History of Ideas

What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilisation without language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates on the joint evolution of language, mind, and culture. This book highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great, this study situates the Berlin debates within a larger temporal and geographical framework. It argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless human beings could have developed their language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry, such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts and the sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors—Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others—this book emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy.

Marsilius of Padua is conventionally considered to be ahead of his time as the first secular political theorist, the first post-classical thinker to espouse republicanism, and a scholastic precursor of the civic humanists of the renaissance. This book attempts to overturn this view, by advancing the first historical interpretation of Marsilius's thought. It examines the neglected evidence for Marsilius's life, and for contemporary responses to his best-known work, Defensor Pacis. Particular attention is given to the second discourse of the Defensor, which tends to receive short shrift in modern scholarly discussions; detailed comparison is also made with Marsilius's lesser-known works. The book argues that Marsilius was not a republican, but an imperialist, and a loyal servant of Ludwig IV, rex Romanorum and claimant to the imperial title. Far from being a precocious work of secular political theory, the Defensor Pacis is an anti-papal polemic underpinned by a profound Christian understanding of history as a providentially ordained process. In this process Marsilius attributes great significance to the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, as the point when the church founded by Christ and the Roman Empire began to coalesce.

By 1300, medieval men and women were beginning to measure multitude, counting, for example, numbers of boys and girls being baptized. Their mental capacity to grapple with population, to get its measure, was developing and this book describes how medieval people thought about population through both the texts which contained their thought and the medieval realities which shaped it. They found many topics, such as the history of population and variations between polygamy, monogamy and virginity, through theology. Crusade and travel literature supplied the themes of Muslim polygamy, military numbers, the colonization of the Holy Land, and the populations of Mongolia and China. Translations of Aristotle provided not only new themes but also a new vocabulary with which to think about population. This book challenges the view that medieval thought was fundamentally abstract. It investigates medieval thought's capacity to deal with concrete contemporary realities, and sets academic discussions of population alongside the medieval facts of ‘birth, and copulation, and death’.

Scholars have become increasingly interested in how modern national consciousness comes into being through fictional narratives. Literature is of particular importance to this process, for it is responsible for tracing the nation's evolution through glorious tales of its history. In nineteenth-century Britain, the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood played an important role in the construction of contemporary national identity. These two legends provide excellent windows through which to view British culture, because they provide very different perspectives. King Arthur and Robin Hood have traditionally been diametrically opposed in terms of their ideological orientation. The former is a king, a man at the pinnacle of the social and political hierarchy, whereas the latter is an outlaw, and is therefore completely outside conventional hierarchical structures. The fact that two such different figures could simultaneously function as British national heroes suggests that nineteenth-century British nationalism did not represent a single set of values and ideas, but rather that it was forced to assimilate a variety of competing points of view.

What did ordinary people believe in post-Reformation England, and what did they do about it? This book looks at religious belief and practice through the eyes of five sorts of people: godly Protestant ministers, zealous Protestant laypeople, the ignorant, those who complained about the burdens of religion, and the Catholics. Based on 600 court and visitation books from three national and twelve local archives, it cites what people had to say about themselves, their religion, and the religions of others. How did people behave in church? What did they think of church rituals? What did they do on Sundays? What did they think of people of other faiths? How did they get along together, and what sort of issues produced tensions between them? What did parishioners think of their priests and what did the clergy think of their people? Was everyone seriously religious, or did some people mock or doubt religion? If these questions have been tackled before, it has usually been by way of claims about what the common people believed in books written by members of the educated ranks about their contemporaries. In contrast, by going directly to other sources of evidence such court records and parish complaints, this book illuminates what ordinary people actually said and did.

The worlds of historians and archivists used to converge around shared understandings of “authoritative” history. This book explores the dramatic changes that have split them apart. Written by an archivist and a historian for the general reader as well as specialists, it shows how shared notions of historical authority and the evidentiary power of archival documentation have given way to radically different approaches to processing the past. New historical thinking, new conceptions of archives, changing notions of historical authority, modifications in archival practices, and new information technologies have opened an “archival divide.” This book situates archives as subjects rather than places of study. It explores how active archivists have long shaped historical knowledge through processes of appraisal, description, and access that have become increasingly contingent and problematic. For historians and those interested in history, the book explains the challenges archivists face in managing both traditional and digital documentation. It examines how archives have traditionally acquired and processed materials deemed “archival” and the changes wrought by the explosive growth of documents of all sorts. For archivists and others, it explores the demands of contemporary historical enquiry, including those relating to social memory, identity politics, and changing conceptions of historical “truth,” and their implications for archival research. For all readers this volume raises the worrisome question of what future historical archives might be like if scholars and archivists no longer understand each other, and indeed, whether their now different notions of what is properly archival and historical will ever again be joined.

This is the story of one of the great literary rows of the 19th century, between one of its greatest historians and one of its sharpest critics. The quarrel began in the House of Commons during the debates of 1831–2 on parliamentary reform and was continued in the quarterly reviews. Even in a political setting, it had a historical dimension. Croker taunted Macaulay for being ignorant of the French Revolution. Macaulay replied by pouring scorn on Croker's accuracy as editor of Boswell's Johnson. The bitterness of the clash made subsequent compromise impossible. Sixteen years later, Croker wrote a long damning review of the first two volumes of Macaulay's History of England. Posterity admires success, and as Macaulay's writings have eclipsed Croker's it has usually been assumed that Croker was moved by mere political spite. This book shows that this verdict is unfair, that Croker's political opinions were both less rancorous and more interesting, and that Macaulay's own scholarship was far from faultless. It also considers each man's historical writing alongside his politics and argues that, while Croker's critical method was sharpened by his politics, Macaulay's political opinions were much more independent of party, and that he is not the typical Whig historian of legend. The book illustrates how the two men actually had many ideas in common, and how the commentators who have seen only political dislike have missed the real purpose of the History of England and what made it the most successful historical work in English literature.

Arguably the most decisive shift in the history of ideas in modern times was the complete demolition during the late 17th and 18th centuries — in the wake of the Scientific Revolution — of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophes, culminating in Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. In this revolutionary process, which effectively overthrew all justification for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of education, and slavery, substituting the modern principles of equality, democracy, and universality, the Radical Enlightenment played a crucially important part. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions of the late 18th century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have been little studied doubtless largely because of its very wide international sweep and the obvious difficulty of fitting it into the restrictive conventions of ‘national history’ which until recently tended to dominate all historiography. The greatest obstacle to the Radical Enlightenment finding its proper place in modern historical writing is simply that it was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish, or Dutch, but all of these at the same time. In this novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents, particular stress is placed on the pivotal role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism.