Historical Sensibility Research Articles

Living with the Ancient Romans: Past and Present in Eighteenth-Century Encounters with Herculaneum and Pompeii

The eighteenth-century ‘discovery’ of the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii revolutionised the way in which individuals thought about their relationship with the ancient world. The accounts of British visitors between 1738 and the end of the century reflect a new historical sensibility, one predicated upon the extraordinary proximity between present and past that these sites seemed to ensure. Yet this communal, cultural response to the ruins of these Roman cities does not mean that the eighteenth-century influence of Herculaneum and Pompeii was purely decorative, nostalgic or sentimental. Several individuals who encountered these excavations over the course of the eighteenth century were able to shape and develop unique political and intellectual arguments influenced by these ruins, and by the feelings of particular closeness with the past that they inspired. This article examines the work of four individuals – Camillo Paderni; Johann Joachim Winckelmann; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Sir William Hamilton – all of whom used the prevailing vocabulary associated with Herculaneum and Pompeii in order to articulate individual and in several cases innovative arguments on subjects as diverse as the validity of Neapolitan Bourbon rule; the ideal of Greek art, and the history of the earth. Their ideas indicate that these excavations, in a small but significant way, helped to shape a diverse range of eighteenth-century thought.

Modern Historical Preservation--Towards a Global Perspective

This volume is devoted to reconsidering the history of historical preservation from an international perspective. 1 Even though the origins of modern preservationism are often traced back to early eighteenth-century Europe, the aim is to address the broader factors behind the global spread of this changing historical sensibility toward ancestral pasts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How, why, and in what form these diverse conservation practices developed in various international settings is the departure point of enquiry. The modern ‘hunger for heritage’ is commonly understood as a cultural by-product of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, which fundamentally altered the perceived relationship between past and present, first in Europe and then in the wider world. While the European roots of this modern political interest in heritage arguably originated with the Swedish Royal Proclamation of 1666, which declared all objects from antiquity to be the property of the Crown, and the 1717 creation of England’s Society of Antiquaries some fifty years later, it was really the ‘dual revolution’ that generated these broader transformations of historical consciousness and claims of political stewardship toward pasts deemed worth preserving. 2 After all, it was during the French Revolution that vast numbers of royal, aristocratic, and ecclesiastical buildings came under new state ownership, sparking wide discussion about the making of a new ‘national’ French past; and it was the Industrial Revolution that inspired the romance of ruins that shaped much of nineteenth-century cultural life, as evidenced in the creation of national museums, cathedral restoration projects, and national park movements, as well as the Victorian cult of antiquities and ancient civilizations. As industrialization spread to other parts of the European continent and North America, so too did the urge to protect relics of the past from the ravages of modernization.

The Liberal Arts, Antidote for Atheism

Abstract C. S. Lewis once stated that the decline of classical learning was a contributory cause of atheism. This article explores why he made this very unusual statement, describing how Lewis saw the Classics as a literature full of gods and goddesses, providing hints of truth, giving us things to write about, and preparing for the Christian faith. Using some remarkable quotations from Virgil and Plato, Lewis demonstrated how those writers anticipated both the birth and the death of Christ. Lewis’s concept of myth, powerfully present in the Classics, shows how the Gospel story itself is a “true myth,” one with a pattern that is similar to many of the pagan myths. The personal story of Lewis himself demonstrates how the Classics, and, more broadly, the liberal arts were a testimony to the truth of God and how the Greek plays of Euripides, the philosophy of Samuel Alexander, the imagination of writer William Morris, the poetry of George Herbert, and the historical sensibility of G. K. Chesterton combined (with many other similar influences) to convince Lewis that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ were especially a “true myth,” one that happened in history, demonstrating him to be the Son of God.

Paradox and Polemic; Argument and Awkwardness: Reflections on E. P. Thompson

This paper situates E. P. Thompson and the attraction and influence of his major study, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), within his insistence on constructing history as argument. Often polemical, Thompson's approach to history also appreciated paradox. In writing as he always did, against the grain of conventional wisdoms, be they of the right or the left, Thompson understood that he would always be situated awkwardly in terms of how his interpretation challenged established orthodoxies. This awkwardness, and its rootedness in refusal to accommodate too easily to established analysis, has proven Thompson's lasting contribution. It nurtured unique historical sensibilities, creative and rigorous use of source materials, and writing marked by panache and passion. The result is that The Making of the English Working Class remains as relevant today as it was 50 years ago, a landmark study whose arguments and their implications are with us yet, and whose suggestions have spawned countless fresh studies and endless research questions.

Invitation to historians

This introduction to my work seeks to account for the kind of history that I practice, and outline exactly why I think particular modes of investigation, types of historiographical practice and iterations of historical engagement will provide us with new insight into the way in which history works in popular culture. I discuss the formation of what I term ‘historical sensibility’ and look at several key issues: anachronism; desire; commodity; authenticity.

A Renaissance Man in Memory: Appayya Dīkṣita Through the Ages

This essay is a first attempt to trace the evolution of biographical accounts of Appayya Dīkṣita from the sixteenth century onward, with special attention to their continuities and changes. It explores what these rich materials teach us about Appayya Dīkṣita and his times, and what lessons they offer about the changing historical sensibilities in South India during the transition to the colonial and postcolonial eras. I tentatively identify two important junctures in the development of these materials: one that took place in the first generation to be born after his death, when the idea of him as an avatar of Śiva was introduced, and another at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when many new stories about his encounters with his colleagues and students surfaced. The essay follows a set of themes and tensions that pertain to Appayya Dīkṣita’s social and political affiliations, his sectarian agendas, and the geographic sphere of his activities. These themes and tensions are closely related and prove to be surprisingly resilient, despite the many changes that occurred during the five centuries of recollection that this essay sketches. This overall coherence, I argue, is integral to Appayya Dīkṣita’s sociopolitical context and self-chosen identity.

The past in the present: historicising contemporary debates about gender and education

History is often embedded, explicitly or implicitly, in discourses on contemporary aspects of gender and education, but relatively few scholars engage critically with history as they grapple with current issues. This article posits ‘historical sensibility’ as a means of engaging constructively with the past when scrutinising and working on current issues in gender and education. Four features of historical sensibility are mapped out and compared with established ways of approaching the relationship between the present and past. The utility of historical sensibility is demonstrated with reference to ongoing debates about the feminisation of schooling, the sexualisation of children and the leisure pursuits of young women.

Sporting mythscapes, neoliberal histories, and post-colonial amnesia inAotearoa/New Zealand

Andrews (1999) has argued that under conditions of market-based liberalization, the sporting past has increasingly been put to use for the purposes of accumulation. This selectively rendered “sporting historicism,” he argues, results in “a pseudo-authentic historical sensibility, as opposed to a genuinely historically grounded understanding of the past, or indeed the present by rendering history a vast, yet random, archive of events, styles, and icons” (2006). Under such conditions, power-laden and selective “mythscapes” emerge. In this paper, we carry Andrews’ contention forward by arguing that critical sport scholars should further problematize the uses of the sporting mythscape—particularly by calling into question those re-historicizations that emerge in public discourse and excavating whose interests they serve. Here we interrogate the politics of how sporting pasts are mobilized in contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand; in particular at the conjuncture of a globalized “free-market” economy and fluctuating (post-)colonial identity politics. We point to various cases that help reveal how specters of sporting pasts circulate within national mythologies in selective and politicized ways.

Historicizing Planning, Problematizing Participation

AbstractIn this article, I offer speculations which share the intentions of this symposium to bring to light seldom acknowledged configurations of knowledges, and to indicate different ways of thinking historically about urban problems and planning policies. I suggest that a genealogical or critical historical sensibility has much to contribute to these projects by tracing how policies and programmes come into being in response to specific conditions and within specific sets of presuppositions, and are rarely the products of unified histories or singular rationalities. But these policies are also configured in discursive terrains that already shape the form of problems and their possible solutions. That is, before policies or concepts can ‘travel’, they have to come into being under certain ‘conditions of possibility’. The main focus of this article is to suggest that posing a policy, programme or set of practices as a ‘problematization’ as a consequence of certain conditions of possibility can productively indicate different avenues of enquiry that trace the disparate ‘pre‐travel’ emergences of what may (or may not) then become ‘travelling’ policies. I indicate some questions and possible research directions arising from taking participation in planning as a particular form of problematization and calling attention to the taken‐for‐granted nature of ‘participation’ as it is theorized and practised in the fields of urban planning and participatory development.

Goitein, Medieval Jews, and the “New Mediterranean Studies”

Goitein, Medieval Jews, and the “New Mediterranean Studies” Fred Astren Goitein, Braudel, and Horden and Purcell: “In” and “Of” the Mediterranean The medieval Jews whose lives are revealed through the Cairo Geniza would probably not have thought that they lived in a “Mediterranean society,” as it was called by S. D. Goitein in his five-volume magnum opus.1 Like the anachronistic “Byzantine,” taken up by nineteenth-century scholars as a name for the Later (Greek) Roman empire, the term “Mediterranean society” obscures as much as it reveals. Although Goitein’s work on the documentary material of the Cairo Geniza constitutes an enormous contribution to both Jewish and Islamic history, when we look closely and try to find the Mediterranean that he describes, its location is neither obvious nor easily defined. Tellingly, the medieval Jews of the Geniza do not even have a specific name for it other than “the Sea.” As Goitein explains, the people of the Geniza looked outward from Egypt and saw three areas whose Mediterranean shores defined their horizons and mental map: the Maghrib or “Muslim West” (consisting of North Africa, Muslim Sicily, and Muslim Spain); al-Rūm or “the land of the Romans” (Byzantium and the Christian West); and the “East” (Egypt and the central Near East).2 The fact that the latter term was used infrequently, with preference for specific local and regional toponyms, points to a mental map resembling a series of concentric circles of familiarity [End Page 513] more than a self-conscious representation of the Mediterranean. With this kind of cultural mapping it is not surprising that in Egypt residents of both the capital metropolitan complex of Cairo-Fusṭāṭ and urban Alexandria distinguished themselves from the rest of Egypt, which they referred to as the rīf, or Province.3 Although Goitein does not appropriate this perspective, neither does he offer an analytical geographical perspective of his own. For him, places inscribed in the Geniza documents come together collectively in a manner that limits broad generalization and yields relatively little in terms of a methodology for thinking about the Mediterranean. For Goitein, unlike Fernand Braudel and many others, the Mediterranean is more an accident of circumstance than a category of analysis. Goitein, who was trained in Germany as a philologist and historian, described himself as a “sociographer,” thereby emphasizing his focus on human activity and his interest in social history, but distancing himself from large-scale analysis and theoretical approaches characteristic of sociology. Goitein also describes his method to be “investigative,” mirroring the dominant methods and foci of modern Jewish studies since the early years of Wissenschaft des Judentums in the nineteenth century. Goitein began his career in a young field still beholden to many of the influential figures of its first generation, such as Moritz Steinschneider, Heinrich Graetz, Abraham (Albert) Harkavy, Solomon Schechter, and Samuel Poznanski. Furthermore, scholars such as Goitein felt the need to “catch up” in textual discovery and publication to such venerable Western European fields as classics and history. The well-established inclination to focus on texts was only reinforced by the “discovery” in 1896 of the Geniza, which brought to scholarly attention a huge number of unknown texts and fragments in a variety of languages. The sheer volume of this material had the potential to provide plenty of material with which to keep him occupied without venturing into comparative and large-scale analysis. There was more than enough for the lifetime’s work of a “sociographer.” Although Goitein was hardly parochial or limited in vision, his career as a Geniza scholar was shaped by the realization that although the medieval India trade was what primarily interested him, he knew that it could not be understood without a full treatment of the Mediterranean materials. This strategic decision not only shaped his scholarly agenda but demonstrates his overarching vision. Explicit in his explanation of changes in the Mediterranean and the accompanying involvement of [End Page 514] Jews in the India trade is Goitein’s larger historical sensibility. He understood that the florescence of Jewish mercantile activity as documented in the Geniza corresponded to a phase in Mediterranean economic history when increased commercial activity during the...

