3. Scholarship, 1600-1750. In the seventeenth cen-
tury, historiography comes to be more scholarly, more
technical, and this is due not only to the ecclesiastics
but also to the lawyers who deal with constitutional
rights and historical precedents, with charters, laws,
and other documents. In England the common lawyers,
with their theory of the “immemorial constitution” and
their interpretation of Magna Carta, provided an his-
torical basis for the ideology of the antiroyalists, and
the controversy brought out great masses of documen-
tary material. Sir Henry Spelman, however, (under the
influence of continental scholarship) called attention
to the feudal system and the danger of arguing from
a past that was assumed to have been like the present;
and his ideas helped to produce after 1660 an impor-
tant reaction against lawyers' history. Particular em-
phasis was now placed on the fact that words still in
currency might, when used in a medieval text, carry
a different meaning, and that a document like Magna
Carta must be interpreted with reference to the kind
of society from which it had emanated. The revolution
of 1688, however, swept away for a century these ideas
which were tending to a more historical view. They
were the kind of ideas that emerge but drop out again,
so that in the history of historiography they have to
be repeatedly rediscovered, as well as being repeatedly
brought home at different levels.
The Reformation controversy, which in the Mag-
deburg Centuries and in Baronius had covered vast
ranges of Church history, produced more permanently
interesting results when in 1619 there appeared the
famous history of the Council of Trent by Paolo Sarpi.
Working as a pioneer in a fairly contemporary field,
Sarpi could use knowledge that he had acquired from
men who had been present at the Council, as well as
archival sources, private correspondence, etc. His
antipapal narrative was answered in 1656 by Sforza
Pallavicino who had secured access to great quantities
of material in Rome. The transition to a more scholarly
type of historiography, however, goes back to a co-
operative endeavor, particularly amongst the Jesuits—
the Acta Sanctorum (the first volumes appeared in
1643) associated with John Bolland and then with the
famous Daniel Papebroch. Almost contemporary with
this was the attempt of the Congregation of Saint Maur
to recover for the Benedictine order the distinction that
it had had in medieval historiography. From 1668 the
Acts of the Saints of the Benedictine Order began to
appear, and from 1703 the Annals of the Benedictine
Order—works in which Jean Mabillon played a leading
part. It was to be of the greatest importance for schol-
arship that the men concerned in these enterprises had
no doubts about their religion—they believed that they
could pursue their enquiries and criticisms without any
fear that the result would be detrimental to the faith.
Daniel Papebrochin found himself in the position
of having to assert the important truth that the oldest
authority might not necessarily be the best—that the
quality of the source had to be considered. On the other
hand, an error of his provoked Dom Jean Mabillon
to defend his order in a treatise of 1681—itself a mo-
mentous demonstration of the fact that matters relating
to distant centuries could be established with some-
thing like moral certainty—without dependence on
mere “reporting.” He dealt with old charters which
might still be essential as evidence for proprietary
rights or constitutional claims or monastic privileges,
but were easy to forge, so that the lawyers had long
been interested in discovering how to test their
authenticity. He showed how these documents could
be properly assessed through detective work on the
parchment, the writing materials, the form of the seals,
the technical terms employed, the kind of Latin used;
he investigated also the way of describing dignitaries,
of stating dates, of introducing and concluding the
main text. In other words, he is the real founder of
the auxiliary science of diplomacy. Many of his criteria
would not have been feasible if a great deal of knowl-
edge had not been accumulated about the history and
geographical distribution of materials, formulas, lan-
guage peculiarities, and so forth. In this sense there
was a certain analogy with the work of the archaeolo-
gists on nonliterary material, and Mabillon's technique
could have been established only after many other
matters had been settled.
