19.08.

2015
Antiquarianism

Even the recent scholarly revival of interest in antiquarianism works against the grain: studying antiquaries now
is like trying to get at the Inca Temple from inside the Franciscan church built right atop it.4

cultural refinement/ social class

It was only between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries that the work of Song Confucian scholars was
seriously questioned and classical antiquity became a renewed focus of intense scholarship. Eventually the new
so-called Han learning and the movement of evidentiary scholarship (kaozheng xue) reinvigorated both the
connoisseurial and philological strands of antiquarianism, modernizing the field of jinshi xue into one that, like
the work of the Song epigraphers and collectors, again compares more readily to European categories of
antiquarianism, where broad philological inquiries are directed to recover material aspects of a distant past.

How necessary is it to take the measure of this Chinese antiquarian tradition bearing in mind the categories,
cautions, and horizons that Momigliano and his heirs have brought to the study of the Western tradition?16 Is this
not, the critic might object, just another form of insidious “Orientalism,” reading the Other in “our” own language
and thus inevitably a “colonizing” act?

Leibniz. un commerce de lumière

Note 20
21

Hong Mai (1123–1202), spent the greater part of his life collecting and critically reviewing reports on strange and
seemingly supernatural occurrences, some 2,700 of which have survived as his celebrated Yijian zhi (Accounts of
the Listener).26 To these scholars, the material traces of a distant past held a mystical allure and demanded to be
explored just like strange natural phenomena.

Defining China’s jinshi xue primarily through categories of historiography, philology, and empirical exploration,
for instance, results in a picture of scholars engaged in constructing and maintaining a Confucian orthodoxy. This
overlooks not only the less positivist dimensions of Chinese thought but also the impact of an increasingly
commercialized society and the heterogeneous makeup of the Chinese elite in the late Ming and Qing era. As the
contribution by Bruce Rusk in this volume reminds us, reading the discoveries of antiquities both in cosmological
and political terms were an essential part of antiquarian scholarship well into the early modern era.

 Writing about a comparative history of ancient agrarian regimes, he explained that such a comparative
study would not aim at finding “analogies” and “parallels,” as is done by those engrossed in the
currently fashionable enterprise of constructing general schemes of development. The aim should,
rather, be precisely the opposite: to identify and define the individuality of each development, the
characteristics which made the one conclude in a manner so different from that of the other

studied, openness to using the material

Momigliano & Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences.

inquiry. Examining it in a raking light, lifting it slightly out of its context and isolating the phenomenon,
is necessary if we are to see its features in highest relief

Only then can we proceed to assessing the full scope of historical understanding and practices available to the
cultures we are examining.

As a proposal, it offers a way of thinking about early modern European culture in its own terms: with the role of
study of the past, and students of the past, near the center, as indeed it was. As a provocation, it suggests that if
we could adequately explain the relationship between the antiquarian study of the past on the one hand, and
poetry, art, religion, natural philosophy, ethnology, ethics, and history on the other, we would be much closer to
understanding what it meant to think like an early modern European. The still bigger provocation might then be
to turn this same spotlight on China.

Avoid meeting or confronting someone, as in "I have ... had to fight shy of invitations that would exhau
st time and spirits" (Washington Irving, Life and Letters, 1821). This usage may allude to a military relu
ctance to meet orengage with the enemy.

Athanasius Kircher

It shows how scholarly comparison can function as a form of translation, exposing incompatibilities (Weber’s
“splitting”) as well as parallels (the “lumping”).

The two essays in Part 2 (“Authenticity and Antiquities”) explore the question of forgery from the perspectives
of the two different cultures, but also of different epistemologies.

If this has been canonized as the Ur-moment of antiquarianism, his reminder that things were as opaque and as
open-ended as texts has several major consequences.

First, it problematizes the idea of the Renaissance as an epistemological break. Second, it problematizes any
simplistic understanding of how material evidence bore within itself any notional certainty. Third, by
juxtaposing “substitutional” and “archaeological” approaches and arguing for their coexistence, at least in the
earlier Renaissance, he has articulated a new argument for the power of imaginative uses of the past.

//
China: The transmission of pictures and paintings seems to have been little affected by early antiquarian attempts
at precise description as they retained the authority granted to textual transmission. The traditional substitutional
mode of understanding artifact production thus remained normative. Such comparison confirms that it is the
European aspiration for a “purely” archaeological, unemotional technology that is the novum.
Cf. this chapter for a definition of substitutional practices

Key notion. Very similar forms of credulity Learned credulity is well evident in the three Chinese cases of
forgery presented by Bruce Rusk

sprawling collectors
market shaped and often corrupted antiquarian learning

so that even a record of the physical destruction of a thing cannot preclude its reconstitution and transmission
later, especially if the object was believed to have been made by a historically eminent figure

His conclusion, on the contrary, that the antiquarianism of the ethnographers blocked the antiquarianism of the
scholars offers a spectacular vantage point on to the question of how Europeans actually came to know China.

