Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800

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Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800

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Introduction: Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China Peter N. Miller and François Louis Until very, very recently, mentioning “antiquarianism” to most historians would elicit expressions of disdain and, even more tellingly, disassociation. 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 history 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 positioned within early modern intellectual life remains a real puzzle. There is still no such thing as a familiar received history of antiquarianism that could help us resolve it, and even our knowledge of the meaning 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 substantial 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 Page 2 →the intense international scholarly exchange of the past century. But in addition we need also to reflect on whether “antiquarianism” is meaningfully 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 European 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. Antiquarianism 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 fifthcentury BCE Greece. Chronologically, the great age of antiquaries 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 antiquarian 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 philology 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 antiquities, 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 antiquaries of the fifteenth century was a self-taught merchant from Ancona, Page 3 →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 impact 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 necessarily 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 identities 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 scholars facilitated not just the study of the past, but bringing the past home. Indeed, by the eighteenth century, the social range is extended still further; travel, the commercial revolution, and mobility of taste made the study of antiquity an object for fashionable engagement. Indeed, “neoclassicism” 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 Renaissance 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 antiquarian movement crossed the Alps, the past that began to be explored and even excavated was not just classical but also Gallic, Germanic, and Norse, and the “antiquity” sometimes not so ancient. With this, antiquarianism laid a foundation for medieval studies, a fact that only becomes apparent in the second half of the seventeenth century. How antiquaries worked was decisive to their future: they studied objects along with texts, sometimes using the objects (often those with inscriptions) 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 themselves 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 Page 4 →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.” Moreover, the interactions between antiquarianism and history, and also between 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 understanding 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 Arnaldo Momigliano's groundbreaking work on antiquaries in the 1950s and 1960s, and to the fact that any serious coming to grips with European 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 “curiosity” 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 Page 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 of the vernacular, opened the way toward a more sentimental, less learned, engagement with the past. This was true for people interested in the past; but where the “Moderns” ruled, the study of antiquity 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 antiquarianism 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 perspective 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 antiquities 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 earlier 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 or boxue haogu yanjiu ) 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 Page 6 →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 collected data. They were textual scholars who were primarily concerned with epigraphy, calligraphy, philosophy, and, above all, the interpretation 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 classics, 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 manner 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 Page 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 systematic turn to antiquities was also the result of an invigorated scholarly skepticism concerning 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 antiquities 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 activities, 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 classification 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. Eventually the new so-called Han learning and the movement of evidentiary scholarship (kaozheng xue) reinvigorated both the connoisseurial and philological strands of antiquarianism, modernizing the field of jinshi xue into one that, like the work of the Song epigraphers and collectors, again compares more readily to European categories of antiquarianism, where broad philological inquiries are directed to recover material aspects of a distant past.15 Page 8 → But how closely do we need to compare jinshi xue to European antiquarianism at all? How necessary is it to take the measure of this Chinese antiquarian tradition bearing in mind the categories, cautions, and horizons that Momigliano and his heirs have brought to the study of the Western tradition?16 Is this not, the critic might object, just another form of insidious “Orientalism,” reading the Other in “our” own language and thus inevitably a “colonizing” act? Leibniz 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 community, 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 contact 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 Chinese 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 experience of antiquity in China will come as a shock to the Europeanist used to seeing poetry and philology, feelings and science, as separate faculties. 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 scholars of European historiography, but for Chinese historians—and those familiar with Chinese history—the role of empirical, documentary scholarship in upholding religious ritual and ideology would have seemed obvious, Page 9 →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 cultural 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 networks, 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 discussed 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 reviewing reports on strange and seemingly supernatural occurrences, some 2,700 of which have survived as his celebrated Yijian zhi (Accounts of the Listener).26 To these scholars, the material traces of a distant past held a mystical allure and demanded to be explored just like strange natural phenomena. 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 engaged in constructing and maintaining a Confucian orthodoxy. This overlooks not only the less positivist dimensions of Chinese thought but also the impact of an increasingly commercialized society and the heterogeneous makeup of the Chinese elite in the late Ming and Qing era. As the contribution by Bruce Rusk in this volume reminds us, reading the discoveries of antiquities both in cosmological and political terms were an essential part of antiquarian scholarship well into the early modern era. The research project of a comparative cultural history was Karl Lamprecht's vision for the Institut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte he established at the University of Leipzig.27 “Comparative history” occupied a central place in the historical thinking of Marc Bloch, in particular, in Page 10 →the 1920s.28 As practiced, it aimed to reveal questions which were occluded from within a single discipline's, or culture's, one-point perspective. It aimed at the open-ended and suggestive, rather than the conclusive 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 precisely 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” showing 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 material remains of the past alongside of texts as sources for its understanding. 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 material remains. To provide a possible path to explain such differences, we propose to expand the comparative framework beyond the study of antiquities. Page 11 →One area the present collection of essays has chosen to examine 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 exhibited 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 groundbreaking history of the Yunnan border region, where he conducted geographic 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 studying 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 comparison 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 Momigliano & 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 nineteenth 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 relationship 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 heavens, and from other parts of the globe. Page 12 →

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 antiquarianism, 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 “antiquarianism” and “archaism” in the context of Chinese art.) Thus, it could be argued that properly situating antiquarianism in its cultural matrix effectively 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 observational 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 specifically Page 13 →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 something 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 relationship between the antiquarian study of the past on the one hand, and poetry, art, religion, natural philosophy, ethnology, ethics, and history on the other, we would be much closer to understanding what it meant to think like an early modern European. The still bigger provocation might then be to turn this same spotlight on China. Alain Schnapp's sketch of the contours of a “comparative antiquarianism” 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 antiquarianism, casts a light on the tremendous, latent power of old things and their study. His broad comparison raises a broad question: is there a parallel 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 broken remains of the past is followed by Jan Papy's case study of the antiquarian 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 experience with physical remains and that derived from travelers to the Western Hemisphere and the Far East was woven into that derived from the reading Page 14 →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 antiquarianism, suggests one possible mapping of this encounter. It shows how scholarly comparison can function as a form of translation, exposing incompatibilities (Weber's “splitting”) as well as parallels (the “lumping”). Its mood is interrogatory, assuming neither tradition to be canonical 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 antiquarian modes. The realms they cover—the relationship to the artifact, 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 cultures, 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 antiquarianism, his reminder that things were as opaque and as open-ended as texts has several major consequences. First, it problematizes the idea of the Renaissance as an epistemological break. Second, it problematizes any simplistic understanding of how material evidence bore within itself any notional certainty. Third, by juxtaposing “substitutional” and “archaeological” approaches and arguing for their coexistence, at least in the earlier Renaissance, he has articulated a new argument for the power of imaginative uses of the past. Rather than accepting the Whiggish distinction between science and art, which has done so much to blacken the reputations of Cyriac of Ancona, Pirro Ligorio, and Piranesi, among others, 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 antiquaries Page 15 →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 artifact production thus remained normative. Such comparison confirms that it is the European aspiration for a “purely” archaeological, unemotional 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 collectors' 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 conviction 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 production materiality, time, and space all become relative, so that even a record of the physical destruction of a thing cannot preclude its reconstitution and transmission later, especially if the object was believed to have been made by a historically eminent figure. Jinshi scholarship, especially its more recondite forms developed during the Ming era, only partially demystified 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 another of Momigliano's casually tossed-off asides, explores the antiquaries' 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 antiquarian investigations. The improvement of physical, mental, or public Page 16 →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 employed 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 community. Kenneth J. Hammond looks specifically at the scholarly networking 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 compilation. Hammond's close reading of Wang's preface, composed over a ten-year period, demonstrates the realization among late Ming scholars 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 corrected 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 classics 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, Page 17 →which was intended as practical knowledge and remained firmly embedded in the tradition of healing, Cheng's studies ultimately took the ancient 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 purpose. It reminds us that the origins of a critical history of religion cannot reflexively be laid at the door of antiquarianism or of ethnology. For the early modern study of Islam shows us something different again: a case study in the resistance of European learned culture to a real engagement with another, competing religion. Firsthand accounts did not dissolve myths or disabuse prejudices. His conclusion, on the contrary, that the antiquarianism of the ethnographers blocked the antiquarianism of the scholars offers a spectacular vantage point on to the question of how Europeans actually came to know China. The attitudes of Chinese Confucian intellectuals toward foreign cultural practices had a particularly complex

history. For Ming scholars, the Mongol occupation of China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, 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 writings 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 superiority. 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, Page 18 →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 debates 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 the Ur-form—of cultural history. D. E. Mungello's essay on the Rites Controversy reviews the collaboration and conflicts between Chinese classicists and European missionaries. Paired with Rubiés's essay it suggests the internal cultural limits to just this sort of investigation. Not every kind of exploration can be accommodated, and some forms of inquiry are less manageable than others. Martin Mulsow's essay, which concludes our volume, shows us how explosive this problem can be when not managed, or when not manageable. 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 implications of their research. Like his exact contemporary Spinoza, the power of Van Dale's critique derives not from the invention of a new polemical 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 possibility 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, Benjamin Elman remarked on the “long-standing” dichotomy within Chinese historiography between diachronic “annals” and synchronic “treatises,” Page 19 →and noted that early modern Chinese examination candidates thought in terms of this dichotomy.39 What, then, might a Chinese version of “Ancient 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 antiquarianism, both gesture provocatively at the longue durée of a historical approach 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 Institute in 2009–10, a conference entitled Traces-Collections-Ruins: Towards a Comparative

History of Antiquarianism, and a collection of papers. World Antiquarianism, edited by Schnapp and to be published by Getty in 2013. 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 History 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 Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California 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 modern 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: Page 20 →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, 2004); On-cho Ng and Q. Edward Wang, eds., Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005); Dieter Kuhn, Perceptions of Antiquity in Chinese Civilization (Heidelberg: Edition Forum, 2008). In the seven articles on Chinese historical 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 antiquaries were still considered “archaeologists”: see R. C. Rudolph, “Preliminary Notes on Sung Archaeology,” Journal of Asian Studies 22 (1963): 169–77; Robert 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 Chinese 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: Xianggang 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, “Reshaping Chinese Material Culture: The Revival of Antiquity in the Era of Print 960–1279” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2010). On earlier preSong 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).Page 21 → 10. Li Ji, “Zhongguo gu qiwu xue de xin jichu” (The new foundations of Chinese antiquities studies), Wenshi zhexue bao 1 (1950): 63–79; Lothar von Falkenhausen, “On the historiographical orientation of Chinese archaeology,” Antiquity 67 (1993): 839–49. 11. “The Master said: ‘I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge. 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. (Heidelberg: 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 Center, 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 bowuguan, 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 Beziehungen zu Russland und Peter der Grosse (St. Petersburg, 1873), appendix 76, cited in Christian D. Zangger, Welt und Konversation: Die theologische Begründung 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 général des hommes et l'accroissement des sciences et des arts chez nous aussi bien que chez les Chinois, car c'est un commerce de lumiére, qui nous peut donner tout d'un coup leur travaux de quelques milliers d'années, et leur rendre les nostres: et doubler pour ainsi dire nos véritables 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.Page 22 → 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 survey of Western oriental studies, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006), and Suzanne Marchand's comprehensive study of German oriental scholarship, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 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 same year the 911 pages of Jan Marco Sawilla, Antiquarismus, Hagiographie und Historie im 17. Jahrhundert: Zum Werk der Bollandisten, ein wissenschaftshistorischer 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 Antiquarianism 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 Center, 2006), 229–74. 24. The classic work remains Zhu Jianxin, Jinshi xue (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1930). 25. For recent exceptions in English see Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic 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 Antiquarian: 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 Historiography 1870–1928” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003).Page 23 → 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 numismatic 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 Universalgeschichte,” 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 “Methodenentwicklung 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 Companion to Weber, ed. S. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 240–55; “New Paths of Antiquarianism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Theodor Mommsen and Max Weber,” Momigliano and Antiquarianism: 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. Weissenbruch, 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 Describing: 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 Leonhard 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.Page 24 → 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 the causes of war: the Monita et exempla politica de re militari (1605),” Bibliothèque 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.

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PART 1 Antiquarianism and the Study of the Past

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ONE Writing Antiquarianism: Prolegomenon to a History Peter N. Miller Fifty years ago Arnaldo Momigliano lamented, “I wish I could simply refer to a History of Antiquarian Studies. But none exists.”1 If there is still no single-volume history of antiquarianism, many, many pieces of this puzzle have been assembled. Already eight years ago Joseph Connors created an online bibliography of early modern antiquarianism of around 680 titles.2 Some of the heroes have gotten monographic treatment by now—Ligorio, Panvinio, Orsini, Scaliger, Cotton, Cassiano, Peiresc, Selden, Caylus—while the majority, of course, have not—Cyriac of Ancona, Camden, Pignoria, Worm, Mabillon, Bianchini, Barthélemy, to name but a few. We know something of who the antiquaries were, and something therefore of the history of antiquarian scholarship, but it is still far too early to write that monographic study. Even more, with all that we have learned, we still know almost nothing about the history of the history of antiquarian scholarship. Momigliano, whose “Ancient History and the Antiquarianism” was not a history of antiquarianism and did not generate any, did nevertheless succeed at inspiring a whole generation of scholars to work on the history of scholarship.3 But with all that there was to do, this question of the history of the history of history was, understandably perhaps, neglected. Some might not even have been aware of it as a question. But Momigliano surely would have been. For his own practice of the “history of historiography” brings to mind the image of the snake swallowing its tail: the historian of today writes about how historians of the past were shaped by what they read and where they lived—and his own work is necessarily Page 28 →transformed by the encounter. At what point does the one touch the other? At what point does the practice of antiquarianism shape the writing of the history of antiquarianism? And at what point does writing the history of antiquarianism affect the practice of history? These are questions we need to answer.4 Fifty years ago, when Momigliano wanted to underscore how neglected antiquarianism was, he signalled this by noting the absence of any ready-made history of it. Ironically—though, as ever, with an exquisite perspicuity—the volume that Momigliano pointed to as a second-best answer to his question actually provides the best one to our own.

A Morphology of Antiquarianism Carl (or Karl) Bernard Stark's Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst—whose first part only, Systematik und Geschichte der Archäologie der Kunst (1880), was completed before the author's death—is not a well-known book.5 Nor is its author well-known, either. Both should change. Momigliano already hinted that this is an extraordinary work, providing not only a summary of how and who studied antiquities, but also a history of the study of those studies.6 Stark's work, as the title suggests, also lies on that fascinating fault line separating and connecting the old “antiquarianism” from the new “archaeology.” Since this semantic frontier is pregnant with implications for any modern grappling with the antiquarian past it is something that we will have to consider here as well. But as we plunge into Stark's scholarship we also discover something very interesting, if not entirely surprising. For the first real historian of antiquarianism was almost perforce a historian of material culture and cultural history. How these fit together then suggests something, I think, of how they might fit together now. So, let us begin then with some first attempts to explain the meaning and history of antiquarianism. This situates us in the landscape of the Handbuch, a purely pedagogical genre that thrived in Germany and only in Germany (what it means that French schoolboys learned about antiquity from novels like Barthélemy's Voyage du jeune Anacharse [1788] while Germans read things with titles like Lehrbuch der griechischen Antiquitäten [1858–75] cannot yet be gauged). But the advantage of working with this sort of text is clear: because its intent is to present to the beginning student a comprehensive survey of a field at a given moment, it affords the later inquirer with a

ready-made guide to a whole scholarly world. Page 29 → Stark wrote at least seven monographs on ancient Greek art and history and a thick collection of essays was posthumously published with the telling title Lectures and Essays from the Field of Archaeology and Art History.7 In addition to his own Handbuch, he also collaborated on Karl Friedrich Hermann's four-volume Lehrbuch der griechischen Antiquitäten.8 This might be a good place to start because its introduction begins by defining “Alterthümer, antiquitates, archaiologia” as a means of reaching back to grasp ancient man, embracing “all the appearances and expressions of his life and his activities at a certain point in time.”9 According to Hermann, adding the study of literature “in its fullness” transformed “Alterthümer” into “Alterthumskunde or Alterthumswissenschaft.”10 In this new conception, antiquities only constituted a small part, though precisely marking the point of engagement with past circumstances of life (“so haftet doch gerade diesen vorzugweise der Gesichtspunkt einer Beschäftigung mit vergangenen Zuständen an”). And for this, Hermann referred to the early modern locus classicus, Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning (1605, Pt. 2, chap. 6), which defined Antiquitates as “relics of history, as if some fragments rescued from the shipwreck of time” (“Antiquitates sunt reliquiae historiae, quae tanquam tabulae e naufragio temporum ereptae sunt”)—itself, as so many have noted, paraphrased out of the preface of Biondo Flavio's Italia Illustrata.11 These sources—Hermann refers to monuments of antiquity (“Denkmäler des Alterthums”)—were either passed down through literary transmission or through actual material survivals. Hermann calls them “eyewitnesses and remains of the past” (“autoptische Zeugen und Reste der Vergangenheit”). Such material reminders include inscriptions, medals, implements, and images. But, and this marks an important turn of the argument, while all these antiquities (“Alterthümer”) served as sources and means to an end, they did not exhaust their fullest meaning and importance. And even, he writes, where this “monumental” Altertumskunde shared the name of Antiquitates with Archaeology, “it had actually through the connection to general Art History gained a new direction.”12 Hermann does not dilate on this point. But Stark, who edited Hermann's Handbuch before proceeding to write his own, made explicating the turn from antiquitates to archaeology by way of art history his chief task. Stark began by explaining that Art-Archaeology, “or the science of the visual arts of the peoples of classical antiquity” (“Die Archäologie der Kunst, oder die Wissenschaft von der bildenden Kunst der Völker des klassich Alterthums”) is an important part of classical Altertumswissenschaft, Page 30 →“or classical philology” in the widest sense, and thus belongs to the field of Philology.13 Archaeology was a way into the spirit of the past, but Stark made clear that he saw it as an “application” of the philological and even natural scientific research method in order to grasp “the Spirit of Antiquity in general,” and in particular the stylistic development of art.14 Philology was, in the nineteenth century, the great polydisciplinary integrator. As its chief spokesman, August Boeckh, proclaimed from his chair in Berlin in 1822, the realm of Philology included “the most important notions to be investigated present in the very nature of the oldest tribes; expressed in the individual parts of ancient cults as in the appearances of images.”15 Similarly, Ludwig Lange, another professor, used an inaugural lecture at Prague to declare philology the science whose task was to research “the spirit of both the classical peoples” (Greeks and Romans),16 while Alexander Conze had used his, at Vienna, to locate archaeology at the crossing of classical philology and art history.17 This recognition that images had something important to say about accessing the spirit of past times seems to have reached consciousness—or at least become a commonplace—by the middle of the nineteenth century. Boeckh drew an exact parallel between the philology of words and of images. The history of classical art, he wrote, which was for him part of philology, could not be separated from knowledge of Western art monuments. He went on to suggest the creation of a “comparative cultural history of all antiquity” as a chief task for Philology.18 Interestingly, Goethe, otherwise such a staunch proponent of world literature, is discovered by Stark to have emphasized that these expectations of classical philology could not be extended to extra-European antiquities. They were, to be sure, interesting (his word was “curiosities”), but not helpful for Western cultural self-

formation.19 Asking about the place of Archaeology relative to classical Philology, as Stark does in his second section, shows how narrow the conception of Archaeology had already become (and which, presumably, Stark hoped to change). In the introduction to this volume we have talked about the very close, even genetic, relationship between the study of words and the study of things. Today, we might locate the key moment in the work of Christian Gottlob Heyne in the 1760s and 1770s.20 Stark, however draws “prooftexts” from the work of Boeckh and F. A. Wolf in the first third of the nineteeth century, each of which emphasize the broad commitment to “the reconstruction of the whole life of the peoples of classical antiquity,” to cite the former.21 But through what? Stark offers two different Page 31 →avenues, the first being the medium of transmission itself and the second the various functions that objects performed. Stark begins with medium-as-material. These included written remains of the past, whether on paper, parchment, stones, clay, wood, ivory, metals, whether in literary works or magic or children's things, official acts or wills or names of the dead. Then there were remains that did not utilize speech or writing, but functioned through “örtliche Fixierung”—space as a primal key—or chemical signature, or weight, or color, or form. Moreover, Stark continued—and all of this is quite brilliant—even textual material that was transmitted could be studied by the student of the past in terms of, or through, the material form of that transmission, such as the material on which the inscriptions were carved, or papyrus rolls, wood, coins, textiles, or the inks utilized. He noted one could add architectural works as a form of inscribing of the human in the landscape and, in general, “the man-made changes to the earth's surface of land and water, high up and in the depths, through man-made or substantially altered natural objects, such as food remains, pigments, and oils.” In other words, the record of Cultura was itself a language that could be deciphered.22 Stark identifies both a literary and a monumental philology, and suggests that this latter became identified with archaeology once “art” was added to the mix. On the frontier between these approaches, Stark argues, stand the auxiliary sciences—he mentions in particular Diplomatics, Epigraphy, and Numismatics, because they were wordrelated material culture studies. Indeed, Stark's argument about medium-as-material seems born out of reflection on the workings of these historische Hilfswissenschaften. What Stark does not state here—but which he refers to elsewhere—is that these Hilfswissenschaften were developed as skills by antiquaries in the seventeenth century. Thus the antiquarian synthesis of word and object marked the path from philology to archaeology.23 The second approach to material remains was not to emphasize the medium of transmission, but rather function, whether in language, religion, science, art, state, cult, private life, or technology, among others. Here Stark followed Otto Jahn's argument that the “essence” of a scientific treatment was that it focused not on the object so much as on the reason for the thing being called into existence.24 This gave a decisive role to archaeology since it was only through the scientific study of remains that this “function” could be assessed.25 Thus, here too materiality mattered—even “function” could not be assessed independently of a discipline he described as “the discipline for the representing of Page 32 →ancient lives” (“des antiken Lebens repräsentirende Disciplin”). “Also the inscription-stone, writing tablet, coin, and papyrus roll which in antiquity served as manuscript leaves in their external form, in the distribution of writing, the relationship to related imagery and finally in the form of characters themselves, call for an archaeological treatment.”26 This vision actually extended beyond Archaeology as it was narrowly construed in Stark's own time, and certainly beyond the received view of antiquarians, however respectful of their achievement he was. Archaeology, thus, could embrace both the specific and the general perspective, the individual, or pointilist inquiry, and the broadly contextual. As if comparing one kind of philology to another, Stark suggested that archaeology could by studying art do what philology achieved by studying literature: it could breathe life into the past and capture its spirit—as opposed to some dry kind of annotation. Archaeology offered a synthesizing, second-order opportunity. It was a way of seeing, rather than a set of protocols for sifting evidence. Citing Otto Jahn, Stark concluded: “Archaeology is to us the scientific study of the important monuments of the peoples of classical antiquity according to their actual expressive means through mass, form, and color, and grounded on this the development and existence of visual arts in antiquity as a part of the whole cultural life itself. Or, in short, the

scientific engagement with the visual art of Antiquity.”27 It should be clear by now that Stark's idea of archaeology, formulated so close to its origin, is very different from our own. He is concerned with hermeneutics and the evocation of lived life, ours with (typically) excavation technology and interpretation of objects. The notes to this section reveal how heavily Stark leaned on Boeckh for the idea of this new-modelled archaeology. And Boeckh, in an oration of 1822, beautifully distinguished between the realms of philology and history. The former was devoted to the historical and philosophical cognition of all antiquity—literally, “of the universe of antiquity” (universae antiquitatis). And by “universe” Boeckh explicity intended not the diachronic narrative of history (“ab historia res ex ordine temporum gestas potissimum docente”) but, rather, the whole life of ancient peoples “by parts” (“philologia omnem antiquarorum populorum vitam comprehendat eamque per partes”).28 In German, in his famous lecture course at Berlin—delivered over and over again for fifty years! —Boeckh was even more apodictic about the sovereignty of philology: “Philology is the historical construction of Antiquity,” “the Knowledge of Antiquity in its full extent,” and, even, “the knowledge of what is known.”29 History was something else, and much less interesting. Page 33 → In his pursuit of the wholeness of past lived life Boeckh represents the culmination and climax of one line of development that emerged in the early Renaissance fascination with ancient Roman texts. Another, also resumed in this turn to a material philology (Boeckh referred to “Sachphilologie”) was synonymous with Archaeology and emphasized visuality. So, Gottfried Bernhardy, in his lecture course on philology, Grundlinien zur Encyclopädie der Philologie (1832) defined Archaeology as the “Kunstwissenschaft der Alten.”30 Obviously, this would be a line that would lead back through Winckelmann, Piranesi and Caylus to artist-antiquarians like Ligorio, but also forward to Jacob Burckhardt, a student of Boeckh's who became an art historian. Stark was aware that it was possible to identify this broad Classical Archaeology with Cultural History. But, instead, he preferred to link “Culturgeschichte” to the study of costume, manners, and material culture; to human history as natural history. In this, he explicitly followed the interpretation of Gustav Friedrich Klemm (1802–67). But while generally sympathetic to the potentially encyclopedic character of a cultural history which paid so much attention to the material world, Stark, whose own interest lay more in the direction of philology than natural history, specified that archaeology was not just about materiality, but about art made matter. For him, “art” separated natural from human history.31

A History of Antiquarianism According to Stark, the ancients used the words archaiologia and antiquitates to refer to their science of past things. For the Greeks, the former term referred to things so old that they no longer continued to live in the present. These archaia, according to Stark, included peoples, spaces, political forms, ways of fighting, and lifestyles. Art materials were part of this general set of remains. And “The same concept of the narration of a past in-itself-completed-life of the people” is what the Romans meant by Antiquitates.32 Already in antiquity, Stark wrote, the term antiquarius referred to an involvement with words and writing, and this was preserved in the medieval use of the term to mean manuscript copyist (and the modern association with rare book dealer).33 The link between study of monuments and the special artistic remains of antiquity—res antiquaria—emerged in Renaissance Rome. The first such modern to be called an Antiquarius was Cyriac of Ancona (fl. 1430); the first to create an institution dedicated to Page 34 →its recovery was Pomponio Leto, who founded the Accademia Romana (c. 1460); the first to use it in the title of a book was Andreas Fulvius, Antiquitates Urbis (1527).34 By the beginning of the eighteenth century it could refer to an entire, existing corpus of learning: J. A. Fabricius's Bibliotheca antiquaria (1713). The “History of Archaeological Studies” constituted the third part of Stark's book, and is what Momigliano must have had in mind when he described Stark's as the best extant history of antiquarianism. It is divided into four chapters: “The beginnings of archaeological studies in the 15th and 16th centuries in the spirit of the Renaissance,

” “The archaeology of art in the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century under the domination of antiquarian interests: pioneers of the scientific foundation,” “The science of ancient art grounded on the philosophy of beauty and on general history: Winckelmann and his followers (1755–1828),” and “The last fifty years of archaeological studies: the greatest expansion and scientific direction of the study of monuments.” For the beginning, Stark's key figure was Pirro Ligorio. This is important, for Ligorio's great achievement according to the two best modern students of sixteenth-century antiquarianism was in refocusing attention on material remains and visual corpora—opening up the path to art-archaeology later seized upon by Winckelmann and celebrated by Stark.35 Stark's account differs markedly, and for the better, from great prior accounts of the history of scholarship, such as Wachler's at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in his attentiveness to manuscript corpora. The emphasis on Ligorio's key role brings this home: “The greatest and most extensive” collection, he writes, “was not published, or in a very mutilated way only.”36 It was only because Stark approached past scholarship as scholarship that someone like Cyriac of Ancona or Ligorio, who lived on through manuscript collections only, could matter so much. The seventeenth century was the century of the antiquaries. The received view, beginning from the age that deified Winckelmann, was to look down on the century of Kunst- und Wunderkammern. But Stark's closer look showed him something else. “Even today we are guided in the greater part of our knowledge of monuments by the publications of that age…Minor archaeological sources were just then sought after and pursued with great zeal and, generally, the whole breadth of the monumental world of antiquity was first assessed.”37 Stark provides a very fair, and very competent, overview of the main figures and strands in the later antiquarian tradition—Kircher, Maffei, Page 35 →the English, the French Jansenists, and the Dutch encyclopedists Graevius and Gronovius. And we must remember that much as with Momigliano four score and ten years later, there was no narrative for Stark to fall back on: it had to be pieced together through primary research. The key figure in Stark's historical account was Peiresc. He hails him as “the great Peiresc,” “one of the most universal men of modern times, the first archaeological critic, important more through his letters and personal communication than through writings. In him was united for the first time in Europe the breakthrough of the coming study of nature with literary erudition and art sensibility.” And Stark noted, too, that he lived—and still lived—under an unlucky star, an Unstern that affected also his manuscript Nachlass, “which even today is still not fully exploited.”38 We could say that a measure of how right Stark got the antiquarian tradition is just how precisely he got the importance of Peiresc. By comparison, Stark devotes a paragraph to Kircher, a paragraph to Maffei, a long paragraph to Cassiano dal Pozzo—which was surely unusual at the time, given that Lumbroso had published his Notizie only five years earlier—and five pages to Peiresc alone. This was more than he allotted to anyone else before the glorious age of Winckelmann (thirteen pages) and Goethe (seven pages). Stark's survey of Peiresc's life is as detailed as anything published between Gassendi's Vita of 1641 and Henri Leclercq's biographical entry in the Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (1939).39 It would be hard to summarize Peiresc's achievement more succinctly than did Stark. The great and enduring importance of this man for archaeology lies precisely in his universal scientific position, that universal history [was] to him equally in combination with ethnography and geography the goal for the study of monuments, as a prejudice-free, empirical and experimental study of nature; exactly these studies he gave leave to consider with a sharp, comparing, proof-driven observation of the object as a necessary condition.40 Ever perceptive, Stark recognized that comparison drove Peiresc's studies.41 And Stark also caught the importance of the East for Peiresc, but in a fascinating window into the late nineteenth-century German map of the East, he redescribes the Near East as a Greek, rather than “Oriental” or even “Levantine” cultural space (in this he overweights the role of Cyprus for Peiresc).42 Page 36 →

Stark pointed to the remains in Carpentras—he even mentions the number of manuscript volumes (eightytwo)—and identified which materials are found in which volumes, concluding that “the influence of Peiresc extends into all the important antiquarian works of the age, which he selflessly promoted.”43 Jacob Spon, in many ways Stark's hero for turning attention toward the monumental and aesthetic, “had,” Stark wrote, “in the spirit of Peiresc brought the entire field of monumental sources into his vision,” adding an especial concentration on Greek inscriptions as Peiresc had for oriental materials.44 Mabillon, Montfaucon, and Caylus were others who cited Peiresc's work from time to time, and the latter two devoted enough attention to him as to suggest that they viewed him as something of an ancestor. As late as 1820, C.A. Böttiger, a close collaborator of Goethe's, in his introduction to the first (and last) volume of Amalthea oder Museum der Kunstmythologie und bildlichen Alterthumskunde (1825) called Peiresc “the first Archaeologist” and offered that he and his successor, Spon, “actually began Archaeology.”45 Having traversed the semantic landscape of antiquarianism in the first two parts of his Handbuch and the human landscape in the third part, Stark was able to reflect with greater clarity on what he meant by the terms “antiquarianism” and “archaeology.” “Nowadays,” he wrote, “we expressly separate Antiquitates from Antiquity and the Antiquarian from the Archaeological—or, we designate a certain part of Archaeology specially as the antiquarian, which includes representation of the technology as well as the manner of living.” The Roman category of Antiquitates referred to the “total narrative of the way of living, institutions, and manners,” and was divided up in various ways, as in the great summae of the late seventeenth century, by Gronovius and Graevius. But even when studying monuments—what Stark calls “special archaeology”—this antiquarianism was not archaeology because it never included the perspective of the aesthetic.46 It bears remembering that Stark's career coincided with the vast nineteenth-century projects of collecting and documenting large bodies of ancient inscriptions, both Latin and Greek. His sense of the power of antiquarianism, of its reach, and also of its limits, reflects this contemporary activity. What makes the case of Stark so valuable and interesting is that his own conceptual language is in fact refined by historical study. His whole distinction between antiquarianism and archaeology, and the significance in it of visual culture and art, is itself built on the work of Spon. In other words, in reconstructing the history of antiquarianism Stark discovered Page 37 →that past practitioners had actually formulated principles that remained valuable—but which needed to be disinterred by the historian before they could be applied by the theorist. As he was willing to wear both hats he was able to grasp these forgotten insights. Jacob Spon, a doctor from Lyon, had coined the term “archaeographia” in the preface to his Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis (1685). He defined his neologism as “knowledge of the monuments through which the Ancients transmitted their religion, history, politics, and other arts and sciences, and tried to pass them down to posterity.” For Stark the key was Spon's emphasis on monuments.47 More extensively presented in his Réponse a la critique publiée par Mr. Guillet (1679) was Spon's answer to the person who viewed printed books as “history itself (l'histoire mesme) and inscriptions and medals as merely “monuments which serve history” (monumens qui servent à l'histoire). This was Bacon's distinction between antiquities and history, or Momigliano's between “ancient history and the antiquarian.”48 In putting the difference between him and his antagonist in these terms, Spon helped articulate a major turning point in western scholarship: the idea that things—objects, matter—constituted the building blocks of history; that words were not the only source of truth; that narrative alone was not identical with “history” but rather an interpretation of it. “For me,” Spon continued, “I say that books are not more history than medals or inscriptions, and that it is not the one or the other but the pieces from which it [history] is drawn.”49 Turning to that science of monuments which his antagonist mocked, Spon set forth the eight parts that constitued Archaeologia, or, as he preferred archaeografia, “the science of what the Ancients wanted to teach posterity about their religion, their sciences, their history and their politics, by the original monuments which they have left us.” The eight divisions he envisioned, entirely constituted by different material remains, are numismatics, epigraphy, ancient architecture, iconography (including sculpture), glyptography, toreumatographia (the study of reliefs—Spon clearly felt the need for new terms; itself a fascinating window into his sensibility), bibliography

and Angeiographia, “a vast and prickly” field that included weights, measures, vases, domestic and agricultural utensils, games, clothing, “and a thousand other things whose study does not easily fit in the previous sciences.”50 If, Stark notes in the Miscellanea, one adds in (as either subordinate or interstitial) fields of inquiry such as Deipnographia (study of dining customs), Dulographia (study of slavery), and Taphographia (study of funerary Page 38 →customs), then we would indeed be dealing here with a “mixture of archaeological and antiquarian principles.” In formulating his own categories Spon drew heavily—though not as visibly as one might expect—on his fellow southerner, Peiresc.51 Most decisive is his use of Peiresc as the key figure when he needed a reply to his Antagonist's doubt that an antiquarian could do better than a reader of books: “Which he would not, therefore, have done to antiquaries of the highest order, like a Mr. de Peiresk [sic], the most universal who ever there was in these matters.”52 And then, a bit later, digressing to show “the merit of a real antiquary,” Spon quotes verbatim from a memo drawn up by Peiresc summarizing his meeting with the Netherlandish artist and antiquary Wenceslas Coberg in Brussels, on July 30, 1606.53 As a historian who read unpublished manuscripts as well as printed books, and who paid attention to the theoretical implications of the one as well as the explicit methodological pronouncements of the other, Stark was able to trace the historical impact of antiquarian scholarship from the Renaissance through the seventeenth century and on into the eighteenth-century origins of archaeology. If Spon clearly defended the value of material evidence, the next key step lay in the explicit awareness of the special meaning of objects that were “art.” From Spon, Stark turned to John Potter, an Oxford fellow and younger contemporary (1673/4–1747). He was much less sophisticated than Spon and did not talk about monuments in his Archaeologia graeca; or, The antiquities of Greece (1695–99). But, as if to prove the point, Potter's German translator Ernst Rambach did. In 1778 he added a section in which “Archaeological Investigations” are described as including not just numismatics, metrology, and paleography—legacy fields of the “old” antiquarianism just then becoming the “new” Hilfswissenschaften—but also architecture, sculpture, and painting.54 This addition precisely highlights a change in terminology between 1699 and 1778. According to Stark, despite the important achievements of the English in the sphere of ancient art—he thought theirs was the most sophisticated culture of antiquity in the eighteenth century—and those of dynamic French antiquaries such as the Comte de Caylus and Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, it was in Germany that Spon found his real heirs (we might rightly disagree with the nationalist priority dispute). According to Stark, the first push toward separating “archaeologia” from “antiquitates” was given by Johann Friedrich Christ (1700–1756) in his lectures on “Literatur oder Archaeologie der Literatur” at Leipzig. His successor, Johann Page 39 →August Ernesti, published his lectures in 1790 as Archaeologia literaria.55 At the same time, the establishment in Leipzig of a branch of the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1764 put an institution's resources behind the inclusion of art in the conception of antiquity.56 But change came slowly. While in Leipzig archaeology was being focused on artistic monuments, at that same Dresden Academy, Philipp Daniel Lippert was Professor of Ancient Art and still thinking like a good seventeenth-century antiquary. “Every stone,” he wrote, “will have an explanation from Greek and Latin writers or poets. For every page, against this, will I, as much as possible, attach parallels from statues, sculptures, coins, lamps, paintings, and inscriptions, and list the authors, so that at once one has together a whole conspectus of all Antiquitates.” With this, he thought, difficult passages of ancient literature could be easily explicated.57 And yet, meanings were shifting. At around the same time (1767), Lippert's much greater collaborator, Christian Gottlob Heyne, began his lecture course on archaeology at Göttingen, published as Einleitung in das Studium der Antike in 1772. He focused Lippert's comparative approach on the description and dissection of ancient art works. Art for him was the object of archaeology, and when his lectures were eventually published ten years after his death they bore the title Archäologie der Kunst des Alterthums, insbesondere der Griechen und Römer. Not coincidentally, this was the very title that Stark chose for his own work. Writing in 1880, Stark could proclaim that “Archaeology is now the specific name for lectures on ancient Art, both inside and outside of Germany.”58

