Eisentstein - Clios and Chronos

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Clio and Chronos an Essay on the Making and Breaking of History-Book TimeAuthor(s): Elizabeth L. EisensteinReviewed work(s):Source: History and Theory, Vol. 6, Beiheft 6: History and the Concept of Time (1966), pp.

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2/30

CLIO AND CHRONOS

AN ESSAY ON

THE

MAKING

AND BREAKING

OF

HISTORY-BOOK

TIME*

ELIZABETH L. EISENSTEIN

I. THE

PRESENT PREDICAMENT

'Tis

all

in

peeces,

all cohaerence

gone.

John Donne's lament has appeared

with

remarkablefrequency

-

a

thousand times

in

the past forty

years,

accord-

ing

to Douglas Bush

-

in

recent scholarly

studies. This

reiteration reflects,

I

believe,

not only

an interest in seventeenth-century

reactions

to the Copernican

hypothesis,

but

also a cr

de

coeur

about

the state

of their

own

craft

on

the

part of many historians. No single new philosophy of history has called all the

old ones

in

doubt.

Yet a clutter of broken

historical perspectives

points to the

shattering impact

of

some sort

of

collision, produced by forces

that remain

undefined. Ostensible diagnoses

turn

out to be symptomatic and

self-contra-

dictory.

Although preoccupation

with discontinuity

is currently displayed

in

many ways,

two

incompatible

schools of

thought appear

dominant.

The

first stresses a recent

acceleration

in

the

rate

of

historical change

that

has

rendered

prior

experience

irrelevant. An unprecedented increase

in cogni-

tive and technological innovations has so drastically altered the intellectual

and

material environment

of Western

man that a kind

of evolutionary

muta-

tion

-

a

great

leap

into the future

-

has

resulted.1 By and large, this

view is

an

extension

of

nineteenth-century elaborations

on ideas of

progress.2

It thus emphasizes

open-ended, developmental

forms of

change, stressing what

*

Acknowledgment is due Marshall

McLuhan,

The

Gutenberg

Galaxy:

The

Making

of

Typographical

Man

(Toronto,

1962),

for

suggesting

the

thesis

I

will

explore

in

this

essay.

The importance

of

considering

available means of

communication when

thinking

about historiographyand the need to examine further the historical consequencesof the

utilization of

movable

type

were

both

brought

to

my

attention

by

this book.

1. Carl

Bridenbaugh,

The

Great

Mutation,

American

Historical

Review

68

(1963),

315-331; Raymond

Aron, The

Dawn

of Universal

History,

transl.

D.

Pickles (New

York,

1961);

Kenneth

Boulding,

The

Meaning of the

Twentieth

Century: The

Great

Transition

(New

York, 1965);

Louis Halle,

'The

World: A

Sense of

History, The

New

Republic (Nov.

7, 1965), 94-95.

2. For

a

recent

vigorous

reassertion of

nineteenth-century

views, see

E.

H. Carr,

What

Is

History? (New

York, 1962).

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3/30

CLIO AND CHRONOS 37

once was called the advancement

of learning

and improvements in the

arts of peace

and war. For

comparisons between the present situation

and

prior experience,

it draws heavily

on testimony provided by those

nineteenth-

century gradualists who regarded the slow change of time as the most

natural form of historical process,

and historical

leaps

-

notably the French

Revolution

-

as unnatural.

Accordingly, upheavals

experienced by prior

generations

are glossed over

and a vivid contrast drawn between

the slow-

changing, stable, well-rooted

societies of the

past and the fast-changing,

unstable, fluid

society of today.

To earlier visions of the course

of history as

a single on-going process working

without rest, without haste, '

the great-

mutation theory merely adds a corollary:

harnessed to a

run-away tech-

nology, the process has been abruptly accelerated.

The

second

school, while

retaining the emphasis on tension

and conflict

that

characterized

social-Darwinian

and Marxist theories,

rejects all

nine-

teenth-century assumptions

about gradualism, continuity, and

synchronized,

on-going processes.4

An age which has undergone

great upheavals

. . .

will

not be

impressed

when it is told that history

is a story of continuity governed

by a law not

of revolution but

of evolution. 5 The scientific and

metaphysical

theories

which

are

held

responsible

-

wrongly,

in

my opinion

-

for

evolu-

tionary assumptions are dismissed as outmoded. The degree to which prior

generations

experienced abrupt dislocation and

decisive upheaval,

rather than

the slow

change of time, is stressed. (The extent

to which such

upheavals were

localized,

unevenly distributed, and not simultaneous

receives

less attention.)

This

abandonment

of

gradualist

evolutionary

views is

accompanied

by concern

with

forms of

change

which are not

developmental,

open-ended,

or

progres-

sive.

Hence

it

involves a revival

of

classical

cyclical and

early Christian

catastrophic concepts. The

former tend to be modernized by importation

of

contemporary Oriental philosophies and notions pertaining to what has been

called

a meeting

of

East

and West.6

Tinged

with

mysticism,

dependent on

a

feeling

for

certain hidden rhythms, cyclical schemes are favored

by philoso-

phers

of

history.

Such

schemes, however, play

a

relatively

minor

role in more

specialized empirical

studies

refuting

or

revising

the work

of nineteenth-

century

historians. Catastrophism,

which

plays

a

predominant

role in

these

reappraisals, probably

serves

best to

exemplify

our second

school.

In

a

wide variety

of recent

studies

pertaining

to

diverse developments in

different areas and eras, one will find metaphors borrowed from modern

3. A.

F. Pollard,

cited

by

J.

H.

Hexter, Reappraisals

in

History (Evanston,

1961), 38.

4. J.

H.

Hexter

and

Geoffrey Barraclough,

History

in a

Changing

World

(Oxford,

1955),

exemplify

this

school.

5. Barraclough,

7.

6.

Grace E.

Cairns, Philosophies

of History:

Meeting of

East and

West

in

Cycle-

Pattern

Theories

of

History (New

York, 1962), exemplifies this

tendency.



4/30

38


technology, Freudian psychology, or existentialist philosophy employed to

bring up to date very old concepts about decisive points of no return and

fateful encounters with unpredictable Acts of God. Recent verdicts by

geneticists and quantum physicists are also cited to show that nature has always

done

many things by leaps. Nineteenth-century terms, such as emergence,

''growth, development, rise and fall, decline, decay, are discarded in

favor

of

more fashionable

terms:

catastrophe, dissociation, mutation,

conflict, take-off, breakthrough,

breakdown.

Beginning

with the

trauma of the Black Death,7 every era

once

regarded as

transitional s

now

presented as an age

of

crisis.

In

fact, the great

mutation of

one

school

comes

almost

as an anticlimax to the

succession of

crises presented by

the other.

One

may read, in chronological sequence, about the political crisis of the early

Italian Renaissance and the aesthetic crisis of the late Italian

Renaissance;

about innumerable

crises

-

including an identity

crisis

-

precipitated by

the Reformation; about a general European crisis in the early seventeenth

century (1560-1660);

about a

crisis of the European conscience in the late

seventeenth century (1680-1715); and about the age of crisis immediately

following, during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (1715-1789). Four

centuries of crisis thus

have to be traversed even before arriving at those classic

late eighteenth-century points of departure for our present twentieth-century

crisis: political revolution in France and Industrial Revolution or the so-called

Great

Transformation in England.8 Headline writers manage to measure the

type

size

required to report different kinds of unprecedented events; a sense

of

proportion

is

equally indispensable to historians. It appears to have vanished

at

present. So, too, has the possibility of integrating recent treatments of the

succession

of

crises and upheavals into a single coherent account.

