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I
Origins of Cultural History
There is no agreement over what constitutes cultural history, any more than agreement over what constitutes culture. Over forty years ago, two American scholars set out to chart the variations in the use of the term in English, and collected more than two hundred rival definitions.1 Taking other languages and the last four decades into account, it would be easy to collect many more. In the search for our subject it may therefore be appropriate to adapt the existentialistsâ definition of man and to say that cultural history has no essence. It can only be defined in terms of its own history.
How can anyone write a history of something which lacks a fixed identity? It is rather like trying to catch a cloud in a butterfly net. However, in their very different ways, Herbert Butterfield and Michel Foucault both demonstrated that all historians face this problem. Butterfield criticized what he called the âWhig interpretation of historyâ, in other words the use of the past to justify the present, while Foucault emphasized epistemological ârupturesâ. If we wish to avoid the anachronistic attribution of our own intentions, interests and values to the dead, we cannot write the continuous history of anything.2 On one side we face the danger of âpresent-mindednessâ, but on the other the risk of being unable to write at all.
Perhaps there is a middle way, an approach to the past which asks present-minded questions but refuses to give present-minded answers; which concerns itself with traditions but allows for their continual reinterpretation; and which notes the importance of unintended consequences in the history of historical writing as well as in the history of political events. To follow such a route is the aim of this chapter, which is concerned with the history of culture before the âclassicâ period discussed in the concluding chapter, in other words before the term âcultureâ came into general use.3
In this case the present-minded questions are the following: how old is cultural history, and how have conceptions of cultural history changed over time? The difficulty to be avoided is that of giving these questions equally present-minded answers. The problem is a slippery one. We are not the first people in the world to realize that culture, as we now call it, has a history. The term âcultural historyâ goes back to the late eighteenth century, at least in German. Johan Christoph Adelung published an âEssay in a history of the culture of the human raceâ, Versuch einer Geschichte der Kultur des menschlichen Geschlechts (1782), while Johan Gottfried Eichhorn published a âGeneral history of cultureâ, Allgemeine Geschichte der Kultur (1796â9), presented as an introduction to the âspecial historiesâ (Spezialgeschichte) of the different arts and sciences.
The idea that literature and philosophy and the arts have histories is much older. This tradition deserves to be remembered. The difficulty is to do this without falling into the error of imagining that what we have defined (and indeed in some places, institutionalized), as a âsubjectâ or âsubdisciplineâ existed in the past in this form.
In some respects the most historically minded manner of approaching the problem would be to tell the story backwards from today, showing how Huizingaâs conception of cultural history differs from that of the 1990s, how Burckhardtâs differed from Huizingaâs, and so on. In liberating us from assumptions of continuity, however, this backward narrative would obscure the ways in which practical, partial and short-term aims and motives (such as civic pride and the search for precedent) contributed to the development over the long term of a more general study often pursued for its own sake. The best thing to do is perhaps for the author to share the difficulties with the reader in the course of the narrative. In other words, like some contemporary novelists and critics, I shall try to tell a story and at the same time to reflect on it and even, perhaps, to undermine it.
Whenever one begins the story, it can be argued that it would have been better to have started earlier. This chapter begins with the humanists of Renaissance Italy, from Petrarch onwards, whose attempts to undo the work of what they were the first to call the âMiddle Agesâ and to revive the literature and learning of classical antiquity implied a view of three ages of culture: ancient, medieval and modern. In fact, as the humanists well knew, some ancient Greeks and Romans had already claimed that language has a history, that philosophy has a history, that literary genres have a history, and that human life has been changed by a succession of inventions. Ideas of this kind can be found in Aristotleâs Poetics, for example, in Varroâs treatise on language, in Ciceroâs discussion of the rise and fall of oratory, and in the account of the early history of man given in the poem of Lucretius on the nature of things (so important for Vico, and others in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries).4
History of Language and Literature
However, the humanists had a more dramatic story to tell about language and literature than their ancient models. A story of barbarian invasions and of the consequent decline and destruction of classical Latin, followed by an account of revival, the work (of course) of the humanists themselves. In other words, an age of light was followed by the âDark Agesâ, followed in turn by the dawn of another age of light. This is the story which emerges from some Italian texts of the early fifteenth century, Leonardo Bruniâs lives of Dante and Petrarch, for example, the history of Latin literature written by Sicco Polenton, or the historical introduction to Lorenzo Vallaâs Latin grammar, the Elegantiae.5 This interpretation of the history of literature formed part of the justification of the humanist movement.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, debates about the relative merits of Latin and Italian as a literary language and the best form of Italian to use generated research into the history of language by Leonardo Bruni, Flavio Biondo, and others. They discussed, for example, what language the ancient Romans had actually spoken, Latin or Italian.6 In the early sixteenth century, the humanist cardinal Adriano Castellesi produced a history of Latin, De sermone latino (1516), divided into four periods â âvery oldâ, âoldâ, âperfectâ (the age of Cicero), and âimperfectâ (ever since). Another humanist and critic, Pietro Bembo, who did as much as anyone to freeze Italian at a particular point in its development, allowed one of the characters in his famous dialogue on the vernacular, the Prose della volgar lingua (1525), to point out that language changes âlike fashions in clothes, modes of warfare, and all other manners and customsâ (book 1, chapter 17).