The period from 1660 to 1720 has been described
as the grand age of scholarly research, and the “second
Alexandrian period of scholarship.” At a time when
there was also great interest in the assembly of speci-
mens in the natural sciences, the collection and study
of the actual remains of the past—archaeological sur-
vivals, inscriptions, coins, etc.—had become large-
scale. The general study of these “antiquities” led to
important developments in what historians call the
“auxiliary sciences,” but it still stood apart from the
work of the ordinary writers and narrators. In a similar
way, and partly through cooperative enterprise, there
occurred in this period massive publications of docu-
ments—more than could be properly digested as yet
into the narrative-writing, though sometimes vast
quantities would be shovelled into the rambling texts
that were now being produced.
In the realm of ancient history an important crisis
had arisen. Laurentius Valla had expressed doubts about
Livy, and in 1685 Jakob Perizonius challenged the
reliability of the sources of early Roman history. There
followed a period that is associated with “historical
Pyrrhonism,” that is to say, with skepticism about the
very possibility of history. These doubts were not re-
moved and Levesque de Pouilly made a more trenchant
attack in 1722, while Louis de Beaufort, in his Disser-
tation sur l'incertitude des cinq premiers siècles de
l'histoire romaine (1733 and 1750), declared that, down
to the third century B.C., the history of Rome had been
built up out of material that was really legendary. The
controversies over this issue reveal the fact that, in this
field, Western Europe did not yet greatly differ from
China in its criteria. It relied on previous historians
who had been contemporary or nearly contemporary,
unless there seemed special cause for distrust; and men
argued that a Livy would not have survived if he had
not secured acceptance in his own day, when people
were better equipped to judge him (and he better
equipped to judge his own sources) than modern
scholars could be. One even meets the assertion that
if two ancient historians provided different versions of
a story, it was preferable to construct a narrative which
would embrace both; also, that for a great simple event
like the Flood, a mere tradition might be a sufficient
authority, provided it were old enough, and not
contradicted by known facts, and not the kind of
thing that somebody might have had an interest in in-
venting.
Owing to the limitations of existing resources, the
insistence on criteria more strict than these would have
left no alternative but skepticism and would have
led—indeed, sometimes did actually lead—to the feel-
ing that history was impossible. The disciples of the
natural sciences, led by Descartes, sometimes doubted
the bases of historical knowledge. Some of the students
of “antiquities” declared on the other hand that it was
only the nonliterary sources that could be trusted.
For the rest, religious and political partisanship was
often the powerful motor behind a new critical en-
deavor. In the early eighteenth century a circle of
scholars in England made an interesting and significant
attempt to rescue ecclesiastical history from the
Protestant and nationalistic prejudices which had con-
stricted it down to the time of Bishop Burnet's His-
tory of the Reformation which began to appear in
1679. This movement was connected, however, with
a High Church and nonjuring party, that was unable
to reconcile itself with the Revolution of 1688. Voltaire
and his successors did some service by raising the
issue—by talking about criticism—but their own con-
stricted outlook would have prevented their solving
the problem even if they had had the patience to carry
out the detailed work that was required. Like the
Protestants of the sixteenth century they thought that
the proper target for the critic was ecclesiastical tradi-
tion and that it was sufficient to reverse what the
Catholics had said. And, as in the case of the Protes-
tants, the procedure was sometimes right, but it was
capable of carrying them further than ever from the
truth. Their determination to see history as the transi-
tion from savagery to culture and to condemn the past
in the light of the present, makes it not improper to
describe them as in a certain sense “unhistorical.” Yet
they did a great service to historiography by the kind
of questions they asked, by their determination to give
the past a kind of structure, and by their attempts to
draw laws from historical data. Voltaire in his Age of
Louis XIV (1751) introduced a wider conception of
general history, to include art, learning, science, and
many varied aspects of life. In his Essai sur les moeurs
(1754) he rose above the older kind of compiling and
used reasoning and thought to give meaning to a uni-
versal history that was conceived in the same generous
manner. The elimination of the supernatural factor was
used to clear the way for deeper mundane reflections
about the processes of time.
