Athens now survives. A comparison of its two main parts illustrates the contrast between the deficiencies of ancient historiography and the impressive achievements of the antiquarian researchers. In the introductory, historical section, Aristotle was baffled by the problem of dealing with the fairly remote past. For each particular period he tried to follow some contemporary sources. The resultant juxtaposition of several writers differing widely in their political outlook produced an account full of contradictions. The second part, however, containing a systematic description of the Athenian constitution, is a masterpiece of shrewd analysis, as are the empirical portions of Aristotle’s Politics (Books IV–VI), which are based on a wealth of concrete examples derived from the different Greek states.

Aristotle inspired in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC a great mass of philological and antiquarian research. The most important scholars were to be found in the new Hellenistic states, especially at Alexandria in Egypt and at Pergamum in Asia Minor. Among the surviving Hellenistic fragments, there are commentaries on Herodotus and Thucydides. The Hellenistic scholars were interested in many subjects connected with history and did pioneering work in chronology, geography, and topography. They were accustomed to using every kind of source and to quoting documents extensively. Their greatest Roman disciple was Varro, who tried to recover all the vestiges of the old Roman society and to make a systematic survey of Roman life based on the evidence provided by language, literature, religion, and ancient customs. Most of his writings have been lost, but he supplied the conjectural (though incorrect) date of 753 BC for the foundation of Rome and knowledge of the probable boundaries between some of the groups whose union produced the city of Rome. Unfortunately, antiquarian researches of such penetrating nature were almost never applied in antiquity to the writing of narrative histories.

Early Christian era

The triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire during the 4th century assured the predominance of a type of historiography radically different from the works of the pagan Greek and Roman historians. Its origins were Jewish. The Jews were the only people of antiquity who had the supreme religious duty of remembering the past because their traditional histories commemorated the working out of God’s plan for his chosen people. By contrast, no Greek ever heard his gods ordering him to remember. It was the duty of every Jew to be familiar with the Jewish sacred writings, which were ultimately gathered into what became the Old Testament. The writers of these biblical books only gave an authoritative version of what everybody was supposed to know, and they were only concerned with the selection of such facts as seemed relevant in interpreting God’s purpose. In addition, the Jews also cherished unwritten traditions. To quote Josephus, a Jewish historian of the 1st century AD, “what had not been written down, was yet entrusted to the collective memory of the people of Israel and especially of its priests.”

The Christians took over the Old Testament and added to it an additional body of sacred history. The writers of the four Gospels included in the New Testament were bearing witness to assured truths that the faithful ought to know, and no convincing reconstruction of historical facts is possible from these books of the New Testament. The only avowedly historical book in it is the Acts of the Apostles. The New Testament as a whole represents merely a selection from the early Christian writings. It includes only what conformed to the doctrine of the church when, later on, that doctrine became fixed in one form. Between the Acts of the Apostles, dating probably from the late 1st century, and the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea (died c. 340) and his contemporaries in the first quarter of the 4th century, there is an almost complete gap in Christian historiography.

For the Christian writers the story of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, represented the fulfillment of the prophecies that could be found in various parts of the Old Testament. The Jewish part of the Bible also assured for Christianity the authority of a long antiquity. The history contained in the two parts of the Bible, now indissolubly linked together, became the only authentic record of God’s revelation for mankind, dwarfing into insignificance all the records of other peoples and religious groups. The concept of a universal history had not been wholly unknown to the pagan world, but the Christians were the first to apply it effectively. Christian history had to be a universal history, though of a very peculiar sort, where only one sequence of privileged events, Jewish and Christian, deserved detailed record. The Christian claims must have seemed more extravagant to the pagans than even the Jewish ones. Thus Eusebius stated that the Christians were, in fact, born with the world, anticipating St. Augustine’s vision of the city of God existing since the beginning of time.

In defending their religion against hostile critics, the early Christians were forced to fit some pagan history into their universal scheme. This was achieved by means of universal chronologies from the creation of the world to each writer’s own time. The events of Jewish and Christian history were thus synchronized with the main dates of the pagan myth and history. Sextus Julius Africanus, who wrote in the early 3rd century, is the first Christian writer known to have attempted this feat. He allotted 6,000 years to the whole span of human history and placed the birth of Christ in the year 5500 from the creation of the world. This work provided the model for the more elaborate Chronographia (Chronicle) of Eusebius. It became the foundation for a long succession of Greek chronographies produced by Byzantine writers. A Latin adaptation by St. Jerome (died 419/420) was immensely influential in western Europe for more than 1,000 years. A modern scholar is filled with mingled admiration and despair at the ingenuity of Eusebius and of his more eminent successors and at the absurdity of many of their conclusions. But they did originate and impose on the world a unified scheme of universal chronology. The dating from the birth of Christ was introduced by Dionysius Exiguus, who wrote at Rome in the early 6th century, and it was successfully popularized in the 8th century by the English historian Bede.

The writing of history of their own time was not an essential task for the Christians of the 4th and 5th centuries. When they did so, they wrote primarily in defense of their religion against the pagan world or against rival Christian groups branded as heretical. All these histories belong to religious apologetics. They suffer from inevitable distortions in the choice of what should be mentioned and what must be suppressed, and they are often excessively unfair to outsiders and opponents. These faults were not uncommon among the classical historians, though the Christians were somewhat unusual in their extreme conviction that they alone must be right. A comparison between the Christian historians and an outstanding pagan writer, such as Ammianus Marcellinus (second half of the 4th century), who was very ready to admire those Christians who merited it, brings out the intolerance and narrowness of outlook of his Christian contemporaries.

Eusebius was the earliest and the most important of the Christian historians of the 4th century. He is quite frank about the practical and apologetic aims of his Historia ecclesiastica (written 312–324; Ecclesiastical History) designed to show how, through a long series of acts of Divine Providence, a Christian empire was finally brought into existence by Constantine. He admits that “we shall introduce into this history in general only those events which may be useful first to ourselves and afterward, to posterity.” This work, like his other historical writings, is a mixture of devout fiction and invaluable detail. But there is plenty of the latter in Ecclesiastical History. Contrary to the usual practice of the ancient historians, Eusebius tries to specify his sources, and he quotes from them extensively in order to document as fully as possible the developments that resulted in the triumph of Christianity. He provided in this respect a valuable model for his medieval successors. The most astonishing thing about Eusebius was his capacity to handle his sources critically, in matters where it seemed permissible to do so. In one passage of his Chronicle he sets aside the authority of St. Paul in favour of a piece of evidence contained in the Book of Judges. In later patristic literature nothing similar is found.

Biography, as it was habitually written in antiquity, could be readily adapted to Christian purposes. St. Jerome modelled himself on Suetonius in compiling the lives of 135 Christian writers (written in 392) as a way of demonstrating the high level of culture attained by his coreligionists. The ancient biographers had freely mingled fact with fiction for the edification of their readers and could be readily imitated by the writers of the lives of Christian saints. The life of St. Anthony of Egypt by St. Athanasius (mid-4th century) set the pattern for this most popular type of medieval literature.

St. Augustine, the greatest of the Latin Church Fathers of the 4th and 5th centuries, was certainly not concerned with writing of history in any ordinary sense of the term. In his De civitate Dei (City of God) he might invoke historical evidence to demonstrate the utter degradation of all the non-Christian societies, and he encouraged his pupil Orosius to develop this theme more fully in the latter’s Historiarum libri VII adversus paganos (Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, to 417). Nearly 200 manuscripts of Orosius have survived, testifying to the immense popularity of his work in the Middle Ages. Augustine’s greatest influence on historiography lay in his main message. His vision of the divine and the earthly cities confronting each other dominated the outlook of all the medieval Christian thinkers and profoundly affected their treatment of history. Within that divine plan for the world, purely secular history seemed an insignificant thing.

Early China

The preservation of some records of historical events can be traced in China to at least the early part of the 1st millennium BC. Confucius (551–479 BC) was credited, rightly or wrongly, in the later Chinese tradition with editing the annals of his native state of Lu. But the appearance of the first works fully deserving the name of histories resulted from the unification of China under a single ruler in 221 BC. The first such work to survive, the Shih chi (“Historical Records”), dates from c. 85 BC. Its author, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, is quite justifiably called the father of Chinese historiography. His history exhibits many of the main features of the later Chinese official histories as they continued to be written down to the deposition of the last Chinese imperial dynasty in 1911. Within this fairly unified tradition, China produced a mass of historical writings unequalled by any other country before modern times. Until the late 19th century, Japanese historiography formed an offshoot of this tradition.

Chinese scholars showed an interest in the history of China from the earliest times. According to the Chinese conception, history makes sense only if it can furnish practical directives for action or supply correct information upon which action can wisely be based. All the schools of Chinese thought quoted the lessons of history. Confucius, with his stress on the moral content of these lessons, formed part of this universal belief in the value of history. One of the duties inculcated by him was the scrupulous transmission of authentic records. When, some centuries after his death, the unified Imperial state began to recruit its bureaucracy among the Confucian scholars, the recording of all the necessary information and the careful preservation of records became one of the main functions of the Chinese government, both centrally and locally. A long series of official histories and of records connected with them has survived from the time of the T’ang dynasty (618–907) onward. From then on, the great bulk of Chinese history was written by bureaucrats for bureaucrats. From a practical point of view this immense body of historical writings fulfilled a very useful purpose. Such histories were bound to be highly stereotyped and restricted in content to what interested the higher officialdom. It is easy to condemn it by modern Western standards for its excessive preoccupation with concrete details and inability to produce works of wider synthesis. But this Chinese tradition did gradually evolve in the direction of greater rationality and subtlety. Its scope widened as the sphere of government expanded. Furthermore, within this tradition there appeared from time to time writers of genius, men of bold critical spirit, genuine historical insight, and overriding integrity. One of the greatest was Liu Chih-chi (661–721), the writer of the Shih t’ung, the first thorough treatise in Chinese, or any other language, on historical method, which also constituted in effect a history of Chinese historiography. He had a successor in Ssu-ma Kuang (1019–86), the author of the first fairly comprehensive general history of China (covering the years 403 BCAD 959). In the 17th century a remarkable group of historical scholars virtually founded a school of critical Chinese philology. None of these writers succeeded in radically transforming Chinese historiography, but they created an increasingly sophisticated and critical tradition. Their successors in the 20th century assimilated some valuable features of modern Western historiography.

Medieval historiography
Europe from the 5th to the 11th century

The period stretching from the 5th to the 11th century was a time of very profound cultural decline in regions that had once constituted the western half of the Roman Empire. Almost all the inhabitants of these provinces again became illiterate. There are long periods for which there are virtually no narrative sources, and the bulk of surviving historical writings consists merely of meagre factual annals. Virtually all the writers were ecclesiastics, in marked contrast to the Byzantine lands, where a strong tradition of lay historiography persisted throughout the Middle Ages. The annalists and chroniclers of the West were predominantly monks, and their lack of experience of the secular world outside their cloisters made them into blinkered and unpractical historians. This was true even of Bede, an Anglo-Saxon monk, who was by far the greatest historian of the early Middle Ages.

All the historians of this period were seriously affected by the cultural decline around them. They were having to write in part for a more uncultured audience. Sulpicius Severus, probably the best Western historian of the early 5th century, still intended his Chronica (to 403) for educated Roman Christians, but his life of St. Martin of Tours is a piece of medieval hagiography. This model could inspire lives full of folklore and miracle, from which the real human personalities of the saints were almost wholly absent. The same duality of purpose is a notable feature of Bede’s voluminous writings. He explicitly recognized that he must adapt himself to his audience when he explained that he was writing in a simple Latin style so that he might be more easily understood by his Anglo-Saxonreaders. There is a marked contrast of tone between his theological and his historical writings. As a theologian, Bede follows Eusebius and the earlier Church Fathers in not exaggerating the frequency of miracles and in believing that they were most common in the earliest days of Christianity. But Bede’s lives of the English saints and his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), covering chiefly the years 597–731, are full of miracles and visions. There is one or other on almost every page. It is possible that some of these incidents were included by Bede because he thought that his readers expected mentions of these familiar, traditional stories.

In preparing his historical works, Bede not only took great care to assemble the widest possible collection of sources but also tells the reader what he is using. In dedicating his Ecclesiastical History to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria, he requests that

in order to remove all occasions of doubt about those things I have written, either in your mind or in the minds of any others who listen to or read this history, I will make it my business to state briefly from what sources I have gained my information.

An impressive list follows, including mentions of documents copied for him by friends at Rome, Canterbury, and other places. Like Eusebius, on whom Bede modelled himself, he quotes some of the documents integrally. Bede’s methods of securing and recording information are so similar to the practices of modern historians and the judicious tone of his writing is so impressive that the reader is almost taken in into treating him as if he were a modern scholar. But Bede’s Ecclesiastical History was written as a work of edification in order to strengthen the faith of his readers in Divine Providence, through which, as he saw it, his Anglo-Saxon countrymen had been converted to Christianity. All matters not connected with his main theme are ignored. Bede’s handling of evidence on subjects that he regarded as embarrassing inspires mistrust. But these are small matters in comparison with the enormous mass of information that he alone has preserved and the encouragement that Bede continued to give for many centuries to the writing of history.

The influence of Bede and other Anglo-Saxon scholars was greatly felt during the later 8th and the 9th centuries in the Frankish kingdom, where under Charlemagne and his successor, Louis the Pious, there was a modest revival of historical writing. Besides the annals kept at various monasteries, which tended to convey information in a manner that suited the Frankish rulers, there were a few more ambitious ventures. The important Historia Langobardorum (History of the Lombards), written c. 774–785 by Paulus Diaconus, or Paul the Deacon, was the work of one of the best educated men of the time. Nithard, a grandson of Charlemagne, left an invaluable narrative of the disintegration of the Carolingian state during his lifetime. The work that exerted the greatest influence on the medieval writers of biographies was Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni (written c. 830–833; Life of Charlemagne). The author was a leading official and a close companion of Charles, and his work was naturally intended as a eulogy of the great king. Einhard says that Charlemagne retreated safely from Spain, returning with his army safe and sound, except that on a ridge of the Pyrenees, on the way home, he happened to experience some small effects of Gascon perfidy. Nobody would gather from this that the Franks had narrowly escaped a major disaster. Einhard was merely echoing the story told in the semiofficial contemporary annals. Another source of distortion was Einhard’s use of a classical model, the Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius. The subject headings under which he described Charles and even the very words used were partly borrowed from the lives of Roman emperors, but his Charlemagne is probably in essentials an authentic and credible portrait.

If bulk alone is to be taken as a criterion, annals were the main product of medieval historiography. The annalist merely sets down the most important events of the current year. In the case of the earliest medieval annals, the events were often noted down in Easter tables, in the blank spaces between the dates calculated for the forthcoming Easters. Such paschal annals would be extremely brief. When, as often happened, annals came to be written down in separate manuscripts, distinct from the Easter tables, there was room for the expansion of individual entries. In either case, the resultant annals cannot be regarded as history since the events are necessarily recorded in isolation. But they preserve in a right order the essential facts, which could be rearranged into a continuous narrative. Such a narrative, if it still followed the chronological arrangement of its various annalistic sources, should properly be termed a chronicle.

Medieval historians show little awareness of the process of historical change. They were unable to imagine that any earlier age was substantially different from their own. The unawareness of the meaning of anachronism helps to explain the strange wanderings of medieval annals and chronicles. If a religious community wanted to acquire a historical narrative, it copied some work that happened to be most readily accessible. A continuation might then be added at the manuscript’s new abode, and, later on, this composite version might be copied and further altered by a succession of other writers. Hence there are at least six main versions of the annals known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. They all derive from the annals kept down to 892 at Winchester, the West Saxon capital. Thereafter, copies were acquired by religious centres in the most diverse parts of England, and one manuscript was being kept up to date at the abbey of Peterborough as late as 1154. An extreme case of wanderings is represented by the annals of the cathedral church of Cracow, the medieval Polish capital. The first section is based on Orosius, the next comprises annals beginning with the death of Bede and containing notices of Frankish and German events, while the Polish section starts with the conversion of Poland to Christianity (965–966) and ends in the 13th century.

Europe from the 12th to the 14th century

Historians are accustomed to regarding the late 11th and 12th centuries as an age of intensified progress in culture and learning; this development, however, did not greatly affect historiography. There was a modest revival of interest in some of the ancient Latin writers, but would-be historians were unsure which ancient models they ought to imitate. A whole series of attempts was made to apply to other races the theme in Virgil’s Aeneid of a noble group of people guided by the gods toward a splendid destiny. The first essential step was to establish the descent of one’s nation from the ancient Trojans and then to trace subsequent history through a series of heroic conquests. The most ambitious of these writings was the Historia regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), by Geoffrey of Monmouth (died 1155), which attempted to establish for the Celts a historical destiny greater than any other. Although some, even contemporary, readers were not deceived by the work, and William of Newburgh, one of the best English historians of the 12th century, denounced it as a tissue of absurdities, many seriously accepted it as history.

With a few exceptions, the ablest minds of the 12th century were attracted into enterprises that ignored history; they were more concerned with systematization of thought and with philosophical speculations. One of the exceptions was Otto, bishop of Freising, in Bavaria. He was a grandson of the Holy Roman emperor Henry IV. He received the best education that his age could give, but he was also briefly a Cistercian monk during the most austere period of that order’s history. Otto was torn between conflicting impulses to seek the city of God as the only reality and yet to hope for the progress of the German empire. Out of this conflict came his first work, Chronica (The Two Cities), a chronicle of world history to 1146, perhaps the most profound medieval attempt at a Christian philosophy of history. As Otto himself confessed, it was composed “in bitterness of spirit . . . in the manner of tragedy.” The election in 1152 of his nephew and friend Frederick Barbarossa, as emperor, filled Otto with a new elation. The excellence of his second work, Gesta Friderici I imperatoris (The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa), derives in a considerable measure from a quality rare in medieval historians, a sense of optimistic belief in the value of writing history because it might become a record of human progress. The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa contains a penetrating analysis of the problems encountered by the German rulers in trying to rule the precociously urbanized Italian society.

As in antiquity, the best medieval works were accounts of contemporary history by men who had participated in the events that they were describing. It is, however, very significant that some of the writers that are prized most highly today survive in only very few manuscripts and were presumably not appreciated by most of their contemporaries. One such work was the Historia pontificalis (“Pontifical History”) covering the period 1148–52, of John of Salisbury, one of the most accomplished scholars of his age, who was writing about the period when he was in the papal service. Another instance of undeserved neglect is furnished by the Liber de regno Siciliae (“Book of the Kingdom of Sicily”) covering the period 1154–69, written by an anonymous member of the Sicilian court.

Unlike the ancient historians, the medieval writers of contemporary history had no inhibitions about extensively quoting official documents. In England, a succession of writers preserved a large quantity of such texts. Roger of Hoveden was, in the last quarter of the 12th century, treated by the English kings as a kind of court historian. He preserved valuable legal and administrative records with which he was familiar through his activities as a royal official and justice. Matthew Paris, the most important English monastic historian of the 13th century, was highly regarded by King Henry III and had excellent sources of information. He left behind a collection of transcripts of royal and ecclesiastical documents that today fills a large printed volume. Some writers made their chronicles into an anthology of official records, thinly connected by the author’s brief comments. Such is the chronicle of Robert of Avesbury, consisting mainly of the military dispatches of King Edward III and other interesting documents to 1356. Another variant of the same method was for a wholly mediocre chronicle to incorporate exciting pieces of eyewitness narratives by other writers. A dull English monastic product of the late 14th century, the Anonimalle Chronicle, includes a narrative of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which is one of the most dramatic and interesting eyewitness accounts to be found in medieval historiography.

The most popular histories of the 13th and 14th centuries were encyclopaedic compilations giving all the important facts neatly arranged under the dates of popes, emperors, and other rulers. There were even more ambitious ventures aiming at summarizing all the important facts from all the different branches of human activity. The Dominican Order, created at the beginning of the 13th century, was especially concerned with producing such aids for the dissemination of useful knowledge. The best known of these Dominican works is the immense Speculum historiale (“Mirror of History”), by Vincent of Beauvais, written under the patronage of King Louis IX of France. It is a compilation made up of excerpts from many authors.

The 13th and 14th centuries were not a period of any fundamental innovations in the techniques and nature of historiography, but there was a growing diversity of types of historical writing. Very detailed, chatty narratives multiplied, often badly organized and inaccurate, but conveying the authentic atmosphere of the times and vividly portraying leading personalities. Such were the St. Albans chronicles of Matthew Paris (to 1259), the reminiscences of Joinville about St. Louis during the Seventh Crusade (1248–54), the Lombard chronicle of Fra Salimbene (to 1287), or the vast history of the first part of the Hundred Years’ War written in the second half of the 14th century by Froissart. Memoirs and histories written in vernacular languages, such as those of Joinville and Froissart, came to be quite common. Laymen began to write histories. Some were great men, like Geoffroi de Villehardouin, one of the leaders of the Fourth Crusade (which captured Constantinople 1202–04), of which he wrote an account. Important urban chronicles began to appear, such as the Florentine chronicle of Giovanni Villani, with its invaluable statistics of Florentine population and activities around 1338. The extraordinary personality of St. Francis, who died in 1226, inspired lives of him more convincingly human than any previous medieval biographies of saints.

The Humanist historians of the 15th century tried to make a deliberate break with the tradition of medieval historiography. By their insistence on a more coherent arrangement of subject matter, by their superior critical outlook, and, above all, by their much more accurate awareness of the process of historical change, they had introduced innovations of fundamental importance. In part they owed their grasp of these new possibilities to the influence of Byzantine scholars. In historiography, as in other matters, the new humanistic scholarship was a joint product of Western and Byzantine traditions.

Byzantine historiography

During the millennium that elapsed between the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West in the 5th century AD and the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century, in no part of Europe did the writers of history consistently maintain as high a standard of achievement as in the Byzantine Empire. Parts of the 7th and the 8th centuries form lengthy gaps in the record of Byzantine historiography, but this seems mainly to be the result of subsequent losses of manuscripts. When, in the middle of the 9th century, Photius, future patriarch of Constantinople, compiled a record of some 280 books that he had read, he mentioned works of 33 Greek historians, dating mostly from the late Roman Empire and the Byzantine period, 20 of which are now lost. But, among the Byzantines of the 7th and 8th centuries, there was certainly no parallel to the Dark Ages in western Europe.

The Byzantine historians were heirs to the combined traditions of classical Greek writing, of the subsequent Hellenistic historiography, and of the Christian historical writing of the 4th century. Few ancient Latin historians were ever translated into Greek, and their influence on the Byzantines was, therefore, very slight. The older classical Greek historians provided the Byzantines with their cherished models of language and style. Like all educated Byzantines, the historians continued for a millennium to write in a literary language that soon became unintelligible to the vast majority of their compatriots. Hence, from the 6th century onward, there appeared, side by side with the learned historiography, a succession of popular chronicles written in the ordinary language. Most of these popular writings form—in their prejudice, ignorance, and crudity—a startling contrast to the works of the more eminent classicizing historians, but they do provide valuable glimpses of the sort of hagiographical history, more religious myth than sober fact, that ordinary Byzantines apparently wanted to read.

Herodotus and Thucydides were frequently invoked by Byzantine historians as models of fine prose. The influence of these two writers on the substance of what was written usually remained slight and superficial, however. The only Byzantine writers who seriously modelled themselves on these two oldest Greek historians wrote during the 15th century. The earlier Byzantine historians owed most to Polybius and to the Greek biographer Plutarch (died c. AD 119), the two Hellenistic writers who had the greatest influence on Byzantine notions of how history and historical biography should be written.

Like Polybius, the majority of Byzantine historians, including most of the best ones, perferred to write about their own times; and within these limits they produced some real masterpieces. Unlike the majority of the ancient historians, Polybius had included much autobiographical detail, and his influence reinforced the readiness of the Byzantine historians to talk about themselves, thus providing abundant information about several of these authors. Their histories are likely to be one-sided and full of details about what interested them, while remaining silent about a great mass of other contemporary happenings. They are frequently gossipy and patently prejudiced, inspiring much less confidence than the austere, impartial writings of authors such as Thucydides. This is one of the main reasons why the Byzantine historians have often been excessively underestimated by modern readers. The bulk of the Byzantine contemporary histories were written by statesmen, high officials, and prelates—men with access to important information. They have to be used critically and cautiously but can be immensely valuable.

Priscus of Panium (c. 450), a member of a Byzantine embassy to Attila’s camp, is the best source of information about that terrible king of the Huns and his followers. A century later, the reconquest of Vandal Africa and of Ostrogothic Italy by the emperor Justinian was the main theme of the History of the Wars of Procopius, a leading civilian adviser of Belisarius, the Byzantine commander. Subsequently, Procopius also wrote a Historia arcana (Secret History), containing a horrible indictment of the activities of Justinian and Belisarius. Many of his details about the corruption at court and the oppressive nature of the government may be substantially correct. In the 11th century Michael Psellus, who wrote a history of his own times, was a leading Byzantine scholar and official, for a time even the chief adviser of emperors. His Chronographia is concerned almost entirely with the happenings at the Byzantine court and is one of the most gossipy and amusing narratives ever written on such a subject. His psychological insight and his lively and subtle style delighted the educated Byzantines. Anna Comnena, the daughter and biographer of the emperor Alexius I, greatly admired Psellus. Her own Alexiad is a much less fascinating work, but the recovery of the Byzantine power under her father provided her with an important theme.

The last, increasingly disastrous, centuries of Byzantine history are recorded by a series of scholarly and interesting historians. Nicetas Choniates, a high imperial official, provides a surprisingly balanced eyewitness account of the siege and capture of Constantinople by the forces of the Fourth Crusade (1202–04). George Acropolites, a leading adviser of the Greek emperors of Nicaea, carries the story from 1203 to the recapture of Constantinople by the Byzantines in 1261. The later 13th and 14th centuries are covered by a succession of writers deeply immersed in contemporary theological disputations. Perhaps the most readable of all Byzantine histories is the largely autobiographical work of the leading politician and emperor John VI (reigned 1347 to 1354), written after his deposition during his years of enforced retirement in a monastery. George Sphrantzes, a close friend of the last emperor, Constantine XI, included in his history an eyewitness account of the siege and capture of Constantinople by Mehmed II in 1453. Two of Sphrantzes’ contemporaries chose to write primarily about the Turks. Their methods place them among Renaissance historians. Laonicos Chalcocondyles wrote (in about 1464) an account of the rise of the Turkish state. He did so in the manner of Herodotus, with long digressions on various neighbouring nations. A little later, Critobulos of Imbros, in his account of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, made Mehmed II his chief hero and modelled his history on Thucydides.

The study of what might be called “historical antiquities” was not much cultivated by Byzantine scholars. The most notable exception was the emperor Constantine VII, but only some fragments of his voluminous collections have survived (dating from about 940 to 959). They include a very interesting account of the various peoples with whom the Byzantines had to deal. Such ancient Greek literature as still survives, including that of all the historians, was preserved by the Byzantine scholars. When, around the year 1400, the teaching of Greek was introduced into Italian universities by Byzantine scholars, they brought also their superior techniques of literary scholarship, transforming thereby the study of Latin authors as well as introducing into western Europe the treasures of Greek literature. One result was the emergence of the new Renaissance historiography.

Muslim historiography

Muslim historiography appears to have originally developed independently of European influences. Until the 19th century Muslim writers only very seldom consulted Christian sources and almost never noted events in Christian countries. Fortunately, they displayed at times more curiosity about the non-Muslim peoples of Asia. The first and best history of the Mongol conquests in the first half of the 13th century was the work of a Persian, Joveynī. On a visit to Mongolia in 1252–53, he was able to consult the recently compiled, earliest Mongol narrative (Secret History of the Mongols).

The origins of Arabic historiography still remain obscure because of the gap between the legendary traditions of pre-Islāmic Arabia before the start of the Muslim era (AD 622) and the sophisticated and fairly exact chronicles that began to appear in the later 8th and 9th centuries. But while the detailed stages of this development still await reconstruction, the main influences shaping the early Muslim historiography are clear enough. As in the case of the ancient Jews, it was created and perpetuated by religion. Muḥammad (died 632) regarded himself as a successor to a long series of Jewish and Christian prophets, and he made Islām a religion with a strong sense of history. The Qurʾān, Islām’s holy book, is full of warnings derived from the lessons of history.

Teachings of Muḥammad not included in the Qurʾān came to be regarded after his death as authoritative tradition left behind by him. All his sayings and actions were therefore carefully treasured and ultimately came to form, in combination with the Qurʾān, the foundation for the body of Muslim law (Sharīʿah), common to all Islāmic communities. These traditions (Ḥadīth) were transmitted orally for several generations, until they were written down in the 8th and 9th centuries. The resultant collections were only partly historical, as myths and inventions crept into them. The scholars who were engaged in preserving and verifying these traditions were chiefly preoccupied with organizing them into legal and theological systems, and they were frequently hostile to the historians. The earliest authoritative life of Muḥammad, written by Ibn Isḥāq (died 768), was attacked by a leading exponent of the legal “traditionist” learning. This confirms the independence of the historical scholars from the theological and legal interests. But both groups shared some common materials, and the strict rules evolved by the legal “traditionists” for recording their sources and tracing a continuous chain of authoritative transmitters of the traditions encouraged similar exact habits in the Muslim historians. The resultant histories were often pedantic, full of unrelated facts, and deficient in reflective comment, though there are some astonishing exceptions, such as the writings of Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406). But the better Muslim historians scrupulously quoted their authorities and tried to be truthful. This was particularly true of the “classical” school of historians, who were writing at the centre of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate in Iraq in the 9th and 10th centuries. Aṭ-Ṭabarī (died 923), the most authoritative of them all, wrote his “History of Prophets and Kings” as a supplement to his earlier commentary on the Qurʾān, and subsequent Muslim historians were content to follow his reconstruction of the early Islāmic history. The Syrian and Iraqi historiography of the 12th and early 13th centuries is at least as valuable as the Western historical writing of this period, and sometimes it is clearly better.

To orthodox Muslims, the development of the Islāmic community represented a continuous manifestation of God’s purpose. Consequently, the recording of the religious progress of the Islāmic society continued to be sacred duty. One of the original features of Muslim historiography is the large amount of attention devoted to the lives of devout men and of scholars. To many Muslim historians, these spiritual and intellectual activities were of much greater importance than the doings of princes and warriors. One of the peculiarities of Muslim historiography was the liking for encyclopaedic dictionaries of famous men. The earliest of these were devoted to the Companions of Muḥammad and to the early transmitters of the Muslim traditions. For a thousand years extremely diverse types of biographical collections have continued to appear in the Muslim world. Those devoted to religious scholars attained a particularly wide diffusion. Saladin (Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn), who took Jerusalem from the crusaders in 1187 and later opposed the Third Crusade, offered to the Muslim writers the particularly congenial subject of a ruler dominated by a sense of religious duty. A particularly fine example of medieval Muslim historiography is the biography of Saladin by Bahāʾ ad-Dīn (died 1234), which gives an exceptional insight into Saladin’s motives for many of his critical decisions.

But the greatest Arab historian and one of the most penetrating thinkers about historiography in any time or place was undoubtedly Ibn Khaldūn. The introduction (al-Muqaddimah) to his Kitāb al-ʿibar, a universal history (begun in 1375), is, in A.J. Toynbee’s judgment (1934), “the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind.” Ibn Khaldūn had absorbed all the learning accessible to a Muslim of his time. He was a master of religious learning, an outstanding judge, a writer on logic. He turned a subtle and most disciplined mind to historiography in order to explain his personal tragedy. He had served a succession of rulers in Islāmic Spain and the Maghrib (Northwest Africa) as a general, a politician, and even once as a chief minister, and his activities had always ended in disaster. In order to explain what had gone wrong, he sought to achieve a correct understanding of the forces that governed the societies known to him. He concluded that political stability had become impossible in his native Maghrib, because over centuries economic prosperity had declined excessively and the forces of lawlessness had become too strong.

