clio and chronos

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Clio and Chronos an Essay on the Making and Breaking of History-Book Time Author(s): Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Source: History and Theory, Vol. 6, Beiheft 6: History and the Concept of Time (1966), pp. 36-64

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CLIO AND CHRONOS AN ESSAY ON THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF

HISTORY-BOOK TIME*

ELIZABETH L. EISENSTEIN

I. THE PRESENT PREDICAMENT

"'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone." John Donne's lament has appeared with remarkable frequency - a thousand times in the past forty years, according to Douglas Bush - in recent scholarly studies. This reiteration reflects, I believe, not only an interest in seventeenth-century reactions to the Copernican hypothesis, but also a cr de coeur about the state of their own craft on the part of many historians. No single new philosophy of history has called all the old ones in doubt. Yet a clutter of broken historical perspectives points to the shattering impact of some sort of collision, produced by forces that remain undefined. Ostensible diagnoses turn out to be symptomatic and self-contradictory. Although preoccupation with discontinuity is currently displayed in many ways, two incompatible schools of thought appear dominant.

The first stresses a recent acceleration in the rate of historical change that has rendered prior experience irrelevant. An unprecedented increase in cognitive and technological innovations has so drastically altered the intellectual and material environment of Western man that a kind of evolutionary "mutation" - a great "leap into the future" - has resulted.1 By and large, this view is an extension of nineteenth-century elaborations on ideas of progress.2 It thus emphasizes open-ended, developmental forms of change, stressing what

* Acknowledgment is due Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographical Man (Toronto, 1962), for suggesting the thesis I will explore in this essay. The importance of considering available means of communication when thinking about historiography and the need to examine further the historical consequences of the utilization of movable type were both brought to my attention by this book.

1. Carl Bridenbaugh, "The Great Mutation," American Historical Review 68 (1963), 315-331; Raymond Aron, The Dawn of Universal History, transl. D. Pickles (New York, 1961); Kenneth Boulding, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century: The Great Transition (New York, 1965); Louis Halle, 'The World: A Sense of History," The New Republic (Nov. 7, 1965), 94-95.

2. For a recent vigorous reassertion of nineteenth-century views, see E. H. Carr, What Is History? (New York, 1962).



CLIO AND CHRONOS 37

once was called the "advancement of learning" and "improvements" in the "arts of peace and war." For comparisons between the present situation and prior experience, it draws heavily on testimony provided by those nineteenth- century gradualists who regarded the "slow change of time" as the most "natural" form of historical process, and historical leaps - notably the French Revolution - as unnatural. Accordingly, upheavals experienced by prior generations are glossed over and a vivid contrast drawn between the slow- changing, stable, well-rooted societies of the past and the fast-changing, unstable, fluid society of today. To earlier visions of the course of history as a single on-going process working "without rest, without haste,"' the great- mutation theory merely adds a corollary: harnessed to a "run-away technology," the process has been abruptly accelerated.

The second school, while retaining the emphasis on tension and conflict that characterized social-Darwinian and Marxist theories, rejects all nineteenth-century assumptions about gradualism, continuity, and synchronized, on-going processes.4 "An age which has undergone great upheavals . . . will not be impressed when it is told that history is a story of continuity governed by a law not of revolution but of evolution."5 The scientific and metaphysical theories which are held responsible - wrongly, in my opinion - for evolutionary assumptions are dismissed as outmoded. The degree to which prior generations experienced abrupt dislocation and decisive upheaval, rather than the slow change of time, is stressed. (The extent to which such upheavals were localized, unevenly distributed, and not simultaneous receives less attention.) This abandonment of gradualist evolutionary views is accompanied by concern with forms of change which are not developmental, open-ended, or progressive. Hence it involves a revival of classical "cyclical" and early Christian "catastrophic" concepts. The former tend to be modernized by importation of contemporary Oriental philosophies and notions pertaining to what has been called a meeting of East and West.6 Tinged with mysticism, dependent on a feeling for certain hidden rhythms, cyclical schemes are favored by philosophers of history. Such schemes, however, play a relatively minor role in more specialized empirical studies refuting or revising the work of nineteenth- century historians. Catastrophism, which plays a predominant role in these reappraisals, probably serves best to exemplify our second school.

In a wide variety of recent studies pertaining to diverse developments in different areas and eras, one will find metaphors borrowed from modern

3. A. F. Pollard, cited by J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (Evanston, 1961), 38. 4. J. H. Hexter and Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Oxford,

1955), exemplify this school. 5. Barraclough, 7. 6. Grace E. Cairns, Philosophies of History: Meeting of East and West in Cycle-

Pattern Theories of History (New York, 1962), exemplifies this tendency.



38 ELIZABETH L. EISENSTEIN

technology, Freudian psychology, or existentialist philosophy employed to bring up to date very old concepts about decisive points of no return and fateful encounters with unpredictable "Acts of God." Recent verdicts by geneticists and quantum physicists are also cited to show that nature has always done many things by leaps. Nineteenth-century terms, such as "emergence," ''growth," "development," "rise and fall," "decline," "decay," are discarded in favor of more fashionable terms: "catastrophe," "dissociation," "mutation," "conflict," "take-off," "breakthrough," "breakdown." Beginning with the "trauma" of the Black Death,7 every era once regarded as "transitional" is now presented as an age of "crisis." In fact, the great mutation of one school comes almost as an anticlimax to the succession of crises presented by the other. One may read, in chronological sequence, about the political crisis of the early Italian Renaissance and the aesthetic crisis of the late Italian Renaissance; about innumerable crises - including an "identity crisis" - precipitated by the Reformation; about a general European crisis in the early seventeenth century (1560-1660); about a crisis of the European conscience in the late seventeenth century (1680-1715); and about the "age of crisis" immediately following, during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (1715-1789). Four centuries of crisis thus have to be traversed even before arriving at those classic late eighteenth-century points of departure for our present twentieth-century crisis: political revolution in France and Industrial Revolution or the so-called Great Transformation in England.8 Headline writers manage to measure the type size required to report different kinds of unprecedented events; a sense of proportion is equally indispensable to historians. It appears to have vanished at present. So, too, has the possibility of integrating recent treatments of the succession of crises and upheavals into a single coherent account.

For it is no longer sufficient to try to arrange in some sort of sequence the great revolutions affecting church and state, trade routes and prices, population

7. William Langer, "The Next Assignment," American Historical Review 63 (1958), 283-304.

8. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1955); Arnold Hauser, The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origins of Modern Art, 2 vols. (London, 1965); The European Crisis 1560-1660- Essays from Past and Present, ed. Trevor Ashton (London, 1965); Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience europeenne (Paris, 1935); Lester Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought (Baltimore, 1959). See also remarks about the philosopher' "anguish" related to the "crisis" of "their Christian civilization" in Peter Gay, The Party of Hu- manity (New York, 1964), 126. The term "identity crisis" is taken from Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York, 1958); "great transformation" from Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time (New York, 1944). The concept of political revolution in France has recently been expanded both in space and time: see R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1959, 1964).



CLIO AND CHRONOS 39

movements, and modes of production. We must simultaneously attend to all the claims being made for the impact of scattered innovations (whether imported or indigenous), such as the stirrup and horse collar, the grist mill, the mechanical clock, double-entry bookkeeping, movable type, the compass, the steam engine, the dynamo, and others. Vast social transformations, resulting from a complex interaction of multiple forms of change, some chronic and some unprecedented, are treated as abrupt, decisive upheavals. Separate innovations, once regarded as single inventions or discoveries which unpredict- ably and abruptly changed the course of history within a few decades, are now regarded as complex social processes in themselves. The invention of printing, the discovery of America, the Copernican revolution may no longer be isolated as discrete events or filed under certain names and dates. Each such innovation has become increasingly problematic.9 It is difficult to describe when each one occurred or who was responsible for it. Thus nineteenth- century gradualism is altering former simple-minded notions about the sudden advent of a single invention or discovery even while twentieth-century catastrophism is prevalent in accounts of major social transformations, experienced unevenly by vast populations over long intervals of time. Modern artists have composed decorative assemblages by juxtaposing incompatible ingredients and disassociated images. A jumbling of time sequences accords well enough with efforts by avant-garde novelists or film makers to enliven their art. For historians, however, entanglement in snarled guidelines is neither an aestheti- cally pleasurable nor intellectually edifying experience. It is instead dispiriting. "As I see it," a distinguished American historian noted recently, "mankind is faced with nothing short of the loss of its memory and this memory is history."'0

One purpose of this essay is to suggest that this is a misreading of the predicament confronting historians today. It is not the onset of amnesia that accounts for present difficulties but a more complete recall than any prior generation has ever experienced. Steady recovery, not obliteration, accumulation, rather than loss, have led to the present impasse. No full accounting of what has happened to the sense of history in the twentieth century will be attempted here. I shall only try to suggest why any account must consider how our print-made culture, our so-called "knowledge industry" operates at present. I shall explore the possibility that the present historical outlook is less directly conditioned by what has happened in the world outside the library and

9. See, for examples, treatments of the "discovery" of oxygen by Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), Chapter VI, and of the "discovery" of America by Wilcomb Washburn, "The Meanings of 'Discovery' in the 15th and 16th Centuries," American Historical Review 67 (1962), 1-21.

