S ince the Enlightenment, calling someone an “antiquarian” has rarely been anything other than an insult. Diderot and his philosophical friends pilloried the positivism of the object-oriented, fact-focused pedant. Chardin’s series of paintings of the “Antiquarian Monkey” reduced the erudite to an obsessive-compulsive with no real intelligence: The diligence of the ape with his magnifying glass served as an allegory for the inability to see the context for the details. A century later, George Eliot’s description of the pompous and stilted Edward Casaubon as a “bat of erudition” confirmed what many had long believed: This was the kind of scholarship that left you dead from the waist down. Even now, if one academic wants to sink another’s argument, there’s no better way than by calling it “antiquarian.”
Only in the past few years have antiquaries and antiquarian scholarship attracted the attention of historians. The question is why the revival of interest in this kind of learning has taken so long. Why now, after hundreds of years of oblivion and ostracism, has antiquarianism returned?
It’s tempting to dismiss that question with a smile, as if itself of only antiquarian interest. But I think the stakes are higher. Because antiquarianism is a way of doing historical scholarship, studying its history is another way of understanding the history of history. The modern discipline grew out of antiquarianism, so to the extent we are unfamiliar with the latter we will be unfamiliar with the former. Not understanding our own practice — its questions, paradoxes, antinomies — is the surest way to uninspired practice. Antiquarianism matters to anyone who thinks historically.
It also leads us to think about research, how we go about it, and how we think about it. Furthermore, because antiquaries were driven by questions posed by the artifacts they studied, doing research on a coin or sculpture could take them into philosophy, literature, even the sciences. Their work suggests paying attention to aspects of learning that are often undervalued: unfettered curiosity and the passion to follow it.
So what was antiquarianism when antiquarianism really mattered?
T hucydides used “archaeology” to refer to the oldest legends and physical remains from earliest times. We cannot be sure of the line of transmission, but a generation later we find Plato putting the same word in the mouth of the sophist Hippias (Hippias Major), who explained that it referred to “the genealogy of heroes and of great men … the origin of cities and how they were founded in the earliest times, and in general … everything that has to do with the knowledge of the past.” Marcus Terentius Varro, a Roman scholar and lover of Roman cultural heritage, translated archaiologia into Latin as antiquitates. For him it covered subjects such as religion, law, government, and calendars, sorted into four categories: people, places, things, and times.
From the Renaissance on, people who called themselves antiquarians (antiquarii) investigated the physical remains of the classical period and used them, alongside textual evidence, to understand it. As they did, they remade Varro’s fourfold classification system into private, sacred, and military antiquities.
William Stenhouse, a historian of classical scholarship, has noted that the work of antiquarians fell along a spectrum from gathering remains of the past to researching its customs and institutions. While historians followed Thucydides in ordering their narratives chronologically, antiquaries organized them around structures or systems — law, religion, sports, warfare, dining, and other themes. Not for nothing did Arnaldo Momigliano, the historian of the ancient world whose work on antiquarianism in the 1950s and ’60s kick-started the modern turn, see its progeny in sociology, and later, anthropology.
Even as antiquaries were being persecuted by historians, elsewhere they were evolving into archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists.
The practice of antiquaries began with collecting. From the 15th to the 18th centuries, their catalog entries and short essays filled thicker and thicker folio volumes, recording erudition’s slow reconquest of the past. After amassing objects, they described them carefully and then compared them with other objects and texts. Reconstruction — that was the aim. In his 1605 The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon developed the metaphor of a shipwreck for the fall of the ancient world, with the spars and flotsam floating on the sea the fragments of antiquity that had survived. The antiquaries tried to put it all back together again. But because the shipwreck of the past was so vast, antiquaries developed their interpretations in conversation with one another. When they weren’t physically proximate, they wrote letters; by the second half of the 17th century, the exchange of letters and manuscripts had evolved into the first learned journals. The Republic of Antiquaries flourished within Europe’s Republic of Letters.
Collecting, describing, comparing — all are deeply empirical practices. It is not surprising, then, that antiquarians corresponded with scientists to obtain the best instruments and latest experimental data that could help them in their researches, worked closely with merchants who could help acquire novelties in their distant commercial circuits, and maintained good relations with farmers to hear of finds newly emerged from under the plow. Nor were human practices beyond the scope of their curiosity. Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637), the Provençal savant whom Momigliano called “that archetype of all antiquarians,” documented state-funeral rituals in France, collected information on the negotiating techniques of sub-Saharan African traders, and investigated the music of the Eastern Christians as performed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. All that was “science” — a revolution in the breadth.
Thus, Momigliano argued, the antiquaries of Renaissance and early modern Europe, though maligned by later generations, invented research. While historians of the ancient world essentially rewrote the surviving written sources, he said, antiquaries dug — in the ground, or in archives — and added what they found to the record of the past.
That research vocation and its related ways to handle evidence were eventually taken over by historians toward the end of the 18th century. Once in possession of the tools, historians no longer needed the antiquaries, whose untimeliness led to their rapid fall into the shadows. So much so that Momigliano could write that the antiquary had himself become a problem worth studying, “a figure, so near to my profession, so transparently sincere in his vocation, so understandable in his enthusiasms, and yet so deeply mysterious in his ultimate aims.”
