Synopses & Reviews
One of the world's leading cultural historians on writing about history in early modern Europe.
Synopsis
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 debates about law, religion, and classical scholarship. In this book, based on the Trevelyan Lectures of 2005, Anthony Grafton explains why so many of these works were written, why they attained so much insight - and why, in the centuries that followed, they were gradually forgotten. Elegant and accessible, What Was History? is a deliberate evocation of E. H. Carr's celebrated Trevelyan Lectures on What Is History?,
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.