Yet, for the study of noncanonical ancient texts such as the Shanhai jing, scholars like Yang Shen may be said to
have devised a form of ethnographic antiquarianism that was historically motivated.

His polarity between the diachronic narrative of political events written by historians and the synchronic study of
the structures of society by philologists and antiquaries has proved heuristically valuable.

Those dissatisfied with the limited historical utility of Said’s Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978) can
now turn to Robert Irwin’s broad survey of Western oriental studies, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and
Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006), and Suzanne Marchand’s comprehensive study of German oriental
scholarship, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009).

See Miller, “Piranesi and the Antiquarian Imagination,” Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ed. Sarah Lawrence and John
Wilton-Ely (New York: Abrams, 2007), 123–38; “Browne, Sebald and the Survival of the Antiquarian in the
Twentieth Century,” The World Proposed: Sir Thomas Browne Quatercentenary Essays, ed. Reid Barbour and
Claire Preston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
I am relying on Momigliano’s contrast betewen the two, presented most clearly in The Classical Foundations of Modern
Historiography, chap. 2.

Momigliano:
Difference between historian/ antiquarian
Thucydides: useful to politicians
Hippias: erudition, learned curiosity (After Alexander)
Varro: a kind of political antiquitas

“was the Varronian idea of "antiquitates"-the idea of a civilization recovered by systematic collection of all the relics of the
past”

Ars inscriptiones interpretandi adeo fallax est, adeo incerta.... Numismata iisdem dubiis obnoxia
sunt. . . . Vides ergo, quicumque demum proferantur historiarum fontes, et antiquitatis monumenta,
omnia laborare sua incertitudine.

The extraordinary story of Pare Hardouin can' be understood only in this context. He is notoriously
a pathological case. Starting from the study of numismatics, he found contradictions between coins
and literary texts and
slowly reached the conclusion that all the ancient texts (except Cicero, Virgil's Georgics, Horace's
Satires and Epistles and his beloved Pliny the Elder) had been forged by a gang of Italians in the
late fourteenth century. He even identified the leader of the gang: Severus Archontius, who
absentmindedly left his trace in a passage of the Historia Augusta (Firmus Sat., 2, i) as a
numismatist. Hardouin carried the contemporary bias for non-literary evidence and the
contemporary suspicion of literary evidence well beyond the verge of madness. But his
contemporaries did not laugh. They answered at length. La Croze wrote a whole volume against
Hardouin (I708). Dom Tassin and Dom Toustain justified their big Nouveau Traitd de
Diplomatique (175o-65) by asserting inter alia that it would make it impossible for a new Hardouin
to repeat his exploits. The discovery of the falsification of the whole of St. Augustine and of the
Divina Commediwa ere, as is well known, among the details of Hardouin's discoveries.'

Thomas Dempster made a hit because the Italian scholars were looking for a new focus for their
patriotic feelings and cultural interests. Deeply rooted in their regional traditions and suspicious of
Rome for various reasons, they
found what they wanted in the Etruscans, Pelasgians and other pre-Roman tribes. Local patriotism
was gratified by the high antiquity of pre-Roman civilizations. The new trend of interest in -non-
literary evidence suggested
the possibility and provided the technique of exploration. The antiquarian method, combined as it
was with the patriotic revival, produced scholars of an excellence unknown in Italy for over a
hundred years.'

The idea of civilization became the main theme of history, and political history was subordinated
to it. Matters such as art, religion, custom and trade, which had so far been left to the province of
the antiquary, became typical subjects for the philosophic historian-but hardly in the manner of the
antiquaries.

In the field of ancient religion, the long-standing collaboration of the antiquary with the philosopher
was disturbed. In the seventeenth century it had become increasingly apparent that Oriental
languages and history were necessary to the understanding of Christianity. In 1617 John Selden
published his epoch-making De Diis Syris. In 1627 D. Heinsius made the point in the AristarchusS
acer that even the language of the Gospels could not be understood without some knowledge of
Oriental languages. Islam became better known and later attracted sympathies. Acquaintance with
mediaeval Jewish philosophy brought up the problem of the origin of idolatry in terms which had
already been formulated centuries before. Johann Gerhard Vossius' treatise De theologia gentili et
physiologia christiana sive de origine et progressu idololatriae (1641) was accompanied by text and
translation of Maimonides' Mishnah Torah. Contact with pagan peoples in Asia and in America
sharpened men's eyes to the characteristic features of paganism. The questions asked by the scholars
were: (a) how polytheism came to replace primitive monotheism; (b) what had been the relation
between Mosaic law and the institutions of surrounding nations; (c) what sort of confirmation, if
any, could be found for Hebrew and Christian truth in pagan texts.

