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New Dictionary of the History of Ideas liii

religion,” meaning, respectively, the various migratory tribes and the Christian Church. It is less

widely recognized that the majority of his famous book in fact dealt with the Eastern, Byzantine

half of the empire, and thus is properly considered a work of medieval, not ancient, history.

Eastern Europe first began to develop a substantive corpus of historiography at this time, often

under foreign influence. The Hungarian-Slovak pastor Mátyás Bél (Matthias Belius; 1684–

1749) established the first learned society in Austria while publishing an extensive collection

of the sources of Hungarian history. Russia had produced a sporadic tradition of chronicle writing,

including its Primary Chronicle (early twelfth century) since the later Middle Ages. Beginning

with the late-seventeenth-century Westernization under Peter the Great, a new national historiography

emerged, first with Vasilii Nikitich Tatischev’s (1686–1750) compilation from older

chronicles into a Russian History from Most Ancient Times, and then with two national histories

by Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711–1765) on the earliest periods, and the seven-volume

survey of Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich Shcherbatov (1733–1790). Eighteenth-century Russian historical

writing reached its highest achievement just after the Napoleonic struggles in the multivolume

synthesis, based on a wide variety of sources, of Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin

(1766–1826). Western European philological scholarship had also arrived in Russia with two Germans,

Gerhard Müller and his literary assistant August Schlözer, the latter of whom edited and

published the Primary Chronicle.

The German Aufklärung contribution to historical thought and writing may have had the most

profound and lasting effects on the next century. In contrast to the gentlemanly tradition of a

Gibbon or the journalism of a Voltaire, German historical thought and writing was intimately

linked to the educational system, and especially to universities such as Göttingen. The list of

achievements is considerable. Schlözer (1735–1809) returned from Russia to Göttingen and a prolifiC

career as a historian in 1767. Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–1799) pursued the development

of a “universal history” and promoted erudite scholarship at Göttingen. Elsewhere, at Halle,

Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) revolutionized Homeric studies and created a new term for

the interdisciplinary study of antiquity, Altertumswissenschaft. Others worked without university

appointments. Johann Winckelmann (1717–1768), a librarian at Dresden, put art history, and

especially the study of Greek sculpture, on a new footing, refocusing attention away from artists’

biographies and on to changing styles and their periods. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1833),

a schoolmaster and clerical official, anticipated the historicism and nationalism of the next century

with his notion that a Volk, or people, exhibited cultural characteristics, the product of language,

climate, and experience, that transcended political boundaries. His Ideen zur Philosophie

der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1791), in some ways a synthesis of the previous century’s

work, nonetheless marked a significant departure from the standard early Enlightenment rationalist

view of an unchanging nature common to all humans at all times. Herder directed attention

away from political and military history (the edificatory value of which he doubted) toward

the “inner life” of humans discernible from art, music, and literature, an approach that would ultimately

evolve into the later German idea of Kulturgeschichte.

Chinese Scholarship under the Qing

Allowing for its very different circumstances, China under the late Ming and succeeding Qing dynasties

experienced many of the same historiographical developments as the West. One leading

authority on the period, Benjamin Elman, has characterized it as a transition “from philosophy

to philology,” as the Neo-Confucianism that had marked most of the previous half-millennium

of Chinese historical writing, especially under the Song and Ming, was challenged and a new emphasis

placed on evidentiary research—itself anticipated by many Song scholars centuries previously.

Despite the strictures and quotas on civil service careers imposed by the Manchu Qing

dynasty, which by and large adopted Chinese language and cultural practices, a higher degree of

professionalization occurred in the eighteenth century. Philology and ancillary disciplines such as

epigraphy, paleography, manuscript collation, and phonology were developed against the backdrop

of an argument within Confucianism between Qing advocates of “Han Learning” (who had

a preference for the texts and methods of Han-era scholars in studying the earlier Chinese classics)

and their Neo-Confucian “Song Learning” opponents—an interesting if inexact analog to

the slightly earlier European querelle of ancients and moderns. During this period, official academies

supplanted the private schools of earlier years. Ming-era survivors such as Gu Yanwu

(1613–1682) epitomized the careful attention to research among a wide range of sources of the

HISTORIOGRAPHY

liv New Dictionary of the History of Ideas

physical as well as the textual, especially in his Rizhilu (Record of daily knowledge). As so often

in historiography, contemporary issues proved a powerful stimulus for detailed and accurate research

that could transcend polemical positions and, a century after Gu, Wang Mingsheng

(1722–1798) would assert the responsibility of the historian to examine all available evidence. Together

with Zhao Yi (1727–1814) and the respected teacher Qian Daxin (1728–1804), Wang was

a member of a great trio of mid-Qing historical scholars who brought historical scholarship to a

new level.

