The oxford history of historical writing volume 3 1400–1800

Guido Abbattista is Professor of Modern History at the University of Trieste Italy.Among his recent publications are several essays on the politics and the ideology ofempire in late eigh

H I S T O R I C A L W R I T I N G

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a five-volume, multi-authored arly survey of the history of historical writing across the globe It is a chronologi-cal history of humanity’s attempts to conserve, recover, and narrate its past withconsiderable attention paid to different global traditions and their points ofcomparison with Western historiography Each volume covers a particularperiod, with care taken to avoid unduly privileging Western notions of periodi-zation, and the volumes cover progressively shorter chronological spans, reflect-ing both the greater geographical range of later volumes and the steep increase inhistorical activity around the world since the nineteenth century The OxfordHistory of Historical Writing is the first collective scholarly survey of the history ofhistorical writing to cover the globe across such a substantial breadth of time.Volume1: Beginnings toAD600

Daniel WoolfGENERAL EDITOR

The Oxford History of Historical Writing

Jose´ Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo,

and Daniel WoolfVOLUME EDITORS

Ian HeskethASSISTANT EDITOR

1

3Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX 2 6 DP

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

and education by publishing worldwide in

Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi

Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece

Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore

South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press

in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States

by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

# Oxford University Press 2012 Editorial matter # Jose´ Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf 2012

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published 2012 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,

or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization Enquiries concerning reproduction

outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,

Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover

and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

Printed in Great Britain

on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

financial support provided by the Offices of the Vice-President (Research)and the Provost and Vice-President (Academic) at the University ofAlberta from2005 to 2009 and subsequently by Queen’s University,

Kingston, Ontario

The Oxford History of Historical Writing has itself been the product of severalyears of work and many hands and voices As general editor, it is my pleasure toacknowledge a number of these here First and foremost, to the volume editors,without whom there would have been no series I am very grateful for theirwillingness to sign on, and for their flexibility in pursuing their own vision fortheir piece of the story while acknowledging the need for some common goalsand unity of editorial practices The Advisory Board, many of whose memberswere subsequently roped into either editorship or authorship, have given freely oftheir time and wisdom At Oxford University Press, former commissioningeditor Ruth Parr encouraged the series proposal and marshalled it throughthe readership and approvals process After her departure, my colleagues and

I enjoyed able help and support from Christopher Wheeler at the manageriallevel and, editorially, from Rupert Cousens, Seth Cayley, Matthew Cotton, andStephanie Ireland I must also thank the OUP production team and CarolCarnegie in particular

The series would not have been possible without the considerable financialsupport from the two institutions I worked at over the project’s lifespan At theUniversity of Alberta, where I worked from2002 to mid-2009, the project wasgenerously funded by the Offices of the Vice-President (Research) and theProvost and Vice-President (Academic) I am especially grateful to Gary Kacha-noski and Carl Amrhein, the incumbents in those offices, who saw the project’spotential The funding they provided enabled me to hire a series of projectassistants, to involve graduate students in the work, and to defray some of thecosts of publication such as images and maps It permitted the acquisition ofcomputer equipment and also of a significant number of books to supplementthe fine library resources at Alberta Perhaps most importantly, it also made thecrucial Edmonton conference happen At Queen’s University in Kingston,Ontario, where I moved into a senior leadership role in 2009, funding wasprovided to push the project over the ‘finish-line’, to transfer the research library,and in particular to retain the services of an outstanding research associate,Assistant Editor Dr Ian Hesketh I am profoundly grateful for Ian’s meticulousattention to detail, and his ability ruthlessly to cut through excess prose (includ-ing on occasion my own) in order to ensure that volumes maintained editorialuniformity internally and together with other volumes, not least because thevolumes are not all being published at once A series of able graduate studentshave served as project assistants, including especially Tanya Henderson, MatthewNeufeld, Carolyn Salomons, Tereasa Maillie, and Sarah Waurechen, the last ofwhom almost single-handedly organized the complex logistics of the Edmonton

conference Among the others on whom the project has depended I have to thankthe Office of the Dean of Arts and Science for providing project space at Queen’sUniversity, and the Department of History and Classics at Alberta MelanieMarvin at Alberta and Christine Berga at Queen’s have assisted in the manage-ment of the research accounts, as has Julie Gordon-Woolf, my spouse (andherself a former research administrator), whose advice on this front is only asmall part of the support she has provided.

Daniel Woolf, General EditorHalf a century ago, Oxford University Press published a series of volumes entitledHistorical Writing on the Peoples of Asia Consisting of four volumes devoted to EastAsia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia, and based on conferencesheld at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in thelate1950s, that series has aged surprisingly well; many of the individual essays arestill being cited in our own day The books were also remarkably ahead of theirtime since the history of historical writing was at that time firmly understood asbeing the history of a European genre Indeed, the subject of the history of historywas itself barely a subject—typical surveys of the early to mid-twentieth century bythe likes of James Westfall Thompson and Harry Elmer Barnes, following EduardFueter’s paradigmatic 1911 Geschichte der Neueren Historiographie [History ofModern Historiography], were written by master historians surveying their disci-pline and its origins The Oxford series provided some much needed perspective,though it was not followed up for many years, and more recent surveys in the lasttwo or three decades of the twentieth century have continued to speak of histori-ography as if it were an entirely Western invention or practice Since the late1990s

a number of works have been published that challenge the Eurocentrism of thehistory of history, as well as its inherent teleology We can now view the Europeanhistoriographic venture against the larger canvas of many parallel and—a fact oftenoverlooked—interconnected traditions of writing or speaking about the past fromAsia, the Americas, and Africa

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is conceived in this spirit It seeks toprovide the first collective scholarly history of historical writing to span the globe

It salutes its great predecessor of half a century ago, but very deliberately seeksneither to imitate nor to replace it For one thing, the five volumes collectivelyinclude Europe, the Americas, and Africa, together with Asia; for another, thedivision among these volumes is chronological, rather than by region Wedecided on the former because the history of non-European historical writingshould, no more than that of its European counterpart, be viewed in isolation

We chose the latter in order to provide what amounts to a cumulative narrative(albeit with well over a hundred different voices), and in order to facilitatecomparison and contrast between regions within a broad time period

A few caveats that apply to the entire series are in order First, while the series

as a whole will describe historical writing from earliest times to the present, eachindividual volume is also intended to stand on its own as a study of a particularperiod in the history of historical writing These periods shrink in duration as

they approach the present, both because of the obvious increase in extantmaterials and known authors, but also because of the expansion of subject matter

to a fully global reach (the Americas, for instance, do not feature at all in volume1;non-Muslim Africa appears in neither volume1 nor volume 2) Second, while thevolumes share a common goal and are the product of several years of dialogueboth within and between its five editorial teams and the general editor, there hasbeen no attempt to impose a common organizational structure on each volume