Setting the record wrong: a Sanskrit vision of Mughal conquests

In 1589, Padmasāgara wrote the first Sanskrit account of the Mughal rise to power within a short poem titled Jagadgurukāvya (Poem on the Teacher of the World). The work primarily eulogizes the life of a Jain religious leader named Hīravijaya, but Padmasāgara devotes one-third of the text to detailing the military exploits of Humayun and Akbar. Moreover, Padmasāgara departs significantly from known Indo-Persian historiography and imagines a startlingly innovative storyline for the early days of the Mughal Empire. Through this substantial rewriting, he furthermore consistently depicts the coerced establishment of Mughal rule as engendering the flourishing of Indian cultural and religious traditions. In this article, I provide the first detailed account of Padmasāgara's presentation of the battles of Humayun and Akbar to secure their claims over the subcontinent. I then seek to understand the motivations that fuelled this particular narrative by placing Jagadgurukāvya in the context of Gujarati relations with the Mughal court, Jain religious interests and historical sensibilities in early modern India. In his account of the early Mughal Empire, Padmasāgara crafts a political vision in which history is not constituted by a set of unchangeable facts but rather by a range of potential cultural implications that can be best realized through literature. His ambitious narrative about the recent past has important implications for how we understand early modern Sanskrit historiography and its relationship to Mughal power.

Anzac Day at Home and Abroad: Towards a History of Australia’s National Day

AbstractOver the last hundred years, Anzac Day (25 April), the anniversary of the initial landing of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at Gallipoli in 1915, has captured the Australian and New Zealand national imaginations. The day remembers the first significant engagement involving Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the First World War. This article is an early report of a major project that will chart Anzac Day’s origins, development and contested meanings. It is both an historical study, tracing changes in commemoration and remembrance over time, and an investigation of the ways in which Australians and New Zealanders mark Anzac Day in the present day. It will interrogate the shaping of historical sensibility by exploring the complex connections between personal and collective remembrance. One of the challenges to understanding Anzac Day is dealing with the multiplicity of meanings of such a large‐scale, diverse and now venerable (in modern Australian terms) observation. It will also examine the neglected subject of Anzac Day’s observance outside the Australia and New Zealand – in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the Pacific – where it has long played a role in expressing the identities of Antipodean expatriate communities.

Writing History in Macaulay’s Shadow: J.R. Seeley, E.A. Freeman, and the Audience for Scientific History in Late Victorian Britain

So similar were the historical mindsets of J. R. Seeley and E. A. Freeman that there is still some confusion about which one coined the famous dictum that “history is past politics, politics present history”. Not only did they agree about history’s proper subject matter, they were also leading members of a community of historians in late Victorian Britain who sought to promote history’s scientific status against men of letters who were more interested in history’s literary potential. Seeley and Freeman seemed particularly to relish in exposing such historical imposters while promoting their own vision of history as a scientific and autonomous discipline. These similarities aside, the two diverged considerably when reflecting on the posthumous legacy of one such man of letters who likely did more than any other to popularize English history in the nineteenth century. Whereas Seeley believed that Lord Macaulay harmed history’s development by corrupting the general reading public’s historical sensibilities, Freeman argued that historians owed Macaulay a great debt of gratitude for not only basing his narratives on factual accuracy but also for doing so while reaching an extremely large audience. In debating about Macaulay, it is clear that Seeley and Freeman had different conceptions about the normative audience for a professional history.

Ukrainophile Activism and Imperial Governance in Russia's Southwestern Borderlands