But this triumph of archaeology was bought at the price of an ever-narrowed grasp. It no longer dared refer to a general conspectus of Antiquitates or Altertumswissenschaft, but only the specific vision of an Archäologie der Baukunst (Stieglitz, 1801) or Archäologie der Malerei (Böttinger, 1811) or Archäologie der Kunst (Karl Otfried Müller, 1830). Responsible for this was: Winckelmann. And, again, a century's hindsight can only make us appreciate even more Stark's unerring feel for the history of historical scholarship. Even as Carl Justi was publishing the first of his monumental three-volume biography of Winckelmann emphasizing Winckelmann and the Beautiful, Stark was publishing his own biographical essay on Winckelmann stressing Winckelmann's roots as a “Polyhistor” who did important work on things like Merovingian diplomatica. Stark wondered of the bookish Winckelmann how it was that “this kind of so commendable detailed medieval scholarship be done by our Prophet of the Beautiful”—Page 40 →the point being that Winckelmann's position vis à vis the antiquarian tradition badly needed reassessment.59 Indeed, the recent work of Ingo Herklotz and Élisabeth Décultot on restoring Winckelmann the érudit follows Stark directly.60 Both Herklotz and Décultot have noted the relationship between Winckelmann and Peiresc, and there is much here to go into more deeply. There are the explicit references to the “famous Peiresc” (“des berühmten Peiresc”) in the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums and in his private correspondence, and to the “immortal Peiresc” (“dell'immortale Peirescio”) in the Monumenti Antichi inediti.61 Each mention is occasioned by reference to the content of unpublished letters from Peiresc to Cassiano dal Pozzo, manuscripts that were then in the collection of Cardinal Albani—whose librarian Winckelmann was! (It is a fascinating irony of unexplored importance that Winckelmann, who drew so heavily on the manuscripts of Cassiano then in Albani's collection, was Bibliotecario when Cassiano's collection of drawings, the Museo Cartaceo, was sold to the English Crown in the first half of 1762.)62 And then there are Winckelmann's reading notes excerpting from Peiresc's letters. What is notable about these is how exactly representative they are of antiquarian interests at the time. The excerpts include discussions of ancient coins and gems, weights and measures, bronzes, drawings preserved in the Vatican of objects since lost, as well as the moderns who had commented on them already. But Winckelmann also had an ear for what made Peiresc's antiquarianism distinctive—his common approach to antiquities, natural history and ethnography—recording also Peiresc's queries about fossils, marine petrifications, Baltic amber and volcanic eruptions in Ethiopia.63 But in addition to these specific references to Peiresc, there are deeper and more alluring parallels of practice. Décultot explains that Winckelmann's emphasis on the spectator's affect as an interpretative key required a new kind of ekphrasis; Peiresc was a master of the older form of description.64 Décultot contrasts Winckelmann's “vertical ethnology” with the “transverse” approach of contemporary antiquaries like Caylus; this, in turn, grew out of Peiresc's oriental studies of a century earlier.65 Décultot draws attention to the importance of natural history for Winckelmann as an autoptic space; Peiresc pursued naturalist observation in parallel with antiquarian observation.66 Décultot stresses the ironic point that Winckelmann, who championed knowledge through direct observation, was also deeply committed to the power of the “conjecture” Page 41 →or “hypothesis”; the same was true for Peiresc.67 In the Handbuch, then, Stark gets Winckelmann right just as he does Peiresc. Winckelmann's broad vision of art as an index of social change, to borrow from Francis Haskell, had the unintended consequence of investing the project of archaeology with a much broader remit, so that to “Classical Archaeology,” which was invented then, could be assigned the responsibility of capturing the ethnographic and cultural-historical dimensions of art.68 For Winckelmann's total history, in Carl Justi's view, joined the “erudition of the student of antiquity, the wealth of illustrative material of the Roman antiquary, the experience of the sculptor, and the thinking of the philosopher.”69 But, interestingly—and Stark caught this as well—Winckelmann used the term “History,” not “Archaeology,” to characterize his work. For him, archaeology was already tainted by overmuch proximity to antiquarianism and “antiquarioli.” “Winckelmann and his Century,” was Goethe's compelling homage to Montesquieu's attempt to grasp the Spirit of a historical development (in one case through law, in the other art). Momigliano was surely right to link Winckelmann's achievement with Gibbon's as the climax of early modern history-writing.70 But Goethe actually provides us with even finer analytical tools. First of all, when he tried to write history it came out looking a lot like antiquarianism—Bacon's “unperfect histories” come to mind.71 Second, he thought hard about the different ways

of thinking that lay behind the different ways of writing. In one of a series of passages aimed at elucidating the function of description in botany he explained that there were four different types of of scholars, those who sought knowledge only in order to apply it, those who observed and described, those who insensibly fused the observed into the imagined, and the “comprehensive whom vanity might call creators” who actually came to observation of the world with powerful ideas.72 Stark saw this, too, and argued that Goethe was so receptive to Winckelmann's project because he perceived the parallel between the study of “style” in art and morphology in botany and comparative anatomy.73 Thus, where Momigliano thought in terms of content when he pointed to Gibbon as the union of “antiquarianism” and “history,” Goethe thought in terms of epistemology, and saw Winckelmann as the figure in whom met a posteriori description and a priori imagination. Here, indeed, Goethe comes very close to figuring these different modes of historical study in terms of Immanuel Kant's distinction between the “synthetic” and the “analytic.” Indeed, in Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert Page 42 →he actually asserted that the only kind of intellectual work “able to reject or oppose or scorn with impunity the great philosophical movement initiated by Kant” was, in fact, the perfect antiquarian: By occupying himself exclusively with the best the world has produced and by comparing humbler, even inferior things to those excellent achievements alone, his erudition reaches such a high level, his judgment becomes so authoritative, his taste develops such consistency, that within his own area of competence he appears admirably, even astonishingly well trained.74 F. A. Wolf, in 1807, had seemingly thought of Altertumswissenschaft differently, describing it as a “Statistik of Remains.”75 The reference here was not to Winckelmann's Geschichte, nor to the antiquarian arts of the Renaissance but to the new political science made famous by Ludwig August von Schlözer who, in his Lectures on Statistik published only three years earlier, had famously written that “Statistik was static history; history Statistik in motion.” In this we can see Momigliano's famous diagnosis of early modern historical culture preserved and transformed: structural, synchronic analysis versus diachronic narrative. And so, in the end, even as he redescribed the project in Schlözer's terms, Wolf was still pointing back to the old world of scholars and connoisseurs. Writing in propria persona, Stark insisted on the priorty of art-archaeology over antiquarianism; of, ultimately, Justi's Winckelmann over Wolf's Schlözer. “It remains, therefore,” he wrote, “a difficult but necessary task to separate the purely antiquarian from the Art-Archaeological, not to make the non-artistic perspective into the guiding and deciding one.”76 Antiquarianism, if not each and every antiquary, stopped short of seeing through the monuments to the minds of those who made them. It was therefore only the combined work of archaeologists and artists—or of their qualities united in a single person, such as Winckelmann—that could reach back and recover the past. Stark's achievement was itself extraordinary. He did not just pull together a diverse and complex narrative, but he was able to see past the conceptions of contemporary historiography to the vital links between early modern antiquarianism and nineteenth-century philology and archaeology. His contemporary, Jacob Burckhardt, whom he does not talk about, represented the prolongation of Winckelmann's77—or Hegel's—view of art as the most telling index of the age. In terms of Stark's historical narrative, Burckhardt the art historian-as-cultural historian Page 43 →represented one possible outcome of the developments he had been analyzing.

A Future of Antiquarianism Nevertheless, the triumph of Art-Archaeology did not mean the disappearance of antiquarianism. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the work of Stark's exact contemporary, Jacob Bernays. For it was Bernays, in a couple of spellbinding articles of the 1870s, who staked out the countercultural argument for the debt still outstanding to scholars of the 1620s and 1630s, like Claude Saumaise and Gabriel Naudé. In the 1870s he was lecturing on the study of antiquities from Sigonio and Panvinio up through Gibbon and Niebuhr,78 and in his contribution to Theodor Mommsen's festschrift—Mommsen, who himself mocked the laborers “at the antiquarischen

Bauplatz”—signalled the contribution of the antiquaries to the kind of problem that Mommsen had made, and claimed, as his own.79 Bernays had coincided with Mommsen at Breslau—Mommsen at the University, of course, and Bernays at the Jüdisches Theologisches Seminar. 80 And Bernays' masterpiece seized upon Joseph Scaliger, the leading scholar of the age of antiquaries, as the focal point for an investigation of what marked the profile of the age. It is striking to read Bernays' biography today for it seems so modern with its emphasis on placing Scaliger's achievements in their context. This is even more extraordinary an achievement measured against the tremendous effort of erudition that was required to know his character from the inside out, and which is so stylishly internalized, and so lightly worn. Looking at the kind of books written by his contemporaries makes us realize even more how amazing and unique was Bernays' achievement. For he was taking a mass of erudite questions and finding in them the person, the mind, even the mentality, of the man. In short, Bernays tackled Scaliger the way an army scout might tackle a high outcropping: as a crucial vantage point for surveying a whole contested landscape.81 Bernays as a cultural historian working in the history of scholarship reminds us that there were other paths to the Kultur der Renaissance than the one chosen by Burckhardt. Bernays represents another kind of cultural history, an alternative antiquarian legacy. For him, it is not art so much as the history of scholarship, and in particular historical scholarship, which guides us directly into the spirit of the time. We understand this better if we accept Momigliano's later claim—uttered as if a disciple Page 44 →of Bernays—that the history of historical scholarship is nothing less than the history of how our predecessors defined, sought, and found the truth. Bernays, who paid such careful attention to the scholarly tools of the early modern antiquaries, himself represents something of the perdurance of their approach, or at least their vision, on into the nineteenth century (just as Momigliano's admiration for Bernays might suggest its continuity into the twentieth.) Bernays's Scaliger shows that such a perspective was still capable of rising to the heights of historical and even human understanding—that scholarship could provide the same access to a cultural vision as art.82 But Stark's wider oeuvre suggests still a third path to understanding the meaning of the past, neither from art history nor from history of scholarship—this despite his majestic Handbuch. For if we were to turn away from Stark's studies of the ancient world we would find a fascinating book documenting a trip he had taken through France in the fall of 1852: Städteleben, Kunst und Alterthum in Frankreich (1855). Half a century earlier, the great antiquary, and first reviver of Peiresc, Aubin-Louis Millin (1759–1818) had traveled through the Midi and published what Stark hailed as “the richest work on the Roman monuments of the South.”83 Stark is not writing this book, though he frequently cites it. Antiquity may be in the title, but his focus is on the moment when cities came together to serve a cultural historical role. “They are given in the title as city life, art, and antiquity, as three equal perspectives on the central cultural historical point.” Stark contrasts this with the role of cities in modern industrial and bureaucratic society. And yet, even so, he finds that contemporary cities still retained their role as “bearers of all the new lifestyles” and as the location “of all the highest spiritual life.” What was then still true only residually was wholly true for the ancient world and middle ages.84 Stark's inspiration came from the venerable genre of travel writing; the aspiration was to what we would today call cultural geography, but which did not then exist. Reflecting on his predecessors, Stark noted that his “physiognomic view of the city” was extremely rare. In particular—and this is long before Karl Lamprecht associated himself with the idea of cultural landscape—Stark felt that there were rich and untapped resources for the traveler to study in the relationship between land and soil, mountains and valleys, above all the relationship to water, to the river, or even to the sea, then the ways, names of streets, the remains of perimeter walls or their replacements, the boulevards, the grouping of chief religious, political Page 45 →and economic buildings relative to one another, the grouping of particular trades in today's time and those of earlier time only surviving in names, the city-dweller's way of building that in different neighborhoods often show such garish opposites, the redesign of the lands nearest the city, [and] finally what, however, only staying longer can develop, the whole range of local expressions, ways of speaking, manners, [and] forms of law.85

The physiognomic approach is perhaps expressed most directly in Stark's comments about Paris. For here it is not the complex relationships in the physical landscape that are the focus—though Stark is right to claim innovativeness for his presentation of these—but the even more complex interactions of the different forms of cultural creation that play out in the different physical spaces of the city. And even today, he writes, and even in a city as well-known as Paris, most people would be unable to identify “specifically urban ways of life, and also which role did Paris play earlier as a city in relation to others; these are questions that can likely be answered by examining the city's physiognomy and using tools of historical evidence.”86 “City Physiognomy” and the “historische Hülfsmittel”—a term so hard to translate, and so bound up with the nineteenth century's love for auxiliary sciences—bridge the gap between antiquarianism, history, and the newer kind of cultural science of urban space that Stark is proposing. With this we can almost look beyond Lamprecht to Walter Benjamin's work on Paris. At the same time, this turn to cultural geography, or city physiognomies, calls upon a specific, and in Stark's case different, set of talents. “I must not be an Archaeologist,” he writes, nor a scholar fascinated by noble ruins. For “the true historical interest” it was necessary to put the “physiognomy” of today's flourishing cities at the center, modern places like Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Orleans, etc. It was both the continuities across time and the ruptures that he wanted to trace. And in the back of his mind, there was always the Italian example. “And truly, city life in the age of Rome [and] that of the Middle Ages on Gallic soil, can be put on nearly the same page with that of the Italian soil.”87 With this the example of Burckhardt's Cicerone hoves into view, and an extraordinary”what if”: what if Stark's vision of the cultural-geographical travel book had triumphed over Burckhardt's history-of-art travel book? The one focused on France with a long look back to the ancient world but with an eye toward the modern life of places, the other on Italy, Page 46 →with an emphasis on the arts that made the modern break with the past. The former attentive to material culture—Spon's angeiographia—and the latter to painting, sculpture and architecture. The one, despite protestations to the contrary, pointing toward archaeology, the other to art history. These are a set of questions we cannot answer, but they do help clarify exactly what the stakes were—and where the fractures lie—in that mid-nineteenth century breaking and remaking of the connections to the past and the way it was studied. For Stark belongs to those German decades ca. 1850–1870 which saw the birth of the cultural sciences and which Momigliano identified with the disintegration of classical philology as the great disciplinary aggregator. Stark's interest in city portraits and in cultural landscape, like his commitment to the meaning of art in archaeology, links him with this same shift. In 1880, the year Stark published the first volume of his Handbuch der Archaeologie der Kunst—and where his history necessarily ends—his praise of the antiquaries would have fallen on not just unreceptive but uncomprehending ears. “Professional,” big-budget archaeology was recording its first great successes, at Pergamon and Olympia, while antiquarian scholarship had long become “antiquarian”—the pejorative description for the small-minded seeking out the small-scale (Winckelmann's antiquarioli). Among historians, cultural history of the sort practiced by the antiquaries had long been drubbed off the field, while the influence of Jacob Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance was rising, though far from the obvious winner it now seems today. Indeed, in 1880, the star that seemed most ascendent might have been that of Karl Lamprecht. His studies of Romanesque ornamented incipits and the Triar-Ada manuscript had just appeared, and he was teaching students like Aby Warburg at Bonn (where Bernays happened then to be teaching as well) about the relationship between art and historical change while working out his massively researched new economic history-as-cultural history: a study of the Mosel region in the high middle ages (1885–86, 4 vols.). In this work Lamprecht would bring together the study of physical space (Landesgeschichte) with the history of law, trade, commerce, and art. What emerged looked like economic history from the outside—Statistik in an age of statistics—but was a material cultural history through and through. There were antecedents for this kind of work among the amateur antiquarians of the earlier nineteenth century Geschichtsvereine, but Lamprecht was not about to identify with them.

With Lamprecht and Pirenne—one of Lamprecht's protégés—and Page 47 →the latter's godchildren, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, we are firmly in the world of the “new” history of the twentieth century, which, with little self-consciousness on this small point, resumed the impetus of these earlier efforts at cultural history but now under the banner of economic and social history. Indeed, as Momigliano himself suggested, the modern cultural sciences emerged out of the decaying antiquarianism.88 With this, the antiquarians receded still further into the backcloth. Pedagogical works like Stark's found the oblivion destined for all such books.89 Yet, if we were to reconstruct the afterlife of the antiquarian as carefully as we have tried to reconstruct the afterlife of antiquity, we would be able to trace not just the continuity of practice—one thinks here of the persistence of the “descriptive,” or synchronic mode—but also the ongoing genetic relationship between Lamprecht and his twentieth-century heirs. For Henri Berr, whom we know as the French promotor of Lamprecht, Febvre, and Bloch, also wrote a sympathetic portrait of Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, after Millin the second modern student of Peiresc.90 So there remained a dimly perceived, and usually misconstrued relationship to the antiquarian past; Stark was truly exceptional in the seriousness and sympathy with which he pursued the history of the antiquarian origins of archaeology. Even Momigliano, in the end not so interested in antiquarianism, when turning to Stark for guidance also accepted some of his prescriptions: most notably that Peiresc was the “archetype” of all antiquaries.91 In the history of historiography, the serpent is always reaching for his tail.

NOTES 1. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” in Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome, 1955), 69. 2. Private communication from Professor Connors; the URL is no longer supported by Columbia University. 3. For Momigliano's project see Peter N. Miller, ed., Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2007), esp. Miller, “Introduction: Momigliano, Antiquarianism and the Cultural Sciences.” 4. A parallel inquiry is Michael Shanks's into “writing archaeology.” See Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley, Social Theory and Archaeology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 12–23; Michael Shanks, Experiencing the Past: On the Character of Archaeology (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 33. 5. Stark is, for example, not mentioned once in the 710 pages of Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Page 48 →Press, 2006), nor in Stephen L. Dyson, In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: A History of Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). Stark is mentioned four times in Helmut Sichtermann, Kulturgeschichte der klassischen Archäologie (Munich: Beck, 1996), but without discussion of his work. 6. Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” 69 n. 3. 7. K. Bernhard Stark, Vorträge und Aufsätze aus dem Gebiete der Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, ed. Gottfried Kinkel (Leipzig: Teubner, 1880). 8. Karl Friedrich Hermann, Lehrbuch der griechischen Antiquitäten, 4 vols., 1858–75 (Frieburg: Akademische Verlagsbuchhandlung von J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1892). 9. “…umfasst alle Erscheinungen und Aeusserungen seines Lebens und seiner Thätigkeit vor einem bestimmten Zeitpuncte,” Hermann, Lehrbuch, 1. 10. What makes these Handbücher such fascinating documents, despite their incredibly turgid style, is that each simple apodictic statement is then supported by such a thick web of references as to provide the modern inquirer with an almost ready-made map with which to explore the question. To support this Hermann refers to Platner, Ueber wissenschaftliche Begründung und Behandlung der Antiquitäten (Marburg, 1812), 8; also F. S. W. Hoffmann, Lebensbilder berühmter Humanisten (Leipzig: A. F. Böhme, 1837), 58, and A. F. Elze, Ueber Philologie als System (Dessau, 1845), for the idea of the wide study of the past, and for the neologisms he cites F. A. Wolf, Museum der Alterthumswissenschaft (Berlin, 1807), 101–45, and his Vorlesungen über die Encyclopädie der Alterthumswissenschaft, vol. 1, ed. Gürtler (Leipzig, 1831), and vol. 6, ed. F. S. W. Hoffman (1833). 11. “…sed gratias mihi potius de perductis ad litus e tanto naufragio supernatantibus, parum autem

apparentibus, tabulis haberi, quam de tota navi desiderata rationem a me exposci debere contenderim,” Biondo Flavio, Italy Illuminated, vol. 1, books 1–4, ed. and trans. Jeffrey A. White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4. On the derivation by Bacon from Biondo and what it means, see now Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 137–38, and the bibliography there. 12. Hermann, Lehrbuch, 2. 13. Carl Bernhard Stark, Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst, Abtheilung 1: Systematik und Geschichte der Archäologie der Kunst (1880; rpt. Boston: Elibron Classics, 2001), sec. 1, 1. 14. “Es ist schliesslich auch die Methode der Arbeit auf dem archäologischen Gebiete, welche als eine Anwendung der philologischen und zugleich der naturwissenschaftlichen Methode der Forschung, der genauesten Feststellung des Thatsächlichen, wie einer in dem Geiste des Alterthums überhaupt und spezielle dieser Stilweise geübten Ergänzung und Wiederherstellung einer nur trümmerhaft uns erhaltenen Kunstwelt sich kundgiebt,” Stark, Handbuch, sec. 1, 2. 15. “Summas esse notiones indagandas veteribus nationibus natura insitas et in singulis antiqui cultus partibus velut in adspectabilibus imaginibus expressas,” Page 49 →Boeckh, Kleine Schriften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1858), sec. 1, 105, quoted in Stark, Handbuch, 3. 16. Christian Conrad Ludwig Lange, Die klassische Philologie in ihrer Stellung zum Gesammtgebiete der Wissenschaften und in ihrer innern Gliederung: eine Antrittsvorlesung (Prague: Tempsky, 1855), 12; quoted in Stark, Handbuch, 3. 17. Alexander Conze, Ueber die Bedeutung der klassischen Archäologie: eine Antrittsvorlesung (Vienna, 1869), 5: “wo sich der Querdurchschnitt der klassischen Philologie und der Längendurchschnitt der Kunstwissenschaften kreuzen, da und genau da liegt das Gebiet der klassischen Archäologie.” Quoted in Stark, Handbuch, 3. 18. “ja ich möchte behaupten, wie sich die vergleichende Sprachenkunde gebildet hat, ebenso dürfte sich eine vergleichende Culturgeschichte des gesammten Alterthums mit der Zeit als eine Hauptaufgabe der philologischen Wissenschaft herausstellen,” Boeckh, Rede zur Begrüssung der Philologenversammlung in Berlin 1850, in Kleine Schriften (Leipzig, 1859), sec. 2, 189, quoted in Stark, Handbuch, 3. 19. “Chinesische, Indische, Aegyptische Alterthümer sind immer nur Curiositäten; es ist sehr wohl gethan sich und die Welt damit bekannt zu machen, zu sittlicher und ästhetischer Bildung aber werden sie nur wenig fruchten,” Goethe, Werke, 23:278, quoted in Stark, Handbuch, 4. 20. See now, for example, on Heyne, Michael Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), chaps. 3, 4, and 6. 21. F. A. Wolf: “die Erkenntniss der alterthümlichen Menschheit selbst, welche aus der, durch das Studium der alten Ueberreste bedingten Beobachtung einer organisch entwickleten Nationalbildung hervorgeht.” Boeckh: “Reconstruction des gesammten Lebens der Völker des klassischen Alterthums, sämmtlicher Bildungskreise und Erzeugnisse derselben in ihren praktischen und geistigen Richtungen,” in “Stellung der Archäologie zu der klassischen Philologie,” in Stark, Handbuch, sec. 2, 4. 22. “Und daneben dehnt sich ein weites Gebiet vor dem Auge des Alterthumsforschers aus: die kolossalen und die kleinsten Architekturwerke, die künstlichen Veränderungen der Erdoberfläche in Land und Wasser, Höhe und Tiefe, die durch den Menschen geformten oder überhaupt veränderten Naturobjekte, wie die Reste der Speise, der Farbenpigmente, der Oele…” “Stellung der Archaölogie zu der klassichen Philologie,” in Stark, Handbuch, sec. 2, 4. 23. Stark, Handbuch, 5–6. Philology, Antiquarianism, Archaeology; for the latter, the “Hilfswissenschaften” were, Stark wrote, Topography and Numismatics. Just as Epigraphy and Diplomatics were graphical as well as material, and so on the border between purely literary and purely monumental approaches, a fully archaeological mode would have less use for them (Handbuch, 74–76). 24. Otto Jahn, “Ueber Wesen und wichtigste Aufgaben der archäologischen Studien,” in Berichte über die Verhhandlungen der Königlich-Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Philologisch-Historische Klasse (Leipzig, 1848), sec. 2, 209ff.: “das Wesen der wissenschaftlichen Behandlung beruht nicht auf der Page 50 →Einheit des Objektes, sondern auf der Einheit des Principes, von welchem sie ausgeht, dessen sie sich bei allen Untersuchungen stets bewusst ist und welches ihr den sichern Masstab giebt, das Wesentliche vom Unwesentlichen zu sondern,” quoted in Stark, Handbuch, 11. 25. Stark, Handbuch, 7–8.

26. “Die Dinge nun nach dieser Seite selbstständig weiter zu betrachten, sie zu benutzen für den antiquarischen oder sonstigen Gesichtspunkt, das fällt der Aufgabe der diese Seite des antiken Lebens repräsentirenden Disciplin zu, nicht mehr der Archäologie. Auch der Inschriftenstein, die Schreibtafel, die Münze, die Papyrus-rolle, das in das Alterthum hinein reichende Manuscriptenblatt fordern in ihrer äusseren Form, in der Vertheilung der Schrift, in dem Verhältniss zum bildlichen Beiwerk, endlich in der Buchstabenform selbst eine archäologische Betrachtung heraus.” Stark, Handbuch, 8. 27. Jahn: “Archäologie ist uns mithin die wissenschaftliche Bearbeitung der durch Masse, Form und Farbe wirkenden Denkmäler der Völker des klassischen Alterthums nach der ihnen eigenthümlichen Ausdrucksweise, und die darauf wesentlich gegründete Erkenntniss der Entwicklung und des Bestandes der bildenden Kunst im Alterthum, als eines Gliedes in dem gesammten Culturleben desselben, oder kurz gefasst die wissenschaftliche Beschäftigung mit der bildenden Kunst des Alterthums,” quoted in Stark, Handbuch, 9. 28. Boeckh, “Oratio etc. MDCCCXXII habita,” in Kleine Schriften, 105, quoted in Stark, Handbuch, 9. 29. Boeckh, Encyklopädie der philologischen Wissenschaften (Leipzig, 1877), 25: “Die Philologie ist historische Construction des Alterthums,” “die Erkenntniss des Alterthums in seinem ganzen Umfange,” and “die Erkenntnis des Erkannten” quoted in Stark, Handbuch, 9. 30. Bernhardy, Grundlinien zur Encyklopädie der Philologie (Halle, 1832), 52, quoted in Stark, Handbuch, 11. 31. Stark, Handbuch, 39. 32. Stark, Handbuch, 44. 33. Guido Panciroli in De magistratibus municipalibus (1593) cited patristic and byzantine sources referring to an ancient place called variously in Latin tabularium, antiquarium, or archium and in Greek chartophylacium, grammatophilacium, or archaeion. Joseph Scaliger in his commentary on the letters of Ausonius (1588) used antiquarius as a synonym for kalligraphos (cited in Jan Marco Sawilla, Antiquarianismus, Hagiographie und Historie im 17. Jahrhundert. Zum Werk der Bollandisten. Ein wissenschaftlicher Versuch [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2009], 238 n. 64 and 239 n. 65). 34. Stark, Handbuch, 44. 35. Herklotz, Cassiano dal Pozzo und die Archäologie des 17. Jahrhundert (Munich: Hirmer, 1999); William Stenhouse, Reading Inscriptions & Writing Ancient History. Historical Scholarship in the Late Renaissance (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2005). 36. Stark, Handbuch, 87. 37. “Jedes nähere Eingehen auf die wichtigsten literarischen Produkte dieser Epoche giebt uns ein anderes Bild. Noch heute sind wir mit einem grossen Page 51 →Theil unserer Monumentenkenntniss auf die Veröffentlichungen jener Zeit angewiesen, ein guter Theil der Durchschnittskenntniss des Publikums ruht auf ihnen. Und zugleich sind die bedeutsamsten Anläufe damals gemacht worden, um zu einer umfassenden und lebensvollen Erkenntniss der antiken Kunst zu gelangen. Die archäologischen Nebenquellen sind gerade damals mit grossem Eifer aufgesucht und verfolgt und überhaupt die ganze Breite der monumentalen Welt des Alterthums erst ermessen worden,” Stark, Handbuch, 108. 38. Peiresc was “einer der universalsten Menschen der modernen Zeit, der erste archäologische Kritiker, mehr durch seine Briefe und persönlichen Verkehr als durch Schriften wirksam. In ihm vereinte sich die damals zuerst in Europa zum Durchbruch kommende Naturforschung mit Sprachgelehrsamkeit und mit Kunstsinn. Ein Unstern hat über seinen gewaltigen literarischen Nachlass gewaltet, der selbst noch heute nicht ausgenutzt ist,” Stark, Handbuch, 110. 39. Henri Leclercq, “Peiresc,” in Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, 15 vols., ed. F. Cabrol (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1939), 14:1–39. 40. “Die grosse und bleibende Bedeutung des Mannes für Archäologie liegt zunächst in seiner universalen wissenschaftlichen Stellung, die ihn ebensosehr die Universalgeschichte im Zusammenhang der Ethnographie und Geographie als Zielpunkt für die monumentalen Studien, wie eine vorurtheilsfreie, empirische und experimentirende Naturforschung, eine scharfe, vergleichende, prüfende Beobachtung der Objekte als nothwendige Voraussetzung eben dieser Studien betrachten liess. Dazu kam ein entschieden künstlerischer Sinn, der in fortwährendem Verkehr mit Künstlern geübt ist und nichts weniger als einseitig blos das Alte um des Alters willen bewundert,” Stark, Handbuch, 132. 41. “Der Vergleich zunächst derselben Objektgattungen wie der Münzen in möglichster Fülle, dann aller

verschiedenen Gattungen ward von ihm fort und fort geübt,” Stark, Handbuch, 133. 42. “Wichtiger noch ist der unmittelbare Verkehr mit dem griechischen Orient, den Peiresc durch dort Ansässige wie in Smyrna, theils durch Reisende unterhielt…Cypern ist eine Hauptstation seiner wissenschaftlichen Erwerbungen,” Stark, Handbuch, 133. 43. Stark, Handbuch, 134. 44. “Münzkunde, Epigraphik, antike Baukunde, Ikonographie, worin neben den Statuen und Büsten aber auch alle Arten von Einzelbildern in der Malerei z.B. inbegriffen sind, Lehre der geschnittenen Steine (Glypotographie), Reliefkunde (toreumatographia), Handschriftenkunde, Gefässkunde, worunter überhaupt omne instrumenti genus verstanden wird. Wenn er dann aber Disciplinen wie Deipnographia, Dulographia, Taphographia als den genannten untergeordnet oder zwischen ihnen sich bewegend bezeichnet, so tritt hier noch eine Mischung des archäologischen und antiquarischen Principes hervor. Spon hat im Geiste von Peiresc den Gesammtbereich der monumentalen Quellen in's Auge gefasst, ganz speciell das bis dahin so vernachlässigte Gebiet der griechischen Inschriften unmittelbar aus den Monumenten herausarbeitend wahrhaft eröffnet.” Page 52 →Stark, Handbuch, 140. Stark notes that Spon made his way from Lyon to Rome and Greece by way of Aix, where he stopped off to view the Peiresc papers, then still mostly in family hands. 45. C. A. Böttiger, ed., Amalthea oder Museum der Kunstmythologie und bildlichen Alterthumskunde: Im Verein mit mehrern Freunden des Alterthums, Band 1 (Leipzig: Georg Joachim Göschin, 1820), xxviii–xxix. The context is Peiresc's study of the tripod found at Fréjus in 1629; Böttiger also refers to Gassendi's discussion of this episode in the Vita Peireskii (bk. 4, 152) as well as the Peiresc letters published in Millin's Magazin encyclopédique in 1812–13. Amalthea was no unimportant journal; for Stark: “In diesen Zeitschriften [Böttiger started another in 1828] begegnen sich bereits die bedeutendsten, aufstrebenden Kräfte eines neuen wissenschaftlichen Standpunktes mit dem absterbenden Kreise der Weimarischen Kunstfreunde,” Handbuch, 223. 46. Stark, Handbuch, 45. 47. “Archaeographia est declaratio sive notitia antiquorum monumentorum, quibus veteres sui temporis religionem historiam politicam aliasque tum artes tum scientias propagare posterisque tradere studerunt,” quoted in Stark, Handbuch, 46. 48. “Il [Guillet] luy plait d'apeller les Livres imprimez l'histoire mesme: mais pour les Inscriptions & les medailles, il leur fait seulement l'honneur de les traiter de monumens qui servent à l'histoire,” Jacob Spon, Réponse a la critique publiée par M. Guillet, sur le Voyage de Grece de Iacob Spon (Lyon, 1679), 59. 49. “Pour moy qui ne cherche pas ces distinctions rafinées, je dis que les livres ne sont pas plus l'histoire que les medailles, ou les inscriptions, & qu'il ne sont les uns & les autres que les pieces d'où elle est tirée. Il ne doit pas mesme s'imaginer que les livres ont un grand avantage parce qu'ils sont plus diffus, & qu'il y a plus de matiere pour en compiler l'histoire,” Spon, Réponse, 59. 50. “L'Angeiographie est une étude vaste & épineuse, qui explique les poids, les vases & les mesures, les instrumens pour l'agriculture & pour le domestique, ce qui appartenoit aux jeux, aux vetemens, à la navigation, & mille autres choses dont l'examen ne se peut pas commodement rapporter aux Sciences precedentes; & qu'on croit pouvoir comprendre sous le nom d'Angeia, quoy qu'il ne soit pas assez general.” Spon, Réponse, 70. 51. Interestingly, however, he only mentioned Peiresc in the last category of Angeiography, or material culture, perhaps identifying this as his particular excellence. 52. Spon, Réponse, 72. 53. Spon, Réponse, 74–77. 54. Stark, Handbuch, 46. 55. Stark provides bibliographical details in Handbuch, 51. 56. Stark, Handbuch, 46. 57. “Jeder Stein wird eine Erklärung aus griechischen und lateinischen Geschichtschreibern oder Poeten haben. Jeder Seite gegenüber werde ich so viel nur möglich die Similia aus Statuen, Marmoren, Münzen, Lampen, Malereien und geschnittenen Steinen mit beifügen und die Autoren Page 53 →hinzusetzen, damit man auf einmal einen ganzen Conspectum der ganzen Antiquitäten zusammen habe: dass auch sogar Knaben die allerschwersten Stellen in Geschichtschreibern und Poeten nicht allein leicht verstehen, sondern sich auch eine gute Kenntniss von den dahin einschlagenden Büchern zuwege bringen können,” from a

manuscript cited in Carl Justi, Winckelmann: Sein Leben, seine Werke und seine Zeitgenossen (Leipzig: Vogel, 1898), 1:366, quoted by Stark, Handbuch, 177–78. 58. “Die Archäologie ist jetzt specieller Name für die Vorträge über antike Kunst, innerhalb und ausserhalb Deutschlands.” Stark, Handbuch, 47. 59. “Und dieser Mann, der bereits in der Mitte der Dreissiger stand, der Mann der Bücherwelt, des staubigen Gelehrtenhandwerks, der in ihrer Art so hoch anerkennenswerthen mittelalterlichen Detailforschung, sollte unser Prophet des Schönen, unser Erklärer einer Welt der Anschauung, ein Wegweiser in das Sonnenland der Kunst werden?” K. Bernard Stark, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, sein Bildungsgang und seine bleibende Bedeutung in Sammlung gemeinverständlicher wissenschaftlicher Vorträge, ed. Rud. Virchow and Fr. V. Holkendorff, II Serie, heft 42 (Berlin, 1867), 2:24. 60. Ingo Herklotz, Cassiano dal Pozzo und die Archäologie des 17. Jahrhundert (Munich: Hirmer, 1999); Élisabeth Décultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Enquête sur la genèse de l'histoire de l'art (Paris: Puf, 2000), explicitly at 221. Herklotz connects Winckelmann back to the seventeenth-century Polyhistor through his study of artifacts; Décultot through his reading practices. 61. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Schriften und Nachlass, Band 4, Teil 1, of Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, ed. Adolf H. Borbein, Thomas W. Gaethgens, Johannes Irmscher, and Max Kunze (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2002), “Vorrede,” xxx; pt. 1, chap. 2 (1764), 106 n. 2; pt. 2 (1776), 827; Briefe, Entwürfe und Rezensionen zu den Herkulanischen Schriften, bearbeitet von Marianne Gross und Max Kunze, ed. Aldolf. H. Borbein and Max Kunze, in Winckelmann, Schriften und Nachlass, Band 2, Teil 3, of Herkulanische Schriften Wincklemanns (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Sabern, 2001), 212 nn. 26, 25; in a letter of 21 February 1761 to Count Bünau, Winckelmann refers to the letters of learned men “welche sich in meiner Bibliotheck in MS befinden. Unter anderen sind zweien Bände Briefe des berhühmten Peirescii an den Commendatore del Pozzo,” Monumenti Antichi Inediti, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Roma: Mordacchini, 1821), 1:60. Winckelmann's excerpta are from Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Allemand, 63, 67. 62. For a brief discussion of Winckelmann's relationship to Cassiano, see Herklotz, Cassiano dal Pozzo, 117–18, and on his use of the Museo Cartaceo, Henning Wrede, “Die Opera de' pili von 1542 und das Berliner Sarkophag-corpus: Zur Geschichte von Sarkophagforschung, Hermeneutik und klassischer Archäologie,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 104 (1989): 373–414, esp. 389–91. 63. Winckelman excerpted from one letter of Peiresc to Lelio Pasqualini, ten to Claude Menestrier, of 25 April 1629, 10 April 1632, 24 March 1633, 3 November 1633, 5 October 1634, 9 February 1634, 22 February 1634, 1 February 1635, 25 February 1635, 4 March 1636, and four to Jean-Jacques Page 54 →Bouchard of 19 March 1631, 2 December 1632, 13 July 1633, and 15 December 1633, Bibliothèque Nationale MS Allemand 59, ff. 274–77. 64. Décultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 114–15; Miller, “Description Terminable and Interminable: Looking at the Past, Nature and Peoples in Peiresc's Archive,” in “Historia”: Empricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 355–60. 65. Décultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 169; Miller, “The Antiquary's Art of Comparison: Peiresc and Abraxas,” Philologie und Erkenntnis. Beiträge zu Begriff und Problem frühneuzeitlicher “Philologie,” ed. Ralph Häfner (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), 57–94. 66. Décultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 193, 198; Miller, “Peiresc and the First Natural History of the Mediterranean,” in Sintflut und Gedächtnis, ed. Jan Assmann and Martin Mulsow (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), 167–98; Miller, “Mapping Peiresc's Mediterranean: Geography and Astronomy, 1610–1636,” in Communicating Observations in Early Modern Letters, 1500–1575: Epistolography and Epistemology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Dirk van Miert (Oxford: Warburg Institute Colloquia, 2012). Décultot draws specific attention to Winckelmann's excerpta on optics, 213; for Peiresc's optical researches see Miller, “Description Terminable and Interminable,” 369–73. 67. Décultot, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 231; Peiresc uses the word “conjecture” so frequently to introduce precisely his comparative narratives that no single reference can be given. But limiting ourselves to the letters to Cassiano dal Pozzo alone—which we know Winckelmann read—see his use of the term in letters of 2 August 1635 and 29 April 1636, Peiresc: Lettres à Cassiano dal Pozzo, ed. Jean-François Lhote and Danielle Joyal (Clermont-Ferrand: Adossa, 1989), 195–202 and 234–40, respectively. 68. Francis Haskell, History and its Images. Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven and London:

