The Birth of the Past

Author:   Zachary S. Schiffman (Chair, Northeastern Illinois University) ,  Anthony T. Grafton (Princeton University)
Publisher:   Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN:  

9781421422787


Pages:   336
Publication Date:   21 March 2017
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Available To Order   Availability explained
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The Birth of the Past


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Author:   Zachary S. Schiffman (Chair, Northeastern Illinois University) ,  Anthony T. Grafton (Princeton University)
Publisher:   Johns Hopkins University Press
Imprint:   Johns Hopkins University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.476kg
ISBN:  

9781421422787


ISBN 10:   1421422786
Pages:   336
Publication Date:   21 March 2017
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

Table of 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"

Reviews

Complex and erudite, confident and controversial. As Schiffman's brilliant argument suggests, anachronism not only helps define the past but becomes its doppelganger. Times Literary Supplement Lively, brilliant, and erudite. [Schiffman's] learned and engaging style [and] fresh, stimulating ideas provide a intellectual feast not only for students of Western civilization, but for those of us seeking to understand other traditions. Essential. Choice This ambitious, lucid book chronicles European methods of imagining and representing the past from the ancient Greeks to the French Enlightenment. Schiffman provides a masterful account of the emergence of modern notions of historical causation that begins with Thucydides and ends more than two thousand years later with Montesquieu and Herder. Sixteenth Century Journal Anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, or the history of historiography for that matter, will find that this book repays close attention. Reviews in History Thought-provoking. History Wire - Where the Past Comes Alive This is an important book, and deserves to be widely read. The Sun News Network Schiffman has given us a 'historiographical essay' by his own admission, and an excellent one at that: not the whole truth, but, more valuably, a new foothold for serious engagement. -- Anthony Ossa-Richardson Intellectual History Review It is refreshing to read a book with a clear, even bold, thesis that forces readers to reexamine the authority and applicability of basic historical concepts... The strength of this engaging study is not simply that it historicizes and thus defamiliarizes what passes for common sense in the present but also that it reconstructs what had been regarded as common sense in previous epochs in the Western tradition, from antiquity to the Christian era, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Journal of Modern History


Complex and erudite, confident and controversial. As Schiffman's brilliant argument suggests, anachronism not only helps define the past but becomes its doppelganger. Times Literary Supplement Lively, brilliant, and erudite. [Schiffman's] learned and engaging style [and] fresh, stimulating ideas provide a intellectual feast not only for students of Western civilization, but for those of us seeking to understand other traditions. Essential. Choice This ambitious, lucid book chronicles European methods of imagining and representing the past from the ancient Greeks to the French Enlightenment. Schiffman provides a masterful account of the emergence of modern notions of historical causation that begins with Thucydides and ends more than two thousand years later with Montesquieu and Herder. Sixteenth Century Journal Anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, or the history of historiography for that matter, will find that this books repays close attention. Reviews in History Thought-provoking. History Wire - Where the Past Comes Alive This is an important book, and deserves to be widely read. The Sun News Network Schiffman has given us a 'historiographical essay' by his own admission, and an excellent one at that: not the whole truth, but, more valuably, a new foothold for serious engagement. -- Anthony Ossa-Richardson Intellectual History Review It is refreshing to read a book with a clear, even bold, thesis that forces readers to reexamine the authority and applicability of basic historical concepts... The strength of this engaging study is not simply that it historicizes and thus defamiliarizes what passes for common sense in the present but also that it reconstructs what had been regarded as common sense in previous epochs in the Western tradition, from antiquity to the Christian era, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Journal of Modern History


Author Information

Zachary Sayre Schiffman is the Bernard Brommel Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Northeastern Illinois University. He is the author of On the Threshold of Modernity: Relativism in the French Renaissance, the coauthor of Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution, and the editor of Humanism and the Renaissance.

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