For it is no

longer sufficient to try to arrange in some sort of sequence the

great revolutions affecting church and state, trade routes and prices, population

7.

William

Langer,

The Next

Assignment,

American

Historical Review 63

(1958),

283-304.

8.

Hans

Baron,

The Crisis

of

the

Early

Italian

Renaissance: Civic

Humanism

and

Republican

Liberty

in an

Age of

Classicism and

Tyranny,

2

vols.

(Princeton,

1955);

Arnold

Hauser,

The Crisis

of

the Renaissance and

the

Origins of

Modern

Art,

2

vols.

(London,

1965);

The

European

Crisis 1560-1660-

Essays

from

Past and

Present,

ed.

Trevor

Ashton

(London, 1965);

Paul

Hazard,

La

crise de la

conscience

europeenne

(Paris,

1935);

Lester

Crocker,

An

Age of

Crisis:

Man

and

World in

Eighteenth

Century

French

Thought

(Baltimore,

1959).

See also

remarks

about the

philosopher'

anguish

related to the

crisis of their

Christian

civilization

in

Peter

Gay,

The Party

of Hu-

manity (New

York,

1964),

126. The term

identitycrisis

is

taken

from

Erik

Erikson,

Young Man

Luther:

A

Study

in

Psychoanalysisand

History

(New

York,

1958);

great

transformation

from

Karl

Polanyi,

The

Great

Transformation:

The

Political and

Economic

Origins

of

our

Time (New

York,

1944).

The

concept of

political

revolution

in

France has

recently

been

expanded

both in

space and

time:

see

R. R.

Palmer, The

Age of

the

Democratic

Revolution,

2

vols.

(Princeton,

1959,

1964).



5/30

CLIO AND CHRONOS

39

movements, and modes of production.

We must

simultaneously attend to all

the

claims being

made for the impact of scattered

innovations (whether

imported

or indigenous), such as the

stirrup and horse

collar, the grist mill, the me-

chanical clock, double-entry bookkeeping, movable type, the compass, the

steam engine, the dynamo, and

others. Vast social

transformations,

resulting

from a complex interaction of

multiple forms

of change, some chronic and

some unprecedented,

are treated as abrupt, decisive

upheavals.

Separate in-

novations,

once regarded as single

inventions or discoveries which

unpredict-

ably and abruptly changed the

course of history

within a few decades, are now

regarded as complex

social processes in themselves.

The invention

of printing,

the

discovery

of America, the

Copernican revolution may no

longer be iso-

lated as discrete events or filed under certain names and dates. Each such

innovation has

become increasingly problematic.9

It is difficult

to describe

when each one occurred or

who was responsible

for it. Thus nineteenth-

century gradualism

is altering former simple-minded

notions about

the sudden

advent of

a single invention

or discovery even while twentieth-century

catas-

trophism is prevalent

in

accounts

of major social transformations,

experienced

unevenly by vast populations

over long intervals of time. Modern

artists have

composed

decorative assemblages by juxtaposing

incompatible

ingredients

and disassociated images. A jumbling of time sequences accords well enough

with efforts by

avant-garde

novelists or film makers to enliven

their art. For

historians, however, entanglement

in

snarled guidelines

is neither an

aestheti-

cally pleasurable

nor intellectually edifying experience.

It is instead

dispiriting.

As I see it,

a distinguished American historian

noted recently,

mankind

is

faced

with nothing

short of the loss

of

its

memory and this memory

is

history. '0

One

purpose

of this

essay

is

to

suggest

that

this is a

misreading

of

the

pre-

dicament confronting historians today. It is not the onset of amnesia that

accounts for present difficulties

but a more

complete recall than any prior

generation

has ever experienced. Steady

recovery, not

obliteration,

accumula-

tion, rather than loss,

have

led

to

the

present

impasse.

No full

accounting

of

what has happened to

the

sense

of

history

in

the

twentieth

century

will

be

attempted

here.

I

shall

only

try

to

suggest why

any

account must

consider

how

our

print-made

culture,

our so-called

knowledge industry

operates at

present.

I

shall

explore

the

possibility

that

the

present

historical

outlook

is

less

directly conditioned by what has happened in the world outside the library and

9. See, for examples, treatments

of the

discovery

of

oxygen by

Thomas S.

Kuhn,

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

(Chicago, 1962), Chapter VI, and of the dis-

covery of America by Wilcomb

Washburn, The Meanings of 'Discovery' in the 15th

and 16th Centuries, American

Historical Review 67 (1962), 1-21.

10. Bridenbaugh, 326.



6/30

40

ELIZABETH

L.

EISENSTEIN

schoolroom

than by what has

been happening

within it. In

so doing,

I hope to

illustrate an aspect

of the impact

of a revolution

in communications

that began

five centuries ago

and is still

gathering momentum.

I hope also to show

that

available means of communication have to be considered when examining his-

toric consciousness

in any

era. My working hypothesis

is

that all views

of

history have been

fundamentally

shaped by the

way records

are duplicated,

knowledge

transmitted, and

information

stored and retrieved.

Although my

point of departure

is the present, and

the following

discussion never

really

leaves

the twentieth-century

library, it

must range far into

the past.

Ancient

views and the conditions that

shaped

them have to be considered.

The per-

petuation

of these

views

-

abstracted

from their

historical contexts

and inap-

propriately applied to dissimilar ones - has contributed much to the present

outlook.

There is

no

need

to

trace

the origins

of

current

views

or to enumerate

all

the

prototypes

from which they

derive. The

resources

of

a

modern

encyclopedic

culture have

been sufficiently

exploited toward

this end

already.

The evidence

uncovered

suggests

that all known

ways of

viewing historical

change

may be found in almost

any

area within the Western

world, during

almost any era

since the first chronicles

were

written, the first records

kept.

Although such views have been classified in many different ways, they seem

to

fall

into

three

main categories,

schematically described

as cyclical,

cataclys-

mic,

and

developmental.

Thus historical

change has

been

patterned

in terms

of: 1)

repetitive,

recurrent, or periodic

phenomena;

2) abrupt upheavals,

discontinuous

leaps, decisive

points of no return;

or 3) cumulative,

progres-

sive,

continuous open-ended

processes.

Each

of these schemes,

of course,

contains elements

of the

others.

Cyclical

theories,

derived from

Oriental,

Near

Eastern, or Greco-Roman

sources, allow

for periodic

cataclysmic endings

and cosmic creations as well as for a limited sequential progression such as

the

decay

of nature theme or

Hesiod's

Four

Ages. 11

Cataclysmic theories,

derived from

scriptural

sources, emphasize

points

of no

return,

such as

the

Fall,

the

Flood,

the

Incarnation,

or

the Last

Judgment. They

may

also

be

plausibly

described

as

one-cycle

variations

on other

cyclical

models.'2

The

persistence,

in Latin

Christendom,

of ideas about eras

lying

beyond

the

Second

Coming

and

about

the

eternal

return

of the

Savior'3

suggests

the

11. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return [1949],

transl.