As a detailed chronicler of events Ibn Khaldūn is not always exact, but, like contemporary historians, he knew how to reconstruct correctly the main trends over several centuries. His ability to formulate general laws that govern the fate of societies and to establish rules for the criticism of sources provided him with an intelligent framework for the correct reconstruction of past history.

Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddimah has survived in at least a score of manuscripts, but he has had no effective influence on Muslim historiography until recently; after his time, as before, the writing of history continued to be a normal feature of Muslim civilization in the more advanced Islāmic societies. In several countries, notably in parts of India, the first works that deserve the name of history appeared only after the Muslim conquest or the conversion to Islām. After the 12th century Arabic ceased to be the main language of Muslim historiography. Distinguished histories were written in Persian in the 13th century, and subsequently Turkish and other vernaculars came to be used by historians in different parts of the Islāmic world. But, in its isolation from non-Muslim influences and its traditional interests, Islāmic historiography underwent no intrinsic change until the 19th century, when it began to be affected by the impact of modern Western civilization.

Historiography in the European Renaissance
The early Humanists

If there is one thing that united the men of the Renaissance, it was the notion of belonging to a new time. Lorenzo Valla, one of the ablest of the early Humanists, in a preliminary draft of his history of King Ferdinand I of Aragon (written in 1445–46), proudly enumerates the modern technical inventions made in recent centuries, and especially near his own day. The sense of the novelty and excellence of their achievements was particularly felt by the men of the Renaissance in connection with their attempts to imitate the works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers and artists. They were not yet claiming that an era of unlimited progress was dawning for mankind—such concepts belong to the 18th century—but the belief in the progressiveness of their own age soon spurred the best Renaissance scholars and artists into achievements that, in some important respects, surpassed their ancient models. This happened in historiography, and especially in the sciences connected with it. The pace of change must not be exaggerated, however. Despite promising beginnings, historiography as a systematic discipline did not emerge during the Renaissance and, in fact, this development did not occur until the 19th century. The reasons for this delay form one of the main problems in any study of historiography between the years 1400 and 1800.

In the early Renaissance one by-product of the newly won sense of modernity was the tendency to regard the millennium between the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and the 15th century as an era of prolonged decline. The concept of the Middle Ages was thus introduced for this intervening period. Two very important histories written in the first half of the 15th century deliberately concentrate on the medieval centuries. Their authors were leading Italian Humanists. The first to appear was the Historiae Florentini populi (“History of Florence”) of Leonardo Bruni, the city’s chancellor from 1427 to 1444. The second, the Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii decades (“Decades”; mainly devoted to Italy), was written by Flavio Biondo, an important papal official. It covered the period from the sack of Rome by Alaric in AD 410 to the writer’s own time. The “invention” of the Middle Ages as a separate historical period remains one of the most enduring legacies of Renaissance historiography.

Unlike the medieval historians, the Renaissance Humanists became much more acutely aware of the process of historical change. This was a gradual development. They were trying to understand the ancient writers, whom they were seeking to emulate, and they became increasingly aware of the need to replace these writers in their correct historical setting. When Petrarch (1304–74), the pioneer Italian Humanist, unearthed in 1345 a collection of Cicero’s letters, he was shocked to discover that Cicero was not a cloistered scholar of the medieval tradition but a busy politician who wrote his dialogues in moments of banishment from active life. In 1361, in a letter to the Holy Roman emperor Charles IV, Petrarch was able to use his increased familiarity with classical documents to expose a medieval forgery of the Austrian archduke masquerading as a charter of Julius Caesar.

Between about 1440 and his death in 1457, Valla was one of the most influential Humanists. His Elegantiae linguae latinae (1444; “Elegancies of the Latin Language”) was a treasury of information about correct Latin usages. For Valla the meaning of words was not natural but conventional and historical, because it was derived from changing custom. Thus a sense of ceaseless historical evolution was planted at the very centre of Humanist preoccupations with the recovery, the correction, and the interpretation of ancient texts.

In 1440 Valla’s patron, King Alfonso of Naples, at war with the papacy, asked Valla to write a treatise against Pope Eugenius IV. Valla obliged by decisively disproving, on both linguistic and historical grounds, the genuineness of the “Donation of Constantine.” From the middle of the 8th century, when this document was probably concocted, it had been used by the popes as one of the weightiest justifications for their claims to secular authority in Italy. Its authenticity had been sometimes questioned in the past by some of the acutest minds, such as Bishop Otto of Freising in the 12th century and Marsilius of Padua in the first half of the 14th century, but it required Valla’s expert techniques to dispose of the “Donation” forever. The validity of Valla’s methods of historical criticism was at once recognized by at least one other leading Humanist. Biondo wrote the relevant portions of his “Decades” of papal and Italian history between 1440 and 1443, while remaining in the service of the very same Eugenius IV who had been the chief object of Valla’s attack. Yet Biondo tacitly accepted Valla’s conclusions, and he never mentions the “Donation of Constantine.” Biondo’s critical outlook found still another expression in his summary dismissal of the fabulous history of Geoffrey of Monmouth. In his copy of Geoffrey he entered only a single note: “I have never come across anything so stuffed with lies and frivolities.”

Historical philology

Valla’s work on the texts of the New Testament proved in the long run to be one of the most influential applications of the new science of historical philology. His aim was to recover, so far as possible, the original Greek version through the use of the oldest extant manuscripts. He defended these researches by pointing out that he was not correcting the Holy Scriptures but merely the Latin Vulgate translation of St. Jerome that had been adopted by the Catholic Church. The revolutionary nature of Valla’s historical approach comes out most strikingly in his comment that “none of the words of Christ have come to us, for Christ spoke in Hebrew and never wrote down anything.” The corrections assembled by Valla became generally known when, in 1505, Erasmus published them as Annotationes on the New Testament. They provided a model for Erasmus’ edition of a Greek New Testament in 1516, from which stem all the new Protestant versions of the 16th century.

The new historical philology was also soon applied to the study of philosophical and legal texts. In this, the most striking progress was made in the second half of the 15th century by Politian, who lectured at Florence, and by his friend Ermolao Barbaro, who taught at Padua. They were inaugurating the history of ideas and of intellectual movements. In his studies of Aristotelian texts, Barbaro insisted on using only the commentators of antiquity. In his lectures and writings (1489–94), Politian tried to reestablish from internal evidence the correct sequence of Aristotelian treatises, and he traced the gradual liberation of Aristotle’s thought from the influence of Plato. The meaning of the terms used by Aristotle was rigorously investigated in the light of the linguistic usage of his Greek contemporaries. Politian’s ventures into the field of legal texts proved particularly influential. He had at his disposal a very good 6th-century version of the Digest—that is, the section of Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law) based on the rulings of the Roman jurists. Politian’s collation of it with the first printed edition of the Digest (in 1490) formed part of an inquiry into the transmission of the texts of the Roman law during the Middle Ages. Politian’s researches stimulated a remarkable school of Humanist jurists, mostly Frenchmen, headed by Guillaume Budé, who published the first historical commentary on the Digest in 1508. In the course of the 16th century, these scholars laid the foundations of a new branch of scholarship, the history of laws and institutions.

The methods of textual criticism used by Politian and his friends were designed to produce definitive editions of classical texts. Politian was aware of the need to establish the correct descent of manuscripts and to disentangle the best textual tradition. In all this he was far ahead of almost all his contemporaries, and he was anticipating the procedures that were systematically adopted for the first time by Karl Lachmann and other German scholars in the 19th century. The historical philology of Politian was a program for the future rather than a dawn of a new era in the editing of classical texts. In contrast to his methods, most of the other Humanist editions of the Latin and Greek classics are very unsatisfactory. This is particularly true of the editions produced between about 1400 and 1550. The reckless emendations of Humanist editors, coupled with the subsequent disappearance of some of the manuscripts used by them, created grave problems for later scholars. Ever since the 17th century the task of the more modern editors has consisted largely in reconstructing, so far as possible, the manuscript versions available before 1400.

Notable works from the period

Modern historiography was created in the 19th century through a successful combination of the use of narrative sources with every other type of evidence. Some 15th-century Italian Humanists were already aware of these possibilities. The idea of recovering an entire civilization through a systematic collection of all the relics of the past was not alien to them. Biondo used mainly conventional narrative sources for his “Decades” of Italian history, but his description of the city of Rome in antiquity (Roma instaurata, 1444–46) was based on a novel combination of the narratives of other historians with a wide range of miscellaneous sources. These included topographical guides, public and private documents, studies of surviving buildings, inscriptions, and coins. But in practice most histories and biographies continued to be written in a conventional way, while the revived study of “antiquities” was cultivated in separation from narrative historiography.

Imitation of ancient models is the feature most often stressed in the modern descriptions of Humanist histories. This meant that style mattered at least as much as content and that historical truth might be obscured by literary conventions. On the more positive side, there was the renewed insistence on the choice of definite, clearly delimited subjects and on a more coherent arrangement of material. The abler Humanist historians, however, were also making innovations that bring their practice a little nearer to present notions of writing history.

Several Humanist historians were particularly attracted to the study of the origins of the states about which they were writing. In the 15th century Bruni did this for Florence, and Biondo and Bernardo Giustiniani for Venice, to mention some notable examples. In the 16th and early 17th centuries, French and English scholars inaugurated a critical study of the origins of their national institutions. Humanist historians prided themselves on their critical ability to overthrow the legends in which various countries had concealed their ignorance of their own origins. The incentives to revise the earliest history were often political. Bruni deemed it essential to prove that Florence had not been founded under the tyranny of the Roman emperors but in the time of the free republic. He happened to be right. The Humanist historians were more confident than their ancient predecessors that they could write competent histories of a remote past. In practice they were much less successful in this than they imagined. In dealing with periods before their own time, they usually followed only a restricted number of earlier narratives, though the best of them, such as Bruni and Biondo, displayed in their histories of medieval Italy a novel ingenuity in combining well-chosen sources. Biondo, for example, made effective use of Dante’s correspondence.

There was also some modest progress through the better use of documentary sources. This is often far from obvious, because Humanist historians, like their ancient predecessors, do not usually refer to their sources, even when they quote texts verbatim. Hence came Leopold von Ranke’s utter misjudgment of the historical value of the Storia d’Italia (“History of Italy”) of Francesco Guicciardini. Before Ranke’s time it was universally accepted as the most authoritative contemporary history of Italy in the years 1494 to 1534. Ranke, who became one of the pioneers of “scientific” history in Germany, first established his reputation in 1824 by his attack on the reliability of Guicciardini. Ranke argued that the statements of that great Florentine statesman were contradicted by documentary evidence and that his history must have been based on unreliable secondary authorities. The discovery in the 20th century of Guicciardini’s private archive proved that his history was scrupulously based on original documents of the highest value.

Guicciardini, in a work that forms the nearest Renaissance parallel to the history of Thucydides, tries to comprehend the succession of tragedies that befell Italy from the start of the French invasions in 1494. This desire to recapture the rational causes of events is one of the most mature features of the best Renaissance historiography.

Early modern historiography
Spread of Humanism

Italian Humanist historians provided models that could be imitated easily in other countries. Almost everywhere in western and central Europe, local writers were encouraged to produce descriptions and histories of their own lands, intent with patriotic pride. In such countries as Spain and Poland, which had only recently achieved their unity, this was a way of commemorating their newly won cohesion. In the 15th century it was the object of a pioneer work on the earliest antiquities of Spain, the Paralipomena Hispaniae, by the Catalan Humanist bishop Joan Margarit i Pau, and of the invaluable Annales seu cronicae incliti regni Poloniae (“History of Poland”), by Jan Długosz, which included an exceptionally precise geographic description of his country. In Germany a sense of national identity could be vindicated by Humanist historians striving to minimize the importance of the continued political division of their land. The Germania of Tacitus was printed in Germany as early as 1473 and started the fashion of using this collective name for that country. Tacitus called the Germans “the indigenous inhabitants.” This was used by a leading patriotic Humanist, Conradus Celtis, as a proof that Germany should be free from all foreign domination. Celtis and his other Humanist contemporaries deliberately hunted for manuscripts of medieval German writers to prove that their country, despite its disunity, could have a national history. Some important masterpieces were recovered, including the histories of Otto of Freising. Celtis’ pet project of a description of Germany modelled on Biondo’s Italia illustrata was carried out in 1530 by Sebastian Münster, and Münster’s fuller Cosmographia (1544; “Cosmography”), though purporting to describe the known world, devoted one-half of its 818 pages to “the German nation.” There was also a spate of histories of Germany, mostly very laborious and unreflective but incorporating the newly rediscovered medieval narratives and even some documentary sources. Greater originality came only in the wake of the Reformation. The same thing happened in France and in England. In both countries patriotic preoccupations were a leading feature of works written by Humanist historians, and the appearance of Protestantism reinforced in a peculiar way the existing nationalist tendencies.

The influence of the Reformation on historiography must first be discussed at a more universal level. As the philosopher Francis Bacon shrewdly observed, Martin Luther had been obliged “to awake all antiquity and to call former times to his succours . . . so that the ancient authors . . . which had a long time slept in libraries, began generally to be read.” This was not because Luther would have regarded himself as a historian. But as early as 1519, in his disputation with Johann Eck, he encountered the assertion that the primacy of the pope was of divine origin. In order to disprove this and to demonstrate that they alone represented the true church, the Protestants had to retell in a new way the entire history of Christianity. In a preface to the Vitae Romanorum pontificum (“Lives of the Pontiffs”), published by Robert Barnes in 1535, Luther himself confessed that, although he himself had not originally attacked the papacy with historical arguments,

now it is a wonderful delight to me to find that others are doing the same thing . . . from history—and it gives me the greatest joy . . . to see . . . that history and Scripture entirely coincide in this respect.

Protestant history

The starting point for the Protestant rewriting of Christian history could best be found in St. Augustine’s teachings. The true church, the city of God, had always existed, even though at times it seemed to be overshadowed by the enemies of the divine order. Those enemies were not only the pagans and the heretics, as St. Augustine had believed. In more recent times they had included also the upholders of the papal authority and the persecutors of such medieval true Christians as John Wycliffe (died 1384) and John Hus (died 1415). The writings of Eusebius provided the model for chronicling the sufferings of the faithful until the dawn of freedom for the true church in the 16th century. These views about the correct history of Christianity were presented with exceptional cogency in John Calvin’s Christianiae religionis institutio (fullest edition 1559; Institutes of the Christian Religion) and were shared by most Protestant scholars. The only obvious disagreements arose when Protestants tried to pinpoint the moment at which the church took the fatal turn away from God’s true purpose. While the radical sectarians considered that the papacy had always been corrupt, less extremist Protestants were prepared to accept the earlier popes and to argue that the rot set in at some date between the time of Eusebius (died c. 340) and the 7th century. The choice of precise date might depend on the national traditions of each country. Thus, Bishop Richard Davies, in his preface to the New Testament in Welsh (1567), treats Pope Gregory the Great (died 604) as a special enemy because Gregory’s effort to convert the Anglo-Saxons led ultimately to the subjugation of the autonomous British church.

Historians writing in this spirit were incapable of impartiality. But the historical controversies between the Catholics and the Protestants produced from both sides huge compilations. Their authors were determined to prove their respective cases by a stupendous marshalling of authorities and documentary sources. The habit of giving copious references and long, exact quotations, missing from the Humanist historiography, was reintroduced by the religious controversialists. On the Protestant side, the largest work is the Ecclesiastica historia, or the so-called Centuriae Magdeburgenses (13 volumes, 1559–74; “Magdeburg Centuries”), retelling the history of the church down to 1200. The Catholic reply, equally huge and graceless, was produced in 12 volumes by Cardinal Baronius. The chief Protestant critic of this work, the great Greek scholar Isaac Casaubon, was astonished by the Cardinal’s ignorance of Greek and Hebrew, his gross mistakes, and his boundless credulity.

The narratives of contemporary events written in the 16th and early 17th centuries by the participants in the religious struggles, though equally partisan, include some works of great historical value and high literary merit. The earliest and best German Protestant narrative, that by Johannes Sleidanus, received a grudging tribute from his great opponent, the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, who remarked that “the rogue has certainly known much . . . ; he has either been in our privy council or our Councilors have been traitors.” John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563) contains a great mass of exact information about the persecution of reformed religion in England and Wales during the reign of Mary Tudor, and it has influenced many generations of British Protestants. The achievements of Queen Elizabeth I and the Anglican Church’s settlement of her reign found an outstanding defender in William Camden, who was encouraged to write by Elizabeth’s leading ministers. In his Annales Rerum Anglicarum, et Hibernicarum Regnante Elizabetha (“Annals of Elizabeth’s Reign”) Camden made excellent use of a mass of official records at his disposal, though his treatment of confidential matters had to be discreet.

Out of a conflict between Venice and the papacy in the first years of the 17th century was born the Istoria del concilio tridentino (1619; History of the Council of Trent, 1676) of Fra Paolo Sarpi. A Catholic friar, but a passionate defender of Venetian autonomy, Sarpi drew a dark picture of worldly papal policies and the unscrupulous machinations of the Jesuits. It is a bitter, prejudiced, but splendidly written and well-informed work, which profoundly influenced the anticlerical historians of the 18th century. All these contemporary narratives, however, have one serious limitation. They deal almost exclusively with political events and with changes in ecclesiastical organization. The Protestant schism is treated as merely a revolt against the abuses of the old church, and the deeper reasons for the alienation of the Protestants from the Catholic faith are never explained. Furthermore, these historians, by attributing the origins of the schism almost exclusively to Luther’s sudden conflict with the papacy, obscured the existence in the early 16th century of numerous Catholic reformers, whose sole aim was to transform the Catholic Church from within. This one-sided approach to the history of the Reformation was destined to persist for a long time. Two influential histories published in the years 1683–88, one by a great Catholic prelate, Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and the other by Pierre Jurieu, a leading Protestant, still agreed on the same superficial account of the causes of the Reformation.

The rewriting by the Protestants of universal church history naturally involved a drastic revision of the history of the national churches. In Germany, particularly, the history of the church had become inextricably intermixed with the destinies of the German empire. Their hatred of the papacy made the Lutherans visualize the course of German history with unusual clarity. Nobody before them had attempted to impose on that history a single intelligible pattern of any sort. Theirs was bound to be a prejudiced pattern, a story of gradual national disintegration as the result of the successive defeats of the German emperors by the papacy. Johannes Stumpf’s tragic chronicle of the Holy Roman emperor Henry IV (published in 1556) treated his struggles with Pope Gregory VII as the beginning of the empire’s tribulations. The whole course of German history was retraced in this fashion under the influence of Luther’s chief Humanist collaborator, Philipp Melanchthon, in the so-called Chronicle of Carion, written in its final versions (1572–73) by Melanchthon’s son-in-law, Caspar Peucer.

One of the most novel features of the English Protestant historiography was the reawakening of scholarly interest in the period before the Norman Conquest of England in the 11th century. Matthew Parker, Queen Elizabeth’s first archbishop of Canterbury, thought he could discern in the pre-Conquest church elements of true Christianity that were destroyed thereafter and had only been reintroduced by the Protestants. The Anglican Church could be represented as a return to the traditional practices and beliefs of the early English Christians. Thus the replacement of Latin by English in the Protestant church services could be justified by citing the presence in Anglo-Saxon England of Bibles, liturgies, and devotional literature in the Old English language. Parker and his friend Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s most trusted minister, gathered around them a circle of enthusiastic scholars, whose work preserved most of the important Anglo-Saxon texts as well as of some leading post-Conquest chronicles. Parker’s own method of editing texts horrifies modern scholars, but some of the antiquarian works published by members of this group were of high quality. Camden’s Britannia (first edition 1586, later much enlarged) was a pioneer work on the topography of Roman and early medieval Britain. The edition by Sir Henry Spelman of the records of the pre-Conquest church councils was the first serious attempt to apply to an important type of early sources the best methods of continental scholarship.

Historical outlook and legal histories

The growth of a historical outlook can be traced in the 16th century in many diverse fields of learning. For the first time men were realizing that there was a historical side to every branch of knowledge concerned with human affairs. “I have become aware that law books are the products of history,” wrote the French legal historian François Baudouin in 1561. In each branch of study there developed a special historical technique particularly appropriate to it. The most sophisticated scholarship was to be found in the field of classical studies. A group of scholars active in the second half of the 16th century were achieving results much superior to the work of the earlier Renaissance classicists. They combined philological expertise with a determination to reach a really adequate understanding of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. A few were Italians, such as Carlo Sigonio, but most of the important works were written in France and in the Protestant centres of Switzerland and Holland. As textual critics these scholars were reacting sharply to the earlier, more haphazard, methods of emending and editing classical authors. They were trying to bring the text of one writer after another to a state of near perfection. Some leading ancient historians, such as Tacitus, benefitted greatly from this treatment (edition of Lipsius in 1575). Though their methods do not quite reach the standards of modern scholarship, they anticipate intelligently many of the procedures more systematically adopted in the 19th century. Isaac Casaubon was the first to point out in his edition of Suetonius (1595) that Einhard’s 9th-century life of Charlemagne was modelled on the work of that Roman historian. Casaubon’s friend Joseph Scaliger renewed the science of classical chronology (1583) and was the first to reconstruct the original Greek Chronicle of Eusebius lying behind St. Jerome’s Latin translation. Sigonio’s pioneer work on the rights and duties of Roman citizens (1560) was later much used by Theodor Mommsen, one of the founders in the 19th century of the modern study of Roman history.

In the course of the 16th century, non-narrative historical work of the highest originality and complexity was being carried on in the legal faculties of French universities. One important stimulus was provided by the existence in France of different legal systems—the uncodified provincial customs in the north and the written law in the south. The latter ultimately derived from the Roman law, and, in the southern French universities, there arose an eager demand for the introduction of the new Italian methods of interpreting the Roman legal texts. Andrea Alciato, a pioneer in the historical treatment of the Roman law, taught at Bourges from 1529 to 1533, and his pupils founded the “Romanist” school of French legal historians.

Important advances were made in the study both of the Roman law and of the origins of the French legal customs, laying virtually the foundations of a new branch of scholarship, the history of law and institutions. François Baudouin published in 1545 the first historical survey of the development of the Roman legal science. The treatise on the custom of Paris by Charles Dumoulin (published 1539–58) resulted from his advocacy of the codification of the northern French legal customs. It was the first scholarly exposition of a body of customary French law derived from feudal practices, and it amounted to a first comprehensive history of European feudalism. It prompted a series of controversial works by a succession of scholars. The Roman, the Germanic, and the Celtic roots of feudalism all found advocates, and the respective claims of Lombard and Frankish texts to provide the best clues were vigorously canvassed. The complexity of the problems presented by the unravelling of the origins of feudalism dawned on scholars for the first time. The most valuable of these attempts to rediscover the “ancient French constitution” were the researches on “the antiquities of France” of Étienne Pasquier (published 1560–1607), which form a basis for all later study of medieval French institutions.


One of the novel features of European civilization in the later 16th and 17th centuries was a secularization of mental interests. Secular learning could now produce ideas more fascinating to intelligent men than theology. History was one of the most popular types of literature sought by a growing reading public. Several treatises on the proper way of writing history appeared in the third quarter of the 16th century. An anthology consisting of 12 such works, including the famous Methodus of the French political philosopher Jean Bodin, was published at Basel in 1576. Nearly 100 years later a “Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England” (1657) showed that history books constituted a large proportion of the total works published. It has been estimated that between 1460 and 1700 at least 2,500,000 copies of 17 leading ancient historians were published in Europe.

The late 16th century and the 17th witnessed the publication of several great collections of historical materials. The men who undertook these gigantic tasks often were antiquarians accumulating miscellaneous records rather than historians, but they were supplying materials for generations of future historians. Some of the most important publications of sources appeared in France and the Netherlands. Pierre Pithou was a pioneer in editing materials for the history of the Frankish period. The collections of André Duchesne are a vast storehouse of chronicles and other sources for the study of medieval French history. Le Nain de Tillemont edited 20 volumes of records devoted to Roman and church history during the first six centuries of the Christian Era, which a century later furnished one of the principal sources for Edward Gibbon’s work The History of the Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire. In 1629 a Belgian Jesuit, Jean Bolland, embarked systematically on the editing of records connected with all the saints whose feasts had at any time been celebrated by the church, and this series of publications has been continued to the present day. In the second half of the 17th century, the French Benedictine congregation of Saint-Maur started an immense series of publications commemorating the history of the Benedictines and of other monastic orders. The greatest Maurist scholar, Jean Mabillon, was accepted throughout Europe as the most erudite historian of his time.

In spite of its popularity among an expanding reading public and of the large number of learned editions of materials that it inspired, history was not, for most of the 17th century, one of the sciences that made men proud of living in a modern age. Immense progress was taking place in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. History not only did not seem capable of much further development, but scientifically minded men were beginning to dismiss it as a branch of knowledge that would never be worthy of serious respect. Mabillon’s De Re Diplomatica (1681) helped to challenge this pessimistic view, but a further century elapsed before history began to be accepted as an authoritative discipline.

One major obstacle to the progress of historiography was the hostility of rulers to publications that did not favour their governments. The growth of an influential reading public made rulers increasingly suspicious of historical writings; for example, the censorship exercised by Cosimo I de’ Medici, ruler of Florence from 1537 to 1574, precipitated the decline of Florentine historiography. Comparisons with the past also could be invidious. In 1599 Elizabeth I of England censured an author for describing the deposition of one of her predecessors, Richard II, 200 years earlier. Fear of possible trouble made highly intelligent scholars into one-sided historians. The great jurist Hugo Grotius avoided in his history of the wars of the Dutch against Spain discussions of the religious aspects. Samuel Pufendorf, the historian of the Swedish conquests, carefully left out the internal developments in 17th-century Sweden.

Bacon, Descartes, and Mabillon

The scholars who in that century were responsible for the great advances in the mathematical sciences were convinced that their achievements would ultimately give mankind a novel mastery over its natural environment. This is particularly true of Francis Bacon and of René Descartes. Their optimism was laying the foundations for a belief in a possibility of continuous progress without which the purposeful and assured historiography of the 19th century would be inconceivable. But the attitude toward history of most of the leading thinkers and scientists of the 17th century was not helpful to its immediate development. Bacon, who wrote a readable and rationally argued biography of King Henry VII of England, attached no importance to accuracy; for example, he antedated Henry’s death by a whole year and could not be bothered to undertake any detailed research. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a great mathematician, but his attempts to apply science to historiography led to mechanistic constructions from which real human beings were largely missing. Numerous influential thinkers were decidedly hostile to history. Descartes, the most eminent of the anti-historical scientists, was not simply disgusted by the unsystematic and imprecise methods of the historians of his time but also doubted whether, strictly speaking, history could be regarded as a branch of knowledge at all. But it is important to remember that much of the 17th-century criticism of history was an attitude of men who simply had other priorities and were concerned to attack doctrines that, for one reason or another, historians seemed to support. In the late 17th century the most successful defenders of history were the members of certain particularly scholarly Catholic orders. Catholicism rested its authority on tradition to a much greater extent than did its Protestant opponents. For Catholic scholars such as Mabillon, the defense of history became really a defense of their religion. They were trying to show that historians were capable of discovering scientifically demonstrable truths. The decisive publication was Mabillon’s De Re Diplomatica of 1681. A member of a rival order, the Jesuit Daniel van Papebroch, had challenged (in 1675) the authenticity of the oldest charters of two French Benedictine monasteries, Saint-Denis and Corbie. Mabillon applied his powerful critical intelligence not only to vindicating these documents but also to formulating the general rules that must be used to prove the authenticity of medieval records. He illustrated his rules by admirable examples and stated his conclusions with a candor and a common sense that convinced most readers. Mabillon’s survey of the tests that must be applied by scholars covered the writing materials, the scripts (thus founding the science of medieval Latin paleography), the seals and other devices of authentication, the official formulas, and the vocabulary used at different periods. Above all, he stressed that the authenticity of a document usually rested not just on isolated details but on consistent correctness of all its features.

Mabillon was not just a “historical scientist.” He had a passionate interest in the past and a vivid historical imagination. He displayed these qualities abundantly in his last and most important work, the Annales Ordinis s. Benedicti (“Annals of the Benedictine Order,” to 1066). In the Traité des études monastiques (1691; “Manual of Monastic Studies”), he defended the importance of scholarly work as the principal activity of an elite of Benedictine monks. But it would be an anachronism to regard Mabillon and his chief associates as fully comparable to modern historians. They were constrained by the limitations of their time and of their special position as monks. For example, Bernard de Montfaucon, Mabillon’s most important successor, is the creator of the science of medieval Greek paleography. But he shares with most of his contemporaries a complete inability to treat the Old Testament as a historical source.

Developments in 17th-century England

Historical and antiquarian studies developed in 17th-century England in several very distinctive ways. The political struggles and religious controversies of that period made some issues of older English history into matters of immediate practical importance. The other distinctive feature was the delay in the absorption of European continental learning, so that the great progress made in the study of feudal origins in the 16th century began to affect the thinking of English scholars only by about 1625. But there persisted also elements of continuity growing out of earlier Tudor scholarship. The interest in the Anglo-Saxon church and civilization continued to stimulate important editions of records throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries, including, especially, Sir Henry Spelman’s edition of the records of church councils and Sir William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum (1655–73), which is still valuable today. Another element of continuity with the Tudor period was the perennial interest of the English notables in heraldry, genealogy, and the antiquities of their native regions. Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656) set a pattern and a standard for county histories.

Students of English law and institutions, lacking the stimulus that was provided for French lawyers by the diversity of legal systems and by the notable progress in the study of Roman law in that country, continued to ascribe immemorial origins to the common law of England and to approach the development of English institutions in a completely unhistorical spirit. Among the parliamentary opposition to the Stuarts, these attitudes were part of a belief in the “ancient constitution,” which these sovereigns were supposed to be defying. Spelman, who was a devout Anglican and a royalist, though a moderate one, was perhaps the first major scholar to break away from this myth. Under the influence of continental publications and correspondents, he accepted that feudal tenure had been introduced into England after the Norman Conquest and that all the English institutions after 1066 must be redefined in feudal terms. But his discoveries were hidden in a dictionary of antiquarian words (Archaeologus, vol. 1, 1626; 2 vol. 1664) and made very little impact until some 50 years had elapsed. Spelman had an acute sense of historical development, and he sadly castigated his countrymen for their lack of it in their attitude to parliamentary origins:

when States are departed from their original Constitution and that original by tract of time worn out of memory; the succeeding Ages viewing what is past by the present, conceive the former to have been like to that they live in. (Of Parliaments, written in about 1640, published 1698.)

His greatest contribution to English history was to grasp that parliaments had developed out of feudal assemblies convoked by the Norman kings and that the Commons were introduced into parliaments subsequently, as a result of the growing prosperity of the lesser landholders. These views first became generally accessible in the 1664 edition of Spelman’s dictionary. They were adopted by Robert Brady (in 1681) and by other partisans of the Stuarts and expanded into a Royalist statement of the English past. Violently polemical though this view was, it did at least lay to rest the myth of the immemorial “ancient constitution.” The Whig triumph at the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which established a doctrine that the king ruled by parliamentary consent, led to the neglect of these discoveries for much of the 18th century. This was the common fate of much of the research of 17th-century antiquarians, who were very much ahead of their time and were writing for a limited audience. John Aubrey’s pioneer description in the 1670s of the prehistoric sites of Avebury and Stonehenge had to wait two centuries for full publication. Even the best of these antiquarians, such as Spelman and Dugdale, were less critical in their handling of the original sources than Mabillon was. Higher standards were reached by a few of their successors in the early 18th century, especially by Thomas Madox, whose Formulare Anglicanum (1702) imitated Mabillon by attempting a systematic introduction to English medieval documents. But this did not save Madox from prolonged oblivion. After about 1730 this English tradition of antiquarian scholarship largely ended and remained unfashionable for most of the 18th century.