Like the Franciscan churches built on the foundations of Incan temples, the modern university-based discipline of history rests on antiquarian methods while at the same time rendering them invisible. That was more or less accomplished by the end of the 18th century. The world of learning had expanded a great deal since the Renaissance, and antiquaries didn’t seem to offer the kinds of answers to contemporary problems found in the Encyclopédie or Newton’s laws. More people read — including women — but fewer read the Latin of the classical period; vernacular forms like the novels of Sir Walter Scott, the memoir, and the periodical took over the task of making the past present. Divested of prestige, antiquaries were forced to the refugia of schools and local historical societies and museums, where they clung to survival. One thing they did not become was university-based historians.
T he historical discipline still believes that history is identical to university-based history. But consider an analogy: We are Homo sapiens, although once upon a time, there were other species in our genus: rudolfensis, erectus, neanderthalensis, floresiensis, denisova. Of them all, only we survived to tell the tale, and so we came to conflate the human being with Homo sapiens and to forget that we were just one possibility among several. Just as sapiens may have forced Neanderthals into more precarious niches, or even hunted them down, university historians targeted the old antiquarianism in ways meant to create the conditions of its disappearance.
Indeed, while antiquaries had been mocked for a long time, explicit efforts to discredit them coincided with the rise of professional history. The flagship German historical journal Historische Zeitschrift, for example, devoted the lead article of its inaugural issue, in 1859, to celebrating the rise and flourishing of a new science able to capture and analyze the past. The great achievement of the long-lived University of Berlin professor Leopold von Ranke, according to the essay, was to model the use of archives to unlock that new history — defined as a tale of states and state politics. By comparison, antiquarian cultural history was deemed lacking in such sophisticated evidentiary skills.
But as Momigliano reminded us, there is a high proportion of antiquarian DNA in the genome of the university-based historian. And even as antiquaries were being persecuted by historians, elsewhere they were evolving into archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and art historians. In other words, all the modern human sciences are marked by antiquarian DNA. Those species did find their way into the university and became distinct disciplines, sometimes leaving the genus of past-loving creatures altogether. But outside the university, antiquarians also evolved: into museum curators, local folklorists, collectors, conceptual artists, authors of historical fiction, and the whole large and late-born clan of public historians.
I n two previous articles in The Chronicle Review, I explored the new thinking about studying the past that has emerged from the turn toward material sources. In our time, histories of the world — and of individuals — through objects seem to abound. Neil MacGregor, who recently stepped down as director of the British Museum, has drawn on a two-million-year-old hand ax, a solar-powered battery, and other artifacts from the museum’s collection to write a history of the world in 100 objects. We have learned a great deal about how to tell object history.
Half a century ago, the historian Fernand Braudel turned his hand to writing about the prehistory of the Mediterranean (Memory and the Mediterranean, submitted for publication to Albert Skira in 1969 but unpublished until 1998). It was the great historian’s least successful work — even he of the longue durée simply couldn’t bring the mute material culture of deep time to life. By contrast, the archaeologist Cyprian Broodbank’s The Making of the Middle Sea (2013) sparkles with objects that bring five million years of the rise of the Mediterranean world to life. The difference between the two measures the improved technologies of dating and materials analysis that we now have available. But we also approach objects today with very different expectations. Like the antiquarians, but even more so, we expect them to have biographies, even agency and influence. When we talk to them, we assume they will answer with affective, human echoes.
There is an enormous amount of serious intellectual skill in the centuries-old tradition of studying things.
With this change in expectations, museums have become showcases for the kind of popular narratives that used to be reserved for books or movies. Take the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s project to engage an audience as curators and conservators talk about the particular objects in the collection that speak to them, personally. Histories through a keyhole, or “microhistories,” whether of people, places, times, or things, offer the promise of a comprehensibility that our condition of information overload seems otherwise to threaten. And everywhere it is in the fragmentary and the juxtaposed that our intellectual aesthetic finds satisfaction.
A good deal of the attraction is related to our digital condition; it simultaneously makes us more aware of the distinctiveness of the material and everywhere suggests its almost infinite divisibility. Books, for example, are recognized to be objects in their own right, not merely neutral containers. At the same time, the collagelike possibilities of web-based composition focus attention on the ever-changing and the very small.
In the land of pedagogy, interest in things has led to interest in making things. The Institute of Making at University College London, housed in the engineering faculty, offers one model for how material culture has been brought into the curriculum. The d.school at Stanford University, which shares a physical space with product design, is another. Both operations bring scholars from different academic disciplines together with artisans and artists to tackle problems that can include enhanced water-supply systems in Africa and self-healing cities in Europe. Materials-based problem solving (Design Thinking) is even being considered as a possible new model for the task of intellectual formation that has been filled for more than a century by the “liberal arts.” Cutting obliquely across the discipline-based shape of university departments, this new-old approach centered on questions re-sorts information. It also recharacterizes the intellectual virtues: the close-looking, comparison, collaboration, and openness to conjecture of the antiquarians end up more important for modern problem-solving than mastery of a static quantity of content, i.e. book learning.