10. Bridenbaugh, 326.




schoolroom than by what has been happening within it. In so doing, I hope to illustrate an aspect of the impact of a revolution in communications that began five centuries ago and is still gathering momentum. I hope also to show that available means of communication have to be considered when examining historic consciousness in any era. My working hypothesis is that all views of history have been fundamentally shaped by the way records are duplicated, knowledge transmitted, and information stored and retrieved. Although my point of departure is the present, and the following discussion never really leaves the twentieth-century library, it must range far into the past. Ancient views and the conditions that shaped them have to be considered. The per- petuation of these views - abstracted from their historical contexts and inap- propriately applied to dissimilar ones - has contributed much to the present outlook.

There is no need to trace the origins of current views or to enumerate all the prototypes from which they derive. The resources of a modern encyclopedic culture have been sufficiently exploited toward this end already. The evidence uncovered suggests that all known ways of viewing historical change may be found in almost any area within the Western world, during almost any era since the first chronicles were written, the first records kept. Although such views have been classified in many different ways, they seem to fall into three main categories, schematically described as cyclical, cataclysmic, and developmental. Thus historical change has been patterned in terms of: 1) repetitive, recurrent, or periodic phenomena; 2) abrupt upheavals, discontinuous leaps, decisive points of no return; or 3) cumulative, progressive, continuous open-ended processes. Each of these schemes, of course, contains elements of the others. Cyclical theories, derived from Oriental, Near Eastern, or Greco-Roman sources, allow for periodic cataclysmic endings and cosmic creations as well as for a limited sequential progression such as the "decay of nature" theme or Hesiod's "Four Ages."11 Cataclysmic theories, derived from scriptural sources, emphasize points of no return, such as the Fall, the Flood, the Incarnation, or the Last Judgment. They may also be plausibly described as "one-cycle" variations on other cyclical models.'2 The

persistence, in Latin Christendom, of ideas about eras lying beyond the Second Coming and about the "eternal return" of the Savior'3 suggests the

11. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return [1949], transl. W. B. Trask (New York, 1959), 112-132. On Hesiod's metallic ages, see also M. I. Finley, "Myth, Memory, and History," History and Theory IV (1965), 286. The closely related "decay of nature" theme is discussed by Hiram Haydn, The Counter- Renaissance (New York, 1950), Chapter Eight, parts 3 and 4.

12. Cairns, Part II, Chapter Two. 13. On Siger of Brabant's heretical opinions about the infinite appearance and dis-

appearance of Christianity and the periodic recurrence of the crucifixion, see E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, transl. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford,



CLIO AND CHRONOS 41

ease with which these two models could be fused. Cataclysmic views could also merge into developmental ones. The unique Incarnation could be anticipated by prophecies and eternally renewed for each generation by religious ceremony. Efforts to link the Old Testament and New, doctrines pertaining to an apostolic succession or to the institutional continuity of the Church made it possible for lines to be drawn from one point of no return to another.14

Some lines could be indefinitely prolonged - like the sway of "eternal Rome," the last of the Four Monarchies in the Book of Daniel. Finally, views pertaining to continuous, irreversible processes may incorporate epoch-making events, distinct stages, "watersheds," and "great divides." They may also take into account periodicity and rhythmic oscillations. They may be fused with cyclical models by patterning change according to an ascending or descending spiral movement.'5 Developmental models lend themselves as easily to concepts about regress as to those about progress. Both, suggesting as they do a steady tendency toward increasing order or increasing disorder, are not altogether open-ended.

The increasingly rich orchestration of developmental themes after the mid- fifteenth century has attracted much comment. Certaintly before the invention of printing few variations were played on such themes in scribal writings, whereas many were played upon cyclical and catastrophic ones. But the latter as well as the former did not emerge as distinct historical typologies until the advent of typography.' Intermittently revived, usually outside official academic establishments,'7 they have nonetheless been progressively elaborated, more thickly documented, and clearly articulated down to the present. Three incompatible conceptual schemes that were once amorphous and blurred have been steadily brought into sharper focus. They now impinge simultaneously with almost equal force upon the modern consciousness. Throughout much of the past they were, on the contrary, barely perceptible.

1961), 156. Other medieval variations on the theme of "eternal return" are noted by Eliade, 143-144; see also Chapters Three and Four.

14. How this was done in some patristic writings and later exploited in the seventeenth century is described by E. Tuveson, Millenium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (New York, 1949).

15. Cairns includes all such "linear" schemes under her "one-cycle" category. K. Lbwith, Meaning in History (Chicago, 1949), like R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1948) and many others, does not differentiate "catastrophic" from "linear" schemes. Both are fused into a single model which is sharply contrasted with cyclic theories. For a recent example of this contrast, see Frank Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History (Stanford, 1965), 2-6.

16. Manuel introduces his "shapes of history" as "typologies by now profoundly im- printed upon our intellectual consciousness" that "do not rub off easily." (6) Elsewhere he describes Augustine as a "form imprinter." (32) I believe there is more than a verbal connection between typography and the fixing of indelible impressions.

17. Cf. 0. F. Anderle, "A Plea for Theoretical History," History and Theory IV (1964), 33-35.




II. THE CONDITIONS OF SCRIBAL CULTURE

During the centuries which preceded the advent of printing, and for several centuries thereafter, one must look in a wide variety of contexts to locate attitudes toward historical change. They will be found only occasionally in writings ostensibly devoted to "history" and often have to be read into such writings. They must also be read into sagas and epics, sacred scriptures, funerary inscriptions, glyphs and ciphers, vast stone monuments, documents locked in chests in muniment rooms, and marginal notations on manuscripts. Only gradually were attitudes inherent in different kinds of record-keeping extricated from their diverse contexts, worked out in different regions by generations of scholars, and combined into full-fledged grand designs. The capacity to work out such designs and to locate the elements which entered into them has been acquired relatively recently.

We tend to forget the recentness of this development since ancient scribal chronicles have been seen in a deceptive dual format for hundreds of years. Ever since they were first set in type four or five centuries ago, they have been indistinguishable from works deliberately written for publication. They are now studied by perusing printed editions, decked out with scholarly apparatus, or by perusing manuscript versions and collating variants in order to produce a new, more authoritative edition. Each such edition tells us more about how the manuscript was composed and copied than was previously known. By the same token each makes it more difficult to envisage how a given manuscript or one of its various copies appeared to the small groups of scholars who had limited access only to undated, untitled works written by hand that were identified, if at all, by "incipits," and catalogued, if at all, temporarily by their position on the shelf of a given library. Historians are trained to discriminate between manuscript sources and printed texts; but they are not trained to think with equal care about how manuscripts appeared when this sort of discrimination was inconceivable - when everything was off the record, so to speak, save that which got read to those who stood within earshot. Similarly the more thoroughly trained they are to use our present printed reference guides, the less capable they are of imagining how men kept track of temporal change with no uniform chronologies or historical atlases to guide them.'8

1.

Before uniform reference guides could be devised and become available, images of the past were ordered by a seemingly random - but in fact locally

18. Lucien Febvre's Le problem de l'incroyance au XVle si'cle: la religion de Rabelais (L'evolution de l'humanite Liii) (Paris, 1942), 418-437, is so remarkable an



CLIO AND CHRONOS 43

significant - association of events. Historical events happened "once upon a time." They could, to be sure, be intermittently ordered by those who had access to various scattered collections of disparate manuscripts. Overlapping, contradictory temporal sequences were worked out, based on dynasties and Olympiads, consulates and tribunates, or on counting generations descended from Romulus and Remus, from Adam, Abraham, Noah, or Aeneas.'9 Much scholarly energy was expended on this sort of counting. An elite group of learned men had to be specially trained to master it. But even as Bishop Ussher's chronology provoked derision by the nineteenth century, so too would Ussher's contemporaries regard with enlightened scorn the errors compounded by scribal chronologies. Adult intelligence and painstaking industry, rather than carelessness, credulity, or a childlike mentality have, in my view, characterized most groups of chronologers. The conditions of scribal culture rather than naivete on the part of scribal scholars accounted for the muddle their efforts produced.