Historiography in the Age of the Enlightenment

The impulse given to historiography by the Italian Humanists and the religious controversialists had largely spent itself by about 1715. Men knew again how to write rationally satisfying contemporary histories, though often it needed courage to do so. Much less progress had been achieved in reconstructing the more distant past. Impressive collections of historical materials were being accumulated, but most scholars still lacked the capacity to rethink the thoughts of past generations and thus really to understand them. Mabillon could write with insight about early Benedictine history, as he possessed both sympathy with the subject and adequate technical expertise, but he was exceptional. Spelman had grasped that a particular society would be molded in a peculiar way by its institutions. He could not reconstruct and explain the gradual changes from one set of institutions to a later one, but he was aware of the problem.

Judged by the quality of its historical output, the 18th century was not, on the whole, an age of successful historians, but some of the defects of earlier historiography were beginning to be overcome. There were also losses, however, for some of the achievements of the preceding period were in danger of being forgotten. In the leading countries of western Europe, religious controversies were becoming less important, and a massive secularization of interests took place, which affected even ecclesiastical scholars. The French Maurists continued until 1790 to publish imposing historical collections, but their choice of subjects was determined much less than in the time of Mabillon by religious priorities. The greatest Italian ecclesiastical disciple of Mabillon was Ludovico Antonio Muratori, a social reformer. In a divided country like Italy, the best way of expressing his patriotism lay in reminding Italians of the former greatness of their country. Muratori spent much of his long life on his editions of Italian medieval sources.

The nationalist motivation shown by Muratori was peculiar to Italy and also to parts of Germany, another divided country. Elsewhere in Europe there was a danger that, as men lost interest in constitutional or religious disputes that might be settled by appeals to the past, they might turn away altogether from history or at least neglect long stretches of it. This did happen to some extent in the 18th century. Some of the radical French reformers, such as Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, one of the main inspirers in the 1750s of the French Encyclopédie, wanted to jettison completely much of the past. The Marquis de Condorcet, an early prophet of the doctrine of endless progress of mankind and a pioneer historian of European civilization, was a prominent member of a French parliamentary commission that in 1792–93 deliberately destroyed some of the royal records as comprising relics of past servitude.

During much of the 18th century it was safer and easier to publish controversial works of history than it had been in the past. The point is important, as without this greater freedom, the peculiarly radical “philosophical” historiography, so typical of that century, would have been inconceivable. In Italy such writing was still dangerous. Pietro Giannone, the author of an anticlerical history of Naples (1723), was tracked down by the Inquisition and spent 12 years in prison, where he died in 1748. Even the great Muratori, who tried to help Giannone, came into danger of having some of his works banned and had to be rescued by the personal intervention of Pope Benedict XIV. In France, Louis XIV in 1714 imprisoned Nicolas Fréret in the Bastille for alleging (correctly) that the Franks were originally a confederacy of German tribes and not descendants of more illustrious ancestors. Under the successors of Louis, nothing quite so absurd happened again, but critics of the government or the church were often in trouble. Great Britain, Holland, Switzerland, and parts of Germany, on the other hand, provided safe oases where most things could be published. It was no accident that the most independent and historically minded group of German professors should have congregated at the University of Göttingen, founded in 1734, in the Hanoverian territory of the kings of Great Britain.

A real renewal of historiography in the 18th century could only come if fresh reasons were discovered for making it again worthwhile. Nationalism could supply one such motive; but this only became decisively influential in the 19th century. An alternative was a historiography inspired by the progress in the natural sciences and based on formulating the general rules governing the development of human societies. The chief features of this “new” historiography were a sense of the unity of all human history, including an interest in the continents outside Europe; a capacity for bold generalizations about the salient features of particular periods or societies; and a preference for topics connected with the progress of human civilization. Condorcet’s historical sketch of the progress of the human mind, written in 1794, subdivided all known history into nine periods, each starting with some great invention or with geographical discoveries.

The shortcomings of this “rationalistic” historiography have been rehearsed often enough. For many of its writers it was primarily a weapon of propaganda against their enemies in church and state. Their redeeming virtue was the fearlessly critical attitude to all existing authorities, however august or sacred. The vast scale of their generalizations often precluded any detailed research. This was particularly true of the attempts to write histories of civilization, as the existing collections of printed materials did not cater for such interests, while systematic research in archives was seldom possible in the 18th century. In preparing his pioneer essay on the history of civilization, covering the millennium from the Carolingians to Louis XIV (Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, 1745–53), the French author Voltaire had to collect bits and pieces from most diverse sources.

One of the most valuable achievements of the thinkers of the 18th century was their capacity to study particular societies as coherent units and to formulate the theory that the various aspects of each society’s life were closely interrelated. This was not an entirely novel idea, but it first became commonly accepted during this period. Nor were all its adherents anticlericals. Giambattista Vico, a Neapolitan Catholic, was ahead of his contemporaries in his particularly subtle sense of the complex influences by which one phase of society gives place to another. In his reconstruction of these transitions during the early stages of Roman history, he makes no clear lines between periods. His countryman Giannone explains in his autobiography that he had studied Roman law not for its own sake but in order to understand the changes in the society of the Roman Empire. The French philosopher Montesquieu, who owed much to Giannone, was not really a historian, but he displays an acute sense of historical realities. His De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of Laws), more than any other book, accustomed his contemporaries to ponder the complex factors that shaped each society. It inspired Gibbon’s definition of the kind of history he wanted to write. It was to be a “history related to and explained by the social institutions in which it is contained.”

This ideal was realized in Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), one of the masterpieces of “philosophical” historiography. Gibbon was preoccupied above all with the problem of human progress. The belief that continuous progress was possible for mankind had been publicly formulated in the mid-18th century by Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in France and by Adam Smith in Scotland, independently, it seems, of each other. Gibbon had read works and known scholars influenced by both these thinkers. A belief in continuous progress would confer a new purposefulness on the study of the entire course of human history and could justify a lengthy account of what otherwise might have seemed very obscure stretches of the past. Such a justification was to inspire most of the historiography of the 19th century. But the problem of progress had a special urgency for Gibbon’s generation, which worried at the thought that their own enlightened civilization might also subsequently collapse. By unravelling the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire, Gibbon was determined to show that the Europe of his own day had attained a much superior degree of development and was immune from the fate of the ancient world.

In the 18th century, historiography was still only very rarely connected with the universities; and thus, except in such isolated places as Göttingen in Germany, no continuous schools of history could develop. Some of the most important achievements of the 18th-century historians meant much less to their contemporaries than to their successors in the 19th century. Gibbon was a pioneer in utilizing in a “rationalist” history the vast materials accumulated by generations of erudite antiquarians, but he had no immediate followers. The German archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann tried to revive the true understanding of Greek sculpture and to make the history of art into something more than just the biographies of artists, but his work bore little fruit until the next century. The saddest fate was that of Vico’s work. He was hardly ever read before the 19th century, when he at last influenced Barthold Georg Niebuhr and the rest of the German historical school, while Jules Michelet’s rediscovery of Vico in 1824 started a new era in French writing on the Middle Ages.

Historiography in the 19th and 20th centuries
Growth of specialization

From the early 19th century, historiography began to develop in a radically different way. The decisive changes occurred among the German historians, largely through a reaction to the French Revolution and to a temporary subjugation of their country by Napoleon. Organized teaching of history in schools and universities became a matter of national importance, first in Prussia and then in other parts of Germany. As universal education spread to most European countries in the course of the 19th century, history was accepted everywhere as a necessary subject in schools. For the first time the bulk of historical writing came to be done by professional historians, for whom it became a condition of securing academic appointments or of consolidating their standings as university teachers. Historiography eventually became a continuously cooperative venture, where the achievements of past historians could be used systematically by their successors. But the growth of specialization and the bewildering number of types of works that came to be published constituted a new danger. In the past, important discoveries were frequently lost through lack of interest. But, by the second half of the 20th century, discoveries were in danger of being simply overlooked amid the flood of publications.

Another great change lay in the growth of intellectual freedom. Free expression of independent or unorthodox ideas had become dangerous during the French Revolution and under Napoleon, both in the territories controlled by the French and, by way of frightened reaction, in the lands of their unconquered opponents. After 1815 conditions for freer historiography improved gradually in much of Europe. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), which put forth a theory of evolution at first unacceptable to church authorities, probably could not have been published with the same impunity any earlier.

One feature of the growing tolerance of governments toward historiography was the gradual creation of public archives, such as the British Public Record Office in London, created in 1838, and the freer opening of the collections already in existence. Even the papacy accepted these changes, and Pope Leo XIII opened up the papal archive in 1883 as part of a deliberate new policy of encouraging historical study of Catholicism. For the first time historiography came to be based largely on unpublished records, and scholars were tempted into excessive reliance on original documents while unduly neglecting the older types of narrative sources.

In the 20th century some grievous threats to the persistence of free scholarship recurred, and historiography suffered with other branches of humane studies. The establishment of a Communist regime in Russia led, at first, to the rejection of most pre-1917 history as a fit subject for schools and universities. This decision was reversed in the 1930s, and from 1945 Communist countries were encouraging a form of historiography especially concerned with economic history and the class struggles of the past. There was also an enthusiastic interest in the material remains of past ages, leading to an impressive development of archaeology, particularly in Poland. The rise of dictatorships in Italy and Germany had disastrous effects on historiography in those countries, and recovery after World War II was only gradual.

Judged merely by the number of “practicing” historians and of their publications, historiography seemed in a very flourishing state in the 1970s. Its European traditions had spread to all the other continents and were largely accepted in all non-Communist countries.

The Introduction aux études historiques (Introduction to the Study of History) of Charles V. Langlois and Charles Seignobos (1898), supplemented by critical comments of another outstanding French historian, Ferdinand Lot (in Le Moyen Age, 1898), provides an excellent starting point for the discussion of modern historical methods. History is an autonomous branch of learning, and some of its methods may be unique. Historians should not try to formulate general laws; their branch of learning merely “aims at explaining reality.” Langlois and Seignobos particularly stress that history is not a science of observation but a science of reasoning how to extract from imperfect documentary or narrative records some glimpses of what actually happened.

The historian’s task

A historian has to subject his sources to a whole series of preliminary investigations. First comes “external criticism,” aimed at determining whether the sources are appropriate and adequate for the particular task in hand. The provenance, date, and authenticity of each source must be established by using the techniques of diplomatic, the detailed study and assessment of documents, and of paleography, the study of ancient handwriting, and of other auxiliary sciences that were elaborated after the 17th century. In France a special institution for teaching some of these techniques, the École des Chartes, was created in 1821. The first specialized seminar for instruction in these subjects was established in 1854 at Vienna by Theodor von Sickel, one of the greatest medievalists of the 19th century, and it was gradually imitated by leading German universities. One of the most important critical refinements introduced in the course of the 19th century was the improved handling of narrative sources brought about by seeking to discover the literary sources that lay behind them. Leopold von Ranke, one of the foremost German historians, who began his career as a teacher of classics, was gradually attracted to history through a desire to understand better the sources of the Greek and Latin authors whom he was expounding. In the later decades of the 19th century, such a quest became a normal feature of historical scholarship.

Once a historian has decided, through the application of “external criticism,” on the sources that are relevant to his purpose, he must next, by “internal criticism,” make sure that he fully understands what he has selected. German classical philologists were the first to bring these latter investigations to a high degree of perfection. Karl Lachmann, an editor of the Latin poets, is justly regarded as the creator of modern textual criticism in its most rigorous forms, and historians gradually adopted similar methods. The language of the sources must be understood, corruptions in the text must be eliminated, and the historian must, as accurately as possible, penetrate the minds of the authors with whom he is dealing.

All these critical operations on the sources are merely preliminaries, and the work of the historian proper only starts when he attempts a synthesis of his materials. F. Lot stresses that in this qualities other than the erudite skills come into play. There must be sympathy with the subjects under study, for without it there can be no imaginative insight into the past. Ideally, a historian must display capacities akin to those of a poet or an artist.

German historiography

Such a quality was, by and large, lacking in the work of the historians of the Enlightenment, who had been unable to achieve imaginative insight into civilizations very different from their own. The greatest shortcoming of Gibbon was his temperamental inability to appreciate religion. The new historiography of the 19th century was created chiefly by Germans, who, through a reaction to the ungodly and cosmopolitan Enlightenment, were endowed to excess with a passion for extolling the unique nature of their fatherland and for tracing the roots of this uniqueness through the whole course of German history. These developments in German historiography can be traced back to some strands of German thought in the 18th century, especially to some features of the writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder. He denied that the purpose of history was to provide a bird’s-eye view of the progress of the human mind. It was, rather, to reconstruct history as it had been, which means that all countries and periods are equally deserving of study. This view anticipated Ranke’s oft-quoted aim to describe what has actually happened and his conviction that the description of all human history displays the workings of God’s providence. The disasters inflicted upon Germany by Napoleon brought forth a patriotic school of historians whose urgent task it became to propagate these views as a means of restoring German independence. The centre of this movement was in Prussia, at the newly founded University of Berlin (1809). Wilhelm von Humboldt, its effective founder, believed that the task of the historian lay in discovering the ideas behind the facts. The concepts that had special validity for him were ideas of religion and of a national state. The German historical school prided itself on the scientific precision of its methods, on its determination to get all the details right, and on the scrupulous quotation of sources. This display of exact scholarship represented a great gain for historical sciences, but its chief purpose was to convince the reader. Yet these German historians were fundamentally inspired by a prejudiced, arbitrary set of assumptions. It is particularly difficult to detect Ranke’s hidden bias, as he made a parade of refusing to pass judgments on the past. His preference for the study of foreign relations between states and his treatment of states as natural entities with a right to fulfill their individual destinies justified the successes of Prussia. The defeat in 1848 of the German aspirations to national unity inspired his pupil Wilhelm von Giesebrecht to write the history of the medieval German empire to remind his countrymen of their past glories. When German unification was achieved in 1871, Giesebrecht doubted whether there was any need to bring out any further volumes of his great work. But many German historians, having contributed mightily to the unification of Germany, continued to describe complacently the triumphs of the Bismarckian state. This was one of the purposes of the school of historical economists led by Gustav von Schmoller. There were some dissenting voices. Theodor Mommsen, the greatest historian of antiquity produced by the 19th century, deplored the tendency of his countrymen to worship state power. Friedrich Meinecke, a leading German historian of political ideas, who until 1914 accepted the ordinary nationalistic assumptions of his countrymen, gradually entirely changed his views and, after the defeat of Germany in two world wars, pleaded in his Deutsche Katastrophe (1946; The German Catastrophe) for a historiography concerned with the higher values of general civilization. Among the German historians, particularly striking progress was achieved in medieval studies. Meanwhile, attempts at imaginative reconstructions of the past were being made in other countries of western Europe. Jules Michelet wrote in 1833–43 the first history of medieval France based on the French national archives, of which he was at that time keeper. Macaulay’s History of England (1848–61), covering chiefly the years 1685–1702, represented again a remarkable though prejudiced attempt to relive the past.

German scholarly techniques and the methods of German historical teaching spread to other countries in the course of the later 19th century, though it is important to note that until 1914 a significant proportion of leading historians from states outside Germany spent some time in that country. This is particularly true of some of the greatest Russian scholars, such as M.I. Rostovtzeff, one of the most important modern historians of antiquity. In England, William Stubbs, though self-taught, applied the results of German scholarship to the reconstruction of English medieval history. Gabriel Monod, who had studied in Germany, was prominent in introducing more scientific techniques into medieval French historiography, and he founded in 1876 the Revue Historique as the main organ of French historical scholarship. A succession of American students went to Germany, and some, on their return home, reorganized historical studies. Measured by the sheer bulk of publications, the amount of American history written since the 18th century is probably greater than that of any other modern nation. But apart from editions of sources, very few works on American history published before about 1900 are of much practical use today. The most influential pioneer in organizing scientific historiography was Herbert Baxter Adams, who between 1876 and his death in 1901 made the Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore into the foremost American centre of historical studies. He was also one of the founders of the American Historical Association in 1884 and played a large part in successfully launching the American Historical Review in 1895 as the main organ of historical scholarship. Some of Adams’ pupils became great scholars in various fields of general history. Charles Homer Haskins’ works on Norman institutions and on science and culture in the 12th and 13th centuries made him one of the foremost medievalists of the 20th century. But a movement for creating a purely American history was launched in 1893 by another of Adams’ pupils, Frederick Jackson Turner, who inaugurated a “progressive” school of historians through his conviction that the fundamental fact of American history down to 1890 was the settlement of a continent. In Turner’s eyes the main theme of American history in the 19th century was the conflict between the patrician and capitalist groups of the Eastern Seaboard and the needs of the new settlers in the Middle West. Charles A. Beard inaugurated by his Economic Interpretation of the American Constitution (1913) an attempt to rewrite the entire history of the U.S. in terms of conflicts between different groups of economic interests. The weakness of this type of historiography was that it encouraged an excessive parochialism. After 1945 the “progressive” historians came under fire both from more conservative scholars who preferred to stress elements of common tradition and purpose in American development and from the historians of the “new left.” In the 1960s and 1970s the close connection between writings on American history and the active political life was infusing great variety and vitality into its historiography, though making it perhaps too susceptible to rapidly changing external pressures.

Methodology of historiography

The methodology of history does not differ in broadest outline from that of other disciplines in its regard for existing knowledge, its search for new and relevant data, and its creation of hypotheses. It is the same for all historical writing, success depending on skill and experience; and division of the past on temporal or topical lines merely reflects the human limitations of historians. Although historical methodology has four facets, the more skilled the historian the less he gives them conscious consideration; and any historian is likely to be concerned with two or more concurrently. The four facets are heuristic, knowledge of current interpretation, research, and writing.

The first two may be briefly considered. Heuristic has been adopted as a convenient term for the technique of investigation that can be acquired solely by practice and experience. In the case of the historian it embraces such things as knowledge of manuscript collections, methods of card indexing and classifying material, and knowledge of bibliography. It underlies other aspects of methodology as in knowledge of the capabilities of historians working in the same and similar fields or in the power of dealing expeditiously with documentary material. The necessity for knowledge of current interpretation is based on the working principle that inquiry proceeds from the known to the unknown; and the historian has to be well acquainted with existing work in his own field, in contiguous historical fields and in allied disciplines. The work in each case consists of both “fact” and interpretation, and the amount the historian accepts will vary. In his own field he will normally not accept facts, and certainly not current interpretation, on trust; in contiguous historical fields he will accept facts and current interpretation by experts in those fields, but qualified by heuristic and his general historical knowledge; in allied disciplines, such as anthropology, economics, geography, natural science, philology, psychology, sociology, he must unless there is strong evidence to the contrary presume the technical skill and intellectual honesty of scholars in those fields. There is, of course, no reason why a historian cannot be reasonably versed in one or more of these and other disciplines, and should the nature of his enquiry demand it he must be.

Historical research is the term applied to the work necessary for the establishing of occurrences, happenings, or events in the field with which the historian is concerned. Knowledge of these is entirely dependent on the transmission of information from those living at the time, and this information forms what is known as the source material for the particular period or topic. The occurrences themselves can never be experienced by the historian, and what he has at his disposal are either accounts of occurrences as seen by contemporaries or something, be it verbal, written, or material, that is the end product of an occurrence. These accounts or end products have been variously termed relics, tracks, or traces of the occurrences that gave rise to them; and from them the historian can, with varying degrees of certainty, deduce the occurrences. The traces are thus the “facts” of history, the actual occurrences deductions from the facts; and historical research is concerned with the discovery of relevant traces and with deduction from those traces insofar as this will aid the search for further relevant traces.

Source material

Source material falls into three groups which can be differentiated as written, material, and traditional. Written source material has two subdivisions, literary, sometimes called subjective, and official. The first consists of events as seen through the eyes of an individual and therefore as interpreted by him, normally entailing selection of occurrences or attribution of motive. The second subdivision, the official, consists of records produced in transacting business at any level from individual to international. The information given is basically in statement form, impersonal, and containing only the most superficial suggestions of causation and motivation. In practice the boundary between literary and official sources is blurred and a document may contain elements of both. The second main division, material source material, consists of objects that have resulted from activities of human beings in the past. The third group, traditional source material, covers what is handed on verbally or as practices, although later generations may commit such things to writing. Obvious examples are archaic forms, traditional practices, nursery rhymes, folklore, and place names. Comparison with parallel source material and knowledge of current interpretation will normally show the historian whether his particular source can be presumed true, partially true, or faked. If true or partially true allowance has to be made for the subjective element in literary and some traditional sources and for the difficulty of reconstructing the events themselves from the traces surviving in official, material, or other traditional sources.

The classification of source material is essentially pragmatic, based on the differing techniques required in handling sources of the different groups: an inscribed tombstone, for example, can be either a written or a material source depending on whether the historian’s concern is with the content of the inscription or with the stone. Specialized training in what are sometimes known as ancillary disciplines may, depending on the nature of his investigation, be necessary for the historian. The most important of these are archaeology, bibliography, chronology, diplomatics, epigraphy, genealogy, paleography, sigillography, and textual criticism. It need hardly be said that the historian must have competence in the languages used in his source material. Many historians give part of their time to the editing of source material. This is not historical writing but is of use to other historians in the same field. The collection of facts as an end in itself is, however, antiquarianism not history, and the essential end product of historical investigation is the historian’s own writing.

Using source material

The question of what history is belongs to the philosophy rather than the methodology of history. The word history itself is used ambiguously to describe both the past and what is written about the past; but it is this second meaning that is relevant to the working definition that history is the past experience of society. For what reasons society may wish to utilize its past experience is not the concern of the historian, whose task is to make available to society that past experience and to record it for future reference. An individual utilizing his own past experience has to recall the significant elements of that experience with accuracy and establish their causal and chronological relationships. The historian behaves similarly concerning the past experiences of society; but the reconstruction of events from traces, the selection of those relevant to his task, and the establishing of relationships allow a varying freedom of choice by the historian, which thus introduces the subjective element of the historian’s personality. This cannot be eliminated from historical writing, and the historian’s aim is to make the margin of intellectual error as small as possible. The handling of source material demands only care and technical competence, and it is mainly in the construction of hypotheses and in the establishing of relationships that this intellectual error can enter. A check is provided by the opinions of other historians working in the same field. His work will, if accepted, become part of current interpretation, sometimes described as accepted history but, as with all current interpretation, subject to revision by himself or others.

Historical methodology became more clearly formulated during the 19th and 20th centuries, but there have been historians at times long past whose work can be judged by present-day standards. There are, however, certain important differences between present methodology and the general run of past methodology. Much medieval writing, for example, bows to precedent in literary sources and in current interpretation, and uncritical acceptance of an earlier writer’s work can occur century after century. The comparative neglect of official sources by the majority of European historians before the 19th century gave no corrective to literary sources. The greatest impediment to the development of modern methodology lay, however, in the varying concepts of history, some of which survive today. The concept of history as a form of literature made it a type of imaginative art on which judgment was passed on grounds of elegance rather than accuracy. Closely allied with this is the “ethical” concept of history whereby historical writing became a series of value judgments on individuals and actions. The converse of this was the impossible “objective” or “scientific” history of the later 19th century, though it did popularize the concept of research and developed the ancillary disciplines. The use of history for propaganda purposes is in its crudest form virtually a branch of fiction and thus independent of research; in its more subtle forms it can encourage accuracy in research, but it will encourage also the suppression of inconvenient traces and intellectual dishonesty in the elucidation of relationships. In this it indicates one of the main impediments to methodological and historical development: the holding by the historian of a priori theories or laws to which all events and relationships must conform, whether it be the theory of divine intervention in human affairs favoured in medieval times or the Marxist theory current over much of the modern world


While sharing a common ancestry with myth, legend, epic poetry, and the novel, history has of course diverged from these forms. Its claim to truth is based in part on the fact that all the persons or events it describes really existed or occurred at some time in the past. Historians can say nothing about these persons or events that cannot be supported, or at least suggested, by some kind of documentary evidence. Such evidence customarily takes the form of something written, such as a letter, a law, an administrative record, or the account of some previous historian. In addition, historians sometimes create their own evidence by interviewing people. In the 20th century the scope of historical evidence was greatly expanded to include, among many other things, aerial photographs, the rings of trees, old coins, clothes, motion pictures, and houses. Modern historians have determined the age of the Shroud of Turin, which purportedly bears the image of Jesus, through carbon-14 dating and have discredited the claim of Anna Anderson to be the grand duchess Anastasia, the daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, through DNA testing

Just as the methods at the disposal of historians have expanded, so have the subjects in they have become interested. Many of the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Polynesia, for example, were long dismissed by Europeans as having no precolonial history, because they did not keep written records before the arrival of European explorers. However, sophisticated study of oral traditions, combined with advances in archaeology, has made it possible to discover a good deal about the civilizations and empires that flourished in these regions before European contact.

Historians have also studied new social classes. The earliest histories were mostly stories of disasters—floods, famines, and plagues—or of wars, including the statesmen and generals who figured in them. In the 20th century, however, historians shifted their focus from statesmen and generals to ordinary workers and soldiers. Until relatively recent times, however, most men and virtually all women were excluded from history because they were unable to write. Virtually all that was known about them passed through the filter of the attitudes of literate elites. The challenge of seeing through that filter has been met by historians in various ways. One way is to make use of nontraditional sources—for example, personal documents, such as wills or marriage contracts. Another is to look at the records of localities rather than of central governments.

Through these means even the most oppressed peoples—African-American slaves or medieval heretics, for example—have had at least some of their history restored. Since the 20th century some historians have also become interested in psychological repression—i.e., in attitudes and actions that require psychological insight and even diagnosis to recover and understand. For the first time, the claim of historians to deal with the feelings as well as the thoughts of people in any part of the human past has been made good.

None of this is to say that history writing has assumed a perfect or completed form. It will never do so: examination of its past reveals remarkable changes in historical consciousness rather than steady progress toward the standards of research and writing that represent the best that historians can do today. Nevertheless, 21st-century historians understand the pasts of more people more completely and more accurately than their predecessors did. This article demonstrates the scope of that accomplishment and how it came to be achieved.

Ancient historiography
The first histories

In the beginning was the spoken word. Humans lived for tens of thousands of years with language, and thus with tales about the past, but without writing. Oral history is still important in all parts of the world, and successful transmission of stories over many generations suggests that people without writing can have a sophisticated historical sense. The historical record, however, must start with a system of writing and a suitable writing technology. The earliest forms of writing included cuneiform and pictographs, which were inscribed on stone and clay tablets in Egypt and Mesopotamia, as well as Chinese ideograms, which were incised in bronze and on oracle bones (baked oxen bones whose cracks and fissures were thought to foretell the future). People in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China were the first to make records of their contemporaries, which took the form of lists of kings and ancestors.

Egypt and Mesopotamia

In Egypt, the first lists date from about the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE and extend back another 1,000 years to a time when kings were thought to mingle with gods. Entries were made year by year, making these lists among the earliest annals. In addition to the names of kings, events occasionally are mentioned, especially for the later years; but it is hard to understand on what principle they are included. Sandwiched between notations of offerings to the gods are such enigmatic references as “Smiting of the cave dwellers.” Despite their occasional obscurity, these early historians accomplished the considerable task of organizing the past into units of the same size (years) and assigning events to them.

The king-lists of the Sumerians, the oldest civilization in Mesopotamia, not only presented the order of rulers but described shifts in power as various kings were “smitten with weapons” and overthrown. The Sumerians were also capable of weaving events into a narrative. A Sumerian stela, or standing stone slab, dating from about 2,400 BCE records what is probably the world’s first historical narrative. The Stele of the Vultures was erected by the city of Lagash to commemorate its victory in a boundary war with Umma; it contains depictions of warriors in battle gear and an inscription celebrating the triumph.

Sumerian writers seem to have developed their own interpretation of history. This interpretation is reflected in the preoccupation of the king-lists with the transitory nature of royal power and in the Sumerian belief that natural phenomena (notably the behaviour of the Euphrates River) are determined by the gods. Although Sumerian gods could be bungling and cowardly and sometimes even subject to fate, they retained the power to punish humans who offended them. The vicissitudes of kings and states were thought to demonstrate the gods’ power to influence human affairs.


A rich and persistent annalistic tradition and a growing emphasis on history as a repertoire of moral examples characterized the earliest Chinese historiography. The first Chinese historians were apparently temple archivists; as the bureaucratic structure of the Chinese state developed, historians occupied high offices. History gained prestige through the thought of the philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE), who was traditionally—though probably wrongly—credited with writing the Chunqiu (“Spring and Autumn [Annals]”) and the Shujing (“Classic of History”). As articulated in these works, Chinese historical thought was intensely moralistic: virtue was conceived as following the example of one’s ancestors. There was consistent interest in the form of governing institutions and frequent emphasis on the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven—the idea that a monarch ruled by heaven’s decree, which would be withdrawn if he committed evil.

The foundational text of Chinese historiography is the Shiji (“Historical Records”), which was compiled by Sima Qian (c. 145–c. 86 BCE). It is an account of the entire history of China from mythical times through the establishment of the Han dynasty in 206 BCE. The story becomes more detailed as Sima Qian approaches his own time and is able to question eyewitnesses of events and make use of abundant official documents. Sima Qian introduced order into the welter of surviving records by organizing them into categories.

The classical Chinese historians made an ideal of objectivity. Although they eschewed interpretation of the historical record, they were often faced with conflicting sources. In such cases they typically chose only one, though they never referred to their sources or explained the choices they made. Historical criticism in China was constrained by propriety because of the high cultural value of ancestors; anything like the contentiousness of the Greeks would have been regarded as most unseemly (see below Greek historiography).

By about 710 CE, however, Liu Zhiji (661–721) had produced the Shitong (“Historical Perspectives”), the first comprehensive work on historical criticism in any language. For him, the writing of history had an exalted—and very Confucian—mission:

Man lives in his bodily shape between heaven and earth and his life is like the span of the summer fly, like the passing of a white colt glimpsed through a crack in the wall. Yet he is shamed to think that within those years his merit will not be known…there is truly none who is not tireless in pursuing merit and fame.…Why is this? Because all have their heart set on immortality. And what, then, is immortality? No more than to have one’s name written in a book.

Liu Zhiji’s view had a lasting influence. Indeed, some of his maxims are still recommended to beginning historians: skepticism about the sources, freedom from deference to established scholars, the necessity of extensive knowledge of the sources before selection can be made, and insistence on arguments supported by extensive evidence.

Hebrew traditions

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was as fundamental to Western historiography as the dynastic histories were to Chinese historiography. Although the Bible is many things, it is substantially a work of history. Seventeen of its 39 books are historical, and the 5 major and 12 minor prophets also offer moral interpretations of historical events. Furthermore, references in the Hebrew Bible indicate that annals of the Israelite kings once existed, though they have since been lost.

A creation story, an account of a flood that all but destroys humanity, long genealogical lists, a set of laws or commandments, and reflections on the effects of divine wrath on the prosperity of kings and peoples can be found among other Western Asian peoples. Nevertheless, the so-called Yahwist writer (one of the individuals or groups identified as a source of the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) possessed a unique conception of history, and the Hebrews identified themselves as a distinct people only because of that conception. They alone had entered into a covenant with Yahweh, who promised Abraham, the first of the Hebrew patriarchs, that his descendants would be as numerous as the sands of the sea. The Hebrews believed that the hand of Yahweh had led them to escape bondage in Egypt and eventually to subdue the peoples of Palestine in order to occupy the Promised Land.

