In Our Time - History of History

Episode Date: January 22, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how the writing of history has changed over time, from ancient epics to medieval hagiographies and modern deconstructions. In the 6th century AD, the bishop of Tours began his history of the world with a simple observation that “A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad”. For a phrase that captures the whole of history it’s among the best, but in writing about the past we are rarely so economical. From ancient epics – Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War - to medieval hagiographies and modern deconstructions, historians have endlessly chronicled, surveyed and analysed the great many things that keep happening, declaring some of them good and some of them bad. But the writing of history always illuminates two periods – the one history is written about and the one it is written in. And to look at how the writing of history has changed is to examine the way successive ages have understood their world. In short, there is a history to history.With Paul Cartledge, AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge; John Burrow, Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the 6th century AD, the Bishop of Tour began its history of the world with the unassailable observation that a great many things keep happening. Some of them good, some of them bad.

Yes, but in writing about the past, we're rarely so easily. From ancient epics to medieval hagiographies and modern deconstructions, historians have endlessly chronicled, surveyed and analyzed the great many things that keep happening, declaring them some of them good and some of them bad, and trying to work out why. But the writing of history always illuminates two periods, the one history is written about and the one it's written in. And to look at how the writing of history has changed is to examine the way successive ages have understood their world. In short, there's a history to history. me to discuss the history of history

or historiography, Arirubin, Professor of medieval and early modern history at Queen Mary, University of London, John Burrow, Emeritus Fellow of Ballion College, Oxford, and Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University.

Briefly, Paul Cartlidge, can you tell us what historiography is? It's of course a modern, invented word of two ancient Greek compounds, so historiography is the writing of history. History originally means inquiry. Historiography has another meaning in academic circles, which is the study of the writing of or the creation of history. And what that does

is draw attention to the fact that historians in some sense make history. There is the past, what happened, which no one individual can of course comprehend in its totality. And then there's history. And this is a brilliant discovery of the Greeks. And the Greeks, and the Greeks discovered that by inquiry into variant traditions, oral in their case, one can develop a story, but they went further than just telling

stories, of course, in modern European languages, Istoire and history, same route, but in French, Istoire is both history and story. In English, we distinguish between history and story. It's quite interesting, I think. That's a sort of cultural question we might come back to.

But the Greeks were very clear, that it wasn't enough just to tell a story. It's got to be about something really significant. And, of course, the first historian, Herodotus, went for the biggest story of them all. Can you tell us a little about Herodotus and then talk about what he wrote? Herodotus was born round about 484, BC. And he was born in what's now, Western Turkey, a place called Halicarnassus, which was a mixed community, not just Greek, but also non-Greek carians.

It's modern Bodrum, and more famous for its wisconsin. windsurfing than for its respect for Herodotus. But what he did, he came from this part of Greece, known generically as Ionia, which had been in touch with eastern traditions, going as far east as Babylon, even India, in terms of maths. And his predecessors, thinking about the world, were not so much interested in the world of men, but the world, what we call the cosmos, the universe. What was it made of?

So the very first intellectual guy called Thales came from not far from Halicarnassus and he decided the whole world was made of water and so on and so on. That was the issue. And he may have used the word historicia. This is the point of the connection with Herodotus. Herodotus seems to have appropriated the word inquiry from Thales and so on. Herodotus wrote what, Paul, and what was significant amount about what he wrote. He wrote just one book.

He's one of these authors. who are just the one big book as opposed to writing lots of books as some of us around the table do. And he chose as his theme, something that affected him personally because he'd actually been born in the Persian Empire. When he was terribly little,

probably less than five, this empire, led by Great King Xerxes, decided that it wanted to add Greece, that is mainland Greece, to its existing empire, which at that time ran right up to the Aegean, up to the Eastern Mediterranean. So Herodotus was born in the Persian Empire.

What he wanted to explain was why the Persians had failed, whereas they had succeeded in every other major enterprise of conquest and annexation, bar one, there was one exception. Nevertheless, they failed and failed twice. And so Herodotus was interested in, what was it about the Greeks or what was it about the Persians, that first of all made them fight? And he says this in his preface, what made them fight?

And then, secondly, why? did the Greeks win? That was his problematic. From what I understand, he laid out a template for many histories that followed. Could you tell us what the main drives in his history was? He's got Thales, he says, and other people around. Nothing comes from nothing. But he is establishing this. So what did he establish that is significant then and continues to be significant about the writing of history?