These conditions probably also accounted for the mixture of sacred and profane tales, imaginary and real locales, allegorical and eyewitness accounts, wide-ranging mythologies and localized contemporary reports that was deposited on printed pages in the era of incunabula. From such ingredients, rudimentary historical perspectives were traced by Renaissance scholars. Their contradictory versions have plagued historiography ever since.20 Some humanists, for example, emphasized the gulf between pagan error and Christian truth. Others, to the contrary, bridged the era of the Incarnation, in order to divide a bright millenium of pagan prophecy and Christian fulfillment from a dark millenium of Gothic barbarism. Italian cycles of republican virtue and imperial decadence were incompatible with Portuguese and French Aeneids, entitled Lusiad or Franciad, and with John Foxe's quasi-scriptural historic prose epic

exception that it seems to prove the rule. Despite the wealth of valuable data contained in another work of which he was co-author, Febvre and Martin, L'apparition du livre (L'evolution de l'humanite XLIX) (Paris, 1958), the relevance of printing to the gap Febvre imaginatively bridged in his book on Rabelais is nowhere made clear.

19. An interesting glimpse of conflicting schemes for describing eras, involving Abraham, Adam, Christ, Diocletian, the Seleucids, the foundation of Rome, Olympiads, etc., is offered by J. Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology (Princeton, 1964), xxv. Much of this book is relevant to the above discussion.

20. Here, as everywhere else, it is necessary to discriminate between what is seen in retrospect and what was visible to contemporaries. It is possible now to collate and compare versions produced by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historians attached to diverse institutions, elaborating disparate traditions, relying on records gathered in different places. Whether these versions are harmonized and patterned after the fact or presented untouched and unreconciled, as evidence of incoherence, they are in both instances seen from an entirely different viewpoint from that of the scholars who composed these versions. From their viewpoint, new order and symmetry were being introduced into world history, although from ours overlapping and incompatible schemes were being developed.




that portrayed Elizabethan England as "an elect nation."2' They also con- flicted with notions that elsewhere persisted about the continued sway of "eternal Rome."22 Seven or six ages composing a vast cosmic week, four ages of metal within which a fifth "age of heroes" was inserted, four successive monarchies or empires, three ages corresponding to the persons of the Trinity, were similarly mutually incompatible.23 Nor did many of these schemes have much to do with various calendars of marvels and disasters compiled from local annals. Nevertheless, it was the duplication of records that made parts of the muddle visible and inspired efforts to clear it up. With the advent of printing each individual scholar or book-reader could "see" more of his past spread out before him than anyone had ever seen before.24 What remained of unused written records could begin to be uncovered, collected, and preserved. New experiences could begin to be recorded in a much more permanent form. It thus became possible, for the first time, to sort out and to compare the accumu- lating deposits left by successive generations, and to reorder them in a single uniform sequence as they accumulated.

Oral transmission, as is later discussed, had worked at cross purposes with such an endeavor. Scribal culture, which was more closely tied to oral and auditory memory-training than is often recognized,25 had frequently frustrated and always limited it. The scholars attached to the Alexandrian Museum

21. William Haller's The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe's Book of Martyrs (New York, 1963) is a pioneering study of the impact of printing on the shaping of a national historical mythology. F. Smith Fussner's The Historical Revolu- tion: English Historical Writing and Thought 1580-1640 (London, 1962), although it covers a wider range of relevant data, is much less useful in this regard.

22. The four-monarchy scheme, involving the persistence of Rome, was forcefully dismissed in sixteenth-century France by Calvin, Bodin, and LeRoy. See Tuveson, 58, 65, 222n. Its prior rejection by quattrocento Florentine humanists is stressed by Hans Baron, "The Querelle of the Ancients and the Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship," Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959), 11-12. Although it was nonetheless retained by Bossuet a century later (Ldwith, 138-139), it apparently did not linger on among lay scholars in France as it did in the Germanies down to the eighteenth century. Rejected by Calvin, it had been espoused by Luther and Melanchthon. See Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1955), 45-46. For ancient views pertaining to the eternal renewal of Rome, see Eliade, 134-137; for diverse interpretations of this theme by historiographers, reaching down to mid-nineteenth-century American fundamentalists, Manuel, Shapes of His- tory, 17-19.

23. On the ancient Near-Eastern background of notions pertaining to cosmic weeks, triadic and quadripartite divisions of "ages," see Eliade, 124-127; on subsequent development of these schemes, Manuel, Shapes of History, 24-45.

24. "The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw more of the Middle Ages than had ever been available to anyone in the Middle Ages. Then it had been scattered and inaccessible and slow to read. Now it became privately portable and quick to read." (McLuhan, 143.)

25. See references cited by McLuhan, 92-100. The key work is H. J. Chaytor's From Script to Print: A a Introduction to Medieval Literature (Cambridge, 1945), a fascinat- ing investigation of this issue.



CLIO AND CHRONOS 45

like Eratosthenes, the "father of chronology" - or those who had access to other large libraries26 might devise rudimentary chronologies and make a start at mapping the whole world. They were fortunate enough to live at the right place and time to take advantage of the varied and dissimilar collections of texts that had been gathered together. But many scholars were less fortunate than the immediate successors of an Eratosthenes or a Eusebius. They were confronted not only by the dispersal and destruction of the texts, upon which their predecessors' work was based; this work was, itself, partly or altogether lost and they had to begin all over again - "once upon a time."

Those portions of the "imperishable past" which were neither inscribed in sacred books - themselves copied, and often altered, by generations of scribes27 - nor committed to verse and preserved by human voices, led a precarious existence before the advent of printing. Insofar as ancient papyri were handled, their lifetime was short. Only those which were stored and went unread could outlast the life-span of a few generations. But moisture, vermin, theft, and fire took a heavy toll of stored documents. Whether they were locked in chests in muniment rooms, moved about with ambulatory princes, or deposited in scattered chanceries, archives, or town halls, medieval documents were accessible only to local elites.28 Manuscripts which went uncopied during the medieval millenium because they did not suit the practical needs of professional jurists, teachers, and preachers survived to find their way into print on a random basis.29 The history of the destruction of library collections throughout the Near East and Europe demonstrates how scholars had to perform the labors of Sisyphus until the "divine art" came to their aid. Almost all such collections were doomed to destruction. The deliberate exercise of pious zeal by pagan or apostate, Christian or Moslem authorities led to many book-burnings.30 The very term vandalism indicates what barbarian

26. Thus Eusebius, the "father of church history," worked at a theological school in Caesarea where Pamphilus had established a "magnificent library" of biblical literature frequently mentioned by St. Jerome.

27. M. H. Black, "The Printed Bible," Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. S. L. Greenslade (Cambridge, 1963), 408, notes that Jewish scribes preserved their writings from corruption by "elevating copying to a ritual, making inaccuracy a blasphemy," and also doubtless by insuring an adequate supply of young men who committed the Talmud to memory. Rigid sanctions, absolute inflexibility, devotion to learning by rote and by reading were required to preserve the Law (and a uniform chronology) among Jews of the Diaspora after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple eliminated a vital "message center" and scattered synagogues were in constant peril.

28. On the chaotic state of quasi-public records in sixteenth-century England, sec Fussner, 69-82.

29. E. P. Goldschmidt, Medieval Texts and their First Appearance in. Print (Supple- ment to the Bibliographical Society's Transactions #it6) (London, 1943), 13.

30. Thus thc great library at Cordova was destroyed by Alnmanzor in 978, muach as Diocletian and Julian had destroyed Christian libraries. See H. R. Tedder and J. D. Brown, "Libraries", The Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. (New York, 1910-11), XVI,




conquests and sacks of cities often involved. But carelessness or neglect on the part of any one generation of custodians, unavoidable accidents, and random "acts of God" also underscored the "vanity of learning" in the era of scribal culture. "Nearly every monastic or cathedral library suffered fire at one time or another."'31

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy, where the trade in manuscripts and their collection in libraries had reached sizable proportions, scholars began to be sensitive to anachronism.32 Civic loyalties, humanist edu- cational reforms affecting the study of law and language, contrasts between antique and Gothic styles in rhetoric and art, all may have contributed to a rudimentary historical consciousness in quattrocento Florence. But without continuous access to increasingly available texts made possible by the utilization of movable type, a local revival of learning might well have been extin- guished in the disorders of the sixteenth century, as was the Carolingian revival after Charlemagne's death. The Laurentian library might have suffered the fate of the collection of fifty thousand volumes amassed by Mathias Cor- vinus, King of Hungary, which had already been despoiled before it was sacked by the Turks at the fall of Buda in 1527.33 Similarly, knowledge of

545-551. Before printing, the destruction of a major library dealt a moral blow to a strategic social institution. In the present century, such phenomena as Nazi book-burnings or the setting fire to American libraries overseas have become ritualistic and sym- bolic. Only two centuries ago, however - before the publication of huge source collections had begun - the sporadic destruction of chateau archives during the French Revolution obliterated much evidence of French feudal history. It is partly because it is so difficult to eliminate data once fixed in print that totalitarian controls have to be so extensive and all-inclusive. Repeated Soviet efforts to rewrite history may be less effective than many accounts suggest.