Yale University Press, 1993), chap. 8. 69. Justi, in his biography of Winckelmann (2:108ff.), presents him as aiming at total history and concludes: “Es ist ein Unternehmen, bei dem die Gelehrsamkeit des Alterthumskenners, die Anschauungsfülle des römischen Antiquars, die Erfahrung des Bildhauers, das Denken des Philosophen zusammenarbeiten müssen,” quoted in Stark, Handbuch, 52. 70. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Antiquari e storici dell'Antichita,” printed in Riccardo Di Donato, “Momigliano from Antiquarianism to Cultural History,” in Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter N. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 19. 71. “As a rule, however, a concept stands fully before the mind's eye while its realization proceeds only in a piecemeal fashion. Thus we have had to resign ourselves to providing the materials for such a history rather than the history itself. These materials include translations, excerpts, our views and those of others, indications and hints, an anthology which may not satisfy every expectation but may merit respect for the earnestness and devotion that produced it. In any case it is our hope that such selected yet unsynthesized materials will be all the more acceptable to the thoughtful reader, Page 55 →for he may take pleasure in combining them as he will,” Goethe, “Theory of Color,” in Scientific Studies, vol. 12 (ed. Douglas Miller), Goethe: Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 161. Compare Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 2:2. The amplitude of Goethe's effort can be somewhat gauged from the Müncher Ausgabe of the Farbenlehre where the historical part is double the size of the other two combined. 72. Goethe, “Excerpt from Studies for a Physiology of Plants [A Schematic Fragment],” in Scientific Studies, 73–74. 73. “Styl ist ihm der Ausdruck ‘um den höchsten Grad zu bezeichnen, welchen die Kunst je erreicht hat und je erreichen kann,' ‘Styl ruht ihm auf den tiefsten Grundfesten der Erkenntniss, auf dem Wesen der Dinge, insofern uns erlaubt ist, es in sichtbaren und greiflichen Gegenständen zu erkennen…Und so gehen in Goethe fortan seine naturwissenschaftlichen und Kunststudien Hand in Hand; seine Farbenlehre, seine Metamorphose der Pflanze, seine Studien zur vergleichenden Anatomie sind immer gedacht in jenem Sinne der Erkenntniss des Styles,'” Stark, Handbuch, 227. 74. Goethe, “Winckelmann and his Age,” in Essays on Art and Literature, vol. 3 (ed. John Gearey), Goethe: The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 115. 75. F. A. Wolf, Darstellung der Alterthumswissenschaft (Berlin, 1807, new ed. 1833), 38ff.: “also wesentlich eine Statistik des Ueberreste.” 76. Stark, Handbuch, 62. 77. As for instance, in the essays collected in Jacob Burckhardt und die Antike, ed. Peter Betthausen and Max Kunze (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1998). 78. Wilfried Nippel, “Das Staatsrecht in der Diskussion—von 1871 bis heute,” in Theodor Mommsens Langer Schatten. Das römische Staatsrecht als bleibende Herausforderung für die Forschung, ed. W. Nippel and Bernd Seidensticker (Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2005), 9–60, at 27 n. 73. While studying at Bonn (October 1867–August 1869), Wilamowitz-Moellendorff had heard Bernays give a lecture “über das Studium der alten Geschichte von Sigonius und Panvinius bis auf Gibbon und Niebuhr” (Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Erinnerungen 1848–1914 [Leipzig: Verlag von K. F. Koehler, 1928], 87). 79. Jacob Bernays, “Die Gottesfürchtigen bei Juvenal,” in Commentationes philologae in honorem Theodori Mommseni scripserunt amici (Berlin, 1877), 563–69, reprinted in Gesammelte Abhandlungen von Jacob Bernays, ed. H. Usener, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1885), 2:71–80. 80. See Lothar Wickert, “Theodor Mommsen und Jacob Bernays: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Judentums. Zu Mommsens 150. Geburtstag, 30.11.1967,” Historische Zeitschrift 205 (1967): 265–94. 81. See Grafton, “Juden und Griechen bei Friedrich August Wolff,” in Friedrich August Wolf: Studien, Dokumente, Bibliographie, ed. Reinhard Markner and Giuseppe Veltri (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999), 9–31, esp. 23, for the extent to which the whole Homeric school of interpretation based in Göttingen had emphasized the Greek-Jewish connection (from Michaelis and Heyne through F. A. Wolf). Others have suggested, with some cause, Page 56 →that Scaliger appealed so much because of his union of classical and Biblical civilization (Hans I. Bach, Jacob Bernays: Ein Beitrag zur Emanzipationsgeschichte der Juden und zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes im neunzehnten Jahrhundert [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag, 1974], 33). But note Grafton's precision that Bernays omits what he cannot face in Scaliger, namely, 1. the claim of

Jewish deceitfulness 2. work on the Masora that historicizes the text 3. Scaliger's use of native informants—like Mommsen's use of him—to acquire oriental knowledge and make living Jews unnecessary for future work (Grafton, “Joseph Scaliger, Jacob Bernays and Others,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David B. Ruderman and David N. Myers [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998], 16–38). 82. Jacob Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger (1855, new ed. Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1965), 68. 83. Stark, Handbuch, 257. For Millin and Peiresc, see G. Matthew Adkins, “The Renaissance of Peiresc: Aubin-Louis Millin and the Post-Revolutionary Republic of Letters,” in Isis 99 (2008): 675–700. Arriving at Aix on his trip through the South, Millin eulogized Peiresc (A. L. Millin, Travels Through the Southern Departments of France: Performed in the Years 1804 and 1805, uncredited trans. [London: R. Phillips, 1808], 199–201); so did Stark (Städteleben, Kunst und Alterthum in Frankreich [Jena: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1855], 65: “des Begründers wissenschaftlichen Lebens in der Provence, dessen literarischer Briefwechsel über ganz Europa sich erstreckte”). 84. “Sie sind als Städteleben, Kunst und Alterthum auf dem Titel bezeichnet, gleichsam als drei Perspektiven von dem culturgeschichtlichen Mittelpunkt,” Stark, “Vorrede,” in Städteleben, Kunst und Alterthum in Frankreich, iv. 85. “…das Verhältniss zu Grund und Boden, Bergzügen und Thalöffnungen, vor allen das Verhältniss zum Wasser, zum Fluss oder gar zum Meer, dann die Richtungen, Namen der Strassen, die Überreste der Umfassungsmauern oder ihre Stellvertreter, die Boulevards, die Gruppirung der religiösen, politischen und staatswirthschaftlichen Hauptgebäude unter einander, die Gruppirungen gewisser Gewerbthätigkeiten in jetziger und die in Namen übrig gebliebenen Andeutungen früherer Zeit, die rein bürgerliche Bauweise, die in verschiedenen Stadtheilen oft so grelle Gegensätze bildet, die Umgestaltung des nächsten um die Stadt liegenden Grund und Bodens, endlich, was allerdings nur längeres Verweilen erschliessen kann, die ganze Fülle von Ausdrücken, Redensarten, Sitten, Rechtsformen, die auf bestimmten Lokalverhältnissen basiren.” Stark, “Vorrede,” in Städteleben, Kunst und Alterthum in Frankreich, v. 86. “Aber wie ist gerade Paris zu dieser Stellung gelangt, gehen vielleicht noch heutzutage den Meisten unbekannt individuelle, speciell städtliche Lebensformen danebenher, was hat Paris früher als Stadt neben andern für eine Rolle gespielt, das sind Fragen, die eine Anschauung der Stadtphysiognomie, unterstützt durch historische Hülfsmittel, wohl beantworten kann,” Stark, “Vorrede,” in Städteleben, Kunst und Alterthum in Frankreich, v. 87. “Und wahrlich, das Städteleben der Römerzeit, das des Mittelalters auf gallischen Boden kann sich fast ebenbürtig dem des italienischen Bodens zur Page 57 →Seite stellen,” Stark, “Vorrede,” in Städteleben, Kunst und Alterthum in Frankreich, vi. 88. On this, see Miller, Momigliano and Antiquarianism. 89. Eduard Fueter's massive and authoritative—still!—history of historical writing had nothing to say about the antiquaries (Geschichte der neueren Historiographie [Munich: Oldenbourg, 1911]) as on principle he did not consider erudition (“der gelehrten historischen Forschung”) to belong to history (v). Moreover, unlike Stark, Fueter did not bother with unpublished material, almost guaranteeing a blind spot where early modern antiquaries were concerned. 90. See Miller, “Gassendi à 350 ans,” in Gassendi et la Modernité, ed. Sylvie Taussig (Brussels: Brepols, 2008), 9–16. 91. Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1990), 54.

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TWO The Many Dimensions of the Antiquary's Practice Alain Schnapp We are in the habit of considering the past a continent which is the privileged territory for our Western conception of history to explore. Although Arnaldo Momigliano, in a famous essay, drew our attention to “alien wisdom,”1 we only pay distracted attention to antiquaries who are not European, and it is indeed rare that we investigate the different types of antiquarian practices in various civilizations. The idea behind this volume is to take a comparative approach with the aim of elucidating both the similarities and differences between China and the Western world. The first step toward this is to reflect on the very essence of antiquarian practices. In his canonical definition, Momigliano distinguishes between the antiquary and the historian. Of course both collect information and attempt to interpret ancient times, but the exercise of their curiosity differs. The reason, he says, is that the historian explores history through problems, favoring the order of time. The antiquary, on the other hand, is interested in all kinds of documents as long as they are ancient: their form, their type, and the way they were made. These themselves are the problems which appeal to the antiquary's curiosity. Paul Petau, one of the forerunners of antiquarian curiosity in the seventeenth century, would affirm with pride, “I want nothing if it is not antique” (“nihil peto sine antiqua”).2 In investigating this curiosity about the past in terms of its material components—objects and monuments—I am well aware that the very concept of monument varies from one culture to the next and that my questions lead me to favor literate societies. However, this Page 59 →investigation seems to me to respond to the challenge of comparing these two traditions, the Western and the Chinese, which each present a unique interpretation of the dialogue and rivalry between text and monument. What remains to be defined is what one means by “Occidental” tradition: the Egyptians and Mesopotamians are not Europeans, but their contribution to what we might call “the processes of memory” inspired Greeks and Romans in antiquity, and then through them, in the Renaissance, modern Europeans. (The nineteenth and twentieth century impact of these civilizations, once their texts became legible, is beyond the scope of this essay or volume, but suggests the extent of an ongoing relationship.) For, if we accept that the Western science of studying antiquities, which preceded archaeology in the modern sense of the word, represents one pole in a wide spectrum of investigative techniques of the past, and the Chinese tradition the opposite pole, there is room left to define the means that the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Mesopotamians, and even others used to explore the past. We must of course remember that Prehistoric man was somewhat aware of the past and that he sometimes attempted to retain traces of it. André Leroi-Gourhan has brought our attention to a “collection of curiosities”—strange fossils, rare or exotic stones—placed in the post-Mousterian layers of the Grotte de l'hyène in Arcy-sur-Cure. No matter the exact status of these precise objects, similar “collections” have been discovered by other pre-historians in different contexts. This therefore leads us to believe that there is a curiosity deeply rooted in the human conscience that is interested in what is not usual, in what is distant or strange. If we accept this hypothesis, every society—from the hunter-gatherers to the largest of the Empires—was in one way or another curious about the past and developed various techniques to explore it. Collingwood, who was one of the richest thinkers about historical method, did not hesitate to talk about “theocratic history,” even about “quasi history,” to describe the way ancient Mesopotamians wrote about history.3 In attempting to define the Egyptian and Mesopotamian approach, I will identify the foundational elements that determined—and determine still—the relationship between man and the past. In doing so, I am well aware that paying attention to the past is not history—in the Greek sense of the term historia—but I am persuaded that the collection, extracation, and restoration of objects and monuments defined as ancient is a part of the process that can lead to history by going down both the material and the immaterial path of memory. Page 60 →

Méric Casaubon, son of the renowned Isaac Casaubon, expressed this particularity with unmatched clarity: That Antiquaries are so taken with the sight of old things, not as doting upon the bare form or matter (though both oftentimes be very notable in old things) but because these visible superviving evidences of Antiquity represent unto their minds former times, with as strong an impression, as if they were actually present, and in sight, as it were.4 Momigliano's distinction between historians and antiquaries helps us see in the practice described by Casaubon both the grandeur and the servitude of the antiquary: his passion is for objects first, and facts only second. His work is not only a work of reason; he requires a personal engagement, an ability to “revive the past,” which involves passion. The power of imagination and the desire to collect are the ingredients of the antiquary's mental attitude and also of his know-how. The antiquary is a collector of works, of images, and even and above all of what we today call “files,” various and precise notations that allow us to draw from the object the features, the characteristics that are the very substance of the object. These particular features—size, form, and material—are all interesting of course, but derive their interestingness in terms of an encounter with the past “as if they were actually present.” The antiquary gives an order to objects so as to extract meaning, and this quest resembles a hunt. The Comte de Caylus, the most accomplished antiquary during the Enlightenment, said, “I am a hunting dog” (“canis venaticus”). Peiresc, the great antiquary of the previous century, was crowned by Daniel Morhof “that great hunter of books” (“magni illius librorum venatoris”).5 The antiquary is haunted by a burning need to know. This can take a turn toward the excessive and become a failing, but it is an integral part of his being. This aspect of the antiquarian condition transcends eras, classes, and even gender. Li Qingzhao (1084–c. 1151), the poetess and scholar from Song China, wrote that once the collection of books and antiquities she gathered with her husband was complete and the couple had fallen on hard times, her passion did not go away: “I began to plan how to make do with only one meat dish in our meals and how to do away with all the finery in my dress. For my hair there were no ornaments of bright pearls or kingfisher feathers.”6 This consuming passion that Li and her husband Zhao Mingcheng (1081–1129) shared was as tragic and exclusive as the one that assails the renowned sinologist Kien in Elias Page 61 →Canetti's Auto-da-fé.7 We find this kind of fever in different cultures and contexts.

Stone and Time (“Stein und Zeit”): The Egyptian Experience of the Past One of the most ancient texts that allows us to formulate an idea of antiquarian conceptions in ancient Egypt is an inscription engraved on the basalt statue of royal prince Kawab, son of Kheops (2700 BCE).8 The inscription is attributed to the high priest Khaemwaset, building supervisor of the city and royal domain of Memphis, son of Pharaoh Ramses II (1290–1224 BCE). Khaemwaset, king's son, sem-priest, and the greatest of directors of craftsmen, was happy because this statue of Kawab, once doomed to turn into rubble [?] in the…of his father Khufu, had survived intact [?]…in order to give him [or something similar?] a place in the favour of the gods and to unite him with the transfigured numbers of the Ka-temple of Rosetau, because he so loved those sublime ancient ones, who came before, and the excellence of their works—as a matter true a million times. This favour should be [consists of] every life, duration and happiness on earth for Khaemwaset [the king's son, sem-priest, and greatest of the directors of craftsmen] after having restored all the cults of them [i.e. his ancestors] in the temple and the memory of the people, who had forgotten them and after having built, near the sublime chamber and according to his taste, a pond which should be used to purify [the] walking [?] and for water sacrifices in the […] of Khafra so as to make him blessed with life.9 All the conditions Méric Casaubon set forth appear in this text. It is clear that the context of the discovery, the reading of the inscription, the attribution of the statue to a very specific figure and a well-identified period are all “very notable” components of Khaemwaset's focus. But what is important is indeed the idea of a continuity, the desire to establish a relationship between the present and the past, which is the very condition of the cult's

restoration. Countering the fragility of memory and the erosion of a monument, the observation of the ground is an instrument of self-identification, a means of establishing contact with the illustrious figures of the past. Here, the search for rare and precious objects, so Page 62 →common in a society that reserved a large portion of its most elegant handicrafts and art for tombs, is not the motive for the exploration. Researching, rediscovering, and reestablishing the traces of the past buried in the ground are signs of devotion, a form of respect and emotion. This concern for the past is not isolated: this same Khaemwaset is well known for his interest in ancient monuments and the numerous restoration projects he undertook.10 The excavation of the past was a practice common to Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Chinese traditions and the emotional experience of continuity, involving the burying, forgetting, and rediscovering of objects and monuments across the space of multiple generations constituted a noteworthy part of the Greek and Roman antiquarian experience.11 In the context of Khaemwaset's inscription, knowledge, awareness of tradition, and cultural respect contribute to what is explicitly defined as a pious work. Another Egyptian document nevertheless points to a different kind of curiosity, one that is private and almost intimate. It involves a fossil discovered in Heliopolis in an archaeological context. This sea urchin fossil (echinolampas africanus) bears a hieroglyphic inscription that can be translated as follows: “found south of the quarry of Spdw by the divine father, the priest Tcha Nefer.”12 This inscription from the New Kingdom takes us somewhere else. Nothing here is official, ritualistic, or even religious; rather, everything tells us that this is the personal expression of curiosity written by a literate person captivated by the discovery of a singular object. In picking it up, in extracting it from its environment, the priest Tcha Nefer was acting like an antiquary, even like a naturalist. Yet, he was fulfilling more than a personal satisfaction, more than a desire to know. By inscribing the place of the discovery and the name of the inventor himself, he was somehow establishing a date in the long list of scholars who communicate to each other outside of time and space. This small inscription reminds us that it was normal for scribes and scholars to exercise their personal curiosity by collecting inscriptions, by decoding them, and sometimes even by translating them. This kind of knowledge was part of a scribe's culture; it was crucial to the performance of his activity and it encouraged the relationship between his profession and what we can call scholarly curiosity. The Mesopotamian scribes excelled in this kind of practice—as we will see below. The scholars of ancient Egypt, as well as their masters the pharaohs, were obsessed by what must indeed be called the “cult of monuments.” This involved building “monuments of eternity” likely to withstand erosion for millennia and to attest to the grandeur of rulers. Page 63 →Jan Assmann has offered the canonical definition of this attitude: “Stone as medium […] of memory and the projection of self into eternity and time, as a dimension in which and against which this stone civilization was built.”13 The powerful and literate were capable of finding and collecting ancient inscriptions. Like the famous Hordjedef, son of Pharaoh Sneferu, Kheops' predecessor, they took pride in their knowledge and in the mysteries that were thus revealed to them: This phrase was found at Hermopolis, on a block of quartzite from Upper Egypt, beneath the feet of this god, in the time of his Majesty Mykerinus, the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, by the prince Hordjedef, who found it when he was inspector of temples, while a force accompanied him on this mission: he demanded it as an homage to himself, and brought it back as a object of wonder to the king, when he saw that it was something very secret, which had never been seen or perceived.14 Collecting inscriptions and restoring monuments are both literate tasks. Knowledge and philological study were required tools for practicing the religious and political missions assigned to them by the pharaoh. But, while searching for monuments and inscriptions, the scribe discovered secrets that could never have been imagined before. The relationship between knowledge and power is evident. Hordjedef and his peers saw that others could not grasp the messages from the past and this turned them into special mediators. Collecting such documents is not only a scholarly act, it means confronting a poetic experience merging life and death. The Greeks called Egypt a dwelling place of eternity, a civilization that affirmed the superiority of the afterlife in the face of the brevity of the human condition. The mastery of the past, antiquarianism, was therefore a necessary tool for preserving

memory. And those making monuments for this future life, masons, sculptors, and poets, were well aware that they were all fighting for the glory of eternity. Those writers, men of learning, Who travel back to earlier times, to the arrival of the gods Those true soothsayers of the future, they have become such That their names will be written in eternity Even though they have gone to the other side, when their time of life is finished Page 64 → When their contemporaries will have all been forgotten. They have not built for themselves pyramids of bronze Not steles of iron; They have not sought to leave heirs in the form of children, To keep their name alive. But they have created books as their heirs And the lessons which they have composed. […] More precious than an inscribed funeral stone is a book More precious than a well-constructed funerary chamber Their books will serve as tomb and pyramid To keep their names alive. In the great beyond it is certain that it is important That a name will be in the mouths of men. A man departs this world, his body turns to dust All of his contemporaries are laid in the earth. Yet will his writing ensure that he is remembered And that one mouth will tell of it to another. More precious than a house of decorated walls is a book More precious than a funerary chamber facing the West More precious than a palace well fitted to its foundations

More precious than a votive stone in the temple.15 The “monuments of eternity” could tame the arts of memory. Faced with artisans who carved, cast, or painted, the poets rose up to say that the memory transmitted from one generation to the next could prove more solid than any construction or any mineral. The past was populated with gods, with important men and poets. Of course, the monuments were made of stone, but the words of their builders, which were inscribed in the cartouche, told things that silent stone could never suggest. And when the highest and most massive of these constructions will be built, “one mouth will tell of it to another.” The meaning of passing time and the melancholy of the human condition are the ingredients of this type of poetry, which draws its meaning from the contemplation and comprehension of the past. There is no doubt, therefore, that Egypt was propitious for the development of what I wish to call an “antiquarian” practice and helped encourage a type of relationship between the past and present that lent “antiquaries” a particular place in society. For the Egyptians, the cult of Page 65 →the past was more than a necessity; it was the way to ground society on a solid basis. Those literate men able to read ancient writing or interpret the images on tombs or ancient monuments acquired an unrivaled prestige. Stone is at once monument and inscription, which explains the tension between monumental forms and verbal forms expressed in a genre that undoubtedly constitutes the most ancient poetry of ruins.

Tablets in the Face of Time The rulers of the great empires all sought to tame time, whether they attempted to leave inexpungable traces of their reign to posterity or whether (and often for the same reason) they sought to show that a particular connection linked them to their most glorious predecessors. From this point of view, the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Mesopotamians, and the ancient Chinese are interconnected. Is there a connection between what the Enlightenment called “Oriental despotism” and the domestication of the arts of memory? This is a provocative question, but cannot be addressed here. Nevertheless, whatever the parallels, there are some obvious differences in behavior and technique. The pharaohs attempted to combat erosion by relying on the indestructible mass of enormous stone buildings. We will turn now to Mesopotamia and then, in the next section, to China. Mesopotamian rulers resorted to another solution: that of carefully burying inscribed bricks into the foundations of their palaces and temples. These bricks bore inscriptions to the glory of the ruler; they attested to his piety and to his munificence. They constituted a message that every ruler sent to his descendants and represented the knowledge he had of the achievements of his predecessors. This know-how was slightly ironic, however: it was not the solidity of the walls, the magnificence of the sculpted or painted décor that attested to the ruler's grandeur, but rather the raw clay brick that was dried in the sun and carefully inscribed by vigilant scribes. Before the majestic stones of the pharaohs, the Mesopotamian rulers understood how fragile their raw brick constructions were; but very loudly and very strongly, they proclaimed their grandeur by turning to this modest form of communication with the future. This subtle strategy rests on the shared knowledge that unites scribes through the millennia. It points to a philological capacity, an ability to master Page 66 →archaic written forms, and the diplomatic traditions that marked the distinction of Mesopotamian scribes, who we know collected inscriptions and were also skilled translators. Egyptians and Mesopotamians presented the same faith and the same interests in the past, but the means they used to explore it were different. Aware of the fragility of their brick constructions, the Mesopotamians strove to combat erosion with knowledge: their palaces, which were so quickly destroyed once they were no longer being maintained, harbored foundation bricks that were protected by the ruins. To communicate with the past, it was not enough to inscribe messages piously deposited into the ground; one had to be sure that for generations to come, kings and scribes would go excavate this same ground in order to find these indestructible traces. This eagerness to explore the ground, to unearth earlier sub-structures, to date and interpret the walls, objects, and inscriptions, is somehow unsettling to modern archaeologists, who sometimes feel they are encountering predecessors as keen as they are themselves. G. Goossens has nevertheless qualified this image of the neo-Babylonian kings by insisting

on the religious and political aspects of this attitude at a time when Mesopotamian tradition was vulnerable and sought out support and consolation from the distant past. For the rulers and their scribes were looking for something very specific in the temple grounds: One word continues to come up regarding these excavations, a word that characterizes what we are looking for and what we are finding, the word temenu…the temenu is the ancient foundation text that authenticates the construction of a temple. Its antiquity could be entirely relative, the text needed only to have been set down by the king's predecessors, but it is indispensable, since moreover, when designating his own foundation text, a king would speak not of temenu but of sitru.16 The specific nature of the temenu matters little; it could be a cone or a terracotta cylinder, a tablet, even a foundation layer with gold and lapis lazuli tablets, sometimes even a statue bearing an inscription. What constitutes the temenu is therefore the proof of a tradition, even if it later seems that this tradition is false because of an older document contradicting it. The proof does not necessarily result from a written document, although that would be preferable, but for lack of Page 67 →text, any authentic Antique remnant found during research is acceptable as temenu.17 Research into the past was therefore an exercise in piety that required a complex body of knowledge. The king and his scribes had to be capable of decoding ancient writing in order to be able to validate their discoveries, but they also had to recognize the traces of ancient temples and other places of worship, and they had to be able to take advantage of the topography and climate to detect ancient constructions. In short, antiquarian knowledge was one of the tools of royal functioning, a way to affirm grandeur and the favor of the ruler's gods. Specialists in Assyriology have strived to curb an overly antiquarian view of Mesopotamian societies by stressing the practices of the neo-Babylonian period, during which research into ancient cults, collections of inscriptions, and excavations blossomed. However, as early as the third millennium, we observe that there were honorary inscriptions among the Sumerians identifying the temples in accordance with a very specific schema: “It includes the name of the divinity to which the building is dedicated, the name of the ruler, the verb expressing the action and the purpose of the construction.”18 This Sumerian protocol was widely repeated by later rulers who aimed to identify with the great figures of the past. Sylvie Lackenbacher has shown how particular this epigraphic and architectural practice was, turning the construction story into (almost) required reading during the renovation or design process of a palace or sanctuary. For the Mesopotamians, building a palace or temple was part of the continuity of the action of rulers. An inscription on a tablet or foundation brick was like a book's colophon. It implies an understanding, a knowledge of philological and historical information, that is astounding. Esarhaddon spoke of the history of the Assur temple as follows: The early Assur temple, which Uspia, my ancestor, priest of Assur, had built long ago had fallen into ruin. Erisum, son of Illusumma, my ancestor, priest of Assur, had rebuilt it. 120 years having passed, it had fallen again into ruin and Samsi-adad, son of Illukapkapi, my ancestor, priest of Assur, had rebuilt it. 434 years having passed, this temple was destroyed in a fire. Salmanasar I, son of Adad Nirari, my ancestor, priest of Assur, rebuilt it. 580 years having past, the inner cella, where resided Assur, my lord, the bît sahuri, the sanctuary of Kubu, that of Dibar and that of Ea was in ruins, decrepit and dilapidated.19 Page 68 → In order to obtain the approval of the gods, it was not only necessary to restore the sanctuaries, but to find the location of their foundation and attempt to reconstruct its history. Of course this kind of chronology is not confirmed, but what is important is the historical chain in which the ruler inscribed his action. The Egyptian tradition and the Mesopotamian tradition have several points in common but the sense of erosion, of the inevitable destruction that threatens human construction was even stronger among the rulers of the Fertile Crescent. The

exercise of power is a struggle against decrepitude, against the tempus edax rerum that the ruler must tame. In this case, the texts do not have the monumentality of the Egyptian lapidary inscriptions but their very discretion, their repetition, is a token of endurance and resistance. What is fascinating about the Mesopotamians is the close and structural link between the foundation and the story that accompanies it. Through time, this story has become more precise and important. It does not only describe the act of construction, but the splendor of the architecture and the décor that go with it. The emulation and competition between the kings of the past and present was the engine behind this type of practice: Sennacherib would take the challenge even further by wanting to build the “palace without rival.” The palace without rival had to capture the imagination. Then there emerged the theme of competition between the arts; the bas-reliefs and paintings, the architecture itself, all became matters that were supposed to ensure the prestige and reputation of the king. The fact remained, however, that in the end, the kings and scribes trusted the inscriptions more than the monuments: “Probably no civilization had at once so much distrust in the future of its constructions and so much faith in its writing, but at the same time, it did not, in this regard, link one to the other in response to its need for eternity.”20 The Mesopotamians therefore went further than the Egyptians in their passion for the vestiges of the past. Their scribes collected ancient writings; they sometimes made casts, offered a translation, and indicated origin. Thus E. Sollberger drew attention to a tablet at the British Museum from Sippar.21 It is a pre-Argonic inscription, the oldest ever to be copied, and signifies the “Marian, the merchant, son of Iddi'-‘il the scribe, son of Arsi-aha the Sarramean, has dedicated (this statue) to Samas.” It is followed by explicit commentary indicating the provenance and the location of the discovery: “From the right shoulder of a stone statue which…on the debris of the Ebabbar.” Knowledge and meticulousness are integral to the character of scribes who, through the millennia, are able to hear and explain these ancient Page 69 →writings. During the same period, Nabonid emerged as an antiquarian ruler who organized expeditions in order to rediscover ancient temples and who exhibited his knowledge and piety by updating inscriptions that his predecessors had not been able to discover.22 This antiquarian penchant was expressed in the royal demand for epigraphic and linguistic competence. Hence, this passage from an inscription by Assurbanipal: I (Assurbanipal) studied the secret knowledge, the entire scribal craft: the work of the wise Adapa. I am able to discuss celestial and terrestrial omens with competence in the assembly of the learned. I have the knowledge to discuss the series “if the liver is a correspondence of the sky” with the expert diviners. I can find [in the lists] the complex reciprocals and products that do not have a solution. I have read the artfully written text whose Sumerian version is arcane, and the Akkadian difficult to clarify. I have examined the inscriptions of stone before the flood, that abstruse esoteric composition.23 In this case, the ruler is expressing his passion for ancient inscriptions, his ability to decipher the most hidden messages, and his knowledge of the first writings given by the gods to man before the Flood. During the neoBabylonian period, we see, antiquarianism became part of government policy. Collecting inscriptions, excavating temples, and collecting objects coming from the most ancient times and from the most distant cities were royal activities. Collections of antiquities (some consisting of several dozen objects, statues, and inscription) spanning over two millennia have been found in Babylon and Ur, but also in Sippar and Nippur.24 This antiquarianism was at the heart of the Neo-Babylonian rulers' religious and political conceptions. A Nabonid tablet, translated by Erica Reiner, amazingly expresses the practical, religious, and political dimensions of this research into the traces of the past: Because for a very long time the office of the high priestess had been forgotten and her characteristic features were nowhere indicated, I betought myself day after day.

The appointed time having arrived, the doors were opened for me; Indeed I set eyes on an ancient stele of Nebuchadnezzar, Son of Ninurta-nadin-sumi, an early king of the past, On which was depicted the image of the high priestess; Page 70 → Moreover, they had listed and deposited in the Egipar Her appartenance, her clothing, and her jewelry. I carefully looked into the old clay and wooden tablets And did exactly as in the olden days A stele, her appartenances, and her household equipment I fashioned anew, respectively inscribed on it, And deposited it before my lord and lady Sin and Ningal.25 Antiquarianism is not only a social practice, the goal of which is to exalt power; it is a technique that is both religious and political in that it furthers the development or the restoration of the cult. Concrete knowledge requires both philological understanding and artistic sensibility as well as a capacity to reproduce monuments and objects from the past (which in turn requires their observation). In undertaking this antiquarian research, in using Sumerian names and expressions from the third millennium, the king was inserting himself in the long line of tradition. Even if his sovereignty seemed threatened, the call to tradition emerged as a weapon that defended the stability and steadiness of the kingdom. In Mesopotamia, one does not find the melancholic tone of the poets of Ancient Egypt. The contemplation of ruins was not an exercise that led to thoughts on the brevity of human life. Instead, the rulers saw ruins as a menace, the sign of a collapse that had to be avoided at all costs through the tireless reconstruction and restoration of what was still visible. The Mesopotamians did not consider themselves from the perspective of a “memento mori.” For them, traces of the past were signs that the gods addressed men, and, in particular, rulers. What was important was discovering them, decoding them, restoring them; but these religious imperatives did not seem to lead to debate about the brevity of the life of men, kings and dynasties. For the Mesopotamians, the past was before them, “pananu,” a word whose root is “face”; yet the future, what is to come, was called “warkatu,” which was found behind one's back.26 By contemplating the past, the Mesopotamians were no longer able, it seems, to turn their eyes away from it.

Poetry, Bronze Vessels, and Power in Ancient China It is well known that the ancient Chinese were curious about the past. The recent discovery of a Shang-dynasty tomb in Anyang from the early twelfth century BCE is clear proof. The deceased, Queen Fu Hao, was Page 71 →buried with a collection of jades, some of which date back to the distant cultures of Hongshan and Liangzhu.27 The excavators were able to establish that these funerary objects resulted from a ceremonial ritual that drew with sophistication on references from the past. That this form of curiosity was at the heart of Chinese culture is clear. When we read in Mozi's writing from the fifth century BCE that the “sources of our knowledge lie in what is written on bamboo and silk, what is engraved on metal and stone, and what is cut on vessels to be handed down for posterity,”28 we discover an exact definition of what Momigliano called “antiquarianism.” In terms of “what is engraved on metal and stone,” the Shang and Zhou offer us numerous inscriptions on bronze ritual vessels. K. C. Chang even noted that the idea of the progression from stone to bronze to iron—attributed in

the West to Ionian philosophy—was similarly expressed in China by the first century CE. A text by Yuan Kang of around 40 CE quotes Feng Huzi, an official from the fifth-century BCE as saying: In the age of Xuan Yuan, Shen Nong, and He Xu, weapons were made of stones, for cutting trees and building houses, and were buried with the dead… In the age of Huang Di, weapons were made of jade, for cutting tress, building houses, and digging the ground…and were buried with the dead… In the age of Yu, weapons were made of bronze, for building canals…and houses… At the present time, weapons are made of iron.29 There is no doubt, then, that early Chinese philosophers and antiquaries asked themselves the same questions as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Hippias—in different terms but perfectly consistent with them. The Chinese wondered very early on about the sources of history. Their scribes compiled events and confirmed them with every kind of evidence imaginable. They drew the comparison between written tradition and objects from a distant past. The monuments that especially captivated the Chinese antiquaries were not statues, carefully hewn stones or brick, but rather bronze vases. How can this Chinese passion, which began in the second millennium, be explained? K. C. Chang has suggested that anyone who was striving for power in China needed to control a certain number of fundamental resources, which included traditional bronze vessels in particular. This Page 72 →consuming attraction is represented in the legend of the nine primordial bronze tripods, which were cast by the founding king of the first Xia dynasty: In the past, when the Xia dynasty was distinguished for its virtue, the distant regions put into picture their distinctive wu and the nine pastors sent in the metal of their provinces. The ding-tripods were cast, with representations on them of those wu…hereby a harmony was secured between the high and the low, and all enjoyed the blessings of Heaven. When the virtue of Jie [i.e. the Xia dynasty] was allobscured, the tripods were transferred to Shang, for 600 years. [King] Zhou of Shang proved cruel and oppressive, and they were transferred to Zhou. When the virtue is commendable and brilliant, the tripods, though they were small, would be heavy; when it gives place to its reverse, to darkness and disorder, though they were large, they would be light. Heaven blesses intelligent virtue, and on its favour rests. King Cheng fixed the tripods in Jiaru, and divined that the dynasty should extend through 30 reigns, over 700 years…Although the virtue of Zhou is decayed, the decree of Heaven is not yet changed. The weight of the tripods may not yet be inquired about.30 The acquisition and possession of ancient bronze vessels was a way of retaining one's status, of expressing one's power and virtue. Therefore, the search for bronzes was a topos of the Chinese historical tradition. In order to find vessels, it was necessary to obtain them from a collector or to discover them through excavation. They were spolia in the Latin sense of the term and were used as tools of distinction and recognition. Stephen Owen devoted a small book to the uses of memory in ancient China and stressed the archaeological and poetic qualities of a story that has come to us via Xie Huilian, a poet from the fifth century CE. It involves the extraordinary account of the discovery of an ancient tomb in Nanjing. After having described the context of the discovery in detail with a scientific vocabulary, very similar in style to an archaeological report, the narrator addresses a prayer to the spirits of the deceased: When excavating a moat north of the wall of the Eastern Precinct, we had gone down to a depth of several yards when we found an ancient tomb. There had been no marker of a burial ground above, and for Page 73 → the sarcophagus no tiles had been used, only wood. In the sarcophagus were two coffins, exactly square, with no headpieces. As for the spirit vessels, we found twenty or so different kinds of ceramic, bronze and lacquer; most of these were of unusual form, and we were not able to identify them all. There were also more than twenty human figures made of wood, each of them three

feet long. When the grave was first opened, we could see that these were all human figures, but when we tapped them or poked them with something, they disintegrated into dust under our hands. On top of the coffin were more than a hundred “five-penny-weight” and coins. In the water were joints of sugarcane along with some plums pits and melon seeds, all of which floated up, none of them very rotten.

The grave inscription had not survived, so we were unable to ascertain the date or age of the tomb. My lord commanded that those working on the wall rebury them on the eastern hill. And there, with pork and wine, we conducted a ceremony for the dead. Not knowing their names, whether they were near to us or far, we gave them the provisional title “The Obscure Master and Mistress.” In the seventh year of the Yongjia Reign (430) on the fourteenth day of the ninth month, Baron Zhu Lin…prepared ceremonial pork and wine and respectfully presented them to the spirits of the Obscure Master and Mistress: I gathered this laboring multitude, To build earthen ramparts was my charge, I went to the depths of springs to make the moat, Massed soil for the wall's base. The single sarcophagus was open Two coffins lay therein. Hods were set aside in sorrow, Spades cast down with streaming tears. Straw spirit-figures were decayed, The carts of clay were broken, The banquet table had rotted, Its vessels for service fallen in. On the platter were still some plums, In the crocks were still some pickles, And of sugarcane, some joints were left, Of melon there remained some rind. Page 74 → Thinking back on you, good people, What was the age in which you lived, How long were you in the resplendent body, At what date did the soul sink away?

