A collection of essays from some of the world's leading intellectual historians, representing an international spectrum of research into the history of philosophy, intellect, science and music.

What is the relationship between intellectual and cultural history? An answer to this question may be found in the area between the two poles of inquiry commonly known as internalist and externalist methods. The first of these deals with old-fashioned `ideas' (in Lovejoy's sense) and the second with social and political context and the sociology and anthropology of knowledge. This article reviews this question in the light of the earlier historiography of philosophy, literature and science, and debates over the role (...) of context in determining historical meaning. Within the horizon-structure of experience and interpretation the short answer is that cultural history is the outside of intellectual history and intellectual history the inside of cultural history. Ideally, historians ought to work both sides of the historical street. (shrink)

In this book, one of the world's leading intellectual historians offers a critical survey of Western historical thought and writing from the pre-classical era to the late eighteenth century. Donald R. Kelley focuses on persistent themes and methodology, including questions of myth, national origins, chronology, language, literary forms, rhetoric, translation, historical method and criticism, theory and practice of interpretation, cultural studies, philosophy of history, and "historicism." Kelley begins by analyzing the dual tradition established by the foundational works of Greek historiography--Herodotus's (...) broad cultural and antiquarian inquiry and the contrasting model of Thucydides' contemporary political and analytical narrative. He then examines the many variations on and departures from these themes produced in writings from Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian antiquity, in medieval chronicles, in national histories and revisions of history during the Renaissance and Reformation, and in the rise of erudite and enlightened history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout, Kelley discusses how later historians viewed their predecessors, including both supporters and detractors of the authors in question. The book, which is a companion volume to Kelley's highly praised anthology Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, will be a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in interpretations of the past. (shrink)

The influence of historiography on aspects of political thought in France, Italy and Germany. In recent years the overlap between political thought and historiography has changed the boundaries of intellectual history. Donald Kelley, the longtime editor of The Journal of the History of Ideas has played a leading part in this process. These essays by his friends and former students follow in his footsteps. The collection is divided into three parts: France, England [six essays], and Italy and Germany [four essays]. (...) Anthony Grafton and John Salmon provide an introduction, and the volume concludes with a bibliography of Donald Kelley's many works. Historians and Ideologues is designed for those with an interest in the contribution of historiography to political thought, and will be a timely addition to the growing reaction against the postmodern scepticism in historiographical research in this field. Contributors include Ann Blair, Julian Franklin, Kathleen Parrow, David Harris Sacks, Sarah Hanley, Daniel Woolf, Gordon Schochet, Joseph Levine, John Pocock, Perez Zagorin, William Connell, Donald Phillip Verene, and Michael Carhart. Anthony Grafton is a Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. John Salmon is the Marjorie Walter Goodheart Emeritus Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College. (shrink)

This second volume of essays by Professor Kelley takes the study of history as its starting point, then extends explorations into adjacent fields of legal, political, and social thought to confront some of the larger questions of the modern human sciences. The first group of papers examine the historiography of the Protestant Reformation and then of the Romantic and Victorian periods; the last section focuses on the legal tradition and its interpretation in relation to social and cultural, as well as (...) historical thought, in the period from the Renaissance to the French Revolution. Throughout, the author's interest is to analyse how people at different times have viewed their past - and reconstructed and utilised it in the service of their present concerns. (shrink)

Annotation Contains texts from 112 historians of the last three millennia who discuss the problems, purposes, and methods of history writing. Kelley provides commentary and interpretation. Annotation(c) 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Giorgio Tagliacozzo is the pied piper of Vico studies in the English-speaking world; and the line behind him--including the likes of Isaiah Berlin, Ernesto Grassi, Hayden White, Donald Verene, Michael Mooney, and the present reviewer--has grown spectacularly in the past three decades of Vichian scholarship and proselytizing. Here Tagliacozzo offers not only a chronicle of this enterprise since 1944 but also a history and summary of his larger, personal vision of the Vichian vision of the structure of learning. This vision (...) of a "tree of knowledge" is depicted by an accompanying wallchart, with commentary, which represents both a taxonomy of preand post-Vichian disciplines and a portrayal of their evolution and the attendant "modifications of the human mind.". (shrink)

While the study of legal history grew up largely within the confines of the legal profession, it was equally the offspring of Renaissance humanism. Legal humanism, a branch of philology developed by lawyers rather than historians, laid the foundation for the study of legal, institutional, and even some social history. These lawyers based their work on the humanist method of critical reading of original sources, but soon realized that a truly historical view of law also required a systematic understanding of (...) jurisprudence. Their method led them to explore canon and feudal as well as Roman law. Although the legal humanists had no intention of allowing the science of law to be governed by the liberal arts, they did professionalize the study of legal history and thus reshaped historical scholarship in general. This experience demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary work in history. (shrink)