Introduction:

Antiquarianism and
Intellectual Life in
Europe and China

Peter N. Miller
and François Louis

Until very, very recently, mentioning “antiquarianism” to most histori-

ans would elicit expressions of disdain and, even more tellingly, disas-
sociation. If the achievements of modern scholarship represented the
gains of disciplinarity and “expertise,” antiquarianism represented for
many its opposite: prescientific polymathy and dilettantism. Over the
past two decades, however, perceptions have changed. Now, as the his-
tory of scholarship has burgeoned into a respected field of academic
study, antiquarianism has emerged as an important precursor of the
modern historical sciences and their associated museum culture.
How, exactly, antiquaries and antiquarian learning are to be po-
sitioned within early modern intellectual life remains a real puzzle.
There is still no such thing as a familiar received history of antiquarian-
ism that could help us resolve it, and even our knowledge of the mean-
ing of antiquarianism itself remains tentative. This dim recognition of
the important and troubling proximity of the old antiquarian and the
modern historian is made still more complicated when we turn from
European antiquarianism, for which of course the term was “coined,”
to non-European antiquarianisms.1 In this volume we restrict ourselves
to a comparison with Chinese antiquarianism, probably the most sub-
stantial of these traditions (though we acknowledge that were we able
to undertake a still wider comparison, we might emerge with different
emphases). As with the European tradition, in China too we confront a
discontinuity between past and current practice, not least as a result of
2 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China

the intense international scholarly exchange of the past century. But in

addition we need also to reflect on whether “antiquarianism” is mean-
ingfully applied to China at all.
So, let us then begin with some definitions, however general, in the
interest of establishing a common analytical framework.
What was antiquarianism? It is a European word adapted for a Euro-
pean phenomenon. Strictly speaking, it refers to the investigations of the
past conducted by antiquaries, scholars who studied antiquity through its
material remains as well as through its texts (it was the material angle that
was new). In the European Renaissance, the antiquarius was the lover of
antiquity, and antiquitates referred to the systematic and comprehensive
study of the ancient world—typically synchronic rather than diachronic
in structure. Religion, law, calendars, clothing, games, food—all these
were reconstructed, often painstakingly, from the flotsam and jetsam of
the past. Most of these scholars worked from textual remains, but some
made the move to join the study of words to that of things. Antiquarian-
ism was a form of study which contemporaries saw as related either to
history or to pedantry (depending on their perspective).
When was antiquarianism? The practice and, indeed, the term of art
have their origins with Marcus Terrentius Varro in the first century in
Rome. And the roots of his practice may go back still further, as far, even,
as fifth-century BCE Greece. Chronologically, the great age of antiquar-
ies is coincident with the European Renaissance. Indeed, it has even
been suggested that the definition of the Renaissance as the revival of
antiquity really means a revival of the study of antiquity. Some of the most
interesting antiquarian scholarship was done in the seventeenth century.
But it is the eighteenth century, with the widening social appeal of anti-
quarian scholarship, that saw its greatest cultural diffusion: in literature,
architecture, and style. With transformed, and often marginalized, social
prestige, the practice continued on into the nineteenth century and in
less obvious ways continues still.
Who were the antiquaries? In the Renaissance, the group was closely
connected with the humanist movement and, especially, with philology,
the study of texts in their historical context. In a way, one could view phi-
lology and antiquarianism as complementary, each in its own way adding
up to the recovery of the whole that was ancient civilization. Indeed,
one could argue that the relationship between philology and antiqui-
ties, or the material remains of the past, lies at the heart of humanism.
There were many points of entry to this material; one of the greatest anti-
quaries of the fifteenth century was a self-taught merchant from Ancona
 Introduction 3

called “Cyriac,” while his contemporaries Poggio Bracciolini and Biondo

Flavio were part of the dominant cultural-industrial complex of the time
(the Roman Curia). By the second half of the sixteenth century, the im-
pact of the revolution in legal study offered a whole other explanatory
matrix for studying the past. Here, texts offered the best access to the
past. At the same time, medical doctors, not least because of their neces-
sarily empirical practice (they had to cure patients, not just write about
Galen), drew close to the equally autoptic approach of antiquaries. In
these cases, the encounter with the object is the site of meaning.
Philologists, lawyers, and doctors are the dominant professional iden-
tities of antiquaries in the seventeenth century. And the Europe of the
antiquaries was the Republic of Letters. While not all its denizens were
antiquaries, this network of letter-writing and, sometimes, visiting schol-
ars facilitated not just the study of the past, but bringing the past home.
Indeed, by the eighteenth century, the social range is extended still fur-
ther; travel, the commercial revolution, and mobility of taste made the
study of antiquity an object for fashionable engagement. Indeed, “neo-
classicism” was the high-water mark of the antiquarian age.
Where was antiquarianism? Its European capital, at least in the very
beginning, was Rome. But with the spread of what we call the Renais-
sance in the Italian peninsula, and then in the sixteenth century over the
Alps and across the European isthmus, we find antiquarianism respected
and practiced everywhere: the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries was
founded in 1595, the Swedish Riksantikvariat in 1630, and Ole Worm
sent his antiquarian questionnaire to Iceland in 1638. As the antiquar-
ian movement crossed not just the Alps, but the past that began to be
explored and even excavated was not just classical but Gallic, Germanic,
and Norse, and the “antiquity” sometimes not so ancient. With this, an-
tiquarianism laid a foundation for medieval studies, a fact that only be-
comes apparent in the second half of the seventeenth century.
How antiquaries worked was decisive to their future: they studied ob-
jects along with texts, sometimes using the objects (often those with in-
scriptions) to explain problems in surviving texts, and sometimes using
texts to help make sense of the objects. In trying to understand what the
ancient world actually was, antiquaries found in objects a clear window
onto the daily life of an admired past when self-consciously crafted texts
offered, paradoxically, only dark panes. The objects presented them-
selves in the light of day, but silently: they could not speak for themselves.
And thus it was only in a constant hermeneutical movement from text to
object and object back to text that meaning could emerge. At the heart
4 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China