Was it ripe old age or early death? Were you eminent or obscure? The tomb inscription has perished, No part of your names comes down to us. Who now are your descendants? And who were your forebears long ago? Were your name and deeds foul or fair? How is it they have been utterly lost?31 […] Stephen Owen in his commentary accents the moral and philosophical dimension of this poem. Once the tomb is described and the archaeological context is well defined, the antiquary's analysis is brought to a close. But despite the attention paid to detail, the absence of an inscription does not allow for a precise chronology of the ritual objects. The religious ceremony functions as a justification of the discovery; by making an offering to the unknown dead, the poet is establishing a relationship between the dead and the living, between the past and the present. The “memento mori” of this philosophical antiquary is very similar to the antiquarian poetry from the Renaissance and the Age of Reason. For example, Petrarch: Your grandeur and your pomp pass away, Pass away the mighty men, pass away the kings; Every mortal thing Time breaks ([…] passan vostre grandezze e vostre pompe, passan le signorie, passano i regni; ogni cosa mortal Tempo interrompe32 […]) The particularity of this Chinese approach to the past is linked to the quality of the description, to the antiquarian rationalism that validates the poetic dialogue between the living and the dead. The Chinese antiquaries were men of reason who put poetic expression in the service of their will to learn, just as was done by European antiquaries of the seventeenth century. We can compare Xie Huilian's story to a poem attributed to Zhang Heng from the end of the first century CE: Page 75 → Suddenly I looked and by the roadside I saw a man's bones lying in the squelchy earth, Black rime-frost over him; and I in sorrow spoke And asked him, saying “Dead man, how was it?” […]33 Observing ruins and archaeological remains is an opportunity to reflect on human destiny and the brevity of life. Petrarch expressed it with unequaled power, but Martin Opitz expanded the poetic effect by using his antiquarian knowledge and his ability to observe ruins: From your graves now grow many flowers

As you had wished back then / and stand in full bloom. Whenever I care to go forth by you And see there standing the foundations of a house, Here a funerary urn filled with ashes. (Auß ewern Gräbern wächst jetzt manche Blume für / Wie jhr euch dann gewündscht / vnd steht in voller Zier. So offt ich hier bey euch mich pflege zu ergehen / Vnd sehe da den Grund von einem Hause stehen Hier einen Todtentopff mit Aschen vollgefüllt. 34) The overlap between the Chinese antiquary-poets and a European antiquary-poet like Opitz is astounding. Both combine traits of observation and poetic invention. Both are able to discipline their pen in order to observe the ground, reveal the entities they brought to light, and wonder about the finality of existence. We must of course turn to Thomas Browne at this point: When the Funerall pyre was out, and the last valediction was over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and, having no old experience of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such afterconsiderations.35 For Browne, as for Opitz, the exploration of the past is a systematic endeavor that merges groundwork with poetic commitment.36 Poetry is one of the tools of this peregesis in the territory of the ancients. For it only exists in the tension between the observation of the present, the Page 76 →intelligence of the ruins and the imagination of the poets. Casaubon defined antiquarian activity through this polarity between reason and imagination. It is striking to note that this subtle balance influenced both the European poets from the seventeenth century and the Chinese antiquaries from Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Li Qingzhao embodies this perfectly. Not only is her poetry filled with antiquarian metaphor, but she is the author of an extraordinary essay on the aesthetic and ethics of collecting. It certainly represents one of the peaks of its genre: When the book collection was complete, we set up a library in Return Home Hall, with huge bookcases where the books were catalogued in order. There we put the books. Whenever I wanted to read, I would ask for the key, make a note in the ledger, then take out the books. If one of them was a bit damaged or soiled, it would be my responsibility to repair the spot and copy it out in a neat hand. There was no longer the same ease and casualness as before. This was an attempt to make things convenient which led instead to nervousness and anxiety. I couldn't bear it.37 The refined and subtle music of this text is not that of a virtuoso from the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment; it is the voice of a woman, a poetess from the twelfth century CE. The preface to this catalog of antiquities is not only a reverent monument to the memory of her deceased husband. It is not only a work of memory attempting to substitute the catalogue raisonné for a dispersed and vandalized collection. It is rather a critical reflection on the moral value and utility of a collection. For Li Qingzhao, the collection is an instrument of knowledge, a tool of intellectual and moral improvement: “through all these inscriptions, one might be able to correct historical error, make historical judgments and mete out praise and blame.”38 The search for, the collection, and the interpretation of ancient bronzes and inscriptions certainly offer pleasure, and an outlet for a passionate desire for rare objects. But they do more than that. They are indeed exercise for the

mind, a discipline of intelligence. The words and context are the same as those used by Gassendi in his famous eulogy of Peiresc: I am not ignorant that many laugh heartily at these Studies, as neither honourable to my self, nor useful to others: howebeit, those men alone are justly to be blamed, who referre these things to no Page 77 →Learning, or to such as in vain; seeing most men get them only to adorn their Armories and the walls of their Houses, and have them to no other purpose, but that it may be said, they have such things. But those men are worthy praise, and do not vainly spend their time, who seek out such things, weighing and illustrating the same, to the end they may give light to the understanding of good Authors; that the circumstances of Histories may be more perfectly understood; and that the Persons, things and actions, may be more deeply fixed in the mind.39 The collection, according to Gassendi and Peiresc, is not to be confused with the desire to possess, with the inebriation of the collector entirely devoted to his quest. It is an exercise of reason: inscriptions, coins, and monuments were tools for establishing historical truth and historical truth in turn a tool for moral improvement. The collection in the noble sense of the word implies a code of ethics. It is indeed interesting we find it shared by two such differing societies as medieval China and Europe during the Age of Reason. The collection is at once an objective and an asceticism, a pleasure and a renunciation. But something the collector would not allow would be for its dispersion, unless he decided to do so himself. The separation of objects that one has collected with an almost obsessive passion over decades is more than wrenching; it is painful, as if mourning over a human loss. Li Qingzhao was able to articulate the essence of the tension between permanence and dispersion, between being and its negation. Through the pages of her autobiography, through the stages of her life wandering from refuge to refuge, each piece she lovingly collected with her husband was scattered until she had nothing left but memory: “When there is possession, there must be loss of possession; where this is a gathering together, there must be a dissolution—this is a constant principle of things.”40 The collection is a way of taming time, a fleeting balance between perfection and the action of completion, but the collector is well aware that there is impermanence in his desire for eternity. Du Bellay also emerged as an emulator of his distant Chinese predecessor: What is firm, is by time destroyed, and what flees, to time resists.41 From East to West, men have developed collective tools for standing up against the erosion of memory. All men have memories, every society has a memory, but certain women and certain men—and certain societies—invent techniques that allow the past to be domesticated. Ruins and collections are part of this arsenal for playing tricks on tempus Page 78 →edax rerum. If ruin is already present in construction, if dispersion is already latent in collection, then the architect or collector can be under the illusion of taming time, of offering an objective account of his project, which is essential and which ensures its survival from century to century. As Borges suggested in his thoughts on Qin Shi Huangdi: The blaze of libraries and the construction of walls are perhaps operations that secretly cancel each other out. The tenacious wall, which, at that moment, and in every moment, projects its system of shadows on lands that I will never see is the shadow of a Caesar who ordered that one respectful nation among many burn its past.42 From deepest antiquity, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Chinese invented complex strategies for controlling the memory of rulers, of great men, and of artists. Within the diversity of their worlds we can observe a unity of behavior: a desire for eternity that draws together the poet and the antiquary, the Orient and the Occident, the past and the present. “A ruin hunts down another, the one that preceded it, and kills it. The tumbledown fortresses of feudal lords pour out a thick lava that forever suffocates arenas and other Roman circuses.”43

NOTES 1. Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge, New York, and

Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 2. Paul Petau, Antiquariae supellectilis portiuncula (Paris, 1610), frontispiece. 3. Robin George Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946, repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 14–15. 4. Méric Casaubon, Treatise on Use and Custom (London, 1638), 1. 5. Caylus quoted by Samuel Rocheblave, Essai sur le Comte de Caylus (Paris: Hachette, 1889), 103; Daniel Morhof, Polyhistor (1688, repr. Lubeck), 50. 6. Stephen Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996), 593. 7. Elias Canetti, Die Blendung (Wien, 1936, English translation by C. V. Wedgwood, Auto-da-Fé [London: Jonathan Cape, 1946]). 8. I draw inspiration for the title of this section from Jan Assmann's book, Stein und Zeit: Mensch und Gesellschaft im alten Ägypten (Munich: W. Fink, 1991). Its very title seems able to explain the relationship ancient Egyptians had with the past. 9. Inscription on the statue of Prince Kawab edited by F. Gomaa, Chaemwese, Sohn Ramses II und Hoherpriester von Memphis (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1973), 68.Page 79 → 10. Gomaa, Chaemwese, 72–75. 11. See the work of P. G. Guzzo, who compiled all the passages in Greco-Roman literature that deal with the discovery of antiquities: Antico e archeologia: Scienza e politica delle diverse antichità (Bologna: Nuova Alfa editorial, 1993). 12. I am grateful to S. Aufrère for having pointed out this extraordinary document, which he has annotated in an article to be published: “Les Anciens Egyptiens et leur notion de l'antiquité”; the document is published by E. Schiaparelli, “Fossile eocenico con iscrizione geroglifica rinvenuto in Eliopoli,” in Bolletino della società piemontese di archeologia e di belle arti, n.s., 1 (Turin, 1947): 11–14. 13. Assmann, Stein und Zeit, 11. 14. Pierre Barguet, Le livre des morts des Anciens Egyptiens (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1967), 104–5. 15. Assmann, Stein und Zeit, 175. 16. Georges Goossens, “Les recherches historiques à l'époque néo-babylonienne,” Revue d'Assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale (1948): 149–60. 17. Goossens, “Les recherches historiques,” 51. 18. Sylvie Lackenbacher, Le palais sans rival: Le récit de construction en Assyrie (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1990), 19, quoted from E. Sollberger and J. R. Kupper, Inscriptions royales sumériennes et akkadiennes (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1971), 25. 19. Lackenbacher, Le palais sans rival, 32. 20. Lackenbacher, Le palais sans rival, 192. 21. E. Sollberger, “Lost inscriptions from Mari,” in XVe rencontre assyriologique internationale, la civilisation de Mari, ed. J. R. Kupper (Liège, 1967), 103–7. 22. Paul Alain Beaulieu, “Antiquarianism and the Concern for the Past in the Neo-Babylonian Period,” Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Study Bulletin 28 (November 1994): 37–42. 23. Beaulieu, “Antiquarianism and the Concern for the Past,” 38. 24. Beaulieu, “Antiquarianism and the Concern for the Past,” 40. 25. Erica Reiner, Your Thwarts in Pieces, Your Mooring Rope Cut: Poetry from Babylonia and Assyria (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1985), 3. 26. Eléna Cassin,“Cycles du temps et cadres de l'espace en Mésopotamie ancienne,” Revue de Synthèse 90 (1969): 241–57. 27. See Wen Fong, The Great Bronze Age of China: An Exhibition from the People's Republic of China (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980). 28. Chang Kwang-chih, The Archaeology of Ancient China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 296. 29. Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 4–5. 30. Zuozhuan (Xuan 3), after the translation of K. C. Chang, Art, Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 95–96. 31. Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 38–39.

32. Petrarch, I trionfi, ed. Guido Bezzola (Milan: Rizzoli, 1957), v. 112–14. 33. Owen, Remembrances, 35.Page 80 → 34. Martin Opitz, Zlatna: oder Getichte von Ruhe dem Gemüthes (1623), quoted in Peter N. Miller, Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven and London, 2000), 140. 35. “Epistle to the Reader,” in Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia (London, 1658, French trans. Dominique Aury, Hydrotaphia [Paris: Gallimard, 1970]), 9. 36. See Miller, Peiresc's Europe, 138–41 and 148–49. 37. Owen, Remembrances, 86. 38. Owen, Remembrances, 81. 39. Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, tr. W. Rand (London, 1657) [rpt. Philadelphia, 2003], 291–92; originally Viri Illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc senatoris aquisextiensis vita (Paris, 1641). 40. Owen, Remembrances, 97–98. 41. Joachim Du Bellay, Oeuvres Poétiques, vol. 2, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: Société des Textes français moderns, 1910), 6. 42. Jorge Luis Borges, “La muraille et les livres,” in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 675. 43. Benjamin Péret, “Ruines: ruine des ruines,” Minotaure 12–13 (1939): 60.

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THREE Far and Away? Japan, China, and Egypt, and the Ruins of Ancient Rome in Justus Lipsius's Intellectual Journey Jan Papy Et Sinas aliquis ad totum Romanum orbem comparabit? And will someone compare China to the whole Roman world? —J. Lipsius, Notae in libros de Magnitudine Romana

Lipsius's Antiquarian Wanderings: Between Curiosity and Vanity A Life for Light: Lipsius's Fax historica Friday, August 8, 1591, was a noticeable and still tangible day in Lipsius's outstanding antiquarian scholarship.1 The high standards he had already reached did not pass unremarked by then, because of his appealing detailed monographs on Roman law and institutions, on gladiatorial games, and on Roman amphitheaters. For having left Leiden University and having arrived in Liège in June 1591, Lipsius, in this new and last period of his life, started on that very day to compose a new work which he had planned some five years before. In the manuscript version, still preserved today in Leiden University Library, he titled this new work Fax Historica, “The Historical Torch” (see fig. 1).2 A letter to his friend Abraham Page 82 →Ortelius sheds light on Lipsius's intentions behind what appeared to be a prestigious project: I am currently occupied in writing the Fax Historica which by its good and easy order will serve to illustrate all historians, yes even all writers. It will contain all antiquities, rites private and public, divine and human, military and legal, and beyond that also rather rare verbs and phrases.3 And, indeed, a closer look at Lipsius's manuscript reveals how top-class philological acumen and scholarly discipline were combined to alphabetically store up all knowledge possible on Roman civilisation—knowledge which, it needs to be emphasized, was based on textual evidence gathered from wide reading. Starting from lemmata such as abacus (“a counting-board”), abdicatio (“abdication”), acta senatus (“decrees of the senate”), and acroamata (“an act, a turn”), and passing over acclamationes (“shouts [of approval or disapproval]”), accubita (“reclining at meals”), actuarii (“short-hand writers”), and adulterium (“adultery”), Lipsius finally managed to continue until the letter D. Here, a comprehensive analysis of all deities (dii) imaginable, ranging from dii caelestes (“gods dwelling in heaven”), dii terrestres (“earthly gods”), dii magni (“mighty”), dii laevi et dextri (“unpropitious and propitious gods”), and dii synnavi (“gods sharing a temple”), was complemented with a series of remarkable religious festivities and rites such as the lustrici dies (“purifying days”) and the nudipedalia (“feasts which are celebrated with bare feet”). An additional survey of all sorts of temples and a long list of all the names and epithets of Jupiter and other Roman deities ends Lipsius's Fax Historica abruptly. If methodical analysis was the very basis of Lipsius's important but overly-ambitious Fax Historica project, meant to be a comprehensive synthesis of Roman, Greek, Jewish, Egyptian, Persian, Macedonian, and Spanish history, together with their institutions and customs, it was this demanding methodology which equally appeared to be suffocating.4 Fourteen years later, Lipsius looked back at his plan for it in the preface to his major 1605 edition of Seneca: My old project more and more recedes; I had resolved on a Fax Historica: to write books on religious practice, and collect there all obscure passages on the customs and rites of antiquity. In that way I started to light my “torch,” in which I wanted to include the more important rites, involving the priests, the magistrates, the public games, the Page 83 →army, marriages, funerals and other such things […]. Such was my resolve. Over the last twenty-five years I had collected material, but my old

age and still more my poor health prevent me from ordering and imposing a structure on it.5

Page 84 → Still, if this project was never completed as such, a great number of subjects which were part of it were. In addition to the already mentioned series of monographs on Roman law and institutions (Leges regiae et leges X. virales, 1576),6 on gladiatorial games (Saturnalia, 1582), or on Roman amphitheaters (De amphitheatro liber and De amphitheatris quae extra Romam libellus, 1584), new studies on crucifixion and other, less notorious forms of ancient punishment (De cruce, 1594), on the Roman army and its organisation (De militia Romana, 1595), on early armaments, fortifications, and sieges (Poliorcetica, 1596), on the libraries of antiquity (De bibliothecis syntagma, 1602), and on the cult of the goddess Vesta (De Vesta et Vestalibus syntagma, 1603) were published separately. Others on Roman institutions, the Roman tax system, grain trade, ancient funeral customs, Roman costume, and street lighting were either included as separate chapters in works dealing with philological matters (such as the Electorum liber I of 1580 and Electorum liber II of 1585)7 or partly incorporated into the Admiranda sive de Magnitudine Romana Libri IV of 1598, Lipsius's synthesis of the greatness of Rome and the Roman Empire,8 whereas some subjects were elaborated upon in letter essays such as the Epistola de gestatione (“Letter on being carried in a litter,” 1594), the Epistola de notis (“Letter on stenographic signs,” c. 1597), the Dissertatiuncula super cursoribus (“Short dissertation on messangers/couriers,” 1598), the Epistola de recitatione (“Letter on recitation,” 1599), the Epistola de potoribus et edonibus (“Letter on drinkers and gourmands,” c. 1599), the Epistola de liberis, quos veteres passim exponebant vel abiiciebant (“Letters on children whom the ancients exposed or abandoned,” 1601) and the Epistola de caminis (“Letter on furnaces/forges,” c. 1601).9 Others still, on the ancient monetary system, on Roman names, on parties, on censure, and on the Roman year,10 were dealt with in courses at Leiden or Louvain University11 (see fig. 2) and appeared in unauthorized editions based on student notes. If one thing, all these monographs or essays, impressive by their erudition and scrutiny of evidence, reveal the character of Lipsius's antiquarianism—an antiquarianism which has a close connection with that of his Italian contemporaries and seems to aim at the same objectives: to illustrate his historical studies with “excerpts taken from ancient writers referring to or touching on the subject”12 and, at the same time, to supplement the ancient texts with more or less recent findings of archaeologists or antiquarians which contribute to the debate. If this explains why Lipsius's tracts and essays were widely read and why they have often been reprinted or published in compendia or handy pocket-editions,13 Page 85 →as they have also been issued as real handbooks on Roman history in the different editions of the Roma illustrata and Georgius Graevius's Thesaurus antiquitatum Romanarum,14 one question remains: how did Lipsius's antiquarian activities relate to his humanist thought and being? Did he want his wife to eat with a supposed ancient silver spoon representing Mercury, as would Peter Paul Rubens, for reason of commodity, in the 1620s and ’30s with Hélène Fourment?15 Scratches from the Past: Roman Inscriptions and Methodical Arrangement It is common knowledge that Lipsius's “antiquarian” basis was laid by his visit in 1568–70 to Rome, where he lived and worked as a secretary to Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle and “diligently sought out many libraries, statues, inscriptions, coins, and whatever was relevant to the understanding of antiquity.”16 The notes which the young Lipsius made during his antiquarian trips in and around Rome under the guidance of Fulvio Orsini and the Haarlem humanist and archaeologist Nicolaus Page 86 →Florentius resulted in his Auctarium inscriptionum antiquarum,17 published as an appendix to the collection of inscriptions put together by Martinus Smetius and including transcriptions sent to him by Augerius Gislenus Busbecquius, Stephanus Pighius, Josephus Justus Scaliger, Paulus Gulielmus, Elias Vinetus, Nicolaus Florentius, and Orsini himself (see fig. 3).18 Still, it is not Lipsius's membership of the Republic of Letters, which guaranteed the necessary exchange of information in order to compare and interpret Roman inscriptions properly, that interests us here. What is striking and new is Smetius's innovative attitude in assimilating the form of the antiquarian sylloge to that of the humanist notebook—something Lipsius himself, devoting a large part of his long letter on the study of history to it, was

interested in.19 Yet, equally striking in this respect is the order (ordo) Lipsius imposes on his material so as to have a firmer grip on all aspects of Roman civilisation—a civilisation which in the letter of dedication he declared to be “unparalleled” and which therefore should be studied so as to reap the benefits attainable through a thorough knowledge of its morals.20 In order to increase and facilitate this knowledge and firm this grip on Roman customs and morals, Lipsius followed Smetius's methodology in editing, yet not in arranging, his collection of inscriptions. For if Smetius opened up the wealth of information stored up in his vast collection of inscriptions by an extensive use of indices on names, surnames, proper names, names of emperors and their epitheta, imperial titles, and geographical names, added to full lists of functions both higher and lower such as trades, consulates, temples, gods and goddesses, and religious festivities, he also organized all inscriptions thematically, not chronologically or following their site as others before him had done. In his own shorter selection in the Auctarium, Lipsius fully agreed to edit inscriptions following the method Smetius had justly proposed (representing the characters, the characterum formae, as they are in order to facilitate more accurate dating; adding dots to indicate lacunae). Yet, if Lipsius's selection of inscriptions was guided by their “use and importance for Roman history or ancient customs and morals,”21 his arrangement also had its own basic principles too: a clear distinction between the living and the dead imposed itself in the first place; among the living, humans and gods were to be distinguished and the following subcategories should be categorized: thanksgivings, laudations, dedications, holy places, laws, titles, and accounts of honours; among the dead, a simple distinction between the rights of the departed and the commemoration they deserved should suffice.22 Page 87 → So, if philological and historical scrutiny and a detective's eye were one thing for the humanist antiquarian, order, dichotomy, and casuistry were another, used to penetrate to the very heart of antiquity and its treasures.23 As with philology, epigraphy was obviously not an end in itself for Lipsius: it was one of the privileged gateways to an understanding of Rome's doctrina and virtus, and hence of Rome's magnitudo.

Antiquarian Curiosity and Its End Two New Directions Obviously, like the philologist Lipsius, the antiquarian Lipsius wanted to transcend the mere accumulation of realia, things and facts24—important Page 88 →as they remained in his richly embellished antiquarian tracts on all aspects of Roman civilization—by incorporating the traditional “material” approach within his own particular humanist view of history: And I confess that most of us scholars have sinned by an excess of zeal or inquisitiveness, we who eagerly investigate all these ancient things and—I would almost say—scrutinize the sand at the bottom of the sea. And what is the use of it? Life and morals must take the way, then judgement, but also a degree of style must come with it, but this last with moderation.25 While opposing himself to the restless hunt for the curious and scholarly pedantry,26 Lipsius defended a philology and erudition which had a practical purpose—an orientation he based on the principle of similitudo temporum (“resemblance of [ancient and modern] times”): an adequate analysis of antiquity and ancient customs and morals could provide an answer to the needs of his time. But if these practical fruits (fructus) of historical and antiquarian studies are equally philosophically and pedagogically based, this research, in order to be adapted to his new Christian world made bigger by discoveries and travel, had to enlarge its focus alike.27 For this reason Lipsius's study had to take two new directions: one through time, the other through space. That is why Lipsius planned his overall Fax Historica, in which he would first add a study of Christian, Hellenistic, and other ancient cultures to his in-depth study of Roman pagan antiquity. That is also why he included—and this equally in line with the common idea, echoed by François Baudouin, Jean Bodin, Joseph Scaliger, and many

others, that to study the history of the ancients, one needed to read a wide field of texts, ranging from the ancient Near East to contemporary travel accounts28—the newly discovered non-European cultures in his humanist programme. They were important to gain access to the European past, for sure, but also and perhaps even more to compare all of them with Rome's greatness (magnitudo). Although, for instance, he had planned such a comparative compendium of Greek, Roman, and “barbarian” history in which the power and greatness of Rome would serve as a point of reference for a comparison with Jewish, Egyptian, Persian, Macedonian, and even Spanish culture,29 his Monita et exempla politica (1605) and other of his political-philosophical works reveal how Lipsius looked further to use all historical material Page 89 →possible for his practical philosophy: “Auditis Principes? Imitamini. Haec cognitio ad gloriam honestumque excitat; haec parandi vias ostendit. Antiquitatis cognitio etiam ipsis Principibus utilis et gloriosa” (“Also for rulers themselves knowledge of antiquity is useful and glorious”).30 For while Lipsius continued to dream that a series of Admiranda, among them the Admiranda Judaïca,31 Aegyptiaca,32 Iberica, and Gallica, would be completed and published as a complement to the Admiranda sive de Magnitudine Romana Libri IV of 1598 (see fig. 4),33 he actually included medieval and contemporary Western European examples, most of them Spanish, in his Monita et exempla politica, together with Turkish, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Indian, Mexican, Peruvian, Japanese, and Chinese ones.34 Page 90 → Egypt, Japan, and China: From Antiquarian Curiosity to Political Philosophy So, while solving concrete philological or historical questions connected with new archaeological findings presented to him from all parts of Europe by antiquarian scholars such as Marcus Welser and Girolamo Mercuriale, Lipsius also clearly integrated his own antiquarian and historical curiosity in a humanist program envisaging both a renewed Tacitean political thinking and a neo-Stoic moral philosophy. As the following examples will show, this intellectual journey often sails for Egypt, Japan, and China. Lipsius's De una Religione, adversus Dialogistam liber, a short but fierce reply against Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert's vehement attack on Lipsius's Politica of 1589, is a first striking example in case. Coornhert, who like Lipsius wished to maintain an orderly and unified state and who likewise had argued for toleration in religious matters, had criticized Lipsius's chapters on the punishment of heretics in Politica (4:2–4). For whereas for Lipsius the principle “cuius regio, eius religio” was an instrument for maintaining peace and order in the state to such a degree that beliefs that did not conform to the religion of the state could only be tolerated when they were held privately, Coornhert was in favour of public freedom of religion. In countering Coornherts's views, Lipsius came up with a thoughtful selection of examples, taken from both ancient and contemporary history, proving that Coornherts's so-called “liberam licentiam in Religione” implied turbulence, a lack of civil discipline, and public disorder. For if the ancient Egyptian kings had mistakenly thought that by introducing various and miscellaneous religious beliefs they would stabilize their throne, and so caused rebellion and turbulence,35 Lipsius is stuck by the fact that, on the face of things, there is peace in modern Egypt and Japan, in the Ottoman Empire, and in some of the contemporary Christian states. In answering this pregnant question, Lipsius appeals to various sources. The Description of Africa (1550) of Johannes Leo (Al Hasan ibn Mohammed al Wazzan, b. Granada c. 1483–d. Tunisia after 1554), the converted Arab geographer from Granada who was captured by Christian pirates, informs him on the four ruling sects in Egypt who, though differing in rites and beliefs, live together in concord. The letters from Japan of the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier (Franciscus Xaverius, 1506–52), included in the Louvain collection Epistolae Indicae: De Stupendis et Praeclaris Rebus, quas divina bonitas in India, et variis Insulis Page 91 →per Societatem nominis Iesu operari dignata est, in tam copiosa Gentium ad fidem conversionem (1566) and in Emmanuel Acosta's Historia Rerum a Societate Jesu in Oriente Gestarum, ad 1568: De Japonicis rebus Epistolarum Libri IV: Et recentium de Rebus Indicis epistolarum liber usque ad 1570 (Paris, 1570), offered him detailed information on Japanese society where it could happen that each member of a family chooses freely from nine different religions without disturbing domestic peace. Still, in the next paragraph of these same “Epistolae Iapanicae” Lipsius reads the sobering testimony that the

Japanese are often involved in rebellion and civil war when one of the religious sects tries to dominate another.36 And this, Lipsius adds, is but normal and necessary, for if religion would not cause dispute, it would be no religion. It deserves special attention to emphasize with Carmen Bernand and Serge Gruzinski that “religion” is understood by Lipsius, as by all other European writers of the seventeenth century, as “ritual practices” and/or the “careful and even fearful fulfillment of all that man owes to God or to the gods,” a definition which corresponded to the classical and Roman concept of the word “religio.”37 For instance, so Lipsius argues, put the Turks, Jews, and Chinese in the middle of Europe and no religious wars will arise, for they do not dispute, they only despise. And for that reason religion does not cause discord with those people,38 the more because anyone who wants to achieve something in their society has to pass by the one prevailing religion.39 Comparing Roman, Jewish, and Spanish society, Lipsius adds the one of China, an old and well-ordered empire, that even has a law that no religion will be admitted without the approval of the emperor and his council.40 It is entirely clear not only that the intriguing Chinese character raised Lipsius's philological curiosity,41 but that distant cultures, both in time and space, such as the Egyptian, Chinese, and Japanese, offered ideal comparative material for Lipsius's Admiranda sive de Magnitudine Romana, his cultural-historical study and political analysis of Rome's and, in parallel, Habsburg Europe's magnitudo. Still, the relevance of these cultures was more than the simple question of whether the causes of China's or Japan's greatness were similar to those of Rome's, or of whether Europe could be again united by conquest, and then by the assimilation of Chinese exemplary virtues and manners—these virtues being the basis, so it was first stated by the Jesuits and repeated in a different philosophical context later on by Montesquieu, of China's lasting empire.42 For, if this issue was central to Lipsius in his Admiranda sive de Magnitudine Romana, where next to Potentia (“Power”) and Virtus (“Excellence”) Page 92 →a special part was devoted to Tempus: diuturnitas Romani Imperii (“Time: the permanence of the Roman Empire”), and it returned again in the section devoted to the principate in the Monita et exempla politica, where comparisons between the Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Roman Empire are made so as to convert European rulers to this political system.43 Likewise, Lipsius was obsessed with the immense magnitude of Imperial Rome's territory and the enormous amount of taxes needed to keep the centralist system going. If his careful calculations—all based on Appian, Ulpian, Flavius Iosephus, Zonaras, Xiphilinus, Lampridius, Hesychius, Suidas, Tertullian, Velleius Paterculus, Strabo, Cicero, Diodorus, Pliny, Varro, Suetonius, and Eutropius—and the comparison with the Egyptian tax system in Admiranda sive de Magnitudine Romana (2:3) were criticized for their exaggeration in favor of the Roman system, Lipsius reopened the question in his additional notes to the Admiranda, comparing the actual size of the Chinese tax proceeds of his days with the ancient Roman ones to prove that if the Chinese annual income already mounted up to 20 million, the 50 million of the Roman Empire had certainly to be an acceptable number, for “Sinas aliquis ad totum Romanum orbem comparabit?” (“Will someone compare China to the whole Roman world?”).44 Contrary to Francis Xavier, who had praised Japan as a model for his European compatriots because of its moral superiority,45 Lipsius used both China and Japan, as he had put forward Egypt before, as negative examples to be avoided by his contemporary Christian readers. As Kircher would repeat in his China illustrata (1667), the Chinese were perhaps more cultivated than the rest of the world in more than one respect, however they did not yet break with idolatry.46 Since, to Lipsius's views, political unity is based on unity of religion, he warned Archduke Albert and with him all European rulers against the dangers of superstition and idolatry.47 For clear reasons, he did not limit himself to one example. If the Egyptians had preceded all other people by their vain and foolish superstition,48 the newly discovered Chinese and Japanese religions deserved special attention too. Both had common and similar rites and cults, since both originated from the doctrines of “Xaca” (presumably Lipsius meant “Buddha Shakyamuni,” the “sage of the Shakyas,” this being the key figure in Buddhism). Worse, however, was their view on death: souls were considered mortal, and everything after death was believed to return to its prenatal situation. In addition, they worshipped the sun, to whom they offered wine as did the Greeks and the Romans Page 93 →and they also venerated statues of domestic gods which, however, they in turn burned and threw away once they did not get from them what was asked. Moreover, their male and female priests, the “Bonzai” as Xavier had already named them, were esteemed as gods; all of them lived in convents as did Christian

monks.49 Yet Lipsius is not only eager to account and exploit these ethnographic details in his political works so as to enlarge his arguments, but even in his theoretical treatises on Stoic physics and moral philosophy a similar tendency—to compare or “illustrate” Stoic views with Chinese and Japanese—can be detected. If the Stoics, for instance, and to a certain degree also Hermes Trismegistus and Plato, regarded the sun as a god elevated above all others since it was situated at the center of heaven and was the soul of the world, it is not that surprising that the Roman Emperor Aurelian worshipped the sun, nor that the Peruvians and the Chinese still did.50 In dealing with the question of suicide in his Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam (1602), Lipsius does not neglect to compare the compelling orders of Tiberius, Nero, and Domitian to commit suicide—Seneca here being the most illustrious example of all Roman victims—to the Japanese emperors' orders to commit hara-kiri.51

A Unity in Lipsius's Intellectual Journey? Why should one focus on Lipsius's neo-Stoic introductions to a new reading of Seneca when dealing with Lipsius the antiquarian humanist scholar? Contrary to expectations, it appears that it is exactly the method followed in Lipsius's neo-Stoic treatises on Stoic morality and physics—tracts which on the surface have no connection with Lipsius's antiquarian works and thoughts—which put his antiquarian works in another light. For both Lipsius's Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam and his Physiologia Stoicorum (1604) were composed, as is already indicated by their very subtitles, in order “to illustrate Seneca.”52 If in the “Ad Lectorem” of his Manuductio Lipsius states that he wrote this work not only to illustrate Seneca, but also Cicero, Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, and the best authors from antiquity,53 and if he reiterated in the dedicatory letter of his Physiologia Stoicorum that this work was meant as a “light” (lucem) for Seneca, not does this echo the very phrasing of his intentions with the Fax Historica-project— “to illustrate all historians, yes even all writers”54—it also reveals Lipsius's ultimate goal, in line with Flavio Biondo's55 and his own neo-Stoic program: to infuse contemporary Christian society with Page 94 →old Roman virtus, as the only way to understand Rome's greatness, but also to continue it in Habsburg Europe.56 On the one hand, this program thus necessitated an in-depth illustration of Roman exempla virtutis and mores by restoring and analysing texts and reconstructing lost customs and institutions—all this explaining why the philologist, historian, and antiquarian Lipsius built a true triptych in three related works analysing the grandeur of the Roman Empire (the De militia Romana [1595–96] on the organisation and tactics of the Roman army, the Poliorceticon libri [1596] on its fortifications and technology, and the Admiranda [1598] on the general sources of Roman magnitudo). Moreover, the very choice Lipsius made regarding the literary genre in which he cast his antiquarian and historical material betrays and proves his humanist agenda: in turning his useful and systematized material into a dialogue or a letter essay, he intended to increase its readability and its paraenetic character, so as to convey his humanist message with greater emphasis and impact.57 On the other hand, Lipsius's supra-confessional intellectual journey had to pass from material findings to a philosophical level: if antiquity had to be reconstructed through fragments, ingenious antiquarianism, and philology, these fragments, as did the ruins of Rome, equally conveyed the image of decay and transience, yet also of the unique possibility that, however far and away, a cultural and philosophical renaissance could be based on them. As torchbearer, Lipsius looked for useful fragments in all corners of history and of the world known to him so as to inspire Christian Europe with Roman virtue and the magnitudo of imperial Rome: as his philosophy, his antiquarianism, and historical research—his historia literaria—was eclectic and, consequently, irenic.58

NOTES 1. I cordially thank Prof. Dr. Nicolas Standaert of the Catholic University of Leuven for his kind and useful remarks on a first draft of this article and for several interesting bibliographical references. I will refer to the letters of Lipsius by the numeration presented by Aloïs Gerlo and Hendrik D. L. Vervliet, Inventaire de la correspondance de Juste Lipse 1564–1606 (Antwerp: Éditions scientifiques Érasme, 1968)

(= GVi), preceded by the abbreviation ILE which stands for Iusti Lipsi Epistolae, ed. Aloïs Gerlo et al. (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1978–). If necessary, reference will also be made to Lipsius's own lettercollections between parentheses using the following abbreviations: Cent. Belg. = Epistolarum Centuriae ad Bel Page 95 →gas (Antwerp: J. Moretus, 1602); Cent. Germ. = Epistolarum Centuria ad Germanos et Gallos (Antwerp: J. Moretus, 1602); Cent. Ital. = Epistolarum Centuria ad Italos et Hispanos (Antwerp: J. Moretus, 1601); Cent. misc. = Epistolarum selectarum centuria miscellanea, pt. 1 (Leiden, 1586); pt. 2 (Leiden, 1590); pt. 3 (Antwerp: J. Moretus, 1601); pts. 4–5 (Antwerp: J. Moretus, 1605–7). The later collections published by Petrus Burmannus, Sylloges epistolarum a viris illustribus scriptarum tomi V (Leiden, 1724–27), and by Guillaume Henri Marie Delprat, Lettres inédites de Juste Lipse concernant ses relations avec les hommes d'Etat des Provinces Unies des Pays-Bas, principalement pendant les années 1580–1597, Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam. Afdeeling Letterkunde, 1/3 (Amsterdam: Van der Post, 1858), will also be referred to in an abbreviated form. 2. Justus Lipsius, “Fax historica cum bono deo coepi digeri die Veneris VIII. Aug. M.D.XCI: Deus summa et sola sapientia, adspira” [1591]. MS Lips. 14, fol. 1r, University Library, Leiden. 3. Jan Hendrik Hessels, Abrahami Ortelii et virorum eruditorum ad eundem et ad Jacobum Colium Ortelianum epistolae, Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum (Cambridge, 1887), 1:454–55, n. 189 (= ILE 91 01 13): “sum in eo ut Facem Historicam conscribam, quae serviet bono et facili ordine ad illustrationem omnium historicorum, imo omnium scriptorum. Continebit omnes antiquitates, ritus privatos et publicos, divinos et humanos, militares et legales, praeterea verba etiam et phrases rariores.” 4. On Lipsius's project to write his Fax historica, see Herman F. Bouchery, Waarom Justus Lipsius gevierd? , Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Klasse der Letteren 11 no. 8 (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1949): 19; Jason Lewis Saunders, Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1955), 45–47; Marc Laureys and Jan Papy, “The Grandeur that was Rome: Lipsius' variaties op een oud thema,” in Rony Dusoir et al., eds., Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) en het Plantijnse Huis, Publicaties van het Museum PlantinMoretus en het Stedelijk Prentenkabinet, 37 (Antwerp, 1997): 129–37 (esp. 133–34). 5. “Itaque vetus meum consilium magis magisque sedet, quo institueram Facem Historicam, tum et Ritualium libros scribere et in eos congerere quidquid esset in moribus ritibusque priscis obscurum. Et facem quidem coepi accendere, in quam grandiores illos ritus, De Sacerdotibus, De Magistratibus, De Ludis, De Militia, De Nuptiis, De Funeribus et qui tales volebam includere […]. Haec, inquam, institueram, et materiem ab annis XXV iam paraveram; disponere et exstruere aetas, et magis valetudo, me vetant”; also quoted in Laureys and Papy, “The Grandeur that was Rome,” 137, n. 50. 6. The so-called Leges Regiae were the laws that were put into place by the rex (king) in ancient Rome; the Leges Decemvirales are better known as the Law of the Twelve Tables, drawn up in 451 BCE by the first Decemvirate or board of ten men with consular power. See for instance the recent editions by Gennaro Franciosi, Leges regiae (Turin: Javini, 2003), and Barry Nicholas, An Introduction to Roman Law, rev. ed. by Ernest Metzger (Oxford: Clarendon, Page 96 →2008). For a historical context, see also Eugen Täubler, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Decemvirats und der Zwölftafeln, Historische Studien 148 (Berlin, 1921). 7. Bouchery, Waarom Justus Lipsius gevierd?, 55, n. 100. 8. Lipsius planned two separate treatises, De funeribus and De triumphis, of which the first has never been published and the second was later partly incorporated into the Admiranda (2:8). See ILE vol. 1, 83 03 10 and 83 03 31. A manuscript version of De triumphis is also preserved at Leiden (MS Lips. 10, University Library). 9. See Jan Papy, “Justus Lipsius, his Dogs, and his Scholarship: Humanist Traditions in Text and Image and its Echoes in Rubens's Four Philosophers,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999): 167–98, and idem, “In Praise of the Omnipresent Egg: Erycius Puteanus' Ovi Encomium (1615),” Humanística Lovaniensia 49 (2000): 317–38. 10. Two manuscript versions of Lipsius's course and/or treatise are preserved at Leiden University Library as MS Lips. 20 and 58, entitled “I. Lipsii Praelectio de Summa rei nummaria” and “I. Lipsii de Re nummaria veterum Breviarium.” On Lipsius's De re nummaria, see Ferdinand Van der Haeghen and Marie-

Thérèse Lenger, Bibliotheca Belgica: bibliographie générale des Pays-Bas (Bruxelles: Culture et civilisation, 1964), 3:999. 11. A manuscript version is preserved at Leiden University Library as MS Lips. 31, entitled “I. Lipsi Viri Doct[issi]mi de Magistratibus veteris populi Romani.” 12. Lipsius's Preface to the reader (“Lectori meo”) in his De militia Romana libri V (Antwerp: J. Moretus, 1595): “ut mores Romanos publicos privatosque proferam (alibi et Graecos) atque eos ita illustrem, ut simul loca scriptorum veterum, qui alludunt vel tangunt.” 13. Under the title Facis historicae compendium, 1st ed. (Strasbourg, 1617; other editions are Padua, 1628; Strasbourg, 1629; Marseille, 1671; and Venice, 1741). See Vander Haeghen and Lenger, Bibliotheca Belgica, 3:1093. 14. The Roma illustrata was first published at Leiden in 1645; other editions are Leiden, 1650 with Georgius Fabricius's Roma; Amsterdam, 1657 and 1689; London, 1692 with Georgius's Fabricius's Roma and Lipsius's Tractatus peculiares octo (1st ed. Frankfurt, 1609 and 1625); and London, 1698; see Vander Haeghen and Lenger, Bibliotheca Belgica, 3:1104 and 1106. The twelve volumes of Graevius's Thesaurus antiquitatum Romanarum were published at Utrecht-Leiden in 1694–99. 15. Letter from Rubens to Peiresc, 18 December 1634, no. 785 in Correspondance de Rubens et documents épistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres, Tome VI: 1632–1649, ed. M. Rooses and C. Rulens (Anvers: Veuve de Backer, 1909), 81–86 (esp. 83). See also David Jaffé, “Peiresc and new attitudes to authenticity in the seventeenth century,” in M. Jones, ed., Why Fake Matters: Essays on Problems of Authenticity (London: British Museum Press, 1992), 157–73. 16. Lipsius, Oratio 2: Cum inciperet publice interpretari Cornelium Tacitum, in Orationes octo Jenae potissimum habitae (Darmstadt, 1607 and Frankfurt, 1608), 36: “multas bibliothecas, marmora, lapides, numismata et quidquid ad illustrandam antiquitatem pertinet…conquisivi.” On Lipsius's “archaeological” Page 97 →experiences during his stay in Rome, see Jan Papy, “Justus Lipsius as Translator of Greek Epigrams,” in Humanistica Lovaniensia 42 (1993): 274–84 (esp. 275–77); idem, “An Antiquarian Scholar between Text and Image? Justus Lipsius, Humanist Education and the Visualization of Ancient Rome,” Sixteenth Century Journal 35 (2004): 97–131; Hendrik D. L. Vervliet, Lipsius' jeugd, 1547–1578: analecta voor een kritische biografie, Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Klasse der Letteren 31, no. 7 (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1969), 24–29; José Ruysschaert, “Le séjour de Juste Lipse à Rome (1568–1570) d'après ses ‘Antiquae lectiones' et sa correspondance,” Bulletin de l'Institut historique belge de Rome 24 (1947–48): 139–92. 17. [Martini Smetii,] Inscriptionum antiquarum quae passim per Europam liber: Accessit auctarium a Iusto Lipsio (Ex Officina Plantiniana, Apud Franciscum Raphelengium), 1588. Copy at Leiden University Library, Leiden, 341 A 6. 18. Marc Laureys, “Lipsius and Pighius: The Changing Face of Humanist Scholarship,” Bulletin de l'Institut Historique Belge de Rome 68 (1998): 329–44; J. Verbogen, “Martinus Smetius et Angelo Colocci: Une collection romaine d'inscriptions antiques au XVIe siècle,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 34A (1985): 255–72; Henry de Vocht, “Maarten de Smet van Oostwinkel, grondlegger der Latijnse epigrafie,” in Miscellanea historica in honorem Alberti De Meyer, 2 vols. (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l'Université de Louvain, 1946), 2:825–35. 19. See ILE vol. 13 00 12 03 H (= Cent. misc, 3:61). This letter to Nicolas de Hacqueville, dated 3 December 1600, immediately became renowned; on its rich printing history and wide diffusion, see Vander Haeghen and Lenger, Bibliotheca Belgica, 3:1091. On Lipsius's views on (the use of) history, see V. A. Nordman, Justus Lipsius als Geschichtsforscher und Geschichtslehrer: Eine Untersuchung, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, series B, 28, no. 2 (Helsinki: Druckerei der Finnischen Literaturgesellschaft, 1932), esp. 60–63 and 86–88. On Lipsius's own humanist note-book(s) and his methodological use of the commonplace book, see Papy, “Justus Lipsius, his Dogs, and his Scholarship,” 177–79. See also Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 202–26; Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Robert R. Bolgar, Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries from the Carolingian Age to the End of the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 265–72. 20. [Smetii,] Inscriptionum antiquarum quae passim per Europam liber, fol. †2v-r: “O beneficium grande!

