Historical Methods Course: Response paper 1: On Chapter 1 and 3 of Anthony

Graftons The Art of History

Anthony Graftons The Art of History is an account primarily of a flourishing tradition of
ars historica- quite literally the art of writing history a body of work influenced by
antiquarian scholarship (amongst other things) that takes its clearest shape in the middle of
the 16
th
century and which assumed canonical form with the publication of Johannes Wolfs
anthology Ars Historicae Penus and then continued to be influential until the late 18
th

century. In following this fascinating account, we learn from Grafton at several instances that
this is a tradition that continues to furnish modern historiography with several of its key
thematic and critical resources. Thus for instance, it could very well have prefigured
E.H.Carrs more recent proposition to future historians of treating their predecessors works
in terms of the existing socio-political conditions of their writing as much as a mining of the
actual contents of their treatises. In the remaining part of this response paper, I summarise
Graftons tracings of such recurring cycles of influence that seemed to have inhered in early
modern historical writing through a presentation of his discussion of the use of speech in
historical writing over the three centuries between the 14
th
and the 16
th
.
The immediate context with which Grafton opens his book is that the organized form of
intellectual exchange that was the Republic of Letters in 17
th
century Europe, institutionalized
in new review journals, extending from Edinburgh to Naples and concerned primarily with
the elements of Newtonian physics, Lockean politics, the chronology of ancient Egypt and
the myths of ancient Greece. The particular debate which he focuses on is that between Jacob
Perizonius, professor of ancient history at Franeker and Leiden and Jean Le Clerc, a journal
editor and critic. The debate concerned Le Clercs attack in his Ars Critica on the Roman
historian Quintus Curtius Rufus history of Alexander written from Greek sources which was
an extremely popular text in the Italian Renaissance and amongst the humanists of the 16
th

century.
For Le Clerc, Curtiuss history was inadequate on count of its towing the protocols of the art
of history writing as it frequently confused elements of geography as well as chronology. But
his primary problem for Le Clerc was that he could not shun the tactics of rhetorics in his
historical compositions and invariably ended up stuffing his narrative, only to render them
vacuous, with an undending queue of direct speeches that lacked all characteristics of
verisimilitude and almost rigorously failed to qualify with any criterion of credibility the
sources used in the text. Le Clercs was then a universal standard like earlier humanists- but
unlike their emphasis on the techniques of rhetorical presentation to serve the ends of
justification in the model of the ancients, he proposed the criteria of general Descartian right
reason that for him was indexically linked to practices like the adding of full citations of
sources to their works and an intelligent weighing of such sources. His attempt was then to
free history for once and for all from the art of oration that could not in any way serve the
ends of veracity. Perizonius defense of Curtius and his use of speeches was not a repudiation
of Le Clercs propositions in their entirety, neither was it a case of siding with the ancients
legacy and the rhetorical tradition of history writing. However it was definitely framed in
opposition to a universal criteria of right reason- if there was indeed a standard of such
sorts, it could in the opinion of Perizonius be defended only if relativised to the order of a
particular temporal and spatial specificity. The direct speeches in Curtius thus yielded in
Perizonius reading, a stylistic unity of the period he wrote in, in which all historians made
use of such speeches to render meaning to their narratives. His was then a historicist
rejoinder appended to the claims of universal reason, Spinozist in spirit and eventually quite
influential in the eighteenth and nineteenth century German thought (of Herder, Kant and
Hegel?).
This debate as Grafton argues, was quite acutely overlapped with the problematic of
modernity with its peculiarly alienating distance from the past, a relation that quite
necessarily provokes reconsideration of such a past rather than a restatement of its actions
and logics. And yet the problematic had much to share with the early responses of the Ars
Historica tradition. The practitioners of this tradition were quite often the chancellors and
secretaries at various courts and public institutions and thus professed a kind of history-
writing that was aimed at making evident the views and policies of their republican or
despotic bosses- theirs was then a history still performed with the goal of a rhetorical
education of morals and politics.
But a new concern about the credibility of historical sources had started to define their
practice following from the controversies over humanism in the universities and the
Reformation over the 14
th
, 15
th
and the 16
th
centuries that made interpretation a complicated
affair. This concern was of course aggravated by the new intellectual traditions in 16
th