of antiquarian practice, then, lay comparison. And comparison, in turn,

required a collection of things to compare, whether texts or coins or
inscriptions or vases. Once compared, the results could only be shared
out across the Republic of Letters by textual descriptions included in, or
appended to, letters. It is important to emphasize that most learning was
still book learning; even those who worked on “things” had necessarily
to immerse themselves simultaneously in literary remains and, finally,
many of the practices—“rules” is probably too strong a term—developed
for studying objects were derived from the practices of philology (the
comparison of vases, for example, from the collation of manuscripts).
But these outlines are tentative. Though the past two decades have
seen an extraordinary recovery in the scholarly study of antiquaries and
antiquarianism, our cup remains more than half empty: we still know
too little about, especially, the “who,” the “where,” and the “what.” More-
over, the interactions between antiquarianism and history, and also be-
tween antiquarianism and what we might term historical psychology,
are extremely complex. Antiquarian scholarship is obviously related to
historical understanding, but fixing this relationship means being very
careful about the meaning of history as well. Antiquarians make a major
contribution to the “sense of the past” in early modern Europe, but we
cannot generalize about how. Similarly, we know that the study of the
past shapes the way people feel about past and present. But the history
of emotions is still a young discipline and, to take one example, our un-
derstanding of why and how objects have such a great power to move us
remains very limited.
That we know even this much testifies to the lasting impact of Ar-
naldo Momigliano’s groundbreaking work on antiquaries in the 1950s
and 1960s, and to the fact that any serious coming to grips with Euro-
pean historical culture in the centuries between Petrarch (d. 1374)
and Peiresc (d. 1637), or even Winckelmann (d. 1768), cannot avoid
antiquaries and antiquarianism.2 Nevertheless, the reason why interest
has long remained so paltry is that antiquarianism disappeared as a self-
conscious practice when the modern cultural sciences came into their
own. Of course, even in its heyday there were critics mocking either the
antiquaries’ myopia (Chardin’s painting of Le singe antiquaire is exhibit
A) or their pedantry and gullibility (Johann Burckhard Mencke’s 1715
De charlataneria eruditorum)—what the antiquaries themselves called “cu-
riosity” and “precision.” Later, the advent of an entirely new organization
of knowledge between the middle of the seventeenth and the middle of
the eighteenth centuries (between the publication of Descartes’ Discours
 Introduction 5

[1637] and Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie [1751]) put this type
of scholarship outside even the university curriculum. Meanwhile, the
widening spheres of commercial society, with their increasing number of
female readers in the vernacular, opened the way toward a more senti-
mental, less learned, engagement with the past. This was true for people
interested in the past; but where the “Moderns” ruled, the study of antiq-
uity was pushed to the margins. Where antiquaries survived, it was in the
provinces, in local history associations, in schools and archives. And even
when professors slowly opened up to the kinds of practices and questions
developed in antiquarian circles, there was no recuperating antiquarian-
ism itself. The birth of “structural history” in the twentieth century did
not recognize these early modern scholars as ancestors.3 Even the recent
scholarly revival of interest in antiquarianism works against the grain:
studying antiquaries now is like trying to get at the Inca Temple from
inside the Franciscan church built right atop it.4
If the way in which the practice of history has developed in Europe
has made the antiquarian heritage difficult of access, a change in per-
spective offers the possibility of new clarity. Among historians of China
the situation is different again; less a matter of accessing a “superceded”
practice—the problem of a Whig history of history is not sensu stricto a
Chinese problem—than of recognizing the contours of what a Chinese
antiquarianism may have been. These differential states of development
may have been responsible for the absence of any comparative focus up
until very recently.5
European antiquarianism has usually been paralleled to Chinese
epigraphy, a field that evolved in conjunction with the collecting of an-
tiquities and is traditionally known as jinshi xue (literally “bronze and
stone studies”). Chang Kwang-chih, explaining the history of Chinese
archaeology for Western readers in the 1980s, was the first to apply the
term “antiquarianism” to jinshi scholarship, although a number of ear-
lier writers had paved the way for this assessment.6 But it has only been
during the past decade, with the maturing of scholarship on European
antiquarianism, that a broader discussion of antiquarianism in China
began and Chinese terms (such as haogu zhuyi 好古主義 or boxue haogu
yanjiu 博學好古研究) were coined to capture the conceptual nature of
the Western “ism.”7
Although the collecting of ancient historic materials is documented
for the Han era (206 BCE–220 CE) already, the systematic investigating
of ancient inscriptions and artifacts first came about in the second half
of the eleventh century under the Song dynasty.8 It grew from the leisurely
6 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China

interests of a small group of intellectuals centered around Ouyang Xiu

(1007–72) and Liu Chang (1019–68). Institutionalization followed only
half a century later with the involvement of the imperial court. By the
end of the twelfth century, not least driven by the urge to recover the
cultural goods dispersed after the loss of northern China to the Jurchen,
the collecting of antiquities had become an accepted elite pastime and
epigraphy was recognized as a scholarly field, as Zhai Qinian’s (fl. 1142)
annotated bibliography attests.9 Antiquarian activity modeled on Song
scholarship remained a respected form of Confucian erudition until the
early twentieth century. Even the introduction of Western archaeological
methods in the 1920s and the subsequent reorganizations of history and
archaeology into academic disciplines did not significantly undermine
its prestige.10
Like European antiquaries, Chinese scholars in the jinshi tradition
celebrated the authenticity of ancient relics as an invaluable boon to
their philological studies. Some of them even made it their vocation to
search for forgotten steles or locate inscribed ancient bronze vessels. But
they never went so far as to sponsor archaeological excavations, relying
instead on the antiquities market and an ever-growing literature of col-
lected data. They were textual scholars who were primarily concerned
with epigraphy, calligraphy, philosophy, and, above all, the interpreta-
tion of the moral and political lessons of the Confucian classics. Hence
they were interested in only certain types of old things, those that either
contained commemorative inscriptions or were mentioned in the clas-
sics, especially the books on propriety and ritual. Descriptions of the past
in terms of a broad “cultural history”—let alone daily life—were not part
of the trajectory of jinshi scholarship, even though some of this content
was in fact discussed in the historical treatises and especially in the local
gazetteers.
The divergent scope of jinshi xue and European antiquarianism rests
in part on the different status accorded to antiquity in the two scholarly
cultures. While the antiquarius who professed his love for antiquity was in
the cultural avant-garde in fifteenth-century Italy, in premodern China
the love of antiquity (hao gu) and the need to learn from it had been
basic scholarly tenets ever since Confucius (551–479 BCE) declared them
to be ideals of his own.11 What was novel in the Northern Song period
(960–1127) was not a revived interest in antiquity per se, but the man-
ner in which that distant past was retrieved. Song scholars recognized
that a systematic study of material remains from antiquity could provide
a direct and authentic connection to that idealized age of the model
 Introduction 7