Well, I think, but then I'm probably biased. The most important thing he did was foreground explanation, responsibility. and of course it's partly a moral judgment as to who was guilty is what interesting, but also objectively, non-judgmentally, why, how come? And I think history is nothing if it's not ultimately explanation, and secondly it's nothing if it's not a debate. And Herodotus came from a very argumentative culture, and it's very notable that the successor of Herodotus,

the most famous successor, there were others, of course, the guy who made his mark most after Herodotus, never mentions him, by name. And he uses... This is Thucydides. And he uses another word than Historia to describe

what he's doing. In other words, I'm doing something completely different. And by the way, my subject is much better than yours. It's much more important. It's much more significant. And so rivalry is another driver

of Greek inquiry. But Herodians is talking about the East and the West. He's being remarkably fair to Greeks and Persians alike. He's relying on interviews to get detail. He is giving great detail, in some cases, extraordinary detail.

In many senses, is a very modern historian. How does this carry on John Burrow in the ancient world? We've mentioned Cucydideswick, mention him a little more if you want, but to say Polybius, who's famous about the writing of Rome, and what shifted between the great template laid down by Herodotus and where we are, a couple of centuries later, in writing about Rome? Paulineus himself is of course a Greek. He's a Greek, but he's very much writing for a Roman audience.

It's thought that he set himself to interpret the rise of Rome for his fellow countryman. It was the great salient fact of the modern world, which they had to understand, because Rome was rising to become unquestionably the world. or at least the Western world power. And because of that, he's able to do several things which in a sense has scarcely options for the Greeks. He has, for example, a single central focus, whereas in Greece's political history, at least,

is dispersed among a number of different political centres, city-states. At the same time, he's able to write what he calls universal history because the single polity that he wants to write about has become the salient central fact of world history. So he's able to do both. He's able to write history which is simultaneously concentrated but also expansive and, as he says, universal. Now, he doesn't actually cover a huge tract of time,

but it is a much longer span of time than Thucydides, who is very concentrated indeed, and even than Herodotus, although central to it, is the Roman wars with the Carthaginians, which you might say almost plays the same kind of role as the relations between... I'm sorry, the relations between Greeks and Persians in Herodotus.

And the extraordinarilyness of Rome's rise, gives birth to an interest in tracing it backwards, seeing how this extraordinary development of a small, obscure city state in central Italy, can have developed, first of all, to conquer the whole of Italy, then the whole of the Mediterranean world. And Bolivus himself doesn't do this. He doesn't take it any further.

the back than the Carthaginian wars. But his successor, you might say, Livy does. Livy sets out to write a history of Rome, as his title proclaims, from the foundation of the city, which is conventionally dated to the 8th century BC by us. And that involves, of course, a great deal of attention to what is admittedly, and admittedly even by Livy to be to a... considerable to end legendary,

but he says it's nonetheless worth recorded. Romans and Remus the sheep. Yes. Herodotus too, of course, records a number of stories which he says he won't vouch for

because I think very intelligently he sees that they are themselves part of history. Sometimes his successors, I think much less intelligent. They thought that if they were not true, then they were of no interest. But both Herodotus and Livy knows that they are of interest

because they let you see how people think So Livy takes it right back to the foundation of the city in Rome and tries to write the whole stretch to his own time, although the latter books are lost. It's a big broad question, John Burrow, but has there been a shift between the way Herodotus looked at history, which Paul was explaining,

and the way the Polybius and Livy are looking in history? The subject has changed. Rome is now the centre of the world. Rome is sufficient, and so that is what we have. But has there been any other shift that we might want to know about? Well, I think the sense of history as inquiry is still there, and indeed we know that Polymius greatly admired Thucydides,

and he picks up a number of themes of suicidies, that history needs, above all, to be truthful, to be certain. We need to inquire, we need to interrogate witnesses, we need to know what actually happened. And secondly, he also picks up from Thucydides the notion that history should above all be useful. So I think his approach to history is similar, more similar to Thetal Thucydides

than of Herodotus, but when of course you get Louis going right back to the legendary origins of Rome, necessarily he has to do things differently. He's simply, it seems, as Paul says, very irritatingly, they don't talk about their predecessors much. But it's clear that he does have predecessors

that he's, as we should say, cribbing from one. And he's putting together a... It's a compilation, in a way, rather more than a monographic history like suicidides or even Herodotus. Mary Rubin, when the Christian religion was taken up by the Roman Empire,

4th century, Constantine, and so on, the history had to be re-formulated and rethought, as I understand it. And there was a big change there. So what had been written was rewritten, written over display. You, sir, you take us on from there. Sure. I mean, it really begins.