Throughout the 19th century, a haunted the Russian Empire. In the early 1800s, ethnic Ukrainian (or as official circles then called them, Little Russian) nobles came to see themselves as leaders of a historical nation whose origins they traced to Kievan Rus' and the Cossack hetmanate. (1) By mid-century, Little Russian elites infused this historical sensibility with political content, initiating a Ukrainian awakening. In the 1840s, the Cyrillo-Methodian Society, a clandestine organization, called for Little Russians to reclaim the freedoms and equality of their Cossack ancestors by forming a federation of Slavic nations. By the 1860s-70s, populist activists known as khlopomany (roughly, fans of the peasantry) and members of cultural associations called Hromady worked to protect and promote folk traditions and the Ukrainian language. (2) As growing segments of Little Russian society discovered a common experience distinct from all-Russian culture, new generations of activists would begin the struggle to build a Ukrainian political nation on these cultural foundations. (3) The existing literature on the Ukrainian question in the 19th century emphasizes the intensifying conflict between the heralds of Ukrainian national awakening and the bureaucrats who governed the immense and ethnically diverse empire. As Russian intellectuals gradually disavowed their earlier interest in Little Russia's cultural peculiarities, which they began to see as a challenge to the emergent myth that Great, Little, and White Russia constituted a single and indivisible triune nation, officials liquidated the Cyrillo-Methodian Society and exiled its leaders. (4) By mid-century, bureaucrats placed official limits on Ukrainian cultural expression. In 1863, P. A. Valuev, the minister of the interior, penned a circular banning the publication of Ukrainian-language materials aimed at a popular audience. In 1876, Tsar Mexander II issued the Ems Decree, which introduced additional injunctions against the use of Ukrainian in public life and exiled leading Ukrainophile activists. Scholars continue to debate the aims of these policies, but they are commonly regarded as evidence of bureaucrats' growing antipathy toward Little Russian particularism, which officials feared would undermine imperial stability and the myth of a triune, all-Russian nation. (5) It is beyond dispute that some officials feared that growing awareness of Ukrainian culture would alienate Little Russians from the empire and that the bureaucratic apparatus worked to prevent the emergence of Ukrainian national separatism. It is less often remarked, however, that throughout the middle third of the 19th century, influential segments of the imperial bureaucracy viewed Little Russian ethno-national consciousness not as a threat but as a powerful weapon in the official struggle to combat Polish influence on Russia's western frontier. (6) Focusing on Kiev--the most active center of Ukrainophile agitation and the administrative center of the empire's southwestern borderlands--this article demonstrates that the support offered to local activists by the St. Petersburg ministries and especially the Kiev governor-general's office played a decisive role in the consolidation of a Ukrainian cultural nation. (7) Official engagement in the elaboration of Ukrainophile ideas in Kiev--and the state's attempts to shape and control these ideas--profoundly influenced the empire's nascent national identities and challenged its long-term stability. During the 19th century, imperial officials were engaged in a fierce struggle against the Polish-Catholic nobility (szlachta), which had ruled right-bank Ukraine (the lands west of the Dnieper) during the early modern period, remained the dominant social group in the region, and rose up twice (1830-31 and 1863) in failed attempts to resurrect the Polish state. Noting that Little Russian patriots sharply defined themselves against Polish-Catholic culture, envisioned the southwestern borderlands as primordially Orthodox, and argued that the local simple folk (narod), not the szlachta, were the rightful owners of the region's resources, influential segments of the imperial bureaucracy regarded Ukrainophile activists as valuable allies in the campaign to claim the borderlands for the empire. …

Contemporary Japanese Literature in Its Transition Towards the New Postmodern Humanism: Haruki Murakami

Although Japan recorded no specific literary movement in the 1980s, in any classical sense of the term, we may say that today we are witnessing, in terms of our historical sensibility, a condensation of narrative viewpoints upon the present or, in other words, the transposition of the criteria of the present to another time, which is undoubtedly a consequence of the so-called “postmodern” will to reject grand narratives. This study aims to review and complete the inventory of the postmodern characteristics that specialisedliterature has identified in Haruki Murakami’s works, seen from the perspective of what the author of the present paper considers to be the “new postmodern humanism.”

GOTHIC HISTORY AND CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE WORKS OF CHARLES DODD (1672–1743)

ABSTRACTThe clergyman-scholar Charles Dodd used the study of the past to articulate a defence of the English Catholic community that enjoyed a rich legacy. His Church history proclaimed a vision of Catholic patriotism that appealed to the influence of medieval and Reformation history on contemporary religious debates, and informed the later push for civil emancipation. Dodd's work brought together two fashionable but seemingly contrary, historical sensibilities: grounded upon antiquarian recoveries of the gothic past, but shaped by a cosmopolitan spirit of ‘reason’ that drew upon continental reformist schools. Challenging the narratives forged through the Reformation, he pitched his works across a wide spectrum of English scholarly life, seeking dialogue with high-churchmen, constitutionalists, and supporters of religious toleration. But Dodd's later reputation as a herald of Catholic Enlightenment belied the controversies roused in his career. In delivering his view of history, Dodd was forced to suppress radical thoughts on the nature of English monarchy, stumbled into conflicts with fellow clergymen, and risked the taint of heresy with reflections upon the Holy See. Conceived to construct a new intellectual platform for his co-religionists within their national community, his works served inadvertently to reveal the complexity and fragility of English Catholic life.