sages and moral exemplars. Such a material connection to a normative

antiquity was more easily established than we might think today, because
the framework of late medieval correlative cosmology allowed for time
to be seen as an entity that could be transcended physically.12 But the sys-
tematic turn to antiquities was also the result of an invigorated scholarly
skepticism over the correctness of classical commentary and even the
authenticity of certain classics. This skepticism, in turn, was due to the
unprecedented state sponsorship of classical learning that went hand in
hand with the rebuilding of the Chinese empire, bringing about a new
kind of scholarly elite (shi daifu). Ever since its Song beginnings, the
study of ancient bronzes and steles was thus more than just a matter of
historical scholarship: it touched on a scholar’s social identity, was closely
related to his personal life experience, and “awakened deep emotions.”13
Song antiquarianism spurred an ever-growing appreciation of an-
tiquities as symbols of cultural refinement and social class. Antiquity-
collecting became especially pronounced after the thirteenth century,
when the Mongol conquest redefined the social identity of Confucian
scholars. By the early fourteenth century, the scholars of the Song era
had come to embody a lost ideal. Collecting antiquities (including relics
of the Song era) offered one way to reconnect to them. Moreover, one
strand of Song scholarship particularly close to early antiquarian activi-
ties, the so-called Neo-Confucianism (daoxue) of Cheng Yi (1033–1107)
and Zhu Xi (1130–1200), was officially declared orthodox knowledge
and tested in the state examinations. Song jinshi scholarship, too, was
disseminated, memorized, and emulated through collecting antiquities.
Ownership of cultural relics (and its cognates: the need for classifica-
tion and the rhetoric of the collector’s passion) now mattered more than
historical research. Over the course of the Yuan (1271–1368) and Ming
eras (1368–1644) connoisseurship in antiquities and knowledge of Song
antiquarian publications became a status-defining aspect of good taste.14
It was only between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries
that the work of Song Confucian scholars was seriously questioned and
classical antiquity became a renewed focus of intense scholarship. Even-
tually the new so-called Han learning and the movement of evidentiary
scholarship (kaozheng xue) reinvigorated both the connoisseurial and
philological strands of antiquarianism, modernizing the field of jinshi
xue into one that, like the work of the Song epigraphers and collectors,
again compares more readily to European categories of antiquarianism,
where broad philological inquiries are directed to recover material as-
pects of a distant past.15
8 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China

But how closely do we need to compare jinshi xue to European anti-

quarianism at all? How necessary is it to take the measure of this Chinese
antiquarian tradition bearing in mind the categories, cautions, and ho-
rizons that Momigliano and his heirs have brought to the study of the
Western tradition?16 Is this not, the critic might object, just another form
of insidious “Orientalism,” reading the Other in “our” own language and
thus inevitably a “colonizing” act?
Leibniz can help us here. In a letter of 1708 he characterized China
as an “Oriental Europe.”17 He meant by this that there was a commu-
nity, or continuity, of interests and history binding together East and
West. The Europeans had developed better solutions to some things, the
Chinese to others. Hence his equally stunning phrase, describing con-
tact between Europe and China as “un commerce de lumière.”18 Leibniz
believed that Europeans could learn from Chinese as much as Chinese
could learn from Europeans. This is our view as well.19
What we hope to do in this volume is to use the European and Chi-
nese traditions to illuminate each other. So, for example, to the historian
of European antiquarianism the Chinese focus on words and texts rather
than the objects on which they were inscribed casts in sharp relief the
European turn to material meaning in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries (such as it was). We might be aware of the predominance of
philological approaches in early modern Europe, but still might need
a cross-cultural comparison to realize that the material turn cannot be
taken for granted as in any way “evolutionary” but was a move that must
be explained. By the same token, the importance of the emotional expe-
rience of antiquity in China will come as a shock to the Europeanist used
to seeing poetry and philology, feelings and science, as separate facul-
ties. Moreover, its persistence in China will puzzle Europeanists who no
longer consider the insights of artists or authors (Piranesi or Sebald, for
example) relevant to the work of studying past material cultures.20 For
the Europeanist, the centrality in China of a synchronic approach to the
past alongside a diachronic one (the model of the “Dynastic History”)
suggests that the prominence of a Thucydidean over a Herodotean
model cannot be read as natural.21 Finally, there is the crucial example of
“ecclesiastical history,” the document-rich account of the life of the godly
community in the world, which established a model for the priority of
evidence to rhetoric.22 Its role may have hitherto been slighted by schol-
ars of European historiography, but for Chinese historians—and those
familiar with Chinese history—the role of empirical, documentary schol-
arship in upholding religious ritual and ideology would have seemed ob-
 Introduction 9

vious, as in the two famous investigations of ancient bells at the Northern

Song courts of Renzong (from 1034) and Huizong (from 1104).23
On the other hand, for the historian of Chinese intellectual and cul-
tural history, the discovery of the breadth of the European antiquarian
tradition but also its relatively precisely researched scholarly anatomy
suggests a massive research potential for even a relatively well-defined
form of antiquarianism such as jinshi xue.24 There is still a considerable
dearth of studies that examine individual scholars and their local net-
works, especially for the centuries after the fall of the Northern Song
dynasty.25
But comparison also may lead to ways in which the boundaries of
Chinese antiquarian learning might be pushed beyond jinshi xue and
elegant collecting. Like antiquaries in Europe, but unlike jinshi scholars
of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, Song scholars emphasized
the empirical gathering of a broad range of new material data. The three
Hong brothers, for instance, not only collected bronze vessels and dis-
cussed ancient writing from steles and bronzes, they also studied ancient
and foreign coins; in addition the youngest brother, Hong Mai (1123–
1202), spent the greater part of his life collecting and critically review-
ing reports on strange and seemingly supernatural occurrences, some
2,700 of which have survived as his celebrated Yijian zhi (Accounts of the
Listener).26 To these scholars, the material traces of a distant past held
a mystical allure and demanded to be explored just like strange natural
phenomena.
Such a broadening of inquiries will also put in relief the inevitable
limitations of the Western concept of antiquarianism. Defining China’s
jinshi xue primarily through categories of historiography, philology, and
empirical exploration, for instance, results in a picture of scholars en-
gaged in constructing and maintaining a Confucian orthodoxy. This
overlooks not only the less positivist dimensions of Chinese thought but
also the impact of an increasingly commercialized society and the het-
erogeneous makeup of the Chinese elite in the late Ming and Qing era.
As the contribution by Bruce Rusk in this volume reminds us, reading
the discoveries of antiquities both in cosmological and political terms
were an essential part of antiquarian scholarship well into the early mod-
ern era.
The research project of a comparative cultural history was Karl Lam-
precht’s vision for the Institut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte he estab-
lished at the University of Leipzig.27 “Comparative history” occupied a
central place in the historical thinking of Marc Bloch, in particular, in
10 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China

the 1920s.28 As practiced, it aimed to reveal questions which were oc-

cluded from within a single discipline’s, or culture’s, one-point perspec-
tive. It aimed at the open-ended and suggestive, rather than the conclu-
sive and comprehensive.
Indeed, Max Weber, who a century ago made the great compelling
case for comparison, was at pains to insist that it was a precision tool—for
“splitting” not “lumping.” Writing about a comparative history of ancient
agrarian regimes, he explained that

such a comparative study would not aim at finding “analogies” and

“parallels,” as is done by those engrossed in the currently fashionable
enterprise of constructing general schemes of development. The aim
should, rather, be precisely the opposite: to identify and define the
individuality of each development, the characteristics which made
the one conclude in a manner so different from that of the other.29