The name of Vulcanus was easily found to be identical with that of Tubalcain. Even the destruction
of Troy was taken as a prophetic description of the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar.
 Hebrew and Phoenician derivations were made fashionable by Estienne Guichart and Samuel
Bochart. In 1700 Thomas Hyde made available Parsi texts-not always with happy consequences.

Comparative madness

Ecole normale

https://books.google.de/books?id=KE8EAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA162&dq=concours+ecole+normale&hl=fr&sa=X
&ved=0CC8Q6AEwA2oVChMI-Ir3-8uzxwIVSAQaCh3PIAdd#v=snippet&q=rapports&f=false

The antiquary was a connoisseur and an enthusiast; his world was static, his ideal was the collection.
Whether he was a dilettante or a professor, he lived to classify.

ready to introduce himself. Classification can dispense with chronology. That explains why doubts on the
possibility of unifying antiquarian and historical studies lingered long even in well-informed minds and was the
object of lively debates. F. A. Wolf in his Darstellungd erA ltertumswissenscha(If8t o7) tried to distinguish
between history concerned with "Das Werdende" and antiquities concerned with "Das Gewordene."' F. Ast felt
that there was adistinction between "Altertumswissenschaft" and the political history of antiquity (I8o8).2 E.
Platner distinguished between history which describes a nation "in seiner Bewegung" and antiquities which
describe it "in seiner Geschlossenheit und Ruhe."3 F. Ritschl in Ueberd ie neuesteE ntwicklung der Philologie
(I833)4 was perhaps one of the first to deny entirely the existence of such things as "Altertiimer" and made many
other acute remarks, but Boeckh in the Enzyklopddiet,h ough denying "Altertuimer"i n general, maintained the
distinction between political history and "Staatsaltertiimer," the one concerned with events, the other with
institutions. Boeckh was obviously influenced by the long tradition of dogmatic teaching of law and political
institutions in the juridical faculties.

> See also L. von Ulrichs, Handbuch der klassisschen Altertumswissenschaft, I886, I, p. 22 for another definition (and defence)
of Antiquity. On all this literature about "Enzyklopadie und Methodologie der Altertumswissenschaft," which I do not propose
to examine in detail, see A. Bernardini and G. Righi, II Concetto di Filologia e di Cultura Classica nel Pensiero Moderno, Bari,
1947.
6 For the discussion on "Staatsrecht"

For the discussion on "Staatsrecht" and "Staatsaltertuimer" see provisionally my note in Journ. Roman Studies, XXXIX,
1949, P. 155- I hope to write later on the influence of antiquarian studies on the rise of sociology.

learning are the antiquary's contributions to the "ethics" of the historian. We cherish the memory of Jean
Mabillon not only for the De Re Diplomaticab ut for the Traite des Etudes Monastiques here he
recommended: "avoir le coeur degage des passions, et sur tout de celle de critiquer."'

Comparison.

1 comparer l’incomparable
2 comparer des techniques
3 comparer ancien et moderne
4 comparer ancien et ancien
5 comparer ancien moderne sauvage

Chap 4

In other words, antiquity had dominated to the detriment of present need. What was
required, he implied, was a new focus on the present, and new rules for insuring that it was
well-served. Thus, whereas in early modern Europe we find that it is the prestige of
antiquity that provided “cover” for a new empirical approach, in China it is the opposite:
the needs of imperial government provided the prestige that lent authority to an empirical
turn.
 As particularity was itself, inevitably, the in which autopsy could be practiced, the tendency
to seek justifications in antiquity, and conclusions that were wide-ranging, could be read as
a reaction against close looking.19 Compilers of these texts were, by tradition, mostly
professional geographers or officials, not academicians. But starting with the Southern
Song, men of letters were more and more their authors, and they wrote for their fellow
literati, not for provincial administrators.20 By the twelfth century, commensurate with this
shift in producers arena came a shift in production: less oriented toward physical
geography, administration, and customs and drawn more toward human affairs and their
lessons. The appeal to “history” masks a methodological slide from “descriptive” to
“exemplary.”