W.

B. Trask (New York,

1959),

112-132.

On Hesiod's

metallic

ages,

see

also

M.

I. Finley,

Myth, Memory,

and

History,

History

and

Theory

IV

(1965),

286.

The

closely

related

decay

of

nature theme

is discussed

by

Hiram

Haydn,

The

Counter-

Renaissance

(New

York,

1950),

ChapterEight,

parts

3 and

4.

12. Cairns,

Part

II,

Chapter

Two.

13. On

Siger of

Brabant's

heretical opinions

about

the infinite

appearance

and

dis-

appearance

of Christianity

and

the periodic

recurrence

of

the crucifixion,

see E.

J.

Dijksterhuis,

The

Mechanization

of the

World

Picture,

transl.

C.

Dikshoorn

(Oxford,



7/30

CLIO

AND CHRONOS

41

ease with

which these

two

models

could

be fused.

Cataclysmic

views

could

also

merge

into developmental

ones.

The unique

Incarnation

could

be anti-

cipated by

prophecies

and

eternally

renewed

for each

generation

by

religious

ceremony. Efforts to link the Old Testament and New, doctrines pertaining

to

an

apostolic

succession

or to the

institutional

continuity

of

the

Church

made

it possible

for lines

to be

drawn

from one

point

of no return

to

another.14

Some lines

could be indefinitely

prolonged

-

like the

sway

of eternal

Rome,

the

last of

the Four

Monarchies

in

the Book of

Daniel.

Finally,

views pertain-

ing to continuous,

irreversible

processes

may

incorporate

epoch-making

events,

distinct

stages,

watersheds,

and

great divides.

They

may also

take

into

account periodicity

and

rhythmic

oscillations.

They may be

fused

with

cyclical models by patterning change according to an ascending or descending

spiral

movement.'5

Developmental

models lend

themselves

as easily

to

con-

cepts

about

regress

as to those

about

progress.

Both,

suggesting as they

do

a

steady

tendency

toward increasing

order

or

increasing

disorder,

are not

al-

together

open-ended.

The increasingly

rich

orchestration

of developmental

themes

after the

mid-

fifteenth century

has

attracted much

comment. Certaintly

before the

invention

of

printing

few

variations

were

played

on such

themes

in scribal

writings,

whereas many were played upon cyclical and catastrophic ones. But the latter

as

well

as

the former

did not

emerge

as distinct historical

typologies

until

the

advent

of

typography.'

Intermittently

revived,

usually

outside

official

aca-

demic establishments,'7

they

have

nonetheless been progressively

elaborated,

more

thickly

documented,

and

clearly

articulated down

to the

present.

Three

incompatible

conceptual

schemes

that

were once amorphous

and blurred

have

been steadily brought

into

sharper

focus.

They

now

impinge

simultaneously

with

almost

equal

force

upon

the

modern consciousness. Throughout

much

of the past they were, on the contrary, barely perceptible.

1961), 156.

Other medieval

variations

on the theme of eternal return

are noted

by

Eliade,

143-144;

see

also

Chapters

Three and

Four.

14. How

this was done

in

some patristic

writings

and later exploited

in the

seventeenth

century is described

by E. Tuveson,

Millenium

and

Utopia:

A

Study

in the Background

of

the Idea of Progress (New

York,

1949).

15. Cairns

includes all

such linear

schemes under

her one-cycle category.

K.

Lbwith,

Meaning

in

History (Chicago,

1949),

like

R.

G. Collingwood,

The Idea of

History (Oxford,

1948)

and many others, does

not differentiate catastrophic

from

linear schemes. Both are fused into a single model which is sharply contrasted with

cyclic

theories.

For

a

recent

example

of this

contrast,

see Frank

Manuel, Shapes

of

Philosophical

History

(Stanford, 1965),

2-6.

16. Manuel introduces

his shapes of

history

as typologies by

now profoundly

im-

printed

upon

our intellectual

consciousness

that do not

rub off easily. (6)

Elsewhere

he

describes

Augustine

as a form imprinter.

(32)

I

believe

there

is more than a verbal

connection

between typography

and the

fixing of

indelible impressions.

17. Cf. 0.

F. Anderle,

A Plea for

Theoretical History,

History

and Theory

IV

(1964),

33-35.



8/30

42


II. THE

CONDITIONS OF SCRIBAL

CULTURE

During the

centuries

which precededthe

advent

of

printing,

and for

several

centuries

hereafter, ne must look

in a

wide

varietyof

contexts

to

locate

atti-

tudes toward historical

change. They

will be found

only

occasionally

in

writings

ostensiblydevoted

to

history

and

often

have

to

be read

into

such

writings.

They

must

also

be read into

sagas

and

epics,

sacred

scriptures,

funerary

nscriptions,

glyphs and

ciphers, vast stone

monuments,documents

locked in

chests

in

munimentrooms, and

marginal

notationson

manuscripts.

Only

gradually

were

attitudes nherent

in

different

kinds of

record-keeping

extricated

from their diverse

contexts, worked out

in different

regions by

generationsof

scholars,

and combined

into

full-fledgedgrand designs.

The

capacity

o workout

such

designs

and to

locate the

elements

which entered

nto

them has been

acquired

elativelyrecently.

We

tend

to

forget

the recentnessof

this development

ince

ancient

scribal

chronicles

have been seen in a

deceptive

dual format for

hundredsof years.

Ever

since

they were firstset

in

type four

or

five

centuriesago, they

have been

indistinguishablerom works

deliberatelywrittenfor

publication.

They

are

now studiedby

perusingprinted

editions,decked

out with

scholarlyapparatus,

or

by

perusingmanuscript

ersions and

collatingvariants n

order to

produce

a

new,

more

authoritative dition. Each

such

edition

tells us more

about how

the

manuscript

was

composed

and

copiedthan was

previouslyknown.

By

the

same

token

each makes t

more

difficult

o

envisage

how

a

given

manuscript

r

one

of its various

copies appeared o

the small

groups of scholars

who

had

limited access

only to

undated,

untitled

works written by

hand

that were

identified, f

at all, by incipits,

nd

catalogued, f at all,

temporarily

y their

position

on

the

shelf

of

a

given

library.Historians

are

trained o discriminate

between

manuscript ources and

printed

texts; but they

are not

trained to

think

with

equal

care

about how

manuscripts

ppearedwhen

this sort of dis-

crimination

was

inconceivable

when

everythingwas off

the record,

so to

speak,save that

which

got readto those

who stood

withinearshot.

Similarly he

more

thoroughly rained

hey

are

to

use our

presentprinted

reference

guides,

the

less

capable hey are

of

imagining

how men

kept track of temporal

change

with

no

uniform

chronologies

or

historical

atlases

to guide

them.'8

1.

Before uniform reference

guides

could be

devised and become

available,

images

of

the

past

were ordered

by

a

seemingly

random

but in fact locally

18.