31. James Westfall Thompson, "The Wanderings of Manuscripts," The Medieval Library, ed. J. W. Thompson (repr. New York, 1957), 659. See also the reference to archives of St. Benoit-sur-Loire, Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, transl. P. Putnam (New York, 1964), 77.

32. Goldschmidt notes how "strangely blunt in their perception of anachronisms" were fifteenth-century scribes and copyists (24); there is a tendency to overrate humanist anticipations of modern scholarship or "higher criticism." Had his successors not been able to take advantage of his Neapolitan polemic against Pope Eugenius IV, it is doubtful whether Lorenzo Valla's De Constantini Donatione Declarnatio (which, according to Thompson, "resumed textual criticism at the point where the Alexandrian School had left it") would have launched a tradition -as it did after being published by Ulrich von Hutten. In the first half of the twelfth century, Otto of Freising had also held the Donation of Constantine to be a forgery. See J. W. Thompson, A History of Historical Writing (New York, 1942), 1, 196, 493-494.

33. Tedder and Brown, "Libraries," 551. One should note the size of some other libraries during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Cambridge University had 122 volumes in its library in 1424, 330 in 1470. The library of a king of France should be compared with that of the king of Hungary. in 1373, Charles V-II owned 130 volumes, all of which had vanished by 1411. See Curt Bbhler, The Fif teentl Centurly Book (Phila- delphia, 1960), 19.



CLIO AND CHRONOS 47

Greek might have withered away once again in the West. Instead it was the familiar scribal phrase: "Graeca sunt ergo non legenda" that disappeared from Western books, never to reappear. For Greek type founts could be cut, Greek grammars as well as "standard editions" of Greek texts could be issued. The duplicative powers of print fixed whatever was known in a more permanent mold, making possible the progressive recovery of arcane letters and ancient languages along with the systematic development of historical scholarship and its auxiliary sciences. Only a little more than a century after the first incunabula, it was possible to compare written records with one another and order them sequentially with unprecedented scope and skill. In 1583 J. J. Scaliger's De Emendatione Temporum was published. This work "revolutionized all received ideas of ancient chronology."34 It represented a feat which might ultimately have been achieved by Eratosthenes's successors had the Alex- andrian libraries not been destroyed.35

In the age of print no special care was required to preserve work like Scaliger's, and energies could be devoted to improving upon it. Although press variants multiplied, gradual correction rather than inevitable corruption or destruction was for the first time possible.36 The knowledge that useful works of reference would not be abruptly obliterated or slowly erased and blurred probably affected the way literate men thought about their past and their future.

Indeed, catastrophic and cyclical theories of historical change appear to be closely related to the specific problems that were posed by the migration of manuscripts. Scholars relying solely on scribal records had direct experience with disastrous "acts of God" that seemed to be directed at the "vanity of learning." They also had experience with seemingly miraculous recoveries of whole systems of knowledge7 and "golden ages" that sometimes receded and

34. R. C. Christie and J. E. Sandys, "Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609)," Encyclo- pedia Britannica, 11th ed., XXIV, 284.

35. Had some successor of Eratosthenes written this work, it might have been "preserved" -that is, altered by copyists and emended by glossators -or else lost, like the chronology of Dionysus of Halicarnassus. By the fourteenth century, corrupted manuscripts used by universities were partly protected from further corruption by the system of pecia (that is, renting out portions of a specially supervised manuscript to copyists who returned it for re-use as a model). See Febvre and Martin, 10-11, 23. The doubtful criteria involved in supervising an already corrupted copy need to be kept in mind.

36. Although M. H. Black, "The Printed Bible," 408-414, argues that press variants multiplied down to the eighteenth century and that texts were altered more rapidly by early printing methods than they had been by fourteenth-century university copyists, he also notes that this process of corruption was ultimately arrested by printers.

37. When the works of such ancients as Ptolemy re-entered the West by circuitous routes, they bore few traces of their antecedents. The extent to which their immense technical superiority depended upon access to the great libraries of antiquity was not




sometimes seemed on the verge of dawning. Views based on these experiences were embedded in all scribal writings, and, down to the seventeenth century, it should be remembered, these were the writings that predominated in pub- lishers' catalogues and booksellers' lists.38 As written words were "cheapened" and books became more plentiful, scribal views were duplicated in a variety of contexts. They thus outlived the culture that had nurtured them. The "decay of nature" theme, which was altogether compatible with the steady erosion of manuscript records, was less compatible with the steady accumulation of printed materials. Yet this theme survived to inspire pessimistic social philosophers with theories about decadence and entropy in the nineteenth century. The contents of the Library of Congress or the British Museum have not been thinned out and are not threatened by dispersal. Alarms about the loss of mankind's memory may nonetheless still be heard. Abstracted from their con- text and perpetuated as typologies, then, cyclical and catastrophic theories survived. But at the same time, the rapid duplication of useful reference guides and the systematic development of many forms of knowledge that this duplication made possible encouraged the formulation of new views. The "premise of straight-line direction" was powerfully reinforced by the progressive accumulation of records and the "advancement of learning" that went with it. It is by now so firmly entrenched in Western historiography that, despite recent revisions, it cannot be dislodged.

Many fields of human activity have, in fact, been subject to continuous development during the past five centuries that were not subject to this kind of development previously. "Steady advance," George Sarton has suggested, "im- plies exact determination of every previous step."39 Not only was exact determination impossible given the migration of undated, untitled manuscripts; in any field of knowledge that involved large-scale collection of data, backsliding was more common than advance. A comparison of Ptolemaic world maps of the second century with twelfth-century mappae mundi offers a useful correc- tive to modern preconceptions. It is also noteworthy that modern conclusions drawn from this comparison were not evident to fifteenth-century printers, who duplicated both crude and relatively sophisticated world-pictures simultaneously in an era when still more accurate renderings than Ptolemy's were being traced by hand by Mediterranean cartographers.40 Save among closed

recognized. This superiority, linked with Christian allegorical interpretations of pagan prophets who anticipated the Incarnation, encouraged belief in the special insights of ancient seers who had recourse to a divine illumination.

38. The preponderance of books published for academic markets down to the seventeenth century consisted of medieval theological texts, according to Goldschmidt, 13-23.

39. George Sarton, "The Quest for Truth: Scientific Progress during the Renaissance," The Renaissance: Six Essays (Metropolitan Museum Symposium, 1953) (New York, 1962), 66.

40. Boies Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance 1420-1620 (New York, 1962), Chapter 16.



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circles of specially initiated craftsmen, distinctions between what was advanced on one hand and retarded on the other could not be perceived. Among all groups there was, furthermore, a blurred perception of what was new and what was old. This was partly because of objective conditions. What was "found" by one generation had often been previously found and then lost by prior ones. The confusion of old with new, remote with recent, also involved a more purely subjective factor: namely, an inability to envisage clearly or gauge correctly distances between one era and another.

2.

Throughout most of the centuries of scribal culture, literate elites shared with pre-literate folk a common reliance upon oral transmission to teach them most of what they knew about the past. Silent reading was apparently an unfamiliar practice, while word of mouth was required to supplement the scarce supply of books. "The ordinary man of our own times probably sees more ... written matter in a week than the medieval scholar did in a year."'41 Even as "publication" before printing generally involved obtaining a public hearing for a given text, so too is it appropriate to think of a "hearing" rather than a "reading" public as the customary audience for scribal books. It is essential to keep in mind that chroniclers and scholars were, all of them, members of this "hearing public," when considering their views of history.