In fact, quite the opposite course has been pursued: individual editorial teamshave been selected because of complementary expertise, and encouraged to ‘gotheir own way’ in selecting topics and envisioning the shapes of their volumes—with the sole overriding provision that each volume had to be global in ambition.Third, and perhaps most importantly, this series is emphatically neither anencyclopedia nor a dictionary A multi-volume work that attempted to dealwith every national tradition (much less mention every historian) would easilyspread from five to fifty volumes, and in fact not accomplish the ends that theeditors seek We have had to be selective, not comprehensive, and while everyeffort has been made to balance coverage and provide representation from allregions of the world, there are undeniable gaps The reader who wishes to findout something about a particular country or topic not included in the OHHW ’smore than 150 chapters can search elsewhere, in particular in a number ofreference books which have appeared in the past fifteen or so years, some ofwhich have global range Our volumes are of course indexed, but we havedeemed a cumulative index an inefficient and redundant use of space Similarly,each individual essay offers a highly selective bibliography, intended to point theway to further reading (and where appropriate listing key sources from the period

or topic under discussion in that chapter) In order to assist readers with limitedknowledge of particular regions’ or nations’ political and social contexts, certainchapters have included a timeline of major events, though this has not beendeemed necessary in every case While there are (with one or two exceptions) noessays devoted to a single ‘great historian’, many historians from Sima Qian andHerodotus to the present are mentioned; rather than eat up space in essays withdates of birth and death, these have been consolidated in each volume’s index.Despite the independence of each team, some common standards are neces-sary in any series that aims for coherence, if not uniformity Towards that end, anumber of steps were built into the process of producing this series from the verybeginning Maximum advantage was taken of the Internet: not only werescholars encouraged to communicate with one another within and acrossvolumes, but draft essays were posted on the project’s website for commentaryand review by other authors A climactic conference, convened at the University

of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, in September 2008, brought most of theeditors and just over half the authors together, physically, for an energizing andexciting two days during which matters of editorial detail and also content andsubstance were discussed A major ‘value-added’, we think, of both conference

and series, is that it has introduced to one another scholars who normally work inseparate national and chronological fields, in order to pursue a common interest

in the history of historical writing in unique and unprecedented ways As theseries’ general editor, it is my hope that these connections will survive the end ofthe project and produce further collaborative work in the future Several keydecisions came out of the Edmonton conference, among the most important ofwhich was to permit chronological overlap, while avoiding unnecessary repeti-tion of topics The chronological divisions of the volumes—with calendricalyears used instead of typical Western periods like ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘Renais-sance’—remain somewhat arbitrary Thus volume1, on antiquity, ends aboutAD

600 prior to the advent of Islam, but overlaps with its successor, volume 2,

on what in the West were the late antique and medieval centuries, and in China(the other major tradition of historical writing that features in every volume), theperiod from the Tang through the early Ming dynasties Volumes4 and 5 have asimilar overlap in the years around the Second World War While 1945 is asensible boundary for some subjects, it is much less useful for others—in China,again,1949 is the major watershed Certain topics, such as the Annales School,are not usefully split at1945 A further change pertained to the denotation ofyearsBCandAD; here, we reversed an early decision to useBCEandCE, on thegrounds that both are equally Eurocentric forms; BC/AD have at least beenadopted by international practice, notwithstanding their Christian Europeanorigins

It became rather apparent in Edmonton that we were in fact dealing with twosets of two volumes each (vols.1/2 and 4/5), with volume 3 serving in some ways

as a bridge between them, straddling the centuries from about 1400 to about1800—what in the West is usually considered the ‘early modern’ era A furtherdecision, in order to keep the volumes reasonably affordable, was to use illustra-tions very selectively, and only where a substantive reason for their inclusioncould be advanced, for instance in dealing with Latin American pictographicforms of commemorating the past There are no decorative portraits of famoushistorians, and that too is appropriate in a project that eschews the history ofhistoriography conceived of as a parade of stars—whether Western or Eastern,Northern or Southern—from Thucydides to Toynbee

This, the third volume in the series (and fourth to be published), spans the gapbetween the first two volumes (covering antiquity and what is usually called—problematically in the case of South Asia and Islam—the ‘Middle Ages’) andvolumes4 and 5, which deal with modernity The roughly four centuries covered

in the present volume encompass a period of enormous change, including theRenaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and French Revolution in Europe,the Ming and early Qing dynasties in China, the rise and fall of the MughalEmpire in India, and the vicissitudes within the other main Islamic powers, thePersian and Ottoman Turkish empires It is also the volume in which theAmericas enter fully into the history of history, and both European and

indigenous forms of historical writing are the subjects of several chapters; Africa,too, absent from the preceding volumes (with the exception of North AfricanIslamic writers) receives its first extended treatment here The editors of thisvolume have assembled an international roster of authors with expertise in avariety of different historical cultures, and they have also included thematicchapters, many with a strong comparative dimension, addressing some of theissues that arose over the period, from the application of philological techniques

to historical evidence, to the emergence of ‘antiquarianism’ and the relationsbetween history, myth, and fiction

N O T E O N T R A N S L A T I O N A N D T R A N S L I T E R A T I O NNon-Roman alphabets and writing systems have been routinely transliteratedusing the standard systems for each language (for instance, Chinese using thePinyin system) For the transliteration of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Syriac wehave followed the rules set out by the International Journal of Middle EasternStudies Non-English book titles are normally followed (except where meaning isobvious) by a translated title, within square brackets, and in roman rather thanitalic face, unless a specific, published English translation is listed, in which casethe bracketed title will also be in italics

List of Maps xvi

Jose´ Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf

1 Chinese Official Historical Writing under the Ming and Qing 24Achim Mittag

Pamela Kyle Crossley

10 Islamic Scholarship and Understanding History in

13 History, Myth, and Fiction: Doubts and Debates 261Peter Burke

Michael A Pesenson and Jennifer B Spock

15 Austria, the Habsburgs, and Historical Writing in Central Europe 302Howard Louthan

16 German Historical Writing from the Reformation

19 History and Historians in France, from the Great Italian

23 Historical Writing in Britain from the Late Middle

Diogo Ramada Curto

27 A New History for a ‘New World’: The First One Hundred

Kira von Ostenfeld-Suske

28 Mesoamerican History: The Painted Historical Genres 575Elizabeth Hill Boone

1 East and Southeast Asia in the Seventeenth Century 25

2 The Muslim Empires of Central and Southern Eurasia and

Guido Abbattista is Professor of Modern History at the University of Trieste (Italy).Among his recent publications are several essays on the politics and the ideology ofempire in late eighteenth-century Britain, Edmund Burke’s writings on empire, and therepresentation of ‘otherness’ in modern European culture; on this topic he has edited thevolume Facing Otherness: Europe and Human Diversities in the Early Modern Age (Trieste,

at the University Press,2011)

David Allan is Reader in Scottish History at the University of St Andrews His recentbooks include A Nation of Readers (2008), Making British Culture (2008), andCommonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (2010)

Don Baker is Professor of Korean History and Civilization in the Department of AsianStudies at the University of British Columbia, Canada Among his previous publicationsare Korean Spirituality (2008) He was a co-editor of Sourcebook of Korean Civilization(1996)

Elizabeth Hill Boone is Professor of Art History at Tulane University, New Orleans.Among her single-authored books are The Codex Magliabechiano (1983), The Aztec World(1994), Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (2000), andCycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate (2007)

Peter Burke was Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge, until his

historiography include The Renaissance Sense of the Past (1969) and The FrenchHistorical Revolution (1990)

Jorge Can˜izares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at theUniversity of Texas-Austin He is the author of How to Write the History of the NewWorld: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World(2001), Puritan Conquistadors (2006), and Nature, Empire, and Nation (2006)

William J Connell is Professor of History and holds the Joseph M and Geraldine C LaMotta Chair in Italian Studies at Seton Hall University He recently edited (with FredGardaphe´) Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice (2010)

Pamela Kyle Crossley is Professor of History at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire,United States Among her previous publications are The Wobbling Pivot (2010), What isGlobal History? (2008), and A Translucent Mirror (1999)

de Lisboa (Portugal) Among his previous publications are (co-ed.) Portuguese OceanicExpansion,1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2007), Cultura Polı´tica e Projectos Coloniais (1415–1800)(Campinas,2009), and Cultura Polı´tica no Tempos dos Filipes (1580–1640) (Lisbon, 2011)

Chantal Grell teaches history at the Universite´ Versailles-Saint-Quentin Among herprevious publications on historiography are Le dix-huitie`me sie`cle et l’antiquite´ en France,1650–1789 (1995) and Histoire intellectuelle et culturelle de la France de Louis XIV (2000).Ian Hesketh (Assistant Editor) is a research associate in the Department of History atQueen’s University in Kingston, Canada Among his publications are Of Apes andAncestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (2009) and The Science ofHistory in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak (2011).