Comparison, in other words, only superficially resembled a pairing

of “like” with “like.” In fact, the pairing was designed to determine pre-
cisely what made the two “unlike.” One could then proceed to the more
interesting question—for Weber, at least—of why they were unlike. After
Momigliano, and especially after the work of Wilfried Nippel, Weber
emerges clearly as a historical thinker, his emphasis on the “why” show-
ing how comparison could yield a picture that was contingent, always
located at a specific point in time and space.30
China and Europe both developed keen historical sensibilities. These
have been much studied. But there also developed, in both cultures, a
much more specific, and much less studied, openness to using the mate-
rial remains of the past alongside of texts as sources for its understand-
ing. In Europe this past was identified with antiquity, and the expansion
of the historical methods for antiquity’s systematic reconstruction soon
came to be called “antiquarianism.” In China, too, this new opening was
identified with antiquity, the three preimperial dynasties Xia, Shang,
and Zhou; and the name for its study, “bronze and stone studies” (jinshi
xue), even hinted both at the materials worked on and at antiquity, since
bronze and stone were the most enduring media to transmit ancient
texts.
But jinshi xue remained a subgenre of the study of the classics while
Antiquitates eventually became closely identified with the study of mate-
rial remains. To provide a possible path to explain such differences, we
propose to expand the comparative framework beyond the study of an-
 Introduction 11

tiquities. One area the present collection of essays has chosen to exam-
ine is the notion that antiquarianism is closely related to empiricism, and
thus to contemporary practices in natural history, medicine, and travel
writing. In this respect, we might consider antiquarianism as a specific
feature, even a manifestation, of “late humanism” in Europe.
Although little studied yet, the best jinshi scholars often also exhib-
ited a great interest in empiricist methods, not just in the Song but in the
Ming and Qing eras as well. For instance, Yang Shen (1488–1559), one of
the most authoritative jinshi scholars of his time, also wrote the ground-
breaking history of the Yunnan border region, where he conducted geo-
graphic fieldwork and even translated texts from the local Bo language
(described in Leo K. Shin’s essay). Fu Shan (c. 1606–84) was not only a
groundbreaking medical author (see Nathan Sivin’s essay), but also an
influential calligrapher who spent decades arduously locating and study-
ing ancient steles and scripts.31 And Cheng Yaotian (1725–1814) not only
conducted botanical fieldwork in close consultation with the Confucian
Classics but also traditional antiquarian research (see Georges Métailié’s
essay). In his attempts to reconstruct ancient music he went as far as
experimenting with the casting of ancient-style bronze bells based on
texts and antiquities. This kind of experimentation had not been done
since the early twelfth century under the Song dynasty. Exact parallels to
this can be found in Europe, especially, perhaps, in recent work on the
history of natural history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.32
In Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China the com-
parison actually runs on two axes: between Europe and China, of course,
but less obviously also between competing historical approaches within
each culture. The cross-cultural comparison necessarily operates in a
synchronic mode, while the implied intracultural comparison is framed
diachronically. From this perspective, this book is a “prequel” to Momi-
gliano & Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences.33 That
collection of essays, edited by Miller, examined one of Momigliano’s
prescient asides, that the decay products of antiquarianism in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries were the modern cultural sciences: art
history, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, and history of religion.
The focus of that book was not antiquarianism per se, so much as its rela-
tionship to successor disciplines and, of course, to Momigliano himself.
In this one, we focus on a period when antiquarian inquiry took place
in the context of the humanist discovery of the world, and when it was a
response to new information emerging from the ground, from the heav-
ens, and from other parts of the globe.
12 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China

Recognizing antiquarianism’s disposition to breadth in an age prior

to disciplinarity, we have begun with the question of origins. How can
trained historians adequately grasp a form of historical inquiry made
redundant by the very forces which, ultimately, have shaped the modern
historical profession? The first essay, Miller’s “Writing Antiquarianism,”
offers a sketch of the history of antiquarian scholarship in Europe from
its early modern heyday through its modern transformation. It reveals
how nineteenth-century archaeologists studied seventeenth-century
antiquaries and how they conceived of this inquiry in a dialogue with
those emerging, and successor, cultural sciences. Greater familiarity with
the history of this cultural practice could enable modern historians to
uncover lost points of contact—and deviation. The essays that follow
suggest steps toward opening up the history of antiquarianism in both
Europe and China. They represent attempts to probe the ways in which
the study of antiquity, the perspective of antiquitates, and the methods of
the antiquary insinuated themselves into a wider—even global—world
of early modern learning. For antiquarianism helped shape inquiries
into ancient remains, religion, and philosophy, as well as contemporary
botany, medicine, poetry, and ethnology. Phenomena which might seem
unrelated may emerge, from the perspective of a new history of anti-
quarianism, as more closely connected.
Given this penetration of antiquarianism and antiquarianizing deep
into the surrounding learned landscape, the reader of these essays would
not be mistaken to feel that at its fullest extent “antiquarianism” had
something to do with nearly every aspect of intellectual life.34 Yet, at this
fullest extent antiquarianism would not mean much of anything, and
certainly not the study of “antiquity.” (This is not so different in scope
from the difficulty of establishing the relationship between “antiquarian-
ism” and “archaism” in the context of Chinese art.) Thus, it could be
argued that properly situating antiquarianism in its cultural matrix ef-
fectively diminishes its own distinctive significance. For all these reasons
we have been careful here to begin with the secure, narrower definition.
But it would be a self-defeating blindness to cling only to the safety of a
narrower definition in the face of the obvious relationship between the
study of antiquity through its physical remains and other facets of obser-
vational culture. This is, after all, just another way of making the point
that in premodern times almost everything could be, and was, taught in
relation to the classics: history, rhetoric, ethics, art and natural science.
There clearly was something distinctive, and important, about this spe-
 Introduction 13

cifically materialized form of historical inquiry. Examining it in a raking

light, lifting it slightly out of its context and isolating the phenomenon,
is necessary if we are to see its features in highest relief. Only then can
we proceed to assessing the full scope of historical understanding and
practices available to the cultures we are examining.
And so this book can be read as something of a proposal and some-
thing of a provocation. As a proposal, it offers a way of thinking about
early modern European culture in its own terms: with the role of study of
the past, and students of the past, near the center, as indeed it was. As a
provocation, it suggests that if we could adequately explain the relation-
ship between the antiquarian study of the past on the one hand, and po-
etry, art, religion, natural philosophy, ethnology, ethics, and history on
the other, we would be much closer to understanding what it meant to
think like an early modern European. The still bigger provocation might
then be to turn this same spotlight on China.
Alain Schnapp’s sketch of the contours of a “comparative antiquar-
ianism” suggests that the meaningfulness not only of the past, but of
material culture as a portal into that past, can be found across time and
place. He himself fights shy of a “structuralist” antiquarianism à la Lévi-
Strauss, and so do we; such a project would have to be conducted on
very different terms and by a very different équipe. Nevertheless, that we
find so much in common in their attitudes toward antiquities among
Egyptians of the Middle Kingdom and the English of modern Middlesex
suggests the richness of the soil yet to be turned over. Schnapp himself,
in drawing attention to the sacred character of much ancient antiquari-
anism, casts a light on the tremendous, latent power of old things and
their study. His broad comparison raises a broad question: is there a par-
allel trajectory that proceeds from Mesopotamia and Egypt not West, to
Greece and Rome, but East, to China? Finding this parallel narrative was
the El Dorado for seventeenth-century comparatists such as Athanasius
Kircher, but does its rejection mean that we must always look for the
roots of antiquarainism to grow only Westward?
Schnapp’s broad survey of the meanings of an immersion in the bro-
ken remains of the past is followed by Jan Papy’s case study of the anti-
quarian humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). Papy shows us the ways
in which textual study could incorporate as well as filter the worlds of
archaeology and ethnography c. 1600. Knowledge derived from experi-
ence with physical remains and that derived from travelers to the Western
Hemisphere and the Far East was woven into that derived from the read-
14 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China