A sense of the past that is primarily based on hearing tales from others is altogether different from one that is primarily based on reading them oneself. As a moment's reflection suggests, historical scholarship and hearsay are fundamentally incompatible. Speech is too fleeting to permit any listener to pause for reflection at all. By means of cadence and rhyme, however, speech can preserve human memories over incredibly long intervals of time. The ability of pre-literate folk to preserve intact in their sagas and epics accounts of episodes from a very distant past invariably appears uncanny to those who learn their history from history books.42 Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars were altogether unaware of this ability. They lived in an era when stories previously accepted by most intelligent adults were for the first time dismissed as "fairy tales" and circulated in printed form to specialized markets

41. Chaytor, 10. What immediately precedes and follows this citation is also drawn from this study.

42. Apart from the references cited in fn. 25, I found useful data on the working of oral/aural memory (as opposed to visual) in Finley, 293-294; G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time (New York, 1963), 92 n.2; and Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), passim. Lord's study points to vast controversial literature on the oral composition of epics, sagas, lays, etc. - a somewhat tangential, albeit closely related, issue.




composed of children and country-folk.43 The assumption that oral lore was bound to be corrupted after the passage of about one century was, for example, a firm rule of Newton in his chronological study.44 It was, however, more in the jumbling of time-sequence than in the falsifying of the record that oral transmission was inferior to scribal. The latter lent itself to forgery and corruption, the former to prolonged preservation but also to vague temporal and spatial location. This accounts for the ease with which Christian saints and holy days could be superimposed upon pagan ones and for the tendency to think of Cathay or Jerusalem as no more real, no less fabulous than Atlantis or Paradise.

For much of what men heard in rhythmic cadence was invisibly preserved, and thus subject to unnoted variations and alterations. Although some versions remained almost intact, others were transposed into new keys as they were applied in different situations or transplanted to different places, and some were altered beyond recognition. Local lore could, however, keep indefinitely alive certain vivid episodes that registered the comings and goings of good times and bad ones. This chain of living memories, associated with an indefi- nite but "living past," persisted long after print, and indeed down to the present, since every child is still introduced to the world of the past by hearing old versions of fables, songs, or stories intermingled with private, familial, or local lore. It has, however, become increasingly diminished in scope. Though even as adults many of us still hear fragments of a ballad about a "bonny boat" which carried "a lad who was born to be King," if we wish to know more about the prince who sailed over the seas to Skye, we must somehow locate his name upon our mental time chart and then consult our print-made encyclopedias or biographical dictionaries. The compendia compiled during the eras of scribal culture, invariably vague about location in time, employing no standardized nomenclature to identify person or place, would provide us with little or no help in locating the innumerable Lords and Princes who had come and gone.45 Nor would many of the scribal "histories" or chronicles - even of the Italian city states - provide such help. However sharply focused and closely ob-

43. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood, transl. R. Baldick (New York, 1962), 96-98, and Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire aux 17e et 18e siecles (Paris, 1964), both suggest that the seventeenth century was a turning point, but both illuminate the French scene only.

44. F. Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 53. See also views of the eighteenth-century G6ttingen scholar, A. L. von Schlbzer, on how many generations may be expected to retain an accurate account of a past episode, in Butterfield, 58.

45. One would have difficulty finding proper names in the first place. Aside from the absence of a standard nomenclature or title pages bearing authors' names, even later medieval catalogues were almost never alphabetical in their arrangement of "incipits." Alphabetical arrangements beyond the initial letter were, in the twelfth century, entirely unknown (see C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century [Cambridge, Mass., 1939], 78).



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served were the events of a chronicler's own epoch, those which preceded it- beginning with Moses or Aeneas - belonged to a misty past where heroes of all ages inhabited the same Elysian fields. Episodes pertaining to this distant era grew only more blurred as they were copied and recopied, and often set to verse.

We often forget that many of the more celebrated so-called "historians" down to the era of printing - and, in most areas, for two centuries thereafter - were not writing "history," as we know it, at all, but describing contemporary events as observant journalists and foreign correspondents. When they were not copying the classics - emulating Suetonius as Einhard did, or following Thucydides' account of the plague in Athens as Boccaccio did - or retelling bardic myths, or transcribing from accounts by their immediate predecessors, they were reporting as contemporary observers upon expeditions abroad or experiences at the court and in the town. Polybius' Histories, for example, deal with his own times, from 221 to 146 B.C. Even Guicciardini, attempting the unprecedented task of encompassing the history of all the city- states upon the Italian peninsula, begins his account with an event that occurred when he was twelve years old. The narrative skill and analytical insight displayed by such "historians" were applied to events within their own life- times, and occasionally to those in the days of their parents or grandparents. Thompson regards it as "singular" that the Greeks were always so "interested . . .in contemporary history.' 46 Given the scarcity of Greek libraries, they were well advised to focus their attention on current events. Curiosity, analytical intelligence, and sophisticated skepticism could not be effectively applied to the study of distant eras. Throughout the centuries of scribal culture, an "imaginary world of fantastic history and wild geography"47 was inhabited by all members of the "hearing public."

Discrimination between the mythical and historical remained blurred for a full two centuries after printing. Groups of antiquarians scouring the country- side for records and scholars engaged in what was for the first time described as "research" were only beginning to sift out fact from fancy in the seventeenth century. Their findings had yet to reach the newly created reading public. Works such as "An Historical Treatise of the Travels of Noah in Europe" were circulated instead. One is reminded of Sir Edward Coke's belief that Britain had been settled by Aeneas' grandson, that Alfred the Great founded Oxford, and that the common law (and the English constitution) were of immemorial antiquity.48

That oral transmission and scribal culture did not convey the sense of the past with which "modern" historians are familiar is suggested by the problems

46. Thompson, History of Historical Writing I, 24. See also Finley, 300-302. 47. Chaytor, 26. 48. Thompson, History of Historical Writing I, 626.




that persist about dating precisely all manner of events, such as Charlemagne's coronation, recorded in the remote past; about determining when the New Year began in different regions throughout Europe, or even within the Italian peninsula during the early modern era; about synchronizing Moslem, Chinese, or Jewish chronologies with our own at present; or about deciding upon appropriate costumes and setting when producing a, Shakespearean play. Down to the era when maps and books could be duplicated on a scale unknown before, and for at least two centuries thereafter, many courtiers and chroniclers tended to shuffle Caesar, Charlemagne, Alexander, and David like kings in a pack of cards. The mental process which is now taken for granted (save by pre-school children) 49 of reaching back through the orderly sequence of chapters in history books to locate such figures was relatively recently acquired. The "abstract concept of a uniform world-wide time" was unthinkable before the seventeenth century.50 Among rural folk in most regions, among urban artisans in many, achronicity prevailed until the last century; it was by then a concomitant of illiteracy. But a highly literate elite throughout the continent had, during prior centuries, relied just as heavily on oral transmission and was similarly unfamiliar with a standardized history-book format and uniform chronology. Before the reading of chapters separated by pagination5' displaced the hearing of tales delivered in rhythmic cadence by a living narrator or re-enacted by troupes of mummers, memory of all past episodes, whether very remote or very recent, remained equally vivid. "Sir Pilate," the villainous Saracen, was a familiar figure in medieval mystery plays. Costume changes over the course of centuries were unnoticed; manuscript illustrations clothed Trojan warriors in medieval garb, and manuscript texts depicted Achilles, Medea, Aeneas, and Dido as barons and damsels.52 We have already remarked that sensitivity to

49. But even our two- and three-year-olds have already been trained, as our forebears' children were not, to order their own lives by counting the years which separate them from the day of their birth. Aries, 15-18.

50. Whitrow, 58. "Chronology was still far from a neutral subject circa 1700." (Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian, 38.)

51. Unlike early printed chronicles, annals, and histories, printed Bibles were always divided into chapters (this division dates back to thirteenth-century manuscripts). But the chapter number was tucked at the end of the preceding chapter down through the sixteenth century. Arabic numbers appear for the first time on each page of an edition of the scriptures with Froben's publication of Erasmus' New Testament in 1516, which set the style for the well-differentiated book-and-chapter headings employed by Luther, Tyndale, Lefevre, and other translators of the Bible into vernacular languages. See H. M. Black, 419, 435.

52. E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences (Stockholm, 1960), 85-86. The importance of printing and engraving in making visible costume changes up to then unperceived is a paradigm of what happened to all previously unperceived stylistic or social changes. On their importance for science and technology, see Sarton, 67; also, R. J. Forbes and E. J. Dijksterhuis, A History of Science and Technology (London, 1963) II, Chapter 16.