Lucien

Febvre's

Le

problem

de

l'incroyance

au

XVle

si'cle:

la

religion

de

Rabelais

(L'evolution

de

l'humanite

Liii)

(Paris,

1942),

418-437,

is so

remarkable

an



9/30

CLIO AND CHRONOS

43

significant

-

association of events. Historical events happened once upon a

time. They could, to be sure, be intermittently ordered by those who had

access to various scattered collections of disparate manuscripts. Overlapping,

contradictory temporal sequences were worked out, based on dynasties and

Olympiads,

consulates and

tribunates,

or on

counting generations

descended

from Romulus and Remus, from Adam, Abraham, Noah, or Aeneas.'9 Much

scholarly energy was expended on this sort of counting. An elite group of

learned men had to be specially trained to master it. But even as Bishop

Ussher's chronology provoked derision by the nineteenth century, so too would

Ussher's contemporaries regard with enlightened scorn the errors compounded

by scribal chronologies. Adult intelligence and painstaking industry, rather

than carelessness, credulity, or a childlike mentality have, in my view, charac-

terized most

groups

of

chronologers. The conditions of scribal culture

rather

than

naivete

on the part of scribal scholars accounted for the muddle their

efforts produced.

These

conditions

probably

also

accounted

for

the mixture

of

sacred

and

profane tales, imaginary

and real

locales, allegorical

and

eyewitness accounts,

wide-ranging mythologies and

localized

contemporary reports that was

de-

posited

on

printed pages

in the

era

of

incunabula. From

such ingredients,

rudimentaryhistorical perspectives were traced by Renaissance scholars. Their

contradictory versions have plagued historiography ever since.20 Some human-

ists,

for

example, emphasized the gulf

between

pagan error and Christian truth.

Others,

to the

contrary, bridged

the era of the

Incarnation,

in

order

to

divide

a

bright

millenium

of

pagan prophecy

and Christian fulfillment

from

a

dark

millenium

of

Gothic

barbarism. Italian

cycles

of

republican

virtue and

imperial

decadence

were

incompatible

with

Portuguese

and French

Aeneids, entitled

Lusiad or Franciad, and with John Foxe's quasi-scriptural historic prose epic

exception

that it seems

to

prove

the rule.

Despite

the wealth of valuable data

contained

in

another work of which he was

co-author,

Febvre and

Martin,

L'apparition

du

livre

(L'evolution de l'humanite XLIX)

(Paris, 1958),

the relevance

of

printing

to

the

gap

Febvre

imaginatively bridged

in his book on Rabelais is nowhere made

clear.

19. An interesting glimpse of

conflicting

schemes for

describing

eras, involving

Abraham,Adam, Christ, Diocletian,

the

Seleucids,

the foundation

of

Rome, Olympiads,

etc.,

is offered

by

J.

Finegan,

Handbook

of

Biblical

Chronology (Princeton, 1964),

xxv.

Much

of this book is relevant to the above

discussion.

20. Here,

as

everywhere else,

it is

necessary

to discriminate

between what is seen

in

retrospect and what was visible to contemporaries. It is possible now to collate and

compare

versions produced by

sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century

historians attached to

diverse

institutions, elaborating disparate

traditions, relying

on

records gathered in

different places.

Whether these versions are

harmonized and patterned

after the fact or

presented

untouched

and

unreconciled,

as evidence of incoherence, they are in both

instances seen from an entirely different

viewpoint from that of the

scholars who com-

posed

these versions.

From their

viewpoint, new order and symmetry

were being intro-

duced

into

world

history, although

from

ours overlapping and incompatible schemes

were

being developed.



10/30

44 ELIZABETH L.

EISENSTEIN

that

portrayed Elizabethan England as an

elect nation. 2' They

also con-

flicted with notions that elsewhere persisted

about the continued sway of

eternal Rome. 22

Seven or six ages composing a vast cosmic week, four ages

of metal within which a fifth age of heroes was inserted, four successive

monarchies or

empires, three ages corresponding to the persons of the Trinity,

were

similarly

mutually incompatible.23 Nor did many of these schemes

have

much to do

with

various calendars of marvels

and disasters compiled

from

local annals.

Nevertheless, it was the duplication of records that made parts of

the muddle

visible

and inspired efforts to clear it up. With the advent of print-

ing each

individual scholar or book-reader could

see more of his past spread

out before him than anyone had ever seen before.24

What remained of unused

written records could begin to be uncovered, collected, and preserved. New

experiences could

begin to be recorded in a

much more permanent form. It

thus

became

possible, for the first time, to sort out

and to compare the accumu-

lating deposits left by successive generations, and

to reorder them in a single

uniform sequence

as they accumulated.

Oral

transmission,

as

is

later discussed, had worked at cross

purposes

with

such an endeavor.

Scribal culture, which was

more closely tied to oral and

auditory memory-training than is often

recognized,25had frequently frustrated

and always limited it. The scholars attached to the Alexandrian Museum

21. William

Haller's

The

Elect

Nation: The

Meaning

and Relevance

of

Foxe's

Book

of

Martyrs (New

York,

1963)

is a

pioneering

study

of the

impact

of

printing

on

the

shaping

of a national historical

mythology.

F. Smith Fussner's

The Historical

Revolu-

tion:

English Historical

Writing

and

Thought

1580-1640

(London,

1962), although it

covers

a

wider

range

of

relevant

data,

is much

less useful in

this

regard.

22. The

four-monarchy

scheme,

involving

the

persistence

of

Rome,

was

forcefully

dismissed in

sixteenth-century

France

by

Calvin,

Bodin,

and

LeRoy.

See

Tuveson, 58,

65, 222n. Its

prior

rejection

by quattrocento Florentine

humanists is stressed

by

Hans

Baron,

The Querelle of the

Ancients

and

the

Moderns as

a

Problem

for

Renaissance

Scholarship, Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959), 11-12. Although it was none-

theless retained

by Bossuet a

century

later

(Ldwith,

138-139),

it

apparently

did

not

linger

on

among lay

scholars

in France

as it did in

the

Germanies

down

to

the

eighteenth

century.

Rejected by

Calvin,

it

had

been

espoused by

Luther

and

Melanchthon.

See

Herbert

Butterfield,

Man

on His Past:

The Study of

the

History of

Historical

Scholarship

(Cambridge,

1955),

45-46. For

ancient views

pertainingto

the

eternal renewal

of

Rome,

see Eliade,

134-137; for

diverse

interpretationsof this

theme

by

historiographers,reach-

ing down to

mid-nineteenth-century

American

fundamentalists,Manuel,

Shapes of His-

tory,

17-19.

23.

On the

ancient

Near-Eastern

background of

notions

pertaining to

cosmic

weeks,

triadic and quadripartitedivisions of ages, see Eliade, 124-127; on subsequentdevelop-

ment of

these

schemes,

Manuel, Shapes

of

History,

24-45.

24.

The sixteenth

and

seventeenth

centuries saw

more

of

the Middle

Ages than

had

ever been available

to

anyone

in

the

Middle

Ages.

Then

it had

been

scattered

and

inaccessible

and

slow

to

read.

Now it

became

privately portable

and

quick to

read.

(McLuhan, 143.)

25. See references cited

by

McLuhan,

92-100.

