Animating the Past: History-Making, Memory-Making, Law-Making

Abstract

This paper examines certain history-making and memory-making practices that allow us to see how the past may be animated. These practices are: first, the Ancient Greek sophistic arts, as exemplified by Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, and as revived, in dialogue form, in Renaissance humanism; and second, Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, and medieval memory arts, with particular attention to the composite generative imagery of those arts. Animating the past – as these practices of history-making and memory-making do – is of great epistemic and political value to communities: it enables acts of argument and judgement, and, more generally, it is vital for vibrant democracies. The paper signals, albeit only briefly, how these practices are also intertwined with legal history, and in particular the history of legal reasoning, suggesting some ways forward, in future work, for investigating the entangled histories of history-making, memory-making, and law-making.