Piecemeal

As particularity was itself, inevitably, the arena in which autopsy could be practiced, the
tendency to seek justifications in antiquity, and conclusions that were wide-ranging, could
be read as a reaction against close looking. Compilers of these texts were, by tradition,
mostly professional geographers or officials, not academicians. But starting with the
Southern Song, men of letters were more and more their authors, and they wrote for their
fellow literati, not for provincial administrators. By the twelfth century, commensurate with
this shift in producers came a shift in production: less oriented toward physical geography,
administration, and customs and drawn more toward human affairs and their lessons. The
appeal to “history” masks a methodological slide from “descriptive” to “exemplary.”

Moreover, the legal and political culture of the communes required trained Latinists. In this
context, it was impossible to segregate the practical functions of Latin from its historical
and cultural overtones
and association

Witt adds that a “strong impetus” for a new kind of historical precision was the search for
tools to separate past from present and so reduce the threat of a glorious pagan past
influencing, inundating, and threatening the fragile Christian present. Bracketing off the
past was only possible if one could make sure that past was actually another country.
Alberto Mussato (1261–1329), for example, had found the way back to this distant space
by recovering lost time in Latin syntax.

What we might only half-jokingly term the “discovery of the past perfect” implied a
radical break, of a “then” and “now” separated by a great chasm of time.

This is where Mussato’s discovery comes home to roost

Petrarch’s return to the self

In order to forget my own time,” Petrarch wrote, “I have always tried to place myself in
spirit in other times. Therefore, I took pleasure in history.”31 This is where Mussato’s
discovery comes home to roost: in the human possibility of seeing oneself existing in a long
time continuum and then imagining what it might be like—or what it was like—to occupy
a different position on that very same continuum. P. 113

For Petrarch had also entered into a deep dialogue with Augustine, and with Cicero, from
whom he would have also encountered a similar sense of the depths of time, as in Cicero’s
breathtaking account of how a walk through Athens evoked the cultural history of that
place.

His famous letters about the antiquities of Rome were letters about walking across Rome.

Books, by contrast, seemed more whole. “Seek in books and you will find authorities.
Explore the entire city and either you will find nothing or the tiniest signs of great works.”40
These two lines of access to the ancient world launched by Petrarch had rich fortunae
afterward: space as a prompt for the learned imagination, and words on monuments as the
preferred kind of antiquity (favoring numismatics and epigraphy).
 The episode of the bells pitted the authority of ancient texts against
the authority of the eye (autopsia) and ear.

He collected rubbings, not the things themselves, and then he wrote about them

The question of a model

But Ouyang Xiu was no scientist. He collected rubbings, not the things themselves, and then
he wrote about them. He was not creating a catalog of calligraphy as models for use (as done
by Emperor Taizong (976–97
at the beginning of the Song dynasty). Taizong used the word “models” [fa] and Ouyang Xiu
“past” [gu]; Taizong looked for examples to improve future practice, Ouyang Xiu old and
idiosyncratic inscriptions that were almost by definition resistant to any future adaptation
 Ouyang Xiu is all about amusement

Moved by the thought that all material things eventually go to ruin, and realizing that even metal and
stone, for all their hardness, do not last forever, I resolved to collect and record inscriptions left to us
from ancient times and preserve them.”56 This is the same melancholy sense of time’s rule over all
things human that takes us back, as Alain Schnapp has shown, past Pindar’s sixth Pythian ode, to
ancient Mesopotamia and Old Kingdom Egypt, but also, via Ovid’s “Tempus edax rerum, tuque
invidiosa vetustas, omnia destruitis,” to the antiquaries and humanists of the Renaissance.

 So two positions: the Antiquarian, destruction and the nostalgia of wholeness // the philologist and
the politician as modeling forces.

What Ouyang does not do is justify his studies by reference to their exemplary value. This of course cuts
completely against the grain of justifications for studying the past that we find in the great historians.

 So what I would like to ask is: what is decorum and how is it practiced in philology? To what
extent is that idea of decorum a strategy of improper reconstruction of our own dreams of
Antiquity?
 This points to the fact that antiquarianism is half amateurish half scientific and that it has direct
links to simple accumulation. But historical method as practiced by Foucault has in some sense
recovered this by using archaeology as a model: stratification, cross-sectioning, accumulation of
evidential commonalities.

Tang). And yet, for all this proximity, Ouyang feels himself as if living on one side of a chasm that
separates his era from pre-Song times.59 This sense of a break, of lost time and lost people, permeates
his work.

 To what extent is the history of philology, and philology itself, an art of nostalgia?

Much as Pierre Hadot has taught us about ancient stoicism as a philosophical exercise, and much as I have
myself tried to argue for antiquarianism in early modern Europe, studying the past could also be a philosophical
exercise because of its instruction in the fragility of the human trace.

 Another question would be: what are philologists and antiquarians doing when they write about
the past, either by accumulating non-stratified pieces of information or by categorizing, selecting,
collating and introducing disruption?