Catherine Julien was Professor of History at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo.She was the author of Reading Inca History (2000) and Titu Cusi, History of How theSpaniards Arrived in Peru: Dual Language Edition (2006) She died in 2011 aftercompleting this chapter

Donald R Kelley is James Westfall Thompson professor of history, executive editoremeritus of the Journal of the History of Ideas, and author of many works, most recently athree-volume history of historical writing, Faces of History (1998), Fortunes of History(2003), and Frontiers of History (2006), and a survey of the history of intellectual history,Descent of Ideas (2002)

Howard Louthan is Professor of History at the University of Florida His previouspublications include The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-ReformationVienna (Cambridge,1997) and Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the CatholicReformation (Cambridge,2009)

Paul E Lovejoy is Distinguished Research Professor, Department of History, YorkUniversity, and holds the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History Hisrecent publications include Slavery, Commerce and Production in West Africa (2005),Ecology and Ethnography of Muslim Trade in West Africa (2005), Slavery, Islam andDiaspora (2009), and Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2010)

Christoph Marcinkowski is Principal Research Fellow at IAIS, a policy and security thinktank in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Among his previous publications are Mirza Rafiʿa’sDastur al-Muluk (2002), Persian Historiography and Geography (2003; trans of a work bythe late Bertold Spuler), and Shiʾite Identities (2010)

Peter N Miller is a professor and Dean at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City

He is the author of Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (2000)and Peiresc’s Orient: Antiquarianism as Cultural History in the Seventeenth Century (2011),and editor of Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern CulturalSciences (2007)

Achim Mittag is Professor for Chinese Studies at the University of Tu¨bingen His specialfield of interest lies in Chinese historiography and intellectual history of early modernChina His latest publications include Conceiving the ‘Empire’: China and Rome Compared(jointly edited with Fritz-Heiner Mutschler,2008)

On-cho Ng is Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Asian Studies at PennsylvaniaState University Apart from his co-authored book on Chinese historiography, Mirroringthe Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (2005), he has publishedextensively on Confucian religiosity and Chinese hermeneutics

Karen O’Brien is Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick She is theauthor of Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (1997)and Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2009) She is currentlyco-editing The Cambridge Companion to Gibbon and volume2 of The Oxford History ofthe Novel.

Kira von Ostenfeld-Suske was recently awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship from theSocial Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada which she will hold atQueen’s University, under Prof Daniel Woolf Her post-doctoral project willinvestigate the political ideologies and methodologies behind the writing of ‘worldhistory’ in sixteenth-century Spain and England

Michael A Pesenson is Assistant Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at theUniversity of Texas at Austin He has written extensively on early East Slavic literatureand culture His forthcoming monograph is entitled: The Antichrist in Russia: Visions ofthe Apocalypse in Russian Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to the Revolution.Jose´ Rabasa teaches in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at HarvardUniversity His publications include: Inventing America: Spanish Historiography andthe Formation of Eurocentrism (1993), Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: TheHistoriography of New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (2000), and WithoutHistory: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History (2010).David Read is Professor of English at the University of Missouri His publicationsinclude Temperate Conquests: Spenser and the Spanish New World (2000) and New World,Known World: Shaping Knowledge in Early Anglo-American Writing (2005)

Asim Roy, former Director of Asia Centre, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia, iscurrently Fellow, School of History and Classics there His previous publications includeThe Islamic Syncretistic Tradition of Bengal (1983), Islam in South Asia (1996), and (ed.),Islam in History and Politics: Perspectives from South Asia (2006)

Masayuki Sato was born in Japan He read Economics, Philosophy, and History at KeioUniversity and Cambridge University After teaching in Kyoto, he was invited to theUniversity of Yamanashi and is Professor of Social Studies in the Faculty of Educationand Human Sciences He was President of the International Commission for the Historyand Theory of Historiography (2005–10)

Karen Skovgaard-Petersen is research librarian at the Royal Library, Copenhagen, and isthe managing editor of the Danish branch of the Danish-Norwegian digital editorialproject, The Writings of Ludwig Holberg (1684–1754) She is the author of Historiography atthe Court of Christian IV: Studies in the Latin Histories of Denmark by Johannes Pontanusand Johannes Meursius (2002)

Jennifer B Spock is Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond,Kentucky Her previous publications focus on the socio-economic, religious, and culturalcontexts of pre-Petrine Russian monasteries

Baki Tezcan is Associate Professor of History and Religious Studies at the University ofCalifornia, Davis, and the author of The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and SocialTransformation in the Early Modern World (2010)

Edoardo Tortarolo is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of EasternPiedmont, Italy Among his previous publications are L’Illuminismo: Ragioni e dubbi diuna modernita` europea (1999) and L’invenzione della liberta` di stampa: Censura e scrittorinel Settecento (2011).

Markus Vo¨lkel is Professor of European Intellectual History and Historical Methodology

at the University of Rostock, Germany Among his previous publications are nismus historicus’ und ‘fides historica’ (1987) and Geschichtsschreibung: Eine Einfu¨hrung inglobaler Perspektive (2006)

‘Pyrrho-Geoff Wade is a historian with interests in Sino-Southeast Asian interactions andcomparative historiography Among his works are an online database of translatedChinese references to Southeast Asia (http://www.epress.nus.edu.sg/msl/), a six-volumecompendium China and Southeast Asia (2009), and the chapter on Southeast Asia,800–1500 in The New Cambridge History of Islam (2010)

Neil L Whitehead is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Madison He is author of numerous works on the native peoples of South America andtheir colonial conquest, as well as on the topics of sorcery, violence, sexuality and warfare.Daniel Woolf is Professor of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada Amonghis previous publications are A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (1998) and TheSocial Circulation of the Past (2003) His A Global History of History was published in 2011

Wisconsin-Michael Aung-Thwin, University of Hawaii

Michael Bentley, University of St Andrews

Peter Burke, University of Cambridge

Toyin Falola, University of Texas

Georg G Iggers, State University of New York, BuffaloDonald R Kelley, Rutgers University

Tarif Khalidi, American University, Beirut

Christina Kraus, Yale University

Chris Lorenz, VU University Amsterdam

Stuart Macintyre, University of Melbourne

Ju¨rgen Osterhammel, Universita¨t Konstanz

Ilaria Porciani, University of Bologna

Jo¨rn Ru¨sen, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, EssenRomila Thapar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi

Jose´ Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf

The period analysed by this, the middle volume of The Oxford History ofHistorical Writing, is a transitional one between the ancient and medieval erascovered by volumes1 and 2, and the modern centuries after about 1800 which arethe subject of volumes4 and 5.1In keeping with the series plan, the temporalscale of this volume shifts down again, to cover a ‘mere’ four hundred years, withoccasional glances ahead to the nineteenth century, and backward as far as thethirteenth and fourteenth centuries, since meaningful historiographical periodsare not respecters of uniform and neat chronological boundaries At the sametime, the series’ geographical scope here expands to embrace the Americas andIslamic West Africa

The temporal span of this volume may be only four centuries, but it is still along one, covering the period from Europe’s late Middle Ages/early Renaissance

to the end of its Enlightenment, from pre-Columbian America to the early Revolutionary era (in the United States) and the eve of independence for manyLatin American nations, from the early decades of the Ming regime in China tothe middle part of the successive—and final imperial—Qing dynasty TheEuropean part of this story will already be familiar to many readers of thisbook and has featured prominently in histories of historical writing Less wellknown, except to specialists, are the parallel—and, we assert, interlocking—stories in the rest of the world Europe has its place in this volume, but wehave deliberately de-centred it in our narrative, and have elected to follow the sunfrom east to west As with the roster of chapters itself, we begin this introductoryessay in East Asia

post-‘East Asia’ is a historical concept, taken here to comprise the peoples andcultures of China, Japan, Korea, and sometimes expanded to include China’sfrequent satellite Vietnam (the last studied in this volume by Geoff Wade in his

1

While the Introduction as a whole is the collaborative work of all four editors, the primary authors of the individual sections are Sato (East and Southeast Asia), Woolf (the Islamic world and Europe to c 1650), Tortarolo (Europe and the United States, 1650–1700), and Rabasa (the non- Anglophone continental Americas).

