The
Ranums'
Panat Times
Volume 1, redone Dec. 2014
Jacques-Auguste de Thou: Taking off the Toga
III: A brief bibliography:
The history of historical thought: France, c. 1500-1715
I - Taking off the Toga, Reflections
II A - Searching for Legal
Perspectives in de Thou's dedication to Henry IV
II B - Searching for Legal
Perspectives in de Thou's History, books I-LXIV
II
C - Hesitant findings
III - Brief bibliography
Several twentieth-century works in this interesting sub-discipline do not contain bibliographies, no doubt because publishers sought to economize. The first general bibliography, to my knowledge, is C.-G. Dubois, La Conception de l'histoire en France au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1977), most learned, problematically still very informed, and full of insights that could inspire further research. His exploration of chiliastic Protestant history is truly remarkable and unsurpassed.
Prior to Dubois, some earlier works still merit mention:
A. Thierry, Dix ans d'études historiques (Paris, 1835).
E. Fueter, Geschichte der neueren Historiographie, translated as Histoire de l'historiographie moderne (Paris, 1914), which first elaborated to a full conceptual approach the distinctions between learned and non-learned history.
P. Ariès, Le Temps de l'histoire (Monaco, 1954).
A. Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), laid out a general framework for understanding the relations between ancient and early-modern historical thought, e.g., a model study of the reception of Tacitus.
J.G.A. Pocock, in the Introduction of The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957) entitled "The French Prelude to Modern Historiography," offered a paradigmatic study of the relations between legal-scholarly approaches (Bartolist-anti-Bartolist), legal history, and the development of "modern historiography."
Pocock's paradigm may be considered to be deepened and made more explicit by two works that began as Columbia University dissertations, namely J.H. Franklin's Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York, 1963); and D.R. Kelley's Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York, 1970). Both have philosophical-jurisprudential dimensions that shed light on the roles played by historical thinking in the sixteenth century, and in the twentieth century. Together, Pocock, Franklin, and Kelley present an ordered and convincing account of the synthesis of legal studies and historical thinking that separated the latter from humanist rhetorical revivalism of antique modes of writing narratives. The scholars whose writings support this synthesis of law and history are Budé, Alciato, Baudouin, Dumoulin, and Cujas, to name just a few. Attention to the political and religious contexts has been considerable but sometimes not yet "complete," notably for de Thou. D.R. Kelley's François Hotman, a Revolutionary's Ordeal (Princeton, 1973), is a model study that should inspire young scholars to tackle other major figures, their writings, and political-religious contexts.
Another work within the same analytical frame is G. Huppert's The Idea of Perfect History (Urbana, Chicago, 1970), which elucidates and logically presents modernist tendencies in several sixteenth-century historians. The chapters on Pasquier and Voisin de la Popelinière are particularly strong and propose the theme of patriotism as a major concern in historical thought in general. To be patriotic, and also to question the miraculous in the life of Joan of Arc, takes the reader deep into the contradictory directions that modernity brought to the fore. See also M. Yardeni, La Conscience nationale en France (Louvain, 1971), and R.E. Asher, National Myths in Renaissance France (Edinburgh, 1993).
As already noted, the "translation" of French approaches to English history (Pocock), and the studies by F.W. Maitland, H. Butterfield, and D. Hay continued to inspire research on how historical thought in French-Protestant circles might influence the English, particularly in the decades leading up to the civl war. See J.H.M. Salmon's pioneering The French Wars of Religion in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1972). See also A. Bakos, Images of Kingship, Louis XI ... (London, 1997).
The ambiguity regarding the relation between political and historical thought was made almost philosophically explicit as early as 1941 by W.F. Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth Century France (Cambridge, MA, 1941). Church poses the question about the relation of theories of legal and natural law to historical thought, taking O. von Gierke's works as a point of departure, and moves to study contemporary, that is sixteenth-century theory about the French constitution in both its specific genres (e.g. Seyssel) and its historicized forms (Du Tillet, La Popelinière). Church's perspective would be further elaborated in Richelieu and Reson of State (Princeton, 1972), a strong critique of Meinecke.
In the political-thought and history nexus, very influential work on republicanism and historical thought came out of Italian Renaissance studies, most notably H. Baron's The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1966), and P.H. Labalme, Bernardo Giustiniani (Rome, 1969).
F. Gilbert's Machiavelli and Guicciardini (Princeton, 1965) deepened forms-of-government perspectives as frameworks for works of history. W.J. Bouwsma's Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (Berkeley, 1968) is built on a very careful reading of French sixteenth-century historical and religious thought, and Italian thought as well, a magnificent general synthesis turning on the fate of Sarpi's History. A major theme is the search for political understanding in history. See also I. De Smet, Thuanus (Geneva, 2006).