ing and editing of ancient texts. Papy is especially alert to Lipsius’s efforts
to find practical utility in antiquarian knowledge, whether in terms of
external (architecture or military tactics) or internal goods (ethics).35
Miller’s “Comparing Antiquarianisms: A View from Europe,” in
which a historian of the European antiquarian tradition picks out four
moments and styles of convergence between European and Chinese an-
tiquarianism, suggests one possible mapping of this encounter. It shows
how scholarly comparison can function as a form of translation, expos-
ing incompatibilities (Weber’s “splitting”) as well as parallels (the “lump-
ing”). Its mood is interrogatory, assuming neither tradition to be canoni-
cal for the other, but using each to expand our potential understanding
of a phenomenon which seems to have, at least at its root, a common
foundation in how people relate to their temporal condition. In short,
its question is as much “Why is the shape of European antiquarianism
not like China’s?” as it is “Why is the shape of Chinese antiquarianism
not like Europe’s?”
The essays that follow, grouped under four distinct headings, are
intended as suggestive encounters between European and Chinese an-
tiquarian modes. The realms they cover—the relationship to the arti-
fact, the natural world, the variety of human customs, and the history
of religion—are, indeed, significant. But they are not at all meant to be
exhaustive.
The two essays in Part 2 (“Authenticity and Antiquities”) explore
the question of forgery from the perspectives of the two different cul-
tures, but also of different epistemologies. Christopher Wood asks us
to re-examine the meaningfulness of the Renaissance turn to material
evidence.36 If this has been canonized as the Ur-moment of antiquarian-
ism, his reminder that things were as opaque and as open-ended as texts
has several major consequences. First, it problematizes the idea of the
Renaissance as an epistemological break. Second, it problematizes any
simplistic understanding of how material evidence bore within itself any
notional certainty. Third, by juxtaposing “substitutional” and “archae-
ological” approaches and arguing for their coexistence, at least in the
earlier Renaissance, he has articulated a new argument for the power of
imaginative uses of the past. Rather than accepting the Whiggish distinc-
tion between science and art, which has done so much to blacken the
reputations of Cyriac of Ancona, Pirro Ligorio, and Piranesi, among oth-
ers, Wood shows us how normal the mixture of the imaginative and the
archaeological really was.
Very similar forms of credulity can be seen among pioneering an-
 Introduction 15

tiquaries in Song China, who were slow to replace transmitted images

of ancient objects with the archaeological data they recovered. Learned
credulity became even more pronounced after the Song period, when
Song antiquarian scholarship itself became the origin of a new chain of
substitutions in the form of both newly printed editions of original Song
books as well as faked Song studies. The transmission of pictures and
paintings seems to have been little affected by early antiquarian attempts
at precise description as they retained the authority granted to textual
transmission. The traditional substitutional mode of understanding ar-
tifact production thus remained normative. Such comparison confirms
that it is the European aspiration for a “purely” archaeological, unemo-
tional technology that is the novum.
Learned credulity is well evident in the three Chinese cases of forgery
presented by Bruce Rusk. His essay on the philological dimensions of
forgery culture in Ming and Qing China lays open how a sprawling col-
lectors’ market shaped and often corrupted antiquarian learning, and
how authoritative much of that antiquarian scholarship has been right
into the twentieth century. Aside from commercial and status pressures,
Ming and Qing credulity also depended on the age-old Chinese convic-
tion to see all occurrences as cosmologically correlated. There were no
such things as chance discoveries of ancient texts—they were all good,
bad, or fake omens. Within a portentological mode of artifact produc-
tion materiality, time, and space all become relative, so that even a re-
cord of the physical destruction of a thing cannot preclude its reconstitu-
tion and transmission later, especially if the object was believed to have
been made by a historically eminent figure. Jinshi scholarship, especially
its more recondite forms developed during the Ming era, only partially
demistified magical objects.
The essays in Part 3 (“The Discovery of the World”) suggest ways in
which antiquarian approaches were at the root of much contemporary
exploration of the natural world. Nancy G. Siraisi, following from an-
other of Momigliano’s casually tossed-off asides, explores the antiquar-
ies’ empirical turn through the parallel history of medicine. And here,
she finds a number of humanistically oriented medical doctors making
the same move toward the study of ancient material culture that is more
familiarly found among nonmedical antiquaries. Her chief example,
Wolfgang Lazius (1514–65), is especially interesting because in his case,
unlike that of, say, Girolamo Mercuriale, a colleague of Panvinio in the
Farnese circle, or Andrea Bacci, there was no medical value to his anti-
quarian investigations. The improvement of physical, mental, or pub-
16 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China

lic health was not Lazius’s goal. Though these practical benefits could
indeed accrue—as Lipsius himself demonstrated—Siraisi shows that
antiquarian production by medical doctors could just as easily reflect
contemporary fashion or the demands of patrons. At this remove from
utility, the example of Lazius becomes a case study in the history of taste
for histories.37
The following three papers examine Chinese scholars who em-
ployed their classical training to advance a special branch of natural
studies known as the “investigation of things” (gewu). Nathan Sivin
comments on the different professional environments of physicians
in early modern China and Europe. He sees the major differences in
the Chinese absence of an organized medical profession and medical
university education. Yet, physicians in China shared the same classical
education with all members of the scholar elite, even if civil service,
for whatever reasons, was not an option for them. Medicine was thus
closely connected to classical learning and physicians, though often
low in political rank, were closely enmeshed in the intellectual com-
munity. Kenneth J. Hammond looks specifically at the scholarly net-
working that bridged different fields of scholarship among the Ming
elite. He examines the exchanges between two of the most prominent
figures in Ming intellectual history, Li Shizhen (1518–93), the author
of the massive Ming materia medica, and Wang Shizhen (1526–90), the
most celebrated poet of his time, who composed a preface for Li’s com-
pilation. Hammond’s close reading of Wang’s preface, composed over
a ten-year period, demonstrates the realization among late Ming schol-
ars that Daoist alchemy may have been at the origin of pharmacological
studies, but that the true contribution of Li’s scholarship lay not in his
metaphysical speculations but in an analytical methodology that cor-
rected earlier errors often on the basis of direct observation. Wang,
a leading advocate of archaism, indeed saw parallels here to his own
studies on the history of poetry.
Two centuries later, as Georges Métailié’s essay shows, evidentiary
scholars had appropriated the empirical approach of Li Shizhen into
traditional classical studies and shed much of the Daoist as well as Neo-
Confucian elements still present in the Ming texts. Cheng Yaotian’s
(1725–1814) evidentiary studies to identify plants mentioned in the clas-
sics reveal a particularly striking example of how Qing classicists could
move toward an antiquarian-style philology. Cheng, who interviewed
farmers and collected plant specimens and seeds from various regions
in China, develops a unique form of botany. Unlike Li’s materia medica,
 Introduction 17