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anachronism in quattrocento Florence preceded printing. But it is equally im- portant to stress that, well after classical forms had been visually reunited with classical spirit and Ciceronian prose had been sharply differentiated from medieval Latin, time intervals still tended to be contracted in such a way as to suggest - even to sophisticated Florentine historians and scholarly Christian humanists - a much closer relationship to the institutions of the Roman Republic or those of the church fathers than men subsequently influenced by nineteenth-century history-book time could ever experience.53

III. ASPECTS OF HISTORY-BOOK TIME

Much as spoken Latin and chanted verse were transformed after the advent of printing, so, too, what is sometimes called the "collective memory" was gradually altered. Elaborate mnemonic techniques, passed down through the ages, began to wither from disuse.54 The function of transmitting messages from the past was detached from human voices and entrusted to book-readers, who were taught to look on library shelves, in catalogues or reference guides for permanently-stored information available for retrieval. A vast abstract reference system made it possible to locate all data uniformly on time scales and global maps. Despite imperfect synchronization of intractable manuscript chronologies, events vaguely and diversely placed by different groups of chroniclers were assigned identical positions by all. But, although everything could be permanently stored for possible retrieval by this uniform reference system, the system was so capacious that no single mind could possibly encompass all the data it could hold - however they were purified, validated, or classified. Each successive generation had to sift out, from all the ingredients constantly deposited by an expanding encyclopedic culture, those portions of the past for which it had particular use. Conscious contrivance, deliberate selection, resort to a literary art that counterfeited reality were required to recapture those ever larger portions of the past that were no longer preserved by oral tradition.

Removed from living memories and fixed to printed pages, more remote events lost their vividness and immediacy. They tended to go out of mind

53. Panofsky, 41, provides evidence that visual differences between cinquecento and ancient Greek sculpture were not perceived by sixteenth-century connoisseurs, thus suggesting that his thesis of a Renaissance "estrangement" from the past and of the new fixed perspective which placed classical antiquity at a distance needs to be qualified. Evidence that sixteenth-century French humanists scorned medieval anachronisms only to invert them by presenting Celtic and Carolingian warriors in Roman postures is offered by George Huppert, "The Renaissance Background of Historicism," History and Theory V (1966), 52 n.18.

54. The role of the Ars memoranda in medieval curricula is stressed by E. P. Gold- schmidt, The Printed Book of the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1950), 48.




whenever they went out of sight. They could be recalled only by scholars trained to study a literary past, whose relation to the living present became increasingly problematic. For although the once-familiar deeds of dead men came to be interred in dusty volumes, they could also be disinterred by published "resurrections." New authors learned to simulate the passage of time as old bards never had. As they sought silently to imitate the voices of different generations, they became more attentive to the features that distinguished different spirits of different times. They could examine these features because customs and styles that had ceased to be used, or been invisibly transformed, were now embalmed and could be artificially revived.

A new self-consciousness about "making history" accompanied the new self- consciousness about writing it. Both imitation and innovation became more deliberate and explicit. Points of reference were established to mark formerly unperceived changes in languages and customs, unnoticed departures in styles of thought and expression. Many such unperceived changes, once they were rendered visible, also came to serve as points of no return. Lines drawn by one generation - the condemnation of a heresy, the excommunication of a schismatic king, the settling of disputes between warring dynasts, schisms within the body politic - could less easily be erased by the next. Relatively amorphous social flux was frozen; the cake of custom had either to be more deliberately preserved or more deliberately broken. Decisions became irre- vocable, innovations more purposeful and directed to the future. New legal fictions were devised - not to withstand the erosion of invisible changes but to accommodate visible ones - to patent industrial processes or copyright literary creations.55

Recognition of invention and authorship went together with new attitudes toward authority and tradition and toward the "dead hand" of old scribes. Veneration for the collective wisdom of the ages was modified as ancient sages were retrospectively cast in the role of individual innovators, prone to human error, capable of being corrected or improved upon. The study of the ancients, the close imitation of classical models, the search for primary sources, became more academic and less inspirational. Gaining access to an "original" source no longer meant in all branches of learning coming closer to a pure, clear, and certain body of knowledge that had subsequently been corrupted and confused. The very term "original" was semantically reoriented toward the future rather than the past. Authentic texts, maps, charts, arranged and dated, turned out to be dated in more ways than one. Defects and contradictions hitherto unper-

55. An early landmark in the history of literary property rights occurred in 1469 when a Venetian printer obtained a privilege to print and sell a given book for a given interval of time (C. Blagden, The Stationers Company, A History: 1403-1959 [London, 1960], 32). According to Forbes and Dijksterhuis, I, 147, the state of Venice was also the first to provide legal protection for inventors in 1474.



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ceived or glossed over now became visible. Doubt of all received opinion replaced necessary reliance upon it. The search for first principles could be undertaken in some fields by trying to slough off, rather than by trying to reconcile, incompatible portions of an inherited tradition. In short, a "tradition of the new" was launched, and a quarrel between "ancients and moderns," perpetuated down to the present, was inaugurated as well.

1.

Similarly, as one might expect, appeals to "posterity" became more frequent as men of letters became more confident that such appeals would reach future audiences. "Even in the seventeenth century, when printing had become commonplace . . . Galileo esteemed as the most stupendous of all inventions that which enabled a man to speak to millions from afar and even to generations unborn."56 The confidence that voices from the past would resound into the future had, to be sure, earlier inspired some ancient chroniclers. "History's function . . . to commend the just and hold up the evil to the reprobation of posterity" had long ago been noted by Tacitus.57 The success of Tacitus and Suetonius in determining how future generations regarded a Nero or a Caligula would, indeed, inspire many efforts to emulate these ancient historians. But although printing served to amplify the carrying power of those manuscript histories which survived, even the new presses could do nothing for eulogists of Roman emperors whose works had been destroyed. The loss of such works and of many other ancient texts had been final. Total loss of this kind, associated with the catastrophic fall of Rome, continued to haunt Western scholars and to influence their writings until the advent of printing. Even afterwards, the fall of Rome was regarded as a catastrophe; but this fall could be more safely located in a dead past. Confidence in posterity need no longer be counterbalanced, as in prior eras, by uncertainty about possible turns of fortune's wheel.

Before printing, confidence in the "verdict of posterity" had depended directly upon the continuity of political institutions designed to maintain law and order, and, as a result, to prevent wanton destruction of manuscripts. Leaders who were associated with the defense of the peace could count upon the allegiance of those with a genuine scholarly vocation. Ambivalence about Christian assaults on pagan letters and fear of war within Christendom went together with the love of books from the age of Jerome to that of Erasmus.

56. Preserved Smith, The Enlightenment 1687-1776 (A History of Modern Culture II) (New York, 1934), 276. Possibly printing was a "common-place" in 1632, but the issues it posed for the traditional custodians of manuscript culture were still explosive ones - as Galileo had every reason to know.

57. Cited by Thompson, I, 88.




The association of the advancement of learning with the maintenance of peace encouraged belief in the possibility of a "perpetual peace," after print had ensured the perpetual continuity of learning and letters. Even advances in weaponry, regarded on Renaissance balance sheets as debits, were, in the eighteenth century, interpreted as going hand in hand with advances in the peaceful arts of civilization. For, as Gibbon put it, in order to conquer, bar- barians now had to "cease to be barbarous; gradual advances in the science of war would always be accompanied, as we may learn from the example of Russia, with a proportionable improvement in the arts of peace and civil policy."58 But as confidence in posterity was detached from fear of warfare, men of letters could also become - as some did - increasingly careless about institutional continuity. They could afford to be unconcerned about the wars of kings, and regard them, along with other follies, as fit subjects for satire rather than for tragedy. They could also afford wholeheartedly to lend their pens to the advocacy of violence in pursuit of a cause. "Clerks" became "treasonable" when they were no longer restrained by concern with safe- guarding their products, and became instead concerned that the language in which their works were written would reach expanding markets.

By the nineteenth century, this new kind of confidence in posterity went hand in hand with a growing uncertainty about holding the attention of "generations unborn." Eighteenth-century men of letters tended to encourage a free trade in ideas and the habit of independent book reading. They appeared confident that the days of the traditional custodians of manuscript culture were ending, and they expected their messages to be heard from beyond their graves. Their descendants were more apt to worry about problems arising from the unprecedented accumulation of such messages, with crowded conditions within the Tower of Babel. Ever since the copyist had been supplanted by the printer and a secondhand book trade supplemented by a new book market,59 the Re- public of Letters had been expanding in a way which made it increasingly less possible for any single new message to be heeded.