The

key work is

H. J.

Chaytor's

From

Script

to Print:

A

a

Introduction

to

Medieval

Literature

(Cambridge, 1945),

a fascinat-

ing investigation

of

this

issue.



11/30

CLIO AND

CHRONOS

45

like

Eratosthenes, the

father of chronology

-

or those who

had access to

other large libraries26

might devise

rudimentary chronologies

and make a

start

at

mapping

the whole world.

They

were

fortunate

enough

to

live

at

the

right

place and time to take advantage of the varied and dissimilar collections of

texts that had been gathered

together. But many scholars were

less fortunate

than

the

immediate

successors of an

Eratosthenes

or

a

Eusebius. They were

confronted

not only by

the

dispersal

and

destruction of

the texts, upon which

their

predecessors'

work was

based;

this

work

was, itself, partly or

altogether

lost and

they had to begin

all over again

-

once

upon a time.

Those portions of

the

imperishable past

which

were

neither inscribed in

sacred

books

-

themselves

copied,

and often

altered, by generations

of

scribes27 nor committed to verse and preserved by human voices, led a

precarious

existence before the advent of

printing.

Insofar

as ancient papyri

were

handled,

their lifetime

was

short.

Only

those

which

were

stored

and

went

unread could outlast the

life-span

of

a

few

generations. But moisture,

vermin, theft,

and

fire took

a

heavy

toll

of stored

documents.

Whether they

were

locked in chests

in

muniment

rooms,

moved

about with

ambulatory

princes,

or

deposited

in

scattered

chanceries,

archives,

or town

halls, medieval

documents

were accessible

only

to local

elites.28

Manuscripts

which

went

uncopied duringthe medieval millenium because they did not suit the practical

needs

of

professional jurists,

teachers,

and

preachers survived to

find their

way

into

print

on a

random

basis.29

The

history

of

the

destruction

of

library

collections

throughout

the Near East and

Europe demonstrates

how scholars

had

to

perform

the

labors

of

Sisyphus

until

the

divine

art

came to their aid.

Almost

all

such collections

were

doomed

to

destruction.

The

deliberate exer-

cise of

pious

zeal

by pagan

or

apostate,

Christian

or

Moslem authorities led

to

many

book-burnings.30

The

very

term

vandalism

indicates

what barbarian

26.

Thus

Eusebius,

the father of church

history,

worked

at a

theological

school

in

Caesarea where

Pamphilus

had established

a

magnificent

ibrary

of

biblical

literature

frequently

mentioned

by

St.

Jerome.

27.

M. H.

Black,

The Printed

Bible,

Cambridge

History of

the

Bible,

ed.

S.

L.

Greenslade

(Cambridge,

1963),

408,

notes

that Jewish scribes

preserved

their

writings

from

corruption

by

elevatingcopying

to a

ritual,

making

inaccuracy

a

blasphemy,

and

also doubtless

by

insuring

an

adequate

supply

of

young

men

who

committed

the Talmud

to

memory. Rigid

sanctions,

absolute

inflexibility,

devotion to

learning

by

rote

and

by

reading

were

required

to

preserve

the Law

(and

a

uniform

chronology)

among

Jews

of

the Diaspora after the destructionof the JerusalemTemple eliminated a vital message

center

and

scattered

synagogues

were

in

constant

peril.

28. On

the chaotic

state of

quasi-public

records

in

sixteenth-century

England, sec

Fussner, 69-82.

29.

E. P.

Goldschmidt,

Medieval Texts

and

their

First

Appearance in.

Print

(Supple-

ment to the

Bibliographical

Society's

Transactions

#it6)

(London,

1943),

13.

30. Thus

thc

great

library at Cordova was

destroyed by

Alnmanzor n

978,

muach

as

Diocletian and

Julian

had

destroyed Christian

libraries.

See H.

R.

Tedder and

J.

D.

Brown,

Libraries ,The

Encyclopedia

Britannica, 11th

ed.

(New York,

1910-11),

XVI,



12/30

46

ELIZABETH L.

EISENSTEIN

conquests

and

sacks of cities

often involved.

But carelessness r neglect on the

part of any

one generationof custodians,unavoidable

accidents,

and random

acts

of God

also underscored

he vanityof learning n the

era of

scribal

culture. Nearlyevery monasticor cathedral ibrarysuffered ire at one time

or another. '31

During the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuriesin Italy, where

the trade

in

manuscripts

nd

their

collection

n

libraries

had

reached sizable

proportions,

scholarsbegan

to be sensitive

o

anachronism.32

ivic loyalties,

humanist

edu-

cational

reforms affecting

he studyof law and language,

contrastsbetween

antiqueand

Gothic

styles

in rhetoricand art, all may have contributed o

a

rudimentaryhistorical consciousness n

quattrocento

Florence. But without

continuous

access

to

increasingly

vailable exts made possible

by the utiliza-

tion of movabletype,

a

local revival of

learningmight

well

have been

extin-

guished

in

the disorders

of

the sixteenth

century, as was the Carolingian

revivalafter

Charlemagne's

eath.The Laurentianibrarymight

have suffered

the fate of the

collection of fiftythousandvolumes amassed

by MathiasCor-

vinus, King

of

Hungary,

which

had

already

been

despoiled

before it was

sacked by

the Turks at the

fall

of

Buda in

1527.33

Similarly,knowledge of

545-551.

Before

printing,

the destruction of a

major library

dealt a moral blow to

a

strategic

social institution. In the

present

century,

such

phenomena

as Nazi

book-burn-

ings or the

setting

fire to American

libraries overseas have become ritualistic and

sym-

bolic. Only

two centuries

ago,

however

-

before the

publication

of

huge

source

collec-

tions

had

begun

-

the

sporadic

destruction of chateau archives

during

the French

Revolution obliterated much evidence of French feudal

history.

It is

partly

because

it

is so

difficult to eliminate data

once fixed in

print

that totalitarian

controls have to be

so extensive and all-inclusive.

Repeated

Soviet efforts to rewrite

history may

be

less

effective

than

many

accounts

suggest.

31. James

Westfall

Thompson,

The

Wanderings

of

Manuscripts,

The

Medieval

Library, ed. J. W. Thompson (repr. New York, 1957), 659. See also the reference to

archives of

St.

Benoit-sur-Loire,

Marc

Bloch,

The

Historian's

Craft,

transl.

P.

Putnam

(New York,

1964),

77.

32. Goldschmidt

notes

how

strangely

blunt

in

their

perception of

anachronisms

were

fifteenth-century

cribes and

copyists (24);

there

is

a

tendency

to

overrate

humanist

anticipations of

modern

scholarship

or

higher

criticism.

Had

his

successors not

been

able to

take

advantage

of his

Neapolitan

polemic against

Pope

Eugenius IV, it is

doubt-

ful

whether Lorenzo Valla's De Constantini

Donatione

Declarnatio (which, according

to

Thompson,

resumed textual criticism

at

the

point where

the

Alexandrian School

had left

it ) would

have

launched

a

tradition as

it

did after being

published by

Ulrich von Hutten. In the first half of the twelfth century, Otto of Freising had also

held the

Donation

of

Constantine

to

be a

forgery.

See J. W.

Thompson, A

History

of

Historical

Writing (New

York, 1942), 1,

196, 493-494.

33.

