Clio and Chronos

Wesleyan University
Clio and Chronos an Essay on the Making and Breaking of History-Book Time
Author(s): Elizabeth L. Eisenstein
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 6, Beiheft 6: History and the Concept of Time (1966), pp. 36-64
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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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 remarkable frequency - a thousand times in the past forty years, according 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-contradictory. 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 cognitive and technological innovations has so drastically altered the intellectual
and material environment of Western man that a kind of evolutionary "mutation" - 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 TypographicalMan (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 consequences of 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).
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 nineteenthcentury 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 slowchanging, 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 greatmutation theory merely adds a corollary: harnessed to a "run-away technology," 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 nineteenth-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 evolutionary 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 progressive. 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 philosophers of history. Such schemes, however, play a relatively minor role in more
specialized empirical studies refuting or revising the work of nineteenthcentury 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 CyclePattern Theories of History (New York, 1962), exemplifies this tendency.
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"is 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 1560-1660Essays 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 Humanity (New York, 1964), 126. The term "identity crisis" is taken from Erik Erikson,
Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and 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).
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 mechanical 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 innovations, once regarded as single inventions or discoveries which unpredictably 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 isolated 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 nineteenthcentury gradualism is altering former simple-minded notions about the sudden
advent of a single invention or discovery even while twentieth-century catastrophism 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 aesthetically 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 predicament 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, accumulation, 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 "discovery" 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.
40
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 historic 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 perpetuation of these views - abstracted from their historical contexts and inappropriately 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, cataclysmic, 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, progressive, 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 CounterRenaissance (New York, 1950), Chapter Eight, parts 3 and 4.
12. Cairns, Part II, Chapter Two.
13. On Siger of Brabant's heretical opinions about the infinite appearance and disappearance of Christianity and the periodic recurrence of the crucifixion, see E. J.
Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, transl. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford,
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 anticipated 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 pertaining 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 concepts about regress as to those about progress. Both, suggesting as they do a
steady tendency toward increasing order or increasing disorder, are not altogether open-ended.
The increasingly rich orchestration of developmental themes after the midfifteenth 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 academic 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 ChaptersThree 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 imprinted 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.
42
II. THE CONDITIONS OF SCRIBAL CULTURE
During the centurieswhich precededthe advent of printing,and for several

centuriesthereafter,one must look in a wide varietyof contextsto locate attitudes toward historical change. They will be found only occasionally in
writingsostensiblydevoted to "history"and often have to be read into such
writings.They must also be read into sagas and epics, sacred scriptures,
funeraryinscriptions,glyphs and ciphers, vast stone monuments,documents
locked in chests in munimentrooms, and marginalnotationson manuscripts.
Only graduallywere attitudesinherent in differentkinds of record-keeping
extricatedfrom their diverse contexts, worked out in differentregions by
generationsof scholars, and combined into full-fledgedgrand designs. The
capacityto workout such designsand to locate the elementswhichenteredinto
them has been acquiredrelativelyrecently.
We tend to forget the recentnessof this developmentsince ancient scribal
chronicleshave been seen in a deceptivedual format for hundredsof years.
Ever since they were firstset in type four or five centuriesago, they have been
indistinguishablefrom works deliberatelywritten for publication.They are
now studiedby perusingprintededitions,deckedout with scholarlyapparatus,
or by perusingmanuscriptversionsand collatingvariantsin orderto produce
a new, more authoritativeedition.Each such edition tells us more about how
the manuscriptwas composedand copied than was previouslyknown. By the
same tokeneach makesit more difficultto envisagehow a given manuscriptor
one of its various copies appearedto the small groups of scholars who had
limited access only to undated, untitled works written by hand that were
identified,if at all, by "incipits,"and catalogued,if at all, temporarilyby their
positionon the shelf of a given library.Historiansare trainedto discriminate
between manuscriptsources and printed texts; but they are not trained to
thinkwith equal care about how manuscriptsappearedwhen this sort of discriminationwas inconceivable- when everythingwas off the record, so to
speak,save thatwhichgot readto those who stood withinearshot.Similarlythe
more thoroughlytrainedthey are to use our presentprintedreferenceguides,
the less capablethey are of imagininghow men kept trackof temporalchange
with no uniformchronologiesor historicalatlasesto guide them.'8
1.
Before uniform reference guides could be devised and become available,

imagesof the past were orderedby a seeminglyrandom- 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
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, characterized 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 deposited on printed pages in the era of incunabula. From such ingredients,
rudimentary historical perspectives were traced by Renaissance scholars. Their
contradictory versions have plagued historiography ever since.20 Some humanists, 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-centuryhistorians 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 composed these versions. From their viewpoint, new order and symmetry were being introduced into world history, although from ours overlapping and incompatible schemes
were being developed.
44
ELIZABETH
L.
EISENSTEIN
that portrayed Elizabethan England as "an elect nation."2' They also conflicted 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.23Nor 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 printing 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 accumulating 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 Revolution: 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 nonetheless 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 pertaining to the eternal renewal of Rome,
see Eliade, 134-137; for diverse interpretationsof this theme by historiographers,reaching down to mid-nineteenth-centuryAmerican fundamentalists, Manuel, Shapes of History, 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 subsequent development 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.
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 during the 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 exercise of pious zeal by pagan or apostate, Christian or Moslem authorities led
to many book-burnings.30The 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 "magnificentlibrary" 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 "elevating copying 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 destruction of the Jerusalem Temple 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 (Supplement to the Bibliographical Society's Transactions #it6) (London, 1943), 13.
30. Thus thc great library at Cordova was destroyed by Alnmanzorin 978, muachas
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,
46
conquestsand sacksof cities often involved.But carelessnessor neglect on the