That land was ill-chosen as a peaceful place to live. The Hebrews faced the constant threat of being squeezed between the great powers of the region. About 722 BCE the northern kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians, and about 598 BCE the southern kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians, who carried many Hebrews off to captivity; the Babylonian Exile lasted until 538 BCE, when the Persian conquerors of Babylonia allowed the Hebrews to return to Jerusalem. The authors of the Hebrew Bible did not, however, think in geopolitical terms; they tried instead to understand why the promise, which seemed to guarantee earthly success, had apparently been abrogated by Yahweh.

Agonizing over this problem led to something hitherto unknown: a widespread reconception of the historical record. The compilers of the Hebrew scriptures had already rejected the sort of vainglorious boasting characteristic of the records of Babylonian kings. The succession story of King David, for example, does not spare details of his discreditable actions. More serious than any individual sin, however, were the sins committed by the Hebrew people as a whole, who are depicted on occasion as turning away from the worship of Yahweh. It was not unusual to see in the disasters that overwhelmed them the avenging hand of Yahweh, but what required historical reflection was the task of reconciling the apostasy and its punishment with the continuing validity of the promise made to Abraham. Eventually the major prophets, especially Isaiah, reinterpreted the story of their people. Despite the sins and sufferings of the people of Yahweh, the promise had not been invalidated and could even be renewed, because the people’s destiny had not been world power or even a secure kingdom. Instead they had been chosen to suffer as a servant of all of humanity.

This view was distinctive in being a history not merely of a single king or dynasty but of a people. Furthermore, it was not narrowly nationalistic; it extended back to the beginnings of the human race and showed how Yahweh, the Lord of the whole earth, was working out his divine plan for humanity through his promise to the chosen people. Unlike the historical vision of other Western Asian peoples, which had seldom extended far into the past or beyond their own ethnic group, the view of the Hebrews was in principle universal. Since the promise was capable of redefinition and renewal, there was even a rudimentary notion of history as progressive.

One element of modern historical scholarship that does not appear in the works of Western Asian peoples is criticism of sources. Babylonian records often end with elaborate curses against anyone who would seek to alter them. It was the classical Greek historians who first made a systematic attempt to find out what actually happened, rather than to preserve a traditional record of events.

Greek historiography

Greek historiography originated in the activities of a group of writers whom the Greeks called logographoi (“logographers”). Logography was the prose compilation of oral traditions relating to the origins of towns, peoples, and places. It combined geographical with cultural information and might be seen as an early form of cultural anthropology. Hecataeus of Miletus, the best known of the logographers, defined his task in his Genealogia (c. 490 BCE) as follows: “I write what I consider the truth, for the things the Greeks tell us are in my opinion full of contradictions and worthy to be laughed out of court.” The logographers also served as advocates and speech writers in the courts, and the need to ascertain facts and make arguments clearly influenced their writings.


Although the logographers pioneered in the study of history, their influence was eclipsed by Herodotus, who has been called the “father of history.” His History of the Greco-Persian Wars is the longest extant text in ancient Greek. The fact that it has survived when so many other works written in ancient Greece were lost, including the majority of the plays of the great tragedians (Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles) and much of the corpus of Aristotle), is testimony to the great esteem in which it was held.

Like the logographers, Herodotus’s approach was historical and anthropological. He questioned the priests at Memphis (in Egypt) and those at Heliopolis and Thebes “expressly to try whether the priests of those places [Heliopolis and Thebes] would agree in their accounts with the priests at Memphis.” He discovered that the Egyptian historical records went much further back than the Greek ones and that Egyptian customs were the reverse of those he knew (which he called “the common practice of mankind”). The Egyptians ate no wheat or barley; kneaded dough with their feet but mixed mud or even dung with their hands; lived with animals; and wrote from right to left. Herodotus also observed that “women attend the markets and trade, while the men sit at home at the loom.”

Although Herodotus also gave ethnographic details of this kind on the Scythians and the Persians, his History possesses a narrative thread, which he announces in the first paragraph: “These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud.” The “grounds of feud” are traced back beyond the Trojan War (12th or 13th century BCE) to a series of abductions of women by both Europeans and Asians. The Greeks made themselves enemies of Persia (which claimed all of Asia) when they led an army to besiege the Anatolian city of Troy to recover Helen, the Greek woman kidnapped by the Trojan prince Paris. The rivalry was renewed in the time of the Persian king Xerxes, leading to an epic conflict between the enormous forces of Persia and those of Athens, Sparta, and most, though not all, of the other Greek city-states. The pattern of a nemesis upon the hubris of the Persians is obvious.

Despite his apparently conscientious questioning of his witnesses, Herodotus developed a reputation for credulity. However, although he was certainly not one to resist a good story, he did not endorse everything he reported. He described a story that the Greeks told about the mythical hero Heracles as a “silly fable” that reflected badly on their critical sense. In the tradition of the logographers, he believed that his duty was to record the traditions of various peoples, no matter how dubious. He combined a remarkable narrative artistry with an effort to discern the causes of customs and events.


The most famous critic—and emulator—of Herodotus was Thucydides (flourished 5th century BCE). Whereas Herodotus had hoped to preserve the glory of Greeks and barbarians from the destruction of time, Thucydides had little glory to celebrate. In his great work, the History of the Peloponnesian War, which describes the destructive conflict (431–404 BCE) between Athens and Sparta, Thucydides aimed “not to write down the first story that came my way, and not even to be guided by my own general impressions.” When reporting on events that he did not personally witness, he carefully checked the reports of eyewitnesses, bearing in mind their partiality and imperfect memories. “It may be,” he concedes,

that my history will be less easy to read because of the absence in it of a romantic element. It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events that happened in the past and that (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public but was done to last forever.

Behind this veiled criticism of Herodotus is the ambition to establish a diagnostic science of history. Just as Thucydides describes the symptoms of plague in Athens, so he clinically notes the degeneration of the Athenian body politic. The city’s highest ideals are articulated in the funeral oration that Thucydides attributes to the Athenian leader Pericles; its realpolitik is brutally illustrated in the city’s treatment of the inhabitants of the island of Melos. In the famous “Melian Dialogue,” the Athenians demand that the hitherto neutral Melians join their confederation. They offer no justification of their demand beyond their power to enforce it, warning the Melians against having any hope in portents or oracles. When the Melians refuse, the Athenians send a force so strong that the Melians surrender unconditionally, whereupon the Athenians massacre all the men of military age and sell the women and children into slavery.

The pathology of the Athenians is most clearly manifested in their disastrous expedition to Sicily. Persuaded by demagogues and by soothsayers and oracles that they will prevail, the Athenians attack the island and its chief city, Syracuse, without realizing that they are undertaking a war almost as demanding as that still under way against Sparta. The expedition goes badly: the entire Athenian army is killed or captured and the prisoners confined to quarries, where “they suffered everything which one could imagine might be suffered by men imprisoned in such a place.” “To the victors,” wrote Thucydides, the Sicilian expedition was “the most brilliant of successes, to the vanquished the most calamitous of defeats; for they were utterly and entirely defeated; their sufferings were on an enormous scale; their losses were, as they say, total: army, navy, everything was destroyed.”

The lessons taught by Thucydides have not lost their timeliness, and his project for a scientific history has been taken up again and again. As a historian, he was true to the central presupposition of Greek philosophy, that the truest knowledge must be of the unchanging. Asserting his belief that human nature is “what it is,” he warned that the situations he described would arise repeatedly and expressed his hope that his analysis would prove useful to future statesmen.

One of the puzzles in the history of historiography is why the brilliant beginnings of the Greek tradition exhausted themselves. Herodotus and Thucydides had no successors, only continuators who tried to bridge the chronological gap between the two historians or to continue the story beyond the end of Thucydides’ texts. These efforts barely rose above the levels of annals, and the authors showed neither the critical skill nor the literary power of their great predecessors. Xenophon (c. 430–350 BCE) was among those who attempted a continuation, but his more valuable contributions were in biography. Although history writing was still done in the Hellenistic Age (323 BCE–330 CE), there was little improvement.

Roman historiography

The Romans inherited Greek historiography as they inherited other elements of Greek culture, aware of its prestige and emulating it in some ways but inevitably giving it the imprint of their quite different temperament. Fittingly, it was a Greek writing in Greek, Polybius (c. 200–c. 118 BCE), who first offered key insights into the development of the Roman state and discussed aspects of Roman society that the Romans themselves had hardly noticed. He asked: “Can anyone be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and brought under the domination of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite 53 years?” In answering this question, Polybius drew comparisons between the Romans and the Greeks, the latter of whom failed to forge a lasting empire, even under Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE). The primary reason for Rome’s success, according to Polybius, was the Roman character, as reflected in statesmanship, public spirit, and moderation toward defeated peoples.

Polybius also argued that Roman political institutions were superior to Greek ones. He accepted the theory of the cyclical degeneration and regeneration of Greek city-states, which had been elaborated by Aristotle. This theory maintained that city-states develop first as despotisms and evolve through periods of monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and finally mob rule before the restoration of order in a new despotism. There was, however, nothing inevitable about this cycle, and Polybius at one time believed that the Romans might avert it because the constitution of the Roman Republic was mixed, allowing for some monarchical and some popular elements as well as the aristocracy of the Senate. (This theory of the benefits of mixed government was to have a long career.) Finally, Polybius believed the Romans had been favoured by Tyche (“fate” or “fortune”), which was partly responsible for drawing the world under Roman rule.

Like Thucydides, Polybius relied on personal experience and the cross-examination of eyewitnesses. Thus, he retraced the route of the Carthaginian general Hannibal across the Alps and observed the siege of Carthage in 146 BCE. Although he scorned historians who merely sat in their studies, he also condemned petty histories of small corners of the world. To the contrary, the triumph of Rome called for a universal history: “Up to this time the world’s history had been, so to speak, a series of disconnected transactions.…But from this time forth History becomes a connected whole: the affairs of Italy and Libya are involved with those of Asia and Greece, and the tendency of all is to unity.”

Diodorus, Sallust, and Livy

Unfortunately, a method based on personal experience and eyewitness accounts could capture a moment of decisive conquest but could not yield universal history. It remained for Diodorus Siculus in the 1st century BCE to come closest, among ancient writers, to this ideal. Diodorus traced to 60 BCE the histories of Arabs, Assyrians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Greeks, Indians, Romans, and Scythians—not to mention Amazons and the residents of Atlantis. He is one of the main ancient supporters of the claim that Plato and other Greek thinkers learned their wisdom from the Egyptians.

Less than a century after Polybius explained the rise of the Roman state, Roman historians were beginning to speak of its decline. Sallust (c. 86–c. 35/34 BCE) described the conspiracy of the Roman patrician Catiline in the Bellum Catilinae (43–42 BCE; Catiline’s War), and his Bellum Jugurthinum (41–40 BCE; The Jugurthine War) focused on the war against Jugurtha, the king of Numida (roughly present-day Algeria). The lesson of both was that the republic was rotting inwardly through corruption and the arrogance of power. Indeed, in Sallust’s systematic analysis Rome was shown to be suffering the general fate of empires.

Livy (59/64 BCE–17 CE), one of the greatest Roman historians, lived through the fall of the republic and the establishment of the principate by Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Like Sallust, Livy was inclined to idealize the severe virtues of republican Rome. His monumental history, most of which has not survived, starts with the founding of the city and extends into the rule of Augustus. Like the Aeneid, by the Roman poet Virgil, Livy’s work served to memorialize Rome’s early history just as the republic was being transformed into an empire.


Nobody was more aware of this development, or decline, than Tacitus (56–120). His two great works—the Annals, which covers the years 14–68 CE, and the Histories, which begins with the famous “year of the four emperors” (69 CE) and ends with the death of the emperor Domitian (96)—provide an important account of the first century of the principate. Tacitus was a self-conscious stylist, and in his treatise on style he claimed that styles were themselves the product of historical changes rather than being entirely the decision of the historian. His own writing is perhaps most remarkable for his concise epigrams. Of the short-lived reign of the emperor Galba, for example, Tacitus wrote: “Capax imperium, nisi imperasset” (“He would have been capable of ruling, except that he ruled”). And concerning Roman methods of pacification, he observed, “Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appelant” (“They have made a desert and call it peace”).

Politics, as it had been known in the republic, no longer existed; the intrigues of the imperial family and of its bodyguard, the Praetorian Guard, determined the fate of Rome. Instead of creating a master narrative about the impersonal forces that might have led to this development, as Polybius or even Sallust might have done, Tacitus focused on the character of the various emperors. As was typical of ancient authors, he had no conception of character as developing through the course of a lifetime. Innate character, however, reveals itself fully only in crises, or when the possession of absolute power allows all its latent features to emerge—as with the vanity and cruelty of Nero. Tacitus’s emphasis upon character, despite the crudity of his psychological theories, made him a pioneer of psychohistory. It also brought the form of historical works close to that of multiple biographies.

Suetonius and Plutarch

This is even more true of the De vita Caesarum (Lives of the Caesars), written by Suetonius in the 2nd century. His treatments consist of an account of each emperor’s administrative and military accomplishments followed by a description of his character and personal life. Although Suetonius, a former imperial secretary, drew upon the imperial archives in composing his Lives, the work is best known for the scandalous details it provides regarding the private lives of the emperors. In this he differed from the best-known of the ancient biographers, Plutarch, whose Bioi paralloi (Parallel Lives) juxtaposed the life stories of 24 Romans and 24 Greeks who had faced similar experiences. His purpose was to draw moral lessons from the lives of these figures. If they responded differently to their challenges, it was partly a consequence of character, but weaknesses of character could—and should—be overcome by a strenuous exercise of virtue.

Despite its origins in Greek historical thought, Roman historiography was in many ways more like Chinese than Greek historiography. The Romans lacked the speculative interests of the Greeks, and their historians made little effort to propound grand or even middle-range theories. This is one reason why they were content for so long with the annalistic form. The Romans of the republic had scarcely less regard for their ancestors than the Chinese did, and both believed that histories should propound moral lessons. Indeed, this was one of the Roman legacies to medieval Christian historiography.

Medieval historiography
The early Christian conception of history

The earliest Christians thought that history was about to end, because Jesus had said that some of his disciples would still be alive at his Second Coming. Fired with such apocalyptic expectations, all they needed to know of history was that God had broken into it through the Incarnation and that Jesus had conquered death through the Resurrection. Thus, it was hardly inevitable that Christians would develop an interest in history, much less their own philosophy of history. But the authors of the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) regarded the Hebrew Bible as authoritative and reinterpreted it to accord with the new revelation. In their view many prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures referred to Jesus, and many of its stories prefigured his life (thus, Jonah’s three-day sojourn in the belly of the great fish was a foreshadowing of the Resurrection).

Incorporation of the Hebrew Bible into the Christian canon helped to shape the Christian conception of history. By tracing their history to Adam and Eve and the other figures who preceded Abraham, Christians encompassed all of humanity within their worldview. Reflecting the influence of the Hebrew prophets, the early Christians held that sins were inevitably followed by divine punishment and that the plot of history was the unfolding of God’s will for humanity. Disasters represented punishment for sins; prosperity indicated divine favour to faithful humans. Thus, nothing could happen that could not be explained by the providential interpretation of history.

Nevertheless, the idea of providence did not instantly solve all historical problems, some of which were peculiar to Christianity. In particular, what was the place of the Roman Empire in the divine plan? For almost three centuries Christians provoked in Roman authorities puzzlement, exasperation, and intermittent persecution. For their part, Christians treated the empire as at best irrelevant and at worst (as in the Revelation to John) as one of the beasts of the apocalypse. But with the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312, Christian historians had to come to terms with the historical significance of a Christian emperor. The challenge was met by Eusebius, whose Historia ecclesiastica (written 312–324; Ecclesiastical History) was the first important work of Christian history since the Acts of the Apostles. For Eusebius, the Roman Empire was the divinely appointed and necessary milieu for the propagation of the Christian faith. Roman peace and Roman roads allowed the Apostle Paul to travel tens of thousands of miles on his evangelical journeys, and now Constantine had been appointed to end the persecution of Christians.


The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 posed a severe challenge to Eusebius’s interpretation of history. The most famous response was the monumental De civitate Dei contra paganos (413–426/427; City of God) of St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Augustine was forced to confront the argument that the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of Rome had led to the downfall of the empire. His rebuttal dissolved the identity of empire and Christianity. Humanity was composed of two cities, inextricably mixed: the earthly, built on self-love, and the heavenly, animated by the love of God. Only at the Last Judgment would the two be separated. Whatever human glory (or disaster) might attend the earthly city paled in significance compared to the denouement awaiting the heavenly city. Although this vast work (Isidore of Sevilla [c. 560–636] said that anyone who claimed to have read all of it was lying) had great influence, especially in periodizing history, it offered little help to historians who wished to write about the affairs of the earthly city.

The issue of periodization was vital. Augustine divided history into six ages, comparable to the six ages of the individual human life span: from Adam and Eve to the biblical Flood, from the Flood to Abraham, from Abraham to King David, from David to the Babylonian Exile, from the Exile to Jesus, and from Jesus to the Second Coming. Augustine’s disciple Paulus Orosius complicated this scheme by introducing apocalyptic material from the Book of Daniel, which was construed as prophesying four kingdoms, the last of which was the Roman Empire. The end of this kingdom would be the end of the world.

Early Germanic and English histories

The fall of the Roman Empire actually resulted from the successful attempt of Germanic peoples to occupy its lands and enjoy its benefits. Goths, Lombards, Franks, and other Germanic peoples carved out new kingdoms from the moribund Western empire and adopted its traditions and even its identity. Yet there were difficulties in fitting the Germanic invaders into this pattern. They were nonliterate and preserved their memories of the past orally in heroic poems such as Beowulf. Historical writing was almost all done by clerics, in Latin. Gregory of Tours (538/539–594), for example, wrote Ten Books of Histories, a history of the Franks from the perspective of the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy, and St. Bede the Venerable (672/673–735) composed the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People). For both authors, the invaders, once converted to orthodox (Roman) Christianity, were instrumental in repressing heresy: the Franks opposed Arianism (which held that Christ was not divine but created), and the Anglo-Saxons suppressed the irregular practices of the Celtic church.

Chronicles and hagiographies

Although Gregory and Bede wrote histories, early medieval historiography typically took one of two other forms: chronicles and hagiographies, or lives of saints. The spare nature of the earliest chronicles is illustrated by the following excerpt from the chronicle of St. Gall monastery in Switzerland:

720 Charles fought against the Saxons.721 Theudo drove the Saxons out of Aquitaine.722 Great crops.723 724 No entries.725 Saracens came for the first time.726 727 728 729 730 No entries.731 Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died.732 Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday.

Even this rudimentary example, however, exhibits typical characteristics of early medieval chronicles. Only events—human deeds and natural prodigies—are listed. There is no effort to show any causal relationship between them—its style is what rhetoricians call “paratactic” (typically, clauses are simply connected by “and”) rather than “hypotactic” (when subordinate conjunctions such as “since” or “therefore” show some sort of relationship between clauses). Although history is presented only in terms of human actions, the absence of causal language makes agency appear limited. Bizarre occurrences in nature are included merely as oddities. For the early medieval chroniclers, the cosmos was bound up in a network of resemblances: bestiaries praised animals for their quasi-human virtues (e.g., elephants for chastity and bees for industry) and plants owed healing powers to their likeness to parts of the body (walnuts were eaten for disorders of the brain). It was therefore significant when fountains oozed blood or clouds assumed symbolic shapes, since they were indications of the divine will.

Chronicles became richer in the later Middle Ages. They proved to be invaluable resources to later historians, especially in cases in which the chronicler had personal knowledge of the events recorded. The Greater Chronicle of Matthew Paris (died 1259) marks the culmination of the chronicle tradition. Indeed, it seemed so comprehensive that virtually all subsequent English chroniclers confined themselves to copying it. Paris made only one trip outside England and spent most of his time in the monastery of St. Albans. Yet he was well-informed about Western European as well as English history. He seems to have acquired this knowledge partly through his access to a vast number of previous chronicles and state papers and partly through his interaction with the many visitors who stayed at the monastery, including friars who had traveled on the continent. Paris combined his comprehensive knowledge with a lively writing style, which was modeled in some ways on classical historians (for example, he used invented speeches).

Reporting what actually happened was not necessarily the primary goal of even the best chroniclers. Emulation or imitation was valued, and criticism of sources was usually subordinated to copying. Nevertheless, changes in consciousness gradually developed as the Middle Ages wore on. Hagiographies increasingly began to resemble modern biographies, as their writers took more interest in the individuality and development of their characters. The chronicle form disappeared in the 15th century.

As chroniclers recognized human actions, rather than impersonal forces, as the stuff of history, it is not surprising that biography flourished, especially hagiography, or saints’ lives. The genre conventionally included details of the saint’s childhood, the miracles he performed, and his eventual martyrdom. Understanding of individual character was much less important than the moral lessons and encouragement conveyed by the story.

New forms

Two writers who in very different ways pointed to new forms of historiography were Otto of Freising (c. 1111–58) and Geoffrey of Villehardouin (c. 1150–c. 1213). Otto, the uncle of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, had received the best education available in his time, which meant studying dialectic and theology in Paris (perhaps under the theologian and philosopher Peter Abelard). Because history was not regularly taught in medieval schools or universities, it is not surprising that Otto adopted a more philosophical approach in his Chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus (“Chronicle or History of the Two Cities”). As its title indicates, the work was inspired by Augustine. Beginning, as many chronicles did, with the Creation and ending in 1146, it reflects abundantly on the miseries of “wars and tottering kingdoms.” Otto, like Orosius, identified the City of God with the church. Yet the Chronicle deals with ecclesiastical affairs with remarkable objectivity, considering Otto’s kinship with the German emperors. He describes the Investiture Controversy between the German ruler Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII and states arguments both for and against the so-called Donation of Constantine (an 8th-century forgery that came to be the basis for papal claims to temporal power). Although he prudently avoids giving unnecessary offense, he defends writing that might anger his predecessors, because “it is better to fall into the hands of men than to abandon the function of a historian by covering up a loathsome sight by colours that conceal the truth.”

Otto participated in the Second Crusade (1146–48) but did not write about it. The Crusades raised interpretative problems that historians had not faced before. Because nothing like the Crusades had ever happened, they posed new issues of historical causality. They brought Europeans into massive—though not invariably hostile—contact with Islamic civilization, and they inspired new kinds of historical writing. Villehardouin, a French nobleman and military commander, was an eyewitness of the Fourth Crusade (1201–04). His Conquête de Constantinople (The Conquest of Constantinople) was the first sustained work of French prose and one of the first great memoirs in French.

Precisely because Villehardouin did not know how histories “ought” to be written, however, his work lacked the conventional preface modestly declaring the author’s lack of ability. His history is basically the memoir of a successful commander. It is free of the moral reflections beloved of monks and the rhetorical effusions indulged in by emulators of the Latin historians. With Villehardouin a new voice—vivacious, conventionally pious but impatient of theological niceties, and keenly interested in military and political strategies—entered historical discourse.

Islamic historiography

The Qurʾān, the sacred text of Islam, contains allusions that constitute the basis of a providential history of humankind from Adam through Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Another valuable resource for Islamic historians is the Ḥadīth (the traditions or sayings of Muhammad), which is arranged in such a way that lines of transmission can be traced back to those who knew the Prophet. Chains of authorities were thus integral to early Islamic theology and historiography, which naturally lent themselves to annalistic treatment.

Al-Ṭabarī and Rashīd al-Dīn

The greatest early Islamic historian, al-Ṭabarī (839–923), was reputed to have memorized the Qurʾān at the age of seven. Legend credited him with producing a 30,000-page commentary on the Qurʾān and an equally long universal history (both survive but are only one-tenth as long). His chief virtues as a historian were his accurate chronology and his scrupulous faithfulness in reproducing authorities. Like Christian annalists, he depended on the Hebrew Bible (as interpreted by Islam), though the world he inhabited was basically Egypt and Muslim Asia rather than Western Christendom. The Persian scholar Rashīd al-Dīn (1247–1318) composed a more truly universal history, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh (“Collector of Chronicles”), which covered not only the Islamic world (which by then extended from Spain to northern India) but also included data on the popes and emperors of Europe and on Mongolia and China.

Ibn Khaldūn

The sophistication of Islamic historical thought was dramatically illustrated by the Muqaddimah (“Introduction”) of the Arab historian Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406). This introductory volume of a universal history reveals Khaldūn’s ideas about history—something chroniclers hardly ever did. The subjects Khaldūn considered in his work include historical method, geography, culture, economics, public finance, population, society and state, religion and politics, and the social context of knowledge. Khaldūn held high office and was often exiled or imprisoned. Late in his life he had the opportunity to discuss history with the Mongol emperor Timur the Lame, who was besieging Damascus. Timur wrote his own memoirs, and he was evidently interested not only in what Khaldūn knew about North Africa but also in his philosophy of history.

Khaldūn lived with the Bedouins of North Africa and in the sophisticated Muslim cities of Granada and Cairo. These experiences were the source of one of his main ideas: that humans first lived in Bedouin tribes and then achieved civilization, but civilization became decadent with increasing wealth and luxury. No dynasty or civilization, he believed, could maintain vitality for more than four generations (though the only example he gives is the decline of the Israelites after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph). Khaldūn contrasted his writing with “surface history,” which was “no more than information about political events” and was used to “entertain large, crowded gatherings.” Historians of his day, he thought, were too credulous in accepting tradition. As for their frequent moralizing about the misconduct of certain caliphs, Khaldūn asserted that people like to justify their own misconduct by looking in histories for examples of the great who have done the same things. To reach the “inner meaning” of history, the historian had to be “speculative” and give “subtle explanations” of causes. To accomplish this, history had to be rooted in philosophy—or, as Khaldūn said of his own work, it had to be a new and original science.

History in the Renaissance

In the 12th century, Europeans took an avid interest in the Arabic translations and commentaries on Greek medical, mathematical, and, especially, philosophical works. By the time of Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), this interest had waned, and his work would influence only later European historians. The idea of history as a new science, however, would have a long career, beginning with some historians of the Renaissance.

The nature, origins, and even existence of the Renaissance has been subject to intensive investigation since the early 20th century. The term has been applied to cultural movements in the 9th and 12th centuries, and medieval precedents have been identified for developments that were previously thought to be unique to the Renaissance. This is as true for historiography as for any other aspect of Renaissance culture; but while the differences between the Renaissance and the earlier Middle Ages may have been exaggerated, they do exist. Nobody could mistake a historian such as Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) for Matthew Paris (died 1259).


Although he was not exactly a historian, the Italian scholar and poet Petrarch (1304–74) illustrates much that was distinctive about the Renaissance attitude toward history. If not the first to coin the term Middle Ages, he consistently held that his own age (subsequently to be called the Renaissance) had made a decisive break with the 10 centuries that followed the decline of the Roman Empire. His true contemporaries, he thought, were the historians and poets of Rome’s Golden Age (c. 70 BCE–18 CE), to whom he addressed a series of letters, Epistolae metricae (begun 1350). The letter to Livy expresses Plutarch’s wish that he had been born in Livy’s time or Livy in his; thanks him for transporting Petrarch into the company of the worthies of ancient Rome instead of “the thievish company of today among whom I was born under an evil star”; and concludes: “Farewell forever, matchless historian!…Written…in the thirteen hundred and fiftieth year from the birth of Him whom you would have seen, or of whose birth you could have heard, had you lived a little longer.”

Medieval historians knew that Livy and the poet Ovid were not Christians (though they sometimes described people hearing mass before the birth of Jesus). Yet, in general they had little understanding of the radical differences between their society and that of the Romans. They conceived of Hector and Achilles as knights like Roland or Lancelot, depicting them in full medieval armour. Petrarch, at least, had an appreciation of the discontinuity between past and present, as well as a painful sense of his own anachronism. For him, all aspects of a culture were in constant change. Petrarch also exhibited an antiquarian interest that would eventually enrich the study of history. He attempted, for example, to reconstruct imaginatively what early Rome looked like.

Lorenzo Valla

Renaissance humanists were above all philologists, rhetoricians, and editors and emulators of the texts of Latin (and later Greek) antiquity. One of their triumphs was the demonstration by Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) that the so-called Donation of Constantine could not have been authentic. This document had been suspect, on various grounds, for centuries; Valla’s argument was distinguished by his proof that its Latin style and diction belonged to the 8th century and not the 4th. With similar philological arguments Petrarch discredited a charter exempting Austria from imperial jurisdiction. Two other famous documents, the Isidorian Decretals (also known as the False Decretals) and the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, eventually earned the prefix pseudo through Renaissance scholarship.

Flavio Biondo and Leonardo Bruni

Antiquarians such as Petrarch were interested in all sorts of relics of the past, material objects as well as texts—an interest that eventually led to social and economic history and even to “everyday history” and “history from below.” In his works on Roman antiquities Flavio Biondo (1392–1463) virtually founded the field of archaeology. His Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii decades (“Decades of History From the Deterioration of the Roman Empire”), for example, introduced the concept of the decline of the Roman Empire and the idea of the Middle Ages as the period from 410 to 1410. In addition, he used the new textual criticism to eliminate many legends that had been accepted as facts in previous histories.

Biondo, however, was not what his contemporaries called a “pure historian.” The model of pure history was the Historiarum Florentini populi libri XII (“Twelve Books of Histories of the Florentine People”), by Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444). Although Bruni owed much to the chronicles kept by the Italian cities, he drew extensively from ancient historians and, having learned Greek, was one of the first Europeans since ancient times to read Thucydides. Bruni was greatly influenced by Livy, who provided the paradigmatic account of how a city is founded and becomes great. Bruni scrupulously (though not slavishly) followed Livy’s example in his emphasis on politics—he found nothing worth relating for the year 1348, when the Black Death first struck Florence—and on individual character as the cause of historical actions. He also restricted himself to the vocabulary that Livy used or could have used.

Bruni’s central theme was the people of Florence. His history followed a strong narrative line that described the rise to power of the Florentines and their victory in their war against Milan, which Bruni believed was made possible by republican virtue, or civic humanism. That same pride continued to animate other Florentine historians, even the apparently cynical Machiavelli.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Whereas Bruni had written at the apex of Florentine power, Machiavelli’s public career was marked by the desperate situation created by what he called “the calamity”: the invasion of Italy first by the French in 1494 and later by the imperial forces of Charles V in 1527. As a diplomat and later secretary to Florence’s ruling Council of Ten, Machiavelli observed and tried to influence the shifting alliances between the Italian city-states. When the Medici family returned to power and ousted him from office, he turned to reflections on politics and history. In addition to Il principe (1532; The Prince), his most famous work, he wrote the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (1531; Discourses on Livy), the Istorie Fiorentine (1532; Florentine Histories), and Dell’arte della guerra (1521; The Art of War). Machiavelli presented his thoughts on history as “a new route” that would provide instruction to the statesmen of his day by marshaling examples from ancient history. As he writes in the Discourses on Livy,

Whoever considers the past and the present will readily observe that all cities and all peoples are and ever have been animated by the same desires and the same passions; so that it is easy, by diligent study of the past, to foresee what is likely to happen in the future in any republic, and to apply those remedies that were used by the ancients, or, not finding any that were employed by them, to devise new ones from the similarity of the events.

History thus would become political science. Machiavelli, however, did not always respect his data in cases in which the historical situation did not lend itself to the maxim of statecraft he was trying to inculcate.

