Theme Issue 33

Proof and Persuasion in History

Edited by Anthony Grafton and Suzanne L. Marchand

Cover image: Josef Strzygowski (circa 1910), from Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Universität Wien

+ MAURICE OLENDER, Europe, or How to Escape Babel, History and Theory, Theme Issue 33 (December 1994), 5-25.

Since William Jones announced the kinship of Sanskrit and the European languages, a massive body of scholarship has illuminated the development of the so-called "Indo-European" language group. This new historical philology has enormous technical achievements to its credit. But almost from the start, it became entangled with prejudices and myths--with efforts to recreate not only the lost language, but also the lost--and superior--civilization of the Indo-European ancestors. This drive to determine the identity and nature of the first language of humanity was deeply rooted in both near eastern and western traditions. The Bible described the perfect, transparent language of Adam and followed its degeneration, caused by human sin, into the multiple, opaque languages of later nations. The three sons of Noah became, for Jewish and early Christian writers, the founders of three distinct human groups. By the sixth and seventh centuries, historians began to magnify the deeds of certain later peoples, such as the Scythians and Goths, and to connect them with the biblical genealogy of languages and races. And in the Renaissance, speculative historical etymology took root and flourished, as national pride led European intellectuals to assert that their own modern languages--for example, Flemish--either could be identified with the original one or offered the closest surviving approximation to it. Japheth, Noah's favorite son and the forefather of the Europeans, emerged as the hero who had preserved the original language in its purity. A new history of the European languages developed, one which traced them back to the language of the barbarian Scythians and emphasized the connections between Persian and European languages. It came to seem implausible that the European languages derived from Hebrew. By the eighteenth century, in short, all the preconditions were present for a discovery that the ancestors of the Europeans, like the common ancestor of their languages, had been independent of Semitic influence. A modern scholarly thesis whose political and intellectual consequences are still working themselves out reveals the continuing impact of a millennial tradition of speculation about language and history.

+ JOSINE H. BLOK, Quests for a Scientific Mythology: F. Creuzer and K. O. Müller on History and Myth, History and Theory, Theme Issue 33 (December 1994), 26-52.

Classical scholarship played a vital role in the intellectual concerns of early nineteenth-century Germany. Situated at the crossroads of religion, history, and explorations of the development of the human mind, Greek mythology in particular was expected to shed light on the origins of civilization. In the search for the true nature of myth, the hermeneutic problems involved in historical understanding were intensified. As myth was held to be of a different nature than rationality, to read the sources was to look for a completely different referent of the texts than was the case in historical reconstruction. In the quests for a scientific mythology, K. O. Müller (1797-1840) was often regarded as an opponent of F. Creuzer (1771-1858). Yet an analysis of their published work and of their private documents shows that they had much in common, a fact they both appreciated. In particular they held similar, deeply Romantic views on the religious origin of culture, in Müller's case inspired by Pietism, in Creuzer's by neo-Platonism. Creuzer's influence is revealed in Müller's Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (1825) and more specifically in his interpretation of the Amazons as worshippers of sexuality in Die Dorier (1824). Nevertheless, Müller differed from Creuzer in his views on the relationship of myth to history. Myth was not the reflection of a universal religion, sustained by a priestly class (as Creuzer had claimed), but the outcome of the encounter between the mental endowment of a people and local, historical circumstances. In the case of the Amazons, however, Müller assessed the connection of myth to history in defiance of his own theory, guided by his views on gender difference and on sexual morality.

+ ANTHONY GRAFTON, The Footnote from de Thou to Ranke, History and Theory, Theme Issue 33 (December 1994), 53-76.

