New Dictionary of the History of Ideas li

New Dictionary of the History of Ideas li

writing about the past, often from non-Confucian perspectives. Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801),

an exponent of the “National Learning” school of history, rejected Chinese-influenced accounts

of the past in favor of the earlier record of the Kojiki, which now achieved a status it had not enjoyed

for a millennium. (Motoori conveniently overlooked the fact that it, too, was heavily indebted

to Chinese histories).

Like Japan (which it in turn influenced), Korea was strongly affected by Chinese historiography

through much of the premodern period. Unlike Japan, Korea had distinct dynasties, and the

annals of each reign (sillok) are analogous to Chinese Veritable Records. The chongsa or dynastic

histories of early Korea are similarly comparable to the Chinese Standard Histories (which in fact

provide the earliest source material for Korean history). Historical records were maintained from

the fourth century C.E., and a history was compiled in 600 C.E. by Yi Mun-jin of the Koguryo

kingdom, but these have not survived; Korean writings may even have influenced the Japanese

Nihon shoki in the eighth century. The earliest example still extant of Korean history-writing, compiled

in the Koryo period, is Kim Pu-sik’s Samguk Sagi (History of three kingdoms) (1145 C.E.);

this used both now-lost Korean sources and Chinese writings, and is clearly modeled on Chinese

Standard Histories. The Koryo dynasty (918–1392), following earlier Tang Chinese practice, established

a History Office in the tenth century; this bureaucracy was considerably expanded during

the ensuing Yi or Choson dynasty (1392–1910), and in the fifteenth century a group of scholars

led by Chong In-ji (1418–1450) completed the Koryosa (a dynastic history of the Koryo). Choson

historians would eventually produce a whole series of sillok for each reign covering nearly five

centuries up to 1863. As with the Chinese Veritable Records, sillok were carefully guarded so that

even the reigning monarch was denied access to them in order to protect against interference.

Again as with China, the presence of an official bureaucracy could not prevent alternate or private

interpretations of the past from being written. A more Korean-focused tradition of historical

writing also sprang from this Confucianism, for instance the thirteenth-century monk Iryon’s

Samguk Yusa (Memorials of three kingdoms). In the eighteenth century, a school of “practical

learning” or sirhak developed that produced such works as An Chong-bok’s distillation and analysis

of Korean history, Tongsa kangmok, one of the first histories to be written by a private scholar

independent of government support. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, both Western and

Meiji Japanese historical scholarship would displace Chinese influences in Korean historiography.

Enlightenment in the West

With the close of the era of religious wars that had marked the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth

century, European historiography expanded its scope considerably beyond the political and

ecclesiastical topics that had predominated since the Renaissance and Reformation. This does not

mean that Enlightenment historiography was a radical departure from what came previously. To

the contrary, it relied very heavily on many of the historiographical accomplishments of the previous

two centuries, and in particular on the enormous corpus of erudite knowledge in the form

of printed documents and texts, engravings of archaeological and architectural remains, and especially

the study of different legal systems. Two centuries of travel and expansion also encouraged

many of the historians of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to undertake a

comparative approach to the study of the past.

A major goal of Enlightenment historiography may be described as the search for a synthesis

and balance between erudite knowledge and philosophy. Some of the best examples show a turn

away from the narration and description of political events toward the consideration of civilization,

customs, and especially moeurs (the French word for “manners”). Having said that, it should

immediately be admitted that the term Enlightenment is itself loaded and complex, and there exists

a wide range of views of history and historical writing among the historians who subscribed

to its principles. Moreover, far from every historian during the Enlightenment can be described

as a practitioner of what J. G. A. Pocock has referred to as “enlightened historiography.”

Two significant Italian contemporaries stand out at the beginning. The younger, Pietro Giannone

(1676–1748), was a Neapolitan jurist who authored a Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples

(1723). This blended detailed knowledge of documents (often derived at second hand from the

erudite works of earlier generations) with a focus on social history and a reform-minded and specifically

antiecclesiastical outlook that would characterize much later Enlightenment thinking. The

older and ultimately—though not immediately—more important was Giambattista Vico

(1668–1744), like Giannone a jurist. The influence of Vico on subsequent European thought—

HISTORIOGRAPHY