How did people learn to distinguish between past and present? How did they come to see the past as existing in its own distinctive context? In The Birth of the Past, Zachary Sayre Schiffman explores these questions in his sweeping survey of historical thinking in the Western world. Today we automatically distinguish between past and present, labeling things that appear out of place as "anachronisms." Schiffman shows how this tendency did not always exist and how the past as such was born of a perceived difference between past and present.
Schiffman takes readers on a grand tour of historical thinking from antiquity to modernity. He shows how ancient historians could not distinguish between past and present because they conceived of multiple pasts. Christian theologians coalesced these multiple pasts into a single temporal space where past merged with present and future. Renaissance humanists began to disentangle these temporal states in their desire to resurrect classical culture, creating a "living past." French enlighteners killed off this living past when they engendered a form of social scientific thinking that measured the relations between historical entities, thus sustaining the distance between past and present and relegating each culture to its own distinctive context.
Featuring a foreword by the eminent historian Anthony Grafton, this fascinating book draws upon a diverse range of sources - ancient histories, medieval theology, Renaissance art, literature, legal thought, and early modern mathematics and social science - to uncover the meaning of the past and its relationship to the present.
Foreword, by Anthony Grafton Gestation Introduction The Past Defined part one Antiquity Flatland Pasts Present The Herodotean Achievement Thucydides and the Refashionings Linear Time Hellenistic Innovations part two Christianity Can't Get Here from There The Power of Prayer Breakthrough to the Now The Idea of the Sæculum The Sæculum Reconfigured Gregory of Tours and the Sæculum Back from the Future part three Renaissance The Living Past The Birth of Anachronism Petrarch's ""Copernican Leap"" The Commonplace View of the World Jean Bodin and the Unity of History part four Enlightenment Presence and Distance Biography as a Form of History The Politics of History The Relations of Truth / The Truth of Relations Montesquieu and the Relations of Things The Past Emerges Epilogue The Past Historicized Notes Selected Bibliography Index
""It is refreshing to read a book with a clear, even bold, thesis that forces readers to reexamine the authority and applicability of basic historical concepts... The strength of this engaging study is not simply that it historicizes and thus defamiliarizes what passes for common sense in the present but also that it reconstructs what had been regarded as common sense in previous epochs in the Western tradition, from antiquity to the Christian era, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.""