chapter on the neighbouring region of ‘Southeast Asia’) Early modern East Asiarevolved around the great, unified Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912)empires, which were the political and cultural centre of gravity for the region

at large Cultural Sinocentrism was the basso ostinato of East Asia for more than amillennium: the classical Chinese language and writing system; ideologicalframes of the Confucian social and familial order; legal and administrativesystems; Buddhism, which was transmitted to Korea, Vietnam, and China viaChinese translations of canonical texts and Chinese versions of Buddhist prac-tice; and the art of historiography itself

East Asia had been among the first regions of the world to produce writtenrecords of the past.2Well into modern times Chinese script, the common scriptacross East Asia, served—with local adaptations and variations—as the norma-tive medium of record-keeping and written historical narrative, as well as officialcommunication This was true, not only in China itself, but in Korea, Japan, andVietnam Just as shared use of the Roman alphabet and Latin classical corpusbound Western Europe together as a civilization, the Chinese script and classicalcorpus has mediated an East Asian ecumene for more than two millennia.The technique of recording the past in writing has been shaped as well

by environmental factors The written records that bind civilizations togetherdepend on a durable media complex—paper and ink—and technologies ofdissemination Both print technologies and the mass production of paper werealready well established across East Asia by the fifteenth century, producing andresponding to the demands of a vast population of educated people

When speaking of ‘historical writing’ we tend to emphasize ‘historians’, thepeople who produce written ‘histories’; but it is worth remembering that theexistence of ‘history readers’ is equally crucial to the success of historical culture.Kenji Shimada has estimated that the number of books published—printed—inChina alone prior to1750 far exceeded the total world publishing output in allother languages combined up to that time; moreover, he notes, works of historywere the most numerous of all genres in print.3In this respect, China experiencedsomething like the same efflorescence of historical genres and their wider dis-semination which occurred during the same period in other parts of the world.Even in the East Asian states on China’s periphery, Japan and Korea, historicalnarrative was dominated by the language and norms of classical Chinese histor-ical writing, much as medieval and early modern European intellectuals wrote inLatin Some Japanese composed historical narratives and theoretical enquiry inJapanese (at this time written with Chinese characters but utilizing Japanese wordorder and pronunciation), but with a few exceptions, the major historical

2

See coverage in Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol 1: Beginnings to AD 600 (Oxford, 2011); and Sarah Foot and Chase F Robinson (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol 2: 400–1400 (Oxford, forthcoming).

3 Kenji Shimada, ‘Chu¯goku’, in Heibonsha hyakka jiten, vol 9 (Tokyo, 1985), 817–28.

narratives in the cultures on the Chinese periphery were written almost sively in the classical Chinese language.

exclu-While there are common features to history-writing across the globe, however,crucial differences must also be noted In particular, the art of recording the pasthad developed along quite a different trajectory in East Asia than it had in theGraeco-Latin world of ancient and medieval Europe European historical writinghas, since Herodotus and Thucydides, been predominantly an individualendeavour, the product of a single author generally writing for an audience ofatomized, individual readers (and sometimes for assembled audiences who wouldhear works read aloud) or, as in the example of monastic chronicles of medievalEurope, for the benefit of successive writers In contrast, historical writing andthe discipline or culture of ‘history’ in East Asia emerged from a culture of publichistoriography The task of writing history was traditionally a state-run project.The dominant—and ideologically normative—mode of historical writing con-sisted in the collection and compilation of sources for the production of ‘officialhistories’, the subject of Achim Mittag’s chapter in the present volume.The corpus of official histories thus compiled, usually by committee, con-stituted the core of Chinese historiography, its bureaucratic organization more orless mirrored in Korea and in early Japan’s Rikkokushi or Six National Histories(the lack of distinct dynasties in Japan made aspects of the Chinese model anawkward fit) The early modern era alone saw the compilation of official histories

of the Yuan and Ming dynasties in China, the Koryo˘ dynasty in Korea porary historiography in which is examined in Don Baker’s chapter), theÐa

(contem-˙i Vieˆ:t sử ky´ toa`n thu [Complete Annals of Dai Viet] (1479; expanded edn,1697) in Vietnam, and the Honcho¯ tsugan [Comprehensive Mirror of our Coun-try] (1644–70) in Japan (the subject of Masayuki Sato’s chapter), all under statesponsorship In addition, the Chinese and Korean states compiled massiverecords of the day-to-day workings of the emperor or king and his court, inanticipation that an official history of the dynasty would be compiled in thefuture

State-sponsored historical writing owed its status as the normative model inEast Asian societies to certain deeply rooted cultural and ideological assumptions

In East Asia, historiography—both the writing and study of history—was theprimary and hegemonic cultural undertaking This is in stark contrast to Euro-pean, Indic, and Islamic civilizations, where historical writing had not—to thispoint—been vested with dominant cultural power and authority In East Asia,the purpose of historical writing was rooted in the Chinese philosophical premisethat historical facts were the only certain and immutable reality, and in thecorollary proposition that it was only by reflecting on history—metaphoricallyconceived as a ‘mirror’, after all—that one could approach ultimate truth.4 4

The precise place of ‘history’ proper within the branches of Chinese learning varied somewhat over the centuries, the ancient historical texts such as the Chunqiu [Spring and Autumn Annals]

Chinese metaphysics was not premised on a revealed religion founded upon thetranscendental existence of a unique and omnipotent deity, as in the Abrahamicreligions Rather, Chinese metaphysics took the world as mutable, conceived inthe Yijing [Book of Changes or Classic of Changes] as an ever-changing set ofphenomena, and therefore sought immutable reality in history, because peoplecould not alter that which had already happened.5This belief made history theaxis of Chinese civilization, the core discipline around which all others orbited.Despite being sponsored by the state, even official historiography set itself apartfrom political affairs, standing both outside and, in a sense, above day-to-dayadministration of state affairs, and established itself as the grounds for all humanjudgement The historiographical tradition therefore demanded both historicalobjectivity and chronological accuracy; both these standards had been firmlyestablished in China by the first centuryBC.

Many of the world’s civilizations have sought the absolute through religion, in

a transcendent identity beyond the human realm, beyond intellect, beyond spaceand time By positing an omniscient and omnipotent deity or plane of imma-terial existence, outside of time and space, they conceive of an eternal, absoluteentity that exists in a continuous, changeless, and perpetual state Such civiliza-tions continually produced new perspectives for interpreting the past, re-conceiving and re-re-conceiving it to reflect the observed changes in the physicaland social world (when these were noted) History in such circumstances issimply a method for becoming conscious of the past, and a literary vessel forarticulations of this consciousness

The cultures of East Asia, by contrast, did not develop indigenous concepts oftranscendental revealed religion; and while they encountered such belief sys-tems—principally in the form of Buddhism—revealed religion was never able toattain the hegemonic epistemological status which the Abrahamic religionsachieved in Europe and Western Asia In the absence of a countervailingabsolute, history itself became that absolute, that immutable truth on whichone could rely History, consequently, came to be endowed with a ‘normative’function and, by extension, it became a source of authority that did not—at least

in theory—permit revision or rewriting.6

sometimes losing ground, especially in periods of resurgent Neo-Confucianism of the sort associated with the twelfth-century philosopher Zhu Xi; but it was invariably near the top of the intellectual ladder.

historian-By the ascent of the Ming in1368, the focus of Chinese historiography had fornearly a millennium and a half centred on ‘official history’, with each successivedynasty compiling the history of its predecessor as a core enterprise of the state.Later generations have positioned Sima Qian’s Shiji [Records of the Scribe],composed at the end of the second centuryBC, as the first of what became twenty-four ‘official histories’; with the exception of the Shiji, each was compiled byscholars in service of a new dynasty to narrate the history of the predecessordynasty It was a critical characteristic of these official histories, following theexample of the Shiji, that they had an encyclopaedic range Sima Qian, that is,brought an entire civilization—indeed, all human history as he knew it—into asingle, unified structure: not simply the culture, but its politics, economics,society, and technology, as well as accounts of all the peoples and states of theknown world The compilation and writing of history, which had developed into

an art that comprehensively described an entire world system, remained thedominant paradigm and the trunk whence sprang other branches of knowledge

in early modern East Asian civilization—though with distinct institutional formsand modes of practice specific to each of the local cultures of the region In thatsense, one might see historiography in East Asia as a ‘primary cultural undertak-ing’, perhaps equivalent to biblical exegesis and the Corpus Iuris Iustanianus inthe West, the Laws of Manu in India, or the study of the Qurʾan in the Muslimworld