The story of Christian history writing begins before Constantine. You may even say that the Gospels themselves, written by the end of the first century, are historical accounts of the amazing life of Jesus and his followers. So there is always this historic moment because Christianity's message is deeply historical. It's about a religion that, it pre-existed Judaism, fine in its time, a covenant with God,

but now a development and a progress and an unfolding of a providential plan that affects every area of human endeavor. So the historical work of Christianity in a way begins first in the accounts of the Gospels. And secondly, in taking that Old Testament and turning it Christian, in interpreting it. And that too is historical work, because that is from that book, from that book, messages into the future are to be found, as well as, of course, signals that Christ would come. So the early historical consciousness of Christianity is very polemical. It's about proving itself as against its predecessor Judaism and the pagan world within which it grows. But of course, as you say,

once under Constantine a very favorable atmosphere is created for Christian activity, and indeed finally he becomes a Christian. His mother is a fervent Christian as well. of course this enters a whole different gear. And the figure I think it's really important to know about is the historian Eusebius, who again very significantly was a biblical exegete. He spent a lot of time interpreting that Bible. So that Bible tells the Christian story and guides Christians. But also very significantly, he also wrote The Life of Constantine,

which used to be dismissed as, you know, too flattering and so on. But it's actually a very remarkable document. because although there is this radical change with the coming of Christianity, there's also tremendous continuity with the traditions that Paul and John have been describing. That's what I wanted to ask. Can you just tell our listeners, was there a real cutaway? Did they just dismiss all that previous stuff as being pre-Christ and therefore not worthy of serious consideration? Was that brought in people like St Augustine and Rosiusius, Your Savists,

are they bringing that in to their study of history? They're bringing it in as much as they are formed in the very same intellectual tradition. They learn from the same texts about rhetoric. They learn their grammar, their modes of writing, their poetry. They are imbued with that classical tradition, but they use it very instrumentally. And what's interesting about both the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius and his life of Constantine is this forensic nature, just like you go into a Roman court and you have to bring evidence and prove stuff in the same way. he copies whole documents, whole imperial decrees into his history of ecclesiastical history.

So in terms of the method, mind you, he also adds, just as John said for Livy, legendary material, what we might call legendary material, but material that's very important to him. For example, the acts of martyrs and saints, which are also a sign of God's providence in the world. So he puts together, I like this word John used compilation, in a way, a compilation of, everything and anything that is necessary to promote the Christian case within the empire. Can you, I'd like to talk about one specific book you choose. It's the St. Augustine's book or Rosius's Seven Books of History Against the Pagans. Can you say this is get an even more specific idea of what was going on here?

Then we can sort of, if you do that first. So we move forward a whole century into the early 5th century, and this is very significant because that whole long fourth century is a century within which Christianity becomes from being tolerated, licit to becoming official and unpersecuted. Exactly. Now it is the one that's doing the persecuting.

It is now state religion. And extraordinary things are happening in the Mediterranean and the empire. There are new kingdoms being carved out of it. There are invasions by peoples like the Goths and some people's pagans indeed are invas are inveying against Christians by saying, how can you say there's a god out there supporting you?

Look, the empire goes Christian and look what happens, appalling things. The appalling, traumatic sack of Roman 4-10, what could be more of an indication? That needs explanation. Augustine isn't really a historian at heart. He takes a more theological moral point of view about we shouldn't really pay attention to these events in the world. but his disciple Orosius says,

no, we do actually have to have an historical explanation and an account of these events so as to rebut our detractors. And he writes these books, which are, as you say, a history but against the pagans, a history that is out to prove that, quite frankly, ups and downs have happened in other cultures as well. We have to situate ourselves looking forward

into the seventh age of history, which is a history when everything will come right. at the last judgment and the end of Christian history. So just to summarize this section, Paul Cartledge, we've done a major shift, haven't we, from Herodotus to Augusta, in attitude, in the way in which the past should be thought about. Can you just talk to that for a minute?