Francesco Guicciardini

Machiavelli’s younger contemporary Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) shared some of Machiavelli’s attitudes but not his rationale for studying history. “It is most fallacious,” he wrote, “to judge by examples; because unless these be in all respects parallel they are of no use, the least divergence in the circumstances giving rise to the widest possible divergence in the conclusions.” Instead, in his Storia d’Italia (1537–40; “History of Italy”), Guicciardini attempted to explain why Italy had been unable to resist foreign incursions. Writing the history of such a diverse area was itself an innovation, for which Guicciardini’s diplomatic experience served him well; but he also drew from the repertoire of classical historians the technique of the character, or psychological, sketch of the leading actors. Since Guicciardini, like almost all Renaissance historians, believed that historical change resulted from the virtù (or lack of it) of individuals, the ability to draw a brilliant character—at which he excelled—enhanced the explanatory power of his work.

Giorgio Vasari

It is thus not surprising that biographies flourished in the Renaissance. Some were of individuals, but a more typical genre was multiple biographies. Petrarch, again, was a pioneer with his De viris illustribus (begun 1338; Illustrious Men). A still more famous example was Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori (1550; Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects), by Giorgio Vasari. Vasari did not simply compile a series of biographical sketches; he grouped them into three periods, which were marked by a progressive improvement in artistic technique. He concluded that “it is inherent in the very nature of these arts to progress step by step from modest beginnings, and finally to reach the summit of perfection.” He noted that in his own day “art has achieved everything possible in the imitation of nature, and has progressed so far that it has more reason to fear slipping back than to expect ever to make further advances.” This last clause hints at the belief in historical cycles which was common in Renaissance thought. Vasari acknowledged that the arts of the ancients had also risen and then declined.

It is easy to make the Renaissance too modern. It was an era in which beliefs in magic and in numerology had wide currency. It is also possible to exaggerate the level of interest in history during this period. Thus, the archetypal “Renaissance man,” Leonardo da Vinci, seems to have had little interest in acquiring historical knowledge. Renaissance humanists, however, made positive contributions to the study of history, and the humanist approach to the past helped to create the great upheaval of the Reformation.

Early modern historiography
Church history
Centuriae Magdeburgenses and Annales Ecclesiastici

Martin Luther (1483–1546), the German theologian who set the Reformation in motion, at first glance bears little resemblance to Petrarch, much less to Machiavelli. But while his piety was intense, he embraced much of the new learning. Nobody was more insistent on returning to the sources, which for him meant the New Testament. Any belief or practice not found there, he thought, must be a human invention, introduced during the long period of papal perversion of the Christian faith.

Protestantism thus entailed a reinterpretation of church history as well as of the Bible. As a consequence, history, which was not part of the curriculum in medieval universities, came to be taught in Protestant ones. (The early association of history and German universities became important later.) Luther’s followers also set about publishing their version of church history. Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523) published a manuscript of Valla’s treatise on the Donation of Constantine, impudently dedicating it to the pope. A team of scholars (a novelty) toured Germany, Denmark, Scotland, and Austria looking for documents on which to base their Centuriae Magdeburgenses (1559–75; “Magdeburg Centuries”), a 13-volume work that constituted a denunciation of the course of church history up to 1300. The Centuriae Magdeburgenses was in some ways regressive; the compilers could not think of any more satisfactory arrangement for their material than by centuries, and their credulity toward documents damaging to the papacy was as invariable as the critical acumen they deployed to discredit every basis of papal authority. Nevertheless, they unearthed large quantities of data. The Centuriae Magdeburgenses called forth an equally voluminous and tendentious Roman Catholic response, the Annales Ecclesiastici (“Ecclesiastical Annals”), by Caesar Baronius (1538–1607), also in 13 volumes and also organized by centuries. This in turn was refuted by Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), who was outraged that Baronius had attempted to write ecclesiastical history without knowing either ancient Greek or Hebrew.

Paolo Sarpi

One great work that emerged from this era of often tedious controversy was Paolo Sarpi’s Istoria del Concilio Tridentino (1619; History of the Council of Trent). Sarpi, whose range of interests and accomplishments rivaled those of da Vinci, knew Greek and Hebrew and was able to do extensive historical research and to mold the results into a compelling literary form. Sarpi was a friar and, by his lights, a loyal Catholic, but he was also a loyal Venetian and hence an opponent of the temporal powers of the pope. He understood that the Council of Trent (1545–63) had quashed the last hope of reuniting Christendom. In its attack on the Jesuits, the guardians of Roman Catholic theological orthodoxy, the History demonstrated a mastery of irony, sarcasm, and ridicule that was not approached again until Les Provinciales, by the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–62). Despite its errors and biases, it remains a masterpiece of Italian prose. And, like the controversy between Baronius and the authors of the Centuriae Magdeburgenses, it stimulated the publication of many additional sources for the study of medieval history.

Sarpi’s work closed an epoch in Italian historiography. In the late 16th and 17th centuries France became the centre of historiographical innovation, which was applied now to the history of law. This field became almost as contentious as the history of religion but was ultimately more fruitful, since it opened lines of inquiry that eventually led to modern conceptions of history.

Legal history

France was the earliest beneficiary of the rise of Italian humanistic scholarship, but it differed from Italy in ways that facilitated fruitful extension of the new learning. The Protestant stimulus to historiography was much stronger in France, and there was also no inquisition or Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of Prohibited Books”) to suppress free inquiry. Whereas Italian humanists tended to regard the Middle Ages as an embarrassing interlude between the glories of ancient Rome and their own time, France had been the intellectual centre of Europe during that period. Furthermore, any serious treatment of medieval history required sorting out Germanic elements from Roman ones, a problem that the French were better able to undertake.

Guillaume Budé and François Hotman

Throughout the Middle Ages the Code of Justinian, or Corpus Juris Civilis (“Body of Civil Law”), the four-volume codification of Roman law compiled under the patronage of the Byzantine emperor Justinian (483–565), was regarded as the quintessence of human law, applicable in virtually every situation. Parts of it were contradictory or barely intelligible, but commentators regarded these difficulties as the result of their own hermeneutic ineptitude. In the 15th century, however, humanists (among them Lorenzo Valla) assumed instead that the text had been corrupted by its compilers and that its pure form could be recovered through the application of philological methods. In France, Guillaume Budé (1467–1540) followed Valla’s example, and his commentary on the Pandects, the second volume of Justinian’s code, established the power of this approach. Budé’s commentary and his book on the economic history of the Roman Empire earned him a scholarly prestige comparable to that of the great Dutch humanist Erasmus.

The effort to recover the pure text of Justinian’s code required both sensitivity to linguistic change and the ability to establish the historical context in which the Pandects were compiled. These became the hallmarks of the so-called “French mode” of legal studies, which ousted the unhistorical “Italian mode” from most French universities within a single generation. The more radical implications of the French approach, however, remained to be revealed. If the Code of Justinian was a jumble of republican and imperial law, as the French school held, then, as François Hotman (1524–90) concluded, the laws of Rome were irrelevant to those of France. This conclusion was of more than antiquarian import, since Hotman attributed tendencies toward absolutism in the French monarchy to the influence of Roman law; the monarchy of the Franks, in his view, was more limited.

François Baudouin and Jean Bodin

Although the new study of law was closely related to historiography, the early commentaries on civil law did not constitute histories. The two disciplines were married in theory in Institution of Universal History and its Connection with Jurisprudence by François Baudouin (1520–73) and the Method for the Easy Understanding of History by Jean Bodin (1530–96). These two works belonged to an extremely popular genre, the ars historica (“art of history”). Baudouin’s work, though repeating all the old commonplaces about the virtues of history, was also a handbook—perhaps the first—of historical method. Acknowledging that rhetoric is history’s mother and political science its sister, Baudouin declared that history ought to narrate and explain historical events themselves, as well as their causes and consequences. To establish historical truth, the historian should rely on eyewitness accounts, or, lacking these, primary sources. Although history was partly geographic in scope, it required also, in principle, attention to all human culture (for Baudouin this meant ecclesiastical as well as political and military history).

Bodin’s book shared many of Baudouin’s ideas. Although Bodin placed history “above all sciences,” he actually wished to extract from it the materials for a transcendent political philosophy and a universal jurisprudence. He attempted this in Les Six Livres de la République (1576; “The Six Books of the Commonwealth”).

Étienne Pasquier

The union of historiographical theory and practice was best achieved by Étienne Pasquier (1529–1615) in his Recherches de la France (1560–1621), which may be regarded as the first work of modern history. Pasquier denied that medieval chronicles were “authorities,” instead regarding them as raw materials or primary sources, no more credible than law codes or even folk traditions. Medieval French chronicles usually began the story of the French people by tracing their descent from some hero of the Trojan War. Although these stories had lost credibility, no convincing alternative had been developed. Pasquier began his story with the Gauls, and, since the chronicles said almost nothing about them, he reconstructed their history from comments in Julius Caesar’s De bello Gallico (Gallic Wars). He read Caesar just as critically as any chronicle, however, reversing the Roman leader’s negative value judgments where appropriate and wringing from the texts a picture that Caesar supplies almost in spite of himself.

Pasquier’s ability to recognize and utilize the best historical sources available is also demonstrated in his treatment of Joan of Arc, the peasant who led French armies against the English during the Hundred Years’ War. Not yet an enormous cult figure, Joan was treated in many chronicles as an intriguer and impostor or, even worse, a witch or heretic. Yet the records of her trial, which allow her to speak in her own voice, were accessible, as were those of the second trial, which rehabilitated her character and quashed the accusations that led to her execution. Not only did Pasquier base his account squarely on these primary sources, he also incorporated crucial sections of these documents into his text. This practice of quoting documents to support historians’ claims, universal today, was controversial at the time. The classical model discouraged quoting other writers (hence the use of invented speech).

The Bollandist Fathers and Jean Mabillon

Progress in historiography is hard to establish, and there are clear cases of regress. In 17th-century France the discredited story of Trojan origins returned. Scholars in the 16th century, while not denying that God’s will might be the ultimate cause of everything, had focused entirely on secondary causes; in the following century, however, the most influential historical work was Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681; Discourse on Universal History), by the French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, which restored a providential interpretation of history.

Despite these developments, scholarly advances occurred in the study of history, most notably those made by clergymen studying medieval charters and the lives of the saints. A group of Jesuits who came to be known as the Bollandist Fathers compiled biographies of all the saints in the calendar of the Roman church—a collective task that has continued into the 21st century. The Bollandists’s scrupulously high standards of evidence and analysis has resulted in the removal from the calendar of a number of saints who had the misfortune not to have existed.

Using the results of their researches, the Bollandists challenged the authenticity of many of the charters of the Benedictine houses in France. Some of these documents were certainly forgeries, and the danger of forfeiture of the houses naturally created a demand for a method of authenticating charters. This need was met by a Benedictine of St. Maur, Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), in his De re diplomatica (1681), which can be regarded as the founding work of diplomatics, or the study of charters. Mabillon’s methodology was comprehensive—he examined ink, parchment, and handwriting style and compared one charter with others. Indeed, he did his work so well that little has since been added to it.

In light of the tendentious histories of this turbulent period, the intellectual honesty and modesty of the Bollandists is refreshing. One of them wrote to Mabillon, after reading his treatise:

I have no other satisfaction in having written upon the subject than that of having given occasion for the writing of a treatise so masterly. It is true that I felt at first some pain in reading your book, where I saw myself refuted in so unanswerable a manner; but finally…seeing the truth in its clearest light, I invited my companion to come and share the admiration with which I felt myself filled.

Enlightenment historiography
Science and skepticism

Two new challenges confronted the study of history in the 17th century. One was generated by the successes of natural science, claimed by its proponents to be the best—or even the only—producer of truth. Science created a new picture of the world, discrediting all past conceptions. As the English poet Alexander Pope wrote: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night/ Then God said: ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.” These successes inspired the hope that similar laws would be found for social and historical phenomena and that the same scientific methods could be applied to every subject, including politics, economics, and even literature.

The other challenge lay in the relativism and skepticism generated within historical discourse itself. In his Histoire des histoires et l’idée de l’histoire accompli (1599; “History of Histories and the Idea of History Accomplished”), Lancelot Voisin La Popelinière (1540–1608) asked: if history shows the ceaseless mutations of human culture, what keeps history itself from being more than a mode of perception of any particular culture, of no more permanent value than any other changeable cultural artifact? Thus, the unmasking of forgeries could lead to suspicions about every relic of the past. In a similar vein, the French Jesuit Jean Hardouin claimed that almost all the Latin and Greek classics and most of the works of the Church Fathers, including St. Augustine and St. Jerome, were written by a group of medieval Italian scholars, who then forged all the manuscripts purporting to be earlier. Hardouin, it must be said, pushed historical criticism past the boundaries of sanity.

The most influential philosopher of the 17th century, René Descartes, included history in his catalogue of dubious sciences. In his Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes asserted that, although histories exalt the mind,

even the most accurate of histories, if they do not exactly misrepresent or exaggerate the value of things in order to render them more worthy of being read, at least omit in them all the circumstances which are basest and least notable; and from this it follows that what is retained is not portrayed as it really is, and that those who regulate their conduct by examples which they derive from such a source are liable to fall into the extravagances of the knights-errant of romances.

According to Descartes, history is doubtful because it is selective. Unlike the sciences, which are based on mathematics, history cannot yield knowledge.

One attempt to rescue the truth-claims of history, which ironically lent support to skepticism, was the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; “Historical and Critical Dictionary”), by the French philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), one of the most widely read works of the 18th century. The articles in Bayle’s dictionary, enlivened by learned and often witty marginalia, established what was known about the subject but often undermined religious and political orthodoxies. These sallies were far more memorable than the often trivial facts provided in the work.

Montesquieu and Voltaire

The leading historians of the French Enlightenment, Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Voltaire (1694–1778), responded in different ways to the scientific impulse. In De l’esprit des loix (1748; The Spirit of Laws), Montesquieu explored the natural order that he believed underlay polities as well as economies. Despite lacking information about many cultures, he systematically applied a comparative method of analysis. Climate and soil, he believed, are the deepest level of causality. The size of the territory to be governed also determines what kind of government it can have (republics have to be small; large countries like Russia require despotism). Montesquieu’s preferred form of government was constitutional monarchy, which existed in France before Louis XIV (reigned 1643–1715) and in England during Montesquieu’s day. Among his many readers were the Founding Fathers of the United States, who embraced Montesquieu’s idea of balanced government and indeed created one exquisitely contrived to allow each branch to check the others.

Voltaire’s temperament was more skeptical. “History,” he declared, “is a pack of tricks we play on the dead.” He nevertheless spent much of his life playing those tricks, producing L’Histoire de Charles XII (1731; “History of Charles XII”), on the Swedish monarch, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; “The Century of Louis XIV”), and Essai sur les moeurs (1756; “Essay on Morals”). In an article on history for the Encyclopédie, edited by the philosopher Denis Diderot, Voltaire noted that the modern historian requires not only precise facts and dates but also attention to customs, commerce, finance, agriculture, and population. This was the program that the Essai tried to fulfill. It starts not with Adam or the Greek poet Homer but with the ancient Chinese, and it also treats Indian, Persian, and Arab civilizations. Voltaire’s Essai was the first attempt to make the genre of “universal history” truly universal, not just in covering the globe—or at least the high cultures—but also in studying every aspect of human life. In this respect Voltaire is the father of the “total histories” and the “histories of everyday life” that blossomed in the second half of the 20th century.

Voltaire was curious about everything—but not tolerant of everything. Like most philosophes (the leading thinkers of the French Enlightenment), he considered the Middle Ages an epoch of unbroken superstition and barbarism. Even the age of Louis XIV exhibited “a history of human stupidity.” Like Machiavelli, he believed that one could learn from history—but only what not to do. Thus, a statesman reading a history of the reign of Charles XII should be “cured of the folly of war.”

Although Voltaire was interested in other cultures, he believed that reason had made headway only in the Europe of his own day. It was left to thinkers of the next generation, including the baron l’Aulne Turgot (1727–81) and the marquis de Condorcet (1743–94), to construe history as gradually but inevitably moving toward the elimination of bigotry, superstition, and ignorance. Condorcet rhapsodized: “How welcome to the philosopher is this picture of the human race, freed from all its chains, released from the domination of chance and from that of the enemies of progress, advancing with a firm and sure step on the path of truth, virtue, and happiness.”

Edward Gibbon

Science contributed not only its ambitions but also its concepts to historiography. The philosopher David Hume (1711–76) took from it the sober empiricism and distrust of grand schemes that informed his History of England (1754–62). The greatest of the Enlightenment historians—and probably the only one still read today—Edward Gibbon (1737–94), managed to bring together in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) the erudition of the 17th century and the philosophy of the 18th. Gibbon borrowed rather than contributed to historical erudition, for he was not a great archival researcher. “It would be unreasonable,” he said, “to expect that the historian should peruse enormous volumes, with the uncertain hope of extracting a few interesting lines.” The influence of Enlightenment thought is indicated particularly in Gibbon’s wit and in his skeptical view of religion. “To the believer,” he wrote, “all religions are equally true, to the philosopher, all religions are equally false, and to the magistrate, all religions are equally useful.”

Gibbon’s great work gives no elaborate account of the causes of the decline and fall—because the causes, he thought, were obvious. Borrowing an image from physics, he wrote:


The Enlightenment has been condemned as “unhistorical.” It did lack sympathy, and thus full understanding, of some cultures and periods. Hume’s view that human nature was essentially the same in the Roman Empire and in 18th-century Britain now seems wrong. No technical advances in historiography were made by the philosophes. On the other hand, history was widely read, and the brilliant writing of Voltaire and Gibbon helped to create something like a mass public for historical works. Finally, the Enlightenment expanded the historical world, in principle at least, almost to the limits recognized today—and it never shrank again.

Romantic historiography


Johann Gottfried von Herder






Giambattista Vico




Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel




Jules Michelet



Historiography in England




Historiography in the United States

The most influential American historian of the 19th century was George Bancroft (1800–91), who studied at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin (see below Johann Christoph Gatterer and the Göttingen scholars). During intervals in a busy career as a public official he wrote a 10-volume History of the United States (1834–74), which placed the country within God’s plan for all humanity. The European colonists who settled the country brought with them the “vital principles of Teutonic liberty.” With the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “a new plebeian democracy took its place by the side of the proudest empire,” a democracy that was destined to spread the blessings of liberty to the rest of the world. As to spreading the blessings of liberty to American slaves, Bancroft argued that slavery was imposed on the United States and that it played a role in the providential plan. The resonance within his work not only of Romantic principles (it can be seen as an adaptation of Hegel) but also American political rhetoric of the 19th century explains its wide appeal.

Other American historians, such as Francis Parkman (1823–93), William Prescott (1796–1859), and John Lothrop Motley (1814–77), also addressed epic themes in captivating language. Parkman’s theme was the contest between France, Britain, and the Native Americans for possession of North America. Prescott and Motley recounted the wars of imperial Spain in the Golden Age of the 16th and 17th centuries. Prescott’s theme was the conquest of Mexico and Peru; Motley (also a product of Göttingen and Berlin) recounted the successful rebellion of the Netherlands, which he did not fail to compare frequently to the American Revolution.

History becomes academic
Johann Christoph Gatterer and the Göttingen scholars

Until the beginning of the 19th century, the history of historiography could be represented in a list of great and near-great individuals. Group efforts like those of the Bollandists or the Benedictines of St. Maur were the exception; almost all historians worked alone. History had no established place in most university curricula, being subsumed under rhetoric (or occasionally grammar) and studied mainly in faculties of law or theology. The universities, too, lacked intellectual vitality; Gibbon called the 14 months he spent at Oxford the most idle and unprofitable of his life. In Germany, where universities had always been more influential (almost all the great figures in German intellectual life had doctoral degrees), the characteristic institutional structure of contemporary historiography was being established.

The centre of this activity was the university at Göttingen, in the electorate of Hannover. The electorate was ruled by the Hannoverian kings of England (George I through William IV), who, whether from tolerance or inattentiveness, allowed greater freedom of thought than did rulers in other parts of Germany. As a new university (founded 1737), Göttingen was less bound by traditional academic divisions, and it soon devoted itself especially to law and history rather than to philosophy or theology. Its rise to prominence began with the appointment in 1759 of Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–99) to the chair of history. One of the first scholars to be interested in the history of historiography, Gatterer understood the institutional support that the new academic discipline would require. By 1763 the library of the university had grown to 200,000 volumes, making it one of the largest in Germany.

One of Gatterer’s most important projects was a critical edition of sources for the study of German history, which ultimately came to fruition in the collection known as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (“Historical Monuments of the Germans”). He also founded two historical journals (by 1791 there were 131 mainly historical journals in Germany) and a Historical Institute, an early type of seminar.

The scholars of Göttingen shared some of the philosophical interests of Enlightenment thinkers, including Montesquieu’s empirical approach to law and politics. One of the Göttingen professors, for example, lectured on what he called Statistik, which at first was the study of mostly qualitative data about states but soon came to resemble modern statistics as numerical data became more widely available. What was most important about the Göttingen scholars was that they described states as they were rather than fantasizing about how they might have been.

Leopold von Ranke

Soon other German universities became centres of advanced historical research. This was particularly true of Berlin, which was the site of the Prussian Academy of Sciences (founded 1700) and the Humboldt University of Berlin (founded 1809–10), both of which attracted great scholars from all over the country.

The name that will always be associated with the latter institution, however, is that of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), who taught there for 37 years. His written works were only one avenue of his influence on 19th-century historiography. Ranke was an obscure Gymnasium (a state-run secondary school) teacher when, at the age of 29, he published Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (1824; History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514). In the preface to the work he famously stated that, although history has been assigned the task of judging the past and giving lessons for the future, his work “will merely show how it actually was (wie es eigentlich gewesen).” The second volume, Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber (“Critique of Modern Historians”), established critical methods of historical scholarship that have since become normative. Ranke emphasized the acquisition of first-hand information and the tireless search for all relevant data, which he defined as “memoirs, diaries, letters, reports from embassies, and original narratives of eyewitnesses.” He cited Guicciardini as an example of faulty historiographical practice, demonstrating that he invented the content of many reported speeches, that he could not have had any personal knowledge of many events about which he wrote, and that, even when he did have personal knowledge, he often copied from contemporary accounts.

Interestingly, Ranke’s list of sources of relevant data omits what present-day historians would consider the most obvious and valuable source: state papers (the documents produced by public officials in performing official actions). Such documents were not generally available to historians when Ranke started to write, but, as a result of pressure from the growing historical profession, more and more archives were opened to them.

Shortly after Ranke’s book was published, he was called to Berlin. He would have won no awards for lecturing, however. One of the many Americans drawn to the new temple of historical research described him as “a little round-faced man, with a baldish forehead, a high voice and thin hair.” He “jerked out” his observations “like a garden fountain which keeps spurting up little futile jets and then stopping.” But it was his seminars that established his influence. Modeled on seminars in philology and Greek literature that Ranke had attended as a student, they offered a “laboratory” in historical method in which problems were posed, documents sought out and produced, and mutual criticism offered.

More than 100 historians passed through Ranke’s seminar, including Heinrich von Sybel (1817–95) and Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97). Ranke’s students established seminars of their own, and their hundreds of pupils were also disciples of Ranke. When Gabriel Monod (1844–1912), who would become one of the leading French historians of his generation, asked the great Hippolyte Taine (1828–92) whether he should go to Germany to study history, Taine answered yes. The Germans’ superiority, he said, rested on two bases. They were philologists who went straight to original documents, but they were also philosophers, which gave them “the habit of generalizing and of seeing objects in masses.”

Although Ranke has been regarded as a positivist who was concerned only with facts, the very intensity of his preoccupation with ascertaining those facts came from his conviction that history was, as he wrote, a “holy hieroglyph.” He was as convinced as any medieval monk that history was the unfolding of a divine plan; for him, however, the plan required the existence of modern European nation-states. States, he wrote, were “thoughts of God”; by intuiting the idea or cultural principle incarnated in each nation, the historian could discern at least intimations of the divine plan. Accordingly, much of Ranke’s own scholarship focused on the inner workings of the nation-states and their relationships with each other; for this his exploitation of the relazioni, or reports, of astute Venetian diplomats was especially important.

The conclusion of his life’s work, however, was an unfinished universal history, published in nine volumes between 1881 and 1888. In an age of rampant nationalism, to which Ranke’s histories had certainly contributed, his final legacy was a sort of cosmopolitanism.

New histories

Although Ranke’s influence was enhanced by his longevity (he lived to the age of 91), it was mainly due to the seductive synthesis he offered. He maintained that scholarship could produce historical truth; he held a conception of the divine will that linked it to the existing nation-states of 19th-century Europe; and he possessed a considerable literary gift. Even in Germany, however, his sway was never absolute, and by the end of the century his style of history was under assault from a number of directions.

Ranke’s philosophy of history, which he usually articulated in prefaces or asides, was examined by Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–84) in a series of lectures eventually published as the Historik. Droysen maintained that Ranke’s critical method and literary virtuosity had created an aura of scientific accuracy that shielded his faulty theistic interpretations. Rather than focusing on a core of ascertainable facts, however, Droysen emphasized how the same set of facts could be accounted for in different ways. The French Revolution, for example, could be the subject of at least four forms of discourse: investigative, narrative, didactic, and discussive (mixtures of these being found in most historical works). Of these, Droysen favoured the discussive, because it was explicitly addressed to the relevance that historical knowledge might have to society. The past is inaccessible except through its “remains,” which can be interpreted pragmatically, focusing on the aims of the actors in historical events; conditionally, stressing the material conditions under which actions take place; psychologically, comprising both character types and the element of individual personality and will; or ethically, contemplating the events under moral categories. By drawing attention to representative practices, by conceiving history as a discourse, and by arguing that no historian could give an unmediated account of “how it actually was,” Droysen undercut the foundations on which Ranke’s work rested, though this was all but unrecognized at the time.

Another attack came from those who believed that history should model itself after the natural sciences, especially physics. In their view, the reliance on intuition ensured that historiography would always be imprecise. Such critics also believed that the invocation of notions such as Spirit, Volk, or God was a mere mystification and that the focus on the individual or the particular rather than the general was misguided. Although very few historians fully embraced this position, some had ambitions in that direction. Among them was Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), whose 12-volume Deutsche Geschichte (1891–1901: “German History”) elicited a furious response from historians in Germany. Lamprecht’s transgressions were two-fold: he criticized the prevailing idealist approach to history, and he made social and cultural life, rather than the formation of the state, the central theme. His opponents accused him of having socialist sympathies (which was doubtful) and of attempting to undo the tradition of historiography that had made Germany admired throughout the world. Lamprecht sought to find laws of collective psychology governing the behaviour of Germans. His approach found few followers in Germany but had somewhat more influence in the United States. It was in any case a symptom of a widespread desire to find a different and more scientific basis for history.


The most important voices calling for a new scientific history were heard in France and the United States. France had its own tradition of documentary criticism, stemming from the humanist scholars of the 16th century and stimulated by the founding of the École des Chartes (School of Paleography) in 1821. More resistant to German influence than any other European country, it also produced Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the prophet of scientific laws in history.

Comte, inventor of the word sociology and often regarded as the founder of the discipline, propounded an elaborate tripartite view of historical development. Humanity, he declared, had already passed through two stages, the theological and the philosophical. In the former, divinities or spiritual forces were believed to be the causes of natural and human events. In the philosophical period, natural laws were discovered, but the world of human events was still held to be indeterminate, and thought was confused by the belief in essences, teleologies, and other unobservable forces. The advent of the positive period was the French Revolution, which liberated humans from their theological fancies and philosophical mistakes. Henceforth, Comte prophesied, humans would rely only on what their senses told them and would seek out the laws that governed the human world. The aggregate of these laws would be sociology. Observations would be provided by historians; but historians, incapable of fully understanding their own discoveries, would rely on sociologists to place their observations under appropriate laws. This program, not surprisingly, did not appeal to historians, but it did offer an ideal for uniting all aspects of society in a single analytical framework.

In 1900 the French philosopher Henri Berr founded the social-science journal Revue de Synthèse Historique, which attracted contributions from some French historians. Berr’s program for “historical synthesis” was more ambitious than any single historian could achieve; he called for teams of scholars from various disciplines to engage in empirical historical research with the aim of synthesizing their discoveries. Berr argued that no discipline could proceed without some sort of logical method that would involve hypothesis and synthesis as well as analysis. In this respect he agreed with the leading figure in French social science, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who established the journal L’Année Sociologique at about the same time. Although many French historians remained more traditional in their practice, Berr in 1907 recruited both Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) and Marc Bloch (1866–1944) as collaborators on the Revue. Together these men would challenge and revolutionize the study of history in France and in the rest of the world.

While at the University of Strasbourg, which then was on the margins of the French historical profession, Bloch and Febvre produced important works of their own, often focused on what became known as the history of mentalités, or popular attitudes and unconscious preconceptions. Although both eventually attained chairs at universities in Paris, it was not until after World War II that they achieved a significant following—by then Bloch had been shot by the Nazis for his participation in the French resistance. After the war, the Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, which they had founded in 1929 as Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, became the most influential historical journal in the world (the title was changed again in 1994, to Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales). Its impact was vastly enhanced by the capture by the Annalistes of the newly reconstituted Sixth Section of the École des Hautes Études (School of Higher Studies). Eventually, as a result of bureaucratic centralization in France and the willingness of the government to commit funds to higher education in order to gain cultural prestige, the directorate of the Sixth Section was virtually able to supervise historical research in the country.

The United States

Whereas in 1875 there was hardly anything that could be called a historical profession in the United States, by 1900 the American Historical Association (AHA) and its journal, the American Historical Review, as well as a number of university Ph.D. programs in history, had been established. No clique of senior professors in the great universities could have achieved the sort of dominance in the United States that was possible in France or Germany, but there was nevertheless a struggle to create a group of historians, highly trained in the approved German manner, to claim the national history from the hands of the great amateurs such as Bancroft, Prescott, and Parkman. For a while amateurs coexisted amicably with the professionals (Bancroft was the second president of the AHA), but they soon withdrew to found more-congenial forums such as the Mississippi Valley Historical Review (now the Journal of American History). This prompted former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, who served as president of the AHA in 1912, to complain, not without reason, that the professionals were squeezing all the life out of history; their expertise was bought at the cost of pedantry in the profession and boredom among the public.

As they professionalized the teaching and writing of history, the new academic historians sought to dislodge the picture of the American past that had been painted by their predecessors. The first shock occurred in 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) delivered a paper on his “frontier thesis.” Whereas Bancroft and most other leading historians of his generation had claimed that the early settlers of New England brought with them the germs of “Teutonic liberty,” Turner—inspired by the announcement of the U.S. Census Bureau in 1890 that the western frontier was now “closed” (or entirely occupied)—declared that the decisive experience in American history had been that of pioneers as they pressed westward, settling the “empty” frontier. On the frontier, he declared, Americans developed their most distinctive characteristics: egalitarianism, self-help, and pragmatism.

Few important historical writings have ever rested on such a slender empirical basis. The “emptiness” of the frontier was an illusion created by the Census Bureau, which made no count of the Native Americans who inhabited these lands. Although the frontier thesis had been anticipated by Hegel, Turner’s genius lay in bringing it forward at just the right time. The closing of the frontier did mark the end of a readily understandable period in American history.

Turner not only introduced a new conception of American history but also wrested the historical spotlight from Harvard and New England and shone it on his native Wisconsin and points west. His book The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935), emphasized the importance of sectional conflict and demonstrated how cultural traits interacted with the natural environment; he thus achieved his goal of making history not just “the brilliant annals of the few” but also the story of “the degraded tillers of the soil, toiling that others might dream.”

A generation of Turner’s younger contemporaries, most notably Charles Beard (1874–1948), Carl Becker (1873–1945), and James Harvey Robinson (1863–1936), issued the first of many calls in the 20th century for a “new history.” Although there was actually little novelty in the methods they advocated, they all aspired, like Turner, to reinterpret American history in the interest of a more democratic and rational society.