part of any one generationof custodians,unavoidableaccidents,and random
"acts of God" also underscoredthe "vanityof learning"in the era of scribal
culture."Nearlyevery monasticor cathedrallibrarysufferedfire at one time
or another."'31
During the fourteenthand fifteenth centuries in Italy, where the trade in
manuscriptsand their collectionin librarieshad reachedsizable proportions,
Civic loyalties,humanisteduscholarsbeganto be sensitiveto anachronism.32
cational reformsaffectingthe study of law and language,contrastsbetween
antiqueand Gothic styles in rhetoricand art, all may have contributedto a
rudimentaryhistoricalconsciousnessin quattrocento Florence. But without
continuousaccess to increasinglyavailabletexts made possible by the utilization of movabletype, a local revival of learningmight well have been extinguished in the disordersof the sixteenth century, as was the Carolingian
revivalafterCharlemagne'sdeath.The Laurentianlibrarymighthave suffered
the fate of the collectionof fifty thousandvolumes amassedby MathiasCorvinus, King of Hungary, which had already been despoiled before it was
sacked by the Turks at the fall of Buda in 1527.33Similarly,knowledgeof
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-burnings or the setting fire to American libraries overseas have become ritualistic and symbolic. Only two centuries ago, however - before the publication of huge source collections 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-centuryscribes 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 doubtful 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 CenturlyBook (Philadelphia, 1960), 19.
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 incunabula, 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 Alexandrian 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)," Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., XXIV, 284.
35. Had some successor of Eratosthenes written this work, it might have been "preserved"-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 corrupted copy 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
48
sometimesseemedon the verge of dawning.Views based on these experiences

were embeddedin all scribalwritings,and, down to the seventeenthcentury,it
should be remembered,these were the writings that predominatedin publishers'cataloguesand booksellers'lists.38As writtenwordswere "cheapened"
and books becamemoreplentiful,scribalviews were duplicatedin a varietyof
contexts.They thus outlivedthe culturethat had nurturedthem. The "decay
of nature"theme, which was altogethercompatiblewith the steady erosion
of manuscriptrecords,was less compatiblewith the steady accumulationof
printed materials.Yet this theme survivedto inspire pessimisticsocial philosopherswith theoriesaboutdecadenceand entropyin the nineteenthcentury.
The contentsof the Libraryof Congressor the BritishMuseumhave not been
thinned out and are not threatenedby dispersal.Alarms about the loss of
mankind'smemorymay nonethelessstill be heard.Abstractedfrom their context and perpetuatedas typologies, then, cyclical and catastrophictheories
survived. But at the same time, the rapid duplicationof useful reference
guides and the systematicdevelopmentof many forms of knowledgethat this
duplicationmade possible encouragedthe formulationof new views. The
"premiseof straight-linedirection"was powerfullyreinforcedby the progressive accumulationof recordsandthe "advancementof learning"that went with
it. It is by now so firmlyentrenchedin Westernhistoriographythat, despite
recentrevisions,it cannotbe dislodged.
Many fields of human activity have, in fact, been subject to continuous
developmentduringthe past five centuriesthat were not subjectto this kind of
developmentpreviously."Steadyadvance,"GeorgeSartonhas suggested,"implies exact determinationof every previousstep."39Not only was exact determinationimpossiblegiven the migrationof undated,untitledmanuscripts;in
any field of knowledgethat involvedlarge-scalecollectionof data, backsliding
was more commonthan advance.A comparisonof Ptolemaicworld maps of
the secondcenturywith twelfth-centurymappaemundioffers a useful corrective to modernpreconceptions.It is also noteworthythat modernconclusions
drawn from this comparisonwere not evident to fifteenth-centuryprinters,
who duplicatedboth crude and relativelysophisticatedworld-picturessimultaneouslyin an era when still more accuraterenderingsthan Ptolemy'swere
Save among closed
being traced by hand by Mediterraneancartographers.40
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 preponderanceof books published for academic markets down to the seventeenth 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.
CHRONOS
CLIO AND
49
circlesof speciallyinitiatedcraftsmen,distinctionsbetweenwhatwas advanced

on one hand and retardedon the other could not be perceived.Among all
groupstherewas, furthermore,a blurredperceptionof whatwas new and what
was old. This was partlybecause of objectiveconditions.What was "found"
by one generationhad often been previouslyfound and then lost by priorones.
The confusion of old with new, remote with recent, also involved a more
purely subjectivefactor: namely, an inability to envisage clearly or gauge
correctlydistancesbetweenone era and another.
2.
Throughoutmost of the centuriesof scribalculture,literateelites sharedwith

pre-literatefolk a commonrelianceupon oral transmissionto teach them most
of whatthey knew aboutthe past. Silentreadingwas apparentlyan unfamiliar
practice,while word of mouth was requiredto supplementthe scarce supply
of books. "Theordinaryman of our own times probablysees more ... written
matterin a week than the medievalscholardid in a year."'41Even as "publication" beforeprintinggenerallyinvolvedobtaininga publichearingfor a given
text, so too is it appropriateto think of a "hearing"ratherthan a "reading"
public as the customaryaudiencefor scribalbooks. It is essentialto keep in
mind that chroniclersand scholarswere, all of them, membersof this "hearing public,"when consideringtheirviews of history.
A sense of the past that is primarilybased on hearingtales from others is
altogetherdifferentfrom one that is primarilybased on readingthem oneself.
As a moment's reflection suggests, historical scholarship and hearsay are
fundamentallyincompatible.Speech is too fleeting to permit any listener to
pause for reflectionat all. By means of cadence and rhyme,however,speech
can preserve human memories over incrediblylong intervals of time. The
abilityof pre-literatefolk to preserveintact in their sagas and epics accounts
of episodesfrom a very distantpast invariablyappearsuncannyto those who
learn their historyfrom historybooks.42Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century
scholarswere altogetherunawareof this ability. They lived in an era when
stories previouslyacceptedby most intelligentadults were for the first time
dismissedas "fairytales"and circulatedin printedform to specializedmarkets
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.
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 corruption, 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 indefinite 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 ob43. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood, transl. R. Baldick (New York, 1962),
96-98, and Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire aux 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 generations 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 arrangementsbeyond the initial letter were, in the twelfth century, entirely
unknown (see C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century [Cambridge,
Mass., 1939], 78).
CLIO AND CHRONOS
51
served were the events of a chronicler's own epoch, those which preceded itbeginning 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 thereafter - were not writing "history," as we know it, at all, but describing contemporary 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 predecessors, 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 citystates upon the Italian peninsula, begins his account with an event that occurred when he was twelve years old. The narrative skill and analytical insight
displayed by such "historians" were applied to events within their own lifetimes, 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, analytical 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"47was 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 countryside 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.
52
that persistaboutdatingpreciselyall mannerof events,such as Charlemagne's

coronation,recordedin the remote past; about determiningwhen the New
Year beganin differentregionsthroughoutEurope, or even withinthe Italian
peninsuladuringthe earlymodernera; about synchronizingMoslem, Chinese,
or Jewish chronologieswith our own at present;or about decidingupon appropriatecostumesand settingwhenproducinga,Shakespeareanplay. Down to
the era when maps and books could be duplicatedon a scale unknownbefore,
andfor at least two centuriesthereafter,manycourtiersand chroniclerstended
to shuffleCaesar,Charlemagne,Alexander,and David like kings in a pack of
cards.The mentalprocesswhichis now takenfor granted(save by pre-school
children) 49 of reachingbackthroughthe orderlysequenceof chaptersin history
books to locate such figures was relativelyrecently acquired.The "abstract
conceptof a uniformworld-widetime"was unthinkablebeforethe seventeenth
century.50Among ruralfolk in most regions,among urban artisansin many,
achronicityprevaileduntil the last century;it was by then a concomitantof
illiteracy.But a highlyliterateelite throughoutthe continenthad, duringprior
centuries,relied just as heavily on oral transmissionand was similarlyunfamiliar with a standardizedhistory-bookformat and uniform chronology.
Before the readingof chaptersseparatedby pagination5'displacedthe hearing
of tales deliveredin rhythmiccadence by a living narratoror re-enactedby
troupesof mummers,memoryof all past episodes,whethervery remoteor very
recent,remainedequallyvivid."SirPilate,"the villainousSaracen,was a familiar figurein medievalmysteryplays. Costumechangesover the course of centuries were unnoticed; manuscriptillustrationsclothed Trojan warriorsin
medievalgarb, and manuscripttexts depictedAchilles, Medea, Aeneas, and
Dido as barons and damsels.52We have alreadyremarkedthat sensitivityto
49. But even our two- and three-year-oldshave 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-centurymanuscripts). 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-differentiatedbook-and-chapterheadings 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 importance of printing and engraving in making visible costume changes up to then unperceived is a paradigm of what happened to all previously unperceived 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.
CLIO AND CHRONOS
53
anachronismin quattrocento Florenceprecededprinting.But it is equallyimportantto stressthat, well afterclassicalforms had been visuallyreunitedwith
classical spirit and Ciceronianprose had been sharply differentiatedfrom
medievalLatin,time intervalsstill tendedto be contractedin such a way as to
suggest- even to sophisticatedFlorentinehistoriansand scholarlyChristian
humanists- a much closer relationshipto the institutionsof the Roman
Republicor those of the churchfathersthan men subsequentlyinfluencedby
nineteenth-century
history-booktime could ever experience.53
III. ASPECTS OF HISTORY-BOOK TIME
Much as spokenLatin and chantedverse were transformedafterthe adventof

printing, so, too, what is sometimes called the "collective memory" was
graduallyaltered.Elaboratemnemonictechniques,passed down throughthe
ages, began to wither from disuse.54The function of transmittingmessages
fromthe past was detachedfrom humanvoices and entrustedto book-readers,
who were taughtto look on libraryshelves, in cataloguesor referenceguides
for permanently-storedinformationavailable for retrieval.A vast abstract
referencesystemmade it possible to locate all data uniformlyon time scales
and global maps. Despite imperfectsynchronizationof intractablemanuscript
chronologies, events vaguely and diversely placed by different groups of
chroniclerswere assignedidenticalpositions by all. But, althougheverything
could be permanentlystored for possible retrievalby this uniformreference
system, the system was so capaciousthat no single mind could possibly encompassall the datait could hold - howeverthey 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 literary art that counterfeitedreality were requiredto
recapturethose ever largerportionsof the past that were no longer preserved
by oral tradition.
Removed from living memories and fixed to printedpages, more remote
events lost their vividness and immediacy.They tended to go out of mind
53. Panofsky, 41, provides evidence that visual differences between cinquecento and
ancient Greek sculpture were not perceived by sixteenth-centuryconnoisseurs, thus suggesting that his thesis of a Renaissance "estrangement"from the past and of the new
fixed perspective which placed classical antiquity at a distance needs to be qualified.
Evidence that sixteenth-century French humanists scorned medieval anachronisms only
to invert them by presenting Celtic and Carolingian warriors in Roman postures is
offered by George Huppert, "The Renaissance Background of Historicism," History and
Theory V (1966), 52 n.18.
54. The role of the Ars memorandain medieval curricula is stressed by E. P. Goldschmidt, The Printed Book of the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1950), 48.
54
wheneverthey went out of sight. They could be recalled only by scholars