which was intended as practical knowledge and remained firmly embed-

ded in the tradition of healing, Cheng’s studies ultimately took the an-
cient classics as their main referent. In this antiquarian approach Cheng
closely resembles Lazius.
Similarly, the essays in Part 4 (“Antiquarianism and Ethnography”)
connect the antiquarian study of ancient religion with the study of living
human practices. Noel Malcolm looks closely at the learned encounter
with Islam in early modern Europe, and Leo K. Shin provides an initial
survey of several Ming scholars engaged in the research of non-Chinese
peoples.
Malcolm’s closely argued study serves a broader methodological pur-
pose. It reminds us that the origins of a critical history of religion cannot
be laid at the door of antiquarianism or of ethnology. For the early mod-
ern study of Islam shows us something different again: a case study in
the resistance of European learned culture to a real engagement with an-
other, competing religion. Firsthand accounts did not dissolve myths or
disabuse prejudices. His conclusion, on the contrary, that the antiquari-
anism of the ethnographers blocked the antiquarianism of the scholars
offers a spectacular vantage point on to the question of how Europeans
actually came to know China.
The attitudes of Chinese Confucian intellectuals toward foreign cul-
tural practices had a particularly complex history. For Ming scholars, the
Mongol occupation of China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centu-
ries, the close interaction between Central Asian and Chinese officials
at court, and the state sponsorship of the Tibetan Buddhist clergy since
that time all provided for a situation radically different from Europe. But
besides the foreigners to the north and west who organized into states
and posed formidable military threats, Ming China was also in contact
with numerous non-Chinese peoples along the southern frontier into
whose lands Ming culture began to infringe. Leo Shin probes the writ-
ings of a diverse group of Ming Confucians on non-Chinese peoples in
the South to see how scholarly interest in the ancient past intersected
with an increased awareness of human diversity. Ultimately, despite the
firsthand accounts and attempts in translating local history, none of the
Ming scholars was able to overcome classical stereotypes of cultural su-
periority. Yet, for the study of noncanonical ancient texts such as the
Shanhai jing, scholars like Yang Shen may be said to have devised a form
of ethnographic antiquarianism that was historically motivated.
The concluding section makes something of a return to the points
broached by Schnapp. For at a certain moment, the study of religion,
18 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China

especially as it changes over time, becomes another way of meditating

on the encounter between the temporal and transcendental. And in this
context, histories of religion can serve as surrogates for wider cultural
self-definition. The essays in Part 5 all engage with this theme. Joan-Pau
Rubiés explores the place of study of Indian and Chinese religion in de-
bates that he locates at the heart of the European Enlightenment. With
histories of religion transposed into philosophical history, antiquarian
investigation emerges as a form—perhaps Ur-form—of cultural history.
D. E. Mungello’s essay on the Rites Controversy reviews the collabora-
tion and conflicts between Chinese classicists and European missionar-
ies. Paired with Rubiés’s essay it suggests the internal cultural limits to
just this sort of investigation. Not every kind of exploration can be ac-
commodated, and some forms of inquiry are less manageable than oth-
ers. Martin Mulsow’s essay, which concludes our volume, shows us how
explosive this problem can be when not managed, or when not manage-
able. Looking at the late seventeenth-century Dutch humanist Antonius
van Dale (1638–1708), Mulsow asks whether it was antiquarian research
or broad philosophical history that most seriously damaged the delicate
balance of seventeenth-century apologetic ancient history. He shows that
the deeper Van Dale and his circle plunged into the details of ancient
Greek and Roman religion, the less they were able to control the im-
plications of their research. Like his exact contemporary Spinoza, the
power of Van Dale’s critique derives not from the invention of a new po-
lemical tool, or even a new polemical spirit (this differs from Spinoza),
but in pursuing a traditional line of research with the latest knowledge
and most scrupulous commitment to truth. Mulsow leaves us with the
thought that whether Van Dale was a libertine or not, his scholarship
represents the liberation of antiquarianism from apologetics. This marks
the beginning of an “objective” Altertumswissenschaft but also the possibil-
ity of “objective” facts being harnessed to polemical projects that had as
their aim the desacralization of history. With these twin “objectifying”
developments, antiquarian scholarship emerges as a constant point of
reference for a self-consciously secular modernity.
When Momigliano published “Ancient History and the Antiquarian”
in 1950 he launched the modern study of antiquarianism. His polarity
between the diachronic narrative of political events written by historians
and the synchronic study of the structures of society by philologists and
antiquaries has proved heuristically valuable.38 Fifty years later, Benja-
min Elman remarked on the “long-standing” dichotomy within Chinese
historiography between diachronic “annals” and synchronic “treatises,”
 Introduction 19

and noted that early modern Chinese examination candidates thought

in terms of this dichotomy.39 What, then, might a Chinese version of “An-
cient History and the Antiquarian” look like? And what would it mean
for the history of Chinese historiography? Craig Clunas, citing Elman,
has drawn a line from the thematic content of the treatises in the Ming
History (Ming shi) of 1645–1735 to the thematic content of the Cambridge
History of China.40 Without either Elman or Clunas referring to antiquari-
anism, both gesture provocatively at the longue durée of a historical ap-
proach that shapes our present-day practice without our even knowing it.

Notes

1. Alain Schnapp organized with Lothar von Falkenhausen, Tim Murray, and
Irène Aghion an international research project dedicated to a “Universal
History of Antiquarianism” which included a year at the Getty Research Insti-
tute in 2009–10, a conference entitled “Traces-Collections-Ruins: Towards a
Comparative History of Antiquarianism, and a collection of papers.
2. Momigliano’s nine, and soon to be ten, volumes of Contributi alla storia degli
studi classici offer a treasure trove for the student of the study of the past.
For antiquarianism in the narrowest sense we might single out “Ancient His-
tory and the Antiquarian” (1950) and “Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical
Method” (1954), in Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome: Edizioni di
Storia e Letteratura, 1955), 67–106 and 195–211; “L’eredità della filologia
antica e il metodo storico,” in Secondo Contributo alla storia degli studi classici
(Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960), 463–80; and Classical Founda-
tions of Modern Historiography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1990), a barely revised version of lectures delivered at Berkeley
in 1963. There is already an impressive literature about Momigliano.
3. Fernand Braudel, for example, perceived the relevance of Gustav Friedrich
Klemm’s work, but did not see that Klemm himself looked back to Worm
and the antiquaries. Braudel, “The History of Civilizations,” in On History,
trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 186.
4. For a less compressed account of the “decline and fall” of the early mod-
ern antiquary, see Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the
Seventeenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000),
155–57.
5. There are a number of recent essay collections on the practice of history
in China, and sometimes comparing it to Europe, but none engage with
antiquarianism. See, for example, Thomas H. C. Lee, ed., China and Europe:
Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Hong Kong: The
Chinese University Press, 1991); Q. Edward Wang and Georg G. Iggers,
eds., Turning Points in Historiography: A Cross Cultural Perspective (Rochester:
Rochester University Press, 2002); Thomas H. C. Lee, ed., The New and the
Multiple: Sung Senses of the Past (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press,
20 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China