The future of information history

This panel discusses developments in the scholarship of information history and speculates on its future. Previously, history was a distinct mode of research and a specialty community within information science; it operated largely outside of the mainstream scholarship that was underway within the dominant empirical and rational paradigms. Today, more social and culturally-oriented approaches have gained momentum across the discipline and these frameworks include an historical perspective as one dimension of their conceptual apparatus. As a result, an historical sensibility is now embedded more broadly across a larger swath of scholarship. This is an exciting and welcome development for champions of history--but it is also problematical. The new historical dimension to research is diffuse and its practitioners typically do not identify as historians. To illustrate the new ambiguous place: there is no obvious home for this historical panel in the track-based program structure of the ASIS&T annual meeting. From a variety of angles, our panel traces the recent breakthrough and mainstreaming of history and aims to characterize its new face. The panel includes a classically trained historian, a theorist, and two scholars whose research features historical themes but is centered outside an historical specialty. A concluding discussion among panelists and the audience will be guided by a big question: What is the future of information history?

Hannah Arendt’s “Histories”

In Arendt's interrogations of political modernity, the concepts of and politics have an ambiguous relation. On the one hand, she insisted that the performative character of politics as action was bound to its narrative aspect as remembrance. She was also a fervent proponent of integrating the historical sense into political understanding. On the other hand, Arendt characterized the modern historical sensibility the point of view of politics as a ghastly absurdity, and asserted that the political thought of our times needed to free itself both from and from thinking in historical terms. This paper explores the different meanings that Arendt granted to history as a (anti)political force and to historical sensibility as the basis for political understanding. It argues that not only were Arendt's rejection of the modern concept of and its politics of central for her critique, but that it was one of the key concerns that shaped the articulation of her own theory of action. The paper also examines the problem against the background of the intellectual tradition of Arendt's youth and in particular its uncompromising antihistoricism.

J.W. Burrow: A personal history

The late John Burrow, one of the most stimulating promoters of the distinctively interdisciplinary enterprise that is Intellectual History, was a vital member of what has become known as the ‘Sussex School’. In exploring the resonances of his singular and richly idiosyncratic contribution, this article places his unique historical sensibility within a series of interpretative contexts, demonstrating the vitality of writings that will continue to inspire and inform scholarship in the field for decades to come.

A Wayward Art: Battle-Pieces and Melville's Poetic Turn

Marrs's essay considers how Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) provides an immanent account, or inside narrative, of the author's transition from novelist to poet. Focusing on the relation between his figurations of time and the structures of his verse, Marrs argues that Melville's turn to poetry originates not in a politico-aesthetic reversal or withdrawal—as some critics have argued—but rather in a revised understanding of historical change. In his experience of the Civil War, Melville comes to perceive history as an agent of destructive repetition. This altered historical sensibility, Marrs demonstrates, not only leads him to conjoin the South's rebellion to an extended series of upheavals, from the bloody coups of ancient Rome to the peasant rebellions of medieval France, but also stimulates the very form of his poetry, in which damaged rhymes, broken meters, and twisted syntax attempt to carry the weight of the war and its chronopolitical meanings. In Battle-Pieces, the war's historical significance becomes a matter of intense formal interest, as Melville connects the mechanics of his verse to an idea of aesthetic time according to which poetry's aleatory and self-determined temporality exceeds or escapes the force of historical necessity. What Melville creates in Battle-Pieces through this fusion of politics and aesthetics is nothing less than a novel lyric form, one whose strange capaciousness has everything to do with its refractions and rearrangements of historical time.