Tedder

and

Brown,

Libraries,

551.

One

should note

the size

of some other

libraries

during

the

fourteenth and

fifteenth

centuries.

Cambridge University had

122

volumes

in

its

library

in

1424,

330 in

1470.

The

library of a

king of France

should be

compared

with

that

of

the

king

of

Hungary.

in

1373,

Charles

V-II

owned

130

volumes,

all

of which

had vanished

by

1411. See

Curt

Bbhler, The

Fif

teentl

Centurly

Book

(Phila-

delphia,

1960),

19.



13/30

CLIO AND CHRONOS

47

Greek

might

have withered

away

once again in

the

West. Instead it was the

familiar

scribal phrase: Graeca sunt ergo non legenda that

disappeared from

Western

books, never

to

reappear. For Greek type founts could

be cut,

Greek

grammars as well as standard editions of Greek texts could be issued. The

duplicative powers of print fixed

whatever was known in a

more permanent

mold, making possible the

progressive recovery of arcane

letters and ancient

languages

along with the systematic development of historical

scholarship and

its

auxiliary sciences. Only a little more than a century after

the first incunab-

ula, it

was possible to compare

written records with one another and

order

them

sequentially with

unprecedented scope and skill. In 1583 J. J. Scaliger's

De

Emendatione Temporum was published. This work

revolutionized all

received ideas of ancient chronology. 34 It represented a feat which might

ultimately have been achieved by

Eratosthenes's successors

had the Alex-

andrian

libraries

not been

destroyed.35

In the

age of print

no

special care was required to

preserve work like

Scaliger's, and

energies could

be

devoted to improving upon it. Although press

variants

multiplied, gradual correction

rather

than

inevitable corruption or

destruction

was

for the

first time

possible.36 The knowledge that useful works

of

reference would

not

be abruptly obliterated or

slowly

erased

and

blurred

probably affected the way literate men thought about their past and their

future.

Indeed,

catastrophic and cyclical theories of historical

change appear

to

be

closely related

to

the

specific problems that were

posed by

the

migration

of

manuscripts.

Scholars

relying solely

on

scribal

records had

direct experience

with

disastrous acts

of

God that seemed to be directed

at

the

vanity

of

learning. They

also

had

experience

with

seemingly

miraculous recoveries

of

whole systems of knowledge7 and golden ages that sometimes receded and

34. R. C.

Christie

and

J.

E. Sandys,

Joseph

Justus

Scaliger

(1540-1609),

Encyclo-

pedia

Britannica,

11th

ed.,

XXIV,

284.

35. Had some

successor

of

Eratosthenes

written this

work,

it

might

have been

pre-

served that

is,

altered

by copyists

and

emended

by glossators

-or else

lost,

like

the chronology of

Dionysus of

Halicarnassus.

By

the

fourteenth

century,

corrupted

manuscripts

used

by

universities were

partly

protected

from further

corruption

by

the

system

of

pecia

(that is,

renting

out

portions

of a

specially supervised

manuscript

to

copyists

who

returned

it for

re-use

as

a

model).

See

Febvre

and

Martin,

10-11,

23. The

doubtful criteria involved in supervising an already corruptedcopy need to be kept in

mind.

36. Although

M. H.

Black, The

Printed

Bible, 408-414,

argues

that press

variants

multiplied down to the

eighteenth century and

that

texts were

altered more

rapidly by

early

printing methods

than

they had been

by

fourteenth-century

university

copyists,

he

also

notes

that

this

process

of corruption

was

ultimately arrested

by

printers.

37. When

the

works

of

such

ancients as

Ptolemy

re-entered the

West by

circuitous

routes,

they

bore few

traces of

their

antecedents.

The

extent to which

their immense

technical

superiority depended

upon

access to the

great

libraries of

antiquity was

not



14/30

48

ELIZABETH

L.

EISENSTEIN

sometimes eemed

on the verge

of dawning.Views based

on theseexperiences

were embeddedn

all scribal

writings,and,down to the

seventeenth entury,

t

should

be

remembered,

hese

were the writings that predominated

n

pub-

lishers'cataloguesand booksellers'ists.38As writtenwords were cheapened

and books became

more plentiful,scribal

views were

duplicatedn a variety

of

contexts.They thus outlivedthe

culture

that had nurtured hem.

The decay

of nature heme,

which was altogether

compatible

with the steady erosion

of manuscript ecords,

was less compatible

with the

steady accumulation

f

printed

materials.Yet this theme

survived

to inspirepessimistic

social phi-

losopherswith theories

about

decadenceandentropy

n the nineteenth

entury.

The

contentsof theLibraryof

Congress

or the BritishMuseum

have not been

thinned out and are not threatenedby dispersal.Alarms about the loss of

mankind'smemory

may

nonetheless tillbe heard.

Abstracted rom

their con-

text and perpetuated

as typologies,

then, cyclical

and catastrophic

heories

survived. But at

the

same

time, the rapid

duplicationof useful

reference

guides

and the systematic

developmentof

many forms

of knowledge hat

this

duplication

made possible encouragedthe

formulationof new

views.

The

premiseof straight-line

irection

was powerfullyreinforced

by the progres-

sive accumulation

f

records

and

the

advancement f learning

hat went

with

it. It is by now so firmlyentrenched n Westernhistoriographyhat, despite

recent

revisions,

t cannotbe

dislodged.

Many fields of

human activity

have, in fact, been

subjectto continuous

development

during he past fivecenturies

hat were

not subject o this kind

of

development reviously.

Steady

advance, George

Sartonhas

suggested,

im-

plies exact

determination

f

every previous

step. 39Not only

was

exact

deter-

mination

mpossible

given

the

migration

of

undated,

untitled

manuscripts;

n

any field of knowledge hat

involved

arge-scale

ollection

of

data,backsliding

was morecommonthan advance.A comparisonof Ptolemaic worldmapsof

the second

century

with twelfth-century

mappae

mundi offers a

useful

correc-

tive to

modern

preconceptions.

t is also

noteworthy

hat modern

conclusions

drawn

from

this comparison

were

not evident to

fifteenth-century rinters,

who

duplicated

both crude and relativelysophisticated

world-pictures

imul-

taneously

n an era

when still

more accurate

renderings

han

Ptolemy's

were

being

traced by

hand

by

Mediterraneanartographers.40

ave

among

closed

recognized. This

superiority,

linked

with Christian allegorical

interpretations

of

pagan

prophets who anticipated the Incarnation, encouraged belief in the special insights of

ancient seers who

had recourse to a divine illumination.

38.

The

preponderance

of books published

for academic markets

down to the seven-

teenth century

consisted of medieval theological texts, according

to

Goldschmidt,

13-23.

39. George Sarton, The Quest for Truth:

Scientific Progress during

the Renaissance,

The Renaissance: Six

Essays (Metropolitan Museum Symposium,

1953) (New York,

1962), 66.

40. Boies Penrose,

Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance 1420-1620

(New York,

1962), Chapter 16.



15/30

CLIO AND

CHRONOS 49

circlesof specially

nitiated raftsmen,distinctionsbetweenwhatwas

advanced

on one hand and

retardedon the other

could not be perceived.