Well, if I could qualify that just slightly, because, of course, the big difference in any version of Christianity or indeed Judaism and anything before that is, Solytheism versus monotheism. So for the Greeks, the world was full of gods. But Herodotus was not by any means unique in thinking that there was some divine motivation, some divine responsibility for what went on.

What was new for him was that he was able to combine it with what you and I might call a secular. They couldn't have had that notion. A non-theistic, over-determined explanation of why things happened. Herodotus still sometimes seems to speak as if he's in the Old Testament, if I might put it that way, and of course the Old Testament, as Christians look at it, the Hebrew Bible, is indeed being created just at the same time as Herodotus is quite interesting fact, parallel but completely separate.

And on the other hand, his successor, as we tend to think of him, Thucydides, explicitly right from the start, says the divine is going to have absolutely nothing to do with my account whatsoever, He uses a very rude word. The mythic, and the mythic or mythi comprehends the divine. So that's out. And he says, my readers may find my work less interesting,

less sort of amusing, less entertaining, and indeed less explicative. But nevertheless, this is what I think history is about men make history. So in that sense, there is a very big shift between Thucydides and, let's say, Orosis, or Gussis,

or Augustine or Eusebius, but not such a huge shift from Herodotus to these early Christian historians. John Burr, can I ask you, do you think that the writing of history in this period we're talking about, that Paul has brought us up to the day with, is as good as,

has deteriorated in the sense of inquiry, in the sense of writing history, when we get to something like Gregory of Tour in the first century, can you just give us some idea of the quality of inquiry, that is now afoot.

I think there is less emphasis on, for example, the interrogation of eyewitnesses. On the other hand, as very said, in Eusebius, reading Eusebius, you sometimes feel that you're reading someone much more like a modern historian because of the reliance he places on documents,

which, by and large, the ancient historians, don't. And the reason he does that is not in order to establish what happened, not in order to establish the historical facts as it were. It is in order to create a, or to present

for his readers, the heritage of Christian orthodoxy. So he's in a sense less of a historian but more of a scholar in some ways than earlier historians. But in general I think there is

less probing inquiry as it were. What there is is two things essentially, which are seem very much at odds to each other, to us, but which are actually quite unself-consciously stitched together, I think. And one is an enormous universal history. I mean, universal history becomes even more universal, because the Hebrew scriptures allow you to write a history that goes back to the creation of the world. And indeed, Gregory O'Tooah starts with the creation of the world,

and in about, I can't remember exactly, in about three books, he gets to the election of a bishop of Clermont-Ferrant. So he doesn't seem to have any sense as we would, that this is incongruous. You start off with universal history, and this becomes, I think, quite a common pattern. You start off with universal history, which is a stitching, as many says, a stitching together of Hebrew and classical history. But then you tend to move on to the very local recording of recent events. and these are not, I think, thought of as generally,

as so problematic that you go around interrogating eyewitnesses. They're very often written out of people's personal experience, and the local entity which is written about it is very often the writer's monastery, for example, of which he knows a great deal, but knows very little of what is beyond that. So it's simultaneously universal and intensely local, and much less of a probing inquiry, I think.

It's really interesting this business of the experience, say, of the life of a saint or a conversion of a people, is an intensely local experience. And yet the story is always set within a vast providential context of God's will unfolding, as you say, from the sublime to the very local like Clermont-Ferrant. But we must also remember that historical consciousness, historical research, and historical understanding are now embedded in a genre which do not proclaim themselves historia. For example, hagiography,

the development of a whole mode of writing historically about really, really important people, saints or indeed martyrs of the past, or leading figures within the church, because they are seen as tools of God's work. And indeed, when we get to someone like Bede in the early 8th century, his history again, is deeply instrumental.

Where it's suitable, he brings in miracles. Where it's suitable, he brings in exemplary figures in the past. Where it's suitable, he copies out from Roman histories or early Christian histories. But new genre are developing because of the nature of Christianity and this belief in signs and personalities that convey grace that are worth writing about. Paul, Paul. Mary, you talk about new genres, but of course, hagiography is, if you like, a Christian version of a very ancient genre, or namely, well, the incoming, but also then more, if you like, generically still biography.