trainedto study a literarypast, whose relation to the living present became
increasinglyproblematic.For althoughthe once-familiardeeds of dead men
came to be interredin dusty volumes,they could also be disinterredby published "resurrections."
New authorslearnedto simulatethe passageof time as
old bardsnever had. As they sought silentlyto imitatethe voices of different
generations,they became more attentive to the features that distinguished
differentspiritsof differenttimes. They could examinethese featuresbecause
customsand styles that had ceased to be used, or been invisiblytransformed,
werenow embalmedand couldbe artificiallyrevived.
A new self-consciousnessabout"makinghistory"accompaniedthe new selfconsciousnessabout writingit. Both imitationand innovationbecame more
deliberateand explicit.Points of referencewere establishedto markformerly
unperceivedchangesin languagesand customs,unnoticeddeparturesin styles
of thoughtand expression.Many such unperceivedchanges, once they were
renderedvisible,also came to serveas pointsof no return.Lines drawnby one
generation- the condemnation of a heresy, the excommunicationof a
schismatic king, the settling of disputes between warring dynasts, schisms
within the body politic- could less easily be erased by the next. Relatively
amorphoussocial flux was frozen;the cake of custom had either to be more
deliberatelypreservedor more deliberatelybroken. Decisions became irrevocable, innovationsmore purposefuland directedto the future. New legal
fictionswere devised- not to withstandthe erosion of invisiblechanges but
to accommodatevisible ones - to patent industrialprocesses or copyright
literarycreations.55
Recognitionof inventionand authorshipwent togetherwith new attitudes
toward authorityand traditionand toward the "dead hand" of old scribes.
Venerationfor the collectivewisdomof the ages was modifiedas ancientsages
were retrospectivelycast in the role of individualinnovators,prone to human
error,capableof beingcorrectedor improvedupon. The studyof the ancients,
the close imitationof classicalmodels,the searchfor primarysources,became
more academicand less inspirational.Gainingaccess to an "original"source
no longermeantin all branchesof learningcomingcloser to a pure, clear, and
certainbody of knowledgethathad subsequentlybeen corruptedand confused.
The very term "original"was semanticallyreorientedtowardthe futurerather
than the past. Authentictexts, maps, charts,arrangedand dated,turnedout to
be dated in more ways than one. Defects and contradictionshithertounper55. An early landmark in the history of literary property rights occurred in 1469
when a Venetian printer obtained a privilege to print and sell a given book for a given
interval of time (C. Blagden, The Stationers Company, A History: 1403-1959 [London,
1960], 32). According to Forbes and Dijksterhuis, I, 147, the state of Venice was also
the first to provide legal protection for inventors in 1474.
CLIO AND CHRONOS
55
ceived or glossed over now became visible. Doubt of all received opinion
replaced necessary reliance upon it. The search for first principles could be
undertaken in some fields by trying to slough off, rather than by trying to
reconcile, incompatible portions of an inherited tradition. In short, a "tradition of the new" was launched, and a quarrel between "ancients and moderns,"
perpetuated down to the present, was inaugurated as well.
1.
Similarly, as one might expect, appeals to "posterity" became more frequent

as men of letters became more confident that such appeals would reach future
audiences. "Even in the seventeenth century, when printing had become
commonplace . . . Galileo esteemed as the most stupendous of all inventions
that which enabled a man to speak to millions from afar and even to generations unborn."56The confidence that voices from the past would resound into
the future had, to be sure, earlier inspired some ancient chroniclers. "History's
function . . . to commend the just and hold up the evil to the reprobation of
posterity" had long ago been noted by Tacitus.57 The success of Tacitus and
Suetonius in determining how future generations regarded a Nero or a Caligula
would, indeed, inspire many efforts to emulate these ancient historians. But
although printing served to amplify the carrying power of those manuscript
histories which survived, even the new presses could do nothing for eulogists
of Roman emperors whose works had been destroyed. The loss of such works
and of many other ancient texts had been final. Total loss of this kind, associated with the catastrophic fall of Rome, continued to haunt Western scholars
and to influence their writings until the advent of printing. Even afterwards,
the fall of Rome was regarded as a catastrophe; but this fall could be more
safely located in a dead past. Confidence in posterity need no longer be
counterbalanced, as in prior eras, by uncertainty about possible turns of
fortune's wheel.
Before printing, confidence in the "verdict of posterity" had depended
directly upon the continuity of political institutions designed to maintain law
and order, and, as a result, to prevent wanton destruction of manuscripts.
Leaders who were associated with the defense of the peace could count upon
the allegiance of those with a genuine scholarly vocation. Ambivalence about
Christian assaults on pagan letters and fear of war within Christendom went
together with the love of books from the age of Jerome to that of Erasmus.
56. Preserved Smith, The Enlightenment 1687-1776 (A History of Modern Culture
II) (New York, 1934), 276. Possibly printing was a "common-place"in 1632, but the
issues it posed for the traditional custodians of manuscript culture were still explosive
ones - as Galileo had every reason to know.
57. Cited by Thompson, I, 88.
56
The associationof the advancementof learningwith the maintenanceof