2004); On-cho Ng and Q. Edward Wang, eds., Mirroring the Past: The Writ-
ing and Use of History in Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press, 2005); Dieter Kuhn, Perceptions of Antiquity in Chinese Civilization (Hei-
delberg: Edition Forum, 2008). In the seven articles on Chinese histori-
cal scholarship in the forthcoming five-volume Oxford History of Historical
Writing, constituting almost a book within a book, one finds mention of
“the archaeological interests of scholars in the Northern Song dynasty” in a
single sentence.
6. Chang Kwang-chih, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4th ed. (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 4–21. On Chang, see Lothar von
Falkenhausen, “Kwang-chih Chang 15 April 1931–3 January 2001,” Artibus
Asiae 61, no. 1 (2001): 120–38. Chang harks back to Wang Guowei, “Songdai
zhi jinshi xue” (The study of bronzes and steles in the Song era), Guoxue
luncong 1, no. 3 (1927): 45–49. Wang’s influential paper was translated by
C. H. Liu as “Archaeology in the Sung Dynasty,” China Journal 6, no. 5 (May
1927): 222–31. Wei Zhuxian, a student of both Wang Guowei (1877–1929)
and Li Ji (1896–1979), first talked about Song jinshi scholars as models for
archaeology in Zhongguo kaogu xue shi (The history of archaeology in China)
(Shanghai: Shanghai yinshuguan 1937), 67–82. In the 1960s, Song antiquar-
ies were still considered “archaeologists”: see R. C. Rudolph, “Preliminary
Notes on Sung Archaeology,” Journal of Asian Studies 22 (1963): 169–77; Rob-
ert Poor, “Notes on the Sung Dynasty Archaeological Catalogs,” Archives of
the Chinese Art Society of America 19 (1965): 33–41; Edward L. Shaughnessy,
Sources of Western Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 5–13.
7. Cf. Wu Hung, ed., Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarianism in Chi-
nese Art and Visual Culture (Chicago: Art Media Resources, 2010); Li Ling,
Shuo gu zhu jin: Kaogu faxian he fugu yishu (Smelting the old to cast the new:
The discovery of archaeology and the art of archaism) (Hong Kong: Xiang-
gang zhongwen daxue yishixi, 2005); Xu Bo, “Boxue haogu yanjiu yu xifang
shixue” (Antiquarian research and Western historiography), Sichuan daxue
bao 1 (2005).
8. The most recent and comprehensive studies on this topic are Yun-Chiahn
Chen Sena, “Pursuing Antiquity: Chinese Antiquarianism from the Tenth to
the Thirteenth Century” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007); Patricia
Ebrey, Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong (Seattle and
London: University of Washington Press, 2008); and Hsu Ya-hwei, “Reshap-
ing Chinese Material Culture: The Revival of Antiquity in the Era of Print
960–1279” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2010). On earlier pre-Song attitudes
toward antiquities in China see Wei Juxian, Zhongguo kaoguxue shi (The
history of Chinese archaeology) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1937),
24–66; Edward L. Shaughnessy, Rewriting Early Chinese Texts (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2006).
9. Zhai Qinian, Zhou shi (The history of ancient script) (Beijing: Zhonghua
shuju, 1985).
10. Li Ji, “Zhongguo gu qiwu xue de xin jichu” (The new foundations of Chi-
nese antiquities studies), Wenshi zhexue bao 1 (1950): 63–79; Lothar von
 Introduction 21

Falkenhausen, “On the historiographical orientation of Chinese archaeol-

ogy,” Antiquity 67 (1993): 839–49.
11. “The Master said: ‘I am not one who was born in the possession of knowl-
edge. I am one who loves antiquity and is diligent seeking [knowledge]
there (min yi qiu zhi).” Lunyu 7, no. 63, in Shisanjing zhushu; cf. Mu-chu Poo,
“The Formation of the Concept of Antiquity in Early China,” in Perceptions of
Antiquity in Chinese Civilization, Dieter Kuhn and Helga Stahl, eds. (Heidel-
berg: Edition Forum, 2008), 89.
12. François Louis, “Cauldrons and Mirrors of Yore: Tang Perceptions of
Archaic Bronzes,” Zurich Studies in the History of Art 13, no. 14 (2006/2007):
202–35.
13. Qianshen Bai, Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the
Seventeenth Century (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Asia Cen-
ter, 2003), 172.
14. National Palace Museum, ed., Through the Prism of the Past: Antiquarian Trends
in Chinese Art of the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century (Taipei: Guoli gugong bowu-
guan, 2003); Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material
Cultures of Ming China 1366–1644 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
2007), 112–59.
15. Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects
of Change in Late Imperial China, 2nd rev. ed. (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2001), 210–67; Shana Julia Brown, “Pastimes: Scholars, Art
Dealers, and the Making of Modern Chinese Historiography 1870–1928”
(PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003).
16. For just such a comparison in regard to Song antiquarianism see Yun-chiahn
Chen Sena, “Pursuing Antiquity,” 14–27.
17. For his admiration for the Chinese achievement, especially in the “precepts
of civil life,” in which they surpassed Europeans, see for example Leibniz,
“Novissima Sinica,” pars. 1–3, Writings on China, trans., intro., and notes
Daniel J. Cook and Henry Rosemont, Jr. (Chicago and Lasalle: Open Court,
1994), 45–46. Leibniz’s description of China as the “Oriental Europe” is
found in a letter of 3 January 1708, in V. I. Guerrier, Leibniz in seinen Bezie-
hungen zu Russland und Peter der Grosse (St. Petersburg, 1873), appendix 76,
cited in Christian D. Zangger, Welt und Konversation: Die theologische Begründ-
ung der Mission bei G. W. Leibniz (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1973), 190.
18. Leibniz to Antoine Verjus S. J., 2 December 1697, citation: “‘Je juge que
cette Mission est la plus grande affaire de nos temps, tant pour la gloire de
Dieu et la propagation de la religion Chrestienne, que pour le bien gen-
eral des hommes et l’accroissement des sciences et des arts chez nous aussi
bien que chez les Choins, car c’est un commerce de lumiere, qui nous peut
donner tout d’un coup leur travaux de quelques milliers d’annees, et leur
rendre les nostres: et doubler pour ainsi dire nos veritables richesses de
part et d’autre. Ce qui est quelque chose de plus grand qu’on ne pense,’”
quoted in R. Widmaier, ed., Leibniz korrespondiert mit China (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1990), 55.
19. Those dissatisfied with the limited historical utility of Said’s Orientalism
(New York: Random House, 1978) can now turn to Robert Irwin’s broad
22 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China