The Chinese had developed their own way of creating—they would have said,

‘recording’—an immutable past In China and Korea, it became standardpractice for each new dynasty to direct a historical compilation bureau (firstfounded by the Tang in China during the seventh century) to collect historicalsources and to compile the official history of the immediately preceding dynasty.Upon completion of the official history, moreover, the bureau was supposed todestroy the sources it had collected, a practice designed to prevent others fromrevising or rewriting the official history, for once it had been published by thestate, the history itself took on the character of sacred text The surest way toendow the official history with unassailable authority, after all, was to destroy thesources on which it was based This did not always occur in practice, and a variety

of Shilu (the ‘Veritable Records’ of a particular emperor’s reigns), supposedlytransitory documents toward the final dynastic history, survived the Ming–Qingtransition, along with many other forms of document, official and unofficial,such as the fangzhi or regional gazetteers.7

The various cultures comprising East Asian civilization preserved in thisfashion the ideal of history as the sole immutable basis for human judgement

The biographies that comprise over half the material in the official histories,maintained in their own way this tradition of objective narration In the biog-raphies, as in other sections of the official history, the compilers first set forthwhat they believed to be ‘fact’, and only then did they follow this with their ownevaluation This vast corpus of biographies, however, forces us to consider whyEast Asian historians believed biography to be a necessary part of any history:arguably, because the East Asian tradition lacks a unitary supreme being, it wasonly in the recorded lives of eminent individuals that one could find true sacredtexts—sacred in the sense of being un-rewritable, unchangeable, and authorized.

An episode in the life of a fifteenth-century Korean historian is paradigmatic

of the notion of the historian as exemplar It is recorded that in 1431, as thecompilation of the T’aejong taewang sillok [Veritable Records of King T’aejong]was nearing completion, T’aejong’s successor, King Sejong, asked the compilers

to show him their work in progress ‘In the previous dynasty’, Sejong is quoted assaying, ‘each monarch personally reviewed the Sillok of his predecessor; but [mypredecessor] King T’aejong did not review the Sillok of [the Choso˘n dynasticfounder] King T’aejo’ Sejong’s senior ministers resisted, replying that, ‘If YourMajesty were to review [the work in progress], future monarchs would surelyrevise [historians’ drafts] Were that to happen, then [future] historians wouldsuspect that the monarch might look at their drafts and, [fearing royal displeas-ure] might fail to record the facts completely How, then, could we transmit[facts] faithfully to future generations?’ Upon hearing this, the king ultimatelywithdrew his request.8

In the traditional East Asian paradigm, therefore, the role of the past was toserve as a normative history, and as a template of exemplars, both positive andnegative, for monarchs and ministers alike Were historians to shade theirnarratives to fit the predilections of a monarch in their own day, the historicalrecord they produced would fail to provide either a true picture of the past, or areliable guide to future action It would fail in its purpose This forms aninteresting contrast to historical practices in Europe, where, Masayuki Sato hasargued, history had evolved as a ‘cognitive’ discipline, rather than as a normativeone.9In the West, notwithstanding the strong appeal of historical exemplarity(that is, its utility as a source of moral and political wisdom) dating back toantiquity, the historian’s raison d’eˆtre often lay in rewriting the past;10the practice

of history evolved as a competition among the interpretations and approaches of

8 Suiichiro Tanaka, Tanaka Suiichiro shigaku ronbunshu (Tokyo, 1900), 510–12 Sillok is the Romanized Korean rendering of the Chinese term shilu.

different historians engaged with a mutable past This difference becomesincreasingly apparent during the centuries covered in this volume, when thecombination of competing Christian faiths, emerging new central monarchies,the impact of printing, a spreading readership, and the routine deployment ofhistory as a political weapon rendered even the most apparently stable views ofthe past open to a process of revision and argument, especially during times ofacute ideological, religious, and dynastic conflict, a frequent occurrence in theearly modern world.

The Ming dynasty witnessed, in addition to the continued activity of officialhistory-writing, an efflorescence in the composition of what is often called

‘private’ or ‘unofficial’ historiography (here treated by On-cho Ng) This dency continued, along with the multiplication of genres (a feature once againobservable in contemporary Europe) under the last imperial dynasty, the Qing,Manchurian conquerors who nonetheless adopted the historiographical tradi-tions of the Han people they had subjugated In the course of the later seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries, the peak of Qing power, history became a tool

ten-of imperial expansion, as demonstrated in Pamela Kyle Crossley’s chapter.Finally, something of the philological scholarship that is generally associatedwith Renaissance European humanism and late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century German classical studies can be seen in the late Ming and Qing practice

of kaozheng.11

Japanese historical writing, here described by Masayuki Sato, shared manyfeatures with Chinese, the influences of Confucianism and Buddhism amongthem, but the differences are nearly as profound Official historical writing in aChinese vein did not fit well with a political system that postulated only a single,uninterrupted dynasty (albeit one prone to schisms and, from the twelfth centuryvirtually through to the mid-nineteenth, largely under the sway of a series ofbakufus headed by shoguns) The late Middle Ages had left off the earlier practice

of writing national histories, and generated a variety of different genres in bothChinese and Japanese These included the series of ‘Mirrors’, such as the

O¯ kagami and Azuma kagami (‘Mirror of the East’, a late thirteenth-centurychronicle written from the perspective of the shogunate), and the various literaryworks, in Japanese, such as the various classes of monogatari, prose or verse epicsabout fictional events but often in a historical setting

During the seventeenth century, with the consolidation of power in the hands

of the Tokugawa bakufu, historical writing continued, sometimes in the hands ofthe rulers themselves A relative of the shogun named Tokugawa Mitsukunipersonally oversaw a pro-imperial history, the Dai Nihon Shi [Great History ofJapan], which had nearly130 scholars working on it by the time Mitsukuni died

in1700; the work would only be presented in draft to the bakufu in 1720 and it

11

Benjamin A Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).

was not completed till the early twentieth century Japan, too, produced its share

of historians or scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as AraiHakuseki, mentor to a shogun, and the great eighteenth-century nationalist—and foe of Chinese influences upon his country—Motoori Norinaga, who sought

to use philology to strengthen, rather than undermine, some of Japan’s nationalmyths and established a school of ‘national learning’ emphasizing the emotiveaspects of Japanese culture at more or less the same time that Goethe and Schillerwere exploring similar themes in the German Sturm und Drang.12

Moving westwards into Central and South Asia we encounter a very differenthistoriographical culture in the three major Islamic empires of the early modernera, the Mughals of northern and central India, the Persian Safavid dynasty, andthe Ottomans A further variant, or family of variants, occurs in the Muslim parts

of Africa—once previously thought to be ‘without history’ and here explored(in its West African manifestations) by Paul E Lovejoy The early modernAfrican and Asian versions of Islamic historical writing were all heirs to aneight hundred-year-old tradition of Muslim historiography the formative andclassical ages of which are treated in OHHW vol.2 Each, however, spun history

in directions that reflected Islamic values but were devoted primarily to therecording of the great deeds of the various rulers In India, for instance, a series

of royal namas or books were written to celebrate the reigns of successiveMughals from the founder, Babur, through Akbar the Great (under whosecourt historian, Abuʾl Fazl, the genre matured) to the ill-fated Shah Jahan,builder of the Taj Mahal and an inveterate micro-manager of his own courthistorians Under Akbar, in particular, historical writing became an explicit tool

of empire and was employed by the emperor both to weaken the power of theMuslim religious elite and to recast Indian history in a more secular form.13AsimRoy’s chapter focuses on this Persian-influenced imperial tradition of Indianhistorical writing By tracing the Indo-Persian connection back into the DelhiSultanate (a pre-Mughal state of the thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries), Roy

‘National Learning’ movement; and Masao Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, trans Mikiso Hane (Princeton, 1974), is a classic survey of the intellectual scene, with an emphasis on philosophical aspects, by one of Japan’s leading modern historians.