peace encouragedbelief in the possibilityof a "perpetualpeace," after print
had ensuredthe perpetualcontinuityof learningand letters. Even advances
in weaponry,regardedon Renaissancebalance sheets as debits, were, in the
eighteenthcentury,interpretedas going hand in hand with advancesin the
peaceful arts of civilization.For, as Gibbonput it, in order to conquer,barbariansnow had to "ceaseto be barbarous;gradualadvancesin the science of
war would always be accompanied,as we may learn from the example of
Russia, with a proportionableimprovementin the arts of peace and civil
policy."58But as confidencein posteritywas detachedfrom fear of warfare,
men of letterscould also become- as some did - increasinglycarelessabout
institutionalcontinuity.They could affordto be unconcernedabout the wars
of kings, and regardthem, along with other follies, as fit subjectsfor satire
ratherthan for tragedy.They could also affordwholeheartedlyto lend their
pens to the advocacy of violence in pursuit of a cause. "Clerks"became
"treasonable"when they were no longer restrainedby concern with safeguardingtheir products,and became instead concernedthat the languagein
whichtheirworkswere writtenwould reach expandingmarkets.
By the nineteenthcentury,this new kind of confidencein posteritywent
hand in hand with a growinguncertaintyabout holdingthe attentionof "generations unborn."Eighteenth-centurymen of letters tended to encouragea
free tradein ideas and the habit of independentbook reading.They appeared
confidentthatthe days of the traditionalcustodiansof manuscriptculturewere
ending,andthey expectedtheirmessagesto be heardfrombeyondtheirgraves.
Their descendantswere more apt to worry about problemsarisingfrom the
unprecedentedaccumulationof such messages,with crowdedconditionswithin
the Towerof Babel. Ever since the copyisthad been supplantedby the printer
and a secondhandbook tradesupplementedby a new book market,59the Republicof Lettershad been expandingin a way which made it increasinglyless
possiblefor any singlenew messageto be heeded.
Drowned out by the seemingly harmoniousresonance from beyond the
grave, interferedwith by the cacophonyproducedby competingcontemporaries- by the end of the nineteenthcentury,every authorcould still appeal
to posterity,but none could take for grantedthat he would be heard.Indeed,
the more stridentthe tone adoptedby one generation,the more deafeningthe
"staticinterference"becamefor the next. We need not analyzethe varietyof
reactions: despairat what appearedto be a movementtoward anarchy;the
search for waves of the future upon which to ride; commitmentto political
58. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York, Modern
Library, n.d.), II, 942.
59. The extent to which the manuscript book trade was almost wholly secondhand
is noted by BUhler, 33.
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57
action in order to guaranteefuture fame; retreat into ivory towers from

which to assail impersonal markets and invisible publics; competition to
capture, by vulgarization,the new mass audience or to entice, by esoteric
mystification,the avant-gardeelite.They are all too familiarsince they are now
being duplicatedeverywhereand with ever greater frequency.Nor will we
pause over the many explanationsofferedfor the sense of increasingdisorder
that becameprevalenttowardthe end of the last centuryand the beginningof
this one. Certainlymany forms of social change contributedto fin-de-siecle
pessimism and anti-intellectualism.The point is that diminishedconfidence
amongmany men of lettershad much less to do with propheticanticipations
of lightsgoing out all over Europethan with the utilizationof the steam press
in the earlynineteenthcenturyand of the linotypeand monotypemachinessix
or seven decadeslater.
This point is pertinentto alarmsrecentlysoundedregardingthe ominousconsequencesof the becloudingof our "imageof the future."60Up to the fifteenth
century,such imagestendedto wax and wane more or less in phase with the
stabilityor instabilityof social institutions;broadly speaking,they were apt
to be moreboldlyassertedand clearlydefinedin times of peace and prosperity
than in times of war and upheaval.But one must also considerthe possibility
that views of the futurewere affectedby entirelydifferentperturbationsafter
the adventof typography.Here, as elsewhere,a fundamentaldisparitybetween
scribalviews and modernones has been veiled by print-madepatterns.
When printingmade it possiblefor scholarsto try to read the entirecourse
of humanhistory,the vast bulk of their evidencewas drawn,of course, from
the age of scribes.This evidencelent itself to theories (such as Vico's) associatingbardicversewithyouthfulvigor,scholarlyeruditionwith senileossification. For when accumulatedmanuscriptrecordsperished,as they invariably
did in societies subjectto social disorganization,the less vulnerablechain of
living memoriesprovidedby tellersof tales and singersof songs assumedthe
functionof transmission,until institutionsdevelopedwhich permittedscribes
and copyiststo begin again.Prose and eruditionthus appearedas a preludeto
the fall of Rome or Constantinople- althoughit had been merely a consequenceof their capacityto endure.Poetry and myth appearedas a preludeto
the foundationof empires- althoughit had been merely the only available
methodof transmissionin primitiveor disorderedsocieties.
Althoughevidencedrawnfrom scribalculturelent itself to such literarylifecycle patterns,muchof ancienthistoryhad to be distortedin orderto conform
neatly with them. They were altogetherinappropriateto developmentsthat
came after the mid-fifteenthcentury.Neverthelessthey proved congenial to
60. These alarms appear throughout two massive volumes by F. L. Polak, The Image
of the Future, transl. E. Boulding (Leyden, 1961).
58
nineteenth-century romanticists and medievalists and were powerfully reinforced by fin-de-siecle reactions to entirely different problems associated with
a permanent, cumulative, rapidly proliferating print-made culture. Consequently, as the output of erudite scholarly industries increased, premature
obituaries about every aspect of Western culture-from
the death of the
novel to that of God - were posted over and over again. Images of the future
during the last century register, with relative accuracy, what happened to
image-makers. If we are attentive to the clues they offer, we shall not be sanguine about the possibility that eighteenth-century confidence in posterity will
be reasserted soon again. Fortunately, the fate of the image-makers provides
no infallible portents of what will happen next -to
us, to them, or to the
novel, or God.
2.
Similarly, views pertaining to the course of history at present may tell us more
about what has happened to historians than about what has happened to the
society in which we live. According to Alfred Weber and Geoffrey Barraclough,
we stand at the end and outside of the traditionalhistory of the schools and universities, . . . we are beset by a new sense of uncertaintybecause we feel ourselves
on the thresholdof a new age to which previous experienceoffers no sure guide.
As Raymond Aron has noted, however, sentiments of this sort have been manifested by each generation, in turn, for over one hundred and fifty years:
From the beginning of the nineteenth century every European generation has
believed in the uniquenessof its own period. Does the very persistenceof this conviction in itself indicatethat it was unfounded?Or was it rather a kind of premonition, the truth of which has been borne out by our own generation, and which
must, therefore,have been false in the case of our predecessors?If we hesitate to
ascribe error . . . to every generation but our own, can we suggest a third hypothesis, namely, that all of them have been right, not individually,but regarded
as a whole . . ?
In other words it would seem to be a fact, or at least a plausible hypothesis, that
the last century has seen a kind of revolution,or more precisely a mutation which
began before the nineteenth century, but whose rate of change has accelerated
duringthe past few decades.62
The first question Aron poses surely deserves to be considered more carefully.
"Does the very persistence of this conviction in itself indicate that it was unfounded?" A recurrent sense of discontinuity between generations may well
have less to do with recent transformations of the social landscape than with
the way men were and are being trained to perceive this landscape. Indeed,
61. Barraclough, 1.
62. Aron, 15-16.
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59
this repetitive experience, undergone by each generation, does appear to be

