HISTORIOGRAPHY

the writing of history, especially the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particulars from the authentic materials in those sources, and the synthesis of those particulars into a narrative that will stand the test of critical methods. The term historiography also refers to the theory and history of historical writing. Two major tendencies in the writing of history are evident from the beginnings of the Western tradition: the concept of historiography as an accumulation of records and the concept of history as storytelling, filled with explanations of cause and effect. Before Herodotus, the historical tradition in Greece was based on myths and the epic tradition; and in Egypt and Babylon it consisted of genealogical records and commemorative archives. In the 5th century BC the Greek historians Herodotus and, later, Thucydides emphasized firsthand inquiry in their efforts to impose a narrative pattern on wars and major political events. As examples of literary art, their critical accounts are interesting and dramatically unified, though sometimes at the expense of truth or verifiability of evidence. Impartiality was at least a goal, if it was not always achieved; and biased accounts are more likely among the Romans, whose historians generally were members of the ruling class and thus were hardly disinterested. The dominance of Christian historiography by the 4th century introduced the idea of world history as the result of divine intervention in the affairs of men and women, an idea that was to prevail throughout the Middle Ages. One result of this view was the creation of a unified chronology that reconciled all history around the birth of Christ. In the early Middle Ages in the West, the Christian monastic historians mingled fact and myth in their accounts, as in Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th-century history, which attempts to single out the Celts as receivers of the world's destiny. The strengths of medieval historiography are its occasional accounts of witnessed contemporary events and frequent quotations from official documents. The major contributions of Byzantine historiography were its strong lay tradition, which resulted in contemporary histories, biographies, and popular chronicles, and its preservation of and emulation of the Greco-Roman classical models, which resulted in the continuation of Greek learning and culture. The Byzantine tradition's most important achievement lay in its revival of the concept of critical history: attention thus was paid to rational analysis, to cause and effect. The Renaissance brought about an awareness of historical change, although this awareness meant regarding the Middle Ages as a period of decline. Renaissance historiographers tended to regard the preceding period as unimportant, even benighted; hence the origin of the three-part division of all history into ancient, medieval, and modern. The two main influences on historiography in the early modern period were nationalism (as manifested in the concept of national history) and the Reformation. In the latter rupture, conflicting claims to doctrinal validity led to the study of original church history. The new historiography of the Enlightenment resulted from the wish to transfer the objective and impartial methods of natural science to the analysis and improvement of human social structures. The 19th and 20th centuries have seen the development of modern methods of historical investigation; the basis of these is the authentication, interpretation, and critical evaluation of historical documents and earlier historiographic writings, and the synthesis of these materials into an accurate narrative or analysis of the past. Modern historiography has largely become the province of professional historians who acquire a knowledge of their discipline through specialized higher education. Modern historiography is a cooperative venture in which the achievements of past historians are used systematically by their successors in a continuously expanding and changing reevaluation of the past. the writing of history, especially the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particulars from the authentic materials in those sources, and the synthesis of those particulars into a narrative that will stand the test of critical methods. 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. 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 was more appropriately the function of religion, of philosophy, even perhaps of poetry and other imaginative literature. Additional reading C.V. Langlois and C. Seignobos, Introduction aux tudes historiques (1898; Eng. trans., Introduction to the Study of History, 1898); Harold Temperley (ed.), Selected Essays of J.B. Bury (1930, reprinted 1964); James T. Shotwell, The History of History (1939); James W. Thompson and Bernard J. Holm, A History of Historical Writing, 2 vol. (1942); Robin G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946); Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past (1955); John W. Miller, The Philosophy of History with Reflections and Aphorisms (1981); Agnes Heller, A Theory of History (1982).J.B. Bury, The Ancient Greek Historians (1909, reprinted 1958); M.L.W. Laistner, The Greater Roman Historians (1947, reprinted 1963); Moses I. Finley (ed.), The Greek Historians (1959), selected passages in translation with a valuable introduction; Maurice Platnauer (ed.), Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship (1954; rev. ed. with appendixes, Fifty Years (and Twelve) of Classical Scholarship, 1968), especially chapters 6 by G.T. Griffith and 13 by A.H. MacDonald; Arnaldo Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (1966), a selection from his vast collection of valuable articles in Contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, 5 vol. (195969); T.A. Dorey (ed.), Latin Historians (1966) and Latin Biography (1967); John Barker, The Superhistorians: Makers of Our Past (1982).Gyula Moravcsik, Byzantinoturcica, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (1958), not always reliable in its judgments. There is no satisfactory study in English. There is much useful information in the appendixes to J.B. Bury's edition of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 7 vol. (18961900, reprinted 190914).Thomas F. Tout, The Study of Mediaeval Chronicles, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 6:414438 (1921), reprinted in The Collected Papers of Thomas Frederick Tout, 3 vol. (193234); Reginald L. Poole, Chronicles and Annals (1926); M.L.W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe, A.D. 500 to 900, new ed. (1957); Charles H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927); Ralph H.C. Davis and John M. Wallace-Hadrill (eds.), The Writing of History in the Middle Ages (1981).Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (1948); Denys Hay, Flavio Biondo and the Middle Ages, Proceedings of the British Academy, 45:97128 (1960); Myron Gilmore, Humanists and Jurists (1963); Paul O. Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, ch. 2 (1964), on Valla; Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (1965); Ida Maier, Ange Politien (1966); L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (1968); Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (1969); E.J. Kenney, The Character of Humanist Philology, in R.R. Bolgar (ed.), Classical Influences on European Culture, A.D. 5001500 (1971).J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957), also valuable for France; Herbert Butterfield, The History of Historiography and the History of Science, Mlanges Alexandre Koyr, vol. 2 (1964); and Delays and Paradoxes in the Development of Historiography, in Kenneth Bourne and D.C. Watt (ed.), Studies in International History: Essays Presented to W. Norton Medlicott (1967); Glanmor Williams, Reformation Views of Church History (1970); Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (1970); May McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (1971); G. Strauss, The Course of German History: The Lutheran Interpretation, in Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (eds.), Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (1971).David C. Douglas, English Scholars, 16601730, 2nd rev. ed. (1951); Martin L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England, 17001830 (1945); David Knowles, Jean Mabillon, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 10, no. 2 (1959), and Great Historical Enterprises (1962); Christopher Dawson, Edward Gibbon, Proceedings of the British Academy, 20:159180 (1934); and Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , 6 vol. (177686, best modern edition by J.B. Bury, op. cit.); Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 27:166787 (1963), and The Idea of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in The Age of the Enlightenment (1967).J.G.D. Clark, Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis, rev. ed. (1962); O.G.S. Crawford, Archaeology in the Field (1953); J.G.D. Clark, World Prehistory (1960); Charles Samaran (ed.), L'Histoire et ses mthodes, vol. 11 of the Encyclopdie de la Pliade (1961); Vivian H. Galbraith, An Introduction to the Study of History (1964).Arthur M. Schlesinger (ed.), Historical Scholarship in America (1932); William T. Hutchinson (ed.), The Marcus W. Jernegan Essays in American Historiography (1937); Hugh H. Bellot, American History and American Historians (1952); Donald Sheehan and Harold C. Syrett (eds.), Essays in American Historiography: Papers Presented in Honor of Allan Nevins (1960); John Higham (ed.), The Reconstruction of American History (1962); Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War, 2nd ed. (1962); Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians, Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968); Marcus Cunliffe and Robin W. Winks (eds.), Pastmasters: Some Essays on American Historians (1969); C.L. Sonnigsen, The Ambidextrous Historian: Historical Writers and Writing in the American West (1983).Lord Acton, Historical Essays and Studies (1907), see especially German Schools of History; J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (1920, reprinted 1960); Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (1940), especially for French historiography; Pieter Geyl, Napoleon, voor en tegen in de Franse geschiedschrijving (1946; Eng. trans., Napoleon, For and Against, 1949); Some Modern Historians of Britain: Essays in Honour of R.L. Schuyler (1951); G.P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd rev. ed. (1952); Ferdinand Schevill, Six Historians (1956), particularly interesting on Ranke; Georg G. Iggers, The Image of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought, in History and Theory, 2: 17123 (1962); and The German Conception of History (1968); Henry E. Bell, Maitland: A Critical Examination and Assessment (1965); Frederick M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (1965); John Cannon (ed.), The Historian at Work (1980); J.W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (1981).Eugene N. Anderson, Meinecke's Ideengeschichte and the Crisis in Historical Thinking, in Medieval and Historiographical Essays in Honor of James Westfall Thompson (1938); Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l'histoire; ou, Mtier d'historien (1949; Eng. trans., The Historian's Craft, 1953); Architects and Craftsmen in History: Festschrift fr Abbott Payson Usher (1956), biographies of leading historians; Jack H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (1961); Richard Pares, The Historian's Business, and Other Essays (1961), particularly valuable for the works of Arnold Toynbee; Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsrson in der neueren Geschichte (1957; Eng. trans., Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d'tat and Its Place in Modern History, 1957); Donald C. Watt (ed.), Contemporary History in Europe (1968); Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present (1981).On Russian historiography there is no satisfactory general survey in English. The following can be useful for particular periods or historians: Anatole G. Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 2nd ed. (1958); Alexander S. Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture: A History to 1860 (1963); and Richard Pipes (trans.), Karamzin's Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia (1966); John S. Curtiss (ed.), Essays in Russian and Soviet History, in Honor of Gerold Tanquary Robinson (1962), especially on Semevsky; Alan D. Ferguson and Alfred Levin (eds.), Essays in Russian History: A Collection Dedicated to George Vernadsky (1964); John Keep and Liliana Brisby (eds.), Contemporary History in the Soviet Mirror (1964).Franz Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography, 2nd rev. ed. (1968).William G. Beasley and E.G. Pulleyblank, Historians of China and Japan (1961); Charles S. Gardner, Chinese Traditional Historiography (1938, reprinted 1961). History of historiography 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 144546), 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 mankindsuch concepts belong to the 18th centurybut 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 (130474), 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 (148994), 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 Digestthat 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 Bud, 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. 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.