13

Mughal official historiography was not the sole mode of writing in the subcontinent, and recent works have examined the rich regional and local modes of historicity that existed See, for instance, Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (New York, 2003).

demonstrates the many features shared by South Asian historical writing withthat of its neighbour to the north-west Persian had indeed long been a literarytongue for the pursuit of adab (literary and scientific scholarship as distinct fromQurʾanic studies) and had become the dominant language for the writing ofhistory within much of the later medieval Islamic world Within Persia itself, therule of the Safavids (the first native dynasty in Persia to reign as Shahs in nearlyseven centuries) created a court culture of which history became a significant by-product, through the writings of chancery scribes and officials such as the munshi(or chancery scribe) Iskandar Beg Christoph Marcinkowski here traces thedevelopment of Safavid historiography, once dismissed by orientalist scholars

as dry and difficult to read, but in recent years the subject of renewed attention.14

The courtly historians of Persia and India are reminders that aspects ofhistorical writing can transcend otherwise impermeable borders The thirdgreat Islamic empire of the period, the Ottomans, regarded as the most potentenemy of Western Christendom from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, hadmuch in common historiographically with both its Muslim coreligionists inPersia and India, and their European neighbours to the west, where historywas also used as an instrument of state power alike by monarchies (new andold) and republican regimes such as those of Florence and Venice Solidifyingtheir power in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Ottomans sought tobestow a level of centralized order on the inherited frontier culture of their semi-nomadic past, captured in works such as the ‘Chronicles of Osman’ By themid-sixteenth century, with the empire expanding in several directions, courthistorians called s¸ehna¯meci were being appointed by the sultans Their name itselfderived from Persian origins, and the holders themselves aspired to the highlyliterary style of medieval Persian epitomized by the great eleventh-century epicwriter, Firdawsi (from whose great epic, the Shah-nama, they drew their title).Notwithstanding the close relationship that some of them, such as Seyyid Lok-man, enjoyed with the sultans who appointed them, the s¸ehna¯meci never entirelyevolved into historians of the Ottoman state In the course of the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, they lost ground to a number of other official writers Theseincluded leading civil servants or bureaucrats—often writing unofficially—such

as the chancellor Mustafa C¸ elebi Celaˆlzade, the polymath Katib C¸ elebi, and theHungarian-born Ibrahim Pec¸evi By Pec¸evi’s time, Ottoman historians were alsogrowing familiar with the historical writings of the Christian nations to the west

As Baki Tezcan’s chapter shows, a respectable quantity of Ottoman historical

14

Sholeh A Quinn, Historical Writing during the Reign of Shah (

Abbas: Ideology, Imitation and Legitimacy in Safavid Chronicles (Salt Lake City, 2000); the latter part of Bertold Spuler, Persian Historiography and Geography, trans Christoph Marcinkowski (Singapore, 2003) (a translation of a much older work); R M Savory, ‘“Very Dull and Arduous Reading”: A Reappraisal of the History of Shah (

Abbas the Great by Iskandar Beg Munshi’, Hamdard Islamicus, 3 (1980), 19–37; and Felix Tauer, ‘History and Biography’, in Jan Rypka et al., History of Iranian Literature, ed Karl Jahn (Dordrecht, 1968), 438–61.

writing ranged beyond the house of Osman, or even the Turks themselves, tocover the pasts of the various subject and neighbouring peoples whom theirarmies and ambassadors had encountered.15 By the early eighteenth century,Ottoman history had evolved further away from its courtly connection andbecome a truly official genre in the hands of vak(

a-nu¨vis, state-sponsored ians whose version of Turkish imperial history could now be spread increasinglythrough the medium of that great European invention, printing

histor-As in other parts of the world, the year 1400 in Europe marks in itself noparticular epoch nor any sharp break with the past Historiographically, theenduring medieval practice of chronicling would remain for several more decades(longer still in northern Europe) not only the dominant but, for all intents andpurposes, the only mode of representing the past, biography excepted (which,apart from saints’ lives remained a relatively minor genre, and not alwaysincluded under the umbrella of history) There were, however, some changes

on the horizon First and foremost, the traditional dominance of the monasticclergy in historical writing had begun to break down in the thirteenth century, assecular clerics and increasingly laity (such as the Crusader chroniclers Villehar-douin and Joinville, or the aristocratic authors of French martial romances)began in increasing numbers to write about the past.16The laity wrote history

of two different sorts, typically in the vernacular language of their homeland Thefirst comprised politically and militarily focused narratives (often but not always

in conventional annalistic form) motivated by the martial struggles of the latemedieval years, the period of the Hundred Years War in Western Europe, and,

on the eastern borders, the looming presence of the Ottomans and the rapiddecline (and by1453, extinction) of the Byzantine Empire The second type wasthe urban chronicle, frequently written by a socially inferior rank of person,typically the prosperous mercantile townsman or civic official, for instanceGiovanni Villani of Florence.17

15

Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley, 1995); Halil Inalcik, ‘The Rise of Ottoman Historiography’, in Bernard Lewis and P M Holt (eds.), Historians of the Middle East (London, 1962), 152–67; Cornell H Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali (Princeton, 1986); Lewis V Thomas, A Study of Naima, ed N Itzkowitz (New York, 1972); V L Me´nage, Neshri’s History of the Ottomans: The Sources and Development of the Text (London, 1964); Gabriel Piterberg, An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play (Berkeley, 2003); Baki Tezcan, ‘The Politics of Early Modern Ottoman Historiography’, in V H Aksan and D Goffman (eds.), The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge, 2007), 167–98; and Christine Woodhead,

‘An Experiment in Official Historiography: The Post of Sehnameci in the Ottoman Empire c 1555– 1605’, Wiener Zeitschrift fu¨r die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 75 (1983), 157–82.

16

See Gabrielle Spiegel, Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997); and Nancy Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth- Century England (Chicago, 1977) for two illuminating studies of this period See also Foot and Robinson (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol 2.

17 On the transition from chronicle to history in Renaissance Florence see Louis Green, Chronicle into History: An Essay on the Interpretation of History in Florentine Fourteenth-Century Chronicles (Cambridge, 1972); on humanism and Florentine historiography see Donald Wilcox, The

As throughout the history of the world’s historical writing, social andpolitical, and not merely intellectual, change underlay shifts in the representa-tion of the past The advent of city chronicles represented not so much arevival of ancient and late antique annales so much as a curiosity, among agrowing urban bourgeoisie, about the origins and illustrious histories of theircities, which over the previous several centuries had established themselves assemi-autonomous political entities within larger realms Similarly, the firstthree centuries of our period would see considerable growth at the opposite end

of the social ladder, among kings and princes, many of them of very new dynasties(Tudor, Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Valois and Bourbon, Romanov) as monarchscementing their power at the expense of a feudal aristocracy (and, in Protestantlands, at the expense of the papacy and Holy Roman Empire) encouraged,influenced, and sometimes censored accounts of their own reigns and of those

of their ancestors The tangled relations of history, myth, and fiction acrossEurope, with glances further afield to Asia, are captured in Peter Burke’s chapter.Two significant developments of the early modern era were the relatedphenomena of humanist philology and antiquarianism The former, which hadroots in the study of both language and law, played a considerable part in thedevelopment of that sense of historical distance, and of anachronism, which hasbecome a hallmark of modern Western historicity Its development has a longhistory and Donald R Kelley’s chapter places it in the longue dure´e of Europeanculture between the late medieval and modern, from the era of Lorenzo Valla,Angelo Poliziano, Guillaume Bude´, and Joseph Scaliger, to that of the greatEnlightenment and early nineteenth-century philologists, such as BartholdNiebuhr, and thus to the advent of ‘disciplinary’ history in the decades covered

by OHHW vol.4; its comparability, in broad terms, with Chinese khaozheng hasbeen noted above In the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenthcenturies, philologists restored a number of ancient texts to something liketheir original forms, developed a critical apparatus for editing manuscripts andciting sources (the footnote originates at this time), and sent packing a number ofcelebrated textual frauds such as the medieval Donation of Constantine.18

Antiquarianism (the main features of which are here summarized by Peter

N Miller) grew out of the same roots as philology, but it was also very muchfocused on the physical remains of the past, both man-made (coins, statuary,buildings, funerary urns) and natural (landscape features, fossils, and curiositiessuch as the skeletal remains of ‘giants’) What began as the activity of aristocraticvirtuosi, a collecting mania often satirized in contemporary literature and for atime excluded from narrative historiography, would evolve by the late

Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass, 1969).