Northern humanists, at once imitators and rivals of their Italian predecessors, amplified the story by drawing attention to literary and linguistic developments in their own countries. In France, for instance, two humanist lawyers, Ătienne Pasquier in his Recherches de la France (1566) and Claude Fauchet in his Origine de la langue et poĂ©sie françoises (1581), chronicled and celebrated the achievements of French writers from the thirteenth century to the age of François I and the PlĂ©iade.7 In England, a discussion of English poetry from Chaucer onwards can be found in the treatise called The Arte of English Poesie published in 1589 and attributed to George Puttenham. A history of Spanish, Del origen y principio de la lengua castellana, was published by Bernardo Aldrete in 1606, in the same year as a similar study of Portuguese, Origem da lingua portuguesa, by the lawyer Duarte Nunes de LeĂŁo. The Germans had to wait until the later seventeenth century for an equivalent history, just as they had to wait until the seventeenth century for an equivalent of the poets of the PlĂ©iade, but the history, when it arrived, was more elaborate and comparative. The polymath Daniel Morhof placed the history of the German language and German poetry in a comparative European framework in his Unterricht von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie (1682).8
Building on these foundations, a number of eighteenth-century scholars produced multivolume histories of national literatures, notably those of France (by a research team of Benedictine monks headed by Rivet de la Grange), and of Italy (compiled single-handed by Girolamo Tiraboschi). The breadth of Tiraboschiâs notion of âliteratureâ is worth noting.9 In Britain there were similar plans afoot. Alexander Pope put forward a âscheme of the history of English poetryâ; Thomas Gray amended it. Meanwhile, the history had been undertaken by Thomas Warton. Warton never went beyond the early seventeenth century, but his unfinished History of English Poetry (4 vols, 1774â8) remains impressive.10
Monographs were also written on the history of particular literary genres. The French Protestant scholar Isaac Casaubon published a study of Greek satire in 1605, and John Dryden, following his example, wrote a Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) discussing its development from what he called the ârough-cast, unhewnâ extempore satire of ancient Rome to the polished productions of a period when the Romans âbegan to be somewhat better bred, and were entering, as I may say, into the rudiments of civil conversationâ. Again, the rise of the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was accompanied by investigations of its oriental and medieval origins by the polymath bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet, in his Lettre sur lâorigine des romans (1669), and following him by Thomas Warton, who inserted into his history of poetry a digression âOn the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europeâ.
History of Artists, Art and Music
It is hardly surprising to find men of letters devoting attention to the history of literature. Art was a less obvious object for a historianâs attention, even in the Renaissance. Learned men did not always take artists seriously, while artists generally lacked the kind of preparation necessary for historical research. When, in fifteenth-century Florence, the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti produced a literary sketch of the history of art in his autobiographical Commentaries, he was doing something rather unusual.11
We ought not to take Vasari for granted either. He was remarkable in his own day because he had a double education, not only a training in an artistâs workshop but a humanist education sponsored by Cardinal Passerini.12 His Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, first published in 1550, was written, so the author tells us, in order that young artists might learn from the example of their great predecessors, and also (one may reasonably suspect) for the greater glory of his adopted city Florence, and his patrons the Medici (it was in fact published by the Grand Dukeâs press).13
However, Vasariâs book is much more than a work of propaganda. It is also, of course, a good deal more than a biographical collection. The prefaces to the three parts into which the work is divided include an account of the rise of art in antiquity, its decline in the Middle Ages, and its revival in Italy in three stages, culminating in Vasariâs master Michelangelo. It has been shown by Ernst Gombrich that Vasariâs developmental scheme was adapted from Ciceroâs account of the history of rhetoric. Without Vasariâs double education, such an adaptation would have been virtually inconceivable, even if we allow for the fact that Vasari was helped by a circle of scholars including Gianbattista Adriani, Cosimo Bartoli, Vincenzo Borghini, and Paolo Giovio.14 Vasariâs concern with art rather than artists was given still more emphasis in the second edition (1568).
Vasariâs book was treated as a challenge. Artists and scholars from other parts of Italy compiled lives of local artists in order to show that Rome, Venice, Genoa, and Bologna were worthy rivals to Florence. However, they paid much less attention than Vasari had done to general trends in art. The same goes for responses to Vasari outside Italy, in the Netherlands, by Karel van Mander in Het Schilderboek (1604), and in Germany, by Joachim von Sandrart in his Deutsche Akademie (1675â9), who argued that the age of Albrecht DĂŒrer marked the shift of cultural leadership from southern Europe to the north. It was only in the mid-eighteenth century that Horace Walpoleâs Anecdotes of Painting, intended as a Vasari for England (Walpole joked about his âVasarihoodâ), found room not only for biographies but also for chapters on the âstate of paintingâ at different periods, the equivalent of the chapters on economic, social and literary history to be found in the contemporary History of England by David Hume.15
The rise of what it is retrospectively convenient to call the history of art as opposed to the biographies of artists took place earlier in studies of classical antiquity, for a sufficiently obvious reason. De...