Emere impenso pretio monumentum, quod non privato vestro usui seponatis, sed omnium exponatis, et e quo nihil ad vos redundet praeter bonam famam. At in publicum immensi fructus: cognitio scilicet aevi morisque veteris, et florentissimi / illius Imperii, cui par non est, non erit, in terris.” Letter of dedication to the Curators of Leiden University, dated Leiden 1 March, 1588. See also ILE vol. 3 88 03 01. 21. “Ad Lectorem,” in Iusti Lipsi Auctarium Inscriptionum Veterum (1588), fol. 4: “Mea vidi, Smetiana vidi (adiutus in comparando amici nostri P. Colvii literatissimi iuvenis sedula opera) et quae superare mihi comperi, conieci in hunc librum. Nec tamen omnia (cui bono quaedam tenuia et minuta?) sed Page 98 →electa maxime et edecumata, quae usum et momentum habere visa ad Historiam aut mores antiquos.” 22. “Ad Lectorem,” in Iusti Lipsi Auctarium Inscriptionum Veterum (1588), fol. 4: “In Ordine, meus mihi placuit, non quia Smetianum illum improbem, sed quia promptius nobis et pronius istum sequi, quem in Collectaneis meis Antiquitatum institueram iam-olim. Ante annos enim p.m. octodecim, cum in Italia essem, usurpata a me in describendo ea series, ut Vivorum omnia facerem aut Mortuorum. Ad Vivos referrem, quidquid ad deos hominesque, dum tales sunt, pertineret: Grates, Laudes, Dedicationes, Sancta, Leges, Titulos et Paginas honorum. Ad Mortuos, quidquid manium iura tangeret, aut memoriam functorum.” 23. One should compare this humanist method to Lipsius's method of arranging other of his work, such as his famous Guide to Stoic Philosophy published in 1604. See, for instance, Jan Papy, “Lipsius as ‘Master of Order': The True Face of Lipsius's Stoicism in the Manuductio ad Stoicam philosophiam (1604) and Leiden, U.B., MS Lips. 6,” De Gulden Passer 84 (2006): 221–37. 24. Thomas M. Greene, “Resurrecting Rome: The Double Task of the Humanist Imagination,” in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P. A. Ramsey, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), 18:41–54 (esp. 41). 25. Lipsius, “Ad Lectorem,” in Admiranda (1598): “Et vere fateor, nimia iam etiam cura an curiositate peccari a plerisque nostrum, qui omnia haec antiqua avide scrutamur et in maris illo fundo paene dicam arenas. Ah quis fructus est? Vita et mores praeeant, tum prudentia, sed et elegantia quaedam accedat, tamen ultima haec cum modo.” 26. Compare with Peter N. Miller, Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 33–34. 27. See Miller, Peiresc's Europe, 9–10. 28. D. R. Kelley, “The Development and Context of Bodin's Method,” in Horst Denzer, ed., Jean Bodin: Verhandlungen der Internationalen Bodin Tagung in München, Münchener Studien zur Politik (München: C. H. Beck Verlag, 1973), 18:142–43; J. Freund, “Quelques aperçus sur la conception de l'histoire de Jean Bodin,” in ibid., 115–19; Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. I: Textual Criticism and Exegesis and II: Historical Chronology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983–93); and, for a general synthesis, Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 29. Cf. ILE 97 11 15. Original preserved in Leiden, University Library, MS Lips. 3 (8), fol. 23; see also P. Burmannus, ed., Sylloges epistolarum a viris illustribus scriptarum tomi V (Leiden, 1724–27), 1:545, epist. 520. 30. C. Cornelii Taciti Opera quae exstant: Iustus Lipsius postremum recensuit […] (Antwerp: J. Moretus, 1607), 65, s.v. “utilitas cognoscendae antiquitatis.” 31. London, British Library, MS Harl. 4122; see H. Van Crombruggen, “Een onuitgegeven werk van Justus Lipsius, De magnitudine Hebraea,” De Gulden Passer 25 (1947): 280–85; F. De Reiffenberg, De Justi Lipsii vita et scriptis commentarius (Brussels, 1823), 103; Nordman, Justus Lipsius als Geschichtsforscher, Page 99 → 43, n. 1; Bouchery, Waarom Justus Lipsius gevierd?, 44, n. 43; Saunders, Justus Lipsius, 46, n. 2; and Vander Haeghen and Lenger, Bibliotheca Belgica, 3:883. 32. A manuscript version of what was to become the De magnitudine Aegyptiaca has been preserved as MS Lips. 18, fasc. 8 at the University Library, Leiden; cf. Nordman, Justus Lipsius als Geschichtsforscher, 43, n. 2 and Saunders, Justus Lipsius, 46, n. 2. 33. In his letter of 14 February 1603 to Aegidius Schoondonckius, Lipsius confessed that he had been thinking for a long time on Admiranda veteris aevi, but that he could only finish a small part of it so far (cf. ILE 03 02 14 S; Cent. misc., 5:16). In his letter to Balthasar Gómez de Amescua of 17 March 1603, Lipsius again mentioned his plan to write Admiranda Judaïca, Aegyptiaca, Iberica, Gallica(cf. ILE 03 03 17 GO;

A. Ramírez,Epistolario de Justo Lipsio y los españoles [Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1966], 360; Cent. misc., 4:64; ILE 04 03 14 C; Cent. misc., 4:91). 34. See De Nave, “Justus Lipsius, schrijver in politicis,” 110–44, and the more recent (unpublished) doctoral dissertation by Marijke Janssens, “Collecting Historical Examples for the Prince. Justus Lipsius' Monita et exempla politica (1605): Edition, Translation, Commentary and Introductory Study of an Early Modern Mirror-for-Princes” (PhD diss., Leuven University, 2009), as well as Marijke Janssens, “Rhetoric and Exemplarity in Justus Lipsius' Monita et exempla politica,” in Erik De Bom et al., eds., (Un)masking the Realities of Power: Justus Lipsius's Monita et exempla politica and the Dynamics of Political Writing in Early-Modern Europe, Brill's Studies in Intellectual History (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011)115–34. On the sequel to his first two books of Monita et exempla politica, planned but not finished by Lipsius, see Jan Papy, “An Unpublished Dialogue by Justus Lipsius on Military Prudence and the Causes of War: the Monita et exempla politica de re militari (1605),” Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 65 (2003): 135–48. 35. Lipsius, De una religione, adversus Dialogistam liber (Leiden: F. Raphelengius, 1590): In Caput 2, Lib. 4, Politic. ad pag. 78 s.v. Neque audiendi Aegyptii reges qui variam et miscellam religionem induxerunt, stabiliendo, ut putarunt, sceptro. The story is taken from Diodorus Siculus, book 2. 36. Lipsius, De una religione, adversus Dialogistam liber: In Caput 2, Lib. 4, Politic. ad pag. 78 s.v. Et a confusa ea semper turbae: “At de Iapanibus, speciose dictum, sed decoloratur valde hoc adtextu. Nam fideliter subdunt: Agitantur interim non raro seditionibus inter se, quin et armis decertant, dum suam religionem singuli aliis anteferre conantur.” 37. See Carmen Bernand and Serge Gruzinski, De l'idolâtrie: une archéologie des sciences religieuses (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 43–44 and 234; Ernst Feil, “From the Classical Religio to the Modern Religion,” in Religion in History: the Word, the Idea, the Reality, ed. Michel Despland and Gérard Vallée (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), 32–56. 38. Lipsius, De una religione, adversus Dialogistam liber: In Caput 2, Lib. 4, Politic. ad pag. 78 s.v. Et a confusa ea semper turbae: “Aut religio non est religio quae sic friget. Iam de Turcis, plane disconveniens est. Nam quod ad ipsos attinet, una inter eos religio et vae illius capiti qui verbo aut facto turbet. Alienas Page 100 →tantum, nec corruptas ex ea, sed plane adversarias permittunt, atque ita communicandi aut disserendi vix cupiditas est aut caussa. Contemnunt enim magis inter se quam contendunt. Pone in media Europa Iudaeos, Turcas, Sinenses (modo ne immani nimis numero), nihil turbabis religionis aut Ecclesiae pacem.” 39. Lipsius, De una religione, adversus Dialogistam liber: In Caput 2, Lib. 4, Politic. ad pag. 78 s.v. Et a confusa ea semper turbae: “Adde quod una religio dominans apud Turcas; reliquae mussant et falsae illi ac barbarae vel invitae submittunt fasces dignitatis. Sed nec ad honores aut militiam cuiquam aditus, nisi per illam unam.” 40. Lipsius, De una religione, adversus Dialogistam liber: In Caput 2, Lib. 4, Politic. ad pag. 79 s.v. Eos vero qui in divinis aliquid innovant, odio habe et coerce: “Quin apud Sinenses (vetus et compositum regnum) etiam lex est: Neque religio alia admittatur sine scito Regis eiusque Consilii; qui aliter, capitale ei sit.” 41. Lipsius dealt with Chinese characters in his letter essay on characters and stenographic signs (Epistola de Notis) addressed to his Jesuit friend and confessor at Louvain, Leonardus Lessius, in 1597; see Cent. Belg. I, 27 (= GVi LES 3). 42. Walter Watson, “Interprétations de la Chine à l'epoque des Lumières: Montesquieu et Voltaire,” in Les rapports entre la Chine et l'Europe au temps des Lumières: Actes du IIe Colloque International de Sinologie, Centre de Recherches interdisciplinaire de Chantilly (CERIC) 16–18 septembre 1977 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1980), 15–37; Virgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l'esprit philosophique en France (1640–1740) (Geneva: Slatkine, 1971; 1st ed. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1932), 313–14. 43. Lipsius, Monita et exempla politica, Book 2, Cap. 1 (De Principatu), Mon. 6. 44. Lipsius, Notae in lib. II [de Magnitudine Romana], cap. 3, s.v. Supra centum quinquaginta milliones. Around 1600 China had a population which was more than double that of Europe, viz. ca. 150 million inhabitants versus 60 million; see Nicolas Standaert, “The transmission of European culture in seventeenthcentury China,” Renaissance Studies 17 (2003): 367–91 (esp.368–69). 45. Josef Kreiner, “Some Thoughts on the European Image of Japan and of the Ainu,” in Firenze, il

Giappone et l'Asia Orientale. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Firenze, 25–27 marzo 1999, ed. Adriana Boscaro and Maurizio Bossi (Firenze: Olschki, 2001), 47–55. 46. Daniel Droixhe, L'étymon des dieux: Mythologie gauloise, archéologie et linguistique à l'âge classique, Titre courant 21 (Genève: Droz, 2002): 117. 47. Lipsius, Monita et exempla politica, Book 1, Cap. 3 (De superstitione), Mon. 2, 7. On Lipsius and the Archdukes, see now Toon Van Houdt, “Justus Lipsius and the Archdukes Albert and Isabella,” in Towards an intellectual Biography of Justus Lipsius: Proceedings of the Colloquium held at Rome, Academia Belgica, 22–24 May 1997, ed. M. Laureys et al. = Bulletin de l'Institut historique belge de Rome 68 (1998): 405–32; idem, “The Spectacle of Power: Lipsius' Model of Princely (and Humanist) Conduct in His Monita et exempla politica (1605),” in Maria Berggren and Christer Henriksén, eds., Miraculum Eruditionis. Page 101 →Neo-Latin Studies in Honour of Hans Helander, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Latina Upsaliensia 30 (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2007): 13–30. 48. Lipsius, Monita et exempla politica, Book 1, Cap. 3 (De superstitione), Mon. 2, 1: “Aegyptiorum quos omnes gentes credo equidem vana et stulta superstitione anteivisse.” 49. Lipsius, Monita et exempla politica, Book 1, Cap. 3 (De superstitione), Mon. 2, 7. The teaching system of the “'Bonzai” is also expounded in Lipsius's Lovanium sive Opidi Et Academiae Eius Descriptio: Libri Tres (Antwerp: J. Moretus, 1605), Book 3, cap. 6. A new anastatical edition of Lipsius's Lovanium with Dutch translation, introduction, and notes recently appeared: Justus Lipsius, Leuven: Beschrijving van de stad en haar universiteit, Latijnse tekst met inleiding, vertaling en aantekeningen door Jan Papy (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2000). 50. Lipsius, Physiologiae Stoicorum libri tres: L. Annaeo Senecae aliisque scriptoribus illustrandis (Antwerp: J. Moretus, 1604), Book 2, diss. 13: “Perüani et Sinenses etiam hodie summum Deum colunt, quid Aurelianus olim Princeps? Dii faciant et Deus certus Sol, quasi de uno hoc fides et certitudo.” 51. Lipsius, Manuductionis ad Stoicam Philosophiam libri tres: L. Annaeo Senecae aliisque scriptoribus illustrandis (Antwerp: J. Moretus, 1604), Book 3, diss. 23: “Apud Iapanes etiam hodie usitari aiunt, ut Rex offensus nobilium alicui mandet ‘Abi, ventrem tibi scinde,' et ille pareat faciatque.” On Lipsius's views on suicide, see Jan Papy, “Lipsius's Neostoic Reflections on the Pale Face of Death: From Constancy to Rubens's Dying Seneca,” Lias: Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and Its Sources 37, no. 1 (2010): 35–53. 52. See also Lipsius's “Introductio lectoris,” L. Annaei Senecae Philosophi Opera (Antwerp: J. Moretus, 1605), iiii: “Atque eos libros [sc. Manuductionem ad Stoicam Philosophiam ac Physiologiam Stoicorum] sic institui, ut quamquam a capite sectam sensusque Stoicos ordine exsequar, nihil tamen inseram, quod proprie non sit Senecae illustrando.” On Lipsius's goal in “illustrating” Seneca, see, for instance, Jan Papy, “Erasmus's and Lipsius's Editions of Seneca: A ‘Complementary' Project?,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 22 (2002): 10–36; and idem., “Sanctifying Stoic Virtues? Justus Lipsius's Use of Clement of Alexandria in the Manuductio ad Stoicam Philosophiam (1604),” in Gert Partoens, et al., ed.,Virtutis Imago: The Conceptualization and Transformation of an Ancient Ideal, Collection d'Études Classiques 19 (Leuven: Peeters, 2004): 507–27. 53. Lipsius, Manuductionis ad Stoicam Philosophiam libri tres: L. Annaeo Senecae aliisque scriptoribus illustrandis, [*4r]: “Illud tamen: haec non facere solum Senecae illustrando, sed Ciceroni, Plutarcho, Laërtio et optimis veterum scriptorum.” 54. ILE 91 01 13 O (=Hessels, Abrahami Ortelii et virorum eruditorum ad eundem et ad Jacobum Colium Ortelianum epistolae, 1:454–55, n. 189): “sum in eo ut Facem Historicam conscribam, quae serviet bono et facili ordine ad illustrationem omnium historicorum, imo omnium scriptorum.” 55. Cf. Angelo Mazzocco, “Rome and the Humanists: the Case of Biondo Flavio,” in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P. A. Ramsey, Page 102 →Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 18 (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), 185–95 (esp. 189–91), and idem, “Linee di svilupo dell' antiquaria del Rinascimento,” in Vincenzo De Caprio, ed., Poesia e poetica delle rovine di Roma: Momenti e problemi, Quaderni di Studi Romani 1, no. 47 (Roma: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 1987), 53–71 (esp. 63). 56. On Lipsius's Admiranda and Habsburg propaganda, see Marc Laureys, “'The Grandeur that was Rome': Scholarly Analysis and Pious Awe in Lipsius's Admiranda,” in Recreating Ancient History: Episodes from the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literature of the Early Modern Period, ed. Karl Enenkel et al.,

Intersections: Yearbook for Early Modern Studies 1 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2001), 123–46 (esp. 134 and 138–40). 57. On Lipsius's didactic structure in his antiquarian works, see Colette Nativel, “Juste Lipse antiquaire,” in Juste Lipse (1547–1606) en son temps, ed. Christian Mouchel (Paris: H. Champion, 1996), 275–93 (esp. 280–81). 58. Paul Nelles, “Juste Lipse et Alexandrie: les origines antiquaires de l'histoire des bibliothèques,” in Le pouvoir des bibliothèques. La mémoire des livres en Occident, ed. Marc Baratin and Christian Jacob (Paris: A. Michel, 1996), 224–42 (esp. p. 239).

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FOUR Comparing Antiquarianisms: A View from Europe Peter N. Miller Comparative history is about the art of the question. Like a question, comparison directs our attention to new horizons. And, like a good question, it contains within itself the seeds of an answer. But it is not an answer—it is a suggestion of what an answer might look like. Our comparison of the role of the meaning and study of antiquity in the shaping of scholarship and scholarly lives in Europe and China from 1500 to 1800 should be read as one long question.1 The European antiquarian tradition played a key role in the development of modern historical studies, not just in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—this much is charted—but even in the nineteenth and twentieth. Modern historians, nevertheless, have shown little interest in their maligned and obsolescent ancestors. Only very very recently can one point to a prejudice-free reexamination of this antiquarian legacy. The Chinese category of jinshi xue has been more respected, but whether it has been adequately appraised by historians is an open question. (This would mean understanding its limitations as well as its advantages.) Yet, over the course of the twentieth century it has effectively morphed into epigraphy and become a serious auxiliary science for archaeologists and historians—leaving aside the appeal it had on dilettantes, collectors, and calligraphers—and thus was subject to some of the same marginalization that affected antiquarianism and its successor auxiliary sciences in Europe. This process was driven by a common engine, imported with the biases of the European university at the founding of the modern academic Page 104 →system in China c. 1900. It would be no exaggeration to state that studies of Chinese antiquarian learning are today where the study of European antiquarianism was after Momigliano's article was published in 1950—with no common bibliography, chronology, terminology, or teleology. The essays in this book present various ways in which the study of antiquities gave a determinate shape to intellectual life in the European Renaissance and in the corresponding Ming and early Qing periods. In what follows, I would like to take Weber's comparative model seriously and closely probe at several likely points of convergence in order to determine much more precisely the divergent and distinctive contours of the European and the Chinese antiquarian traditions. Weber's next step, the detailed study of each of these on their own, is a task for others, and elsewhere.

The Monograph Tradition In the Sather Lectures, Momigliano explained how the study of the deep past was called archaiologias by the Sophists, who were pointing to the kinds of records that extended beyond the memory of living men—the eyewitnesses preferred by historians for their supposedly greater reliability. But it was the Roman Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE) who effected the fundamental linguistic and conceptual transposition from the Greek archaiologias to the Latin antiquitates: a transposition that would hold for almost 1900 years, until the academic turn documented by Karl Bernhard Stark a century ago. Varro's gigantic Antiquitatum rerum divinarum humanarumque libri (Divine and Human Antiquities) was lost sometime in late antiquity (Petrarch thought it could still be found) and exists for us only in fragments and references. But we do know that of its forty-one books, twenty-five concerned human and sixteen divine antiquities. Each part was, in turn, divided into peoples, places, times and institutions: Qui agant, ubi agant, quando agant, quid agant (Augustine, City of God 6:3). In other words, the “Rerum Humanarum” was divided into four parts, each of six books, plus a one-book introduction. The parts consisted of the great men of Rome from the time of Aeneas (men), geography of Italy and Rome (places), chronology of Rome with a discussion of calendars and events in Roman history (times), and institutions, customs, legal, and military systems (things). The Rerum divinarum adds a fifth part, on the gods, so that its structure was pontiffs, augurs, quindecemvirs (men),

shrines, temples, Page 105 →religious places (places), holidays, circus, theater (times), consecrations, private rites, public rites (things), and gods certain, uncertain, principal, and select. Compared to Livy's contemporary historical project, which also recounted the glory that was once Rome in order to uphold it for a future Rome, we can easily grasp just how different Varro's was. Even within his categories of “people” and “places” Varro was not aiming at the kind of seamless narrative that Livy created. On the other hand, moral exhortation through exemplarity, and dedication to the mos maiorum, was certainly part of what Varro was on about. We can grasp some further, more precise sense of Varro's cultural place by looking at how his work was interpreted by his friend Cicero, in the latter's Academica. The dialogue begins with the arrival of Varro at Cicero's villa near Cumae. After some banter about whether Varro wouldn't finally say something about philosophy, Cicero offers an appreciation of what he had written: “What you say, Varro, is true,” I rejoined, “for we were wandering and straying about like visitors in our own city, and your books led us, so to speak, right home, so that we could at last realize who and where we were [tui libri quasi domum reduxerunt, ut possemus aliquando qui et ubi essemus agnoscere]. You have revealed the age of our native city, the chronology of its history, the laws of its religion and its priesthood, its civil and its military institutions, the topography of its districts and its sites, the terminology, classification and moral and rational basis of all our religious and secular institutions, and you have likewise shed a flood of light on our poets and generally on Latin literature and the Latin language, and you have your self composed graceful poetry of various styles in almost every metre, and have sketched an outline of philosophy in many departments.2 Cicero stresses Varro's conservative project (“who and where we were”). But the catalog of the project also corresponds precisely to what we know of Varro's encyclopedia with its visions of chronological ordering and cultural systematizing, and defines for us, as well, the content of antiquitates.3 Finally, in Cicero's metaphor of wandering (and straying) we have the prototype for Petrarch's and Poggio's walks through Rome, and in his image of being “led right home,” for Freud's therapeutic peregrination through our mental Romes. The end of the Roman world meant the end of the world for which Varro wrote and for whom he was meaningful (even his negative meaningfulness Page 106 →for Christians such as Augustine—for which we have much to be grateful for) dissipated once pagan Rome was no longer even worth mocking. The disappearance of his work from that of subsequent scholars followed from this physical disappearance. But what if the Roman Empire had lasted for another 1000 years? Then Varro might today have the status of his near-contemporary, Sima Qian (145–86 BCE), who gave Chinese dynastic history its lasting shape. Sima Qian's Shiji is a history of China from the mythical Yellow Emperor down to the author's own time, the beginning of the first century BCE. The history contains 130 juan. But in contrast to the diachronic order of the earlier historical works, like the Springs and Autumns (Chunqiu) and the Bamboo Annals (Zhushu jinian), this history is divided into five groups: 1. Twelve scrolls (juan) that are basic annals of rulers of successive dynasties (benji). 2. Ten scrolls of biao, or tables, with chronological concordance of rulers of various preimperial states, but also genealogies of the families ennobled early in the Han. 3. Eight scrolls of shu, literally “documents,” but actually treatises on subjects important for good government, such as ritual, music, calendar, etc.4 4. Thirty scrolls on hereditary families (shijia). 5. Seventy scrolls of biographies (liezhuan) of prominent figures in all walks of life. These also include information on the foreign peoples with whom the Chinese came into contact during this period.5 By including biographies and monographs (treatises) as well as narrative, diachronic, and political history, Sima Qian set forth for the future the combination of—and the model of how to combine—synchronic and diachronic forms within a single historical investigation. One reason why the Chinese antiquarian tradition may have escaped careful attention is that it was incorporated into a living mainstream practice of history from the very beginning.

Unlike in Europe, where the success of Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus, to choose only a few examples, emphasized the distinctiveness of Varro's antiquitates, in China both diachronic and synchronic studies were subsumed into “History” and thus excluded no separate practice that could be revived later. Sima Qian's model took hold immediately.6 When Ban Gu (32–92) wrote the Hanshu, or History of the Han, he not only followed Sima Qian Page 107 →by making a dynasty the unit of measure, but by adopting the same fivefold division of material. He added new treatises and omitted others, for a total of nine: calendar, rites and music, punishments and laws, food and money, state sacrifices, five phases, geography, land drainage, and literature.7 The invention of the monograph, or treatise, was a great success. Indeed, so great was it that it burst the bounds of dynastic history under the Tang dynasty, where administrative reform created an ongoing need to know about religion, calendars, and public law, and gave birth to a whole new and separate genre, the “encyclopedia,” or leishu writing.8 Paradoxically, however, the invention of this new form made it possible to view the monograph tradition as separate from the historical, creating something like a Chinese equivalent of Momigliano's polarity between the “ancient historian” and the “antiquarian.” History, in China as in Europe, narrated deeds or events (res gestae) from which readers could learn proper virtue. The treatises conveyed information about the proper cosmological positioning of past rulers, and the encyclopedias useful information for bureaucrats, but neither fed into the culture of moral education by narrating the exemplary deeds of the good and great. When the Tang Emperor Taizong established the History Bureau in 629 its members were assigned to add monographs to the Five Histories. Completed in 636, new treatises were written on ten topics: rituals and protocols, the calendar, astrology, the five phases, ritual music, commodities, penal law, bureaucracy, geography, and books. The last treatise, a survey called “Monograph on the Classics and Literature' (jingjizhi), was an attempt to classify knowledge by dividing books into four categories, Classics, History, Philosophy, and Belles-Lettres, which were then further subdivided into thirteen classes. In this schema, there were 874 titles under “History,” containing 13,264 fascicles.9 The next important contribution to the development of a “Varronian” tradition in China comes during the Song. Zheng Qiao's (1104–62) General Treatises (Tongzhi, 1157) was organized into three parts: annals, biographies, and monographs. Zheng preferred “monograph” to “treatise,” explaining that the former were linked to Erya, the authoritative reference book for classics; this textual reference was a bid for increasing their prestige in the eyes of the wider public.10 In addition to the old topics (rites and rituals, laws and punishments, civil service, recruitment of talents, agriculture, and trade) we find genealogies of important clans, categories of ideograms, phonetic sounds, astronomy, geography, cities and towns, posthumous titles, ceremonial costumes, music, food Page 108 →and money, literature and writing, the comparison and verification of documents, diagrams and illustrations, bronzes and stones, cosmological portents of catastrophes, and flora and fauna. The monograph on books is organized into twelve categories which reflect his sense of how all human knowledge in book form looks (it is slightly different from the list of monographs), including classics, rites, music, philological and phonetic works, histories, philosophers, knowledge of heaven, five phases, arts, medicine, encyclopedic works, and literature. Zheng's stress on huidong, or meeting and linking (or convergence and comprehensiveness), gives his encyclopedism a theoretical dimension. The increasingly ambitious range of these monographs comes out even more clearly in Ma Duanlin's (1245–1322) General Study of Literary Remains. Like Zheng, Ma argued for the interrelatedness of synchronic and diachronic, and thus for the utility to the historian of a toolkit that included both annals and treatises. “Therefore,” he writes, “to understand the reasons for the gradual growth and relative importance of institutions in each period, you must make a comprehensive and comparative study of them from their beginnings to their ends and in this way try to grasp their development; otherwise you will encounter serious difficulties.”11 He superimposed on this the reality of continuity in Chinese history. Thus, from the Qin and the Han down to the Tang and Song, the regulations concerning rites, music, warfare, punishments, taxation, and the selection of officials, as well as the changes and elaborations in bureaucratic titles or the developments and alternations in geography, did not suddenly spring into being as something unique for each period. In other words, Ma was not

merely trying to link modes of presentation (synchronic versus diachronic), but also modes of human experience, of time (continuity versus change). Indeed, Ma scored Sima Qian for his relentless diachronicity, turning on its head the historian's commitment to chronology-as-explanation. Instead, Ma argues that this offers “facts without continuity, without reciprocal relationship (buxiang yin).” Étienne Balázs' interpretation of Ma (c. 1960) shows us how familiar these texts could seem to those immersed in the work of Braudel's VIe section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études:“In other words, the history of events, dominated by contingency, is without great interest.” (“Autrement dit, l'histoire événementielle, dominée par la contingence, est sans grand intérêt.”) And thus, Balázs cited Ma in that same preface, but now quoting Jiang Yan (444–505), saying, “Nothing is more difficult in historiography than to write monographs,” and Page 109 →added that “in effect, monographs are related to statutes and cannot be written by someone who has not been familiar with institutions for a long time.”12 Ma's insistence on practical familiarity defines the antiquarian in much the same way that the classical European insistence on the primacy of the eyewitness privileged a different class of historical writer, the military participant (viz. Thucydides, Josephus, Sallust). But it also helps us understand the methodological as well as thematic connection between these encyclopedias and the local administrative gazetteer, or difangzhi. These, according to James Hargett, contained individual essays ranging across what we might call cultural geography, discussing territorial divisions, the founding of cities, and local products and customs. Difangzhi had their origins in the seventh century genre of tujing, literally “maps/illustrations and treatises.” These were collections of maps, or illustrations with accompanying explanations, that were intended to supply bureaucrats with information on local communications, administrative institutions, customs and legends, products, and landmarks. Over time, the texts gradually displaced the illustrative material in importance. In Li Jifu's (758–814) preface to the sole surviving Tang tujing, the Yuanhe junxian tuzhi, he explained that geographers have “placed greater emphasis on antiquity than on contemporary matters” so that “those who collect folk customs for the most part transmit what is suspect and miss what is factual.” In other words, antiquity had dominated to the detriment of present need. What was required, he implied, was a new focus on the present, and new rules for insuring that it was well-served. Thus, whereas in early modern Europe we find that it is the prestige of antiquity that provided “cover” for a new empirical approach, in China it is the opposite: the needs of imperial government provided the prestige that lent authority to an empirical turn.13 Li signals an important change that began in the Tang and fed the Song genre of fangzhi, or gazetteers, for political, administrative, and military purposes. Again, to the European eye, this seems like a marriage of Varro with Ludwig August von Schlözer, the late eighteenth-century German founder of Statistik, or science of the state. Schlözer took the structural study of economy, agriculture, land, geography, and population—what we might think of as the antiquarian heritage applied to modern times, or as a Western version of the tujing—and made it into a modern university field, somewhere between political science, sociology, and human geography.14 Page 110 → More tujing were compiled in the Northern Song than in any other period. Ouyang Xiu, in the Xin Tangshu, writes that the Supernumerary Gentleman in the Bureau of Operations and Court Gentlemen was in charge of “matters pertaining to maps, walls and moats, strongholds and garrisons, beacon mounds, frontier guards, road distances and naturalization of the four aliens.”15 In other words, the kind of information that now found its way into this literary genre was linked directly to an administrative officer. The lone surviving Northern Song tujing, Zhu Changwen's Wujun tujing xiuji (1084), with its discussion of topography, monuments, technological improvements, and human features, is a kind of chorography, not so different from those of Conrad Celtis (Germania Illustrata, c. 1500) or William Camden (Britannia, 1607), or indeed from their ancestor, Biondo Flavio's Italia Illustrata (c. 1453), though given definitive shape by administrative necessity.16 According to Hargett, it was the blending of this tujing with another genre, that of the zhi, or study of the capital

city, that produced the “modern” difangzhi. The only surviving zhi dates from the eleventh century, Song Minqiu's (1019–79) Chang'an zhi. The preface was written by none other than the famous historian Sima Guang and is important for its emphasis on the encyclopedic character of the work, on the way in which the study of a city could open out on to various subjects—as an early modern European antiquary might propose for ancient Rome and as Stark later offered as a model for a new cultural geography: As for [periods when Chang'an was] declining and prospering, shifting and changing, as well as the records of its mansions and chambers, its inner and outer walls, wards and market-hubs, homes and dwellings of officials, townships and market towns, villages and hamlets, mountains and rivers, fords and bridges, roadside pavilions and stations, temples and shrines, tumuli and graves, together with traces and vestiges of its ancients and forefathers, the refinements and elegance of its notable persons, the excellence and abilities of its prefects and magistrates, the unusual and outstanding specimens of its flowers and plants—in no case has the author failed to provide information. Compared to Wei [Shu's New] Records [on the Two Capitals], this work is well over ten times more detailed! When you open this work it will bedazzle you—the information therein will seem to be right in your palm of your hand! Truly, this is a book about everything!17 Page 111 → Hargett notes that in the Southern Song the difangzhi become “overwhelmingly” textual, perhaps as a consequence of needing to be more easily used by administrators. The shift away from geography toward a “rational” system would occur in Europe as well, though there would be nothing comparable to the needs of a centralized imperial bureaucracy until the early modern rise of the state. Under the cover of administrative necessity, autopsy comes to the fore. Chen Qiqing (1180–1236), in the preface to his Jiading Chicheng zhi, explains that “Whenever my venerable elders could not explain something, I would rely on stone-tablet inscriptions; whenever stone-tablet inscriptions could not resolve something, I would rely on written records; whenever the content of written records was indecipherable, I would then make a judgment based on reason, at the same time basing my decision on human nature.”18 But there was a tension at work here; if antiquity versus autopsy describes one of its axes, generality versus particularity does another. As particularity was itself, inevitably, the arena in which autopsy could be practiced, the tendency to seek justifications in antiquity, and conclusions that were wide-ranging, could be read as a reaction against close looking.19 Compilers of these texts were, by tradition, mostly professional geographers or officials, not academicians. But starting with the Southern Song, men of letters were more and more their authors, and they wrote for their fellow literati, not for provincial administrators.20 By the twelfth century, commensurate with this shift in producers came a shift in production: less oriented toward physical geography, administration, and customs and drawn more toward human affairs and their lessons. The appeal to “history” masks a methodological slide from “descriptive” to “exemplary.” Contemporaries now explicitly linked the administrative gazetteer to the monographs found in the dynastic histories. Wang Xiangzu (thirteenth century), in his preface to Chicheng zhi (Gazetteer of Chicheng), writes, “The Gazetteer of Chicheng was written by the Grand Historian, master Chen Qiqing. His guiding rules of compilation were strict and discriminating; he rejected and selected the essential and reliable. The various prefaces praise his writing style for its similarity to the monograph style of Sima Qian and Ban Gu. No other writer can match him.”21 By the Ming period, these fangzhi were actually considered as history. Finally, a third realm of structural narrative related to the monograph form was genealogy.22 Hugh Clark has argued that “the redefined genealogy” Page 112 →of the Song period “became one of the most unique records of local history through the later Chinese imperial era.”23 For later periods there are prefaces, directions for use, tables of contents, generational descent charts, lineage origins, imperial patents, biographies and funerary inscriptions, ancestral hall inscriptions and ancestral rituals, household regulations and lineage covenants, household instructions and household traditions, charitable estate inscriptions, tomb inscriptions and tomb charts,

and essays and writings. Like the treatises and difangzhi, this is a synchronic format that aimed at description.24 But here, too, as in the case of the difangzhi, the Song-era treatises showed new trends, marking less a change in methodology than approach. Those who see a “neo-Confucian” revival have pointed to the genealogical thinking of Ouyang Xiu and Zheng Qiao as examples of it. Some Song thinkers viewed this a narrowing of genealogy's function. Zheng Qiao, for example, in his treatise on clan and family, contrasted the traditional genealogy, with its dual function of assisting governments in selecting officials and great houses in arranging marriages, with a new approach that was all about lineage.25 But what we do not find, even among these leading scholars, are new uses of the genealogical materials to create a new kind of history. If we want to get a sense of the genre, it makes sense to take a look also at its “neighbors.” For example, in the “Bibliography of [Ming] works” found in the standard history of the Ming compiled in the Qing, we find ten categories of historical works: official histories (zenghshi), miscellaneous histories (zashi), sundry historical recordings (shichao), anecdotes (gushi), geography (dili), genealogies (pudie), biographies (zuanzhi), information on imperial bureaucracy (zhiguan), rites and ceremonies (yizhu), and penal codes (xingfa). Reading this as a Europeanist, it is hard not to think of the researches of seventeenth-century antiquaries such as Peiresc, or André du Chesne or Charles du Fresne du Cange (to stay in France), or of the mid-eighteenth-century historical curriculum, with biography, political history and the Hilfswissenschaften, or of Schlözer's revisioning of geography and ethnography as Statistik at the beginning of the nineteenth century.26