This is a crucial point: in the Chinese tradition, as in Europe, textual survivals facilitated the “time travel” that
enabled moderns to learn from ancients
The poet studying the physical remains of the past and infusing them with imaginative spirit while at the same
time launching a whole new scholarly tradition; an exile with a commitment to pursuing antiquity and antique
style back through language. This pursuit of the materialized past is the foundation of modern antiquarian
studies. But with all this, the past remains more food for emotional reflection than for science. Are we talking
here about Ouyang Xiu . . . or Petrarch?
  But is it really the same thing? Is it really the same past? Is there an equally rightful claim in both
cases and on both ends?

Other, alterity of ancient times: the age of anthropology or how the discovery of America is a shock.

Qui sont les « classiques » pour Barthes ? « Signes déformés mais nécessaires d’un événement général,
le Classicisme », ils « forment entre eux une confrérie » dont « les chefs de cohorte » sont Corneille, La
Bruyère, Descartes, La Fontaine, Rousseau, Racine, Boileau : un auteur du XVIIIe siècle parmi six du
XVIIe siècle. Dans le florilège qui suit, la proportion des auteurs du XVIIIe est supérieure. (Roland
Barthes, « Plaisir aux Classiques », dans Œuvres complètes, I, 1942-1961, Paris, Seuil, 2002, p. 60.)
Les Classiques furent clairs, d’une clarté terrible, mais si clairs que l’on pressent dans cette transparence des vides inquiétants dont
on ne sait, à cause de leur habileté, s’ils les y ont mis ou simplement laissés.

Miroirs transparents de nous-mêmes, précise Roland Barthes, les Classiques « réfléchissent le lecteur » comme toute littérature, mais
de façon si concise et si générale qu’elle en devient « très obscure [3][3] Ibid., p. 57. » :
4
[…] après tout, réfléchir le lecteur, c’est une fonction de toute littérature […]. Ce qui la rend séduisante chez les Classiques [4][4] Je
souligne : le motif de la « séduction » est en effet..., c’est qu’ils y répugnent. Ils ne parlent jamais d’eux, jamais de nous. Ils ont mis
leur art dans l’économie des pronoms personnels. Penser et faire penser je, mais dire ils ou on, quelle tyrannie, mais aussi quelle
majesté ! […] Fréquenter les classiques, c’est donc prendre une continuelle leçon de décence, et, si l’on veut, de silence […] [5][5]
Ibid., p. 58..
5
« Cela fait penser, et penser indéfiniment [6][6] Ibid., p. 59. » : Barthes illustre ce « pouvoir explosif des Classiques, dont les œuvres
possèdent la minutieuse, imprévisible et dangereuse architecture des machines infernales » par un florilège de citations et, après
l’ultime citation de Médée de Corneille évoquant « un si grand revers [7][7] « Dans un si grand revers, que vous reste-t-il, — Moi....
», le conclut ainsi :
6
Pour certaines raisons, de nombreux textes ne peuvent être cités, qui pourtant auraient donné du plaisir et du courage au lecteur;
mais il ne lui est pas interdit d’en chercher la trace dans Vauvenargues, Chamfort, Michelet, La Fontaine, Hugo, etc. [8][8] Ibid., loc.
cit. On remarquera que la confrérie classique...
7
En 1944, l’intention paraît assez claire, claire-obscure, et les Classiques fournissent de la sorte à la fois un modèle et un moyen pour
adresser aux lecteurs un message de « résistance » au moins morale.

Voir l’ouvrage de P. Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européenne (1680-1715), Paris, 1934, les travaux
de H. R. Jauss, telle son introduction « Ästhetische Normen und geschichtliche Reflexion in der “Querelle
des Anciens et des Modernes” » [« Normes esthétiques et réflexion historique dans la “Querelle des Anciens
et des Modernes”] au Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes de Perrault, München, 1964 ou son essai
traduit sous le titre « La “modernité” dans la tradition littéraire et la conscience d’aujourd’hui » (Pour une
esthétique de la réception, Paris, 1978) ou ceux, déjà cités, de F. Hartog.

La Querelle est donc pour L. Norman l’expression complexe et ambivalente d’une crise historique. Dans le sillage d’analyses
déjà menées par d’autres11, il insiste sur l’émergence d’une nouvelle conscience historique qui entérine la radicale altérité
d’une Antiquité aussi éloignée que révolue.

