What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe

by Anthony Grafton

Overview

From the late fifteenth century onwards, scholars across Europe began to write books about how to read and evaluate histories. These pioneering works grew from complex early-modern debates about law, religion, and classical scholarship. Anthony Grafton's book is based on his Trevelyan Lectures of 2005, and it proves to be a powerful and imaginative exploration of some central themes in the history of European ideas. Grafton explains why so many of these works were written, why they attained so much insight – and why, in the centuries that followed, most scholars gradually forgot that they had existed. Elegant and accessible, What was History? is a deliberate evocation of E. H. Carr's celebrated Trevelyan Lectures on What is History?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107606159
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/29/2012
Series:	Canto Classics
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	330
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, and one of the most distinguished and influential cultural historians writing today. His many previous publications include The Footnote (Harvard University Press, 1997), Leon Battista Alberti (Harvard University Press and Penguin, 2000), and Christianity and the Transformation of the Book (Harvard University Press, 2006).

Table of Contents

List of plates; 1. Historical criticism in early modern Europe; 2. The origins of the Ars historica: a question mal posée?; 3. Method and madness in the Ars historica: three case studies; 4. Death of a genre; Bibliography; Index.