This desire to challenge conventional wisdom led to new works, including Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). Although he did not claim that his was the only possible interpretation of the founding document, he asserted as a fundamental principle that

different degrees and kinds of property inevitably exist in modern society; party doctrines and ‘principles’ originate in the sentiments and views which the possession of various kinds of property creates in the minds of the possessors; class and group divisions based on property lie at the basis of modern government; and politics and constitutional law are inevitably a reflex of these contending interests.

Beard neatly expressed his reinterpretation of the American Revolution by saying that it concerned the issue not just of home rule but of who should rule at home.

Marxist historiography

These historians, who were generally Progressives in politics, emphasized the importance of class conflict and the power of economic interests in their studies, revealing the influence of Karl Marx (1818–83). Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) worked together in almost total isolation, and when Marx died it would have been difficult for a casual observer not to conclude that his ideas would disappear with him. By 1900, however, Marxism constituted the greatest challenge to the idealist tradition.

Despite the influence of philosophy, sociology, and economics, Marx’s thought was profoundly historical. Hegel had taught him that history was constant change, produced by oppositions, reconciliations, and more oppositions. Acknowledging (in a way) this debt, Marx remarked that he found Hegel standing on his head and turned him right side up again. By this he meant that Hegel had mistaken the real motor of history: it was not the conflict of ideas but the conflict of social classes. Marx admitted, however, that this was not his own discovery; the “bourgeois” historians, such as Vico, had anticipated him. What Marx brought to the idea of class struggle was a conception of how it had developed and how it must eventually turn out.

Marx’s understanding of class struggle was influenced by the work of the English economist David Ricardo (1772–1823), who had developed a model of how “perfect” markets work in a capitalist mode of production. Ricardo had made the conflicting interests of landlords, employers, and workers the centre of his picture of the economy. He argued that, because of Malthusian population dynamics, the wages of workers would always be held at or near subsistence levels. Marx extended the analysis by taking into account increases in population and in the productive powers of the economy. He correctly predicted—at a time when there were very few companies that employed more than 50 workers—that the size of capitalist enterprises would inexorably increase until giant corporations dominated the economy. Equally correctly, he predicted that the proportion of the labour force engaged in agriculture (over half in parts of Europe) and the number of small business owners would sharply decline, so that proletarians—those who had nothing to sell but their labour—would become the overwhelming majority of the population. Marx was less certain about the political consequences of these changes; by the end of his life he thought that capitalism might be brought to an end without violent revolution in some countries (the United States among them), and he saw that not all societies would pass through exactly the same sequence of changes. But he never lost his confidence that the system of private ownership of the means of production, in which enormous quantities of wealth accumulated in fewer and fewer hands, would inevitably be replaced by socialism.

None of this is history, properly speaking. The appeal of Marxism, for some historians, has been the rigour of this economic argument, which promises an eventual system based on moral precepts more appealing than “greed is good”; they also have been attracted to its suggestive implications for a unified approach to history. These are implications only, however. Marxist historiography, as a contemporary Marxist once said, is still “under construction.” Marx’s own historical writings are far from a mechanical application of his system. In his brilliant Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon (1852; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), several classes, not just two, played important roles, and the political skill of Napoleon III is acknowledged—albeit grudgingly—as significant. Although some Marxist historians may still maintain a residual allegiance to the notion that ideas are a mere “superstructural” reflection of the material “base,” the way this relationship is supposed to work has never been satisfactorily demonstrated, and this aspect of Marxism has largely been laid aside.

In recent times the idea has gained currency that Marxism has been “refuted by history.” No successful revolution has broken out in any advanced capitalist country, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of the regimes in eastern Europe that called themselves Marxist has been taken as the conclusive demonstration that Marx was wrong. But “history” refutes nobody; only historians can do that, and other historians, looking at different evidence or reinterpreting the same, can in turn refute them. A more well-grounded objection might be that there is no way to refute Marx, because his predictions are insufficiently precise; for example, he wrote that no mode of production gives way to its successor before it has exhausted all of its possibilities. The history of historiography suggests, however, that no grand scheme, whether of Augustine, Hegel, or Marx, can be “disconfirmed” by empirical evidence. They are different interpretations of history, more or less persuasive as one judges them on what are essentially aesthetic or moral grounds. The option to refuse to interpret in such a mode is of course always open.

Contemporary historiography

The extraordinary expansion of higher education throughout the world in the first decades after World War II, and the prominent place that instruction in history occupied in colleges and universities, contributed to the dramatic growth in the historical profession in the second half of the 20th century. This in turn reflected a widespread public interest in—indeed, a fascination with—the past.

In the countries that fought in the war, especially the United States, returning veterans were given access to higher education. This created a mass market for teachers of history, again, especially in the United States, where it became common to inculcate in first-year students, under the rubric of “general education,” courses in “Western civilization.” (This was quickly and appropriately nicknamed “Plato to NATO”; its premise was that there was a continuous and relatively coherent Western tradition beginning in classical Greece and mutually enjoyed by the countries that happened to be members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.) With so many more people studying history, publishers in the English speaking world began to produce cheap paperback editions even of historical monographs, making it possible for the first time to introduce undergraduates to real historical writing.

Borne on this tide were the graduate schools, which expanded their faculties and admitted Ph.D. candidates in numbers not seen before. Good doctoral dissertations (and even some bad ones) could attract the interest of publishers, and their authors usually had some choice of permanent employment. The buoyant publishing climate also encouraged historical journals to proliferate. None matched the impact of the Annales, but they often moved to the cutting edge of historical work. Past and Present was founded in 1952 at the University of Oxford with the provocative (but short-lived) subtitle “A Journal of Scientific History.” Although committed to social history and drawing mainly on left-wing contributors, the journal never followed any rigid ideological line, and it quickly became the outstanding historical journal in English, rivaling the staid and traditional English Historical Review (founded 1885). Similar interests were addressed by Comparative Studies in Society and History (founded 1958) and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History (founded 1970), while History and Theory (founded 1960) became the first journal devoted to the theory of history.

Branches of history

History of the arts

Histories have been written about architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, theatre, motion pictures, television, and literature. Despite essential differences, these forms of historiography have some common features. One is that they are almost invariably produced outside history departments and faculties. For this reason they have tended to be regarded as somewhat exotic specialties. Because the activities of artists are inevitably the central subject of most histories of the arts, such histories generally include formalistic analyses of artistic works. The distinction between history and philosophy in the case of art is thus less distinct than it is in other subject areas. Finally, performance traditions figure prominently in histories of music, dance, and theatre.

Historians are seldom satisfied with purely formal analyses of art and are seldom competent to make them. Historians have tried to integrate art history into their studies in three fundamental ways. The first is to consider the material conditions of production. Some of the issues are technical: what pigments were available to an artist? What special effects were possible in an Elizabethan theatre? Others relate to patronage, since most artists have always worked for commissions or pensions given to them by the rich (who in return got to appear in paintings, be mentioned in the prefaces of books, or attach their names to pieces of music). Finally, the working conditions and social status of artists have been investigated. Artists in past centuries had little social prestige; they were regarded as artisans and were organized in guild workshops with apprentices (or sons—Bach in Germany was almost a generic name for a musician).

A second approach, which became popular in the late 20th century, is to shift the emphasis from the artist to the audience. German literary critics carried this conception farthest in what they called Rezeptionstheorie. Applied to a work of literature, Rezeptionstheorie implies that the meaning of a work is determined not by the writer but by the reader, who is “implied” in the text. Sometimes scholars simply treat themselves as “the reader,” thus producing literary criticism rather than history. Occasionally, however, there is evidence of how ordinary readers reacted to novels (e.g., when readers wrote to magazines in which novels were serialized). The face-to-face nature of the performing arts makes it easier to determine how audiences responded to such works; there are famous stories of the disastrous premieres of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen or Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata and of the riot that erupted at the first performance of the ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), by Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev. Reception theory has been particularly fruitful in the field of history of the moving image, since sophisticated means of measuring and evaluating audience responses are available (and, in television at least, slavishly followed).

The most ambitious—and most controversial—way of integrating art history into historiography relies on such notions as a zeitgeist, or spirit of an age. The originator of this approach was Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), whose masterpiece, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, begins with a chapter called “The State as a Work of Art” and argues that artistic production in the Renaissance is of a piece with politics and statecraft. Giambattista Vico’s idea of the poetic tropes of an age of heroes, as contrasted with the prose of an age of irony, points in the same direction, as does G.W.F. Hegel’s conception of Spirit coming to full self-consciousness through art, religion, and philosophy.

The history of painting has gained the most attention from scholars in part because paintings are traded commodities that often require authentication by experts. The authentication of modern paintings seldom requires the services of a professional historian, but works from previous centuries, especially those in which the cult of the individual artistic genius had not fully developed and paintings were not always signed, often do. One of the great art historians of the early 20th century, Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), borrowed a technique for attributions that depended on mannerisms of painting ears and noses, but he also overestimated his ability to identify paintings by the Italian Renaissance master Giorgione and others, incidentally making large sums for himself. In the late 20th century, art historians developed more-rigorous criteria for attribution, with the result that works once attributed to great artists such as Giorgione were demoted to “school of,” “follower of,” and the like. Art history is thus a field in which detecting forgeries is still a live issue. One of the great forgers of the 20th century, Hans van Meegeren, succeeded in passing off a number of his own canvases as works of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

Art historians have taken a variety of approaches. Such eminent figures as Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) stoutly defended the establishment of a canon of indubitably great paintings, whereas Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) treated “categories of beholding,” which reveal the ways in which paintings create their effects. Paintings and works of sculpture also can have an intellectual content. One school of art historians, most prominently identified with Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), studied iconology, or iconography, which consists of the formal analysis of visual motifs used to express thematic content or to identify important figures (thus, a skull or hourglass indicated death, and a figure carrying his skin over his shoulder referred to St. Bartholomew, who according to legend was flayed). To understand such paintings, knowledge of iconology is necessary but not sufficient. Iconologists have tried to move beyond providing simple lists of motifs to developing treatments of how motifs change and of what these changes indicate regarding the cultural and intellectual context of the painting.

Painting has not escaped the conceptual issue besetting most of the arts: how to identify an object as a work of art. Several developments challenge historians of contemporary art: the presentation of ordinary objects as “art”—such as the urinal that Marcel Duchamp submitted to a gallery as The Fountain; the rise of abstract painting; and portraits of soup cans by Andy Warhol. In Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), the American philosopher of art Arthur Danto argued that art is at an end, since there is now no way to distinguish between works of art and urinals and no distinct mode in which works of art can convey their intellectual content. Concurrently with this proclamation of the end of art came the question of whether art history has also come to an end. This is a typical postmodern provocation, of a piece with the claim that history as a whole has ended.

Biography and psychohistory

Ancient biography, especially the entire genre of hagiography, subordinated any treatment of individual character to the profuse repetition of edifying examples. They were generally about eminent men, but women could qualify as subjects by being martyred. Although biographies written in the Italian Renaissance, such as that of Giorgio Vasari, began to resemble modern biographies, those written in the Northern Renaissance were still of great public figures, by someone who knew them. They were almost totally lacking in psychological insight, personality being swathed in thick layers of virtue. For example, the life of Thomas More, written by his son-in-law, does not even mention that More was the author of Utopia (1516). In the 17th century, however, Izaak Walton (better known today for his classic treatise on angling) wrote some lives of literary figures, adding heroes of culture to those of war and politics as appropriate subjects. The renowned Samuel Johnson (1709–84) has the distinction of being both a biographer (of English poets) and the subject of the biography by James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791), which was roughly as important for biography as Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) was for historiography.

Biographers of contemporaries are often faced with one of two unique challenges. They sometimes discover that the letters, diaries, and other personal documents of the subject that are most necessary for writing the biography have been destroyed, sometimes precisely to prevent a biography from being written. Writers of authorized biographies, however, are often granted privileged access to these materials but are somewhat constrained by the commission. Even when the biographer is not dependent on the subject (or literary executor) for the necessary sources, the relationship between the two persons can be intense. There is likely to be some—perhaps overriding—emotional attraction on the part of the biographer to the person he wishes to write about. Some writers believe that the biographer must become intimately acquainted with the mind and emotions of the subject. This requirement is obviously easier to meet if the two are close friends, but biographers can also generate deep empathy with people long dead. However, it seems to be fascination, not admiration, that is essential, since good biographies have been written by authors who came to despise their subjects. Otherwise there presumably could never have been good biographies of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.

Writing the life of a major writer or artist presents different problems—and opportunities—from those presented in writing the life of a statesman. It also makes a vast difference whether or not one is writing about a contemporary. Biographers face the problem of access to private collections as well as the problem of the quality of those collections, which vary enormously in size and informativeness. For example, whereas only about 300 often terse letters by the American novelist Herman Melville survive, there are about 15,000 extant letters by the American writer Henry James—this after James had burned all his copies of his letters and everything else that might have been useful to a biographer.

Although at times faced with the willful destruction of the personal papers of their subjects, almost every biographer of a contemporary figure faces an embarrassment of documents and must at times envy the biographer of such sparsely documented figures as William Shakespeare. Victorian biographers generally surrendered to a plethora of sources by writing extremely long accounts of the life and times of statesmen, larded with extensive verbatim quotations from their correspondence and speeches. The English critic Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) ridiculed these multivolume monuments piled on the bones of the dead, and in his Eminent Victorians (1918) he completely changed the course of biography as a literary genre. In four short and witty sketches of Florence Nightingale, Henry Cardinal Manning, Gen. Charles George Gordon, and Thomas Arnold, Strachey gave vent to all that a modernist generation that had survived World War I felt for its pious and overbearing predecessors. Strachey was particularly adept at pouncing upon and pointing out instances of unconscious hypocrisy. Although his brother James Strachey was the first translator of Sigmund Freud in England, it is not clear that Lytton Strachey had read anything by him, but Freud’s ideas were in the air and could not fail to interest a biographer imbued with “the hermeneutics of suspicion.”

Those seeking a balanced account of these four great Victorians will not find it in Strachey’s pages. Yet though he was sometimes unfair and sacrificed judiciousness to witticisms, Strachey became a model for future biographers who wanted to escape from the thousand-page tomes that monumentalized great statesmen and authors. This meant touching subjects that had previously been passed over, either through prudery or respect for privacy. Thus, the poet Robert Southey’s life of Horatio Nelson, the English naval hero, denied that there was any “crudity” (sexual intercourse) in his relationship with Lady Hamilton. As late as 1951 Roy Harrod published a biography of the influential economist John Maynard Keynes that did not mention homosexuality. By contrast, many biographers in the later 20th century considered their primary task to be the interpretation of their subject’s psychosexual development.

For this enterprise there are, of course, psychological theories. Unfortunately, there are all too many of them. Even if the biographer decides on depth psychology—and there are alternatives—the choice is not much simplified. Although Freudian psychoanalysis has pretty much swept the field in the United States, there are still European scholars influenced by Carl Jung. Furthermore, there are a bewildering variety of alternative Freudian theories—not a few of them propounded by the master himself. So it is not altogether clear what orthodox Freudianism is, but it would emphasize the importance of instinctual drives and of experiences in early childhood.

Even for the psychoanalyst, these are the most difficult areas, and the most difficult time, of human life to get evidence about; this is why full analyses run toward the interminable. For the biographer with little or no access to reports of the dreams of his subject—very few of anyone’s dreams have been recorded—or to the other ways in which the unconscious most often gives itself away, “psychobiography” inevitably becomes speculative. Freud’s own ventures into the field are not reassuring. Art historians have pointed out that the smile of the Mona Lisa was a standard way of painting a certain emotion, not necessarily an unconscious revival of a childhood sexual memory of Leonardo da Vinci. American political historians have been even more dismissive of the joint effort by Freud and William C. Bullitt to write a psychological biography of Woodrow Wilson.

In practice, many psychohistorians have adopted the psychoanalytic theories of the analyst who analyzed them (a few have become psychoanalysts themselves). The problem of getting evidence for psychobiographies is easier, however, if one accepts the American revision of Freudianism known as ego psychology. This theory denies that personality is fixed after the age of five; it can still be substantially influenced by what goes on later, especially in adolescence. The most influential exponent of this approach for biographers was Erik Erikson, who propounded an eight-stage theory of the normative life course and wrote substantial psychobiographies of Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi. The overriding theme of both was the way in which an individual leader, working out his own “identity crisis,” was also able to do what Erikson called “the dirty work of his society.” This reinterpretation of the “great man” theory of history (which holds that the course of history is determined by a few individuals) made it possible to argue not only that culture influences adolescent personality development but also that adolescent personality development might at times powerfully influence culture.

Construal of evidence by psychobiographers can be radically different from normal historical practice (as reviewers were not slow to remind Erikson). Historians are accustomed to “weighing” the evidence, almost in a literal sense. Frequent iteration of an attitude generally persuades, even if there are one or two exceptions. For the psychobiographer, an apparently trivial event or slip of the pen can be the vital clue to the personality of the subject. Luther’s toilet habits, treatment of Hitler’s mother by a Jewish doctor who used a gas therapy in an attempt to cure her cancer, or Baudouin I of Belgium’s auto accident a few years before World War II would be dismissed by many historians as of dubious relevance to public careers; to psychobiographers they can be the foundation of an entire work.

Although they cannot study dreams, biographers have in the writings of poets and novelists a kind of public dream. Deciphering these for their disguised biographical content runs against current literary critical as well as historiographical orthodoxy, yet many biographers of writers place great stock in their ability to do this. The conventional historian, asked to describe Nathaniel Hawthorne’s state of mind during the years he lived at Salem, would look for the various documents he produced while he was there. But these throw little light on the question. The literary biographer, in contrast, claims to be able to answer it by interpreting the works that Hawthorne wrote while he was there. One has even said that, no matter how much other, more usual evidence might turn up, he would still stay with what he drew from his interpretation.

Like cliometrics, psychohistory was a fashionable methodology in the 1960s and ’70s but has become distinctly less fashionable since. It has to a degree been discredited by the excesses of some of its partisans, and its difficulties proved greater than most of its early advocates had expected. Just as biography has made a contribution to historiography generally through prosopography (the study of related persons within a given historical context), collective psychology has reappeared in a psychoanalytic study of early adherents of Nazism and in the history of mentalités (semiarticulated or even unconsciously held beliefs and attitudes that set limits to what is thinkable; see below Social and cultural history). Freud’s exercise in group dynamics, Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse (1921; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego), was appropriated by Henry Abelove for his fine study The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists (1990). These are signs that neither the biographical nor the psychohistorical impulse has exhausted its energy.

Diplomatic history

Diplomatic history comes closer than any other branch of history to being “completed”—not in the sense that everything about past diplomatic relationships has been discovered but rather in the sense that apparently all the techniques proper to it have been perfected. Unfortunately, the sharpest set of tools is useless without the matter on which to work, and in this respect historians of 20th- and 21st-century diplomacy are at a considerable disadvantage compared with those of earlier periods.

There is probably no branch of history—excepting perhaps biography—in which access to sources is so tricky, or their interpretation so difficult. The main obstacle to contemporary diplomatic history is the shroud of security that almost every state has thrown over its records, especially states that have mixed conventional diplomacy with covert operations. Historians typically have to wait 30 years or more for state papers to be declassified. The photocopying machine, however, created new opportunities for diplomatic leaks, most notably the publication in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed American planning for military intervention in Indochina from World War II until 1968 (see also Vietnam War).

After coming to power in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks gave historians of the origins of World War I a bonanza by publishing the secret dispatches of the tsarist government, which for the first time revealed the web of alliances and secret agreements that had allowed a Balkan incident eventually to embroil all the great powers. Each government thereupon published its own editions of documents. This plethora of documentation did not allow historians to reach consensus about the responsibility for starting the war, but the blame was certainly allocated more evenly than it had been in the “war guilt” clause of the Treaty of Versailles. Many historians in Britain and the United States concluded that the Germans were no more responsible than anyone else for starting the war. Surprisingly, in 1961 a German historian, Fritz Fischer (1908–99 ), reopened this question with Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegziel politik das kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1914/18 (1961; Germany’s Aims in the First World War, 1967), kindling a lively debate in West Germany.

Comparatively little was said about the diplomacy preceding World War II—and there was little basis for saying anything—until more than the captured papers of Nazi Germany were made completely available (the British prime minister and historian Winston Churchill simply took the relevant English state papers with him when writing his six-volume history of the war). It has seemed obvious that Hitler intended to start a war, if not necessarily on Sept. 1, 1939. But the postwar relations between the United States and the Soviet Union became the subject of controversy when the American historians William Appleman Williams (1921–90) and Gabriel Kolko (1932– ) challenged the conventional American view that the Soviets intended world conquest and were deterred only by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its nuclear umbrella. Williams and his students, who were influential in the 1960s, produced a series of revisionist accounts of the outbreak of the Korean War and later of the Vietnam War. These were in turn attacked by defenders of the orthodox view.

This sketch of the liveliest issues in postwar diplomatic history would seem to support the view of those who claim that all history is implicated in ideology. The disagreements of diplomatic historians do suggest that political and national passions play an unusually large part in their interpretation of diplomatic history. On the other hand, lack of new techniques does not mean that diplomatic historians are no better at their task than their predecessors were. Some interpretations have been definitively discredited, and signs of convergence have emerged even on such contested topics as the origins of World War I. As the European nations entered the European Union, an effort was made to write a history textbook on which historians from various countries could agree. Although it relied upon a certain amount of euphemism (the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 was referred to as a “transit” of their troops), it did show that, even in this controversial field, some consensus can be achieved.

Economic history

History and economics were once closely related. Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and Karl Marx were all political economists who incorporated historical data into their analyses. A historical school of economics developed in Germany in the late 19th century and was associated with figures such as Gustav von Schmoller (1838–1917). Reacting against the free-trade doctrines of British economists (which would have prevented Germany from protecting its industries until they were strong enough to compete), the historical economists argued that there are no universally valid economic laws and that each country should define its own economic path.

A similar interest in historical development was shown by institutional economists such as the eccentric genius Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929). The American Historical Association and the American Economic Association were founded together and did not separate for several years; it was common in American colleges for historians and economists to be in the same department. From the turn of the 20th century, however, the two disciplines pursued radically different paths. While economists developed ever-more-elaborate mathematical models, historians remained mired in the messy details of the world.

While this division between the disciplines occurred, much good work was done on the workings of preindustrial economies and on the question of why serfdom was introduced in Poland and Russia just as it was dying out in western Europe. In several countries, cost-of-living indexes that covered several centuries were computed. Although these estimates were imperfect (as they still are), they illuminated such famous questions as the causes of the French Revolution and the condition of the working class during the Industrial Revolution in England. The French historian Camille-Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988) showed that in France during the period from 1778 to 1789, a long recession was exacerbated by high bread prices and eventually the bankruptcy of the crown. Believers in “deeper” causes of the revolution treated this conjunction as only a trigger, but since many popular disturbances in the first years of the revolution were bread riots that turned to political violence, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the history of the period would have been quite different under different economic conditions.

Economic history in Britain has always been influenced by the fact that it was the first country to undergo an industrial revolution. In the aftermath of World War II, economic planners looked to Britain for an example of how countries in the developing world might achieve the same transformation. The American economist and political theorist Walt Whitman Rostow (1916–2003), in Stages of Economic Growth (1960), attempted a general theory of how economies industrialize. His six-stage model did not gain general acceptance, but he did raise the issue of long-term economic development, which directed some economists, at least, toward history.

The proposition that the Industrial Revolution was a good thing was universally maintained by historians who were sympathetic to capitalism. Socialist historians, on the other hand, judged it more ambivalently. For orthodox Marxists, only industrialized countries would create a proletariat strong enough to expropriate the means of production, and the enormous productive power of industrial society would be the basis of the “kingdom of plenty” under communism. At the same time, they emphasized the arbitrary way in which industrialization was carried out and the suffering of the workers. Because much of the evidence for the suffering of the workers was in fact anecdotal, a number of economic historians tried to determine whether their standard of living actually declined. Although wage rates were known, industrial workers were often laid off, so their annual income was not a simple multiple of their average wage. Despite the difficulties of the inevitably controversial calculations, it seems to be true that workers’ standard of living at least did not decline, and may even have improved slightly, before 1850. This conclusion did not resolve the issue of their suffering, however, since workers also endured noneconomic losses. The matter continues to be a concern for social and economic historians.

The distinctive feature of the American economy was slavery. One overriding issue for economic historians has been whether slavery was inherently inefficient as well as inhumane and thus whether it might have disappeared through sheer unprofitability had it not been legally abolished. This is an extremely complicated question. An answer requires not only large amounts of data but also data about almost all aspects of the American economy. To see how the data fitted together, historians after World War II drew upon macroeconomic theory, which showed how various inputs affect the gross national product.

There was, however, a further problem: how did the productivity of slave labour compare with the hypothetical product of free labour applied to the same land? In other words, if there had been no slavery, would Southern agriculture have been more (or less) profitable? One attempt to resolve this counterfactual question was offered in Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Economic History (1964) by Robert Fogel, an American economist who shared the Nobel Prize for Economics with Douglass C. North in 1993. Fogel tested the claim that railroads were of fundamental importance in American economic development by constructing a model of the American economy without railroads. The model made some simplifying assumptions: passenger travel was ignored, and since canals were the principal alternatives to railroads, the part of the United States west of the continental divide was also left out. With these provisos, the model showed that the importance of railroads had been exaggerated, because in 1890 the gross national product without railroads would have reached the same level as the actual one.

In Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), Fogel and his colleague Stanley Engerman addressed the issue of the profitability of slavery, using the methods Fogel had developed in his earlier study. Using evidence only from the last decade of American slavery, they argued that the system was not only profitable but more profitable than free labour would have been. The response to their work illustrates many of the accomplishments and pitfalls of what came to be called cliometrics, the application of statistical analysis to the study of history. It sold more than 20,000 copies, a large number for a scholarly book; it shared the Bancroft Prize for history; and it was the subject of stories and bemused reviews in the popular press. However, because it adopted the French custom of segregating tables and other statistical matter in a second volume—which appeared not simultaneously but several months later—the initial reviewers had access only to the conclusions and the supporting textual arguments. These initial reviews were generally respectful, but when the second volume appeared, many cliometricians attacked its statistical analysis. Other scholars assailed the work for everything from insufficient indignation about the evils of slavery to improper attributions of classical profit-maximizing economic motives to participants in an institution that Thomas Jefferson characterized as “a continuous exercise of the most boisterous of passions.” (Fogel and Engerman argued that slaves were rarely whipped, because whipping would have diminished their capacity for work.)

Some of these criticisms missed the mark. Fogel and Engerman did not undertake even a political economy of slavery, much less a moral evaluation. The most searching critiques, from fellow cliometricians, were arcane and technical. But they resembled disputes in the natural sciences in that the data were publicly available, and fairly well-understood criteria were available to adjudicate the issues. Furthermore, the authors’ main conclusion, which was anticipated by earlier studies, has not been refuted: slavery was indeed profitable and was not withering on the vine in 1861.

Cliometrics was an important innovation because it offered new answers to old questions and provided a methodology better suited to tackling large questions of system and structure. Although it was a new and rather spectacular technique, it did not eclipse older branches of economic history. In the United States, which had pioneered business history, institutional historians continued their work on entrepreneurs and on management tactics, while labour history was avidly pursued not only in the United States but throughout Europe. Historians were also preoccupied by peasants in numbers sufficient to justify a Journal of Peasant Studies, and, since peasants were found all over the world, peasant studies easily became comparative. These studies readily crossed the fluid boundary between economic history and social history. Quantitative analysis of the records left by ordinary people, gathered for cliometric purposes, has brought their experiences to light—the great accomplishment of the social historians of our time.

Intellectual history

“All history,” as R.G. Collingwood said, “is the history of thought.” One traditional view of history, now discarded, is that it is virtually synonymous with the history of ideas—history is composed of human actions; human actions have to be explained by intentions; and intentions cannot be formed without ideas. On a grander scale, the doctrines of Christianity were the core of the providential universal histories that persisted until the 18th century, since the acceptance—or rejection—of Christian ideas was considered history’s master plot. When the providential argument in its simpler medieval form lost credibility, it was reformulated by Vico, with his conception of the tropes appropriate to the different ages of humanity, and by Hegel, whose “objective” idealism identified the development of Spirit, or the Idea, as the motor of history. In the techniques of historical investigation too, the history of ideas was the source for the hermeneutical skills required for reading complex tests. The interpretation of ancient laws and religious doctrines was the workshop in which were forged the tools that were subsequently used in all historical work.

It was not until the speculative schemes that identified the development of ideas with the historical process were generally discredited, and its hermeneutic techniques thoroughly naturalized elsewhere, that intellectual history became a specialty—the first specialized field to supplement the traditional historical specialties of political, diplomatic, and military history. It emerged slightly earlier than social history, and for a time the two were allies in a joint struggle to gain acceptance. The incompatibility—indeed, antagonism—between the two emerged only later.

Confusion can arise because history of ideas and intellectual history are sometimes treated as synonyms. The former is properly the name of a field of study in which ideas themselves are the central subject. The most sophisticated approach to the history of ideas was formulated by Arthur Lovejoy (1873–1962). Lovejoy focused on what he called “unit ideas,” such as the notion of a Great Chain of Being extending from God through the angels to humans down to the least-complicated life-forms. Lovejoy traced this idea from its classical roots through the 19th century in both philosophical and literary elaborations. Philosophical or theological doctrines (e.g., Plato’s theory of Forms, or Manichaeism, a dualist religious movement founded in Persia) lend themselves best to the unit-idea mode of study. One difficulty with the history of unit ideas, however, is that it is often difficult to establish the identity of an idea through time. The term natural law, for example, meant quite different things to Stoic philosophers, to Thomas Hobbes, to John Locke, and to the prosecutors of Nazi war criminals at the Nürnberg trials (1945–46); the meaning of the same words can change radically. This drives the historian to the Oxford English Dictionary or its equivalents for other languages to get a first take on the history of meaning changes. This step, however, must be supplemented by extensive reading in the contemporary literature, not only to see what semiotic load the words bear but also to see what controversies or contrary positions might have been in the mind of the writer.

The phrase intellectual history did not come into common usage until after World War II. It seems to owe its first currency to The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953), by Perry Miller (1905–63), who required it for his approach to the complex of religious, political, and social ideas and attitudes in Massachusetts in the 17th and 18th centuries. The focus of intellectual history has been not on the formal analysis of ideas, as in the history of ideas, but on the conditions of their propagation and dissemination. It also considers not just the formally articulated ideas of theorists or poets but also the sentiments of ordinary people. Even popular delusions come within the ambit of intellectual history; in this respect it intersects studies within psychohistory and the cultural history of mentalités.

Perhaps because their area of study is so ill-defined, intellectual historians have been unusually reflective and argumentative about the methods appropriate to their work. One methodological controversy was initiated in the 1960s by Quentin Skinner. Skinner questioned the custom in political philosophy of identifying certain “eternal” questions (such as “Why does anyone have an obligation to obey the state?”) and then arraying various political texts according to the answers they give. This procedure, he argued, led to invalid historical conclusions, since the eternal questions were the constructions of modern political philosophers and reflected modern concerns. Taking his cue from the ordinary language philosophy of John Langshaw Austin and other postwar Oxford philosophers, Skinner contended that the task for the historian of political thought was to discover what effect the writer of a text intended it to have.

Skinner’s best example was Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), which for generations had been paired with Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as one of two versions of a social contract theory. Skinner and his colleague John Dunn started from the obvious but often ignored fact that there was a first treatise by Locke that refuted the idea that political power devolved from the power that God gave to Adam. Absurd as this idea seems to contemporary philosophers, it nevertheless commanded widespread assent in 17th-century Britain. Similarly, a great deal of controversial writing was then done by clergymen, and Locke (as is evident from his many quotations of the Anglican divine Richard Hooker) participated actively in this discourse. On the other hand, there is very little evidence that Locke was responding to Hobbes.