And traditionally, the ancient, that's the ones we've been looking at from Herodotus onwards, the sort of the big names. They tend to draw a quite sharp distinction. Of course, characters occur in their work, and you might or might not think that a particular character drives a bit, but history is a bigger thing than any individual, and they're different generically. And Plutarch is, of course, the most famous,

ancient biographer to survive with terrific emphasis and influence on the Renaissance and later. He starts his life of Alexander the Great than whom there can be probably few greater subjects by saying I write lives, Beoy, not histori. And so that's a nod to the whole tradition of writing about the past involving humans. But Plutarch is saying, no, no, no, I'm not going to talk about, well, finance, public finance. I'm not going to be able to. of talking about diplomacy. I'm interested in individual characteristics, in anecdotes,

and there's a difference in other words of emphasis. So that's an interesting point. No, I think that's absolutely right, that there is this difference in emphasis. And, of course, when you get someone like Gregory of Tour, whom you've mentioned, or other monks or ecclesias writing, the histories of dynasties,

you get the combination of the two, because again, these kings are kings de gratia, by the grace of God. How do you write about Charlemagne, if you're Einhard in the early 9th century? Well, you have your model in Suetonius, the Roman, but also you see him as this world historical figure, a great ruler. Holy Roman Empire, is of course. That's what I want to ask, Joe.

Are we missing a trick here that is the Christian history ideologically driven in a way that classical history was not? Can you answer? Can you respond? Yes. Yusanius history is emphatically ideological from beginning to end. His targets are heretics. His targets are people who are, as it were, leading the Christian church.

And we need to refer to that, I think, more. Leading the Christian church in deviant directions. It's almost like the Communist Party. I mean, he is intensely concerned to establish orthodoxy and which are the correct authors, which ones you can believe, which ones you can accept, which are the correct traditions. That's where it's driven. And I think it's worth feeding in.

this point, that Christianity is itself an intensely historical religion. Because of the conception of a church founded by Christ, which has lasted until the present, whenever that is, and the necessity to establish the true church, the church founded by Christ, it's intensely self-consciously historical, as also because of the adoption of the Hebrew scriptures as again part of the Christian canon. So it's an historical religion,

and in that religion, in that history of the church, the classical story has its role because, mostly because of Constantine, above all, emperors like Constantine, and even Augustus before him, are given a role in the Christian providential story.

They are part of the architects of a Christian-eastern... Empire. And the Christian Empire, of course the phrase Holy Roman Empire only comes about much later, but the conception of a Christian empire goes right back to Eusebius and Erosius. And so the secular imperial history, as it were, and the history of the Christian Church are bound together in a single historical conception. Paul Lemery, yeah. I want to move on. Sure, John is right about Christianity as being ideological, but of course,

One can argue what one means by ideological, but Herodotus is driven by an idea, a great idea. And what is it that differentiates the Greeks from the Persians? Well, it's a notion of freedom, that is a political notion of freedom, that is that Greeks self-govern, whereas Persians are in effect all slaves, that is all the various members of the Persian empires, and there's only one in sense free man, and that is the Persian Emperor. And a lot of Herodotus' work is, in a way,

a meditation on this dialectic between freedom and slavery. Or we can look at it another way, and this is something maybe people want to take up, but some have argued I'm quite sympathetic to the notion that Herodotus in a sense invents the West. Because though geographically, of course, many Greeks lived in what is Asia, i.e. the East and what the Persians thought of as their sphere, as far as the Greek sources record them. By the way, we have no Persian history, historiography at all. They didn't do it.

or if they did, it hasn't survived. So we're very one-sided in our view of the Persians. But Herodotus takes the notion of freedom and slavery as almost genetic that there's something ethnic and you mentioned Melvin the fact that Greeks had many, many cities. There were about a thousand at any one time and they couldn't agree on anything. And it's a miracle that 30 of them agreed long enough to resist the Persians to win.

and they very soon fell out immediately afterwards. But nevertheless, Herodotus saw this as liberating this sort of difference. Maria then, John. Yes, just again on this point of the historical consciousness of Christianity, just to say not only the sense of purpose and the history of a church within an empire, but also wherever you are at any moment, you are part of history, but you also know the end. And that's a peculiar thing. You know what the end will be?

You have this sort of apocalyptic millinarian point, but what do you make of the present? Actually, that present drives a tremendous amount of historical speculation. Do we have to do things differently? Are we doing them right? And can we see signs in the present of the coming of the end of time? This apocalyptic moment is extremely crucial. John, you wanted to go.

