Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations - Softcover

Bevilacqua, Alexander; Clark, Frederic

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022660120X ISBN 13: 9780226601205

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2019

Synopsis

If the vibrancy on display in Thinking in the Past Tense is any indication, the study of intellectual history is enjoying an unusually fertile period in both Europe and North America. This collection of conversations with leading scholars brims with insights from such diverse fields as the history of science, the reception of classical antiquity, book history, global philology, and the study of material culture. The eight practitioners interviewed here specialize in the study of the early modern period (c. 1400–1800), for the last forty years a crucial laboratory for testing new methods in intellectual history. The lively conversations don’t simply reveal these scholars’ depth and breadth of thought; they also disclose the kind of trade secrets that historians rarely elucidate in print. Thinking in the Past Tense offers students and professionals alike a rare tactile understanding of the practice of intellectual history. Here is a collectively drawn portrait of the historian’s craft today.

About this title

About the Author

Alexander Bevilacqua is assistant professor of history at Williams College. Frederic Clark is assistant professor of classics at the University of Southern California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Thinking in the Past Tense

Eight Conversations

By Alexander Bevilacqua, Frederic Clark

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2019 Alexander Bevilacqua and Frederic Clark
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-60120-5

Contents

Introduction, 
Ann M. Blair, 
Lorraine Daston, 
Benjamin Elman, 
Anthony Grafton, 
Jill Kraye, 
Peter N. Miller, 
Jean-Louis Quantin, 
Quentin Skinner, 
Acknowledgments, 
Index, 
Footnotes, 

CHAPTER 1

Ann M. Blair

Ann M. Blair is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University.

What were your early intellectual interests?

In retrospect, a life might seem to follow a pattern, but at each moment along the way, you just go forward with what seems like the best decision. In other words, I never had a grand plan. I arrived at Harvard as a freshman in 1980, with two suitcases, from Switzerland. Within the first week, I decided I should take sophomore standing, based on my thirteenth year of school typical of the Swiss system, and in order to do that, I had to choose a concentration. I chose History and Science, partly because it was a hedge against having to make a decision. The concentration called for courses in history, the science of one's choice, and history of science. My science was math, and I thought of my history as medieval. My goal as an undergraduate was to read about all the schools of thought that I didn't know much about. I perceived, rightly or wrongly, that the History Department at that time wasn't very oriented toward the study of ideas. Therefore, history of science appealed to me as a way of approaching intellectual history. So I had an orientation toward intellectual history from early on.

One factor that influenced my interest in an earlier period of history was surely that I grew up in Geneva, where the Reformation was always perceived as an especially exciting period. During a number of summers, I worked as an official tour guide of the city of Geneva — my languages were French, German, and English. I would climb on a bus of people taking an organized tour that included Geneva, and we'd drive around the city for a couple of hours while I'd rattle off the sights, and then I'd get off that tour bus and onto another one [laughs]. I think growing up in Geneva pulled me naturally toward the sixteenth century.

What was it about intellectual history that drew you to the field? Were there particular questions or themes that interested you?

Because I was studying the history of science, science became a theme. I've never been particularly keen on political thought, which has dominated intellectual history. Other than that, as an undergraduate I didn't think of myself as focused on particular themes but rather on an encyclopedic desire to understand the sweep of intellectual history. Naturally I had in mind the European tradition, though I also took Donald Fleming's course on American intellectual history. But global perspectives were not prominent then. Even so, I enjoyed and pursued a lot of variety. I wrote my senior thesis on the French anti-Aristotelian Petrus Ramus, a sixteenth-century pedagogue who got flak in his time for turning every problem into a dichotomous diagram. That was my first introduction to reading early modern Latin treatises and to the sense of responsibility — both frightening and exhilarating — that comes from reading a text that has not been translated or commented on before.

Within the Harvard years, I also spent one year at the University of Geneva in 1981–82. That year was an important one, because at Geneva you chose one field as your principal focus along with two minor fields. I chose history, then philosophy of science, and in third place Sanskrit, from which I'm sorry to say I haven't managed to retain anything! Focusing on history at the University of Geneva (or elsewhere in Europe, I suspect) was to join a discipline with a strong sense of identity. The way students were introduced to history generated a real esprit de corps around the phrase "we historians!" By contrast, my experience at Harvard didn't have rousing moments of disciplinary identity formation.

After graduating I went to Cambridge, England, for a one-year MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science. That was my first introduction to the "strong programme" in the social history of science. I became especially interested in the principle of symmetry — of attending to the "failed" developments in science on the same terms as the ones that had a longer legacy. I took a bit of philosophy of science (with Mary Hesse no less) and concluded that I would stick with history! I was called a "keen American" for attending more lectures than was the norm. I wrote my MPhil thesis with Simon Schaffer, on the seventeenth-century mathematician Isaac Barrow. It was a wonderful year, living like an undergraduate and working like a graduate student. But the crucial formative phase for me was graduate school at Princeton.

What are some key intellectual moments that stand out from your time at Princeton?