In no branch of history has the challenge of postmodernism and deconstruction been felt more keenly than in the history of ideas. Here the goal has been to interpret past texts; the intentions of the author, as revealed in those texts, set limits to possible interpretations even where they do not mandate a single one. Deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida assert that the intentions of the author can never be known and would be irrelevant even if they could be. All that an interpreter has is the text—thus, Michel Foucault proclaimed the “death of the author”—and no single meaning can be assigned to it, because what it does not say may be more significant than what it does. Even what it does say cannot be reduced to a stable meaning, because of the intrinsic opacity and slipperiness of language. (Most words in ordinary usage have several different definitions; there is no way to use them so as to totally exclude all traces of the other meanings. Puns, of which Derrida was fond, illustrate these “surplus” meanings.)

The subversiveness of such views for the traditional practice of the history of ideas is obvious. Derrida’s advocates presented his ideas as liberating and as allowing critics to exercise the same creativity as imaginative writers. The apparent concession to total relativism, however, has seemed too high, not least because it renders the deconstructionist position vulnerable to the paradox of relativism (if the deconstructionist is right that there are no stable meanings, then there is no stable meaning to the assertion that there are no stable meanings, in which case the deconstructionist position cannot even be formulated). Derrida occasionally complained of being misread. But the deconstructionist position is not absurd, nor can it be refuted by saying that few historians have accepted it.

Military history

Soldiers in battle were the theme of the earliest Greek epic and the earliest histories. It has not lost its interest for modern readers and writers. The focus of academic military history, however, has changed as markedly as the nature of modern warfare has changed. The campaigns of the American Civil War, with their chesslike maneuvering and great set-piece battles, continue to fascinate, but attrition and pounding by superior force assumed an ever-greater role in 20th-century military strategy, despite yielding few brilliant generals or individual heroes. On the other hand, World War I was the first European war to be fought by literate armies, and the soldiers in that conflagration created not only a great literature but also a mass of material about their experiences. In The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell made full use of these documents to produce an account of life in the trenches. Although the literary output of soldiers in World War II was much less significant, the American writer Studs Terkel, using techniques of oral history, managed to compile in The Good War (1984) a comparable panorama of its participants, including those on the home front. Perhaps the leading exponent of military history as the social history of war is John Keegan, whose work ranges from the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 to the wars of the 21st century.

Political history

For many people, and for many years, “history” simply meant political history. A large proportion of published works by historians was devoted to political history as late as the 1970s, but even before that time historians had begun to examine other topics. Although E.A. Freeman’s slogan “History is past politics” no longer rings true, it is safe to say that political history will continue to be a prominent part of historical writing and will challenge the subtlety, worldly wisdom, and narrative powers of historians as long as history is written.

The primary goal of political history in the immediate postwar years was to supplement (or, in the minds of some, to supplant) the historian’s traditional reliance on narrative with a scientific or quantitative approach; inevitably, this endeavour came to be called “new political history.” It was to be, as William Aydelotte put it, “a sedate, hesitant, circumspect, little behavioral revolution” in American historical practice. The postwar United States furnished some innovative young historians who combined an interest in political history with a program for making it more scientific. Among the most systematic of these scholars was Lee Benson, author of an influential work that applied quantitative techniques to the study of Jacksonian democracy. “By 1984,” he predicted in 1966,

a significant proportion of American historians will have accepted … two basic propositions: (1) past human behavior can be studied scientifically; (2) the main business of historians is to participate in the overall scholarly enterprise of discovering and developing general laws of human behavior.

Wherever possible, all statements in historical works should be formulated so precisely as to be “verifiable.” Implicitly but vaguely quantitative terms (e.g., most or significant proportion) should be replaced by numerical expressions.

Quantitative data to support such ambitions were available for elections. Using what he found in New York state, Benson succeeded in showing that party affiliation was largely determined by ethnic and cultural loyalties and remained surprisingly immune to the issues raised by party platforms or political speeches.

The University of Iowa was another hotbed of quantitative approaches, and electoral statistics of Iowa and other Midwestern states soon joined those of New York. The new political historians also established an archive of national election data at the University of Michigan, which they hoped to use to prepare a truly comprehensive electoral history.

Less-ambitious quantitative projects focused on parliamentary bodies. Lewis Namier (1888–1960), probably the greatest English historian of his generation, undertook the biographical study of members of Parliament. Namier borrowed the prosopographic technique of Ronald Syme, a historian of ancient Rome, which involved tracing the family connections, sources of income and influence, and offices held by a defined group of the political elite. This approach was most useful for the study of oligarchic regimes and hence was especially suitable for the Roman Senate and mid-18th-century British parliaments. The main effect of such work was to de-emphasize the impact of political ideologies and to assert the importance of kinship and personal relations in deliberative assemblies.

More directly quantitative was the work of Aydelotte, who investigated the conventional claim that the English Corn Laws (protective tariffs on grain imports) were abolished because members of Parliament who represented manufacturing districts wanted the cheapest-possible food for their workers (allowing the lowest-possible wages). As plausible as this view was, significant correlations frequently failed to appear.

The new political historians carried the quantitative program into the stronghold of traditional historiography. Terms such as impressionistic, anecdotal, and narrative acquired dismissive connotations. More-traditional historians were admonished for excessive reliance on literary evidence (i.e., anything that could not be quantified).

A generation later, the debate over quantification fizzled out, leaving some permanent mark on political history. Few would now deny the value of some quantitative studies or the desirability of precision in historical language. The habit of collaboration with other historians and membership in research teams, virtually unknown earlier, is now well established. A number of intuitively obvious interpretations have been shown to be exaggerated or plainly wrong.

On the other hand, it is clear that quantification in political history was oversold. Its idea of scientific procedures was startlingly old-fashioned, and many of the studies based solely on quantification failed to produce significant results. Sometimes things already believed were confirmed—not a useless exercise but not a high priority either. More-interesting correlations often failed the significance test or showed inexplicable relationships. Finally, attention was diverted to bodies of data that could be quantified. The most judicious of the new political historians warned against the exclusive reliance on quantification and recognized that archival research would remain indispensable, especially in the traditional fields of constitutional, administrative, and legal history.

History of science

The history of all the branches of learning has always been a part of intellectual history, but the history of science has had a peculiarly tense relationship with it, and with history more generally. Although much history of science has been written by practicing scientists, it is almost never formally taught in science departments. It is now mostly treated as autonomous, but in some cases historians of science have been included in history faculties. Even though their relationships with other historians may be distant (though cordial), the study of the history of science is in many ways analogous to the study of other aspects of the past. The history of science has also produced, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), by Thomas Kuhn (1922–96), one of the most influential books by any American historian in the postwar period. Almost everybody who uses the word paradigm in any of the many senses in which Kuhn used it is indebted to that book.

The tension between the history of ideas and intellectual history reappears in the history of science in a tension between “internalist” and “externalist” approaches to the subject. To the internalist the critical questions are: What problem was the scientist attempting to solve, and how did he solve it? To answer these questions, the historian obviously needs to know in intimate detail the state of scientific thought during the time about which he is writing. But he also needs to be familiar with the nuts and bolts of scientific work—the apparatus, the experimental animals, if any, and the like. The problems for investigation are likely to be generated within the compass of what Kuhn calls “normal science,” which has well-established procedures for verifying results. (Anomalous results can be dismissed as experimental error, though when they accumulate they can lead to an overturning of an established paradigm of normal science.)

The great merit of the internalist approach is also the source of its greatest difficulty. It deals with how science is actually done, which means that not many historians have the necessary knowledge of science to write it. This difficulty becomes particularly acute when modern science (roughly, science since the start of the 19th century) is the subject. The literature in the history of science is disproportionately focused on the so-called scientific revolution of the 17th century. One reason for this is that the scientific revolution was a heroic period, but another is that much less knowledge of modern science is required to understand Galileo, Johannes Kepler, or Isaac Newton than is required to understand Albert Einstein or Werner Heisenberg. Ignorance of scientific practice can be further concealed by concentrating on what scientists say about their method in the prefaces to their works. It may seem strange to make a distinction between scientific method and practice, but it is not. “Method” is not simply distilled practice, and sometimes it is a poor description of what scientists actually do. It seems clear that improvements in scientific method had relatively little to do with the successes of the scientific revolution. Furthermore, some scientific works (those of Francis Bacon, for example) are barely disguised appeals for funding, and the prefaces of others are not free of self-advertisement.

In part because a history of modern science would require knowledge of modern science, some historians who attempt the internalist mode have focused their investigations on what counted as science in the past. An influential early work in this vein, Lynn Thorndike’s A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923–58), discussed two seemingly distinct approaches that share the belief that human practice can affect the natural world. Distinguishing between the two approaches requires criteria—effectiveness and rationality—that are essentially modern. Sorting out what was scientific work can easily lead to a history that begins with the concepts of modern science and then looks backward to see how those categories were anticipated by earlier scientists. The result is a story of how scientists finally “got it right” after the bungling and delusions of their predecessors were corrected—though such stories inevitably tend to mangle the integrity of past scientific traditions. Another approach is to give a “rational reconstruction” of the history of science—that is, to show how the underlying logic of scientific discovery unfolded, without bothering with the irksome details of how things actually happened.

The externalist approach aims at a retrospective sociology or anthropology of scientific discovery. One of its earliest advocates was Bruno Latour, who with his colleague Steve Woolgar did fieldwork in a biological laboratory, where they discovered that scientific practice was not a pure expression of scientific method and that scientists did not disdain the use of rhetoric in reporting their results. The most aggressive partisans of this approach advocated a “strong program” for contextualizing science. Important work in contextualization has been done by Marxist historians; their masterpiece is Science and Civilization in China (1954), a multivolume history of Chinese science by the English historian and scientist Joseph Needham. The traditional point of intersection between science and society is technology, and Marxist historians made valiant efforts to argue that the practical needs of ballistics influenced Newton’s celestial mechanics. However, this approach is of limited usefulness for any time before the late 19th century, when chemistry revolutionized dyestuffs, pharmaceuticals, and photography; before then, science and technology had proceeded on essentially unrelated paths, accompanied by condescension from scientists and resentment from artisans. In modern times, the relationship has been much closer, and even advocates or practitioners of “pure” science often entertain the hope that some useful device will emerge.

Externalists can get by with much less scientific knowledge than internalists, which accounts for some of the appeal of the former school. Externalists have undoubtedly made clearer the process whereby people become accepted as scientists; this is vital, because there is no way to know what science is other than by knowing what the community of scientists say it is. Externalists have also shown why some topics become interesting to scientists while others are ignored. Yet natural science is probably more autonomous than most modes of knowledge production, and there are limits to how much illumination a historian can bring to the history of science without knowing a lot of science himself.

Social and cultural history

Many historians in the past echoed the calls of Jules Michelet or Thomas Carlyle to rescue ordinary people from the silence and condescension of history, but they generally lacked the means to go beyond anecdote, sentimentalism, and left-wing politics. Only since World War II (and here the journal Annales: histoire, sciences sociales was an extraordinary engine for progress) have historians developed the techniques to begin carrying out the program now called “history from the bottom up.”

Historical demography, virtually created in the postwar period, was the armature around which much of modern social history was wound. Although the first theorist of population was the English economist Thomas Malthus, modern population studies developed mainly in France, the first country on the continent of Europe to experience declining population in the late 19th century. For the French, the main issue in population study was the cause of their population decline and how it might be reversed; for the English, the issue was why population had exploded from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. Historical demography has many ramifications beyond the question of population size: migration, social mobility, household size and composition, and marriage patterns. The conventional wisdom in 1945 was that peasants in traditional European societies rarely moved from the parish of their birth; they lived in large multigenerational households and married young. Two generations of research proved that these views were either wholly false or true only of other parts of the world.

While some demographic historical techniques were developed by Louis Henry of the Institut National d’Études Démographiques (National Institute of Demographic Studies) in Paris, the Cambridge-based Group for the History of Population and Social Structure was responsible for helping to extend demographic studies to Japan, China, and most parts of Europe and North America. It served as a clearinghouse for researchers on three continents and directed attention to types of evidence that were previously unknown. The picture of population that emerged from these researches was complex. A northwestern European pattern was visible in which until 1750 first marriages on average were late—mid-20s for women, late 20s for men. Households were small, and three-generation households were uncommon. One surprise was that the custom of kinfolk’s living together was more common in industrialized than in agrarian areas. Another was the discovery that in England the main reason for the large population increase after 1750 was increased fertility, achieved through earlier marriages. On the other hand, south and west of a line from Trieste to St. Petersburg, people married much younger, and celibacy was rare. Households also tended to be larger, reaching remarkable sizes in the zadrugas (corporate family groups) of Yugoslavia and the Baltic provinces of the Russian empire.

Such findings may seem only of specialized interest, but their ramifications are broad. Studies of family structure in colonial Massachusetts revealed that fathers were reluctant to agree to opening new lands for settlement, wishing to keep their sons within the household. Resentment of this by the sons may have played some role in the mind-set that led to the American Revolution. Migration too is a key to understanding not only the way that industrialization occurred (where did the new workers come from?) but also the settlement patterns of North America (the much higher propensity in the British than in the French or Spanish to leave their native parishes created an overwhelming British North American population). Migration is also a factor in social mobility; a 1964 study of Newburyport, Mass., by Stephan Thernstrom (Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City) tested the reality of the American dream of rising to wealth. It was followed by others proclaiming a new urban history.

Quite different data helped create a history of sexuality. Extramarital or premarital sexual activity was indicated in figures on prenuptial or bridal pregnancy and bastardy; here again a surprise was that these seemed to be higher in 18th-century England—especially after 1750—than in France. Considering that in northwestern Europe people reached sexual maturity almost 10 years before they married, the relatively low level of illicit sexual activity suggests a general acquiescence to a repressive sexual morality. Although homosexual relations do not appear directly in these data, it may be significant that homosexual roles appear to have become available in the late 18th century just as the insistence on chastity began to weigh less heavily on heterosexuals. The history of sexuality was treated in depth by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his final work, the multi-volume Histoire de la sexualité (1976–84).

Foucault wrote important works in other areas of social history in which quantitative methods were relatively unimportant. Particularly significant was his treatment of "the great sequestration." In his Surveillir et punir: naissance de la prison (1975; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison), Foucault argued that prisons and hospitals (and by implication schools) developed as means of social control, and the oppressiveness of these institutions was only enhanced by high-minded rhetoric that declared them to be entirely devoted to their inmates’ good. The image of the panopticon—a prison design by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham that allowed for constant surveillance of the inmates—represented for Foucault the intimate link between power and knowledge and raised disturbing questions about who benefited from the activities of (for example) historians.

Protest and social control had long been a staple of social history. The former was the theme of the most-admired work of the period, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), by E.P. Thompson. Thompson defined the working class not as a statistical aggregate of people who had only their labour power to sell but as a group who between 1790 and 1840 came to consciousness of themselves as “working class.” As the prospect of social revolution faded after 1968, however, historians, especially in the United States, began to investigate the absence of effective working-class protest in previous centuries. Although there was clear evidence of multiple acts of resistance by African American slaves, organized revolts were rare, especially after 1832. Eugene Genovese looked for an explanation in the work of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), who responded to the defeat of communist movements in Europe (except for Russia) after World War I by stressing the “hegemony” exercised by the ruling class through its control of education and other institutions that mold public opinion so that their rule appears natural and inevitable.

Historians are promiscuous borrowers from other disciplines, and in the late 20th century most borrowed techniques and concepts came from anthropology—especially the symbolic anthropology espoused by Pierre Bourdieu and Clifford Geertz. Rather than seeking laws that govern social behaviour (the ambition of early sociology) or compiling quantitative data, symbolic anthropologists conceived human social relations as “texts” to be interpreted. The texts were exhibited as language, of course, but also as rituals of various sorts, and they had to be approached without any theoretical preconceptions. In Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight, for example, Geertz claimed to “read” the event he witnessed. His method, which he called “thick description,” was not far removed from traditional ethnography. It was also congenial, in its aversion to theory, to traditional historical practice, which was never comfortable with the attempt to explain historical events by subsuming them under laws.

Like much social history, cultural history could claim an ancestry from early works by Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) and Marc Bloch (1866–1944), who were early contributors to the social-science journal Revue de Synthèse Historique. In Les Rois Thaumaturges: étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale, particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (1924; The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France), Bloch investigated the belief that the kings of France and England possessed the quasi-magical power of curing scrofula (a disease affecting the bones and lymphatic glands) by touching sufferers; in La Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: la religion de Rabelais (1942; The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais), Febvre showed that the French writer and priest Francois Rabelais lived in a mental world in which atheism was not yet possible. These were studies of mentalités, which naturally often lay at the intersection between superstition and religion. Although the field was pioneered by French historians, Anglo-American scholars also studied mentalités; their works were concerned with the history of witchcraft and witch persecutions as well as with the decline in belief in magic.

The 1980s were marked by the emergence of a different kind of cultural history, “microhistory,” which consists essentially of a story about a person or persons. Two famous examples are Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1980), about the unorthodox cosmological and theological beliefs of a 16th-century Italian miller, and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), a scholarly treatment of a famous true story about an imposter who took over the farm (and bed) of a substantial peasant in 16th-century France. Typically, microhistories featured central characters who were socially marginalized—exactly the sort likely to be overlooked by social history no less than by orthodox political history. Nevertheless, the marginal can be defined only relative to the typical, and the latter is something that only social history can provide.

Cultural history can be applied to nearly anything, and it has enriched understanding of a wide variety of phenomena. A good illustration is the French Revolution, one of the most intensively studied events in European history. For at least a century after it took place it was treated as a political breakdown of the ancien régime, facilitated by the spread of the Enlightenment. Later, the economic and social organization of 18th-century France was studied—first by Marxists who saw it as a classic “bourgeois revolution” in which a feudal order was overthrown by a more progressive capitalist one and then by more-nuanced investigators who analyzed the various social and interest groups within the bourgeoisie and nobility. A cultural-historical approach emphasized the important role of cultural symbols—the Great Fear (prompted by rumours of an aristocratic conspiracy to overthrow the Third Estate), the Phrygian cap (an emblem of liberty during the revolution), the planting of “liberty trees,” the great revolutionary festivals (such as the Festival of Federation, held in Paris in 1790 on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille)—and denied that they could be reduced to underlying inequalities and social tensions.

Women’s history

In the 19th century, women’s history would have been inconceivable, because “history” was so closely identified with war, diplomacy, and high politics—from all of which women were virtually excluded. Although there had been notable queens and regents—such as Elizabeth I of England, Catherine de Medici of France, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Christina of Sweden—their gender was considered chiefly when it came to forming marriage alliances or bearing royal heirs. Inevitably, the ambition to write history “from the bottom up” and to bring into focus those marginalized by previous historiography inspired the creation of women’s history.

One of the consequences of the professionalization of history in the 19th century was the exclusion of women from academic history writing. A career like that of Catherine Macaulay (1731–91), one of the more prominent historians of 18th-century England, was impossible one hundred years later, when historical writing had been essentially monopolized by all-male universities and research institutes. This exclusion began to break down in the late 19th century as women’s colleges were founded in England (e.g., at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge) and the United States. Some of these institutions, such as Bryn Mawr College in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, had strong research agendas.

Although the earliest academic women’s historians were drawn to writing about women, it cannot be said that they founded, or even that they were interested in founding, a specialty like “women’s history.” Alice Clark wrote Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1920), and Eileen Power wrote Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 (1922), a definitive monograph, and Medieval Women (published posthumously in 1975). Many women (including some in the early history of the Annales) worked as unpaid research assistants and cowriters for their husbands, and it is doubtless that they were deprived of credit for being historians in their own right. An exception was Mary Ritter Beard (1876–1958), who coauthored a number of books with her more famous husband, Charles Beard, and also wrote Women as a Force in History, arguably the first general work in American women’s history.

Since it was still possible in the 1950s to doubt that there was enough significant evidence on which to develop women’s history, it is not surprising that some of the earliest work was what is called “contribution history.” It focused, in other words, on the illustrious actions of women in occupations traditionally dominated by men. The other preoccupation was the status of women at various times in the past. This was customarily evaluated in terms of comparative incomes, laws about ownership of property, and the degree of social freedom allowed within marriage or to unmarried women. In The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), Gerda Lerner, whose work chiefly concerned women in the United States, examined Mesopotamian society in an attempt to discover the ancient roots of the subjection of women. Explorations of the status of women also contributed to a rethinking of fundamental historical concepts, as in Joan Kelly’s essay Did Women Have a Renaissance? (1977).

Another area of study, which was curiously slow to emerge, was the history of the family. Since in all times most women have been wives and mothers for most of their adult lives, this most nearly universal of female experiences would seem to dictate that women’s historians would be especially interested in the history of the family. Yet for a long time few of them were. The history of the family was inspired primarily not by women’s history but by advances made in historical demography, whose heavy quantification women’s history generally avoided.

This partly explains why the majority of works in women’s history have dealt with unmarried women—as workers for wages, nuns, lesbians, and those involved in passionate friendships. Evidence concerning the lives of these figures is in some ways easier to come by than evidence of maternal and family life, but it is also clear that feminist historians were averse to studying women as victims of matrimony—as they all too often were. There are, however, intersections between history of the family and women’s history. A few historians have written works on family limitation (birth control) in the United States, for example; one of these scholars, Linda Gordon, raised the important question of why suffragists and other feminists did not as a rule support campaigns for family limitation.

Another way in which women’s history can lead to a reassessment of history in general is by analyzing the concept of gender. Joan Scott has taken the lead in this effort. Gender, according to Scott and many others, is a socially constructed category for both men and women, whereas sex is a biological category denoting the presence or absence of certain chromosomes. Even physical differences between the sexes can be exaggerated (all fetuses start out female), but differences in gender are bound to be of greatest interest to historians. Of particular interest to women’s historians are what might be called “gender systems,” which can be engines of oppression for both men and women.

World history

World history is the most recent historical specialty, yet one with roots in remote antiquity. The great world religions that originated in the Middle East—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—insisted on the unity of humanity, a theme encapsulated in the story of Adam and Eve. Buddhism also presumed an ecumenical view of humankind. The universal histories that characterized medieval chronicles proposed a single story line for the human race, governed by divine providence; and these persisted, in far more sophisticated form, in the speculative philosophies of history of Vico and Hegel. Marxism too, although it saw no divine hand in history, nevertheless held out a teleological vision in which all humanity would eventually overcome the miseries arising from class conflict and leave the kingdom of necessity for the kingdom of plenty.

These philosophies have left their mark on world history, yet few historians (except for Marxists) now accept any of these master narratives. This fact, however, leads to a conceptual dilemma: if there is no single story in which all of humanity finds a part, how can there be any coherence in world history? What prevents it from simply being a congeries of national—or at the most regional—histories?

Modernization theorists have embraced one horn of this dilemma. There is, after all, a single story, they argue; it is worldwide Westernization. Acknowledging the worth of non-Western cultures and the great non-European empires of the past, they nevertheless see the lure of Western consumer goods—and the power of multinational corporations—as irresistible. This triumphalist view of Western economic and political institutions drew great new strength from the downfall of the managed economies of eastern Europe and the emergence in China of blatant state capitalism. It is easier to claim worldwide success for capitalism than for democracy, since capitalism has been perfectly compatible with the existence of autocratic governments in Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; but history does suggest that eventually capitalist institutions will give rise to some species of democratic institutions, even though multinational corporations are among the most secretive and hierarchical institutions in Western society.

Modernization theory has been propounded much more enthusiastically by sociologists and political scientists than by historians. Its purest expression was The Dynamics of Modernization (1966), by Cyril Edwin Black, which made its case by studying social indexes of modernization, such as literacy or family limitation over time, in developing countries. Extending this argument in a somewhat Hegelian fashion, the American historian Francis Fukuyama provocatively suggested, in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), that history itself, as traditionally conceived, had ceased. This, of course, meant not that there would be no more events but that the major issues of state formation and economic organization had now been decisively settled in favour of capitalism and democracy. Fukuyama was by no means a simple-minded cheerleader for this denouement; life in a world composed of nothing but liberal nation-states would be, among other things, boring.

A much grimmer aspect of modernization was highlighted by Theodore H. Von Laue (1987) in The World Revolution of Westernization. Von Laue focused on the stresses imposed on the rest of the world by Westernization, which he saw as the root cause of communism, Nazism, dictatorships in developing countries, and terrorism. He declined to forecast whether these strains would continue indefinitely.

The stock objection to modernization theory is that it is Eurocentric. So it is, but this is hardly a refutation of it. That European states (including Russia) and the United States have been the dominant world powers since the 19th century is just as much a fact as that Europe was a somewhat insignificant peninsula of Asia in the 12th century. Some modernization theorists have caused offense by making it clear that they think European dominance is good for everybody, but it is noteworthy how many share the disillusioned view of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who compared the rational bureaucracies that increasingly dominated European society to an “iron cage.” More-valid criticisms point to the simplistic character of modernization theory and to the persistence and even rejuvenation of ostensibly “premodern” features of society—notably religious fundamentalism.

A considerably more complex scheme of analysis, world-systems theory, was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein in The Modern World System (1974). Whereas modernization theory holds that economic development will eventually percolate throughout the world, Wallerstein believed that the most economically active areas largely enriched themselves at the expense of their peripheries. This was an adaptation of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s idea that the struggle between classes in capitalist Europe had been to some degree displaced into the international economy, so that Russia and China filled the role of proletarian countries. Wallerstein’s work was centred on the period when European capitalism first extended itself to Africa and the Americas, but he emphasized that world-systems theory could be applied to earlier systems that Europeans did not dominate. In fact, the economist André Gunder Frank argued for an ancient world-system and therefore an early tension between core and periphery. He also pioneered the application of world-systems theory to the 20th century, holding that “underdevelopment” was not merely a form of lagging behind but resulted from the exploitative economic power of industrialized countries. This “development of underdevelopment,” or “dependency theory,” supplied a plot for world history, but it was one without a happy ending for the majority of humanity. Like modernization theory, world-systems theory has been criticized as Eurocentric. More seriously, the evidence for it has been questioned by many economists, and while it has been fertile in suggesting questions, its answers have been controversial.

A true world history requires that there be connections between different areas of the world, and trade relations constitute one such connection. Historians and sociologists have revealed the early importance of African trade (Columbus visited the west coast of Africa before his voyages to the Americas, and he already saw the possibilities of the slave trade), and they have also illuminated the 13th-century trading system centring on the Indian Ocean, to which Europe was peripheral.

Humans encounter people from far away more often in commercial relationships than in any other, but they exchange more than goods. William H. McNeill, the most eminent world historian, saw these exchanges as the central motif of world history. Technological information is usually coveted by the less adept, and it can often be stolen when it is not offered. Religious ideas can also be objects of exchange. In later work, McNeill investigated the communication of infectious diseases as an important part of the story of the human species. In this he contributed to an increasingly lively field of historical studies that might loosely be called ecological history.

Focusing on the biological substrate of history can sometimes capture a vital element of common humanity. This was an early topic for the Annales historians, who were often trained in geography. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie grounded his great history of the peasants of Languedoc in the soil and climate of that part of France, showing how the human population of the ancien régime was limited by the carrying capacity of the land. He went on to write a history of the climate since the year 1000. Even more influential were the magisterial works of Fernand Braudel (1902–85), perhaps the greatest historian of the 20th century. Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949; The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II) had a political component, but it seemed almost an afterthought. Although it was not a world history, its comprehensive treatment of an entire region comprising Muslim and Christian realms and the fringes of three continents succeeded in showing how they shared a similar environment. The environment assumed an even greater role in Braudel’s Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIIe siècle (vol. 1, 1967; vol. 2–3, 1979; Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century). Although some of its claims seemed designed to shock conventional historical sensibilities—the introduction of forks into Europe, he wrote, was more important than the Reformation—no historical work has done more to explore the entire material base on which civilizations arise

One of the most important links between ecological history and world history is the so-called Columbian exchange, through which pathogens from the Americas entered Europe and those from Europe devastated the indigenous populations of the Americas. The Native Americans got much the worse of this exchange; the population of Mexico suffered catastrophic losses, and that of some Caribbean islands was totally destroyed. The effect on Europeans was much less severe. It is now thought that syphilis entered Europe from Asia, not the Americas.

Overt moralizing in historiography tends to attract professional criticism, and historians in Europe and the United States, where nation-states have long been established, no longer feel the moral obligation that their 19th-century predecessors did to exalt nationalism. They can therefore respond to global concerns, such as the clear-cutting of rainforests and global warming. It has become obvious that the world is a single ecosystem, and this may require and eventually evoke a corresponding world history.

There is, however, a powerful countertendency: subaltern history. Subaltern is a word used by the British army to denote a subordinate officer, and “subaltern studies” was coined by Indian scholars to describe a variety of approaches to the situation of South Asia, in particular in the colonial and postcolonial era. A common feature of these approaches is the claim that, though colonialism ended with the granting of independence to the former colonies of Britain, France, the United States, and other empires, imperialism did not. Instead, the imperial powers continued to exert so much cultural and economic hegemony that the independence of the former colonies was more notional than real. Insisting on free trade (unlimited access to the domestic markets of the former colonies) and anticommunism (usually enforced by autocratic governments), the old empires, as the subaltern theorists saw it, had reverted to the sort of indirect rule that the British had exerted over Argentina and other countries in the 19th century.

The other belief that united subaltern theorists is that this hegemony should be challenged. Orientalism (1978), by the literary critic Edward Said, announced many of the themes of subaltern studies. The Orient that Said discussed was basically the Middle East, and the Orientalism was the body of fact, opinion, and prejudice accumulated by western European scholars in their encounter with it. Said stressed the enormous appetite for this lore, which influenced painting, literature, and anthropology no less than history. It was, of course, heavily coloured by racism, but perhaps the most insidious aspect of it, in Said’s view, was that Western categories not only informed the production of knowledge but also were accepted by the colonized countries (or those nominally independent but culturally subordinate). The importation of Rankean historiography into Japan and Russia is an example. The result has been described rather luridly as epistemological rape, in that the whole cultural stock of colonized peoples came to be discredited.

Although originally and most thoroughly applied to the Middle East and South Asia, subaltern history is capable of extension to any subordinated population, and it has been influential in histories of women and of African Americans. Its main challenge to world history is that most subaltern theorists deny the possibility of any single master narrative that could form a plot for world history. This entails at least a partial break with Marxism, which is exactly such a narrative. Instead, most see a postmodern developing world with a congeries of national or tribal histories, without closures or conventional narratives, whose unity, if it has one at all, was imposed by the imperialist power.

The project of bringing the experience of subordinated people into history has been common in postwar historiography, often in the form of emphasizing their contributions to activities usually associated with elites. Such an effort does not challenge—indeed relies on—ordinary categories of historical understanding and the valuation placed on these activities by society. This has seemed to some subaltern theorists to implicate the historian in the very oppressive system that ought to be combated. The most extreme partisans of this combative stance claim that, in order to resist the hegemonic powers, the way that history is done has to be changed. Some feminists, for example, complain that the dominant system of logic was invented by men and violates the categories of thought most congenial to women. This is one of the reasons for the currency and success of postmodernist and postcolonialist thought. It licenses accounts of the past that call themselves histories but that may deviate wildly from conventional historical practice.