survey of Western oriental studies, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and
Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006), and Suzanne Marchand’s com-
prehensive study of German oriental scholarship, German Orientalism in the
Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2009).
20. See Miller, “Piranesi and the Antiquarian Imagination,” Giovanni Battista
Piranesi, ed. Sarah Lawrence and John Wilton-Ely (New York: Abrams,
2007), 123–38; “Browne, Sebald and the Survival of the Antiquarian in the
Twentieth Century,” The World Proposed: Sir Thomas Browne Quatercentenary
Essays, ed. Reid Barbour and Claire Preston (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
21. I am relying on Momigliano’s contrast betewen the two, presented most
clearly in The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, chap. 2.
22. Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, chap. 5, and
“Mabillon’s Italian Disciplines,” Terzo Contributo alla storia degli studi classici
e del mondo antico (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1966), 135–52,
among others. There has been a spate of work in the last decade, including
in the last year the 911 pages of Jan Marco Sawilla, Antiquarismus, Hagiogra-
phie und Historie im 17. Jahrhundert: zum Werk der Bollandisten, ein wissenschaft-
shistorischer Versuch (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009), and the 511 pages of Jean-
Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction
of a Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009). I am grateful to Anthony Grafton for making available to me
“Arnaldo Momigliano and the Tradition of Ecclesiastical History,” a lecture
delivered at University College London on 29 May 2009.
23. On this story see, most recently, Patricia Ebrey, “Replicating Zhou Bells at
the Northern Song Court,” in Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarian-
ism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture, ed. Wu Hung (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010), 179–99; Ebrey, Accumulating Culture, 159–62; Ebrey,
“Huizong’s Stone Inscriptions,” in Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song
China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics, ed. Patricia Buckley
Ebrey and Maggie Bickford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Cen-
ter, 2006), 229–74.
24. The classic work remains Zhu Jianxin, Jinshi xue (Shanghai: Shangwu yins-
huguan, 1930).
25. For recent exceptions in English see Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aes-
thetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song-Dynasty China (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Asia Center, 2006); Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The
Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1986), 80–98; Robert E. Harrist, Jr., “The Artist as Anti-
quarian: Li Gonglin and his Study of Early Chinese Art,” Artibus Asiae 55,
no. 3 (1995): 237–80; Qianshen Bai, Fu Shan’s World; Shana Julia Brown,
“Pastimes: Scholars, Art Dealers, and the Making of Modern Chinese Histo-
riography 1870–1928” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003).
26. Two books on ancient calligraphy, Lishi (History of clerical script) and Lixu
(Continued history of clerical script) by Hong Gua (1117–42), survive. Hong
Zun’s (1120–74) Quanzhi (Record of Coins) is the oldest surviving numis-
 Introduction 23

matic work in China. On Hong Mai, see Alister D. Inglis, Hong Mai’s Record
of the Listener and Its Song Dynasty Context (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006).
27. Walter Goetz, “Das Leipziger Forschungsinstitut für Kultur- und Univers-
algeschichte,” Forschungsinstitute: Ihre Geschichte, Organisation und Ziele, ed.
Ludolph Bauer, Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and Adolf Meyer, 2 vols.
(Hamburg: Paul Hartung Verlag, 1930), 1:387.
28. Marc Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes,” Revue
de Synthèse Historique 46 (1928): 15–50; “Comparaison,” Bulletin du Centre
International de Synthèse 9 (supplement to RSH, 1930): 31–39.
29. Max Weber, “[Concluding Note on Method],” The Agrarian Sociology of
Ancient Civilizations, trans. R. I. Frank (London: Verso, 1998), 385.
30. Among Nippel’s many works on the subject are his editions of Momigliano
(Ausgewählte Schriften, Band 1: Die Alte Welt [Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1998])
and Weber (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Teilband 5: Die Stadt [Tübingen:
Mohr (Siebeck), 1999]) and specific studies devoted to “Methodenent-
wicklung und Zeitbezüge im althistorischen Werk Max Webers,” Geschichte
und Gesellschaft 16 (1990): 355–75; “From Agrarian History to Cross-cultural
Comparisons: Weber on Greco-Roman Antiquity,” The Cambridge Compan-
ion to Weber, ed. S. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
240–55; “New Paths of Antiquarianism in the Nineteenth and Early Twenti-
eth Centuries: Theodor Mommsen and Max Weber,” Momigliano and Anti-
quarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences,ed. Peter N. Miller
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 207–28. Henri Pirenne seems
both to have underestimated Weber’s commitment to the historical and
overestimated the potential of comparison as a precision tool, insisting
that while sociology could suggest possible perspectives, only “comparison”
could help the historian attain “la connaissance scientifique.” Pirenne, De la
Méthode Comparative en Histoire: Discours prononcé à la Séance d’Ouverture du Ve
Congrès International des Sciences Historiques, le 9 avril 1923 (Brussels: M. Weis-
senbruch, 1923), 9–10.
31. Qianshen Bai, Fu Shan’s World.
32. For example, Karen M. Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1991); Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describ-
ing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006); and the various essays of Sachiko Kusukawa such as “The Uses
of Pictures in the Formation of Learned Knowledge: The Cases of Leon-
hard Fuchs and Andreas Vesalius,” Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images, and
Instruments in Early Modern Europe, ed. Sachiko Kusukawa and Ian Maclean
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 73–96.
33. Miller, ed., Momigliano and Antiquarianism.
34. For the notion of “antiquarianization,” see Miller, “The ‘Antiquarianization’
of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–57),” Journal of
the History of Ideas 63 (2001): 463–82.
35. Papy has been publishing extensively on Lipsius, most recently, “Lipsius as
‘Master of Order’: The True Face of Lipsius’s Stoicism in the Manuductio ad
Stoicam philosophiam (1604) and MS Lips. 6,” De Gulden Passer 84 (2006): 221–
37; “An unpublished dialogue by Justus Lipsius on military prudence and
24 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China

the causes of war: the Monita et exempla politica de re militari (1605),” Bib-
liothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance: Travaux et documents 65 (2003): 135–48;
“An Antiquarian Scholar Between Text and Image? Justus Lipsius, Humanist
Education, and the Visualization of Ancient Rome,” Sixteenth-Century Journal
35 (2004): 97–131.
36. For a fuller presentation see now Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities
of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
37. For greater detail see now Siraisi, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of
Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
38. See Ingo Herklotz’s careful assessment of its fortuna and arguments in
Miller, ed., Momigliano and Antiquarianism, 127–53.
39. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial
China (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press,
2000), 489.
40. Elman is cited in Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness, 16.