built into the way our present time-scale is ordered and our surveys of the past
are narrated.
Although we must, in fact, reckon backward from the present year to date
accurately any past occurrence, all our reference systems and books still employ - for the sake of convenience and in place of any feasible alternative a chronology based upon the Christian calendar, which numbers our centuries
forward from the Incarnation.63 The illusion encouraged by this numerical
forward progression is powerfully reinforced by a narrative drive, which is
invariably harnessed to it; so that chains of retrospection are pushed forward
toward the problematic present which we momentarily inhabit. Readers are
thus forced to turn their backs on the limitless vistas that now extend historical
time into prehistoric eras and beyond, ending ultimately in cosmological
mystery; they are, instead, mentally propelled to a precarious vanishing point
defined by their own brief and mortal life-span.
Introduced as a child to this history-book time, using it constantly to sort
out and arrange any portion of the past he encounters, to find his ancestors or
to "find himself," almost every literate member of our present society becomes
increasingly accustomed to unfold in his mind an imaginary book of world
history. The story he tells himself moves in the same direction as his own
growth processes. It grows more familiar as he comes of age, and appears most
compelling when he is most vulnerable to the illusory sense of acceleration
that results from the slow-down of physiological processes. The narrative
begins somewhat vaguely "once upon a time," with childhood fables intermingled with archaeological findings gleaned from exotic, far-off, ancient
lands. But it does not peter out vaguely with a reference to some remote
country where everyone lives "happily ever after." It always stops just short
of the immediate present, closing off the most personally significant, densely
packed, fact-crowded final chapter. Because of the way the story is told, its
"end" appears to encapsulate both meanings of that paradoxical term: a goal
to be sought and the completion of a process. All events appear to point to this
"end"; the purposeful strivings of successive generations seem to find their
ultimate meaning in it. But the "pilgrimage of Western Man" is also brought
to completion with this end. The pilgrim, himself, is left to grope, often blindly,
toward an unknown destiny. Unlike his ancestors, who may be safely located
within the "traditional history" of the schools he attended as a youth, he must
find himself somewhere outside this history. He is destined always to be
poised as an adult on the threshold of a new age, where previous experience
offers no sure guide.
63. Uniform adoption of this convention is quite recent. Only two centuries ago
historians were still debating over whether one should count forward from the Creation
or the Flood, or backward from the birth of Christ. (Butterfield, 50.)
60
Every modernhistorianhas, thus, to contend with the experienceso well