Footnotes seem to rank among the most colorless and uninteresting features of historical practice. In fact, however, footnoting practices have varied widely, over time and across space, between individuals and among national disciplinary communities. Little clarity has prevailed in the discussion of the purpose footnotes serve; even less attention has been devoted to the development they have undergone. This essay sketches the history of the footnote in the Western historical tradition. Drawing on classic work by A. D. Momigliano, H. Butterfield, and others, it shows that critical research into and argument about sources have long formed part of the historical tradition. Classical political historians could not insert much explicit reflection about the use of sources into their work without violating the rhetorical rules they accepted. But their histories, as the case of de Thou shows, often rested on careful critical work. And the many historians who did not provide instructive narratives of war and high politics, but rather, accounts of local history or religious institutions, discussed their sources, and sometimes quoted them extensively. These varied traditions were only integrated, however, by the invention of the footnote in its modern form, which made it possible to combine a high literary narrative with erudite investigations. The footnote in its modern form seems to have been devised in the seventeenth century, as part of an effort to counter skepticism about the possibility of attaining knowledge about the past. It was used to great intellectual and literary effect in the eighteenth century, when individuals as different as Gibbon and Möser made the foundations of their texts into elaborate mosaics of erudite research and ironic reflection. Ranke did not invent, but dramatized, the historical footnote. He made the research that produced it as vital to the historian's culture and as central to the historian's achievement as the high style that had distinguished pragmatic exemplar history of the traditional kind. The historical footnote emerges not as a simple trademark guaranteeing quality nor as a uniform piece of scholarly technology, but rather as the product of long collective struggles and individual efforts to devise a visibly critical form of historical writing.

+ DAVID WOOTTON, Narrative, Irony, and Faith in Gibbon's Decline and Fall, History and Theory, Theme Issue 33 (December 1994), 77-105.

This article is divided into three sections. The first argues that the significance of David Hume's History of England as an inspiration for Gibbon's Decline and Fall has been underestimated, and that Momigliano's famous account of Gibbon's originality needs to be adapted to take account of the fact that Gibbon was, in effect, a disciple of Hume. Hume and Gibbon, I argue, shaped our modern understanding of "history" by producing narratives rather than annals, encyclopedias, or commentaries. Moreover, they made history primarily the study of the remote past, not the recent past. In order to test my claim that "histories" had generally been quite different in character from those written by Hume and Gibbon, I survey the histories of the early church available to Gibbon. Of Gibbon's critics, East Apthorp, I suggest, is most alert to the novelty of his enterprise. The second section analyzes the argument of chapter fifteen of the Decline and Fall, the first chapter on Christianity. I argue that Gibbon deliberately assembles all the arguments against belief in Christianity that were current (or that one may presume were current) in the first century. But I also argue that Gibbon intends the alert reader to notice that ancient arguments against Christianity and modern ones largely overlap, so that he is at the same time offering a conspectus of eighteenth-century arguments against religious faith. At one point only do the modern arguments differ from the ancient ones, and that is in the attitude to miracles expressed in Conyers Middleton's Free Enquiry and Hume's essay "Of Miracles." The last section criticizes David Womersley's claim that the attitude to religion expressed in the later books of the Decline and Fall is significantly different from that in the first. I argue that Gibbon is throughout a more subtle historian of faith than is generally recognized (more subtle, certainly, than Hume), and that this is because Gibbon himself had once been a Catholic convert.

+ SUZANNE L. MARCHAND, The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski, History and Theory, Theme Issue 33 (December 1994), 106-130.

This essay argues that in overlooking the assault on the autonomy, unity, and tenacity of the classical world (and especially Rome) underway in Europe after 1880, historians have failed to appreciate an important element of historiographical reorientation at the fin de siècle. This second "revolution" in humanistic scholarship challenged the conviction of the educated elite that European culture was rooted exclusively in classical antiquity in part by introducing as evidence non-textual forms of evidence; the testimony of artifacts allowed writers to reach beyond romantic-nationalist histories toward the identification of cultural areas, defined by morphological similarities, and to disrupt the traditional categories of the civilized and the barbaric. The essay focuses on a relatively obscure Austrian art historian, Josef Strzygowski, whose insistence upon Europe's dependence on Oriental forms and upon the superior historical value of material, over textual, evidence provided critics of philologically-based humanism with two important argumentative avenues. Strzygowski also represents a para-academic type, whose rise to power and prestige contributed to the so-called "decline of the German mandarins." In sketching his career, the essay attempts to show how this "decline" is bound up with the waning institutional and popular status of Renaissance humanism--and a corresponding rise of biologistic Germanophilia--in the two intellectual milieux Strzygowski inhabited (Germany and Austria). A final section suggests that this antihumanist crusade contributed not only to the articulation of racist historiography, but also to the eventual transference of politico-moral legitimacy to a non-elitist, anthropological definition of culture.