century Italy for example, of satire, elegy, and textual criticism as well as by the rivers of new
and abundant information suddenly available in print that flowed into European libraries in
the 15
th
and the 16
th
centuries that brought along with them certain novel requirements of
bibliographical and interpretive control. Thus along with the concern of rhetorical production,
Ars Historica seemed to also be a lot about reading or decoding existing history as well as
other kinds of empirical knowledge - travel writing, military studies, the evolving sciences -
that around then was fusing together the knowledge of divine, natural and human processes
on the basis of the unity of occurrences rather than the necessity of first principles. These
were really the most immediate intellectual predecessors of Le Clerc and Perizonius and a
number of concerns about the use of speech in historical writing seemed to have recurred or
at least emerged in these their treatises.
Amongst them, the 15
th
century practitioners of historical writing were for instance quite
acutely concerned with oration as/in history, but also adapted other influences like Aristotle
who preferred the art of poetry more than history to move a person, to affect him in the
deepest sense. In opposition to such influences, Valla in the 1440s quite prominently
proposed the theoretical justification of the use of speeches in historical writing as an
incorporation of the rhetorical doctrine of decorum, which showed how to work out the
ways of acting and speaking that were appropriate in a particular situation and to particular
actors this for him, could entail the same kind of affective knowledge as that in poetry and
thus decorum was conceptualized as the point at which rhetorical discipline met the
protocol of moral philosophy and political prudence- a means of knowledge as well as that of
enhancing the readers prudence. Patrizi in the 16
th
century came to most forcefully argue
against this conception of decorum and its necessity for historical writing as he severed again
the connection between knowledge and affective speech. Decorum for him was a stylistic
substitute for factual accuracy for historians who were orators in court but they were also
inadequate as keys to reading as they could not really yield any understanding of military or
political strategizing in a different time and place that for him were essential components of
historical understanding.
While Patrizis arguments could then be understood as prefiguring those of Le Clerc a
century later, Perizonius too had formidable intellectual predecessors. The primary opposition
to Patrizis views by historians like Viperano and Vossius emphasized that decorum was not
necessarily an empirical tool a way of transcribing a historical actors words and actions in
detail- but rather a way of presentation of the concerned knowledge. However Jean Bodins
response to Patrizi while involving a denunciation of his radical iconoclasm that failed to
secure the useful from existing historical treatises, quite categorically expressed his own
reservations about the use of speech in historical writing. Instead, Bodins understanding was
really that the role of speeches in historical writing was not as a tool for crafting a future
imaginary and perfect history but rather they were an index of a particular time and place,
they were sources to be read rather than a manner to be emulated.
If we stop here and consider the cyclical turns of early modern historiography that this
response paper has attempted to abstract from Graftons understanding of the subject, there is
a small caveat to be made: for any self-admitted student of modernity - used to reading
breaks of all size and scope into texts and contexts alike - the essays in Anthony Graftons
book The Art of History could well prove to be a puzzle, one that involves working past a
series of infinite regression in order to arrive at the beginning proper, the beginning that is of
a modern historical sensibility. And yet where exactly the points of distinction lie in these
apparently successive problematics of historiography, we are left to infer on our own at least
in Graftons text that otherwise concerns itself with what seems to be the rather cyclical
motions of early modern historical writing. But perhaps if there is a lesson to be gleaned from
the first and third chapters of Graftons book it is really that the movements in early modern
historiography were always a case of two steps forward, one step back, a description of which
could be quite rewarding especially to understand the the existence of microenvironments
where the pursuit of historia humana involved the creation of new practices and the
cultivation of a new critical sensibility.
Ritam Sengupta
PhD Coursework, 2013-2014