The study of historical thought from the perspective of antique rhetoric has not been developed for French history. The major works in the Italian Renaissance begin with H.H. Gray, "Renaissance Humanism, the Pursuit of Eloquence," Journal of the History of Ideas, 24 (1963), pp. 497-514; and the fundamental N.S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1970). T. Hampton's Writing from History (Berkeley, 1990) is a very strong general book on exemplarity that has not been superseded by recent works on the subject. My Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-Century France (Chapel, Hill, 1980) is primarily a study of the recruitment of men of letters for posts as historiographers royal. There are a few pages on rhetorical aspects as the relation between history and panegyric is explored. Marc Fumaroli's L'Age de l'éloquence et res litteraria (Geneva: Droz, 1980; Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), and his "Mémoires au carrefour des genres," XVIIe Siècle, 94-95 (1971), pp. 7-37, shed enormous light on all aspects of early-modern French historical thought. So does B. Neveu's Un historien à l'école de Port-Royal, Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (The Hague, 1966). See also B. Barret-Kriegel, Jean Mabillon (Paris, 1988).
Before turning to more recent studies, several works on medieval historical thought must be mentioned. There is B. Guenée's Histoire et culture historique (Paris, 1980), which was followed by several other major studies. Another historian whose works are required reading for anyone who takes up history as a research topic, is G. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis (Brookline, 1978); Romancing the Past (Berkeley, 1993); and The Past as Text (Baltimore, 1997). R. Morissey's L'Empereur à la barbe fleurie (Paris, 1997) is an exemplary study that rightly stresses continuity and even "structure" in historical thought. See also the brilliant N. Edelman, Attitudes of Seventeenth-Century France toward the Middle Ages (New York, 1946).
Approaches to the history of history through content analysis have been, if not resented, usually ignored by close readers. Peter Burke's The Renaissance Sense of the Past, London, 1969. M. Tyvaert's "L'image du Roi: Légitimité et moralité royales dans les histoire de France au XVIIe siècle," Revue d'Histoire moderne et cnotemporaine, 21 (1974), pp. 521-47; and "Les histoires élémentaires de la France au XVIIe siècle," Revue de Marseille, 88, supplement (1971), pp. 70-78, confirm Aries's argument that early-modern historians ought to be thought of as compilers and continuators, since when writing general histories, they deviated very little from the "structure" of themes and events.
For recent work, a good place to begin is the conference, Les princes et l'histoire du XIVe au XVIIIe siècles, ed. C. Grell, W. Paravicini, and S. Voss (Bonn, 1998), which replaces the now-dated National Consciousness, History, and Political Culture (Baltimore, 1975) that I edited and which has chapters by Gilbert (Italy), Pocock (Britain), Krieger (Germany), Church (France), Cherniovsky (Russia). See also C. Grell, Les historiographes en Europe de la fin du Moyen Age à la Révolution (Paris, 2006).
With remarkable range and erudition, A. Grafton's scholarship has contributed to answering significant old questions and has many new ones. His Joseph Scaliger: a Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (1983-93), and his What was History (Cambridge, 2007), a significant reading of Baudouin, are state-of-the-art in every respect. There are excellent, indispensable bibliographies. We still are, in some respects, compilers and continuators (Ariès) of a book such as Georges Lefebvre's La naissance de l'historiographe moderne (Paris, 1971), a course that Fernand Braudel sponsored for publication. Disappointing it may be, but it might contain just the fact, or just the insight that some current researcher needs for going forward. Other works are classics and deserve to be read again and again, Maitland, Momigliano, and Pocock being examples.
De Thou remarks, in his narrative about the Estates of 1588, that Bodin is "so well-known for his writings." M.-D. Couzinet's Histoire et méthode à la Renaissance (Paris, 1996), along with J. Franklin, do justice to Bodin on history. Like the knights who appear in the mists before Georges Sand, names, names, and more names come to mind that I have not included here. It is your duty, dear reader, to dutifully go back to the works of our predecessors. They may not have been giants, but we stand on their shoulders nonetheless.
P.S. But I wish to end on a positive note. As a signal for promising further work, Steve Uomini's Cultures historiques dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1998) is a brilliantly learned and wide-ranging study of historical thought. Philippe Ariès used to comment about historians whose works he admired: "Il a la bête de l'histoire." Such is the case for Uomini! While there are some references to this work in the recent number of XVIIe Siècle, which is devoted to history, the entire issue would have been richer and deeper had Uomini been taken into account from the beginning, and presented as a work of reference, and as a work with which one must enter into dialogue.
P.P.S., autumn 2012. Amy Graves-Monroe, Post Tenebras Lex, Preuve et propagande dans l'historiographie engagée de Simon Goulart (Geneva: Droz, 2012), is a major contribution to all the questions in the history of the historical thought of that most important century, the sixteenth.