C’est donc à un travail de périodisation(s) faisant voler en éclats « l’harmonieuse synthèse gréco-romaine héritée de la
Renaissance » (p. 27) que conduit l’affrontement entre les deux partis, à travers une resémantisation transhistorique des
catégories d’ « ancien » et de « moderne »

L’Antiquité qui se dégage de ces débats apparaît ainsi comme un objet historique conflictuel, « dont l’étrangeté instaure de
nouveaux paradigmes historiques et esthétiques » (p. 31). C’est pourquoi la Querelle peut être lue, selon L. Norman, comme
une opposition entre une vision « historiciste », défendue par les Anciens attentifs à l’altérité historique de l’Antiquité, et une
perspective « universaliste » portée par les Modernes, qui nivelle les différences culturelles et historiques au nom d’un unique
paradigme progressiste. En ce sens, contrairement à une tradition historiographique tenace qui voit dans la défense des Anciens
un conservatisme atavique et une compréhension ahistorique de l’Antiquité, les Anciens peuvent être considérés comme les
précurseurs de l’historicisme théorisé par Vico, Herder ou Michelet (p. 33)

Au terme de ce parcours, L. Norman n’hésite donc plus à affirmer que si l’un des deux partis représentait celui de l’autorité,
c’était celui des Modernes, que leur soutien à la politique de Louis XIV, leur collusion avec les institutions religieuses et leur
adhésion aux normes morales et sociales dominantes de leur temps ne pouvaient que mener à rejeter la dérangeante
« altérité » incarnée par les Anciens.

« Il y a longtemps que je suis choqué de cette manière antique » : tel est en effet l’aveu de Perrault dans son fameux Parallèle
des Anciens et des Modernes (p. 15). A quoi tient donc le scandale de la Querelle ? À cette préférence « irraisonnée » des
Anciens pour un temps éloigné dont les mœurs, selon Perrault lu par L. Norman, offenseraient la bienséance « universelle ».
En quelques exemples bien choisis, L. Norman soutient que l’attaque de Perrault relève d’un ethnocentrisme qui lui fait
assimiler les mœurs de son temps à une hypothétique raison universelle.

Le parallèle avec l’Antiquité n’est donc plus là, comme à la Renaissance, pour héroïser le monarque contemporain par une
comparaison flatteuse, mais pour souligner, par contraste, sa supériorité sur une Antiquité désormais dévaluée, dont les usages
se doivent d’être mesurés, contrôlés, voire censurés
À ce titre, L. Norman souligne que si Marcel Detienne a raison d’affirmer dans sonInvention de la mythologie que c’est
au XIXe siècle que naît la mythologie comme science du scandaleux, c’est cependant dans le contexte de la Querelle que sont
posés les fondements d’une critique rationaliste du « scandale » des mythes.

Dans un passage suggestif, L. Norman esquisse une analogie entre le débat sur les langues anciennes et l’essai de Virginia Woolf
« On Not Knowing Greek » (1925), où elle souligne que la beauté de la langue grecque, son « glamour » et son pouvoir de
fascination viennent en premier lieu de la mécompréhension des modernes pour cette langue perdue, de leur incapacité à
retrouver la pleine saveur de ses sonorités désormais éteintes (p. 167). Si le texte de Woolf témoigne d’une conscience
typiquement moderniste que L. Norman se garde d’assimiler de manière hâtive aux enjeux de la Querelle, l’écho heuristique
qu’il tisse entre cet éloge woolfien du « malentendu » poétique et l’attachement des Anciens à la singularité irréductible des
textes antiques dessine un subtil renversement, qui fait des Anciens des modernistes avant la lettre, revendiquant le « choc
de l’ancien » comme les modernes du XXe siècle se réclameront du « choc du nouveau

Ute Heidmann l’a montré de manière convaincante, que l’écriture des contes par Perrault n’est pas tant l’élaboration d’une
soi-disant matière folklorique « nationale » et « moderne » qu’un savant dialogisme intertextuel reconfigurant des mythes
antiques à des fins rhétoriques et morales propres, et qui, précisément, peut se lire comme une réponse aux questions de la
Querelle — telle la « morale » ironique de La Barbe bleue détournant les leçons misogynes de Boileau

But it is just important to remember that Cyriac was full of fancy, and that as precise as he was, there was an
extraordinary imaginative energy at work in his reconstructions. Invocations to Mercury, his personal
deity, stand cheek by jowl with very careful ekphrases of sites and inscriptions.
This poetic power is a Petrarchan legacy that would live on in Pirro Ligorio, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Jean-
Jacques Barthélémy. If, as Wood argues in this volume, the history of modern scholarship can, in part, be read as
a long effort to purge from itself its “substitutional” origins and recast itself as “archaeology,” the presence and
power of these figures—and one could stretch the story up to our own time—are deeply challenging.