I realized only in retrospect that the late 1980s were an exceptionally good time for early modern European history at Princeton, with five terrific faculty members in the History Department and John H. Elliott at the Institute for Advanced Study. We also had a large cohort of grad students in early modern Europe, many of whom focused on France. Natalie Z. Davis's seminar on France in the sixteenth century was delightfully memorable. She would combine readings, primary and secondary, that seemed puzzling when they were assigned but then came together brilliantly in the discussion. We sometimes met at her house. At one such meeting, she printed out copies of a handout for all ten of us on her printer, bypassing the photocopier — in the era of the dot-matrix printer this was a first! Robert Darnton was finishing up The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-revolutionary France at the time, and his seminar introduced us to some of his research and sources for that project among many other topics, which was great fun.

Ted Rabb offered an excellent wide-ranging seminar for which I wrote a paper on historiography in seventeenth-century France. I remember coming up with a real argument only as I was writing the conclusion just hours before the paper was due and then frantically revising it. I am still grateful today for hard deadlines because they concentrate the mind; I find oral presentations — lectures or conference papers — useful in that way, in addition to the pleasure of getting immediate feedback. I also took a seminar with Lawrence Stone on the causes of the English Civil War and experienced vividly the point that coursework in graduate school is often about historiography more than history. I did not know much about what happened in the English Civil War, and we were plunging right into complex layers of historiographic debate. At some point — embarrassingly far into the semester — it dawned on me that it might help if I read a nice encyclopedia article on the Civil War [laughs]! It was a good seminar in which we were encouraged to argue back and forth across different interpretive positions. Tony Grafton offered a graduate seminar on the Holy Roman Empire only when I was in my fifth year, but I attended for the fun of encountering a remarkable reading list full of primary sources I had never read.

After generals I taught for a semester in Bill Jordan's medieval history course. I had not taken a single medieval history course at Princeton, and I was very grateful for the existence of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, which sadly wasn't complete at the time. It only went to letter P or so. So my challenge was to prepare for teaching based only on looking up terms that occurred before P in the alphabet [laughs]!

Your first book was on the French Renaissance philosopher Jean Bodin's treatise Universae naturae theatrum (1596). How did you choose Bodin's natural philosophy as your topic of research?

Bodin's Theatrum was Tony Grafton's suggestion. I had various practical criteria in mind: I wanted a French topic because I hoped to be in Paris for my research, and I was very interested in encyclopedism in the sixteenth century. I don't know whether Tony got the idea from noticing a copy of Bodin's book for sale, but in any case he suggested the topic just as a copy of Bodin's Universae naturae theatrum (the 1597 second edition) was available from William Poole in London. I bought it, though it seemed shocking at the time to spend 250 pounds on a book! The opportunity to buy the book was a wonderful stroke of luck. For the following ten years until The Theater of Nature came out, that book traveled with me wherever I went for any length of time, complete with a velvet cover that I sewed for it (putting to use the skills that girls acquired in sewing class in Swiss primary school and which I have hardly ever exercised since).

It seemed like a providential moment, soon followed by another. Bodin's Theatrum, an octavo book of 630 pages in Latin, was printed in three editions, but the French translation appeared in just one edition of 1597, so it is harder to find. Princeton did not have a copy, and it was not easy to sustain day trips to study the copy held at Columbia. While visiting my soonto-be in-laws in San Francisco that summer, I went to Stanford and out of curiosity checked their library catalog, which claimed that the stacks held a copy of Bodin's 1597 French Théâtre. This seemed hard to believe, but I went to look. In the stacks was a bound set of photocopies of the 1597 French translation. So I got myself a copy card and photocopied the photocopy [laughs]! As a result I had my main corpus easily at hand: the Latin in rare book form and the French through two layers of photocopying. At the time this was a rare privilege, though now almost all of Bodin's works are available in PDF format.

Did some intellectual inclination of your own lead you to the Theatrum? Many historians are interested in the first this, or the first that. Were you more interested in the persistence and longevity of certain traditions?

I've mostly been interested in the long persistence of ideas and practices rather than the firsts — firsts are hard to ascertain, though they get so much more attention. How about looking into "lasts" instead? Bodin's Theatrum was more innovative than I realized initially, but I was especially interested in using it to learn more about what I called "ordinary" science — the lesser-known works that hadn't been hailed as forward-looking, even if they weren't "normal" in Thomas Kuhn's sense of being widely accepted. I got a little pushback from some people about this choice of dissertation topic: why would I write on an obscure book of natural philosophy by someone who's famous for being a political philosopher — what was going to be of interest in this? My reaction was, well, I'm a historian, and my job is to make it interesting. I suppose my naïve assumption was I could make anything interesting!

