5. New Developments in Criticism. Even in the
eighteenth century the effects of criticism might be
limited if the work was governed by the concealed
assumption that only the evidence of the “other
party”—now, perhaps, the Catholic, now the Tory,
now the foreigner—called for the critical endeavor.
And this limitation could be overcome only as the
passion for historical understanding became all-
consuming—a thing which was happening in the
eighteenth century, and still more in the nineteenth,
as this branch of scholarship became more autonomous.
Even today it is always possible for a man's view of
the past to be distorted through his prejudices in re-
spect of the present. On the other hand, in the middle
of the eighteenth century the world still needed in any
case a form of criticism that went further than a blind
dependence on a witness or an early historian who was
deemed reliable, or an equally blind rejection of one
who was regarded as unsafe. This would be a “positive”
form of criticism, constructive (and not merely de-
structive) in its results, like the kind which had enabled
Mabillon to show that certain things can in fact be
established with moral certainty. It might also be a
creative kind of criticism, bringing the historian to
something new, something not contained in the sources
themselves. In this respect historiography made a great
stride in the eighteenth century.
At this point, the study of the ancient world and
even biblical scholarship made a remarkable contri-
bution to the development of history; for, owing to
the priority of these branches of study since the
Renaissance, owing to the amount of ingenuity which
they devoted to a limited number of sources, and owing
to the importance attached to the results, these fields
had made the greatest technical advances. A point of
particular importance in modern historiography can
be best illustrated perhaps by work that was done on
the earliest books of the Bible. In 1685 a French writer,
Richard Simon, picked up the problem, saying that he
was only continuing a work of criticism already begun
by the Fathers of the Church. He held that Moses—still
regarded as the author of the Pentateuch—must have
used detailed chronicles of an earlier date. In the mid-
dle of the eighteenth century, Jean Astruc claimed that
one could identify some of these sources, particularly
the main two which were distinguished by their differ-
ent ways of naming the deity. He showed further that
when these were disentangled—the patches and frag-
ments of each extracted from the present text and
properly arranged—they formed a better narrative
than Genesis, where the interweavings have produced
repetitions, contradictions and passages that appear in
the wrong order. The result was a pattern of what
could be achieved by getting behind a piece of histori-
cal writing, detecting the earlier sources that had been
used, and then even reconstituting them after they had
been lost. It was to become an important matter that
the historian should discover “the source of the source.”
In Göttingen, where a similar analysis of Genesis was
produced, a great development was made in historical
study in the later decades of the eighteenth century,
so that the University acquired a reputation in this field
which lasted through the early decades of the nine-
teenth century. Here were created the first seminar
and the first learned journal in the subject, and much
attention was given to the auxiliary sciences, such as
diplomatics and numismatics. Here Professor August
L. von Schlözer transported the various techniques of
the classical and biblical scholars into the medieval
field in his edition of the Russian “Chronicle of Nestor,”
for which he, too, reconstituted a lost source. And here
men first dreamed of what was to be the
Monumenta
Germaniae historica (a vast critical edition of sources,
discussed below), besides carrying the development of
historiography to the point from which Ranke began.
It was virtually the birth of “academic history,” for
the University was able to improve its standards, and
hand them down in a teaching tradition, so that hence-
forward there could be a continuity of development.
Rejecting some things from the
philosophes but ac-
cepting others, choosing sometimes rather the princi-
ples that were associated with the romantic movement,
but insisting at the same time on scholarship, they
brought the “antiquarians” and the narrators or gener-
alizers closer together for the final synthesis, a synthesis
more adequately achieved for the time being, however,
in the work of Edward Gibbon.
Gibbon found a magnificent theme in The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 vols., 1766-88) and
his work is the greatest monument of eighteenth-
century historiography. He showed great enterprise in
dealing with a thousand years of Byzantine history after
the downfall of the empire in the West, though this
later section of the work, running to 1453, shows his
hand less sure and his command of the sources less firm.