Well, really just two footnotes, too, both Paul and then may have said different points. On Herodus, of course, just as a qualifying footnote, there is an ideology, it is, as it were, the very familiar one, identified with the geographical polarity of Western East, it's as recent as the Iraq War, the notion that democracy is Western autocracy, tyranny is oriental. But there are other components of that too, which are interesting, those antitheses which you get from Herodotus onwards.

One is frugality versus luxury. The Orient is the realm of luxury. and Greeks are hardy and frugal, or Westerners are hardy and frugal. And the second is masculinity and femininity. The word effeminate is used extraordinarily often from the Greeks onwards, right through to the 18th and 19th centuries of orientals, oriental culture, oriental life. It's rather puzzling sometimes, but it is an insistent theme

And as I thought now to to what Mary was saying, sorry, Mary remind me of your body and something I wanted to add to. Well, I just was emphasising this apocalyptic moment, which is extremely interesting. How do you do history when you know the end? Yes, of course. Well, the other people who, of course, know

not exactly the end in the Christian sense, but you know the present are the Roman historians of the first centuries BC and AD. they have a very strong contrast of past and present. The present is not as the past was and is greatly inferior. They have a conception of decadence. It's associated with the idea of luxury in particular. They are decadent.

And therefore, in a sense, they do have a sense of a kind of long-term cultural history, which is in fact degenerative. So the present as a reference point is important. to them too in a different way. Are we going to abandon all attempts to get to the 20th century? I'm looking at the clock, but I want to talk about the...

Oh, 21st, God. Keep forgetting. Would it be fair to say, though, that a next big shift in the way history was looked at, two things happened, if we can put these two,

and I think because of the way this is developing, this will take us quite a long way enough. But is the, the, the notions inside 16th century Renaissance humanism and the beginning then of what became could be called a fragmentation of historical points of view which led to

feminism, ethnic, so these are two things I think if we can discuss those will have done okay and apologies that we didn't we missed out the last three centuries we will return right Renaissance humanism who wants to take that on us So what, oh, lots of fingers. Oh, good, that's okay then. Mary, you start on that.

Just to say, of course, the 16th century is crucial because these frames we've been talking about collapse, the frame for ecclesiastical history. There's a massive, massive challenge to that vision of history with the coming of the Protestant history. There's a whole alternative Christian history, which is being written by the mid-16th century, the Magdeburg centuries.

And, of course, the retort by a... Catholic historiography to say, well, we ought to look at our history and check it really, really carefully. Everything. rewrite it so that it can stand up to the onslaught by Protestants. But remember, there's another thing. What is the West? So we've got a different, we've got two religious histories then. This is the beginning maybe of that particular fragmentation, the Protestant history and the Catholic history of the world.

Absolutely. And others to follow, though. Can you bring in all the others at first through? Absolutely. And then there's, of course, another dimension that, of course, what is the West? The West is now global. When you write a history of Spain, you write the history of New Spain. You write of the Philippines and Mexico and Peru and so on.

But the Catholic history itself is very self-reflective. You go back to shrines that are well established and you actually check them out. Do we have evidence of miracles and so on? So the two sides spur each other. And of course there are all the other denominations that develop as well. For a British audience, what would be really important particularly is to think of Fox's acts and monuments, an attempt in the 16th century to go back over Christian history

and to say, not only was that wrong, but Protestantism has a hidden history that goes back to the beginning of right-thinking people who were suppressed by the church and that of course is one of the great bestsellers after the Bible in England until the 19th century. John, I want to come back to you on feminism

and get it in here, Mary, because we have this Christine Epizade. Well, I want to say about the Renaissance. There are two features, I think, which have to be attended to. one is a change in the nature of the interest in the heritage of the ancient world and that is that it's no longer simply a matter of acquiring knowledge or techniques from them which was in the Middle Ages was keen on as well

it was almost a kind of identification with the mores the values of the classical world they want to recreate them in themselves academically what that does is it creates an important shift from in academic prestige as it were from law, theology, philosophy to rhetoric. They become interested in

the actual ways in which things are said because they carry as it were, the spirit of the ancient world. And so they become impatient with all the manuscript accretions that have occurred for the previous 3,000 years. They want to get 2000, 3,000 years,