Western influences were increasingly felt during this period, albeit inconsistently, and indeed

the parallels with Renaissance humanism three centuries earlier are striking, including the considerable

expansion of woodblock printing that began late in the Ming era, the frequent exchange

of correspondence among scholars, and the particularly high valuation of ancient learning. A consequence

of this was that certain venerable texts were held up to the kind of critical scrutiny that

Renaissance philologists had applied to forgeries like the Donation of Constantine or the pseudohistories

of Annius of Viterbo. And, as the humanism of the Renaissance had preceded the rationalist

skepticism of the Enlightenment, so the Han Learning revival eventually produced a decline

in the status of Confucianism. Methodologically, the “School of Evidentiary Research” (kaozheng

or k’ao-cheng) as it is often called, is exemplified in works such as Yan Ruoqu’s (1636–1704) exposure

of selected chapters of the Shujing (the “Book of Documents,” both a classic and a history)

as a piece of later, post-Confucian authorship. This iconoclastic pursuit of truth had effected momentous

changes in scholarship before the School itself declined in the nineteenth century. It

would clear the way by the end of the Qing era in 1911 for Liang Qichao’s (1873–1929) now

Western-influenced call for a “new historiography” and for his associate Xia Zengyu’s general history

of China, itself affected by Western-style Japanese histories of China.

A number of other important genres of historical writing appeared during the period. Histories

of institutions (Zhi guan), previously annexed to the Standard Histories and other works, were

now presented as independent reference books. A preexisting form of local history or “gazetteer”

dating back to the Song dynasty or earlier, the Fangzhi also proliferated, initially as a guide to local

administrators who were often strangers to their region, intending to provide a complete history

of all phenomena, natural and human, within a particular administrative area. Nearly one

thousand Ming and five thousand Qing-era Fangzhi survive; although they have no exact Western

counterpart, their local focus and emphasis on multiple sources bears comparison with the

natural histories and “surveys” of late-seventeenth-century Britain, and, more remotely, with an

outstanding German work of local history, Justus Möser’s History of Osnabrück (1768).

Romanticism, Historicism, and Nationalism

Möser’s Osnabrückische Geschichte has been praised by modern historians such as Friedrich Meinecke

for its sensitivity to the uniqueness of the local community. When combined with Herder’s

understanding of the cultural differences among various peoples and the integrity of the Volk, and

with the enormous influence of a cultural icon such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, late-

Enlightenment Germans had anticipated a number of coming trends in European historical

thought. In the political aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, and amid the

intellectual wake of the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, the nineteenth century

saw a turn away from grand theories (philosophers such as Hegel being notable exceptions) and

world histories and an increased focus on the individual—especially the heroic individual—and the

nation. Early-nineteenth-century French historians such as François Guizot (1787–1874) and

Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) postulated a unified past for their nation, while the more radical

Jules Michelet (1798–1874) directed readers to the history of le peuple (the common people). Both

the interest in individuals and the intuitive sympathy for the unique and distinctive contributions

of past ages to modernity (the latter traceable to Herder and as far back as Vico) are hallmarks of

a mode of apprehending the past that subsequent ages have called “historicism” (or, following

Meinecke, “historism”).

But Romanticism had more immediate outcomes. Initially a conservative or even reactionary

movement that privileged nature over reason and revalued neglected periods such as the Middle

Ages, it proved adaptable for many in the next generations into a creed for the advancement of

liberty and for the promotion of the rising tide of nationalism that threatened the stability of post-

Napoleonic Europe. Romantic nationalism was often linked to a sense of identity built upon a

shared sense of a people’s ethnic or even political past—for an example one need only think of

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