Among

all

groups herewas,

furthermore, blurred

perceptionof whatwas new and what

was old. This was partly because of objectiveconditions.What was found

by onegenerationhad often been previously

ound and then

lost by priorones.

The

confusion of

old with new, remote

with recent, also involved a

more

purely subjective

factor: namely, an inability to envisage

clearly or

gauge

correctlydistances

betweenone era andanother.

2.

Throughoutmostof the centuriesof scribal

culture, iterate

elites sharedwith

pre-literateolk a

commonrelianceuponoral transmission

o teach them most

of what

they knew

about the past. Silent

readingwas apparently n unfamiliar

practice,while wordof mouth was required

o supplement

he scarce supply

of books. Theordinary

man of our own

times probably ees more ... written

matter

n

a week

than the medievalscholardid in a year. '41

Even as publica-

tion beforeprinting

generally nvolved

obtaininga publichearing or a given

text, so too is it appropriate o thinkof a hearing atherthan a reading

public as the customary

audience or scribal books. It is

essential to keep in

mind

that chroniclers

and scholarswere,

all of them, membersof this hear-

ing public, when considering heirviews

of history.

A sense

of the past that is primarily

based on hearing

tales from

others is

altogether

different

rom one

that is primarily

based on reading

hemoneself.

As a moment's reflection suggests,

historical

scholarship

and hearsay

are

fundamentally

ncompatible.Speech

is

too

fleeting to permit

any

listener to

pausefor reflectionat all. By meansof cadence andrhyme,however, speech

can

preserve

human

memories

over

incredibly ong

intervals of

time.

The

ability

of

pre-literate

olk

to

preserve

ntact

in

their

sagas

and

epics

accounts

of

episodesfrom

a very distantpast invariablyappears

uncanny o those

who

learn

their

history

from

history

books.42Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century

scholarswere

altogether

unawareof this

ability. They

lived in

an era

when

stories

previously

acceptedby most intelligent

adults were for the

first

time

dismissedas

fairy

ales

and

circulated

n

printed

orm

to

specialized

markets

41. Chaytor,

10. What

immediately

precedes

and

follows

this citation

is also

drawn

from this study.

42.

Apart

from the

references cited in fn.

25,

I

found useful data

on the

working of

oral/aural

memory (as opposed

to

visual)

in

Finley, 293-294;

G. J.

Whitrow,

The

Natural

Philosophy of

Time

(New York,

1963), 92

n.2; and Albert

B.

Lord, The Singer

of Tales

(Cambridge, Mass.,

1960), passim.

Lord's

study points

to vast

controversial

literature on the

oral

composition of

epics,

sagas, lays,

etc.

-

a

somewhat

tangential,

albeit

closely related,

issue.



16/30

50


composed

of children and country-folk.43

The assumption

that oral lore

was

bound to be corrupted

after

the passage of about

one century

was, for example,

a firm

rule of Newton

in his chronological

study.44 It was, however, more

in

the jumbling of time-sequence than in the falsifying of the record that oral

transmission

was inferior

to scribal. The

latter lent itself to

forgery and cor-

ruption, the

former to prolonged

preservation but

also to vague

temporal and

spatial

location. This accounts

for the ease

with which Christian saints and

holy days

could

be superimposed

upon pagan ones

and for

the tendency

to

think of Cathay

or Jerusalem as no more

real, no

less fabulous than Atlantis

or

Paradise.

For

much of what men

heard in rhythmic

cadence was invisibly

preserved,

and thus subject to unnoted variations and alterations. Although some versions

remained almost intact, others

were

transposed into new

keys as they were

applied

in

different situations

or transplanted to different

places,

and some

were altered beyond

recognition.

Local

lore could, however, keep

indefinitely

alive certain

vivid episodes that registered

the

comings and goings

of good

times

and

bad

ones. This

chain

of

living

memories, associated

with an

indefi-

nite but

living

past, persisted long

after print,

and indeed down

to the

present, since every

child is

still introduced to the

world of the

past by hearing

old versions of fables, songs, or stories intermingled with private, familial, or

local

lore. It has, however,

become increasingly diminished

in scope.

Though

even as adults

many of us still

hear fragments of a

ballad about

a bonny boat

which

carried a lad

who

was born to be King,

if we wish to know

more about

the prince

who sailed over the

seas to Skye, we must

somehow

locate his name

upon

our

mental time chart

and

then consult

our

print-made

encyclopedias

or

biographical

dictionaries. The compendia

compiled

during the eras of

scribal

culture,

invariably vague about

location in time,

employing

no standardized

nomenclature to identify person or place, would provide us with little or no

help

in

locating

the innumerable Lords and Princes who had come and

gone.45

Nor would many

of the

scribal

histories or chronicles

-

even of the Italian

city

states

-

provide

such

help. However

sharply focused

and closely ob-

43.

Philippe

Aries,

Centuries

of

Childhood,

transl.

R.

Baldick

(New

York,

1962),

96-98, and

Robert

Mandrou, De

la

culturepopulaireaux 17e

et

18e

siecles

(Paris,

1964),

both

suggest that the seventeenth

century was

a

turning

point,

but both

illuminate

the

French

scene

only.

44. F. Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian (Cambridge,Mass., 1963), 53. See also views

of the

eighteenth-centuryG6ttingen

scholar,

A. L. von

Schlbzer, on how

many genera-

tions may be

expected

to

retain an

accurate account

of

a

past episode, in

Butterfield, 58.

45. One

would

have

difficulty finding

proper

names

in

the first

place.

Aside from

the

absence

of

a

standard

nomenclature

or title

pages

bearing

authors'

names, even

later

medieval

catalogues

were

almost

never

alphabetical

in

their

arrangement

of

incipits.

Alphabetical

arrangements

beyond

the

initial letter

were,

in

the

twelfth

century, entirely

unknown

(see

C.

H.

Haskins,

The Renaissance

of

the

Twelfth

Century

[Cambridge,

Mass.,

1939],

78).



17/30

CLIO AND CHRONOS

51

served were

the events of a chronicler's

own epoch,

those which preceded

it-

beginning with Moses

or Aeneas

-

belonged to a misty past

where heroes of

all ages

inhabited the

same Elysian fields. Episodes

pertaining to this distant

era grew only more blurred as they were copied and recopied, and often set to

verse.

We

often

forget that

many of the more celebrated

so-called

historians

down to

the era of printing

-

and, in most areas,

for two

centuries there-

after

-

were not writing history,

as we know

it, at all, but describing con-

temporary

events as observant

journalists and foreign

correspondents.

When

they were

not copying the classics

-

emulating

Suetonius as Einhard did,

or

following

Thucydides' account of the

plague in

Athens as Boccaccio did

-

or

retelling bardic myths, or transcribing from accounts by their immediate pre-

decessors,

they were reporting

as contemporary

observers upon

expeditions

abroad

or

experiences at the court

and in the town.

Polybius' Histories,

for

example,

deal with his own times,

from 221 to

146 B.C. Even Guicciardini,

attempting

the unprecedented task

of encompassing

the history of all the city-

states

upon

the Italian peninsula,

begins his account

with an event that

oc-

curred

when

he was

twelve years old. The narrative

skill and

analytical insight

displayed

by such historians were

applied to

events within their

own

life-

times, and occasionally to those in the days of their parents or grandparents.