What’s been so far missing from the work of both writers and makers, however, is a sense of the past. Despite the rhetoric of design thinking — conveying an almost magical empathy with objects to promote understanding of the world around us — little attention has been paid to the fact that objects are also archives of human activity. Antiquarians not only contributed to those archives but also acknowledged that objects have many lives, not disappearing but continuing to have new meanings. They are part of our past — and present.
Recently, though, there have been the beginnings of what we might describe as a backlash against the wave of interest in materiality. Consider the article in these pages by the historian Russell Jacoby, “The Object as Subject”: It’s a critique of “things” as faddish, linking material-culture studies to hipster consumerism, intellectual trivialization, and the cyclical need of the slash-and-burn, theory-head nomenklatura to find new forests to turn into paper. For Jacoby, object study simply isn’t serious. As with design thinkers, that critique ignores the deeper historical perspective of antiquarianism. It forgets, first, that there is an enormous amount of serious intellectual skill in the centuries-old tradition of studying things, and second, that criticism of it takes its place in the long line of university-based historians’ attacks on those whom they believed were spending too much time studying things of too little importance.
L et’s return now to those different species of ancient hominins. Fully sequencing the antiquarian genome in today’s human sciences will help spell out the relationship among the various species of past-lovers. While it’s true that distinct species often compete for resources, it’s also true that awareness of distinctiveness can facilitate collaboration. Take the relationship between curators and historians, or between historical novelists and historians. Each brings something different and important to our understanding of the past. Over the course of the 20th century, university history departments broadened the category of what counts as history, and now include social history, women’s history, history from below, history of every life, history of science, environmental history. But we haven’t also broadened the category of who counts as a historian. Why shouldn’t a deeply attentive documentary filmmaker like Frederick Wiseman or evidence-based conceptual artists like Hans Haacke or Mark Dion be considered historians? And what about journals like Cabinet or the Museum of Jurassic Technology, both of which play with erudition and re-present its forms as a kind of art?
If the prophets of doom warn us that the past-loving species whose habitat is the university is on its way to extinction — or at least to declining enrollment in its courses — the broader genus of past-lovers is more robust than ever. The novelist Hilary Mantel has turned a 16th-century administrator into a best seller and star of stage and screen. The most-visited museums are historical: the British Museum, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Palace Museum in Beijing. Venice and Colonial Williamsburg bring the past palpably into the present — and that’s not even talking about weekend warriors who re-enact the Civil War with enthusiasm and quite often an admirable precision.
Curatorial activity is about the kind of intensive and close observation of which antiquarianism was made. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are our current versions of the Republic of Letters. If the digital revolution has made collaboration easier and more inclusive, it has also pushed us in the direction of the antiquaries’ style of presentation: nonlinear, focused on the fragment, curatorial in approach, and aspiring always to the database. Many of our research practices remain those of the antiquaries, and that may be the most significant of the antiquaries’ contributions to the university-based study of the past.
If that is so, then understanding something about antiquarianism may help us understand why we do research. Friedrich Nietzsche was a young professor at the University of Basel when, in the summer of 1871, he introduced a lecture course on classical philology by declaring, “In Antiquity philology was in no way a science, but only a general passion for every kind of knowledge.” He went on to explain that the “next sign of the revival of antiquity is the sentimentality of ruins, especially Rome’s, and in excavations this longing [Sehnsucht] was satisfied.”
Longing? The choice of that amazing word in an introductory lecture to bored youngsters signals us to pay close attention. Nietzsche was saying that research, even scientific research about broken pieces of pottery and stone, is about finding an answer to something we are passionate about. Forget about tenure. The reasons we dig into the past are far more personal. It is but a short step to Freud’s vision of our psyche as a kind of archaeological site, with layer upon layer of our various selves piled up and simultaneously accessible. It is an equally short step in the other direction to Proust’s comparison of the antiquary’s voracious curiosity to the lover’s.
Nietzsche’s insistence that scholarship needs passion is something we have to take seriously. But even more, in a digital world of infinite reproducibility, we need to recognize that our longing is for things that we can hold in our hands. Rilke, a century ago, reminded us that we think with our hands. Hands “have their own Culture,” he wrote; “the hand is a mighty delta” through which we make our greatest hopes. What will the culture of the hand be in the 21st century? About how we stroke a keyboard? The whole idea of spirit passing into matter by way of hands seems now so quaint. But if Nietzsche is right, if there is a longing that is satisfied through excavation or the physical act of using a trowel and brush to remove the layers of time, then it will not go away.
Just as the monopolization of the past by university-based historians did not kill off the desire to hold history in one’s hand, but merely displaced it into literature, art, and artmaking, so the digitization of the world will not eliminate the culture of the hand, only shift it. In this vast panorama of the history of historical research is an agenda ready-made for historians thinking about the future of their discipline and academic administrators thinking about the future of the humanities.
Peter N. Miller is a professor and dean of the Bard Graduate Center. His next book, History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture Since 1500, will be published this year by Cornell University Press.