18

Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (London, 1990); and id., The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).

seventeenth century into the foundation of both classificatory natural history(especially geology and biology) and of those erudite studies ‘ancillary’ to historysuch as numismatics, palaeography, and diplomatic.

A further consequence of this new scholarship was to cast doubt on sometraditional explanations for the origins of particular peoples, while generatingnew ones that were sometimes equally implausible Apart from historical writings

on particular ‘races’ (further encouraged by the discovery of aboriginal tions in the Americas, and by increased contact with East Asia), the ‘nation’ as anorganizing principle for historiography began to feature more prominently in thelate medieval and early modern era Reflecting this, much of the present volumefollows political and often ‘national’ lines, acknowledging that the latter termreally only works in the monarchies of Western and Northern Europe, especiallyEngland, Spain, France, and Russia, and that even these contained ethnic andlinguistic minorities, frequently with divergent (and sometimes mutually incon-sistent) historical traditions Elsewhere, the map was divided into larger chunks,either great multinational empires (the Habsburgs or the Ottomans) or subordi-nated principalities and city-states Italy is a case in point: it is permissible tospeak of Italian historiography during this period if one understands that tomean writing by Italian-speaking persons (in the first half of the period, oftenwriting in humanist Latin rather than the vernacular) Indeed, Italy has trad-itionally and deservedly occupied a central role in narratives of early modernEurope—despite the fact that throughout these centuries it was a fracturedpeninsula of republican city-states and minor monarchies, converted by thelater sixteenth century into a slightly less fractured territory of larger principal-ities, mainly satellites of greater powers to the west, especially Spain

popula-Whatever its disunity, Italy’s importance in European historiography isbeyond dispute It was on the peninsula, and especially in Florence, that theurban chronicles composed by the likes of the Villani family in the fourteenthcentury first metamorphosed into humanist historiography via a few key indivi-duals of genius like Leonardo Bruni, Florence’s sometime chancellor and one ofits leading scholars through much of the early fifteenth century William J.Connell’s chapter recounts the story of Italian historical writing through thefirst half of this volume, paying close attention to its medieval precedents andrevising the master narrative, set three decades ago by the late Eric Cochrane.19

From Italy, the revival of classical methods of writing history spread firstwestward, to France, Spain, and Britain, north to the Habsburg lands (includingthe future Dutch Republic), Scandinavia, and Germany (where by the1520s itengaged with another potent force, that of Lutheranism), and, rather later,eastward to the emergent Muscovite Empire As Edoardo Tortarolo shows inhis complementary chapter on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

19 Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1981).

Italy continued to play an important role in the post-Renaissance age, itsEnlightenment historical texts including the significant contributions of jurists,philologists, and philosophers such as Pietro Giannone and Giambattista Vico.The corso followed by historical writing in Western Europe from the lateMiddle Ages through to the seventeenth century, from late medieval chroniclingthrough early humanist experiments and ending in the grand tradition ofneoclassicism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, is perhapsmost obviously typified in France, the subject of Chantal Grell’s chapter In thefifteenth century, France saw the growth of a politically attuned though not yetfully humanist narrative, epitomized in the historical writing of Philippe deCommynes France was also one of the few Western monarchies to havedeveloped a systematic Crown-sponsored historiography in the Grandes Chron-iques de France [The Great Chronicles of France], produced at the pro-royalistabbey of Saint Denis.20The impact of humanism altered the style and structure

of writing but not its general direction: as first the Valois and then the Bourbonkings cemented their power over the great aristocracy, the Estates General, andprovincial parlements (culminating in the rule of the adult Louis XIV), theGrandes Chroniques tradition was easily converted into a much more highlybureaucratized system of historiographes du roi (and much less frequentlyappointed historiographes de France) that endured up to the age of the Revolution

In a sense, France was repeating, as were the contemporary Ottomans, a patternobservable in China centuries earlier, namely the transition from a monarch-focused official historiography to a more formalized bureaucratic system To thesouth in Spain (from the late fifteenth century, the newly united crowns ofCastile and Aragon, each with subordinate kingdoms), there was a much longermedieval tradition of royalist historical writing, including some ostensiblyauthored by the kings themselves Kira von Ostenfeld-Suske traces Spanishofficial historical writing from the early years of Trasta´mara/Habsburg hegemony

to the high point of Spanish imperial fortunes under Philip II Her chapter linksEurope to the various modes of historical writing (and some oral and pictograph-

ic forms of history) discussed in the final section of the volume Across theChannel from France lay England and Scotland, the northern and southernhalves of Britain (which until1707 is a term that applies to a geographic space,the island, and not to an actual political entity) Both show roughly similartrajectories to that of France, with some important differences both from Franceand, notably, each other We have treated them both jointly and separately atdifferent points in the four-century period, because their historiographies, whileoverlapping, nevertheless reveal many different features In many ways, Scotland,the less prosperous and more sparsely populated kingdom, was consistently themore innovative of the two with respect to history-writing, as illustrated in

20 Gabrielle Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denys: A Survey (Brookline, Mass., 1978).

Daniel Woolf’s and David Allan’s respective chapters While both Scots andEnglish writers of the sixteenth century clung to late medieval mythologiesconcerning putative foundational monarchs, Scottish writers embraced conti-nental humanism much more quickly in the form of Hector Boece and thenGeorge Buchanan To the south, an abortive importation of classical modelsthrough the Italian Polydore Vergil and the humanist lawyer-minister turnedCatholic martyr Sir Thomas More quickly faded before a resurgent chronicle, itsfortunes briefly revived through the medium of print and the curiosity of anurban mercantile audience; a more robust humanist historiography would appearonly in the last years of the sixteenth century The Scottish willingness to departfrom past patterns continued into the eighteenth century, in narrative historianssuch as William Robertson and David Hume and in philosophical, juridical, andsocio-economic thinkers such Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar.Against this must be weighed the considerably greater volume of English histor-ical writing and—something that did not develop well in Scotland—theemerging practice of antiquarian scholarship And, as Karen O’Brien demon-strates in her chapter on later eighteenth-century England, the southern kingdomexperienced its own somewhat different historiographic Enlightenment, one inwhich Britannic Scots such as Hume featured prominently, and which wasconcluded in that most cosmopolitan of narrative historians, Edward Gibbon.