I had no idea then of the surprising things that I ended up learning about, such as the German popularization of the text or the work's strong reception among German university philosophers. The work's anti-Aristotelianism was also not clear to me until well into the research. On that point I deeply benefited from studying annotated copies. Upon first reading the text I was struck by how Aristotelian Bodin seemed — for instance, in his discussions of causes, matter and form, passive and agent intellects. What first alerted me to the fact that Bodin was hostile to Aristotle on many specific points was a heavily annotated copy that I was able to study in Paris. One of the most common annotations in that copy was the marginal note "Aristotle criticized" (Aristoteles reprehensus), which appeared 160 times in the 630 pages. These annotations made me pay closer attention to the many places where Bodin was indeed critical of Aristotle and offered a new causal explanation or (in another specialty of his) a "confession of ignorance." The latter occurred when Bodin rejected Aristotle's explanation but did not suggest an alternative, concluding that it was better to acknowledge the mystery of nature. Another annotator flagged some of those confessions of ignorance with the note "Bodin's piety." I realized from these annotations that historians can learn a great deal from the assessments of contemporary readers, who are better placed than we are to appreciate what was striking about a text at the time it was written. For scholars who study texts, contemporary responses help to develop what Michael Baxandall called the "period eye" for art historians.

How did you track down that privately owned annotated copy of Bodin's Theatrum?

When I headed for Paris in my fourth year of graduate school, Natalie Davis gave me a number of names of people to contact. One was Jean Céard, a tremendous scholar of sixteenth-century French literature who had published a massive thèse d'état on monsters. I wrote to him before traveling to Paris but didn't hear back. Once in Paris, I wrote again and again didn't hear back. But then I met with someone else from Natalie Davis's list who invited me to dinner with him. At the dinner, when I described my dissertation topic Jean said, "Oh, I think I might have a copy of that book. You should come to my house, and we'll look at it." When I went to his house soon after I realized why he hadn't answered my letters: his house was full of stacks of mail — on every surface, both opened and unopened [laughs]! There were books everywhere, too, but the piles of mail were especially remarkable. Obviously, he was in incredibly high demand, and massively overworked.

But he was also extremely generous. I went to his home once a week for a number of months that year, and while he went off to teach, I would make progress through the heavily annotated copy of Bodin's Theatrum that he had bought years before. I transcribed and translated every note, keying it to the text. At the end of the day, when Céard came home, I would have a long list of questions for him about the notes and also the text itself. He could answer many of them, recognizing allusions from memory, which was an incredibly valuable skill in the days before Google. But, in a more transferable fashion, he taught me how to find answers in early modern reference works. In his home he owned essential reference tools like Ambrogio Calepino's dictionary, where I could find not only definitions of words but also their sixteenth-century cultural connotations, which helped make sense of statements by Bodin and his annotator. For example, Calepino reported the ancient view that cabbage had an antipathy to the vine, citing Cicero, which explained Bodin's claim that cabbage juice dispelled drunkenness! Or when the annotator glossed Bodin's term larus [seabird or mew] saying, "this is Greek for the Latin fulicae, [which are] aquatic birds," I could see that that definition was available in Calepino and therefore not unusual at the time, even though both terms were new to me. Céard also introduced me to Caelius Rhodiginus's Lectiones antiquae, a wonderfully rich collection of ancient lore miscellaneously ordered, so that you have to use the alphabetical index to find things. The annotator (whom we never identified) cited Rhodiginus explicitly to gloss the term Taraxippos in Bodin's text and even did so accurately, so that reference was not hard to find. But other times the entry in the index was wrong, so Jean would try to reconstruct the error involved (which digit of the page number might be different, for example) to track down a passage that was clearly in there somewhere. It was a thrill to find it finally, although sometimes we had to give up too.

I learned a tremendous amount from Céard, not only about Bodin and this annotator, but especially about the value of using resources from the period as guides to understanding a Renaissance text — including near-contemporary annotations and reference works and classical texts that were available at the time rather than modern ones. It's also true that in the libraries of Paris like the BN (now BnF, Bibliothèque nationale de France), it was actually easier to call up a sixteenth-century edition of Aristotle than a twentieth-century one, which might be already in use or not even available in the collection. And I think the experience of looking for answers to my questions in Rhodiginus's Lectiones antiquae and other reference books from the Renaissance first seeded my interest in reference books, which is evident in my book Too Much to Know.

At this point, in what format were you taking your notes?

At Harvard in 1984, I was cutting edge. My father, who has always been a gadget person, lent me what was called a portable (later "luggable") Kaypro computer, which weighed twenty-nine pounds and had a tiny green screen and two drives for 5¼-inch floppy disks: one for the software, the other for the text you were writing. I wrote my senior thesis on that computer and continued to use it in graduate school, but only for writing papers, never for taking notes. I started composing at the computer at that point. Before then I had written my papers in longhand and then typed them up. But I wrote my senior thesis on the Kaypro and printed it out; I must have had a printer, too, because there was no common computer infrastructure. When I was done I lent my computer to someone in my dorm who reported that he had not yet started writing his thesis and managed to write it in the space of a weekend, thanks to word processing [laughs]! I also took the Kaypro to England for the following year and was stopped at customs and asked if I had any commercial goods. The customs officers were clearly eyeing my strange computer, but I said, "No commercial goods," and they let the Kaypro in and then out again when I came back to the United States.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022660120X
• ISBN 13: 9780226601205
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 230