The Song Moment Some time between Augustine and Petrarch, Varro disappeared. And while various imperial and, especially, Papal programs of Renovatio invoked Page 113 →the glory that was Rome, they were piecemeal, lacking the vision of a whole conveyed by our use of the word “civilization.” For this, we have to wait for the creation of an ideology of Antiquity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Traditionally, this has been associated with Francesco Petrarca, though as Ronald Witt has argued most recently in English it was the Latin revival in France which brought a “classicism” to the strivingly autonomous comunes of northern Italy—two generations before Petrarch.27 Moreover, the legal and political culture of the communes required trained Latinists. In this context, it was impossible to segregate the practical functions of Latin from its historical and cultural overtones and associations. Only afterward did the impractical lure of poetry triumph over the how-to manuals of the ars dictaminis. Witt's key point is that access to the past came through access to new modes of expression. The poet's pursuit of language—in this case, crucially, an ancient language—made possible a new kind of history. We might say that this is the birth of history out of the spirit of poetry. Witt adds that a “strong impetus” for a new kind of historical precision was the search for tools to separate past from present and so reduce the threat of a glorious pagan past influencing, inundating, and threatening the fragile Christian present.28 Bracketing off the past was only possible if one could make sure that past was actually another country. Alberto Mussato (1261–1329), for example, had found the way back to this distant space by recovering lost time in Latin syntax.29 What we might only half-jokingly term the “discovery of the past perfect” implied a radical break, of a “then” and “now” separated by a great chasm of time. In Europe this was real; in China, by contrast, this sense of irreparable rupture was less obvious. In Europe, this new sense of time through poetry extended from the wider world into the narrower frame of the self. It now became possible to describe one's own life not in relative terms like youth or old age, but to experience it in discrete increments of time. Identity and time—and time's slow but inexorable passage—were now joined. “In the next generation,” Witt writes, “the implications of considering one's life experience as a continuity of precisely defined temporal units would hit Petrarch with their full force. Preoccupied with time, desperately anxious about its measured passage, compulsively autobiographical, Petrarch obsessively returned to his own past.”30 “In order to forget my own time,” Petrarch wrote, “I have always tried to place myself in spirit in other times. Therefore, I took pleasure in history.”31 This is where Mussato's discovery comes home to roost: in the human possibility of seeing oneself existing in a long time continuum Page 114 →and then imagining

what it might be like—or what it was like—to occupy a different position on that very same continuum. Poetry and history meet in the nexus of imagination and reconstruction.32 Petrarch the poet, who immersed himself in Ovid and Virgil, had acquired this sensibility as second nature. But we would be wrong to see only a literary imagination at work here. For Petrarch had also entered into a deep dialogue with Augustine, and with Cicero, from whom he would have also encountered a similar sense of the depths of time, as in Cicero's breathtaking account of how a walk through Athens evoked the cultural history of that place.33 Much has been said about Petrarch's antiquarianism—probably more has been said about him on this subject than was actually written by him. He was certainly captivated by Cola di Rienzo's discovery of the Lex de imperio Vespasiani in 1347 and lent his authority to Cola's political revolution. His interest in coins and inscriptions was genuine, though superficial and very imperfect.34 Where he intuitively grasped the past was on the page—he was a manuscript-hunter and collector of the first rank—and in the heart. Indeed, were we to properly assess Petrarch's contribution to the study of antiquity we would have to celebrate as paramount his “spatialization” of the past, his ability to see the past in its physical space and through its physical space. His famous letters about the antiquities of Rome were letters about walking across Rome.35 This would prove crucial for subsequent generations. But for him, even the physical remains of the past were just a different kind of fuel for the imagination. And so it was less the learned, precise reconstruction of ancient Rome that he sought—not, of course, that it would have been possible at that time—so much as to use the remains that were there to evoke and stimulate interest in a Roman past that was much richer than its physical survivals.36 In the famous letter to Giovanni Colonna describing his walk through the ruins of Rome, it was “not so much because of what I actually saw as from the recollection of our ancestors [non tam ob id quod ante oculos erat, quam recordatione nostrorum maiorum], who left such illustrious memorials of Roman virtue so far from the fatherland.”37 As atop Mont Ventoux, it was not the place itself, so much as what the place called to his mind's eye, that Petrarch beheld. Indeed, Petrarch actually feared the consequences of too great a familiarity with the “real” remains of ancient world, “fearing that what I had imagined in my mind my eyes would belittle at the moment of reality, which is always injurious to a reputation.”38 Page 115 → Nor did Petrarch think of this kind of account as “history.” In the Itinerarium ad sepulcrum Domini Nostri Ihesu Christi), written in 1358 in the form of a letter and sent to Giovannolo Guido da Mandello, governor of Bergamo, Petrarch described the places along the route from Genoa to Jerusalem. He himself had, of course, not visited most of these places. In this, as in his earlier antiquarian work, he was writing through his mind's eye. But in this letter he was explicit that it wasn't history either; “Nor indeed I am now writing history, but am describing places” (“neque enim scribo nunc historiam, sed loca describo”). It was under the rubric of “place” that Petrarch then broached, as in the example of Genoa, the manners of the inhabitants, the dispositon of the site, quality of its buildings, fleet, the mole, the artificial port, city, coast, mountains, and the customs, spirit, and style of life of its inhabitants.39 Place, then, offered Petrarch a way into the distant past—as at Rome—and distant present—as at Genoa. Both these aspects remained part of the European antiquarian legacy. Petrarch also understood that there was much he did not know. But like everyone else in his day, and before, and most since, he preferred literary to material sources. He found them easier to work with, of more meaningful content, and more familiar. On top of that, what material had survived was often broken, or at least so damaged as to require exquisite powers of remediation. Books, by contrast, seemed more whole. “Seek in books and you will find authorities. Explore the entire city and either you will find nothing or the tiniest signs of great works.”40 These two lines of access to the ancient world launched by Petrarch had rich fortunae afterward: space as a prompt for the learned imagination, and words on monuments as the preferred kind of antiquity (favoring numismatics and epigraphy). Thinking about Petrarch in this way can help us recognize the antiquarian in Ouyang Xiu, and the extraordinary efflorescence of the study of ancient objects under the Northern Song. For the Moderns who created the academic

study of the Chinese antiquarian tradition, the eleventh and twelfth centuries were a kind of miraculous moment of birth and zenith all at once. The explicit methodological justifications for the study of old things, so close in sound to modern justifications of historical evidence, would surely have caught the ear of the Chinese scholars trained at European universities of the late nineteenth century who then created the literature on Chinese antiquarianism—and of course for the Westerners who followed in their footsteps. Moreover, that these Page 116 →Song texts were foundational for the Chinese study of their own antiquities from the eleventh century onward—not necessarily for the same reasons, though the Chinese canonization was later read in terms of the Western sensibility of evidence which the Song were believed to have possessed—also established their worth. The raw facts of this moment of origins, in the Northern Song, according to Li Yusun in 1824, are that there were sixty-one antiquarians in the Song. Yang Dianxun in 1926 counted eighty-nine titles from that period that no longer survive. Thirty do, and the earliest is from 1092. This is Lü Dalin's Kaogu tu, and in its preface he gives three practical purposes for the work, namely, to account for the origin of ritual institutions, to fill lacunae in the classics and commentaries, and to correct the errors of older scholarship. Lü described in words and line drawings 210 bronze artifacts and 13 jades from the Shang to the Han dynasties, in the Imperial and in 30 private collections.41 Lü's method included line drawings of artifacts, facsimilies of any inscription, ekphrasis of physical appearance and dimensions, and use of terms from classic texts to designate artifact types and decorative designs.42 This catalog established the canonical type and was imitated a few years later (1107–10, revised 1119–25) in the Bogu tu, the catalog of 839 artifacts in the collection of Emperor Huizong (r. 1100–1126). The catalog “entry” model became normative, containing a line drawing, image of the inscription and its transcription, and then a short record of basic information and a study of particular aspects of the object.43 Whether or not he was the most established scholar of the group, it is Ouyang Xiu, like Petrarch, who set the tone. A high court official and reformer, in the 1040s Ouyang emerged as an intellectual leader during the decades that followed.44 He directed examinations at the time when Su Shi (1037–1101) and Cheng Yi (1033–1107) were taking them. Ouyang's exam questions of 1057 offer a parallel to the European tradition of viewing history, by which was meant ancient history, as the teacher of life (Historia magistra vitae). According to Peter Bol, “Ouyang's questions are oriented toward selecting individuals who studied the classics for the conceptual skills necessary to deal with similar affairs in the present, as a source of general principles necessary for the task of government, and as part of traditions of factual knowledge.” Antiquity and classics were foundations for Ouyang's questions, and Bol contrasts this sharply with Hu Su's questions of 1059, for example.45 This interest in the human world was reflected also in Ouyang Xiu's projects of the 1050s, the revision of The New Tang History and The Remarks Page 117 →on Poetry. A widely shared view of Ouyang Xiu was that his importance lay in broadening the basis of historical research beyond government documents to include works of fiction and historical anecdotes, etc. As a stylist he was a crucial figure for advocating guwen, or archaic literary style, as developed in the Tang.46 Is there a resemblance between Ouyang Xiu and Petrarch? Could there not be a resemblance between the two? Again, this is a question that has not yet been asked from within Chinese studies.47 But a Europeanist, thinking about the craze for better and better Latinity in the Renaissance, might easily view a preference for, or return to, archaism as something characteristic of the best ambition of fifteenth-century Italian humanists, or even the worst excesses of the “Ciceronians” pilloried so magnificently by Erasmus (1528). In the first treatise of his New History of the Tang, “Rituals and Music,” Ouyang Xiu lays out his historical theory. His very real sensitivity to ritual as lived history echoes a commonplace defence of court rites; the point is, rather, how available was a rhetoric which could now be redeployed for hermeneutical purposes. The ancients used palaces and conveyances for abodes, garb and headgear for clothes, sacrificial vessels for utensils, and natural materials for music. Thus did they attend the sacrifices and approach the court, serve the spirits and order the populace. Their annual and seasonal assemblies took place as audiences and visitations; their happiness and social intercourse took place as archery contests and communal feasts. They gathered the masses to undertake projects, creating hunting parks and schools

down to hamlets and paddy fields. Whether auspicious or ominous, sorrowful or joyous, all the affairs of the populace came as one out of ritual.48

As a court official, he was also involved in a fascinating episode which turned on the materiality of ritual music. Robert E. Harrist suggests that the very impetus for the rise of antiquarianism came from the imperial court, where Confucian ritualists wanted to identify proper models for vessels used in court ceremonies. The efforts at the court of first Renzong (1010–1063) beginning in 1034 and then Huizong (1082–1135) to reform court music aimed at replicating the bronze bells and tripods of the Zhou. Efforts to do this based on textually supported practices did not succeed. The chance discovery of three actually ancient bells in the 1030s suggested the possibility of a breakthrough, though recasting from Page 118 →the objects, as opposed to from the texts, ran into stiff resistance. The project faltered; but several decades later—decades filled with the work of Ouyang, Lü, and other pioneering students of ancient inscriptions—Huizong did succeed at modeling new bells on an ancient model.49 The episode of the bells pitted the authority of ancient texts against the authority of the eye (autopsia) and ear. To this same contest we could add Ouyang Xiu's famous, genre-launching discourse on the peony and its attention to the social, economic, and cultural rituals surrounding the cultivation of flowers. Here the challenge was to the idea of textual power tout court, since in this essay Ouyang gleaned information from gardeners, artisans, and other lower class types.50 And, similarly, in his Remarks on Poetry Ouyang argued that poets were men like himself, responding with emotions to events. The poem is a commemoration of responses to life. These discrete, emotionally unique responses to life are embedded by the poet in his scholarly colophons.51 How does this connect to Ouyang Xiu's path-breaking antiquarian operation, Ji gu lu (Collected relics of the past, 1061), one of the most cited and reprinted of all the Song antiquarian works? Ouyang had been interested in ancient inscriptions from the time of his exile to Luoyang, where he associated with other scholars then promoting a revival of ancient prose, of the sort found in inscriptions—just as in Europe epigraphy and humanism went together.52 Ouyang Xiu proclaimed his attraction to these “most bizarre and extraordinary, majestic and striking, skillfully crafted and delightful of material things.” This is more than just an attraction to the archaic. (One should be clear that he refers here, as elsewhere, to inscriptions and their vessels—but he only concerns himself with objects on which there is writing.) Unwilling to leave inscriptions to the elements, or to entrust them to the faulty hands of human copyists, he decided to make rubbings. And knowing that even this collection of rubbings would eventually be broken up, he decided to make a catalog of colophons “where I have recorded the facts they contain that they may be used to correct the textual historical record. It is my hope that this will be transmitted to future scholars as a contribution to learning.”53 It is this rhetoric of historical utility that has attracted the attention of scholars ever since, leading them to view Northern Song antiquarianism as the foundations of modern historical practice in China.54 Ouyang Xiu argues that an inscription can correct a copyist's error in the textual record, supplement that textual record, or clarify something misunderstood Page 119 →in the textual record. This could easily be read as a statement of evidentiary sophistication “far in advance of its time.” It led Zhu Xi (1130–1200), not much later, to name Ouyang Xiu the first to collect and record “inscriptions on metal and stone” (jinshi). But Ouyang Xiu was no scientist. He collected rubbings, not the things themselves, and then he wrote about them. He was not creating a catalog of calligraphy as models for use (as done by Emperor Taizong [976–97] at the beginning of the Song dynasty). Taizong used the word “models” [fa] and Ouyang Xiu “past” [gu]; Taizong looked for examples to improve future practice, Ouyang Xiu old and idiosyncratic inscriptions that were almost by definition resistant to any future adaptation.55 Looking closely at Ouyang Xiu's antiquarian colophons, Ronald Egan concluded that very rarely did Ouyang Xiu in fact offer a methodological perspective. Egan's main point is that though Ouyang Xiu gestures toward historical

utility, it is a concessionary gesture toward his audience, not a reflection of his personal commitment. Personally, it was all about “amusement” (wan). Over and over again in the preface and the colophons we find him justifying his practice in terms of the pleasure it gives him. And what gives him pleasure is itself very interesting. In a colophon he writes, “Moved by the thought that all material things eventually go to ruin, and realizing that even metal and stone, for all their hardness, do not last forever, I resolved to collect and record inscriptions left to us from ancient times and preserve them.”56 This is the same melancholy sense of time's rule over all things human that takes us back, as Alain Schnapp has shown, past Pindar's sixth Pythian ode, to ancient Mesopotamia and Old Kingdom Egypt, but also, via Ovid's “Tempus edax rerum, tuque invidiosa vetustas, omnia destruitis,” to the antiquaries and humanists of the Renaissance.57 It turns out that, according to Egan, what gives Ouyang pleasure is contemplating the fragility of the human trace. In another colophon he writes: “The things that scholars who are fond of the past collect and preserve do not necessarily serve any use in the world today. It is just that when they come across such fragments that are buried or strewn about the countryside, they view them with special affection and pity. Such is the obsession of fondness for the past.”58 What Ouyang does not do is justify his studies by reference to their exemplary value. This of course cuts completely against the grain of justifications for studying the past that we find in the great historians. Nor Page 120 →is Ouyang's “past” all that past. By Egan's reckoning, 60 percent of his material is from the previous dynasty (Tang). And yet, for all this proximity, Ouyang feels himself as if living on one side of a chasm that separates his era from pre-Song times.59 This sense of a break, of lost time and lost people, permeates his work. And so the colophons, and the history of their artifacts, become occasions for reflection, rather than objects of study. Much as Pierre Hadot has taught us about ancient stoicism as a philosophical exercise, and much as I have myself tried to argue for antiquarianism in early modern Europe, studying the past could also be a philosophical exercise because of its instruction in the fragility of the human trace. Ouyang Xiu seems to be articulating this same principle. The broken inscriptions he studies remind Ouyang of the broken lives of their authors or of the inexorability of time's passage. Their illegibility, in turn, helps him mark that passage. When Ouyang finds some great piece of calligraphy by someone totally unknown, he immediately reflects on how thin is the thread saving that forgotten figure from an undeserved oblivion. “How could they ever be fully enumerated, such gentlemen as this man, who were outstanding in their time for their exceptional learning but through misfortune did not have their names transmitted to posterity? And how could we ever grieve sufficiently for them?…Could they ever be fully enumerated, those gentlemen who had true ability but were never appreciated by others?”60 This is a crucial point: in the Chinese tradition, as in Europe, textual survivals facilitated the “time travel” that enabled moderns to learn from ancients.61 With Ouyang, the same sense of the depth of the human condition is now being read through things, not words. Reading Ouyang Xiu's colophons alongside of the prefaces of the Comte de Caylus (1692–1765) makes us wonder about the work performed by old things in the human emotional economy. I declare that this particular examination is the essential point and the principal object of these reflections, because it presents in effect the greatest advantage of the study about which it is a question, that it shows to the antiquary the millions of men immured in the abyss of time, which will carry him off in turn in its whirlwind. He perceives a considerable number of Kings, absolutely ignored where even a name is hardly known…The return to oneself that these examples trigger is perhaps the most effective means to destroy Egoism, the great enemy of man and the most bothersome defect in society.62 Page 121 → The names recorded in the old inscriptions transported Ouyang to other times, other places, other fates. One

colophon reflects on an inscription containing the names—only names!—of all those who visited Mount Hua over a 200-year period. Ouyang contemplated the dates and noted that some marked the best of times, and others the worst. Some individuals had luck and others did not. But “in the end these 500 men all shared the same end in death. The winds and frosts through the years have cracked their names, so that while some are still preserved others have been lost…Whenever I place my hand on the rubbing, I am overcome with emotion.”63 When he actually knew the people named, the emotion was even more keenly felt. In another colophon he explained that when he opened a box and took out his rubbings, he thought of all those with whom he visited the site. Many were now dead; “Moved by these events, and yearning for the past, I am overcome by grief.” Egan notes that when Ouyang Xiu is held up as the forerunner of epigraphic studies in China, “what is ordinarily omitted from accounts of the project is this personal dimension that we have been discovering in the colophons.”64 Indeed, when Ouyang looks into the past he is not seeking a lost archaeological truth, but more like a poet connects across time and space through the medium of an emotional reception. The poet in Ouyang Xiu makes the past present for the historian in Ouyang Xiu. His colophons were ostensibly devoted to making sense of an inscription but were actually opening on to the human experience. The poet studying the physical remains of the past and infusing them with imaginative spirit while at the same time launching a whole new scholarly tradition; an exile with a commitment to pursuing antiquity and antique style back through language. This pursuit of the materialized past is the foundation of modern antiquarian studies. But with all this, the past remains more food for emotional reflection than for science. Are we talking here about Ouyang Xiu…or Petrarch?

The Renaissance and the Ming The most important thing about Petrarch the Antiquarian is that he failed. Or, more precisely, that he had few followers and was soon superceded. Looking back, it might seem that Petrarch was the earliest figure to have recognized the importance of numismatics and epigraphy for history, and he certainly was a great polemicist on behalf of antiquity, but Page 122 →there is really no comparison between him and the great triumvirate of antiquarian studies of the 1440s, Cyriac of Ancona, Poggio Bracciolini, and Biondo Flavio. With them there is a dramatic leap forward in the depth, range, methodological seriousness, and success with which the material remains of the past were plumbed. The important thing about Ouyang Xiu the Antiquarian is that he succeeded. As an epigrapher—whether one accepts Egan's view or hews to the received, “scientific,” interpretation of his motives—he created a genre, and the catalogs of antiquities assembled by Lü Dalin and by the Emperor Huizong became canonical. For the next seven or eight hundred years their work was reprinted, in ever so slightly changed forms, and established the framework in which Chinese antiquities were formally studied. The Song “Moment” came to define antiquarianism in China. Ouyang Xiu's legacy meant, in practice, a focus on epigraphy and a disembodied relationship to materiality—carriers of textual meaning, often linked to reflection on time's passage, but not evidence for the social and cultural history of past civilization. It is precisely this, by contrast, which increasingly came to capture the attention of those Europeans who followed Petrarch. If his immediate fourteenth-century followers struggled with the aporiae of classical epigraphy, by the 1430s the great and mercurial Cyriac of Ancona had cracked the code. His travels around the Aegean, always with notebook in hand, mark the zero hour of classical epigraphy in Europe. His notebooks were copied over and studied by contemporaries and it is because of this vast contemporary reception that we know anything of his project, since his own papers have been lost to fire, carelessness, and “eating time.”65 But it is just as important to remember that Cyriac was full of fancy, and that as precise as he was, there was an extraordinary imaginative energy at work in his reconstructions. Invocations to Mercury, his personal deity, stand cheek by jowl with very careful ekphrases of sites and inscriptions. This poetic power is a Petrarchan legacy that would live on in Pirro Ligorio, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Jean-Jacques Barthélémy. If, as Wood argues in this volume, the history of modern scholarship can, in part, be read as a long effort to purge from itself its “substitutional” origins and recast itself as “archaeology,” the presence and power of these figures—and one could stretch the story up to our

own time—is deeply challenging. Two of Cyriac's Roman friends were secretaries in the Papal Curia, Poggio Bracciolini and Biondo Flavio. With them, too, we discern the impress of Petrarch, and in one way even more powerfully than with Page 123 →Cyriac. For they absorbed and explicitly acknowledged his message of the spatialization of the past. Poggio used the same convention of a walk through Rome to present his study of Roman inscriptions (Book 1 of de Varietate Fortunae, 1448),66 and Biondo based an entire volume of studies on the physical disposition of Rome's monuments (Roma Restaurata, 1446). If for Petrarch space was a prompt for the imagination, for Poggio and Biondo it was the skeleton on which they performed their autopsy of an ancient civilization, exposing and classifying its guts.67 We do not find this step from Petrarch to Poggio in China. From the giants of the later eleventh century, we have to wait until the later seventeenth for a comparable step “forward” from the imaginative to the analytical—and even then, as we will see, there is a question as to whether that later step is not in fact an entirely new beginning. If we look to the parallel Song-Ming “transition,” we find it is the philosophical, ruminative, and connoisseurial dimension that is continued.68 To the Europeanist, the Ming attitude to antiquities—or at least what scholars assert of it—looks very close to what we might describe as a “neoclassicism.” Momigliano's “age of the antiquaries” was, after all, not the seventeenth century, with the pioneering scholarship of people like Casaubon and Scaliger, but the eighteenth, when the fruits of this revolutionary deepening of knowledge of the ancient world was deployed by architects, designers, and artists. Consumption patterns, rather than incisive scholarship, ruled the day. James Watt in his 1987 catalog on literati art and life in the Ming makes this point that antiquity served as a lifestyle option (“archaic elegance”). By the late Ming, “the ability to understand ‘antiquity’ became a common prerequisite in cultural education.”69 Indeed, if we compare Ming China with later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe we indeed find a similar production of manuals and catalogs that would enable bourgeois collectors to acquire practical information without long years of hard scholarly labor. The closest parallels are between Henry Peacham's The Complete Gentleman (1634), Baudelot de Dairval's De l'Utilité des voyages, et de l'avantage que la recherche des antiquitez procure aux sçavans (1686), and the many-times republished Ge gu yao lun (c. 1388). This was a world in which the goal was not amassing knowledge for original work, but acquiring the necessary trappings for cultural advancement. As Yang Mei-li suggests, “In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the trend of ‘fondness for antiquity,’ with scholars as its fountainhead, stimulated wealthy merchants and others of means to adopt an air of artistic cultivation. It also promoted expansion of the Page 124 →antiquities market in the Kiangnan area, which in turn stimulated major developments in handicraft techniques.”70 This would be an equally valid description of Momigliano's eighteenth-century “Age of Antiquaries”—the conventional identification of which he sets out to undermine, or at least sidestep, in his 1950 essay. This description fits perfectly with the received trajectory of “antiquarian” study in China, namely, that it came into existence, near full-blown in its complexity and self-consciousness, in the late Northern Song period; became aestheticized; continued in this vein under the Ming; and reappeared with new vigor and conceptual acuity in the Qing period.71 This standard account reflects the fact that many of those Song texts survived into the modern period (i.e. the twentieth century) in Qing era editions. Even when it is not the book but the eye that confers authority, of the sort that we find in the Northern Song in the unique person of Shen Gua and his Brush Notes from Dream Brook (Mengxi bitan, 1056–77), it is often transformed into something formulaic. Take for example the diary of the translator who accompanied Admiral Zheng He on the fourth of the great Ming blue-water flotillas of the early fifteenth century. The Yingya shenglan (The overall survey of the ocean's shores, c. 1433), contains information about the nature of the people in these different lands, their culture, physical environment, and political borders. Ma Huan's preface of 1444 puts the ethnographic into an imperial context. It records the distances to the lands of the island barbarians [lit. barbarous tribes], the changes in the

countries, the places which adjoin the boundaries, and the arrangement of cities and suburbs, with the differences of costume, the varieties of diet, the punishments and prohibitions, laws and regulations, customs and products. Nothing is left unrecorded, because it was this gentleman's intention, his whole wish, to make the people of the future, for a thousand years hereafter, realize that the way of our country is in harmony with nature and that we have achieved this measure of success in civilizing the barbarians of the south and east.72

If we look at some of the places visited we find a regular and repeating set of categories. For example, describing Vietnam, Ma Huan begins with a description of the capital city and proceeds through the king's costume, people's costume and appearance, housing, climate, natural resources, animals, flora, economic life, marriage customs, wine, writing Page 125 →culture, punishments, calendar, new year's holiday, government (ruling and resigning), superstition, and customs. There is only slight variability to this list, usually adding in categories of especial local relevance. Thus, for the entry on Calicut, he devotes attention to Hindu rites; for Hormuz Persian dates, precious stone merchandise, and goats; and for Mecca a brief history of Islam, doctrines, and geography, etc. Indeed, the preface places the text squarely within the category of quasi-bureaucratic reckonings of others, of the sort produced in quantity by Chinese diplomats and embassies sent out to deal with and report on the neighbors. This obviously resembles the administrative gazetteers discussed above, as well as the later imperial ethnographies discussed by Shin in this volume and in the work of Hostetler and Crossley.73 There is no comparable bureaucratic intensification in Europe. In the Renaissance, many “embassies” and missionary expeditions are undertaken, and these do return a wealth of ethnographic information, but always reflecting the perspective of the individuals involved—usually clerics or merchants. The single exception to this rule has, however, played an oversize role in the history of historical scholarship: Venetian ambassadorial reports, which have been mined for their precious nuggets from Ranke onward. One has only to reflect on the rollicking eccentricity of Cyriac, with his prayers to Mercury, or on Poggio embedding his epigraphic text in a volume on the varieties of fortune whose concluding book is in fact a description of contemporary travel to India. It is precisely this idiosyncratic viewpoint that is absent in Chinese observation reports. (We would want especially to know about the impact or absence of the merchant perspective on observing the surrounding world since the argument can be made that it is this point of view that is decisive in Europe.) But as engimatic as are those grand flotillas, so too the triumph of text over observation among those Chinese who traveled to, and beyond, their frontiers. This, of course, is a function of the classics and the dominant cultural position they occupied. Indeed, one could argue that a similar “bias” would be true of any highly evolved civilization, whether Jewish, with its textual tradition, or Roman, with its strong association of material culture with the work of slaves (viz. Cicero's sharp and value-laden distinction between the “liberal” and “mechanical” arts). That is what makes the next step in the European antiquarian tradition such a revolution. If we can credit Petrarch with initiating the “spatial turn” in the study of the past, and his prestige for insuring its appeal a century later, we Page 126 →need also to remember that spatialization can underpin a variety of presentational formats. Thus, while Biondo Flavio followed Petrarch, as well as his contemporary Poggio, in using the physical reality of Rome to determine the disposition of his Roma Instaurata, his next work, Roma Triumphans, instead adopted a systematic, theoretical vision of the Roman world, with books devoted to law, government, the army and religion, etc.74 This was the model adopted, in turn, by Johannes Rosinus, whose Romanorum antiquitatum libri decem (1583) is really the first modern Handbuch of antiquities. And it is almost entirely untouched by archaeology, with only a few illustrations, nearly all relating to public life, such as altars, weapons, clothing, and all drawn from coins.75 Rosinus was able to compile this textbook because so much work had been done recovering the Roman textual tradition.76 And philology was, as discussed above, intimately linked to antiquarianism, both theoretically, in terms of parallel justifications for encyclopedic claims, as well as practically, since the interpretation of objects drew on texts even as objects were used to fill lacunae in the existing interpretations of them.77

But nothing in Rosinus could prepare us for the turn toward the material reality of ancient history that can be linked first to Pirro Ligorio, and through him to the circle of antiquaries supported by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in the second half of the sixteenth century: Onufrio Panvinio, Girolamo Mercuriale, Fulvio Orsini, Antonio Agustín, and Alfonso and Pedro Chacón. Only Panvinio, Mercuriale, and Orsini were in the Farnese employ, but they served as magnets for other scholars, especially younger ones, such as Tommaso Bosio, who pioneered the study of Christian antiquities, and non-Italians, such as the Flemings Phillips van Winghe and Jean l'Heureux (Macarius), who launched the historical study of images (iconography). The novelty and power of this turn was not lost on contemporary scholars. Another northerner, Philip Rubens, the painter's brother and Lipsius's star student, wrote, “It's incredible how much the study of coins, epigraphy and other ancient monuments adds to the fuller understanding of antiquity. Indeed, I would dare to assert that these things, scarcely able to be grasped from ancient writers, can be properly understood from these physical sources and indeed well explained.”78 The connections between philology and antiquarianism, and indeed their deepening connection is evident in the roles played by Joseph Scaliger and Fulvio Orsini.79 Each, in his different ways inspired the next generation of scholars who viewed the ancient world as a historical experience to be reconstructed in the round. Scaliger's reach was continent-wide; Page 127 →Orsini, in Rome, provided a bridge to the work of seventeenth-century antiquaries such as Lelio Pasqualini and Lorenzo Pignoria. It was Cardinal Francesco Barberini, in the 1620s, who assembled the next powerful antiquarian équipe. His household included Girolamo Aleandro, Giovanni Battista Doni, Lucas Holstenius, Jean-Marie Suares, Jean-Jacques Bouchard, Athanasius Kircher, and was presided over by his secretary, Cassiano dal Pozzo.80 This group was itself partly assembled by, and partly animated by, the Provençal antiquary Peiresc. 81 Their achievement in focusing attention on ancient material culture and its meanings continued to drive the best work of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that of Bellori, Bianchini, Piranesi, and Winckelmann. Comparison with China, where the supremacy of textual access to the past was unchallenged, helps us recognize the novelty of this material turn. As suggested above, it is made possible by the centrality of Rome, which gave preeminence to a spatial mode of reconstruction. From this it was but a short sideways step to the reconstruction of the cultural artifacts that would have been used within that space. But once the material turn is taken, it develops a compelling logic of its own. This is seen most clearly in the increasing attention paid to Christian and medieval material evidence, which begins at the turn of the seventeenth century and reaches a kind of maturity in the work of Mabillon and the Bollandists. The sanction of antiquity is no longer needed for the study of instituta et mores through things.82

Antiquarianism in Europe and Kaozheng Studies in China There would be few better ways of illustrating the power of the material turn in early modern antiquarianism than by turning to the paradigmatic antiquarian studies of China: Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrata (1667) and Leibniz's Novissima Sinica (1697). Kircher's book is framed by the issue of comparative religion, itself a central concern of European antiquaries.83 But it is dominated by the study of matter: it begins with a long examination of the Nestorian Stone (“the Sino-Syrian Monument”) which includes careful physical description (both verbal and visual), translations, an account of its discovery (from several different sources), and an explanation of its likely origin. This, in turn, leads into the second part of the book, describing the various journeys undertaken by Christians to China (building on the history of the eighth-century Nestorians) and an account of the idolatry that spread from West to East, Page 128 →ultimately polluting what Kircher, as a Jesuit in the line of Ricci, viewed as the original purity of the Chinese tradition. The second half of the book, structurally, though not by weight, is devoted entirely to China: art, nature, architecture, mechanical inventions, and, finally, literature. Especially interesting for our purposes is Kircher's effort to present the Chinese as themselves possessing an antiquarian culture similar to Europe's (or to the best of Europe's). This was part of Kircher's general effort to draw the Chinese as compatible with Europeans, but insofar as it reflects his sources it may still point us to some authentic aspects of the Chinese respect for antiquities. “The Chinese,” he reports, are very curious about unusual things, and as soon as news about this stone had spread, learned people came from everywhere to see it. When the local governor, struck by the novelty of the affair,

had considered the venerable antiquity of the monument, he set it up in an open place in a temple of the bonzes for the many people it attracted from all over the empire, for its fame had spread. He built a roof over it large enough for protection against the elements, and to allow the spectators to read, examine, and describe the monument.84

Kircher, like Peiresc and Cassiano, was deeply committed to travel knowledge; he wrote that since the kingdoms crossed by some of the returning missionaries he had debriefed were unknown, “and since the fathers observed many things that are noteworthy about the dress, customs and habits of those nations, they left this material with me deliberately in the form of manuscripts and drawings, so that these might be inserted into the account of the journey they completed.”85 For Kircher, geography and ethnography were directly connected. Leibniz, whose complete mastery of the antiquary's skills is only hinted at in the recent presentation of his historical writings, first came to China through Kircher's book, which he read almost immediately after its publication.86 But China came to occupy the leading place in Leibniz's discussions of non-European cultures. His Novissima Sinica is something of an anthology, perhaps modeled on the Jesuits' compilation, Confucius Sinarum philosophus sive scientia Sinensis latine exposita (1687). Leibniz's deep commitment to the study of China was nurtured by his correspondence and contact with the Jesuit father Claudio Filippo Grimaldi (1639–1712), whom he met in Rome in 1689. In their letters and in Leibniz's conversation notes, we find the same kind of antiquarian encyclopedic interest in recovering the daily life of a distant civilization: Page 129 →only now it is distance in space rather than distance in time that is the issue. In mid-July 1689 Leibniz and Grimaldi met. Leibniz's notes on their conversation (“Locutus sum cum R. P. Grimaldi”) were then followed by a questionaire for Grimaldi about China. One group of questions was devoted to how the Chinese made fireworks, porcelain, glass, metals, and their methods for mining, chemistry, and leatherworking. There were questions about botany, flora, and medicine, and then others on geography, history, astronomy, chronology, and linguistics.87 Some of this material found its way into Leibniz's Phoranomus.88 It was from these antiquarian inquiries, as much as from his philosophical investigations, that Leibniz came to his view of China as an “Oriental Europe.”89 Writing to the French Jesuit Antoine Verjus in 1697, Leibniz described the current contacts between Europeans, represented by the Jesuits, and the Chinese, as “un commerce de lumière.”90 Kircher and Leibniz represent, in some ways, the apex of antiquarian efforts to grapple with the Chinese. But in decades in which knowledge of the extra-European world was increasingly mobilized as a safe means of attacking Christianity, Confucius could be assimilated to Socrates, as in François de La Mothe le Vayer's De La Vertu des Payens (1642) (Socrates having already been likened to Christ, even humorously, as early as Erasmus's Colloquies, 1518). The project of comparative religion, which might have reached its learned apogee in Van Dale's work, was also captured in projects such as Noel Alexandre's Conformité des cérémonies chinoises avec l'idolatrie grecque et romaine (1700) or in Bernard Picart's visual religious ethnographies.91 Benjamin Elman's work on the kaozheng xue, or “evidentiary scholarship” movement of the late Ming and early Qing periods, if not that of the kaozheng scholars themselves, picks up from where Kircher and Leibniz leave off. Focusing on the very same period, Elman reflects on the history of scholarship in China as someone comfortable using the categories of contemporary European historiography.92 While he does not explictly frame his argument in terms of the historiography of European antiquarianism, his discussion of early Qing scholars in From Philosophy to Philology and On Their Own Terms comes closest to tying together the narratives of the Occidental and Oriental Europes.93 Elman describes evidential research as “a mode of empirical scholarship that sanctioned new, precise methods by which to understand the past and conceptualize the present. As a style of scholarly method and representation, evidential studies marked the beginning of an unprecedented strategy for research.”94 But because of the preeminence of Page 130 →texts in China, the only way to reach back to the correct understanding of wisdom was

through a science of words. Elman, working within the Chinese context, juxtaposes a historical to a philosophical approach to words. The Ming and early Qing “return to antiquity” movement (fugu) was about rejecting philosophical daoxue for return to the most ancient sources, “in order to reconstruct the classical tradition.”95 Hence Elman's central point: “philology, not philosophy, became the methodology to restore the past.”96 The European early modernist cannot fail here to catch the clarion call of “the new humanism” of the antiquaries: Lipsius's declaration that “From Philology I made Philosophy” (E philologia philosophiam feci). For Elman, the compiling of the Siku quanshu, the great Qing recension of 3,460 works totaling 36,000 volumes reproduced in seven manuscript copies for the court's main libraries between 1773 and 1782, showed the kaozheng movement ascendant. The editors criticized undersourced contributions for “being deficient in evidential research” or for “not constituting a contribution to evidential research.”97 The importance of philological reconstruction led to a new focus on textual veracity and this, in turn, to a new awareness of the need for tools. Evidentiary scholarship, in short, put an emphasis on “evidence,” but also on the tools needed to identify, extract, manipulate, and validate that evidence. And thus, according to Elman, there was a new growth “of auxiliary disciplines such as epigraphy, bibliography, and collation. The techniques employed in these fields became essential tools in the more formal disciplines of textual criticism, historical geography, historical linguistics, classical studies, historical research, and mathematical astronomy.”98 What Elman has outlined here is almost exactly parallel to the shape of developments in Europe during the period 1500–1800. He himself looks “back,” toward the historiography of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century “Enlightenment,” rather than to the “scientific” history of the nineteenth, for parallels to the “evidentiary” movement.99 But is kaozheng to be identified with “antiquarianism”? No. Or better: not exactly. For while it represents an attitude to evidence that is shared by antiquaries in early modern Europe, Elman is clear that its focus was mostly textual. If European antiquarianism grew out of, but also alongside of, the study of texts (philology), kaozheng remained anchored to texts. And thus the “auxiliary sciences” that developed in China were those related to establishing the veracity of texts, such as epigraphy, whereas in Europe the practice of antiquaries moved outward from the text and gave birth to a wider range of Hilfswissenschaften. Even someone like Mabillon, Page 131 →the great restitutor of medieval public documents, recognized that manuscripts had to be studied as things, not just collections of words, and so delved deeply into seals, script, paper, and inks—the materiality of the text. Of course he was not the first to see evidence where those before them had seen texts, just the first to systematize what had been a body of artisanal knowledge. That his eighteenth-century continuators referred to him as L'Antiquaire makes plain this debt to his predecessors. And yet, the demands of kaozheng did lead some of these Qing scholars to things. Elman discusses the empirical turn in areas as distinct as botany and engineering.100 As in Europe, we find early Qing doctors thinking hard about the implications of observation.101 Dai Zhen (1724–77) used mathematics to estimate the size and shape of the ceremonial bronze bells mentioned in the Artificer's Record (Kaogong ji), a text in the Classic Rites of Zhou (Zhouli), and included diagrams as well, since he viewed texts and objects as archaeological evidence. Ruan Yuan's Explications Using Diagrams of the Design of Wheeled Carriages in the “Artificer's Record” (1788) improved on Dai Zhen's research by reconstructing the dimensions of ancient vehicles, which he claimed could be reproduced. “Archaeological research,” Elman concluded, “was taking on a momentum of its own as a field of exact classical scholarship.”102 And Elman reports that Qing scholars also did a lot more field archaeology than did the famous Song antiquaries—over 3,000 ancient bronze finds were recorded during the Qing period, compared with 643 during Song.103 The evidence of jinshi xue was “a major element in kaozheng scholarship.”104 In this environment it comes as no surprise to find Qing scholars like Gu Yanwu (1613–82) recognizing in Song epigraphers such as Ouyang Xiu an ancestor—and precisely for the presence of a rhetoric of historical utility that sounded to him a lot like his own justifications for evidentiary research. In the preface to his Record of Inscriptions on Bronze and Stone Artifacts (Jinshi wenzi ji), Gu Yanwu wrote: Ever since my youth, I have been fond of searching for the ancients' inscriptions on bronze and stone objects, but at the time I did not understand them clearly. After reading Ouyang Xiu's Collected Records of Antiquity (Jigu lu), I realized that the events recorded in these inscriptions and those

described in historical texts could be verified one against the other; that such inscriptions could be used for interpreting the concealed, clarifying the unclear, supplementing the missing, and correcting the misrecorded, and so should not be valued solely for the grace of their literary styles. In twenty years' travel Page 132 →in China, whenever I visited famous mountains, large towns, shrines, or Buddhist temples, I would without exception search for inscriptions on bronze and stone objects. I climbed risky peaks, explored deep valleys, handled fallen rocks, trekked through wild forests, walked on broken walls, and scooped up decayed soil; and as long as texts were legible, I transcribed them. When I found a text unseen by my predecessors, I would be so happy that I could not sleep…Day and night I have sought [such inscriptions] and used them to verify historical texts and to interpret the Classics. Many of my discoveries are not recorded in Ouyang Xiu's Collected Records of Antiquity or in Zhao Mingcheng's Record of Inscriptions on Bronze and Stone.105

Passages such as this led the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars studied by Shana Brown to connect the dots leading from their own conception of scholarly discipline back through the Qing editors of the Siku quanshu to the Northern Song epigraphers. Thus, Qian Daxin (1728–1804) (Critical Notes on the Twenty-Two Histories) “insisted that one must use the best editions of existing historical works and complement this with myriad other materials, such as writings on topography, rituals, astronomy, phonetics, and linguistics, including inscriptions on bronze and stones.” He added in also genealogies, biographies, geography, and the history of institutions. All this was to figure out what was right and wrong, so that history could be a guide to action (didactic).106 The rhetoric of a return to sources, of critical examination of evidence, reading widely, and broad contextualization—this all would have sounded like the way Germans taught history, only formulated first in China 800 years earlier. At what point, we might ask, did the historical tradition and the modern practice merge? Or, more precisely, how did the modern conception of practice affect the interpretation—and recruitment—of presumed intellectual ancestors? Elman's emphasis on the centrality of the Qing evidentiary turn raises, from a comparative angle, several fascinating possibilities. First, it would have the effect of bringing the rise of Chinese “critical” scholarship into exact chronological parallel with Momigliano's “age of the antiquaries” and Gatterer's development of the historische Hilfswissenschaften at Göttingen. Second, as a result, it would force us to reassess the nature of Song antiquarianism and the accepted narrative of Chinese antiquarianism. Perhaps the poetic and personal emphasis driving Ouyang Xiu, despite his use of the rhetoric of historical utility, made for a real continuity with the Ming tradition. Thus, rather than seeing the Ming as a connoisseurial Page 133 →interlude between the “serious” antiquarianism of the Song and Qing, perhaps the evidentiary movement should be viewed as the true beginning of modern historical scholarship in China. Third, since this crucial development occurred during the period in which China was exposed to European thinking via the Jesuits, it raises the question about whether there is a real genetic relationship between European and Chinese empirical scholarship, mediated by Jesuits and Jesuit texts. Indeed, Elman and others have argued that the impact of the Jesuits was precisely in areas in which empirical authority was decisive (observation, experimentation, etc.). This final question, of the Jesuit role in linking the two antiquarian traditions, is important, but not easy to establish. We know that in China, they translated or copied 437 works between 1584 and 1790; 31 percent of these (131) were in sciences and 57 percent (251) on Christianity.107 But beyond raw numbers there is still too limited a sense of the breadth of the Jesuit contribution to Chinese thought. Its study has, thus far, tended to concentrate on the most obvious areas, such as astronomy and mathematics, and not—Peterson and Elman aside—with what we might call the epistemological foundations of that scholarship.108 In other words, if we start from the premise that the works the Jesuits chose to translate reflect the state of western epistemologies at a certain time, then we could conclude that nolens volens the Chinese were being exposed to a way of thinking when they thought they were only being exposed to a translated text. But to establish the impact of just this sort of “Trojan Horse” epistemology would require a great deal of close work. Elman also looks to the social networks of knowledge—what could pass as a regional Republic of Letters—to trace some of this impact on the study of things. As in Europe, Fu She (Return [to Antiquity] Society) was deeply

implicated in the turn to empirical, mechanical sciences. Many were directly or indirectly influenced by Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), the scholar-official who worked with Ricci on translating European works on mathematics, hydraulics, astronomy, and geography into Chinese. Elman makes the point, based on Sivin, Grafton, and Goodman, that the Jesuit contact cannot be restricted to the hard sciences while leaving out the human.109 Elman suggests that developments internal to Chinese intellectual culture—the whole debate about “things” (wu) and their “concrete” (zhi) investigation—prepared its receptivity to the Jesuits' imported subject matter. He has also suggested that it was the transmission of kaozheng to Japan that, in turn, prepared their receptivity to “German Rankean Page 134 →history.”110 One could go a step further and suggest, building on the work of Shana Brown, that it was the persistence of Song and Qing learning that made for the receptivity of the generation of scholars c. 1900 who created the first studies of jinshi xue, or antiquarianism, in China. For most of the twentieth century, in Europe as in China, antiquarianism was a non-subject. In Europe, it had been identified with myopic pedantry in the Enlightenment and then shuffled off to the dusty basement of the modern university system. In an era that prized expertise, as expressed in disciplinary specialization and priority claims, there was almost nothing worse, nothing more out of step, than being an antiquarian. Even today, there are few condemnations scholars fear more than to be called “antiquarian.” Historians' hostility may, however, reflect a “narcissism of minor differences.” In China, the psychic situation is very different. Until much more recently, veneration of antique heritage would have been the norm—but veneration is not the same as scholarship, and, in any event, the term “antiquarian” was absent. When it arrived, borne on the wings of modern German historical and archaeological scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century, it brought with it many of those negative European connotations. And so the founders of the study of Chinese antiquarianism were at pains to emphasize the way in which that whole tradition had been finally “overcome” and made “scientific.” Reviled, and therefore neglected, the European antiquarian tradition was able to survive more or less intact to be rediscovered and reexamined in the late twentieth century. Chinese antiquarianism, because so familiar and so valued, at some point ceased to exist as an object of study in itself, even as jinshi xue has continued to be practiced. Before its study can occur, it needs to be properly reconstituted as a field of questions, not just a collection of texts or a living tradition. With the flurry of new work on Song antiquarianism, perhaps this time has now come.