they want to get back to the original text. And this means a very scrupulous kind of philological scholarship, which, this is the important point here, which is subsequently turned on later periods, which is subsequently turned on what we call them

in ages, which is subsequently turned to the political, cultural, social foundations of Europe in what previously we thought of simply as the barbaric. centuries. So the techniques are applied to the writing

subsequently of what we call medieval history. And carry through. The techniques once absorbed by historians are employed by historians in case after case after case. As Mary raised on the idea of saints, on antiquarianism, on the evidence, and so on... Paul, you want to come in. Yeah, if you want to link to modernity, I don't know how much time we're going to have, but, I mean, Gibbon is one. Don't worry about the time. That's my worry. You just worry about it's what you have to say. Yeah, I'm just thinking that Gibbon will

take you back to antiquity. Gibbon. He will sort of embrace everything because he both thinks Herodotus is the right type of his story. He wrote an essay on Herodotus very early on. On the other hand, he was a great admirer of Polybius because he thought Polybius wrote very good

causal history. He writes about the opposite of Polybius, and so he's in a way homage to Polybius because he's going down, as opposed to Polybius, going up. And then he's the heir to the enlightenment in the general intellectual sense that enlightened thinkers embraced

what we would call sociological history as well as theological history as well as secular and cultural history in particular and so I personally see myself as the air of Gibbon and given through Gibbon to ultimately Herodotus. That's my own intellectual lineage and it's from Gibbonian

comprehensive historian with one exception I think it is the major omission of all historians until the 20th century, and that's the role of women. I mean, yes, given mentions women, but the notion of a women's history or women being an important factor in writing history. No, no, this is, I think, a 20th century phenomenon. Well, it doesn't it, it came in sooner than we think, didn't it, Mary?

Well, yes, I mean, there is a tradition, I mean, that's really interesting. I mean, it's not as if the position of women and the condition of women was, it never posed a problem before. But we have, for example, very important poet in early 15th century, in the French court. Christine de Pison was the daughter of an Italian who came to the court. Her father

was an Italian court poet and she continued after him and she supported herself by her writing. And she was supposed to be a poet, not a historian at all. But simply as an intelligent woman who sees all around her, you know, the dismissing of women within the tradition, both classical and Christian, she says, look, this isn't on. I'm going to write a counter history. And she writes the book of the city of women, which is a historical inquiry into good example. from the Virgin Mary to the prophetess Judith, Miriam, and so on and so forth. So we see there are already one way in which history is used by people arguing for recognition, for justice. And in a way, that's what will happen 500 years later when feminism takes off and a history of women is written. You have to do the history in order to both document the injustice, but also to show women are up there and are worthy of full rights. And that'll happen with African-American history. That'll happen with the history

of post-colonial states in Africa and Latin America and Asia. And that gives us the history today, which is so multifaceted. John Barrow, can I ask you, you wrote about the 18th century as being a period in which historians were concerned about the state of society? Why was that such a shift? Well, I think we, I think obliquely, we've been talking about it. We've been talking about social or sociological history and its emergence, I would want to say from the 18th century rather than just in the 20th century. And the link with what I was saying earlier about the application of scholarly inquiry to the Middle Ages, actually. The core of that is the notion of what the 18th century came to call feudal society. The interest of that is

that it's a kind of history about a form of society, not about constitutions, qualities, churches, or whatever. The feudal bond, as they saw it, was a bond which was simultaneously military, agricultural, social, ideological, it carried a certain set of manners with it. And they saw, in the 18th century,

they came to see that as superseded by what they call commercial society. and the supersession of feudalism by commercial society was the story of the social history of Europe and in a sense we're still doing that finally Paul Cartley you started you started off can you sort of bring this to a conclusion do you think that the template of Herodotus

in any way or substantially obtains can you give us a brief answer to that well I think it's impossible to characterize the state of historiography in a few sentences but broadly speaking there has been, looking at it from my own ancient historian's terms, a dialectic between Thucydidean style,

what really matters is what men typically of power do in government as opposed to social, what happens to culture and society and we're now very much at the cultural end of the spectrum away from the political end of the spectrum. Thank you very much for trying that impossible feat and thank all of you. Next week we'll be talking about Jonathan Swift's

a modest proposal which suggested cannibalism as a cure to 18th century poverty. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.