step “forward” from the imaginative to the analytical

Antiquarianism : This was a world in which the goal was not amassing knowledge for
original work, but acquiring the necessary trappings for cultural advancement

The connections between philology and antiquarianism, and indeed their deepening
connection is evident in the roles played by Joseph Scaliger and Fulvio Orsini

Comparison with China, where the supremacy of textual access to the past was
unchallenged, helps us recognize the novelty of this material turn. As suggested above, it
is made possible by the centrality of Rome, which gave preeminence to a spatial mode of
reconstruction. From this it was but a short sideways step to the reconstruction of the
cultural artifacts that would have been used within that space. But once the material turn is
taken, it develops a compelling logic of its own. This is seen most clearly in the increasing
attention paid to Christian and medieval material evidence, which begins at the turn of the
seventeenth century and reaches a kind of maturity in the work of Mabillon and the
Bollandists. The sanction of antiquity is no longer needed for the study of instituta et mores
through things.82

The project of comparative religion, which might have reached its learned apogee in Van
Dale’s work, was also captured in projects such as Noel Alexandre Conformité des
cérémonies chinoises avec l’idolatrie grecque et romaine (1700) or in Bernard Picart’s
visual religious ethnographies.91
The Ming and early Qing “return to antiquity” movement (fugu) was about rejecting
philosophical daoxue for return to the most ancient sources, “in order to reconstruct the
classical tradition.”95 Hence Elman’s central point: “philology, not philosophy, became the
methodology to restore the past.”96 The European early modernist cannot fail here to catch
the clarion call of “the new humanism” of the antiquaries: Lipsius’s declaration that “From
Philology I made Philosophy” (E philologia philosophiam feci).
 who in his book Unearthing the Past shows how Renaissance archaeology became
a framework for poetic storytelling about objects and origins, dovetailing in the first
decades of the sixteenth century with the emergence of a culture of art.

The work of visual art, however, was frequently expected, in late medieval and
Renaissance culture, to double as a historical document. The confusions we have
been detecting around artifacts were generated by the
interference between the documentary and aesthetic identities of the artifact

The tomb of the poet was the point of intersection of archaeological and aesthetic
cultures.

“A forger emerges,” Grafton wrote, “as the first really modern theorist of critical
reading of historians—a paradox that only a reader with a heart of stone could
reject.”

The faked finds became the archaeological basis for Annius’s extravagant theses,
which he published only a few years later—in the form of counterfeited texts
attributed to the Chaldean sage Berosus—on the earliest history of Europe,
involving the postdiluvian movements of Noah, his progeny, and the Egyptian
gods.”

“Our forefathers. . . in order to keep the eternal memory of the antiquity of this city
before our eyes, placed before the rostra a columnula, that is, an alabaster tablet,
monument to the triumph of Osiris”

.53 Medieval historians and clerks generated an enormous quantity of forged

documents that came to carry real legal force. Forgery flourished in proximity to
power. A famous case in point is the fantastical genealogical tree dreamt up by the
Habsburg Emperor Maximilian’s court historians Ladislaus Suntheim and Jakob
Mennel.54 The scholar Johannes Trithemius invented an entire source, Hunibald, to
prove the genealogical connection between the Trojans and the Franks.55 To be sure,
many document forgers were simply cynical opportunists. Medieval scholars and
jurists were quite capable of applying rationalist criteria in accepting or rejecting
evidence.” 161

But it has also been argued that concepts of the authenticity of a document are
historically relative and that medieval forgers were simply playing by the rules of
their own time. It is argued, for example, that the overriding framework of
salvational justification provided a legitimating context for document forgery, that
the deceit was a “pious fraud” (pia fraus); or it is argued that such deceits were
justified by a traditional, popular sense of fairness (aequitas) which transcended any
simply binary opposition between the true and the false document.
Cf. note 57

With documents, the intent to deceive outright is difficult to disentangle from the
desire to establish and publicize historical or legal precedents that were simply
known to have been real even if the original material indexes of those precedents
had gone astray. The forger, rational and irrational at once, thought “doubly.” The
forger offered the fabricated documents as a legitimate substitute for an absent
document that must have existed.

 Is it very different from Tacitus’ or Livy’s speeches

 Valla’s technique

To fabricate a document was just to complete a paper record that was incomplete only by accident, unfairly. If a
tradition was old enough—custom beyond memory—then there was an almost irresistible tendency to believe it.