exemplified- with characteristicirony- by Henry Adams, with the sense
that the entire course of human history is pointed to a single end-product.
This productmay be the generationinto which the historianhappens to be
born - a generationthat it destinedto suffermuch travailas it gives birth to
a new era. Or, if the historianis given to solipsisttendencies,the end-product
turns out to be the historianhimself, that single wide-rangingreader whose
mind,travelingacrossthe centuries,must end its journeywith a self-encounter:
"No such accidenthad everhappenedbeforein humanhistory.For him alone,
the old universewas throwninto the ash heap and a new one created."64For
well over a century, several old universeshave been thrown into ash heaps
only to be rescuedtherefromby membersof the next generationwho find the
action to have been premature- it should have been postponeduntil their
own arrivalon the scene: "Thedate that divideshumanhistoryinto two equal
partsis well withinliving memory.... In a very real sense the changesin the
state of mankindsince the date of my birthhave been greaterthanthe changes
that took place in many thousands of years before this date."65Mentally
inhabitinghistory-booktime, alwaysbornduringthe penultimatechapter,each
generationdiscoversthat many earlierturningpoints have failed to turn after
all, while remainingconvincedthat the real "greatdivide,"the final playing
out of the old tradition,is occurringin its own day and age. Guizot and
Macaulaywere carried to the "final"triumphof "middle-classliberalism,"
Ranketo thatof the Prussianstate,Marxto the finalclass struggle,Spenglerto
the declineof the West. And today, after a progressionof ever more thunderous and crashingfinales,all of us have arrivedat the end of Westerncivilization, the "dawnof universalhistory,"the adventof "post-historicman"- or
merelyat anotherpreludeto anotherfin-de-sie'cle,destinedto be transmuted,
seven or eight decadeshence, into anotherbelle epoque.
In short,crisesseem to accumulateas time is repeatedlythrownout of joint.
Narrative drive harnessed to chronologicalprogression has resulted in a
repeatedbreakageof perspectiveat the point of the present.Althougha recent
essayistcalls upon historiansto fuse more completelytheir methods of retrospectiveanalysiswith the "grandsweep"of the narrativeline,"66the unfortunate cumulativeimpactof successivedislocationsresultingfrom this practice
64. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Cambridge,
Mass., 1918), 5. Compare Adams's account of how he was abruptly severed from the
eighteenth century by the opening of the Boston and Albany Railroad, the appearance
of the first Cunard steamer, and the advent of telegraph wires with Samuel Eliot
Morison's conviction that "the internal combustion engine, nuclear fission and Dr. Freud"
had cut his generation adrift from that of Adams's era. (Vistas of History [New York,
1964], 24.)
65. Boulding, 7-8.
66. H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and Science (New York, 1964), 86-88, 107.
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61
has to be considered.Each new "grandsweep"must traversea series of previous collision points. Each, in turn, creates a new, more formidableone. Dissolved when examined separatelyand retrospectivelyanalyzed, these same
collision points, when synthesizedin broad surveys,are mergedinto a single,
- into a "kindof revolution"or "mutation."Here again,
vast transformation
muchthat is currentlyattributedto the severanceof bonds with the past may
more plausiblybe attributedto an inability to sever any such bonds. The
illusion of rapid change is enhancedby a mental movementacross so many
great divides in so short a span of time. The permanence,rather than the
transience,of each imprint made by prior generationsis illustratedby the
successionof "final"chaptersthat now form a prologueto our present.
IV. SUMMARYAND CONCLUSION
All views of historical change are conditioned by how events have been
recorded,stored, retrieved,and transmitted.A "primitive"achronicitystemming from relianceon oral transmissionwas only partlymodifiedby a scribal
culture,constantlyenfeebledby erosion, corruption,and loss. Views of historicalchange,inscribedon ancientmanuscripts,were more clearlyarticulated
afterthese manuscriptswere firstset in type. Thereaftera permanent,cumulative print-madeculturefosterednew views associatedwith continuousprocess
and open-endeddevelopment.But scribal accountswere also perpetuatedin
print. Catastrophicand cyclical theories were subject to amplificationand
elaboration,whenever and whereverthe new developmentalconcepts were
found wanting.Old schemeswere revivedand extendedeven while new ones
were superimposedand traced backwards.The disparitybetween basically
dissimilarcultureswas veiled as the entire course of humanhistorywas patternedaccordingto one model or another.The degreeto which scholarswere
freed from old problemsby the mechanicalduplicationof records and the
extentto which new problemswere createdby permanenceand accumulation
went undetected.Distractedby the necessity of masteringa large literature
devoted to tangentialissues, historianshave yet to come to terms with the
very real problems inherent in the communicationssystem they use. As a
consequence,these problemstend to be displaced.
Historicalperspectiveshave been set askewby certaindistortionsthat result
fromthe way historicaldataare at presenthandled.Use of uniformtime-charts
and global maps makes it possible to store all data for subsequentretrieval.
But the use of these referenceguides also encouragesthe uniform processing
of all data, abstractedfrom dissimilarand varying contexts. Special studies
devotedto replacingevidencewithin its appropriatecontexts are not lacking.
In fact, most monographsare directedto this end. But these special studies
62
cannot be synthesizedin terms of a referencesystem that ignoreshow actual

