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Full Description
How did people learn to distinguish between past and present? How did they come to see the past as existing in its own distinctive context? In The Birth of the Past, Zachary Sayre Schiffman explores these questions in his sweeping survey of historical thinking in the Western world. Today we automatically distinguish between past and present, labeling things that appear out of place as "anachronisms." Schiffman shows how this tendency did not always exist and how the past as such was born of a perceived difference between past and present. Schiffman takes readers on a grand tour of historical thinking from antiquity to modernity. He shows how ancient historians could not distinguish between past and present because they conceived of multiple pasts. Christian theologians coalesced these multiple pasts into a single temporal space where past merged with present and future. Renaissance humanists began to disentangle these temporal states in their desire to resurrect classical culture, creating a "living past."
French enlighteners killed off this living past when they engendered a form of social scientific thinking that measured the relations between historical entities, thus sustaining the distance between past and present and relegating each culture to its own distinctive context. Featuring a foreword by the eminent historian Anthony Grafton, this fascinating book draws upon a diverse range of sources-ancient histories, medieval theology, Renaissance art, literature, legal thought, and early modern mathematics and social science-to uncover the meaning of the past and its relationship to the present.
Contents
Foreword, by Anthony Grafton
Gestation
Introduction The Past Defined
part one
Antiquity
Flatland
Pasts Present
The Herodotean Achievement
Thucydides and the Refashionings
Linear Time
Hellenistic Innovations
part two
Christianity
Can't Get Here from There
The Power of Prayer
Breakthrough to the Now
The Idea of the Sæculum
The Sæculum Reconfigured
Gregory of Tours and the Sæculum
Back from the Future
part three
Renaissance
The Living Past
The Birth of Anachronism
Petrarch's "Copernican Leap"
The Commonplace View of the World
Jean Bodin and the Unity of History
part four
Enlightenment
Presence and Distance
Biography as a Form of History
The Politics of History
The Relations of Truth / The Truth of Relations
Montesquieu and the Relations of Things
The Past Emerges
Epilogue The Past Historicized
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
