Main Trends in Historical-Method Literature: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

The entire literature concerned with the philosophy and methodology of history during the three centuries preceding 1800 can be schematically divided into two groups, although in individual works the two aspects were often fused and difficult to differentiate, especially in the eighteenth century when these two branches met. The first tendency was educational or pedagogical, the second and ancillary. One branch stemmed from the antique tradition of didactic history, clearly the product of classical influences such as rhetoric and Stoicism. and emphasized the utilitarian role of history in the private and public sphere. This so-called exemplar history' stressed the efficacy of historical examples as opposed to philosophical principles. In the various artes historicae of the sixteenth century, those essays describing the ways or means of studying or writing history, this was the emphasis which we meet almost exclusively. We can also say pedagogical in the strict sense of the word, insofar as these considerations about the role of history were to be found in larger educational treatises from Vives until the end of the eighteenth century Rollin, La Chalotais, or Condillac, to mention only a few later writers.2 The second branch was a younger one, beginning in the seventeenth century. This variety was a product of such influences as Cartesianism and the monastic tradition of erudite research; it dealt with questions of historical epistemology and logic, and contained, for example, debates on historical pyrrhonism. Seen from this viewpoint, critical may be broadly interpreted to include, beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, historical dictionaries and catalogues, and, in the eighteenth century, historical journals. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as we shall see, maintained an intense interest in the question of historical pyrrhonism. Yet all but a minority of the historical treaties produced at this time were essentially in nature, and logic came in second place. Any speculations about historical doubt derived generally from didactic motivations, rather than from philosophical or pyrrhonistic detachment. We may say that in the eighteenth century there developed a diversification of concerns. Questions of method, problems, or criticism became more defined and multiplied. Old elements of historical theory underwent adaptation in order to meet new social and political needs. This is clearly noticeable in the role of history in the programs or in the introductions and contents of the historical catechisms. At the same time, there was a fusion of research and his-