History and Historiography

F

The Antiquarians and Enlightenment History

The classical traditions of history writing had emphasized literary skill and the reinterpretation of history at the expense of basic research. From the 16th century onward, many scholars throughout Europe devoted their lives to the laborious, systematic collection of the sources for their national and religious histories. The French Benedictines, notably Jean Mabillon and Bernard de Montfaucon, began the exhaustive examination and publication of the sources of ecclesiastical history. Ludovico Muratori collected the sources for Italian history. Gottfried W. Leibniz compiled the annals of medieval Germany, and the Austrian Joseph Eckhel established the field of numismatics. Sir William Dugdale, Bishop Thomas Tanner, and Thomas Hearne collected documents and inscriptions in England and edited medieval annals. These examples represent only a few of the many antiquarians, or érudits, whose scrupulous work preserved the sources of historical knowledge and created and defined the major fields of critical research such as diplomatics, numismatics, and archaeology.

The same uncompromising attention to detail and method that was the highest accomplishment of erudition, however, separated the antiquarians, in method and sympathy, from the newest developments of 18th-century historiography—the philosophic history inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment. Voltaire recharged the literary traditions of historiography with the excitement of his provocative rationalism. He ignored the classical focus on politics and included all facets of civilization in a historiography of sweeping intellectual scope but displayed rather cavalier impatience with learned detail. Enlightenment historians, such as Montesquieu, David Hume, William Robertson, and the marquis de Condorcet continued the bolder philosophic conception of history and the philosophers' careless evaluation of evidence. Edward Gibbon combined a deep respect for antiquarian research with Enlightenment élan and great literary gifts to produce The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), which set a standard for historical writing.

G

The 19th Century

With the work and influence of Leopold von Ranke, history achieved its identity as an independent academic discipline with its own critical method and approach, requiring rigorous preparation. Ranke insisted on dispassionate objectivity as the historian's proper point of view and made consultation of contemporary sources a law of historical construction. He substantially advanced the criticism of sources beyond the achievements of the antiquarians by making consideration of the historical circumstances of the writer the key to the evaluation of documents. This combination of the neutral, nonpartisan approach (at least as an ideal) with the acute realization that all observers are the products of their specific time and place and are thus necessarily subjective recorders promised to break history's ancient connection to the intuitive literary arts and align it with modern scientific research. Many modern historians trace the intellectual foundations of their discipline to this development of the 19th-century German universities, which influenced historical scholarship throughout Europe and America.

French interest in the history of civilization was sustained by François Guizot, and the new scientific methods were applied to medieval history by Fustel de Coulanges. In England, Thomas Macaulay's brilliant style continued the Enlightenment mode of a personal, essaylike history, but more exacting methods were applied in the universities. With colleagues and students at the University of Oxford, William Stubbs established English history on foundations of a thorough examination of sources, a movement carried forward by Samuel R. Gardiner and Frederick W. Maitland. George Bancroft was the first notable writer of U.S. history, and American universities in his time increasingly accepted the influence of German methods. By the 20th century, history was firmly established in European and American universities as a professional field, resting on exact methods and making productive use of archival collections and new sources of evidence.

---

---

H

Current Trends

The divisive effects of two world wars, which undermined the ideal of a common international enterprise informed by an internationally acceptable point of view, and the increasing specialization and variety within the historical discipline itself have left history in much the same state of complex and divided purpose that marks all contemporary intellectual life. The earlier optimism that promised imminent recovery of the truth of the past has been replaced by the belief that no accumulation of facts constitutes history as an intelligible structure, and no historian, however free from crude bias, can be a totally neutral, impersonal recorder of an objective reality. Furthermore, the scope of history has expanded immeasurably, in time, as archaeology and anthropology have provided knowledge of earlier ages, and in breadth, as fields of inquiry entirely unknown in the past (such as economic history, psychohistory, history of ideas, of family structures, and of peasant societies) have emerged and refined their methods and goals. To many scholars, national history has come to seem an outmoded, culture-bound approach, although history written on thoroughly international assumptions is extremely difficult to achieve.

Historians have looked more and more to the social sciences—sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics—for new methods and forms of explanation; the sophisticated use of quantitative data has become the accepted approach to economic and demographic studies. The influence of Marxist theories of economic and social development remains vital and contentious, as does the application of psychoanalytic theory to history. At the same time, many scholars have turned with sharpened interest to the theoretical foundations of historical knowledge and are reconsidering the relation between imaginative literature and history, with the possibility emerging that history may after all be the literary art that works upon scholarly material.

V

Non-Western Historiography

Many Asian peoples have traditions of historical writing that date back many centuries. Perhaps the most familiar to Westerners is the Jewish tradition as known from the Bible. Others, however, are noteworthy.

A

Muslim

Like that of the ancient Jews, Muslim interest in historiography was derived from and strongly influenced by religious belief. The Prophet Muhammad, regarded as the successor to the Jewish and Christian prophets, imbued Islam with a strong sense of history. By the 8th and 9th centuries, both theologians and historians were engaged in writing an authoritative record of Muhammad's life and teaching. Al-Tabari wrote a History of Prophets and Kings that became the accepted source for early Islamic history. Muslim historians characteristically record the lives of devout men and scholars in preference to political and military leaders, regarding the lives of the devout as a surer measure of the spiritual progress of society. Biographical dictionaries have thus had a long and important tradition, beginning with those that record the lives of the companions of Muhammad.

In the 14th century Ibn Khaldun wrote a universal history that reveals the extraordinary extent of his learning and his unusual ability to conceive of general theories to account for centuries of social and political development. He was the only Muslim historian to suggest social and economic reasons for historical change, but his work, although widely read and copied, remained without effective influence until the additional impetus of Western thought was introduced in the 19th century.

	More from Encarta
	•  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain