“Conversation—What a Concept!” is the thought (supplied in words by a cartoonist) of a dress-suit-clad chimpanzee who shares a bar booth with three conversing adults as they turn to stare at him. Ordinarily one does not begin a review of a profound book with reference to a New Yorker cartoon, but I saw in it a means of access to the startling character of any discovery of what should have always been obvious. In this case, what is more naturally the preoccupation of every historian than the presence of the past? Every historian deals with it, more formally than do people afflicted with nostalgia, but still with dedication.

So: “The Past—What a Concept!” Northeastern Illinois University historian Zachary Sayre Schiffman wants us awakened to it in new ways. Humans ordinarily take for granted the naturalness of conversation as a form of communication, yet they can profit by occasionally examining its role and meaning, so Schiffmann backs off and helps us start over on the often taken-for-granted “past.” For his major example, we become alert when something from what we take for granted as belonging to the past is inserted into representations of what we know to be the present; we call this anachronism. Anachronisms can offend. Their disruptive character inspired Schiffman to rethink the tenses. He does this not with theoretical discourse but by exploring historical writing and reflecting on the discovery of how past and present differ.

A work of impressive erudition, The Birth of the Past calls on the reader to be ready to make considerable imaginative leaps from one encounter with historical writing to another, from another era, a different past. The first surprise for many readers—I was one of them—is that the idea of the past as a concept does not have a long past in the historical community. Schiffman locates steps toward the discovery of the past in much Renaissance-era writing. He had not found any awareness of how different the past is from the present in the writings of the pioneer historians Thucydides or Herodotus. He found good reasons to study both of them, but discerned that they had no principled way to situate elements and incidents in the pasts about which they wrote. Therefore, in a sense each episode in their narrative meant a kind of starting all over again. While all the incidents about which they wrote were bound to particular times, the historians did not seem to be aware of that and could do nothing to help readers come to awareness.

After the Enlightenment-era historians and philosophers advanced writing which revealed what the discovery of the past meant—an objective past, which stood on its own ground—they came to see how jarring was anachronism in historical writing. Such misplacements of the past were not supposed to be there. For the past two centuries historians and readers know better than did Thucydides and Herodotus how to read and write history so that events find their proper place. These should not be uprooted and relocated into, say, a more recent past or more consistently, what we regard and know as the present.

Those who write the history of Christianity, or “church history,” will find much illumination on Schiffman's pages. To inspire and enhance the discovery of the past, he points out, there had to be disruptions in the standard conception of historical worlds, worlds in which anachronism was not recognized. The major disrupting element, in the author's reading, is theology. If he devotes attention only to major historians, so he wastes no time on lesser theologians. The major theological figure in his book was Augustine of Hippo. No modern-style theorist, Augustine, however, did contribute to a breakthrough in historical writing by proposing and working with a concept of history in which human activity is to be grasped as part of a whole of history. He came close to discovering the past as past, but in the end his theological treatment of history as a “whole” also prevented him from dealing with the past as past, as being different from the present. In his case and tradition, the transcendent order is so prominent and pressing that it takes away from the focus on the movement of human history and, in effect, so thoroughly regards all history sub specie aeternitatis that the tenses get absorbed into that single “whole.”

Schiffman turns to later Christian thinkers to show that they were, shall we say, still too Augustinian to give the ages and stages of history their particular due. Like Augustine, these Christian historians told their stories with such an eschatological outlook, the end being part of and absorbed into the whole, that while they might write about what was past, they had no principled or systematic way to deal with it. Discovering anachronism, then, came with the Enlightenment and trends we associate with “the modern.” It was with the Enlightenment that historians found a way to put themselves and those about whom they wrote, those who were in the “past,” into perspective.

In our time of theorists and historians in worlds they call “post-modern,” there are assaults on the concepts of the past and attempts to “relativize” what had, since Enlightenment times, come to be taken for granted as three tenses. Schiffman gives little “place” to such a time or concept of time because still so dominant, so taken for granted, is the concept of the past discovered in France and elsewhere in Europe a couple of centuries ago. Dramatists and writers of fiction, especially science fiction, may play all they wish with fantasy versions of past, present, and future, but historians share commonplace understandings of past and present so regularly that we remain uneasy or critical whenever anachronism appears in texts or daily life.

Trust Zachary Schiffman to guide us to the sources if a new concept of dividing present from past begins to emerge. He certainly is a learned guide through the literature of what happened to separate Thucydides and Herodotus and no doubt everyone else from those who are heirs of the time of The Birth of the Past. He mentions on his first page (xiii) that the impulse and insight which led to this book came to him one day as he walked past Botany Pond on the University of Chicago campus, as he was reflecting on the Renaissance “attitude toward the past” and the problems it raised. I passed that pond several times a week on class days for thirty-five years and never had such an illumination as his. But anyone who is ready to take up the problem of present/past and anachronism has reason to be grateful for the fact that Schiffman walked where he did and thought as he did and writes as he does.