NOTES 1. Given the nature of this essay, I do not presume to bibliographical omnicompetence. References, like broader theses, aim to be suggestive, not comprehensive. Creating a framework for comparison may also have the unintended but inevitable consequence of reductiveness. I plead guilty to this, but hope the gains outweigh the losses. 2. Cicero, Academica, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, and London, 1929), 1.3:419–21.Page 135 → 3. See Anthony Grafton and N. Swerdlow, “Technical Chronology and Astrological History in Varro, Censorinus and Others,” Classical Quarterly 35 (1985): 454–65. 4. “Of the changes of rites and music, the improvements and revisions of the pitch pipes and calendar, military power, mountains and rivers, spirits and gods, the relationships between heaven and man, the economic practices handed down and changed age by age, I have made the eight treatises.” Sources of the Chinese Tradition, ed. William Theodore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan, and Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 1:232. 5. Michael Loewe, ed., Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1993), 405–14. See also Burton Watson, Ssu-ma Ch'ien: Grand Historian of China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), and Dzo Ching-chuan, Sseu-ma Ts'ien et l'historiographie chinoise (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957). 6. Denis C. Twitchett, “Chinese Biographical Writing,” in Historians of China and Japan, ed. W. G. Beasley and E. G. Pulleyblank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 95–114, at 96. 7. Sources of the Chinese Tradition, 1:229. 8. For this in general see Denis Twitchett, The Writing of Official History Under the Tang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and in particular chap. 9, “Histories of Institutions, Historical

Encyclopedias, and Collections of Documents,” 84–118. 9. On-cho Ng and Q. Edward Wang, Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005), 109. For the development of important new forms of synchronic study of Chinese society under the Tang, see 128. 10. Thomas H. C. Lee, “History, Erudition and Good Government: Cheng Ch'iao and Encyclopedic Historical Thinking,” in The New and the Multiple: Sung Senses of the Past, ed. Thomas H. C. Lee (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2004), 170 and 174. 11. Sources of the Chinese Tradition, 1:445. 12. E. Balázs, “L'Histoire comme guide de la pratique bureaucratique (les monographies, les encyclopédies, les recueils de statuts),” in Historians of China and Japan, ed. W. G. Beasley and E. G. Pulleyblank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 78–94, at 82. 13. James M. Hargett, “Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers and Their Place in the History of Difanghzi Writing, ” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56 (1996): 412. 14. Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel 1550–1800 (Chur: Harwood Academic Publications, 1995), ch. 6: “August Ludwig Schlözer and the Study of Mankind According to Peoples.” 15. Hargett, “Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers,” 412, n. 24. 16. Chapter 1 is constituted by the history of administrative boundaries, city walls and districts, population, wards and markets, local products, local customs, gate names, schools, residences of former prefects, Southern Garden, granaries and warehouses, pavilions and guest houses, roads to the sea, former Page 136 →prefects, and local personages. Chapter discusses 2 bridges, shrines, Daoist abbeys, Buddhist temples, mountains, lakes, rivers, and other waterways. Chapter 3 deals with water management, vestiges of the past, gardens and official residences, tumuli and graves, stone grave tablets, chronicles of famous events, and miscellaneous accounts. Hargett, “Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers,” 413–14. 17. Quoted in Hargett, “Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers,” 417. 18. Quoted in Hargett, “Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers,” 424. But no Southern Song gazetteer described his method better than Zhou Yinghe (1213–80), chief compiler of Jingding Jiankang zhi (1261). In addition to a preface he also supplied a detailed report on the “Essentials and Peripherals of Compiling the Gazetteer” (Xiuzhi benmo) and a list of “Guiding Rules of Compilation” (Fanli). His “Essentials” shows what he and his staff mined for information: “In all cases from antiquity up to the present, whenever we discovered an event, a thing, a poem, or essay that deserved to be included in our gazetteer, we included it whether it was past or present, long or short.” 19. For example, Lin Fu (jinshi 1097) in his colophon to Zhu Changwen's Wujun tujing xuji distinguishes this project from narrow geography: “By elevating the governors of ancient times Zhu hopes [to instruct] the ministers of tomorrow; by praising the excellence of figures from past generations he hopes [to help] their descendents make themselves stronger. [The chapter] on watercourses and waterways disseminates ways of controlling rivers; those on rice granaries provide plans to enrich the common people. Discourses on the practices and precedents of customs, boasts of the abundant growth of the population, and extends to the grand enterprise of transformation through education, rites, and music. Thus, we see that the gentleman's will has always been devoted to the world (or society). How is it possible, then, to regard this as if it were merely a geographical work with maps?” Quoted in Hargett, “Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers,” 424–25. 20. Hargett, “Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers,” 427. 21. Hargett comments, “If my reading of this passage is correct, then shu-chih refers here to the monograph chapters in the Shih-chi (where they are called shu) and Han-shu (where they are called chih).” This would be a clear identification of the antiquarian with those parts of the standard history, and again linking the Varronian to these accounts. (Hargett, “Historiography in Southern Sung Dynasty Local Gazetteers,” The New and the Multiple, 292). Bol sharply disagrees with Hargett's interpretation and sees these local gazetteers as not only remaining local, but as representing an emphatic localism-as-resistance to centralizing tendencies, Peter K. Bol, “The Rise of Local History: History, Geography, and Culture in Southern Song and Yuan Wuzhou,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 61 (2001): 37–76. 22. For the T'ang, see Twitchett, “The Composition of the T'ang Ruling Class: New Evidence from Tunhuang,” in Perspectives on the T'ang, Arthur F. Wright and Denis C. Twitchett (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 47–85. 23. Hugh R. Clark, “Reinventing the Genealogy: Innovation in Kinship Practice in the Tenth to Eleventh

Centuries,” in The New and the Multiple, 237.Page 137 → 24. In fact, Clark argues precisely for the integration of the evidence in the genealogical texts with those in the difangzhi, “Reinventing the Genealogy,” 238. 25. Joanna M. Meskill, “The Chinese Genealogy as a Research Source,” in Family and Kinship in Chinese Society, ed. Maurice Freedman (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1970), 144. 26. For this, see Miller, “The Ancient Constitution and the Genealogist: Momigliano, Pocock, and Peiresc's Origines Murensis Monasterii (1618),” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (May 1, 2009): http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/37. 27. “The highly urbanized republican world of northern and central Italy was, through its own experience, better fitted to absorb ancient culture and identify with it. By 1250, renewed contact with ancient authors had inspired a lay intellectual to formulate a new urban morality. Over subsequent decades, Italians' sense of a special filial relationship to the superior culture of Romanitas intensified. Italy's privileged link with ancient Rome later provided the foundation for Petarch's stance in his quarrels with the Francophiles at Avignon.” Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 65. 28. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 171. 29. Alberto Mussato's Historia Augusta (ca. 1320–25) is important not for what it says, according to Witt, so much as how. For in the comparatively much richer syntax of ancient Latin—Witt notes moods and tenses, participles, gerunds, gerundives, and finite and infinite verbs—Mussato found tools that helped him “capture the complex flow of historical time.” Mussato's immediate predecessors, such as Rolandino, lacked these tools and so produced accounts of less power, less precision. See Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 144. 30. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 172–73. 31. P. G. Ricci, ed., Posteritati, in Petrarch, Prose, 7, quoted in Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 276. 32. Witt here refers to the work of Cranz on the existence of a real break in the West ca. 1100 in which a passively structured epistemology was replaced by an active one. Petrarch's searching for lost time would constitute a prime example of the latter. Perhaps. But these mega shifts are easier to posit than they are to precisely document, so I include it here only to amplify just how significant we could find Petrarch indeed to be. F. Edward Cranz, “1100 A.D.: A Crisis for Us,” in De Litteris; Occasional Papers in the Humanities, ed. Marijan Despalatovic (New London: Connecticut College, 1978), 84–107. 33. Cicero, De finibus, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1933), 5.1:–2. 4, 390–93. The passage concludes with Cicero declaring “No wonder the scientific training of the memory is based upon place.” 34. Roberto Weiss, “Petrarch the Antiquarian,” in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Honor of Berthold Louis Ullman, ed. Charles Henderson, Jr., 2 vols. (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1964), 199–209, at 207; Angelo Mazzocco, “The antiquarianism of Francesco Petrarca,” Journal of Medieval Page 138 →and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977): 203–24; Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), 23. 35. Petrarch, Familiares 6.2. 36. Mazzocco, “The antiquarianism of Francesco Petrarca,” 208. 37. These words are actually drawn from Familiar Letters 1.5, writing about his daytime and nighttime wanderings around Cologne. 38. Francesco Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols. (Baltimore, 1982), 1.113, 2.14: “Metuens ne quod ipse michi animo finxeram, extenuarent oculi et magnis semper nominibus inimica presentia.” This dialectic between reconstruction and imagination was real and would remain, through the age of Piranesi and on toward our own. This is how Wilhelm von Humboldt expressed the same idea in a letter to Goethe of 23 August 1804: “Rome is the place where all of antiquity converges into one, for us to see. What we feel when we read ancient literature or hear about ancient forms of government, we believe, in Rome, not merely to sense but to experience directly. Just as Homer cannot be compared to other poets, so Rome cannot be compared to any other city, the Roman countryside to any other landscape. For the most part, however, this impression is subjective, not objective. And yet it is more than the sentimental notion of standing at the spot where some great man stood. A powerful force is pulling us into the past which we perceive as nobler and more sublime, though that might simply be a necessary delusion. Even if

we wanted, we could not resist this force because the desolation, which the present inhabitants do nothing to prevent, and the unbelievable amount of rubble make us take refuge in imagination. In these surroundings the past appears to our mind with a greatness that makes envy impossible and which we are overjoyed at perceiving, in the only way we can, in our imagination. At the same time, our eyes actually see with absolute clarity the lovely forms, the grandeur and simplicity of the figures, the rich vegetation (though not as luxuriant as further south), the clean outlines in the clear air, and the beauty of the colors…But it is only a delusion to want to be inhabitants of Athens and Rome. We should experience antiquity only from a distance, as isolated from everything ordinary and as something irrevocably past—a feeling a friend and I have when we see ruins. We are always annoyed when a half-buried ruin is excavated. At most, that may benefit scholarship, but at the expense of imagination. There are only two things I dread: if they cultivate the Campagna di Roma, and if they make Rome into an orderly city where no one would carry a knife anymore. If ever such a strict pope comes along (which, I pray, the seventy-two cardinals will prevent!), I shall leave. Only if Rome remains a city of divine anarchy and the area around it such a heavenly wilderness will there be room for the shadows of the past, one of which is worth more than this whole present generation.” Quoted in Goethe, The Collected Works, vol. 3: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey (Princeton, 1994), 107–8, emphasis added. 39. Petrarch, Itinéraire de Gênes à la Terre Sainte (1358), trans. Christophe Carraud and Rebecca Lenoir, notes Rebecca Lenoir (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2002), nn. 13 and 14, 31.Page 139 → 40. “Quaere in libris, invenies nomina. Quaere urbem totam, aut nihil invenies, aut perexigua tantorum operum vestigia.” From Petrarch, De remediis, quoted in Mazzocco, “Petrarca, Poggio, and Biondo: Humanism's Foremost interpreters of Roman Ruins,” Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium, ed. Aldo Scalgione (Chapel Hill and Chicago: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures: Symposia, 3, 1975), 356. 41. Many of these came from the collection of Li Gonglin; see Robert Harrist's fascinating reconstruction, Robert E. Harrist, Jr., “The Artist as Antiquarian: Li Gonglin and His Study of Early Chinese Art,” Artibus Asiae 55 (1995): 237–80. 42. K. C. Chang, “Archaeology and Chinese Historiography,” World Archaeology 13 (1981): 156–69, at 158. 43. Yun-Chiahn C. Sena, “Cataloguing Antiquity: A Comparative Study of the Kaogu tu and Bogu tu,” in Reinventing the Past, 207. But Sena notes that it is precisely the discussion of provenance in the section on basic information that is suppressed in the Bogu tu, reflecting the ideological aims of court sponsorship. 44. Ronald Egan provides a brief biographical sketch in English in the introduction to The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–72) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 45. Peter Bol, “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 193–94. 46. Sources of the Chinese Tradition, 1:438. 47. Achim Mittag, in his fascinating “History in Sung Classical Learning: The Case of the Odes (Shihching),” in Lee, ed., The New and the Multiple, 201–36, shows how Xiu's philological and genealogical work was important for shifting the parameters of their respective discourses, but does not link to the epistemology also manifested in his antiquarianism. 48. Quoted in Bol, “This Culture of Ours,” 195. 49. On the 1030s reforms see Patricia Ebrey, “Replicating Zhou Bells at the Northern Song Court,” in Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture, ed. Wu Hung (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 179–200. On the reforms under Huizong, see Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Accumulating Culture: The Collections of Emperor Huizong (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2008), 159–66. For more background, see Joseph S. C. Lam, “Huizong's Dashengyue, a Musical Performance of Emperorship and Officialdom,” 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: Harvard Asia Center, 2006), 395–452. 50. Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), 133–34. 51. Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 60–108. 52. Classical epigraphy was not in itself a terribly literary genre; it was rather in terms of letter forms that

epigraphy proved so especially inspiring to Europeans of the Renaissance. The same is true for Ouyang Xiu, who was at least Page 140 →as, if not more, interested in the shape (calligraphy) as in the content of his rubbings. 53. Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 11–12. A later example is from Zhao Mingcheng, Records of Bronzes and Stones (Jinshi lu): “However, the dates, places, offices, and genealogies [in the Books of Poetry and History], when checked with records found in the bronze or stone inscriptions, are often found to contain errors. I have examined the similarities and differences and compared them with various other records,” quoted in Thomas H. C. Lee, “New Directions in Northern Sung Historical Thinking (960–1126),” Turning Points in Historiography: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Q. Edward Wang and Georg G. Iggers (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2002), 61. 54. See for instance Richard L. Davis's characterization of Ouyang Xiu in the preface to Ouyang Xiu, Historical Records of the Five Dynasties, trans. and intro. Richard L. Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), xv and xliv—but note that there is no reference to Ouyang's jinshi xue, perpetuating the Chinese version of the split between the “ancient historian” and the “antiquarian.” 55. Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 8. 56. Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 21. 57. Nor was melancholy foreign to Ouyang himself. In a farewell written for one Yang Zhi in 1047, he explained, “I used to be afflicted by melancholia. Even after I resigned my office and lived in retirement I was unable to cure it.” Egan, The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–72), 34. 58. Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 27. 59. Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 38–39. 60. Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 49. 61. For example, in Liu Zhizhi, Shitong (ca. 710): “As long as the profession of historian is not cut off, and the bamboo and silk of their records survive, then even though a man himself has perished and disappeared into the void, his acts are as if they still survive, bright and clear as the stars of the Milky Way. As a result later scholars can sit and open the wrappers and boxes [holding the histories] and encounter in spirit all the men of antiquity; without leaving their own homes they can exhaust the lessons of a thousand years,” quoted in Denis Twitchett, The Writing of Official History Under the T'ang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 77. 62. “J'avoue que cet examen particulier est le point essentiel, & l'objet principal de ces réflexions, puisqu'il présente en effet le plus grand avantage de l'étude dont il est question, qu'il montre à l'Antiquaire des millions d'hommes, noyés dans l'abime du temps dont le tourbillon doit l'emporter lui-meme. Il apperçoit un nombre considerable de Rois absolument ignorés, ou dont le nom est à peine connu…Enfin, supposé que l'on opposat à des exemples si convaincans, que plusieurs des Anciens ont été célébrés, & que l'on retrouve tous les jours des Monumens élevés à leur honneur, l'Antiquaire remarque sans peine que ceux qui sont parvenus à quelque distinction, sont nos voisins de siecles & de pays. Ce voisinage lui démonstre la raison physique qui met leur mémoire à portée de recevoir cette légère fumée; & le retour que ces exemples l'engagent à faire sur lui-meme, est peut-etre le moyen le plus Page 141 →efficace pour la destruction de l'Egoisme, ce grand ennemi des hommes, & le défaut le plus importun dans la société” (Caylus,Recueil d'antiquités egyptiennes, etrusques, greques et romaines, 7 vols. (Paris, 1752–67), 5:xv–xvi). 63. Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 51. 64. Egan, The Problem of Beauty, 53. 65. On Cyriac, the main works remain Charles Mitchell, “Archaeology and Romance in Renaissance Italy,” Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F. Jacob (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 455–83; G. Paci and S. Sconocchia, eds., Ciriaco d'Ancona e la cultura antiquaria dell'umanesimo (Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis, 1998); and the many works of Edward W. Bodnar, most recently Cyriac of Ancona: Later Travels, ed. and trans. Bodnar, with Clive Foss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 66. Twenty-three of the fifty-two inscriptions copied out by Bracciolini, and preserved in a sylloge that passed through the hands of Cyriac and Coluccio Salutati before eventually finding a place in the Vatican Library, were used in de Varietate's first book. Poggio Bracciolini, Les Ruines de Rome: De varietate fortunae, book 1, ed. and intro. Philippe Coarelli and Jean-Yves Boriaud, trans. Jean-Yves Boriaud (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999), xiii. 67. Martin Ott has studied the link between this spatial approach and the shape of early epigraphy in

“Gelehrte Topographie im Geist des Altertums: Antike Inschriften und die Erfassung des Raumes in der Zeit der Renaissance,” in Medien und Sprachen humanistischer Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Johannes Helmrath, Albert Schirrmeister, Stefan Schlelein (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2009), 139–66. 68. Why this is so cannot be explained here. The tendency among Chinese intellectual historians has been to reach for large-scale explanations having to do with philosophical mega-trends, whether Buddhism (Peter Bol) or neo-Confucianism (De Bary) or Daoism (Benjamin Elman). This has its obvious appeal, as did such all-inclusive explanations in Western intellectual history of previous generations, though the historiography of history of scholarship has since focused much more on transmission and micro-historical contexts—what the absence of parallel evidence in China seems to eliminate (assuming that such evidence is in fact absent). 69. Through the Prism of the Past: Antiquarian Trends in Chinese Art of the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2003), 24. 70. Through the Prism of the Past, 27. 71. For example: “During the Ming dynasty, an interest in ancient artifacts as curiosities was evident, but as in so many other fields, the Northern Sung concern for exact scholarship was not continued. Ming collectors were mainly concerned with aesthetic elements of color and shape in their antique collections. No extensive archaeological fieldwork was attempted, with few works on paleographical study.” Benjamin Elman, “Classical Learning in Ming-Ch'ing China,” Turning Points in Historiography, 128. Even Craig Clunas's very sensitive reading of the contexts of Ming antiquarianism does not argue for a scholarly as opposed to aesthetic imperative (“Antiquarian Politics and the Politics of Antiquarianism in Ming Regional Courts,” in Reinventing the Past, 229–54).Page 142 → 72. Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan: “The overall survey of the ocean's shores” (1433), trans. and ed. Feng Ch'eng-chün, intro. J. V. G. Mills (Bangkok: White Lotus Co., 1997), 70. Note, however, for a much earlier period, Edward H. Schafer, The Vermilion Bird: T'ang Images of the South (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967). 73. Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton, eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). 74. Riccardo Fubini's treatments of Biondo as antiquarian are compelling, but do not note these differences between spatial and conceptual dispositions of antiquarian material. See Fubini, “La geografia storica dell' ‘Italia Illustrata’ di Biondo Flavio e le tradizioni dell'etnografia,” and “Biondo Flavio e l'antiquaria romana, ” especially “Nuovi studi sulla ‘Roma Triumphans,’” in Storiografia dell'umanesimo in Italia da Leonardo Bruni ad Annio da Viterbo (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003), 53–76 and 77–83. 75. Ingo Herklotz, Cassiano dal Pozzo und die Archäologie des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hirmer, 1999), 248. 76. Fubini argues for the role of Panvinio in creating the conditions for Rosinus's encyclopedic presentation in “Onofrio Panvinio: alle origini del mito di Varrone come fondatore della scienza antiquaria,” in Storiografia dell'umanesimo in Italia, 83–89. 77. For the former, Helmut Zedelmaier, Bibliotheca universalis und Bibliotheca selecta: Das Problem des gelehrten Wissens in der frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 1992); for the latter the essays in Ralph Häner, ed., Philologie und Erkenntnis: Beiträge zu Begriff und Problem frühneuzeitlicher “Philologie,” (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), and Helmut Zedelmaier and Martin Mulsow, eds., Gelehrsamkeit als Praxis: Arbeitsweisen, Funktionen, Grenzbereiche (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001). There is a mountain of impressive scholarship on antiquarianism and philology in the sixteenth century, as well as specific studies of Poliziano, Vettori, and others. I am, here, only suggesting the broadest outline of the detailed structure that has been so impressively charted by others. 78. “Incredibile est, quantum ad pleniorem antiquitatis notitiam valeat observatio numorum, lapidum, aliorumque veterum monimentorum…Equidem affirmare ausim, haud parum in scriptoribus esse, quae vix aliter, quam ex illis cum intelligi tum explicari recte possint.” Philip Rubens, Elect. libri (1608), 20, quoted in Herklotz, Cassiano dal Pozzo, 253. Rubens' emphasis on intellibility is different from the more obvious interest in materials such as coins or inscriptions because of their greater durability, as in Panvinio's statement: “Verum quum lapides et metalla, quae omnium durissima sunt, quaeque vix hominum vis frangere postest…” Onufrio Panvinio, preface to De his qui romanas antiquitates scripto comprehenderunt

(1568) quoted in Jean-Louis Ferrary, Onofrio Panvinio et les antiquités romaines (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1996), 51.Page 143 → 79. Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983–93); Giuseppina Alessandra Cellini, Il contributo di Fulvio Orsini alla ricerca antiquaria (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2004). 80. Herklotz, Cassiano dal Pozzo, 225. 81. David Jaffé, “The Barberini Circle: Some Exchanges between Peiresc, Rubens, and their Contemporaries,” Journal of the History of Collections 1 (1989): 119–47; idem, “Aspects of Gem Collecting in the Early Seventeenth Century: Nicolas-Claude Peiresc and Lelio Pasqualini,” The Burlington Magazine 135 (1993): 103–20. 82. On this, generally, see Jan Marco Sawilla, Antiquarianismus, Hagiographie und Historie im 17. Jahrhundert: Zum Werk der Bollandisten: Ein wissenschaftlicher Versuch (Tübingen, 2009), and the bibliography there. Otto, looking from the perspective of epigraphy, also points to a shift from spatial to functional classification systems ca. 1600, which would have facilitated precisely this change in perspective (“Gelehrte Topographie,” 159). 83. See, for example, the articles collected in Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 3 (2001) and Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006). 84. Athanasius Kircher, China Illustrata with Sacred and Secular Monument, Various Spectacles of Nature and Art and Other Memorabilia, trans. Charles van Tuyl (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1987), 5. 85. Kircher, China Illustrata, pt. 2, chap. 4, 60. 86. Leibniz to Kircher, quoted in Leibniz, Writings on China. trans., intro., and notes Daniel J. Cook and Henry Rosemont, Jr. (Chicago and Lasalle: Open Court, 1994), 11. Leibniz, Schriften und Briefe zur Geschichte, ed. Malte-Ludolf Babin and Gerd van den Heuvel (Hannover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2004). 87. André Robinet, “La Rencontre Leibniz-Grimaldi à Rome et l'Avenir des Académies,” in Das Neueste über China: G. W. Leibnizens “Novissima Sinica” von 1697, ed. Wenchao Li and Hans Poser (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000), 80–83; André Robinet, G. W. Leibniz Iter Italicum (Mars 1689–Mars 1690): La dynamique de la République des Lettres: Nombreux textes inédites (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1988), 122–25. 88. “Puis, sollicité par L., G. parle de la lune et des fixes, et des progrès de l'astronomie chinoise. Les arts de la nature y sont développés. Une plante cultivée en Chine est apte à soulager des douleurs de la goutte: un specimen en a été offert au Duc de Toscane pour ses jardins botaniques. Les usines de tissage y sont développées, mais les Chinois sont à la recherche des machines européennes. D'où le nouvel exposé de L. sur sa machine arithmétique, qui attire l'attention d'un Grimaldi incredule. L. insiste de plus sur la nécessité d'initier les Chinois aux arcanes des nouvelles mathématiques.” (These comprise paragraphs 3–5 of Phoranomus; quoted in Robinet, G. W. Leibniz Iter Italicum, 122.) 89. For his admiration for the Chinese achievement, especially in the “precepts of civil life,” in which they surpassed Europeans, see for example, Leibniz, Page 144 →“Novissima sinica,” pars. 1–3 (Writings on China, 45–46). Leibniz's description of China as the “Oriental Europe” is found in a letter of 3 Jan 1708, in V. I. Guerrier, Leibniz in seinem Beziehungen zu Russland und Peter der Grosse (St. Petersburg, 1873), appendix: 76, cited in Christian D. Zangger, Welt und Konversation: Die theologische Begründung der Mission bei G. W. Leibniz (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1973), 190. 90. Leibniz to Antoine Verjus S. J., 2 December 1697: “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 general des hommes et l'accroissement des sciences et des arts chez nous aussi bien que chez les Chinois, car c'est un commerce de lumière, 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 (F.a.M., 1990), 55. 91. See for example the papers presented at the Getty Research Institute and the Clark Library conference organized by Margaret C. Jacob, UCLA, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, Universiteit Utrecht, December 2007: “At the Interface of Religion and Cosmopolitanism: Bernard Picart's Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous

les peuples du monde (1723–43) and the European Enlightenment,” http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/c1718cs /proginterface.htm, accessed 29 August 2008. 92. He describes the break with Daoxue as “Remarkably” like that associated with Lorenzo Valla and Desiderius Erasmus. “Like their European counterparts, Qing dynasty philologists favored liguistic clarity, simplicity, and purity. This endeavor led them to expose inconsistencies in contemporary beliefs and forms of expression.” Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, 2001, 2nd revised ed., 1st ed. 1984), 3. The idea behind this was “to throw a bridge across the era of the ‘Learning of the Way’ and resume the interrupted conversation with antiquity,” Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 28–30. It is hard not to hear in this an equivalent of the Renaissance humanist's call Ad fontes. Similarly, he anchors kaozheng scholars in a milieu of letter-writing, libraries, printing, note-taking and learned sociability that is the early modern European Republic of Letters in all but name: xxv, 7, 121, 181, 189, 211, 240. 93. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, and Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 94. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 28. 95. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 81. “A common field of inquiry developed gradually among late Ming scholars who insisted on the centrality of philological research, an area of concern that others still found marginal, i.e. xiaoxue.” He notes that some contemporaries, such as Wu Cheng, saw philology as “excessive refinement”—pedantry in Western terms?—“Similarly in late Ming civil examinations, we see increasing evidence of policy questions dealing with kaojuxue (studies based on what can be ascertained) a Ming Page 145 →intellectual current that Qing kaozheng scholars would see as a precursor.” Elman, 58. 96. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 31. 97. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 101. 98. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 102–3. 99. Elman, “Classical Learning in Ming-Ch'ing China,” in Turning Points in Historiography, 103. 100. For botany, see Elman's discussion of Li Shizhen's Systematic Materia Medica in On Their Own Terms, 29–34; for engineering, On Their Own Terms, 197–98. 101. The most systematic treatments are Nancy G. Siraisi, History, Medicine and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), and Siraisi and Pomata, eds., “Historia”: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 102. Elman, On Their Own Terms, 260. 103. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 227. Of course there are many possible explanations for this other than “greater archaeological sensibility.” 104. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 225. 105. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 227 106. Quoted in Ng and Wang, Mirroring the Past, 244. 107. Elman, On Their Own Terms, 110. 108. See on this Willard J. Peterson, “Fang I-chih: Western Learning and the ‘Investigation of Things,’” in The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, ed. William Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 369–412; Peterson, Bitter Gourd: Fang I-Chih and the Impetus for Intellectual Change (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979). To him we could add also Nicolas Standaert, “The Investigations of Things and the Fathoming of Principles (Gewu Qiongli) in the Seventeenth-Century Contact between Jesuits and Chinese Scholars,” ed. John W. Witek, Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688): Jesuit Missionary, Scientist, Engineer and Diplomat, Monumenta Serica Monograph Series XXX (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994), 395–420. 109. Elman, On Their Own Terms, 112–13. 110. Elman, “Classical Learning in Ming-Ch'ing China,” in Turning Points in Historiography, 134.