Drowned out by the seemingly harmonious resonance from beyond the grave, interfered with by the cacophony produced by competing contemporaries - by the end of the nineteenth century, every author could still appeal to posterity, but none could take for granted that he would be heard. Indeed, the more strident the tone adopted by one generation, the more deafening the "static interference" became for the next. We need not analyze the variety of reactions: despair at what appeared to be a movement toward anarchy; the search for waves of the future upon which to ride; commitment to political

58. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York, Modern Library, n.d.), II, 942.

59. The extent to which the manuscript book trade was almost wholly secondhand is noted by BUhler, 33.



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action in order to guarantee future fame; retreat into ivory towers from which to assail impersonal markets and invisible publics; competition to capture, by vulgarization, the new mass audience or to entice, by esoteric mystification, the avant-garde elite. They are all too familiar since they are now being duplicated everywhere and with ever greater frequency. Nor will we pause over the many explanations offered for the sense of increasing disorder that became prevalent toward the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. Certainly many forms of social change contributed to fin-de-siecle pessimism and anti-intellectualism. The point is that diminished confidence among many men of letters had much less to do with prophetic anticipations of lights going out all over Europe than with the utilization of the steam press in the early nineteenth century and of the linotype and monotype machines six or seven decades later.

This point is pertinent to alarms recently sounded regarding the ominous consequences of the beclouding of our "image of the future."60 Up to the fifteenth century, such images tended to wax and wane more or less in phase with the stability or instability of social institutions; broadly speaking, they were apt to be more boldly asserted and clearly defined in times of peace and prosperity than in times of war and upheaval. But one must also consider the possibility that views of the future were affected by entirely different perturbations after the advent of typography. Here, as elsewhere, a fundamental disparity between scribal views and modern ones has been veiled by print-made patterns.

When printing made it possible for scholars to try to read the entire course of human history, the vast bulk of their evidence was drawn, of course, from the age of scribes. This evidence lent itself to theories (such as Vico's) asso- ciating bardic verse with youthful vigor, scholarly erudition with senile ossifica- tion. For when accumulated manuscript records perished, as they invariably did in societies subject to social disorganization, the less vulnerable chain of living memories provided by tellers of tales and singers of songs assumed the function of transmission, until institutions developed which permitted scribes and copyists to begin again. Prose and erudition thus appeared as a prelude to the fall of Rome or Constantinople - although it had been merely a consequence of their capacity to endure. Poetry and myth appeared as a prelude to the foundation of empires - although it had been merely the only available method of transmission in primitive or disordered societies.

Although evidence drawn from scribal culture lent itself to such literary life- cycle patterns, much of ancient history had to be distorted in order to conform neatly with them. They were altogether inappropriate to developments that came after the mid-fifteenth century. Nevertheless they proved congenial to

60. These alarms appear throughout two massive volumes by F. L. Polak, The Image of the Future, transl. E. Boulding (Leyden, 1961).




nineteenth-century romanticists and medievalists and were powerfully reinforced by fin-de-siecle reactions to entirely different problems associated with a permanent, cumulative, rapidly proliferating print-made culture. Conse- quently, as the output of erudite scholarly industries increased, premature obituaries about every aspect of Western culture-from the death of the novel to that of God - were posted over and over again. Images of the future during the last century register, with relative accuracy, what happened to image-makers. If we are attentive to the clues they offer, we shall not be san- guine about the possibility that eighteenth-century confidence in posterity will be reasserted soon again. Fortunately, the fate of the image-makers provides no infallible portents of what will happen next -to us, to them, or to the novel, or God.

2.

Similarly, views pertaining to the course of history at present may tell us more about what has happened to historians than about what has happened to the society in which we live. According to Alfred Weber and Geoffrey Barra- clough,

we stand at the end and outside of the traditional history of the schools and universities, . . . we are beset by a new sense of uncertainty because we feel ourselves on the threshold of a new age to which previous experience offers no sure guide.

As Raymond Aron has noted, however, sentiments of this sort have been mani- fested by each generation, in turn, for over one hundred and fifty years:

From the beginning of the nineteenth century every European generation has believed in the uniqueness of its own period. Does the very persistence of this conviction in itself indicate that it was unfounded? Or was it rather a kind of premoni- tion, the truth of which has been borne out by our own generation, and which must, therefore, have been false in the case of our predecessors? If we hesitate to ascribe error . . . to every generation but our own, can we suggest a third hypothesis, namely, that all of them have been right, not individually, but regarded as a whole . . ?

In other words it would seem to be a fact, or at least a plausible hypothesis, that the last century has seen a kind of revolution, or more precisely a mutation which began before the nineteenth century, but whose rate of change has accelerated during the past few decades.62

The first question Aron poses surely deserves to be considered more carefully. "Does the very persistence of this conviction in itself indicate that it was unfounded?" A recurrent sense of discontinuity between generations may well have less to do with recent transformations of the social landscape than with the way men were and are being trained to perceive this landscape. Indeed,

61. Barraclough, 1. 62. Aron, 15-16.



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this repetitive experience, undergone by each generation, does appear to be built into the way our present time-scale is ordered and our surveys of the past are narrated.

Although we must, in fact, reckon backward from the present year to date accurately any past occurrence, all our reference systems and books still employ - for the sake of convenience and in place of any feasible alternative -

a chronology based upon the Christian calendar, which numbers our centuries forward from the Incarnation.63 The illusion encouraged by this numerical forward progression is powerfully reinforced by a narrative drive, which is invariably harnessed to it; so that chains of retrospection are pushed forward toward the problematic present which we momentarily inhabit. Readers are thus forced to turn their backs on the limitless vistas that now extend historical time into prehistoric eras and beyond, ending ultimately in cosmological mystery; they are, instead, mentally propelled to a precarious vanishing point defined by their own brief and mortal life-span.

Introduced as a child to this history-book time, using it constantly to sort out and arrange any portion of the past he encounters, to find his ancestors or to "find himself," almost every literate member of our present society becomes increasingly accustomed to unfold in his mind an imaginary book of world history. The story he tells himself moves in the same direction as his own growth processes. It grows more familiar as he comes of age, and appears most compelling when he is most vulnerable to the illusory sense of acceleration that results from the slow-down of physiological processes. The narrative begins somewhat vaguely "once upon a time," with childhood fables intermingled with archaeological findings gleaned from exotic, far-off, ancient lands. But it does not peter out vaguely with a reference to some remote country where everyone lives "happily ever after." It always stops just short of the immediate present, closing off the most personally significant, densely packed, fact-crowded final chapter. Because of the way the story is told, its "end" appears to encapsulate both meanings of that paradoxical term: a goal to be sought and the completion of a process. All events appear to point to this "end"; the purposeful strivings of successive generations seem to find their ultimate meaning in it. But the "pilgrimage of Western Man" is also brought to completion with this end. The pilgrim, himself, is left to grope, often blindly, toward an unknown destiny. Unlike his ancestors, who may be safely located within the "traditional history" of the schools he attended as a youth, he must find himself somewhere outside this history. He is destined always to be poised as an adult on the threshold of a new age, where previous experience offers no sure guide.

63. Uniform adoption of this convention is quite recent. Only two centuries ago historians were still debating over whether one should count forward from the Creation or the Flood, or backward from the birth of Christ. (Butterfield, 50.)




Every modern historian has, thus, to contend with the experience so well exemplified - with characteristic irony - by Henry Adams, with the sense that the entire course of human history is pointed to a single end-product. This product may be the generation into which the historian happens to be born - a generation that it destined to suffer much travail as it gives birth to a new era. Or, if the historian is given to solipsist tendencies, the end-product turns out to be the historian himself, that single wide-ranging reader whose mind, traveling across the centuries, must end its journey with a self-encounter: "No such accident had ever happened before in human history. For him alone, the old universe was thrown into the ash heap and a new one created."64 For well over a century, several old universes have been thrown into ash heaps only to be rescued therefrom by members of the next generation who find the action to have been premature - it should have been postponed until their own arrival on the scene: "The date that divides human history into two equal parts is well within living memory.... In a very real sense the changes in the state of mankind since the date of my birth have been greater than the changes that took place in many thousands of years before this date."65 Mentally inhabiting history-book time, always born during the penultimate chapter, each generation discovers that many earlier turning points have failed to turn after all, while remaining convinced that the real "great divide," the final playing out of the old tradition, is occurring in its own day and age. Guizot and Macaulay were carried to the "final" triumph of "middle-class liberalism," Ranke to that of the Prussian state, Marx to the final class struggle, Spengler to the decline of the West. And today, after a progression of ever more thunder- ous and crashing finales, all of us have arrived at the end of Western civilization, the "dawn of universal history," the advent of "post-historic man" - or merely at another prelude to another fin-de-sie'cle, destined to be transmuted, seven or eight decades hence, into another belle epoque.