Such histories have been particularly associated with a “nativist” school of subaltern studies that rejects as “Western” the knowledge accumulated under the auspices of imperialism. An instructive example was the effort by Afrocentric historians to emphasize the possible Egyptian and Phoenician origins of classical Greek thought. Martin Bernal, for example, tried to show in Black Athena (1987) that the racist and anti-Semitic Orientalist discourse of the late 19th century (particularly but not exclusively in Germany) obscured the borrowings of the classical Greeks from their Semitic and African neighbours. That there were borrowings, and that Orientalist discourse was racist and anti-Semitic, is beyond doubt, but these are findings made through ordinary historical investigation—whose conventions Bernal did not violate, despite the speculative character of some of his conclusions. How much distortion there was would also seem to be an ordinary, though difficult, historical question (made more difficult by the claim that the Egyptians had an esoteric and unwritten philosophical tradition that has left no documentary traces but that may have been imparted to Greek thinkers). But no historian could accept the claim that Aristotle gained knowledge from the library at Alexandria, since it was not built until after his death. If the idea that effects cannot precede causes is merely a culture-bound presupposition of Western-trained historians, then there is no logical basis for rejecting even a claim such as this. The nativist subaltern historians deserve credit at least for raising this issue (though, of course, not with such extreme examples). However, the price to be paid is high: if there are no logical categories that are not culture-bound, then people from different cultures cannot have a meaningful argument—or agreement—because these require at least some mutual acceptance of what will count as evidence and how reasoning is to be done. Most subaltern historians have therefore steered between the Scylla of contribution history and the Charybdis of nativism, and their emphasis on studying the mass of the people rather than colonial elites has had a powerful effect not only on the history of Asia and Africa but also on that of Europe and even the United States.

Methodology of historiography

This concluding section surveys contemporary historical practice and theory. As the previous section has demonstrated, there are many branches of history today, each with different kinds of evidence, particular canons of interpretation, and distinctive conventions of writing. This diversity has led some to wonder whether the term history still designates an integral body of or approach to knowledge. Although the emphasis of this article falls on what historians share, it is well to remember that deviations from these norms are always lurking.

The historian’s sources

The oldest source, oral history, is also in some ways the newest. As the emphasis of many historians has turned to social history, especially history “from the bottom up,” they have had to create their own evidence through interviews with those shut out of the documentary record. Students of Victorian England have long depended on the interviews with costermongers and other street people by Henry Mayhew, the author of London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vol. (1851–62); without these we would not know of their attitudes toward marriage and organized religion (casual for both). One of the first great collaborative efforts in oral history was the interviews with former African American slaves conducted in the 1930s by researchers working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Although anyone who could remember slavery would by then have been well over 70 years old, the subsequently published interviews nevertheless tapped a rich vein of family stories as well as personal memories. An enterprise on a similar scale is being carried out with survivors of the Holocaust; now, however, thanks to videotaping, one can see the interviews and not merely read edited transcripts of them.

Getting permission to do an interview, and if possible to tape it, is the first task of the oral historian. Arrangements may have to be made to protect confidentiality; elaborate protocols about this have been worked out by anthropologists, which historians may emulate. People remember things that historians have no independent way of discovering; however, they also seem to remember things that did not happen or that happened quite differently. And, of course, they often fail to remember things that did happen. Correcting for the fallibility of memory is the critical task, and for this there is no substitute for preparation. An entire workweek spent preparing for a single interview is none too lavish. If the interviewer knows a good deal already, he may be able to jog or correct an otherwise recalcitrant memory or to know what is reliable and what is not. Except for the tape or video recorder, techniques for verifying oral testimony have perhaps progressed little since Thucydides.

Different techniques are required for investigating the history of peoples who adopted writing only recently. These used to be regarded as “people without history,” but historians are now beginning to isolate the historical content of their oral traditions. Oral epic poetry is still being performed today, in Nigeria, Serbia, and elsewhere, and studying it not only has revealed a great deal about classical epics such as the Iliad but also has shown how remarkable feats of memory could be performed by trained singers of tales, preserving the memory of historical events with much less distortion than was once suspected and recovering at least some of the early history of Africa and America.

The historian confronting written documents can also draw on a long history of criticism. Manuals for beginning historians often dwell on the problem of forged documents, but this is seldom a problem, except occasionally for the medieval historian. A spectacular exception was the alleged diary of Adolf Hitler, a forgery that temporarily deceived the distinguished British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1983. A more formidable challenge is simply to read well. This sometimes starts with learning to read at all. Modern advances in deciphering codes (stimulated by World War II) enabled classicists to translate Linear B, yielding evidence about the Mycenaean language used on Crete in the 2nd millennium BCE. Computerized technology promises to assist in deciphering other languages not presently understood.

A much more usual problem calls for paleography—the study of ancient or medieval handwriting. Once the handwriting styles of past epochs become familiar, anything written by a professional scribe should be legible, but one can expect the wildest variations of spelling and handwriting in personal documents. Printing stabilizes texts but also leads to a long-term decline in handwriting. The British historian Lewis Namier, (1888–1960), who owed much of his success to being able to read the execrable handwriting of the duke of Newcastle, argued that the two “sciences” the historian must know are psychoanalysis and graphology.

Reading is, of course, far more than making out the letters and words. Establishing the plain sense is only the first step; here the pitfalls are unrecognized technical language or terms of art. Also, the words may have changed their meaning since they were written. Furthermore, texts of any length are almost always metaphorical. Irony may be obvious (Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal was not seriously advocating raising Irish babies for the English table), but it may also be so subtle as to escape detection (did Niccolò Machiavelli really intend that his praise for Cesare Borgia be taken seriously?). What is not said is often the most important part of a text. Historians have to establish the genre to which a document belongs in order to begin to attack these hermeneutical questions (a step they sometimes omit, to their peril). Almost all English wills in the early modern period, for example, started with a bequest of the body to the graveyard and the soul to God; omission of this might be highly significant but would be noticed only if one knew what to expect from a will. The British historian G.M. Young said that the ideal historian has read so much about the people he is writing about that he knows what they will say next—a counsel of perfection, no doubt, but a goal to aspire to.

Written documents of quite a different kind have come to prominence in social and economic history. These are administrative records of actions that individually mean little but lend themselves to aggregation over long time spans. Social history differs from sociology, it has been said, by having “long time series and bad data.” Records of dowries, baptisms, bread prices, customs receipts, or direct taxes are typical of such sources, and all of them are bad in their own way. Estimating a population by counting baptisms, for example, is hazardous if priests were negligent in keeping their registers or if the custom of baptism immediately after birth gave way to long delays between birth and baptism (giving the baby a good chance to die before the rite could be performed). Tax evasion is as ancient as taxation, and tax records as indexes of economic activity are likely to measure instead the fluctuation of mercantile honesty or effective law enforcement, not to mention the ever-present possibility that the records were poorly compiled or preserved. Cost-of-living figures are particularly difficult to compute even today and were more so in earlier periods. Records of prices paid usually come from institutions and may not be typical of what individuals bought, especially since they usually did not have to buy everything they ate or used. On the other hand, their wage rates cannot simply be multiplied by the number of hours or days in the working year, since they were seldom lucky enough not to be laid off seasonally or during recessions.

Even if historians find the evidence solid, records like this are usually too numerous not to require sampling, and drawing a truly random sample of historical records is much more complex than when doing survey research. Handbooks of statistics do not always reflect this fact. Nobody would think of undertaking a quantitative study nowadays without a computer (although desk calculators are quite adequate for some projects), and this raises a further difficulty insofar as historical records usually vary so much in terminology that they have to be encoded for computer use. Coding conventions are themselves interpretations, and few quantitative historians have never had occasion to curse themselves for premature or inconsistent coding. There is no foolproof remedy against this, but providing a database and a copy of coding conventions has become the recommended practice to enable other historians to evaluate the work.

Handbooks of historical method at the end of the 19th century assured students that if they mastered the interpretation of written documents, they would have done everything required to be a historian. “No documents, no history,” one said. In this century the notion of a document has been enormously expanded so that any artifact surviving from the past can serve as the answer to some historian’s question. Aerial photography, for example, can reveal settlement patterns long since buried. Napoleon’s hair can be examined to see whether he died a natural death or was poisoned; analysis of Newton’s hair showed that he was an alchemist. The architecture along Vienna’s Ringstrasse can be construed as revealing the ambitions of the liberal bourgeoisie. The history of sexuality cannot be written without the history of clothing—even the nudes in classical paintings pose in postures influenced by the clothes they are not wearing. Indeed, the ordinary things of all kinds to be found in a folk museum are one of the best sources for the everyday life of people in the past.

Artifacts do not usually tell their own stories. When written documents can be juxtaposed to them, the results are more illuminating than either can be by themselves. Unfortunately, virtually the whole training of historians is devoted to reading written texts, so that skill is hypertrophied, while the ability to interpret material objects is underdeveloped. When historians can, for example, accurately describe how the machines of the early Industrial Revolution really worked, they will have met this challenge—which is, of course, a challenge to know almost everything.

Historians today benefit from much more integrated and comprehensive archival and library systems than existed in previous centuries. The state papers of the United States, for example, were not in usable condition in 1933. Thanks again in part to the efforts of WPA workers, great improvements were made in cataloguing and preservation; now a new archive building in suburban Maryland has been built to cope with the tide of documents produced by the U.S. government. The same step has been taken in Britain, and both Britain and France have new national libraries. Less spectacular, but invaluable to many historians, are the local historical societies, county record offices, and the like, which have been established in many countries. These have allowed the collection and preservation of documents that originated in a great variety of places—churches, courts, city and county governments, legal offices, and collections of letters. One of the remarkable developments of the period since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been the widespread sale of public and private records to Western collectors. Libraries such as Yale or the Hoover Institution (at Stanford University) are now in many ways better places to study the Soviet period than any in Russia, and if one can fault the failure of the Russian government to pay its librarians and the wild capitalism of the new Russia for dispersing these treasures, at least they will be safely preserved. They have already answered many questions about how the Soviet Union was run.

The proliferation of libraries and archives illustrates what is in some ways the greatest difficulty with regard to modern sources—there are too many of them. Most discussions of historiography focus on how historians tease out the exiguous meanings of documents when they are very scarce. The problem facing the historian of the 19th century and even more of the 20th is how to cope with the vast array sources open to him. Computers and the Internet have vastly enhanced the speed with which printed sources can be searched—titles of all the books in all the major Western libraries are online—but the historian must know a great many descriptors to do a reasonable subject search. Furthermore, the Internet has brought as much misinformation as information, if not more.

In the 16th and 17th centuries it was taken for granted that the historian would work alone and would usually own many of his books. The library of Göttingen, the pride of 18th-century Germany, would be small even for a new university or a modest liberal-arts college today. Great reputations could be made in the 19th century for the discovery of a new archive (such as Ranke’s discovery of the Venetian relazioni). Nothing like this could possibly happen today, yet such is the conservatism of the historical profession that the model is still the single scholar exhausting the archives. The archives for modern history are inexhaustible, and collaboratively written works, already becoming somewhat common, will almost certainly have to become even more so if historians are to meet their traditional goals of comprehensive research.

From explanation to interpretation

Until quite recently almost everybody who thought about historiography focused on the historian’s struggle with the sources. Philosophers were interested in the grounds they had for claiming to make true statements about the past. This directed their attention to the process of research; it was not unusual to say that after learning “what actually happened,” the historian then faced only the relatively unproblematic process of “writing up” his findings. This emphasis aptly captured the way that historical method is taught and the understanding of their craft (as they like to call it) that historians entertain. Nevertheless, no historian can rest content simply with establishing facts and setting them forth in chronological order. Histories, as opposed to annals and chronicles, must not only establish what happened but also explain why it happened and interpret the significance of the happening.

The slightest familiarity with historical writing shows that historians believe that they are explaining past events. Criticizing the explanations presented by other historians is an integral part of historical scholarship—sometimes carried to such tedious lengths that the actual narrative of events disappears under a tissue of scholastic sludge. However, it is unusual for historians to question what constitutes a historical explanation. A few abnormally reflective ones—and those few philosophers who have turned their attention to thinking about history—have demonstrated that this is not a simple task.

One philosophical school, logical positivism (also called logical empiricism), held that all other scholarly disciplines should offer explanations like those of physics, the most advanced (and mathematicized) science. The model of historical explanation was illustrated by the bursting of the radiator in an automobile. Explanation of this mishap went as follows: first, certain “boundary conditions” have to be specified—the radiator was made of iron and filled with water without antifreeze, and the car was left in the driveway when the temperature fell below freezing. The explanation consists in enumerating the relevant boundary conditions and then adducing the appropriate “covering” laws—in this case, that water expands as it freezes and the tensile strength of iron makes it too brittle to expand as much as the water does. These are, of course, laws of physics, not of history.

This certainly explains why the radiator of this car burst; such things always happen when a radiator full of water without antifreeze is exposed to subfreezing weather. Scientific explanations are also predictions: “why?” also means “on what occasions?” But is this a historical explanation? A historian would want to go well beyond it; for him the real question would be why the owner exposed the car in this manner. Was he unaware of what happens to unprotected cars in such temperatures? Unlikely. Did he, wrongly, think that he had put antifreeze in the car? Or was he misled by a faulty weather forecast?

Questions like these made historians disinclined to accept this as an example of a satisfactory historical explanation. The author of the example, the philosopher Carl Hempel, granted as much. As he understood, historians do not explain but give “explanation sketches” that have to be filled out before they attain that dignity. One prodigious difficulty is that no covering laws of history have been discovered. One candidate for such a law is, “Whenever two armies, one much larger than the other but equally well led, meet in battle, the larger one always prevails.” The difficulty with this is that there are no independent standards for evaluating leadership. There are examples of much smaller armies beating larger ones, and one counterexample is enough to disconfirm a law. If one tries to save the law by saying that, in those cases, the armies were not equally well led, the argument becomes circular. Another candidate for a historical law is, “Full employment and stable prices cannot exist at the same time.” Some would argue that these supposedly incompatible conditions were achieved in the U.S. economy in 1997. It all depends on how full employment is defined. It is an additional complication that this law, if it is a law, may be restricted in its application to capitalism.

For many years the lack of well-warranted covering laws seemed to be the chief difficulty with this conception of historical explanation, but chaos theory has recently raised another problem: the boundary conditions cannot be exactly specified. Even a minute and imperceptible variation in the original state of a system may have large and entirely unpredictable consequences at some time in its future state. (This is picturesquely dramatized in the image of a butterfly sneezing in Africa and the ensuing hurricane in Florida.)

Hempel subsequently modified his position by substituting high probabilities for invariable laws. In other words, an event might be explained by showing that, under these conditions, the outcome was what usually or almost always happened. This maneuver gave up the ideal of the unity of scientific explanation—that explanation in history would have the same logical structure as that in physics—because showing what almost always happens does not explain why, for this particular event, the outcome was the more- rather than the less-usual one. On the other hand, many generalizations in history have a high degree of probability but are not certain—including the likely result of going into battle with far inferior forces. It is also highly useful to know whether outcomes were almost certainly going to occur or whether they were complete surprises. And it is worthwhile trying to discover more such generalizations.

Such generalizations in fact play an important part in the other principal account of historical explanation, which focuses on the reasoning processes and intentions of historical actors. This approach is more congenial to historians than the one that attempts to work with historical laws, and it has been formulated by philosophers who were either historians themselves (R.G. Collingwood) or particularly acquainted with historical work (William Dray and Louis Mink). Its classic statement, by Collingwood, was that the historian’s “why?” is not “on what occasions?” but “what did he think, that made him do it?” Collingwood believed that the historian could rethink the thoughts of the actor (as one can work out the same geometrical reasoning as Pythagoras); thus, historical knowledge could be based on a kind of acquaintance. Although Collingwood did not discount the presence of irrational elements in historical action, other historians put more emphasis on understanding these elements through empathy or intuition.

It is difficult for explanations of this kind to avoid a kind of circularity. People deliberating on an action usually have reasons to do more than one thing, and they are very seldom in the habit of leaving a written record of their deliberations. Consequently, the historian almost always has to work backward, from what was done to the reasons for doing it. But the evidence that these were the reasons for doing it is that it was done. So what is supposed to explain an action is instead explained by it. The “logic of the situation”—showing that, under the circumstances, what was done was the right or reasonable thing to do—is commonly advanced as an explanation by historians, and it can undoubtedly be convincing if one is not too fussy about what constitutes an explanation. But this means that the explanation is plausible or persuasive, not logically compelling—in other words, it signals a shift toward rhetoric.

Most of what philosophers and historians have thought about explanation has centred on how to explain single events or actions. History, however, is about far more than these, and historical writing in the 20th century moved steadily away from emphasizing individual action and toward the history of large-scale social structures. Furthermore, history is not composed of well-thought-out actions that accomplish their goals; it is instead full of the unintended consequences of actions. These result from social processes that obviously were not anticipated or understood by the actor. While the existence of unintended outcomes obviously poses insuperable difficulties for explanations in terms of individual intentions, it is exactly what theories of universal history are equipped to explain. The first articulation of the providential theory, Genesis 50:20, shows that Joseph’s envious brothers had inadvertently performed God’s will when they sold him into slavery, since he rose to high office in Egypt, managed the food supply so as to avert famine, and so had food to give his brothers. As Joseph says to them, “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive.”

In a similar vein, Vico’s “rational civil theology” recognizes that “men have themselves made this world of nations” but goes on to assert that “this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves, which narrow ends, made means to serve wider ends, it has always employed to preserve the human race upon this earth.” Intending just to gratify lust, humans create the institution of marriage; intending to exert power over others, they wind up with civil laws.

Much the same argument can be found in Adam Smith’s notion of the invisible hand, which produces for society the optimum distribution of goods even though homo economicus acts totally selfishly. Hegel’s great men, or world-historical individuals, such as Alexander the Great and Napoleon, are similarly moved only by ambition, but the result of their actions furthers the development of Spirit in spreading Greek culture and a rational code of law. Hegel calls this the “cunning of Reason.” Finally, for Marx, individual capitalists, and the bourgeoisie as a class, act only to increase their power and perpetuate their profits, but the result of their actions is inevitably to increase the number and misery of the proletarians who will eventually overthrow them.

Theories like this necessarily suggest that history is being made behind the backs (or over the heads) of actual humans, since they cannot “make history” by achieving the goals of their actions. It appears that some sort of commitment of faith is required to accept one of these master narratives. God, or a cosmic teleology, is the ultimate explanation of everything, which means that there is nothing that cannot be explained in those terms. Logicians, however, say that universal explanations are vacuous, since nothing could happen that would show that the explanatory principle was inapplicable.

There are thus serious difficulties with explanation by laws, by intentions, or by appeal to providence or teleology. If historians believe they are explaining things, it might be that they pay little attention to these philosophical arguments, or it might be that they tacitly abandon the goal of giving a logically compelling explanation and settle for one that is highly plausible. A third possibility is that they looked in the wrong place for a warrant for their explanations. Perhaps they should have looked to the explanatory power of narratives.

During the ascendancy of social-scientific approaches to history, narratives acquired a bad name. The term suggested the logical fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc—the belief that simply arranging things in chronological order proved a causal sequence. As the quantifiers suffered various reverses, some of their old supporters moved back to the claim that constructing a narrative was essential to the historian’s activity and that narratives could convey understanding of the past in a distinctive fashion. If so, the autonomy of history as a discipline could be defended against the charge that it was a defective science.

During the 1970s in particular, there was a surge of interest in narrative throughout the human sciences, including anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Literary critics developed “narratology,” the systematic study of narratives, especially novels and histories. In the process they greatly enriched the simple Aristotelian notion of narratives, making it possible to see that many histories, including quantitative ones, were narratives that achieved their persuasive effects in part because they were narratives. Many features of historical interpretation could be understood as properties of narratives. The choice of central subject, the decision as to when to begin and when to end the story, the characterization of the principal actors, the drawing out of moral import, and the identification of turning points are all activities that both historians and novelists perform.

The cogency of the analysis of historical narrative was enhanced by emphasizing that historians use ordinary language. Although they may borrow technical words from other disciplines, they are committed to words such as so, hence, thus, and therefore and hence to the causal linkages that these words imply. Similarly, there is no way to purge ordinary language of its normative connotations. It is therefore vain to dream of a value-free historiography or one free of any causal inferences.

One might expect the rehabilitation of narrative, even more than the emphasis on explanation through intentions of the actors, to give historians a sense that theoreticians of history were finally attending carefully to actual historical practice. As it turned out, the reaction of historians was less than enthusiastic. Narrative might convey understanding, but its advocates usually avoided using words such as explanation. There seemed to be no way for explanations to be anything more than highly plausible.

Insofar as histories interpret rather than explain, there appears to be no way to escape a relativism that would qualify, if not altogether subvert, any claim that histories are true. Proposed explanations can be contrasted and argued about, with the aim of reaching the true explanation; interpretations can be more or less plausible, deep, or ingenious but not true to the exclusion of every other possible interpretation. In the construction of narrative, Hayden White pointed out, a fictive element is inevitably introduced. The historical narrative should consist only of true statements (that is, those most consonant with the appropriate evidence), but in making them into a narrative the historian draws on the same sorts of plots and metaphors that are common to generic narratives. Their readers are prepared to believe them not just because they accept that all the individual statements are true but also because they respond to the story elements common to their culture. Making an even more relativistic claim, White argued that the same set of events could be worked up into different histories, each containing nothing but true statements and thus not vulnerable on empirical grounds but informed by different tropes and “emplotted” in a variety of ways. What looked to one historian like a comedy might seem to another a romance. His position was not that no one true history could be written—the extreme skeptical view of René Descartes—but that a variety of true histories could be written about the same events. This variety is inevitable in the absence of an acceptable master narrative, which would allow stories to be fitted together so as to make them episodes in one overarching narrative.

For generations historians have posed this rather silly question: Is history an art or a science? Usually the comforting answer has been: Both. But in the late 20th century critics said: Neither. History certainly does not meet the criteria for being called a science in the rigorous sense of the word common in the Anglo-Saxon world. It has no laws, no essential use of mathematics, and no technical language that might stand in for mathematics. In the more lenient definition of science (scienza, Wissenschaft) found in Continental languages, it is, because it has a recognizable body of practitioners and generally accepted protocols for validating its claims to truth. The story of how these have developed has taken up much of this article, and there is no reason to downplay their usefulness. But one should not ask too much of history; it cannot be, as many 19th-century thinkers hoped, the master science. Before placing that crown on some other discipline (anthropology, say, or biology), however, a careful study of their epistemological problems and pretensions should be made.

The presentation of history

This theme naturally leads to an exploration of the artistic elements in history. It is as naive to think of the historian merely writing up findings as to picture him handing over facts to the sociologist to be allocated to the proper laws. Some idea of the literary forms that history might take are present throughout the research process, but they are also to a degree controlled by that process.

Although Aristotle said that it made no difference to the essence of a history whether it was in prose or in verse, no truly historical epic poem has ever been written. Historians do not even go in for ballads, nor is one likely to see them trying their hands at history painting or writing librettos for operas. The vast majority of historical writing will thus be discursive prose works, though the chance that some of their words may be performed by actors is greater now than it once was.

Writing with wit and elegance is like moving with speed for an athlete—it cannot be coached. Anyone, however, can learn to write clear, plain prose. Luckily, that is what colleagues and even the general public expect from historians. Besides mastering the rules that books—or computer programs—recommend for this style, such as avoiding passive verbs, substituting short or at least Germanic for Latinate words where possible, and the like, there are some problems peculiar to historical writing.

One is how much of the sources to quote. The American historian Jack Hexter wrote entertainingly about this issue, pointing out that excessive quotation breaks up the flow of the narrative and introduces discordant voices into the text. On the other hand, there are times when a point can be made only with the exact words of a source. There is no rule that shows where the happy medium lies, and this is one of the facts that justify calling history a craft. Another case for tact and discrimination is the use of footnotes. Here good writers recommend not showing off. The reader is entitled to some way of seeing how accurately the historian has interpreted—or quoted—the evidence, but footnotes should not be overlong and in particular should not be converted into minibibliographies, especially when these have as one purpose to show how many books and articles the historian has read (or wants to persuade the reader that he has read).

It seems only too obvious to say that the historian should write accurately, but this is not a simple matter. Lack of a technical vocabulary is often interpreted as a defect of history, but it need not be so. Quantitative findings, for example, look more “scientific” if they are presented as percentages, but besides the necessity to present some measure giving variation from central tendency, such as standard deviations, very few historical sources lend themselves to the sort of accuracy that makes 63.8 percent any more accurate than nearly two-thirds. Wherever possible, quantitative series should be presented graphically; nothing is drearier, as Hexter notes, than attempting to write out a series of numbers in prose. The moral judgments and causal statements in historical writing are also criticized as vague, but they may be precise enough for ambiguous situations, where moral responsibility may be distributed among a number of agents or the precise relationship between causes and preconditions is tangled. Historians can take heart from the failure of translation machines to cope with all the nuances possible in natural languages.

So advice about how to write history is readily available, but historians may lack motivation. The reward structure of the profession certainly affords few incentives to learn good writing. Graduate training overwhelmingly concentrates on research techniques; courses in writing for historians are rare and almost never compulsory. The other guarantor of literary quality, copyediting, is becoming a lost art. It is apparently considered too expensive by trade publishers, and even university presses tend to farm it out as a cottage industry, without consistent quality control. Furthermore, most historians today in almost every country write mainly or only for other historians. To be qualified for lifetime employment, a historian must produce works of original research—as many as possible—that are favourably evaluated by peers. Other professionals, in other words, are the primary audience for which the young historian must write. They may not prize literary skill very highly in comparison with demonstrated mastery of the sources, and they already know many things that would have to be explained to general readers.

It is increasingly expected that a young historian in search of a tenured teaching position will publish not only a first book, based on a doctoral thesis, but also a second and usually more ambitious one. In this respect American universities are beginning to approximate the expectation of two theses long common in French and German ones.

Insistence on early and copious production militates against choosing themes of general interest, because it takes much longer to write books about those. The professionalization of history and the invariably accompanying division of labour have also meant that historians focus on smaller segments of the historical record. Nor are they immune to the lure of the “MPU,” or minimum publishable unit—the smallest bit of a project that an editor will accept and that, duly noted in a curriculum vitae, will reassure department chairs or funding agencies of one’s continuing scholarly vitality.

Collaborative research may be one remedy against this tendency to know more and more about less and less, but collaborative writing, absent divine aid, is unlikely to achieve outstanding literary merit. (According to legend, the 70 translators of the Hebrew Bible into Greek all came up with identical texts; the only example of a great literary work done by committee is the King James translation of the Bible.)

Historians consequently find themselves in a paradoxical position. Public interest in the past has seldom been higher. Some is in the nostalgic mode, and this can be expected to increase as the percentage of elderly people in the population rises. Some is in the service of political agendas, sometimes for entirely understandable reasons; for example, Jews are determined that nobody forget the Holocaust, and defenders of capitalism will continue to note that the Soviet experiment turned out badly. In addition, now that it is customary for everyone to call his ethnic background a “heritage,” the commemoration and celebration of ancestors is a growth industry.

One of the more bizarre manifestations of historical interest has been the apology. The prime minister of Britain, for example, apologized for the inaction of Britain during the great Irish famine, and the pope apologized for the 16th-century St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (actually committed by the French monarch).

Interest in history also benefits from the insatiable demand of the media for “product,” which has vastly strained the capacity of writers to meet it with purely invented materials. Thus, the “docudrama,” “nonfiction novel,” and television miniseries “ based on a true story” have proliferated to supplement the flagging imaginations of the fabulators. All this has been going on while interest in academic history appears to be declining, if figures for undergraduate enrollments or academic appointments are a fair indicator.

This paradox is both a challenge and an opportunity for academic historians. They are unlikely to see a repetition of the publishing success of Thomas Macaulay’s History of England (1849–61)—significantly, not by a professional historian—but the capacity to write for the general public is not intrinsically incompatible with holding university appointments.

The challenge to historical writing for a wider readership is clear. Few historians are taught to do it; many feel they do not need to do it; and professional rewards are not given for doing it. Yet some historians are not content to leave presentation of accounts of the past to novelists and filmmakers and are responding to some of the opportunities presented by the public interest in history. Some of them are relaxing the conventions of historical writing in the interests of greater liveliness. Historians are taught, for example, never to use first-person singular or second-person pronouns. By banishing “I”—“the most disgusting pronoun,” according to Gibbon—from the text, the historian can make it appear that an omniscient observer has written it. The great Marc Bloch, however, advocated bringing the reader into the research process by recounting the difficulties and occasional triumphs that the author experienced, not only helping to signal what is well-grounded and what is more speculative but also, if well done, sharing some of the puzzle-solving excitement that inspires people to be historians in the first place.

Another convention, in place only since the professionalization in the 19th century, forbids historians to quote anything but the actual words spoken by their subjects. Even the invented speeches of Thucydides, so scrupulously identified as such, fell under this ban. However, Garrett Mattingly (1900–62), generally regarded as the master of historical narrative among American historians, enlivened his work with speeches he wrote and attributed to historical characters—without always identifying them as invented. Other historians are now following his example. The results have not always been happy, because writing convincing dialogue is difficult, but since historians often claim to re-create the inner thoughts of people they are writing about, creating dialogue for them is no more speculative than creating indirect speech.

The ability to create convincing dialogue for historical characters is essential to creators of historical plays, movies, and television series. These creators have often, for historians, been all too creative—though even the fantasies of some modern movies are models of accuracy compared with some famous historical plays. (In Friedrich von Schiller’s Maid of Orleans, for example, Joan of Arc dies in battle.) In the 1990s an American cable channel showed films about the past with commentary afterward from a panel of historians, who usually pointed out what liberties had been taken with the historical record rather than criticizing the aesthetic impact of the film. Obviously, a more satisfactory solution would be for historians to be more proactive. Natalie Zemon Davis served as the historical counselor for a movie version of the Martin Guerre story. Her services were not confined merely to ascertaining the authenticity of the props—something Hollywood studios were quite meticulous about—but extended to working with the actors on their characterizations and with the director on the plot. French directors have often worked with historical counselors; it is a practice that would improve the historical literacy of American audiences.

The technological advances of the 21st century will undoubtedly bring new opportunities for the presentation of history. In the early 2000s there was already an interactive video game whose premise was that an evil woman has torn out the pages of the book in which human history is inscribed and substituted false information for them. The player, armed with a reference work, must replace the falsehoods with the correct information supplied by that work. The game is an apt allegory. Time itself has done its best to efface knowledge of the human past and has allowed ideologically distorted versions of that past to flourish instead. The historian’s task is to defeat time and the loss or deceits of memory. Unfortunately, there is no data bank of infallible truths to which one can have recourse—but that simply means that the game is never over.

There may come a time when it no longer seems worth playing, as some postmodernist thinkers have suggested—though postmodernism defines itself as post through a historical judgment. Historical thought, turned on itself, shows that history has not always existed, nor is it found in every culture. Historians, of all people, are reluctant to pose as prophets, because they know best how various are the twists and turns of human events. It is therefore impossible to find a conclusive argument against the suggestion of Foucault that history, like the human subject, will prove to be a transitory conception.

Postmodernism taught that texts allow many interpretations and that there is nothing other than the text. Its attacks on “essentialism” made it much harder to use “history” in such a way as to attribute will or agency to it, or even a capacity to teach. (Here Hegel had anticipated this position by saying that all one can learn from history is that humans have never learned from history.) Historians cannot make the grandiose claims for their discipline that were credible in the 19th century. Nevertheless, they know that there was a Holocaust, and they know that, despite Joseph Stalin’s efforts to make him an “unperson,” Leon Trotsky played some role in the Russian Revolution. Also, it makes quite a difference whether there was a Holocaust or not. This is reducing the case against total relativism or constructivism to truisms, but truisms are nonetheless true. It is hard to imagine that humanity’s grasp of the past, so laboriously achieved and tenuous as it is, would lightly be loosened.