In Northern Europe, Latin humanism also had a significant impact, but it wasthe Reformation rather than the Renaissance that occasioned a sharper breakwith past historiographical practices as parts of Germany, Scandinavia (includingDenmark and a newly independent and powerful Sweden), and the northernsections of the Low Countries successively migrated over to the Protestant side ofChristendom’s religious iron curtain Karen Skovgaard-Petersen discusses theunfolding of this story in Denmark and Sweden while Markus Vo¨lkel offers acounterpart study of Germany between the Reformation and the age of Kant andHerder In the predominantly but not exclusively Catholic central Europe of theHabsburg hereditary territories, including Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, aCounter-Reformation historiography would emerge (as it had in late sixteenth-century Italy), which used much of the same philological and antiquarianmethods that were employed by Protestant counterparts Howard Louthan’schapter points to the complexities of writing history within a multi-lingual,multiethnic, and confessionally diverse empire Another emergent empire duringthis period, one, like the Ottoman, wracked by persistent internecine quarrelsand not infrequent assassination and deposition, was the Muscovite regime.Jennifer Spock and Michael A Pesenson take the story of Russian and Ukrainianhistorical writing from the period of the great late medieval chronicles throughthe age of Ivan the Terrible (which may have produced the Procopian-styleclassic history ostensibly written by his friend-turned-foe-in-exile, Andrei Kurbs-kii), ending in the Western-influenced post-Petrine Enlightenment histories of

Vasilii Tatishchev and Mikhail Lomonosov, and of Germanic visitors such asAugust Ludwig Schlo¨zer.

True to its transitional character, this volume features essays in which changesand transformations are crucial in establishing our perspective on the earlymodern European approach to the past The contributions of Karen O’Brien,Guido Abbattista, and David Allan collectively focus on historiography in theperiod from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth century This was an agethat witnessed significant theoretical and political upheavals culminating in theFrench Revolution, the purgative event anticipated in some of the later Frenchphilosophes These disturbances in turn reinforced each other in shaking upreceived wisdom and setting the stage for the dramatic innovations innineteenth-century historical research and writing The complexity of the ‘his-torical age’, as Hume famously called his own time, can be fully apprehendedonly through a nuanced investigation of the eighteenth century’s major culturaltrends The phenomenon of the French Enlightenment, explored by Abbattista,was, despite the variety of its forms, committed to a radical revision of basicassumptions that left an enduring mark on the European notion of history-writing Among the numerous shifts made by the historians of the FrenchEnlightenment Abbattista stresses two innovations that became a part ofEuropean historical thought In the eighteenth century historians—the Frenchand Scots most famously—developed the need to articulate their self-perception

as members of a society representing a stage in the incremental progress (a wordthat came to acquire its modern meaning principally in this era) of humankind.Parallel to this innovation the historians of the Enlightenment also revised thenotion of civilization They used it as a means to analyse the human world as acoherent set of social patterns, and argued for the greater significance of thesepatterns in comparison with the traditional focus of historiography on rulers,notables, and public institutions In retrospect, this eventually proved to havebeen a process of self-clarification and experimentation in both the collecting andassessing of historical sources and the establishment of cognitive goals for thestudy of the past ‘Disenchanting the past’ and freeing interpretation fromthe kind of providentialism epitomized in Bishop Jacques-Be´nigne Bossuet’sDiscours sur l’histoire universelle [Discourse on Universal History] (1681) loomedlarge among many history writers’ concerns at a time when the grip of religion inother spheres of knowledge, notably science, was beginning to loosen Thephilosophes throughout Europe argued in fact that the history of human activityshould be fully secularized; by the end of the eighteenth century they had beenlargely successful in shifting the cultural climate in this direction The so-calledstadial conception of human development, most commonly associated withcertain among the Scottish philosophes and subsequently refined by late Enlight-enment figures such as Condorcet, became increasingly incompatible with thebiblical narrative And the claim made by orthodox interpreters of the Bible(such as the seventeenth-century Irish archbishop James Ussher), that the earth

had been created in less than a week only four millennia before Christ, wasundermined if not yet thoroughly discredited by empirical findings whichhistorians were beginning to incorporate in their narratives, including the accu-mulated antiquarian, geological, and archaeological discoveries of the previoustwo centuries Providentialism was less and less invoked as an explanation formajor developments, even if it continued to provide an accepted background forvirtually all history textbooks used in schools Visions of intellectual, civil, andpolitical change often went hand in hand with new historical narratives, as thecase of Voltaire shows Voltaire’s dream of a reforming and modernizing monar-chical rule interacted with his own interpretation of French and Russian history.While suggesting that there is no obvious connection between the AmericanWar of Independence and the adoption of secular categories, David Read shows

in this volume that the impact of the political decisions taken in 1776 wasremarkable among American historians In the late colonial and early republicandecades, general social and institutional changes made themselves felt in the wayhistorians from different cultural backgrounds investigated the past in the secondhalf of the eighteenth century Trends in readership, detectable since at least thelate sixteenth century, now picked up considerable momentum An expandingpublic of non-specialist readers provided a market for histories that experimentedwith new modes of combining literary skills, new empirical knowledge, andinnovations in philosophical outlook Socially more diversified and including agrowing participation of the middle classes in cultural life, especially withinurban settings, this new public also included women both as readers of historybooks and, albeit still sporadically, as occasional authors, such as England’sCatharine Macaulay and, later, America’s Mercy Otis Warren

The historians themselves reacted to these social trends by opting for forms ofcultural history which elaborated on Voltaire’s interest in the social past andwhich took up anew issues previously explored by nascent proto-disciplines such

as political economy and anthropology Aided by two centuries of Europeanwritings on the East (see Diogo Ramada Curto’s chapter) and the non-EnglishAmericas (see below), and on the information provided by the booming genre oftravel accounts, they also opened up to non-European peoples whose pasts andpresents were integrated into a number of ‘universal histories’ very different fromthe providential accounts of earlier centuries.21

At the same moment when an expanding public was starting to influence theproduction of history books, state institutions in continental Europe becamemore and more interested in history as a practice and method (the word

‘discipline’ was not yet in vogue) essential to the education of the nobility andthe administrators The quality of the historical knowledge taught at colleges anduniversities had to be improved: the various regimes invested resources in

21

Tamara Griggs, ‘Universal History from Counter-Reformation to Enlightenment’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (2007), 219–47.

academies, focusing mainly or exclusively on research, and in teaching tions, better to develop more reliable bodies of sources from which historiescould be drawn Under the aegis of absolute monarchies throughout Europe anew heyday for erudition commenced in the early eighteenth century, associatedwith editors like the Modenese Lodovico Muratori and with scholarly bodiespatronized by Europe’s princes Decades later, in completing his impressivehistory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during the 1770s and1780s, Edward Gibbon extensively profited from the erudite essays produced atthe Acade´mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, a research institutionsponsored by the Bourbon monarchy, that set very high standards of accuracy.The impressive revision of ancient history completed in Germany during theearly nineteenth century (for which see OHHW vol 4) was based in largemeasure on the ‘philological turn’ that took place at the university of Go¨ttingenand elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire during the second half of theeighteenth century (and which, again, parallels the similar move ‘from philoso-phy to philology’ in late Ming and early Qing China).22 Late medieval andRenaissance forgeries, such as the infamous pseudo-Berossus of Annius ofViterbo or the Hermetic texts, did not disappear altogether—indeed, one ortwo such as Ossian, the alleged remnants of ancient Gaelic heroic poetry, becameliterary causes ce´le`bres But it became a shared doctrine that historians should notdeliberately fabricate evidence to back up their narrative and that they ought toexpose fakes when they became aware of them.

institu-As a consequence of the changes and transformations sketched in the tributions for the European part of this volume, a distinctively Western notion ofhistory emerged at the turn of the century History came to be perceived, asfamously noted by Reinhardt Koselleck, as a ‘collective singular’, a single process

con-of development which at both the national and global level revealed a pattern con-ofregularities.23This new understanding of history is clearly visible in the writings

of such diverse historians as Condorcet, Herder, and Ferguson, all of whomwrote in the late eighteenth century

As suggested above, a major feature of early modern historiography in its laterdecades was the increasing inclusion of the non-European past within its patterns

of explanation Diogo Ramada Curto’s chapter illustrates this as it focuses onhow European historical writing on Asia fits within this framework Whileopening up to a more detailed, empirical, and less mythical knowledge of theAsian cultures, especially Japan, China, and India, European historians also

22

See Elman, From Philosophy to Philology.

23 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Historia Magistra Vitae: On the Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process’, in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans Keith Tribe (New York, 2004), 26–42.