In short, crises seem to accumulate as time is repeatedly thrown out of joint. Narrative drive harnessed to chronological progression has resulted in a repeated breakage of perspective at the point of the present. Although a recent essayist calls upon historians to fuse more completely their methods of retro- spective analysis with the "grand sweep" of the narrative line,"66 the unfortu- nate cumulative impact of successive dislocations resulting from this practice

64. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), 5. Compare Adams's account of how he was abruptly severed from the eighteenth century by the opening of the Boston and Albany Railroad, the appearance of the first Cunard steamer, and the advent of telegraph wires with Samuel Eliot Morison's conviction that "the internal combustion engine, nuclear fission and Dr. Freud" had cut his generation adrift from that of Adams's era. (Vistas of History [New York, 1964], 24.)

65. Boulding, 7-8. 66. H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and Science (New York, 1964), 86-88, 107.



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has to be considered. Each new "grand sweep" must traverse a series of previous collision points. Each, in turn, creates a new, more formidable one. Dis- solved when examined separately and retrospectively analyzed, these same collision points, when synthesized in broad surveys, are merged into a single, vast transformation - into a "kind of revolution" or "mutation." Here again, much that is currently attributed to the severance of bonds with the past may more plausibly be attributed to an inability to sever any such bonds. The illusion of rapid change is enhanced by a mental movement across so many great divides in so short a span of time. The permanence, rather than the transience, of each imprint made by prior generations is illustrated by the succession of "final" chapters that now form a prologue to our present.

IV. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

All views of historical change are conditioned by how events have been recorded, stored, retrieved, and transmitted. A "primitive" achronicity stem- ming from reliance on oral transmission was only partly modified by a scribal culture, constantly enfeebled by erosion, corruption, and loss. Views of historical change, inscribed on ancient manuscripts, were more clearly articulated after these manuscripts were first set in type. Thereafter a permanent, cumulative print-made culture fostered new views associated with continuous process and open-ended development. But scribal accounts were also perpetuated in print. Catastrophic and cyclical theories were subject to amplification and elaboration, whenever and wherever the new developmental concepts were found wanting. Old schemes were revived and extended even while new ones were superimposed and traced backwards. The disparity between basically dissimilar cultures was veiled as the entire course of human history was patterned according to one model or another. The degree to which scholars were freed from old problems by the mechanical duplication of records and the extent to which new problems were created by permanence and accumulation went undetected. Distracted by the necessity of mastering a large literature devoted to tangential issues, historians have yet to come to terms with the very real problems inherent in the communications system they use. As a consequence, these problems tend to be displaced.

Historical perspectives have been set askew by certain distortions that result from the way historical data are at present handled. Use of uniform time-charts and global maps makes it possible to store all data for subsequent retrieval. But the use of these reference guides also encourages the uniform processing of all data, abstracted from dissimilar and varying contexts. Special studies devoted to replacing evidence within its appropriate contexts are not lacking. In fact, most monographs are directed to this end. But these special studies




cannot be synthesized in terms of a reference system that ignores how actual communities have been diversely circumscribed, isolated or linked, by prevail- ing transport and communications systems. Accordingly, in almost all general surveys and classroom manuals, easily manipulated abstractions associated with hypothetical eras are substituted for more intractable empirical findings drawn from real regions.

Inculcated at an early age and reinforced thereafter, mental chronological progression from one hypothetical era to another conveys illusions about the course of history that have to be unlearned with considerable difficulty. Most members of the reading public, most authors and scholars never do unlearn these illusions. The ability to do so is relatively esoteric and conveyed only by the professional training of historians. Yet professional historians, however they steep themselves in dusty records or exercise their historical imagi- nation, are in some ways more prone to think in terms of the abstractions associated with history-book time than are other academics or members of the lay public. As students they have similarly been "fed, in lecture and text- book, sweeping assertions about the course of history, most of which have been borrowed from earlier teachers and writers."67 They are apt to learn their lessons more carefully, to absorb such teachings more completely than fellow students who go on to pursue other activities. They are more accustomed to the constant use of a chronological reference system when consulting card files or organizing lectures, and become adept at mentally filing all data automatically, in accordance with this system. As a consequence they are sometimes hampered when engaged in research by a false sense of the distance that separates them from those of their predecessors whose records they have chosen to explore.

Those who investigate the past are in some ways more remote from, in other ways more directly conditioned by the experience of prior generations than an illusory distance measured by evenly-numbered time intervals suggests. The mental habits of scholars who lived only six hundred years ago are as remote from our present ones as those of scholars who lived two thousand years ago. Yet messages inscribed by ancient writers still find their way into modern history books. Not only in the grand designs devised by contemporary philosophers of history but also in more prosaic texts and surveys, old archetypes may be perceived beneath new stereotypes, ancient contradictory epochal divisions beneath modern periodization schemes. Reliance on a uniform reference system that indicates how all data may be stored but offers no guidance at all as to what should be retrieved or how it should be transmitted necessitates recourse to older guidelines. How old these guidelines are is difficult to determine because uniform processing has rejuvenated them. Some

67. W. B. Willcox, "The Historian's Dilemma," The Journal of Modern History 36 (1964), 180.



CLIO AND CHRONOS 63

appear to be very old indeed. Nor is this surprising when one considers that continuous borrowing from old texts in order to compose new ones goes back to the era of glossators, chroniclers, and copyists.

Continuous borrowing suggests how persistent some scribal traditions still are. Many history courses are still taught and many history books still written as if a thin lifeline to the past had to be preserved. There is, however, no longer any single body of knowledge that can be committed to memory and transmitted from one generation to another. There is instead a variety of different investigatory techniques enabling successive generations to master selected portions of the past that happen to impinge on their particular concerns. Among these concerns at present is a widespread conviction that the times are out of joint. Historians could employ their craft to better advantage by investigating this conviction than by perpetuating it. Clearly, guidelines fashioned when written records were scarce are ill-suited to an era when printed records are overabundant and verbal messages travel with the speed of light. The reverse of this proposition is, however, also true. New conceptual schemes contrived by behavioral scientists utilizing the full resources of a print-made culture are also ill-suited for guidance in understanding the experience of prior generations. When applied to past data, such schemes only exacerbate the distortions that arise from uniform processing. No group of scholars is better equipped to correct such distortions than are historians. Borrowing tools from other trades sets perspectives askew, as does reliance on old guidelines. Only by using the tools appropriate to their craft to examine more carefully their own preconceptions can historians remedy the defects in their present theories. Other groups of scholars might profit if this were done.

In an age that has seen the deciphering of Linear B and the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, there appears to be little reason to be concerned about "the loss of mankind's memory." There are good reasons for being concerned about the overloading of its circuits. With each decade that passes, the matters historians have been trained to understand are not receding from view. To the contrary, most aspects of the past have become ever more accessible and visible. They impinge on the modern consciousness from so many directions that they tax the capacity of the human intelligence to order them coherently. The voracious appetite of Chronos was feared by men in the past. An equally monstrous capacity to disgorge appears to be more of a threat at present.

This should be read as a call to action, not taken as a sign of defeat. To portray historians as the somewhat hapless victims of a "runaway technology" is not at all my intention. Traditional frameworks have proved inadequate to encompass a perpetual increase in cognitive oLUtpUt. Apparently the time has come to reconstruct a more suitable stage of history. I do not believe this is beyond present capacities. I would only insist that the task of distinguishing




between spurious and genuine discontinuities can no longer be postponed, shrugged off, displaced, or evaded by talking about "transitional" eras, some of which are more "transitional" than others. Because careless traversal of a real discontinuity that is five centuries old has, in my view, made this task more difficult, I have tried to focus attention upon it.

If I am right, it would seem that the only possible way out of the present impasse is to retrace more carefully the paths that have led to it. Between the age of scribes and that of printers lies a real "great divide" whose full dimensions must be probed before it may be imaginatively bridged by any scholar. The invention of movable type represents also a decisive point of no return in human history. It introduced changes that have transformed, in Bacon's words, "the appearance and state of the whole world." Since the consequences of this invention have affected both the data he examines and his methods of examination, no historian can afford to ignore them. His equip- ment is particularly suited to the task of exploring them. Nothing more is required for historians to master the problems presented by a permanent cumulative print-made culture than to use more deliberately and hence exploit more profitably the ample resources this culture has placed at their disposal.

American University Washington, D.C.



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