Early modern Europeans (everyone knows) found endless fascination in things Greek and Roman. They devoted themselves obsessively to the expensive, tiring pursuit of ancient objects and ancient knowledge; hunting manuscripts; learning difficult languages; and arguing about it all in long, erudition-stuffed books. Yet the exact nature of their fascination remains something of a mystery, for so much divided Christian, feudal, agrarian Europe from the sunlit world of pagan city-states; and even if they found the ancient world fascinating, why should Europeans have put such effort into gaining accurate knowledge of it, when they turned so readily to mythmaking in other domains? Why did the study of antiquity become Altertumswissenschaft, a science, and why did its technicalities acquire a central place in genteel educations, a cultural centrality that lasted into the twentieth century? We know the stages by which knowledge of the ancients spread in the early modern period, but we have a much hazier idea of what all this activity meant: what drives it expressed, what social groups it touched, and how it fitted with other sides of European life.

No contemporary scholar has done as much as Anthony Grafton to identify, explore, and illuminate these issues. Few historians can match the skills that he brings to the task; familiarity with ancient literatures and languages is only the first of several prerequisites for admission to the mindset of educated early moderns. But perhaps as important are his wide-ranging historical sympathies, which allow him to connect past and present in unusual ways. As a result, he has been especially attentive to the cultural functions played by apparently obscure sides of early modern classical learning. Technical scholarship, Grafton has shown in a series of important studies, did not address the past only; it was also one of the means—no more bizarre than our own—by which the early moderns coped with the challenges that life throws at all of us. Grafton has thus combined the skills of the philologist with the sensibilities of the cultural anthropologist, venturing into unmapped areas of early modern culture and making sense of what goes on there.

In his new book, Grafton applies these approaches to the theory of history in the early modern period. He examines the numerous writings that offered advice on how to read and write history, some of them by still-famous authors like Jean Bodin, others by the more obscure. Much in these texts seems alien to modern readers; Grafton's theorists, for instance, worried extensively about biblical prophecies that four great monarchies would dominate world history—how, they asked were more recent kings to be fitted within the scheme, and where did the rest of the world come in? But from the very start Grafton insists on his commitment to linking past and present. The commitment appears already in his choice of title, which evokes the British historian E. H. Carr's 1961 What Is History? Both books were presented first as the George McCaulay Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge University, but Grafton offers more than generous acknowledgment of a predecessor. Rather, he repeatedly notes parallels between his own concerns and Carr’s—a striking choice, given Carr's present-minded vision of history's functions. Carr believed that “history acquires meaning and objectivity only when it establishes a coherent relation between past and future” (E. H. Carr, What Is History? [New York, 1961], 173), and his own hopes for the future tended to be socialistic. For the culture conservatives who have been the most conspicuous recent celebrants of Europe's classical inheritance, such comments have seemed a rejection of the western tradition of historical thought. Grafton inverts this claim: present-mindedness, he suggests, was just as important to sixteenth-century scholarship as to our own.

Hence, he is especially concerned to explicate the social settings in which historical thought flourished. Those settings were various, reflecting both the complexities of the European landscape and the adaptability of this tradition of thought. In some regions, historical scholarship emerged from the study of Roman law and responded to its imperatives, a connection to which historians have long been alert. But Grafton shows that preoccupation with history also emerged in Europe's developing courtly culture, among kings and nobles who had no legal training. The history theorists responded to other social forces around them: Grafton notes the awareness that some displayed of scientific innovations and of Europe's recent encounters with the rest of the world. Given the variety of contexts in which they worked, practitioners of the genre might take varied positions, and debates could become heated. But Grafton persuasively offers them as a model for thinking about how intellectual traditions function. Even as they debated one another, his theorists agreed on the framework of their discussion. All took ancient authors seriously and, along with the techniques that they shared, they agreed on the list of contested points around which arguments swirled—and would continue to swirl for generations.

The genre collapsed after about 1700, for straightforward reasons. Confronted with an increasing array of new knowledge and new experiences, European intellectuals increasingly celebrated modernity. Ancient ideas and quarrels could no longer supply the foundations for historical study; history itself would remain important to European culture, indeed would become more important than ever, but it would acquire new intellectual bases. Yet Grafton's account of the genre's decay includes a final irony. In numerous specific observations and analyses, his theorists had anticipated key ideas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical writing. Well before 1700, in texts that were almost entirely forgotten thereafter, they had reflected on the relativity of historical judgments and the effect of social arrangements on ideas, and they thought about the parallels between early Europe and the territories that Europe was beginning to colonize. In noting these hidden influences on our own practices, Grafton shows Europe's classical tradition to have been both more complex and more potent than even its admirers have realized.