Ancient History And The Antiquarian

Arnaldo Momigliano was convinced that all disciplines need to be aware of their own history. His famous lecture Ancient History and the Antiquarian, delivered in 1949 at the Warburg Institute, and published in 1950 in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, has become a landmark. In it he showed how historiography had been changed by the recognition that what historians had left out of the record could be put back by the antiquarians. He argued that a comprehensive interest in the vestiges of ancient civilization, beginning in the Renaissance and refined and enlarged during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, made a rigid distinction between historical and antiquarian studies unjustifiable; furthermore, the standards set by the antiquarians in the understanding and interpretation of the past still have relevance.

Since antiquity the city of Rome has been revered both for its prestige as a center of secular and spiritual power, as well as for its sheer longevity. Philip Jacks examines how the creation of the Eternal City was viewed from antiquity through the sixteenth century. Emphasising the myths and discoveries offered by Renaissance humanists from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, he shows how their interpretations evolved over time. With Petrarch, Boccacio, and Vergerio came the earliest efforts to confirm the historical basis of legends through studying the archaeological remains of the city. Such activity accelerated through the fifteenth century and reached a peak in the sixteenth with the discovery, in 1546, of the Fasti, and even more sensationally, the Severan plan of Rome in 1562. These fragments were to have a powerful impact on the development of modern archaeology. The antiquarians of the Renaissance not only discovered the vestiges of ancient Rome, but also actively reinterpreted the meaning of classical antiquity in the light of their own culture.

Antiquarianism and collecting have been associated intimately with European imperial and colonial enterprises, although both existed long before the early modern period and both were (and continue to be) practiced in places other than Europe. Scholars have made significant progress in the documentation and analysis of indigenous antiquarian traditions, but the clear-cut distinction between “indigenous” and “colonial” archaeologies has obscured the intense and dynamic interaction between these seemingly different endeavours. This book concerns the divide between local and foreign antiquarianisms focusing on case studies drawn primarily from the Mediterranean and the Americas. Both regions host robust pre-modern antiquarian traditions that have continued to develop during periods of colonialism. In both regions, moreover, colonial encounters have been mediated by the antiquarian practices and preferences of European elites. The two regions also exhibit salient differences. For example, Europeans claimed the “antiquities” of the eastern Mediterranean as part of their own, “classical,” heritage, whereas they perceived those of the Americas as essentially alien, even as they attempted to understand them by analogy to the classical world. These basic points of comparison and contrast provide a framework for conjoint analysis of the emergence of hybrid or cross-bred antiquarianisms. Rather than assuming that interest in antiquity is a human universal, this book explores the circumstances under which the past itself is produced and transformed through encounters between antiquarian traditions over common objects of interpretation.

This book is a project in comparative history, but along two distinct axes, one historical and the other historiographical. Its purpose is to constructively juxtapose the early modern European and Chinese approaches to historical study that have been called "antiquarian." As an exercise in historical recovery, the essays in this volume amass new information about the range of antiquarian-type scholarship on the past, on nature, and on peoples undertaken at either end of the Eurasian landmass between 1500 and 1800. As a historiographical project, the book challenges the received---and often very much under conceptualized---use of the term "antiquarian" in both European and Chinese contexts. Readers will not only learn more about the range of European and Chinese scholarship on the past---and especially the material past---but they will also be able to integrate some of the historiographical observations and corrections into new ways of conceiving of the history of historical scholarship in Europe since the Renaissance, and to reflect on the impact of these European terms on Chinese approaches to the Chinese past. This comparison is a two-way street, with the European tradition clarified by knowledge of Chinese practices, and Chinese approaches better understood when placed alongside the European ones.

The term antiquarianism refers to engagement with the material heritage of the past—an engagement that preceded the modern academic discipline of archaeology. Antiquarian activities result in the elaboration of particular social behaviors and the production of tools for exploring the collective memory. This book is the first to compare antiquarianism in a global context, examining its roots in the ancient Near East, its flourishing in early modern Europe and East Asia, and its manifestations in nonliterate societies of Melanesia and Polynesia. By establishing wide-reaching geographical and historical perspectives, the essays reveal the universality of antiquarianism as an embodiment of the human mind and open new avenues for understanding the representation of the past, from ancient societies to the present.

Arnaldo Momigliano was convinced that all disciplines need to be aware of their own history. His famous lecture Ancient History and the Antiquarian, delivered in 1949 at the Warburg Institute, and published in 1950 in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, has become a landmark. In it he showed how historiography had been changed by the recognition that what historians had left out of the record could be put back by the antiquarians. He argued that a comprehensive interest in the vestiges of ancient civilization, beginning in the Renaissance and refined and enlarged during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, made a rigid distinction between historical and antiquarian studies unjustifiable; furthermore, the standards set by the antiquarians in the understanding and interpretation of the past still have relevance.