Thompson

regards it as singular

that the Greeks were always

so

interested

. . .in

contemporary

history.'

46

Given the scarcity

of Greek libraries,

they

were

well

advised to

focus their attention on

current events.

Curiosity,

ana-

lytical intelligence, and

sophisticated

skepticism could not

be effectively

applied

to

the

study

of distant

eras. Throughout

the centuries

of scribal culture,

an

imaginary world

of fantastic

history and wild geography 47

was inhabited

by all members

of the hearing public.

Discrimination between the mythical and historical remained blurred for

a full

two centuries after

printing. Groups of antiquarians

scouring

the country-

side

for

records

and scholars

engaged

in

what

was for

the first time

described as

research were only beginning

to

sift

out fact

from fancy in

the seventeenth

century.

Their

findings

had

yet to

reach the

newly

created reading public.

Works such

as An

Historical

Treatise

of

the

Travels

of

Noah

in

Europe

were

circulated

instead.

One

is

reminded of Sir Edward

Coke's

belief that

Britain

had

been settled by

Aeneas'

grandson,

that

Alfred

the

Great

founded

Oxford,

and that the common law (and the English constitution) were of immemorial

antiquity.48

That

oral transmission

and scribal

culture did not

convey

the sense of

the

past

with

which

modern historians are familiar is suggested by

the

problems

46.

Thompson, History of Historical Writing

I,

24. See also

Finley, 300-302.

47. Chaytor,

26.

48.

Thompson, History of Historical Writing I, 626.



18/30

52

ELIZABETH

L. EISENSTEIN

that persistaboutdating

preciselyall

mannerof events, such

as Charlemagne's

coronation,

recorded n the remote

past; about determining

when the

New

Year

began

in different egionsthroughout

Europe,

or even within

the

Italian

peninsuladuring he earlymodernera; about synchronizingMoslem, Chinese,

or Jewish

chronologieswith our own

at present;

or aboutdecidingupon

ap-

propriate

ostumesand

settingwhenproducing

a,

Shakespearean

lay. Downto

the era

when maps andbooks could

be duplicated

n a scaleunknownbefore,

and

for at

least two centuries

hereafter,

many courtiersand

chroniclers ended

to shuffle

Caesar,Charlemagne,

Alexander,and

David like kings in a pack

of

cards.The mentalprocess

which is

now taken for granted (save

by pre-school

children)

49

of reachingback through

he orderly

equenceof chapters n history

books to locate such figures was relativelyrecentlyacquired.The abstract

concept

of a uniform

world-wide ime was unthinkable

eforethe seventeenth

century.50

Among rural

folk in most regions, among

urban

artisans n many,

achronicityprevailed

until

the last

century; t was by

then a

concomitant

of

illiteracy.But a highly

iterateelite

throughouthe continent

had, duringprior

centuries,

relied just

as heavily on

oral

transmission

and was similarly

un-

familiar with a standardizedhistory-book

ormat

and

uniform chronology.

Before

the reading

of

chapters eparatedby pagination5'

isplaced

he hearing

of tales delivered n rhythmiccadenceby a living narratoror re-enactedby

troupes

of

mummers,

memory

of

all

past episodes,

whether

very

remote

or

very

recent,

remained

qually

vivid. Sir

Pilate,

he villainousSaracen,

was a

famil-

iar

figure

n

medieval

mysteryplays.

Costume

changes

over the course

of

cen-

turies

were

unnoticed;manuscript

llustrationsclothed

Trojan

warriors

n

medieval

garb,

and

manuscript

exts

depictedAchilles,

Medea,

Aeneas,

and

Dido

as barons

and

damsels.52

We have

already

remarked

hat

sensitivity

o

49.

But even

our

two-

and

three-year-olds

have

already

been

trained,

as our

forebears'

children

were not,

to

order their

own

lives by counting

the years

which separate

them

from

the

day of

their

birth. Aries,

15-18.

50. Whitrow,

58.

Chronology

was

still far

from

a

neutral

subject

circa

1700.

(Manuel,

Isaac

Newton,

Historian, 38.)

51.

Unlike

early printed

chronicles,

annals,

and histories, printed

Bibles

were

always

divided

into

chapters (this

division

dates

back to thirteenth-century

manuscripts).

But

the

chapter

number

was

tucked

at the

end

of the

preceding

chapter

down

through

the

sixteenth

century.

Arabic

numbers appear

for

the

first time

on

each

page

of an

edition

of the

scriptures

with Froben's publication

of

Erasmus'

New

Testament in

1516,

which

set

the

style

for the

well-differentiated

book-and-chapter

headings employed

by

Luther,

Tyndale, Lefevre, and other translators of the Bible into vernacular languages. See

H.

M. Black, 419,

435.

52. E.

Panofsky,

Renaissance

and

Renascences

(Stockholm,

1960), 85-86.

The impor-

tance

of

printing

and

engraving

in

making

visible

costume

changes

up

to then

un-

perceived

is

a

paradigm

of

what happened

to all previouslyunperceived

stylistic

or

social

changes.

On their importance

for science

and

technology,

see

Sarton,

67; also,

R.

J.

Forbes

and

E.

J.

Dijksterhuis,

A

History of

Science

and Technology

(London,

1963)

II, Chapter

16.



19/30

CLIO AND CHRONOS 53

anachronismn

quattrocento

Florenceprecededprinting.But it is equally

m-

portant o stressthat, well afterclassical orms had been visuallyreunitedwith

classical spirit and Ciceronianprose had been sharply differentiated rom

medievalLatin, time intervals till tendedto be contracted n such a way as to

suggest even to sophisticatedFlorentinehistoriansand scholarlyChristian

humanists a much closer relationship o the institutions of the Roman

Republic

or

those of the churchfathersthan men subsequently nfluencedby

nineteenth-century istory-book ime could ever experience.53

III. ASPECTS OF HISTORY-BOOK TIME

Muchas spokenLatin andchantedverse were transformed fter the adventof

printing, so, too, what is sometimes called the collective memory

was

graduallyaltered.Elaboratemnemonictechniques,passed down through

he

ages, began to wither from disuse.54The function of transmittingmessages

from the past was detached rom humanvoices and entrusted o book-readers,

who were taught to look on libraryshelves, in cataloguesor referenceguides

for permanently-storednformationavailable for retrieval. A vast abstract

referencesystemmade it possible to locate all data uniformlyon time scales

andglobal maps. Despite imperfectsynchronization f intractablemanuscript

chronologies, events vaguely and diversely placed by different groups of

chroniclerswere assigned denticalpositions by all. But, althougheverything

could be

permanently

tored

for possible retrievalby this uniform

reference

system,

the

system

was so

capaciousthat no single mind could possibly

en-

compass

all

the data it

could hold

however hey were purified,validated,

or

classified.Each successivegenerationhad to sift out, from all the ingredients

constantlydepositedby an expandingencyclopedicculture,those portionsof

the past for which it had particularuse. Conscious contrivance,deliberate

selection,

resort

to a

literaryart that counterfeitedreality were required o

recapture hose everlargerportionsof the past that were no longer preserved

by

oral

tradition.

Removed

from

living

memories

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