TOWARD A CONJECTURAL HISTORY OF CONJECTURAL HISTORIES

Anthony Grafton

History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025)
“Philology Now” Theme Issue

Most intellectual historians use the term “conjectural history” to designate a new form of speculative history created in eighteenth-century Scotland by Adam Smith and a few others. These writers traced the development of human society and culture through conjectural reasoning based on philosophers’ views about human nature and travelers’ accounts of “primitive” peoples. Their work had a deep impact on eighteenth-century philology: it helped to shape such original and influential studies of the ancient world as Edward Gibbon's history of the fall of Rome, Johann Joachim Winckelmann's history of the rise of ancient art, and Friedrich August Wolf's demonstration that Homer was an oral poet. But the connection between conjectural history and classical philology began long before any of the varied Enlightenments conjured up by modern scholars came into being. Conjectures about the past were deeply rooted in the central humanistic discipline, rhetoric; this gave Lorenzo Valla the tools for his conjectural refutation of the legend of the Donation of Constantine. But these same tools were plied with similar skill and originality by many other humanists, from Valla's contemporary in the Roman curia, Leon Battista Alberti, to the Jesuit historian of the New World, José de Acosta, a century later. And they saw them not as an innovation but as part of the philological and historical tradition in which they were grounded. Valla, for example, saw Thucydides—whose histories he translated into Latin—as a conjectural historian and thus identified conjecture as a central feature of historiography in the classical tradition.