He distinguished himself by combining some of the
virtues of the Enlightenment with the assiduity of the
érudits; and he mastered the original historians and
primary sources of the classical period, though it was
noted at the time in Germany that he was not quite
up to the stricter standards of criticism which were
becoming current. Otherwise the work made maximum
use of the resources then available, and it provided
(perhaps in a more provocative manner than its author
really intended) an interesting attempt to deal on a
considerable scale with the rise of Christianity from
the point of view of the profane historian. Standing
as an end in itself it ranks as a masterpiece, but it lacks
that sense of the importance of, e.g., economic factors,
which some writers were beginning to have, and it was
not calculated to influence the course of things so much
as were certain Scottish historians of the time, who
were moving to the wider view.
A further achievement, stimulated this time by clas-
sical scholarship, is illustrated by the “Prolegomena ad
Homerum” in an edition of the Iliad published in
1794-95 by Friedrich August Wolf, who was himself
not without antecedents and was even accused of
plagiarism. He traced the development of the Homeric
poem back to sources no longer extant, and declared
that the epics were a later construction, compounded
out of heroic songs and primitive folk-poetry. This field
of scholarship became particularly relevant because the
historian learned how light could be extracted even
from legendary material, even from scraps and sur-
vivals once rejected as simply untrue.
Barthold Georg Niebuhr, in his Römische Geschichte
(which first appeared in 1811) was responsible for the
transmission of these techniques to the ordinary field
of history; he applied the method to the early part
of Livy's History of Rome, the unreliability of which
had created so much uneasiness at the beginning of
the century. Niebuhr began with the assumption that
the early part of Livy had ultimately arisen out of
primitive nationalist poetry. As a romanticist, he was
interested in origins, myths, and folk-art—anxious not
to wipe out this material as merely untruthful, but to
do detective-work on it and use it as evidence. He
knew how to distinguish the different kinds of source—
the original from the secondhand, the newer from the
older—but also how to compare societies that were
similar in pattern though distant from one another in
time and place. He used his romantic sympathy to give
him a grasp of the relations between early Roman
society and the North Friesland agrarian life which he
knew at firsthand. Neither his results nor Wolf's would
be accepted today, and the former himself revised so
many of his conclusions that his second edition was
almost a different book. Niebuhr is important because
he transplanted into historiography a dynamic contri-
bution to the “positive” type of criticism.
In Germany the awakened spirit of nationality, the
pride in an imperial tradition and the romantic love
of the Middle Ages reinforced the demand of various
Göttingen professors for a critical edition of the sources
of German medieval history. In 1819 there was founded
the society which inaugurated the Monumenta
Germaniae historica; all the auxiliary sciences were
invoked to locate the original texts, to discover the
best traditions, to follow the fate of the various manu-
scripts, to test the genuineness and value of the sources,
to examine their relationship with other sources, to
trace earlier documents that had been embodied in
later ones, and to discover where a writer had contrib-
uted original matter. Until this time the French and
Italians had been ahead of the Germans in producing
these critical editions of their national sources. Gibbon
had called for the publication of the chroniclers of
medieval England, but it was not until 1863 that
William Stubbs began his great work on the Rolls
Series.
In 1824, Ranke produced his first book—the
Geschichten der Romantischen und Germanischen
Volkes von 1494 bis 1535, and appended to it an essay
which was later regarded as a landmark in the history
of criticism. He was anxious that the new methods in
ancient history—translated into the medieval realm by
one of his teachers, G. A. H. Stenzel—should be intro-
duced into the modern field, and he exposed the uncer-
tainty of the ground on which modern history had
hitherto been largely based. Of late modern history had
been in the hands of men like Robertson and Roscoe,
Coxe and Sismondi, good easy men whose merit con-
sisted chiefly in making things more accessible which
were quite well known already. In a criticism of
Guicciardini which in some respects later proved to
have been unfair, Ranke at least insisted that the
writers of “histories of their own times” could no
longer be regarded as first-class sources. The insuffi-
ciencies of “memoirs” in particular were now widely
recognized.