+ sentiment, feeling, interpretation, loss

 No tragic feeling
 As Frank Borchardt demonstrated in his book German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth,
the critical historiography of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was often just a
matter of one myth replacing another.
Although Renaissance scholars were quick to condemn the errors of their
predecessors, they were apt to replace those errors with more errors. Borchardt called
this process the “topos of critical rejection,” or, to give it its period name, anasceva,
or “dismantling. Borchardt argued that scholars were reluctant to dismantle a tradition
and leave nothing in its place. That is, they were neither satisfied with Veyne’s “plural
truths” nor willing to face a past completely unstructured by myth.

or of those unwilling to adapt human existence to a historical narrative “fenced in by

the cardinal mysteries” of beginnings and endings, as Wolfgang Iser has put it.62 For
cultures deprived of the framework of meaning provided by, at one end, etiological
myths and, at the other, prophecy—i. e., devices that unlock those cardinal
mysteries—must be prepared to take seriously the mere events of human history. Iser
argues that such cultures develop literature and art, fictional reenactments of life, as
compensations for the loss of its cosmogonies and eschatologies. The credulous early
modern scholar, then, is that seeker of origins who is already beyond myth but not yet
ready to surrender to art. Giambattista Vico, who grasped the power of “poetic
wisdom,” found himself in just that predicament, still protesting deep into the
eighteenth century the dogma of fact established by the Renaissance scholars. But this
also made him the first to anticipate the modern rebellion, initiated by Nietzsche,
against historical reason.

Each of these three accounts of learned credulity in the Renaissance identifies a

mixing of categories that in modernity are notionally kept distinct: historical
scholarship is compromised, in the first instance, by the poetical or aesthetic
imagination; in the second by propagandistic or doctrinal ends; and in the third by
mythic thinking.

Archaeological thinking is in principle the opposite of substitutional thinking, in that

archaeology has decided not to accept passively the written text’s claim to be the
endpoint of an invisible but reliable process of transmission and therefore a
trustworthy source of information. But in its eagerness to improve upon the poor
evidence of texts, early archaeology accepted bad material evidence, and so ended up,
paradoxically, repeating patterns of reception proper to the substitutional model.
Lorenzo Valla, for instance, pointed out in his treatise on the Donation of Constantine
that the evidence produced by the Papacy in favor of the Donation’s authenticity was
all textual.

The key problem of this text:

In this account, the temporal instability of historical artifacts follows from their mutual
substitutability in the imagination of the antiquarian.

The argument is not that production (of paintings, sculptures, or buildings) was in
reality guided by constant reference to a stable origin-point.
Substitution was rather the theory of production that guided the perception,
interpretation, and use of artifacts

Archaeology is thought of as the discipline that overcomes the layers of mediation

that separate us from the past. But early archaeology, to the extent that its preference
for the material depended on an optimistic faith in transmission, was actually working
with mediation.
 A monumental shaping of the past, no matter how spurious, had a powerful placebo
effect on the imagination of the beholder.

The substitutional model is still another way of explaining why archaeology was out
of sync with philology in this period, and why antiquarianism retained its systematic
and nonnarrative character for so long

Neither architects nor scholars were capable of a philology of architecture that might
have distinguished building fabrics and served as the basis for a reconstruction of
building histories. The identity of the building was for them its meaning, not its
physical being, which distended complexly across time and was for any practical
purpose unreconstructible.

They believed that it stood in a reliable substitutional relationship to some original

pagan building on that site, and that was enough.

(An vero haec illa sit, an ei vetustate labenti, ad eius exemplar suffecta, nondum
compertum habemus. Existimamus tamen eandem permanere.73) Walter Stephens
calls this a “doctrine of congruence”: any inscription, no matter when fabricated, could
be defended as a substituted copy of a lost original.

Substitutional thinking is compatible with—may even encourage—a normative

approach to the achievements of the past. Gombrich showed that scribes and architects
alike were more interested in reforming what they saw to be a corrupted traditions
than in seeking out what might be today considered the historical identity of their
models. They wanted good models, not necessarily old models; and they took their
models where they could find them.76 The strictly historical study of architecture was
overwhelmed by the normative imperative. Virtual or desired transmission chains
were generated through triages of essential and accidental features. The Florentine
architects saw only those features of the Romanesque basilicas they wished to see and
ignored the rest. Only the essential, the supposed links to Rome, “made it through,”
while all the rest was dismissed as merely accidental.

Celtis and Annius were accidental artists, in the sense that they fell upon the truth of
the anachronism of the artifact, its capacity to bend time. But they exercised their
creativity within the wrong paradigm, scholarship instead of art, and so it came to
resemble either folly or crime. For archaeology over the course of the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries found its identity in the struggle to cancel out
the noise and distortion of transmission. Error, in that same period, was tamed and
caged within the institution of art.

How can one think paganism as such?

The non literary as transparent?

1) Collecting
2) Reconstructing
3) Historicizing

No parallels