communitieshave been diverselycircumscribed,isolatedor linked,by prevailing transportand communicationssystems.Accordingly,in almost all general
surveys and classroom manuals, easily manipulatedabstractionsassociated
with hypotheticaleras are substitutedfor more intractableempiricalfindings
drawnfrom real regions.
Inculcatedat an early age and reinforcedthereafter,mental chronological
progressionfrom one hypotheticalera to anotherconveys illusions about the
course of historythat have to be unlearnedwith considerabledifficulty.Most
membersof the readingpublic, most authorsand scholarsnever do unlearn
these illusions. The ability to do so is relativelyesoteric and conveyed only
by the professionaltrainingof historians.Yet professionalhistorians,however they steep themselvesin dusty recordsor exercisetheir historicalimagination, are in some ways more prone to think in terms of the abstractions
associatedwith history-booktime than are other academicsor membersof
the lay public.As studentsthey have similarlybeen "fed, in lecture and textbook, sweeping assertionsabout the course of history, most of which have
been borrowedfrom earlier teachers and writers."67They are apt to learn
their lessons more carefully,to absorb such teachingsmore completelythan
fellow studentswho go on to pursue other activities.They are more accustomed to the constantuse of a chronologicalreferencesystemwhen consulting
card files or organizinglectures,and become adept at mentallyfiling all data
automatically,in accordancewith this system. As a consequencethey are
sometimeshamperedwhen engagedin researchby a false sense of the distance
that separatesthem from those of their predecessorswhose recordsthey have
chosen to explore.
Those who investigatethe past are in some ways more remote from, in
other ways more directlyconditionedby the experienceof prior generations
than an illusory distance measuredby evenly-numberedtime intervals suggests. The mental habits of scholars who lived only six hundredyears ago
are as remotefrom our presentones as those of scholarswho lived two thousand years ago. Yet messagesinscribedby ancientwritersstill find their way
into modernhistorybooks. Not only in the granddesignsdevisedby contemporaryphilosophersof historybut also in more prosaictexts and surveys,old
archetypesmay be perceivedbeneath new stereotypes,ancient contradictory
epochal divisionsbeneathmodernperiodizationschemes. Reliance on a uniform referencesystemthat indicateshow all data may be storedbut offers no
guidanceat all as to what shouldbe retrievedor how it should be transmitted
necessitatesrecourseto older guidelines.How old these guidelinesare is difficult to determinebecause uniformprocessinghas rejuvenatedthem. Some
67. W. B. Willcox, "The Historian's Dilemma," The Journal of Modern History 36
(1964), 180.
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CHRONOS
63
appear to be very old indeed. Nor is this surprising when one considers that
continuous borrowing from old texts in order to compose new ones goes back
to the era of glossators, chroniclers, and copyists.
Continuous borrowing suggests how persistent some scribal traditions still
are. Many history courses are still taught and many history books still written
as if a thin lifeline to the past had to be preserved. There is, however, no
longer any single body of knowledge that can be committed to memory and
transmitted from one generation to another. There is instead a variety of different investigatory techniques enabling successive generations to master
selected portions of the past that happen to impinge on their particular concerns. Among these concerns at present is a widespread conviction that the
times are out of joint. Historians could employ their craft to better advantage
by investigating this conviction than by perpetuating it. Clearly, guidelines
fashioned when written records were scarce are ill-suited to an era when
printed records are overabundant and verbal messages travel with the speed
of light. The reverse of this proposition is, however, also true. New conceptual
schemes contrived by behavioral scientists utilizing the full resources of a
print-made culture are also ill-suited for guidance in understanding the experience of prior generations. When applied to past data, such schemes only
exacerbate the distortions that arise from uniform processing. No group of
scholars is better equipped to correct such distortions than are historians.
Borrowing tools from other trades sets perspectives askew, as does reliance
on old guidelines. Only by using the tools appropriate to their craft to examine
more carefully their own preconceptions can historians remedy the defects in
their present theories. Other groups of scholars might profit if this were done.
In an age that has seen the deciphering of Linear B and the discovery of the
Dead Sea scrolls, there appears to be little reason to be concerned about "the
loss of mankind's memory." There are good reasons for being concerned
about the overloading of its circuits. With each decade that passes, the matters
historians have been trained to understand are not receding from view. To
the contrary, most aspects of the past have become ever more accessible and
visible. They impinge on the modern consciousness from so many directions
that they tax the capacity of the human intelligence to order them coherently.
The voracious appetite of Chronos was feared by men in the past. An equally
monstrous capacity to disgorge appears to be more of a threat at present.
This should be read as a call to action, not taken as a sign of defeat. To
portray historians as the somewhat hapless victims of a "runaway technology"
is not at all my intention. Traditional frameworks have proved inadequate to
encompass a perpetual increase in cognitive oLUtpUt. Apparently the time has
come to reconstruct a more suitable stage of history. I do not believe this is
beyond present capacities. I would only insist that the task of distinguishing
64
between spurious and genuine discontinuitiescan no longer be postponed,

shruggedoff, displaced,or evaded by talking about "transitional"eras, some
of which are more "transitional"than others. Because carelesstraversalof a
real discontinuitythat is five centuriesold has, in my view, made this task
more difficult,I have tried to focus attentionupon it.
If I am right,it would seem that the only possible way out of the present
impasse is to retracemore carefullythe paths that have led to it. Between
the age of scribes and that of printerslies a real "great divide" whose full
dimensionsmust be probed before it may be imaginativelybridged by any
scholar.The inventionof movabletype representsalso a decisive point of no
return in human history. It introducedchanges that have transformed,in
Bacon'swords,"the appearanceand state of the whole world."Since the consequencesof this inventionhave affectedboth the data he examines and his
methods of examination,no historiancan affordto ignore them. His equipment is particularlysuited to the task of exploringthem. Nothing more is
requiredfor historiansto master the problems presented by a permanent
cumulativeprint-madeculturethan to use more deliberatelyand hence exploit
more profitablythe ample resourcesthis culturehas placed at their disposal.
American University
Washington, D.C.

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I. THE PRESENT PREDICAMENT

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once was called the "advancement of learning" and "improvements" in the

technology, Freudian psychology, or existentialist philosophy employed to

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movements, and modes of production. We must simultaneously attend to all the

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II. THE CONDITIONS OF SCRIBAL CULTURE

During the centurieswhich precededthe advent of printing,and for several

Before uniform reference guides could be devised and become available,

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significant - association of events. Historical events happened "once upon a

23. On the ancient Near-Eastern background of notions pertaining to cosmic weeks,

ing investigation of this issue.

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like Eratosthenes, the "father of chronology" - or those who had access to

conquestsand sacksof cities often involved.But carelessnessor neglect on the

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sometimesseemedon the verge of dawning.Views based on these experiences

circlesof speciallyinitiatedcraftsmen,distinctionsbetweenwhatwas advanced

Throughoutmost of the centuriesof scribalculture,literateelites sharedwith

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47. Chaytor, 26.

that persistaboutdatingpreciselyall mannerof events,such as Charlemagne's

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Much as spokenLatin and chantedverse were transformedafterthe adventof

wheneverthey went out of sight. They could be recalled only by scholars

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Similarly, as one might expect, appeals to "posterity" became more frequent

The associationof the advancementof learningwith the maintenanceof

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action in order to guaranteefuture fame; retreat into ivory towers from

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this repetitive experience, undergone by each generation, does appear to be

Every modernhistorianhas, thus, to contend with the experienceso well

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IV. SUMMARYAND CONCLUSION

cannot be synthesizedin terms of a referencesystem that ignoreshow actual

between spurious and genuine discontinuitiescan no longer be postponed,

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