Abstract
In this chapter Peter Burke lays down historical perspectives for the volume. He shows that an awareness of cultural history existed long before the term Geschichte der Kultur was being used in late eighteenth-century Germany. Starting with the Renaissance humanists, and with an awareness of classical antecedents, Burke discusses how histories of language and literature were written in the context of the Renaissance framework of classical glory, the darkness of the middle ages, and new dawn of the Renaissance. More surprisingly, because of art’s less learned image, the lives of artists and of art became the subject of histories, beginning with Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects and continuing with writers intent on boosting the artistic reputation of their particular cities. The histories of individual intellectual disciplines and doctrines also came to be written in the period spanning the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The Reformation stimulated the history of religious institutions and doctrines, whilst at a secular level the history of philosophy was being attempted by Otto Heurn in his The Philosophy of the barbarians (1600) and by his successors. From the history of philosophy there naturally came a series of histories of specific disciplines such as mathematics and medicine.
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Notes
R. Wagner, The Invention of Culture, Englewood Cliffs, 1975, p. 21.
For an important contribution to the ‘cutting of the culture concept down to size’, as he puts it, see C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, 1973.
Compare and contrast H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, London, 1931, with M. Foucault, Les mots et les choses, 1966, English trans. as The Order of Things, London, 1970.
On the rise of the term ‘Kultur’ in Germany in the 1780s, W. H. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, Cambridge, 1962, ch. 4.
J. G. Eichhorn, Allgemeine Geschichte der Kultur, Göttingen, 1796.
L. Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity, Baltimore, 1967
On the ‘dark ages’, L. Varga, Das Schlagwort vom ‘finsteren Mittelalter’ Vienna, 193.
W. K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, Cambridge, Mass., 1948 pp. 20f.
On Bruni and Biondo, C. Grayson, A Renaissance controversy, Latin or Italian?, Oxford, 1959.
V. Borghini, Scritti sulla lingua, ed. J. R. Woodhouse, Bologna, 1971 and C. Cittadini, Le origini della volgar toscana favella, Siena, 1604.
G. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, London, 1589.
On him, R. Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History, Chapel Hill, 1941.
E. Pasquier, Recherches de la France, Paris 1566.
G. Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History, Urbana, 1970.
C. Fauchet, Origine de la langue et poesie françoises, Paris, 1581.
B. Aldrete, Del origen y principio de la lengua castellana, Rome, 1606.
D. Morhof, Unterricht von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie, Kiel, 1682.
A Rivet de La Grange, Histoire littéraire de la France; on him, J.-M. Goulemot, ‘Histoire littéraire et mémoire nationale’, History and Anthropology 2, part 2, 1986, pp. 225–35. G. Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura italiana, 11 vols, Modena 1772–95.
T. Warton, The History of English Poetry, 4 vols, London, 1774–8.
J. H. Pittock, The Ascendancy of Taste, London, 1973, ch. 5.
J. Dryden, Discourse concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire London, 1693.
I. Casaubon, De satyrica Graecorum poesi, Paris, 1605.
P.-D. Huet, Lettre sur l’origine des romans (1669: second ed., Paris, 1678); T. Warton, digression ‘On the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe’ in History.
L. Ghiberti, I commentari, ed. O. Morisani, Naples, 1947. On this text, E. van der Grinten, Enquiries into the History of Art-Historical Writing. Venlo, Holland, 1953.
On Vasari’s own life, see T.S.R. Boase, Giorgio Vasari, the Man and the Book, Princeton, 1979.
On Vasari as propagandist, A. Chastel, Art et humanisme à Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique Paris, 1961 pp. 21f.
E. H. Gombrich, ‘Vasari’s Lives and Cicero’s Brutus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23, 1960 pp. 309–21.
G. Baglione, Vite, Rome, 1642.
C. Ridolfi, Meraviglie, c. 1646; ed. D. von Hadeln, Berlin, 1914.
R. Soprani, Vite de’pittori genovesi, Genoa, 1674.
K. van Mander, Het Schilderboek, Haarlem, 1604; the Amsterdam, 1936, edition is translated into modern Dutch; J. von Sandrart, Deutsche Akademie, 1675–9; I used the Munich, 1925 edn; H. Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England 1761; London, 1879. On Walpole, Lipking, Ordering, pp. 127f. The fact that the studies by Daniel Morhof on German literature and Joachim von Sandrart on German painting were published at more or less the same time is worth noting. On Walpole, Lipking, 1970 pp. 127f.
V. Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica e moderna, Florence, 1581.
G. Mei, Discorso sopra la musica antica e moderna, Venice, 1602.
W. C. Printz, Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst, 1690.
G. B. Martini, 1757, Storia della musica; Bonnet-Bourdelot ed., Histoire de la musique Paris, 1715; P. J. Caffiaux, ‘Histoire de la musique’ (written 1754–6), on which see Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie (20 vols, London, 1980), under ‘Caffiaux’. M. Gerbert (1774) De cantu et musica sacra; C. Burney, 1776–89 A General History of Music; J. Hawkins, 1766, General History of the Science and Practice of Music. On the last three scholars, E. Hegar, Die Anfänge der neureren Musikgeschichtschreibung um 1770 bei Gerbert, Burney und Hawkins, 1933, repr. Baden-Baden, 1974. On the last two, Lipking, Ordering, pp. 229f, 269f. J. N. Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, 2 vol, Göttingen, 1788–1801.
The equivalent for the Reformation of Ferguson’s study of the Renaissance (cited above, note 7) is A. G. Dickens and J. Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought, Cambridge, Mass., 1985.
L. Maimbourg, Histoire du Calvinisme, Paris, 1682.
J. B. Bossuet, Histoire des variations des èglises protestantes, Paris, 1688.
On the idea of doctrinal development, see W. O. Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 1957, revised ed Cambridge, 1987.
G. Arnold, Unpartheyische Kirche- und Ketzer-Histoirie, 4 vols, Frankfurt, 1699–1700.
Arnold, E. Seeberg, Gottfried Arnold, Meerane, 1923. On the history of church history, P. Meinhold, Geschichte der kirchlichen Historiographie, Freiburg and Munich, 1967.
These works include O. Heurn, Barbarica Philosophia, Leiden, 1600.
G. Horn, Historia philosophiae, Leiden, 1655.
J. F. Reimann, Historia philosophiae sinensis, Braunschweig, 1727.
A. F. Boureau-Deslande, Histoire critique de la philosophic Amsterdam, 1735.
J. Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, 6 vols, Leipzig, 1767. On these histories there has been a crop of recent studies, such as M. Rak, La parte historica, Naples, 1971, Braun, 1973, Del Torre, 1976.
L. Graham, W. Lepenies and P. Weingart, Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories, Dordrecht, 1983.
On Kepler, N. Jardine, The Birth of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, 1984.
A Smith, ‘History of Astronomy’ in his Essays on Philosophical Subjects, London, 1795, 1–93.
B. Baldi, Vite dei matematici, written 1586–87; J. E. Montucla, Histoire des mathématiques, 2 vols, Paris 1758.
J. F. Gmelin, Geschichte der Chemie, 3 vols, Göttingen, 1797–9.
B. de Fontenelle, De l’origine des fables, 1724; ed. J.-R. Carré, Paris, 1932.
J. Kraft, Kort Fortaelning af de Vilde Folk, Sorø, 1760.
Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des Lois, Paris, 1744, Book 28, ch. 17.
La Curne de Sainte Palaye, Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie, Paris, 1746–50.
On him, L. Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment, Baltimore, 1968.
W. Robertson, History of Charles V, London, 1769.
R. Hurd, Letters on Chivalry, London, 1762
T. Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queene, London, 1754, p. 217.
F. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, London, 1605.
R. Bentley, A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, London, 1697, p. 51.
T. Warton, An Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley, London, 1782.
J. G. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784–91, 2 vols, Berlin, 1965. In vol. 2 he discusses the ‘Rittergeist’ (pp. 449f) and the ‘Kultur der Vernunft’ (pp. 469f). On Herder’s conception of culture, W. H. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, Cambridge, 1962, ch. 4. On C. Adelung and his Versuch einer Geschichte der Kultur des Menschlichen Geschlechts, 1782, J. Garber, ‘Von der Menschheitsgeschichte zur Kulturgeschichte’, in Kultur zwischen Bürgertum und Volk, ed. J. Held, Berlin, 1983 pp., 76–97.
E. H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, Oxford, 1969.
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© 1991 Joan H. Pittock and Andrew Wear
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Burke, P. (1991). Reflections on the Origins of Cultural History. In: Pittock, J.H., Wear, A. (eds) Interpretation and Cultural History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21272-9_2
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