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PART 2 Authenticity and Antiquities

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FIVE The Credulity Problem Christopher S. Wood Early modern European antiquarians made plenty of blunders—but they were such interesting blunders.1 In the first third of the fifteenth century, for example, Italian scholars developed a fluid and legible handwriting based on the manuscripts of classical texts that they had found in monastic libraries.2 They then instructed painters to adorn the initial letters and page borders of their own books with crawling, interlocking growths of vine, curling white stems and shoots, much like those they had seen in the old books. An initial E from a Bolognese manuscript of Suetonius, datable to the middle of the fifteenth century, adorning a text written in a round humanist hand, is a good example (fig. 1).3 But the white vine scroll and the minuscule alphabet were born of a chronological misconception, for the ancient models that scribes and painters looked to were not so ancient. Their models were actually twelfth-century Italian manuscripts which in turn transmitted interlaced forms developed in transalpine monasteries such as St. Gall between the ninth and eleventh centuries; for example an initial C from a Homiliary, an Italian manuscript of the early twelfth century (fig. 2).4 There can be no mistake about the derivation, for fifteenth-century white vine ornament duplicated even the blue, green, and red color scheme of the intervals between the vines found in the medieval sources.5 The philologists in their enthusiasm were reviving not an ancient Roman but an early medieval and northern European form. An art historian might describe such a cross-wiring as a pseudomorphosis, following Erwin Panofsky, who used this term to characterize a Page 150 →historical form invested by Renaissance artists with a meaning that it had not possessed in the past.6 White vine ornament and other false antiquities were not the fantasms of mere illinformed artists, however. They were promulgated by scholars, the pioneers of the modern disciplines of philology and archaeology, critical minds who defined themselves as the enemies of all hopeful or blurry thinking about the past. Just as the reform-minded theologians of the day deplored superstition and the cult of relics, so too did new-model historians ridicule the credulities of unlettered clerics, professorial imposters, and the common folk. In his Bavarian Chronicle of 1526 the historian Johannes Aventinus—to invoke only one distinguished figure—drily mocked the “good, foolish, and ignorant cathedral canon” in Regensburg who on the basis of an inscription mistook the tombstone of Aurelia, a Roman woman, for the tomb of a certain Saint Aurelia, who in fact there was no reason to believe had ever been in Regensburg.7 The local cleric, untutored in epigraphy and archaeology, had no idea how to date an inscription. And for all that the humanists, not excepting Aventinus himself, managed to find their own winding path into error. Renaissance scholars often display the same combination of severity and suggestibility that we find two centuries later in Giambattista Vico, who derided the “unclear, frivolous, inept, conceited, and ridiculous” opinions of other scholars on the origins of languages, and then went on to assert that the most ancient peoples had spoken a natural, nonarbitrary language and that this was the language of Atlantis, just as Plato had said; or who dismissed as “groundless, inappropriate, or simply false” the views of other authorities Page 151 →on the reasons for the monstrous stature of ancient giants, but was himself completely confident of the historical reality of giants.8 Fifteenth-and sixteenth-century scholars were peculiarly prone to credulity, as if archaeology itself, the epochal turn to material evidence as a supplement to oral and textual authority, only led them to ever more wonderful and lucid errors. Credulity was the matrix of creativity. Ernst Gombrich, in one of his most ingenious essays, associated Leon Battista Alberti and Filippo Brunelleschi's reform of architecture with Poggio Bracciolini and Coluccio Salutati's invention of the minuscule script.9 In both cases, the modern-pointing innovations were grounded in what Ingrid Rowland calls an “antiquarianism of false premises.”10 Just as the Florentine scribes had modeled their antiqua

alphabet on Carolingian precedents, so too did the pioneering architect Filippo Brunelleschi select as his paragons the Baptistery and the basilica of SS. Apostoli, both eleventh-century structures.11 For his own S. Lorenzo (begun 1421), as Gombrich and others have shown, Brunelleschi borrowed from SS. Apostoli not only the plan but the Romanesque device of arches resting directly on columns. The entablature blocks he interposed between capital and arch, meanwhile, were derived from the exterior of the Baptistery.12 Alberti styled his façade for S. Maria Novella (begun ca. 1458), with its corner pillars with horizontal incrustations and blind arcades, after the Baptistery and the façade of the twelfth-century basilica of S. Miniato al Monte. 13 Throughout the fifteenth century, the most archaeologically minded and antiquity-oriented architects were as attentive to local pre-Gothic Page 152 →churches as they were to ancient ruins.14 The paradox was explained already by Giorgio Vasari, who, following two centuries of commentary, described the Baptistery as a “most ancient temple” and went on to argue that because the architects of medieval buildings like SS. Apostoli had emulated the “good antique order” that they had found in the Baptistery, Brunelleschi was therefore justified in taking SS. Apostoli as his model.15 Gombrich's paradoxical argument stripped the narrative of the rebirth of antiquity of some its revolutionary grandeur. He showed how a pedantic compulsion to emend could yield serendipitous results. Yet despite Gombrich's warning, modern scholars have found few ways to describe creative misidentifications of old forms and artifacts other than as errors. Things only get worse when the Renaissance scholars figure not merely as passive gulls, but as active forgers, interventionists within the monumental record. For it is the case that humanist scholars in this period actually fabricated facts. The epigraphers copied many dozens of fascinating but inauthentic texts into their sylloges, or anthologies of classical inscriptions.16 The early sylloges included the epitaphs of Lucretia, Caesar, and Lucan, and much else of little historical value. Most syllogists knew which texts were “good” and which were not.17 Still, the ultimate truth content of a given tradition was never quite clear. Scholarship often drifted into a disorienting middle ground where the fabricated supplements to fact could cycle back and become corroborating testimony to their own reality, especially before the era of print (which antiquarians entered alarmingly late).18 Confusingly, some of the pseudepigraphic texts, as well as inscriptions recorded in classical texts such as Livy, had been carved in stone in modern times. But such stones would have been hard to date on stylistic grounds alone.19 The last to see the epitaph of Lucan—M.A. Lucano Cordubensi poete beneficio Neronis Caesaris fama servata, someone's outright invention—was the Florentine philologist Pietro Crinito (1475–1507), who reported that it was done in priscis litteris, “ancient letters.”20 Through repetition, circulation, and association with material evidence, such ludic contrivances could take on a specious factual existence. Huius Nympha Loci was a modern poem, devised perhaps as early as the 1460s by the humanist Giovanni Antonio Campani, invoking the classical and pastoral topos of a girl sleeping near water. The poem then appeared in the anthology of ancient inscriptions compiled by Michael Fabricius Ferrarinus in the 1470s or 1480s, together with the explanation Page 153 →that the poem had been found super ripam Danuvii, above the banks of the Danube, inscribed on a tablet and accompanied by a statue of a sleeping nymph.21 From that point on the inscription and the statue were handed on from sylloge to sylloge, often accompanied by a drawing of the statue. The Danubian location was remote enough that no one would bother to check—that was part of the joke. In Rome, the pseudo-antique poem and statue fell into a mutually corroborating relation with a family of real statues of recumbent sleeping females, ancient and modern. The most celebrated was the Ariadne, known in the Renaissance as Cleopatra, a Roman copy of a second-century BCE Pergamene original, first recorded in the Maffei collection at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Pope Julius II acquired the work in 1512 and mounted it in the Belvedere as a fountain.22 The statue and another like it, now lost, served as the basis for modern copies and adaptations.23 The humanist scholar Angelo Colocci, for example, installed a nude version of the sleeping nymph together with the inscribed poem as a fountain in his garden on the Pincio. Eventually inscription and statue entered into the published sylloges (fig. 3).24 Print recreated the modern work as a “false antiquity.”25 Meanwhile, the symbiosis of statue and poem was extended in drawings and paintings by Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach, who as Danubians, more or less, claimed a proprietory relationship. 26 Another example of a humanist scholar's critical charity toward recent material evidence is the discovery of apparently antique medals by the German poet and antiquarian Conrad Celtis. Petrus Apianus and Bartholomeus Amantius in their anthology of antiquities, Inscriptiones sacrosanctae vetustatis (1534), published woodcut

illustrations of the artifacts. A circular image represents a nude man seated in a rocky landscape, accompanied by a winged child and a skull (fig. 4). The man holds his head in his hands as if anguished by contemplation of the skull. The caption reads: “Found by Conrad Celtis not long ago on a lead plate [or coin] in Styria, on the hill with the church near St. Andreas, in the year 1500” (Nuper a Con. Cel. inventum in plumbea lamina in Stiria in Colle: in quo est Ecclesia circa Sanctum Andream. Anno M.D.).27 The woodcut in fact reproduces the reverse of a selfportrait by the Venetian medallist Giovanni Boldù (d. before 1477).28 Bizarrely, the man, the child, and the skull are labelled in the woodcut reproduction Cloto, Lachesis, and Atropos, i.e., the Three Fates.29 Celtis was apparently not the only one to overestimate the composition's antiquity. In the 1490s the sculptor Cristoforo Solari transposed the composition to a marble medallion and mounted it on Page 154 →the façade of the Certosa di Pavia, alongside other antiquities, including copies of Roman coins as well as the medallic portrait of Emperor Constantine, the famous “remake” of a nonexistent late antique object.30

On his travels Celtis was constantly detecting traces of the presence of the Druids, the ancient priestly caste that supposedly brought religion to the Germans from Greece: forest monasteries, pentagrams stamped on Frankish coins, echoes of Greek in the modern German language; identifications that were received with interest and respect by such authorities as Johannes Aventinus, his own pupil.31 If Celtis's numismatic discoveries muddle pagan and neopagan iconographies, then his pursuit of the Druids among the Germanic antiquities points to a comparable period confusion surrounding medieval artifacts. Conrad Celtis was a voyager in that middle territory of semibelief, where scholarship appealed to the power of suggestion and to the charisma of names and associations. His historiographical and iconographical Page 155 →inquiries were guided by his poetic imagination. Like his contemporary Annius of Viterbo, the Dominican historian, Celtis was also something of a confidence man, a Hochstapler. But these are complicated states of mind, not simple ones. Whatever traces of recent fabrication the Italian medal or the Frankish coins might have borne, Celtis believed that the modern artifacts reliably transmitted the essential content of their ancient prototypes. He felt licensed, or even compelled, to assign the works their “correct” iconographic labels. And this is the thesis that will be advanced in this essay: antiquarian error in this period was often just a matter of “looking through” the recentness of the artifact to a referential target far behind it and so to its true meaning. Page 156 → The turn to material evidence was one of the keys to the development of modern historical consciousness, as Arnaldo Momigliano, Roberto Weiss, Francis Haskell, Alain Schnapp, Ingo Herklotz, and many others have demonstrated.32 Material relics of the past furnished a powerful rhetorical counterweight to the authority of texts. In a sense, the scholars were only following the lead of the clerics, who had been manipulating relics for centuries in their battles with oblivion.33 But the imagination is not cooled by relics, it is heated. J. B. Trapp, who wrote perceptively on the bogus tombs of the Roman poets, spoke of “learned credulity,” and with this phrase suggested that the errors of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century antiquarians were not simply missteps, but were in some sense a function of the new erudition.34 Learned credulity, in this view, was neither a regressive holdover nor a weakness of mind, but a phenomenon catalyzed by antiquarianism itself. The facile “enlightened” view of the history of scholarship as a progressive illumination of darkness obstructed only by fools or knaves—a view voiced by Edward Gibbon himself when he described his seventeenth-century predecessors as “antiquarians of profound learning and easy confidence,”35 implying that the true enemy of critical scholarship was a self-serving and superstitious religiosity—has until recently dominated the historical study of the origins of modern scholarship. For if truth be told, neither Roberto Weiss in his Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity nor Francis Haskell in his History and Its Images had anything really interesting to say about antiquarian credulity. In histories of scholarship, iconographic misadventures such as Celtis's too often figure as incompletenesses or delays in the development of modern archaeological and philological method, no more, no less. Yet one must hesitate before dismissing the “double think”36 of the scholars as incompetence, bad faith, or opportunism. There is a way to redescribe these episodes in period Page 157 →terms, and precisely not in the terms of those critical disciplines that were only just emerging in the Renaissance and were not

institutionalized and internalized until the nineteenth century. I would like to review several recent and imaginative approaches to learned credulity that avoid simple condemnation or judgment in modern terms; and then offer my own structural explanation for the credulity of the Renaissance archaeologists. That explanation aims at validity beyond local circumstances and may therefore possibly contribute to a systematic, nontrivial comparison of European antiquarianism with patterns of scholarly inquiry in China and elsewhere. The first of the recent approaches I wish to identify might be called the “poetic” or “romantic” model, following the lead of Charles Mitchell, who in a well-known essay of 1960 brought out the fanciful, enthusiastic dimension of Quattrocento erudition, showing for example how readily Cyriac of Ancona fell into a fervent, “goliardic”—that is, ludic and festive—worship of Mercury; or with what ingenuity Felice Feliciano invented monumental frames for the inscriptions he discovered.37 Scholarship, Mitchell showed, flowed smoothly into ornamentalizing play. Indeed, one is struck by how readily a suggestive sequence of carved letters triggered the supplementing imaginations of the scholars. The Venetian scholar Marin Sanudo (in the account of Roberto Weiss), “on being shown by the local humanist Giusto dei Giusti the inscription with the name L. VITRVVIVS on the arch of the Gavi, which was locally believed to have been part of the Arena [of Verona], jumped to the conclusion that this Vitruvius, whom he felt certain was the great architect, had also been responsible for the building of it.”38 Scholarship was a matter of filling out the bare skeleton of antique remains. To charge scholars like Celtis with credulity, Mitchell taught, is to misunderstand that imagination was inextricable from scholarship. Mitchell pointed out that later antiquarians appreciated this: the sixteenth-century antiquarian Antonio Agustin despised clumsy forgeries, but admired clever practitioners like Annius of Viterbo and Pirro Ligorio.39 Mitchell's approach unfolds into the more recent, and still more sophisticated, analyses of Leonard Barkan, who in his book Unearthing the Past shows how Renaissance archaeology became a framework for poetic storytelling about objects and origins, dovetailing in the first decades of the sixteenth century with the emergence of a culture of art.40 From this point of view, the errors of the antiquaries were not errors at all, but rather friction produced by the interference between scholarly culture and aesthetic culture at the very moment when the modern boundaries Page 158 →between the two realms were first established. The “poetic” model of antiquarian credulity in the Renaissance indeed always emerges in close proximity to works of art, whether poems, pictures, effigies, or temples. The poem is fundamentally a time-bending machine, as Thomas Greene's profound study of Renaissance intertextuality showed, and for that very reason is seldom mistaken for a document.41 The poets knew to work with and not against anachronism—learned to make a virtue out of the condition of intertextuality, in other words. The work of visual art, however, was frequently expected, in late medieval and Renaissance culture, to double as a historical document. The confusions we have been detecting around artifacts were generated by the interference between the documentary and aesthetic identities of the artifact. Until those identities had been sorted out—if they ever have been—poetry occupied a special niche within the archaeological imagination. Frequent were the reports of discoveries of the tombs of the ancient poets. A stone inscribed T. LIVIVS was unearthed in Padua around 1320 and immediately hailed as the tomb of the historian, a native son. A century later his bones were found in a sarcophagus very near the find-site of the inscription.42 In 1508 a cleric of Bratislava, Leonhard Creutzer, reported the excavation of the tomb of Ovid in Szombathely, outfitted with six stone lamps and two plates engraved with verses, though Creutzer could not remember what they said.43 The tomb of the poet was the point of intersection of archaeological and aesthetic cultures. A second model that attempts to contextualize antiquarian misdatings and mischief might be designated the “forgers as critics” model, following the lead of Anthony Grafton, who wrote an influential short book with a similar title. Grafton argued that forgers like Annius of Viterbo were manipulating the same set of skills that honest scholars were developing to work with ancient texts. The passive and active approaches to the past, in other words, were symmetrical. Annius helped establish the binding rules for the choice and evaluation of sources. “A forger emerges,” Grafton wrote, “as the first really modern theorist of critical reading of historians—a paradox that only a reader with a heart of stone could reject.”44

This paradigm applies not only to Annius's philological work, but also to his archaeological projects. Annius announced around 1492 the “discovery” of a cache of “vases, bronzes, and marbles incised with old letters” near Viterbo.45 The faked finds became the archaeological basis for Annius's extravagant theses, which he published only a few years later—in the form of counterfeited texts attributed to the Chaldean Page 159 →sage Berosus—on the earliest history of Europe, involving the postdiluvian movements of Noah, his progeny, and the Egyptian gods. The most puzzling of Annius's archaeological fabrications is the so-called marmo osiriano, an ornamental lunette in a frame—not a forgery, in fact, but a found object (fig. 5).46 This object was not part of the staged “excavation”; rather, it could be seen by anyone, Annius reported, in the Cathedral, which naturally was once a Temple of Hercules: “Our forefathers…in order to keep the eternal memory of the antiquity of this city before our eyes, placed before the rostra a columnula, that is, an alabaster tablet, monument to the triumph of Osiris.”47 The lunette, with vines, birds, and a lizard, sits in a rectangular frame with two classical-looking profile heads in the corners. Annius interpreted the monument as a fragment of a triumphal column left in Viterbo by Osiris, the Egyptian god. He argued that the profile heads in the spandrel represented Osiris and his cousin Sais Xantho, a muse. This was proof that Osiris really had been to Italy. The birds and other objects in the vines in the lunette were sacred Egyptian letters symbolizing the historical encounter between the Italians, the Giants, and the Egyptians.48 Annius can be forgiven for mistaking the lunette with its twisted vines and animal symbols for an antiquity, for modern scholarship judged it a late Roman artifact until 1927, when Pietro Toesca dated it to the twelfth century. The frame with the profile heads, meanwhile, belongs to more modern times, though it is not clear which times.49 It was by no means unreasonable for Annius to mistake the frame, even if less than a hundred years old, for an antiquity. The whole ensemble was strange-looking and hard to assimilate to any contemporary iconography or function. And as with the Celtis finds, there is no evidence of any doubt on the part of contemporaries. Even Giorgio Vasari two generations later adduced “the statues found at Viterbo” as evidence of the high quality of Etruscan sculpture.50 Grafton's point was that Annius was in many ways an exemplary textual editor. By the same token, he was a gifted archaeologist. Annius believed in inscriptions, artifacts, and names rather than authorities: things, rather than what people said about them.51 He resented the prestigious textual authorities, among them the ancient Roman historians, who contradicted his version of things, mistrusting their literariness, their rhetoric.52 Annius struck back by inventing a purer ancient source to confirm what he knew was true, and preempted skepticism by planting solid archaeological evidence in the ground. “Retroactive” monuments like Annius's marmo osiriano are best understood Page 160 →in the context of medieval document forgery, a well-researched and well-understood phenomenon.53 Medieval historians and clerks generated an enormous quantity of forged documents that came to carry real legal force. Forgery flourished in proximity to power. A famous case in point is the fantastical genealogical tree dreamt up by the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian's court historians Ladislaus Suntheim and Jakob Page 161 →Mennel.54 The scholar Johannes Trithemius invented an entire source, Hunibald, to prove the genealogical connection between the Trojans and the Franks.55 To be sure, many document forgers were simply cynical opportunists. Medieval scholars and jurists were quite capable of applying rationalist criteria in accepting or rejecting evidence.56 But it has also been argued that concepts of the authenticity of a document are historically relative and that medieval forgers were simply playing by the rules of their own time. It is argued, for example, that the overriding framework of salvational justification provided a legitimating context for document forgery, that the deceit was a “pious fraud” (pia fraus); or it is argued that such deceits were justified by a traditional, popular sense of fairness (aequitas) which transcended any simply binary opposition between the true and the false document.57 With documents, the intent to deceive outright is difficult to disentangle from the desire to establish and publicize historical or legal precedents that were simply known to have been real even if the original material indexes of those precedents had gone astray. The forger, rational and irrational at once, thought “doubly.” The forger offered the fabricated documents as a legitimate substitute for an absent document that must have existed. To fabricate a document was just to complete a paper record that was incomplete only by accident, unfairly. If a tradition was old enough—custom beyond memory—then there was an almost irresistible tendency to believe it.58 The fabrication of a corroborating charter or artifact would have appeared to many a routine bureaucratic procedure.

The mosaic of sources had a number of author-sized gaps in it; why not fill them with characters like Berosus or Hunibald?

A third recent approach treats scholarly error in the context of mythic thought. Credulity, in this paradigm, is an effect generated by a mismatch between scholarly and mythical thinking. Myth is a narrative coding of a culture's cosmology and first principles. The historian Paul Veyne in his brilliant book Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? sketched out an ancient intellectual world of “plural truths,” an open competition of myths that made perfect sense according to its own internal rules and even made room for what Veyne called the scholarly practice of “critical credulity.”59 Veyne's model is adaptable to Renaissance culture. As Frank Borchardt demonstrated in his book German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth, the critical historiography of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was often just a matter of one myth replacing another. Although Renaissance scholars were quick to condemn the errors of their predecessors, they were apt to replace those errors with more errors. Borchardt called Page 162 →this process the “topos of critical rejection,” or, to give it its period name, anasceva, or “dismantling.” Borchardt argued that scholars were reluctant to dismantle a tradition and leave nothing in its place.60 That is, they were neither satisfied with Veyne's “plural truths” nor willing to face a past completely unstructured by myth.61 Because myth and written history share the same narrative structure, they are easily knitted together into a common fabric. Cosmogonies or myths of national origins were frequently retained, in this period, as a prelude to more recent and better documented histories. The initiated could easily detect the seam between myth and history, perhaps tacitly sanctioning the mythic prologue through a euhemeristic assumption, that is, the theory that heroic or fabulous narratives were rooted in real but forgotten events. Other readers allowed myth and history to flow into one another. “Credulity” was a way of reading. In modernity, the concept of myth names a flight from the rule of fact. Myth narrates poetically and so becomes the recourse of those who are unconvinced that linear sequences of documents or artifacts can tell the whole story; or of those unwilling to adapt human existence to a historical narrative “fenced in by the cardinal mysteries” of beginnings and endings, as Wolfgang Iser has put it.62 For cultures deprived of the framework of meaning provided by, at one end, etiological myths and, at the other, prophecy—i.e., devices that unlock those cardinal mysteries—must be prepared to take seriously the mere events of human history. Iser argues that such cultures develop literature and art, fictional reenactments of life, as compensations for the loss of its cosmogonies and eschatologies. The credulous early modern scholar, then, is that seeker of origins who is already beyond myth but not yet ready to surrender to art. Giambattista Vico, who grasped the power of “poetic wisdom,” found himself in just that predicament, still protesting deep into the eighteenth century the dogma of fact established by the Renaissance scholars. But this also made him the first to anticipate the modern rebellion, initiated by Nietzsche, against historical reason. Each of these three accounts of learned credulity in the Renaissance identifies a mixing of categories that in modernity are notionally kept distinct: historical scholarship is compromised, in the first instance, by the poetical or aesthetic imagination; in the second by propagandistic or doctrinal ends; and in the third by mythic thinking. I would like to offer still another account of early modern scholarly credulity, here too attempting to overcome what Grafton calls the “distressingly Page 163 →rectilinear” rationalist accounts.63 In this account, the temporal instability of historical artifacts follows from their mutual substitutability in the imagination of the antiquarian. The basic premise behind any premodern use of artifacts as documents was the membership of the artifact within a typological class.64 These classes were structured as chains of artifacts connected to a common source and succeeding and substituting for one another across time. In general, premodern culture coped with deficits of authority by inventing chains that ran backward to a remote, identity-granting origin. If the true meaning of a word was desired, etymology would yield the answer; if a family required a new basis for its hold on power, the genealogist built a chain.65 The chain of substitutions stretching out behind any given artifact was, in practice, invisible and unreconstructible. The argument is not that production (of paintings, sculptures, or buildings) was in reality guided by constant reference to a stable origin-point. Substitution was rather the theory of production that guided the perception, interpretation, and use of artifacts.66

Substitution was a theory about the production and transmission of artifacts that allowed people to work with evidence under the tacit awareness that material vehicles did sometimes need to be replaced or repaired, that messages on material vehicles did sometimes need to be reinscribed or redrawn, and that messages could even be copied to a new vehicle altogether, just as texts were copied from manuscript to manuscript. Archaeological thinking is in principle the opposite of substitutional thinking, in that archaeology has decided not to accept passively the written text's claim to be the endpoint of an invisible but reliable process of transmission and therefore a trustworthy source of information. But in its eagerness to improve upon the poor evidence of texts, early archaeology accepted bad material evidence, and so ended up, paradoxically, repeating patterns of reception proper to the substitutional model. Lorenzo Valla, for instance, pointed out in his treatise on the Donation of Constantine that the evidence produced by the Papacy in favor of the Donation's authenticity was all textual. Why was there no corresponding, clinching material evidence, he wondered, challenging the papal advocates: “I should have expected you to show gold seals, marble inscriptions, a thousand authors,” he wrote. “This Donation of Constantine,” he went on, “so magnificent and astounding, can be proved by no document at all, whether on gold or on silver, or on bronze or on marble or, finally, in books, but only, if we believe that man, on paper or parchment.”67 Valla's statements imply that he would have been convinced of Page 164 →the Donation's authenticity if such a material copy could be found—as if that copy, untested by any science of historical epigraphy, would have proven anything. Valla's protests were partly ironic. He did not really consider the absence of material evidence decisive proof of the Donation's falsity. Nevertheless his remarks reveal his assumption that evidence transmitted by metal or stone was superior to evidence transmitted by paper. Scholars in Valla's time, presented with a material artifact, tended to underrate the possibility of an unreliable or wandering transmission and instead to presume a strong connection between the artifact and its referent. That underrating of the vagaries of material transmission was the very basis in Valla's century for the evidentiary force of artifacts. Archaeology is thought of as the discipline that overcomes the layers of mediation that separate us from the past. But early archaeology, to the extent that its preference for the material depended on an optimistic faith in transmission, was actually working with mediation. The substitutable artifact par excellence was the painted icon, the portrait of a holy personage claiming a direct link back to ancient times.68 Valla, while dismissing the spurious Lentulus letter, an eyewitness account of the appearance of Christ, came to discuss a famous Roman painting: “Similarly, although there are ten thousand instances of this kind at Rome, among the sacred objects are displayed the portraits of Peter and Paul on a panel which Sylvester put on show, when those apostles had appeared to Constantine in a dream, as a confirmation of the vision.” Valla's point was to cast doubt on the legend that the panel was miraculously produced as a confirmation of a vision by Emperor Constantine. But, significantly, Valla does not doubt the portraits themselves: “I do not say this because I deny those portraits of the apostles exist. I wish that Lentulus's letters about the image of Christ were as authentic…. But I say what I say because that panel was not shown by Sylvester to Constantine. In this matter I cannot restrain my astonishment.”69 When it came to painted icons, in other words, Valla dropped his critical guard. He was ready to believe that the icons were substitutionally linked to their referents. The portrait of god, saint, or king, the relief sculpture, the tomb, and the round temple all succeeded in concretizing a past that was otherwise ghostly and obscure. Reference, once recognized, appeared ancient, inevitable, incontrovertible. A monumental shaping of the past, no matter how spurious, had a powerful placebo effect on the imagination of the beholder. Earlier we noted that artifacts generate their own temporalities that Page 165 →disable any easy coupling with histories of texts. The substitutional model is still another way of explaining why archaeology was out of sync with philology in this period, and why antiquarianism retained its systematic and nonnarrative character for so long.70 The hypothesis of mutually substitutable links in a referential chain explains how white vine scroll and the minuscule alphabet, no matter how recent the manuscripts that transmitted them, were held to have preserved the ancient ways of bookmaking; or how the strange iconographies of the medals found by Conrad Celtis could have been understood as antique. The hypothesis of substitutability shows how Brunelleschi was able to look through the eleventh- and twelfth-century buildings of Florence to the true meanings hiding behind them, the good form of

ancient Roman building. Brunelleschi understood the meaning of SS. Apostoli or the Baptistery to be a referential quantum preserved across a chain of artifacts, some prior and now lost sequence of intermediary buildings leading from antiquity to the eleventh century. Any knowledge that one happened to possess about the particular or local circumstances of the building's absolute position within a chain of imitations was not allowed to interfere with the referential linkage and the presumption of substitutability. Brunelleschi probably knew that his models were in an important sense “medieval.”71 But they substituted for the missing ancient models that he really wanted. Neither architects nor scholars were capable of a philology of architecture that might have distinguished building fabrics and served as the basis for a reconstruction of building histories. The identity of the building was for them its meaning, not its physical being, which distended complexly across time and was for any practical purpose unreconstructible. The chronicler Filippo Villani reported in 1330 that the Florentine Baptistery had once been a temple of Mars and that Christianization had brought only minor changes.72 It is not clear whether Villani meant that the present Baptistery replaced an ancient temple, or whether his culture had forgotten after two and a half centuries when the present Baptistery was actually built and believed that it was in fact the ancient temple itself, reconsecrated and refurnished. But that ambiguity is typical. The distinction between “being” an old building and “replacing” an earlier building is never quite drawn. It may therefore simply be unhelpful to ask whether Brunelleschi or for that matter Vasari really thought that the Baptistery was executed in pre-Christian times. They believed that it stood in a reliable substitutional relationship to some original pagan building on that site, and that was enough. Page 166 → A few period voices actually spelled out the principle of substitution. Annius of Viterbo, justifying his own faith in the marmo osiriano, admitted the possibility that it was only a replacement of a lost original: “Whether this is truly the tablet,” he wrote in his Commentaries, “or a substitute for it—the original having collapsed through age—we cannot yet be certain. Either way, we consider the tablet to have survived.” (An vero haec illa sit, an ei vetustate labenti, ad eius exemplar suffecta, nondum compertum habemus. Existimamus tamen eandem permanere.73) Walter Stephens calls this a “doctrine of congruence”: any inscription, no matter when fabricated, could be defended as a substituted copy of a lost original. Equally revealing are the arguments that the scholar Vincenzo Borghini in 1565–67 assembled in defence of the tradition of Florence's antiquity.74 Borghini adduced the Baptistery as evidence, but acknowledged that many experts considered the building's polychrome marble revetment to have been applied in the middle ages. To meet this objection Borghini explicitly introduced a substitutional model of architectural history: he argued that the revetment imitated an earlier decorative scheme on the same building and thus reliably reflected antiquity.75 Substitutional thinking is compatible with—may even encourage—a normative approach to the achievements of the past. Gombrich showed that scribes and architects alike were more interested in reforming what they saw to be a corrupted traditions than in seeking out what might be today considered the historical identity of their models. They wanted good models, not necessarily old models; and they took their models where they could find them.76 The strictly historical study of architecture was overwhelmed by the normative imperative. Virtual or desired transmission chains were generated through triages of essential and accidental features. The Florentine architects saw only those features of the Romanesque basilicas they wished to see and ignored the rest. Only the essential, the supposed links to Rome, “made it through,” while all the rest was dismissed as merely accidental. What looks like error to modern eyes is just the drawing of a different internal frontier between the constitutive and the contingent. The fantastical frame drawn around a real inscription in a fifteenth-century sylloge is ignored by the modern epigrapher as a useless and misleading supplement. But that is precisely because the modern scholar considers the material support of the inscription to be good evidence about the past, potentially as important as the content of the text. The Renaissance antiquarian was slow to arrive at this idea. Renaissance antiquarian credulity was therefore the result of a clash Page 167 →between two models of the production of artifacts: on the one hand, the substititional model, that underrates the transmission process; and on the other hand, the archaeological, that reads every artifact as an inalienable trace of its originary point and

therefore as a powerful threat to textual authority. They are two competitive models of artifact production, two incompatible conceptions of the origins of artifacts, each with its own internal truth. The nefarious or farcical aspects of Annius's Viterbo “excavation,” take your pick, are only a dramatic projection of the deep-structural interference between the substitutional and archaeological paradigms; as if all the latent contradictions of late fifteenth-century antiquarianism were exposed in one scholar's project. The archaeological preference for material relics over texts and the mystical confidence in the mutual substitutability of artifacts across time collided, but held their ground, in Annius's mind. Archaeology made Celtis and Annius possible by tempting them into an overzealous imposition of the substitution model onto recent objects, into the imagining or fabricating of links in nonexistent chains. The power of the artifact translated the scholar back into the very frame of mind, confused and credulous, that scholarship was trying to overcome. Celtis and Annius were accidental artists, in the sense that they fell upon the truth of the anachronism of the artifact, its capacity to bend time. But they exercised their creativity within the wrong paradigm, scholarship instead of art, and so it came to resemble either folly or crime. For archaeology over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries found its identity in the struggle to cancel out the noise and distortion of transmission. Error, in that same period, was tamed and caged within the institution of art. Only artists were allowed to make error their project. The scholars, meanwhile, found themselves liberated into an unending dialectic of critique. Modern scholarship has defined itself precisely against such doubled thinking. The empiricist algorithm locates its own origins in an overcoming of the participatory and divided consciousness. Empiricism is so fundamentally invested in a primal self-differentiation from forgery that when it doubles back on itself and tries to perceive its own historical origins, it loses its capacity for objectivity. Before long the rinascimento dell'antichità was itself receding into the past, its achievements especially in scholarship and in the visual arts benchmarks for later generations, then as now. From the perspective of the later sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, that first and most creative Renaissance, the Renaissance of the humanists, took on a prestigious Page 168 →threshold character, at once facing backward to the deep past and forward to the modern era. In this way, some archaeological fictions of the Renaissance entered into a strange second career, retaining their referential, documentary force, their rapport with antiquity, even as they were fully grasped as fabrications of the moderns. An example of such an illogical retrospective appeal to a Renaissance “document” appears in the discussion of the origins of Montepulciano Page 169 →by Spinello Benci, a seventeenth-century historian. The Renaissance sculptor Andrea Sansovino had modelled in terracotta a colossal portrait of Lars Porsenna, the semilegendary king of the sixth century BCE; according to Vasari the work was commissioned by the citizens of Mon-tepulciano.77 The portrait participated in the interurban Tuscan rivalry that for some decades had hinged on claims to Etruscan origins. The so-called “sepulchre of Lars Porsenna” at Chiusi, in fact the ruins of an ancient hydraulic engineering system, was investigated by Alberti, Filarete, Peruzzi, and Antonio da Sangallo. The Florentine cleric Lorenzo Dati composed a fanciful chronicle, the Historia Porsennae, posing as a translation of an Etruscan text by one Caio Vibenna.78 In 1492 the Sienese presented the funerary urn of Lars Porsenna, inscribed conveniently in Latin, to Lorenzo de' Medici. The fifteenth century knew Etruscan civilization mainly through the textual accounts of the Romans, and everyone wanted more.79 The Montepulcian colossus intervened in this story, filling a portrait-sized gap in the monumental record. Sansovino did not conceal his authorship, nor was it forgotten; still, the artist chose a prestigious and rare format, the colossus, and an unconventional medium for such a colossus, terracotta, lending the figure an archaic flavor. A terracotta bust, 46 cm. in height, only recently resurfaced in a private collection, seems to match the accounts by Vasari and others.80 It would be difficult to attribute it to Sansovino without those notices; indeed it was still judged an antiquity by Luigi Lanzi in the late eighteenth century. Sansovino's colossus had evidently already been reduced to a bust when Spinello Benci, secretary to the Medici, cited and reproduced it in woodcut as the frontispiece to his history of Montepulciano of 1641 (fig. 6).81 Benci knew that Sansovino was the author of the statue; he describes it as a “memorial” erected by the town to its founder. And yet the work figures in his account almost as if it were contributing to the claim, dear to him, of an ancient Etruscan presence in Montepulciano. It was as if the fact that the citizens of Montepulciano had commissioned a memorial in the early sixteenth century rendered the myth of Etruscan origins a little more probable. The folk of the sixteenth century,

after all, were just that much closer to antiquity, or so Benci implies; the old traditions were perhaps still intact then, the invisible lines of communication to the deepest past still open. Modernity, by contrast, our own midseventeenth century, Benci seems to be saying, is forever cut off from the living past and has to make do with mere scholarship. It is worth wondering why a three-dimensional “forgery” like Sansovino's was—perhaps still is—more Page 170 →effective than Lorenzo Dati's obviously fictitious chronicle. The sculpted document activates the magic of figuration. The history of archaeology is also a history of works, and for that reason can never quite be assimilated to the rest of the history of scholarship.

NOTES 1. This paper is closely tied to a long-term collaborative project with Alexander Nagel. See our paper “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism,” Art Bulletin 87 (2005): 403–32, and our book Anachronic Renaissance (New York: ZONE Books, 2010), as well as my own book Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). The present paper was written in 2004 and was meant to appear before these publications. I am grateful to the critical comments of several anonymous readers. 2. B. L. Ullmann, The Origin and Development of Humanistic Script (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960); James Wardrop, The Script of Humanism: Some Aspects of Humanistic Script, 1460–1560 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Stanley Morison, Politics and Script (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), chap. 6; Martin Steinmann, “Die humanistische Schrift und die Anfänge des Humanismus in Basel,” Archiv für Diplomatik 22 (1976): 376–437. 3. Barbara A. Shailor, Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, vol. 3, Marston MSS (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), Marston MS 52, 101–2. On humanist white-vine decoration generally, see Otto Pächt, “Notes and Observations on the Origin of Humanistic Book Decoration,” in Festschrift Fritz Saxl, ed. D. J. Gordon (London and Edinburgh: Nelson, 1957), 184–94; Pächt, Italian Illuminated Manuscripts, exhibition catalog (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1948); and J. J. G. Alexander and A. C. de la Mare, The Italian Manuscripts in the Library of Major J. R. Abbey (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), xxxiii–xxxiv. For still finer distinctions among different types of white-vine scroll, see Melania Ceccanti, “Proposte per la storia dei primi codici umanistici a bianchi girari,” Miniatura 5/6 (1993–96): 11–16, whose researches suggest that the imitations of medieval white-vine ornament improved in accuracy between 1400 and 1425; and Fabrizio Crivello, “‘Vetustioris litere maiestas’: un manoscritto di Sant' Agostino del Petrarca, gli umanisti e qualche osservazione sulle iniziali a ‘bianchi girari,’” Italia medioevale e umanistica 44 (2003): 227–34. 4. Robert G. Babcock et al., Catalogue of the Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, vol. 4, MSS 481–85 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), MS 481.35, 61–62, pl. 23. 5. Pächt, “Notes and Observations,” 189. 6. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 70–71. Panofsky borrowed the Page 171 →term pseudomorphosis from Oswald Spengler, although without naming him. Spengler in turn had adapted the term from mineralogy. See Spengler, Decline of the West (1918, 1922; New York: Knopf, 1957), 1:209; see also 2:189–90. Only two years earlier, Panofsky's teacher Adolph Goldschmidt had argued, under the rubric Formenspaltung or “formal disintegration,” that the history of medieval art had been driven by a series of profitable misunderstandings of earlier artistic formulas. Goldschmidt, “Die Bedeutung der Formenspaltung in der Kunstentwicklung,” in Independence, Convergence, and Borrowing in Institutions, Thought, and Art, Harvard Tercentenary Publications (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 167–77. 7. Johann Aventinus, Bayerische Chronik 1, 2 (= Sämtliche Werke, 4, 2) (Munich, 1883), chap. 49, 699. 8. Giambattista Vico, Scienza Nuova (1725), pars. 430–31, 170; New Science, trans. David Marsh (London: Penguin, 1999), 171–72, 86. 9. E. H. Gombrich, “From the Revival of Letters to the Reform of the Arts: Niccolò Niccoli and Filippo Brunelleschi” (1967), in Gombrich, The Heritage of Apelles: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford:

Phaidon, 1976), 93–110. 10. Ingrid D. Rowland, “Antiquarianism as Battle Cry,” in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen J. Grieco et al., Acts of an International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, 1999 (Florence: Olschki, 2002), 407. 11. See the general discussion in Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper, 1969), 20–23. There is a vast literature on Brunelleschi's and Alberti's reception of ancient and medieval architecture; see the recent survey of Giuseppe Rocchi Coopmans de Yoldi, “Riflessioni sulla storiografia delle origini dell' architettura fiorentina e sullo svolgimento della fabbrica del Battistero,” and “Il Brunelleschi e il Battistero,” in Santa Maria del Fiore, vol. 2, ed. Coopmans de Yoldi, Piazza, Battistero, Campanile (Florence: “Il Torchio,” 1996), 27–34; 64–65. 12. Gombrich, “From the Revival of Letters to the Reform of the Arts,” 106. 13. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949; New York: Norton, 1971), 43–44, described S. Maria Novella as a “posthumous member of the twelfth-century family of ProtoRenaissance buildings.” 14. Simone del Pollaiuolo, called Il Cronaca, active in the 1480s, combined in a single model book drawings of ancient buildings in Rome with the Baptistery and SS. Apostoli in Florence. Giuliano da Sangallo was also interested in the Baptistery. Hubertus Günther, Das Studium der antiken Architektur in den Zeichnungen der Hochrenaissance (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1988), 70–71, 94, 42. An incisive and paradoxical analysis of this general phenomenon is Maria Fabricius Hansen, “Representing the Past: The Concept and Study of Antique Architecture in 15th-Century Italy,” in Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, vol. 23 (1996), 83–116. 15. In the preface to Book One of his Lives, Vasari says that the architects of S. Miniato were able to “recognize” and emulate “l'ordine buono antico” they found “nell'antichissimo tempio di S. Giovanni [the Baptistery] nella città loro”; Vasari, Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, 9 vols., ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: Sansoni, 1906), 1:236–37. In the “Life of Andrea Tafi” he refers again to the Baptistery as “quel tempio antico…Page 172 →la quale è dagli architetti moderni come cosa singolare lodata, e meritamente: perciocchè ella ha mostrato il buono che già aveva in sè quell'arte,” and confirms that Brunelleschi, Donatello, and other masters used both the Baptistery and SS. Apostoli as models for their own work; Le vite, 1:332. 16. Fritz Saxl, “The Classical Inscription in Renaissance Art and Politics,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 4 (1940/1941): 19–46. Ida Calabi Limentani, “Primi orientamenti per una storia dell' epigrafia latina classica,” Acme 19 (1966): 155–219, esp. 162–63 and section 3, 2, “Falsificazioni.” See also the Appendix on medieval and Renaissance pseudo-antique texts and inscriptions in Wolfgang Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum (Munich: Beck, 1971), 315–20. 17. In some cases, the syllogists surely suspected inauthenticity but copied the texts anyway; after all, they sometimes included openly modern texts, including their own inventions, alongside the ancient ones. Therefore one cannot always assume maximum credulity every time a scholar copies a spurious text. 18. On this point see my article “Notation of Visual Information in the Earliest Archeological Scholarship,” Word and Image 17 (2001): 94–118. 19. Calabi Limentani, “Primi orientamenti,” 162. 20. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin, 1862 ff.), no. VI.5.6*, II. 200*. Ida Calabi Limentani, “Sul non sapere leggere le epigrafi classiche nei secoli XII e XIII; sulla scoperta graduale delle abbreviazioni epigrafiche,” Acme 23 (1970): 261. 21. The history of the epigram is complicated; see Elizabeth MacDougall, “The Sleeping Nymph: Origins of a Humanist Fountain,” Art Bulletin 57 (1975): 357–65, esp. 358–59. 22. Vatican Museums, inv. no. 548. See Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture (London: Harvey Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 97 and n. 79; Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 184–87; and Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 233–47. See Robert W. Gaston's comments on the intertwining of the literary and archaeological traditions of the sleeping nymph, “Ligorio on Rivers and Fountains: Prolegomena to a Study of Naples XIII. B. 9,” in Pirro Ligorio: Artist and Antiquarian, ed. Gaston (Milan: Silvana, 1988), 176–77. 23. Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, n. 62. See most recently Gunter

Schweikhart, “Nymphen in Statuengarten: Zu einer Zeichnung des Dresdener Kupferstichkabinetts,” in Ars naturam adiuvans, Festschrift Matthias Winner, ed. Victoria V. Fleming and Sebastian Schütze (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996), 244–51. 24. Jean Jacques Boissard, Romanae urbis topographiae, pt. 6 (Frankfurt, 1602), pl. 25, based on Boissard's researches in Rome half a century earlier, and reproducing the fountain in Colocci's garden. Jacopo Mazzocchi published the inscription in his Epigrammata antiquae urbis (Rome, 1521), 158, giving a location in Trastevere. On Colocci's installation, see MacDougall, “The Sleeping Nymph,” 361–62, and Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Page 173 →Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in SixteenthCentury Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 182–84. 25. See the ingenious argument by Madeleine Viljoen, “Prints and False Antiquities in the Age of Raphael,” Print Quarterly 21 (2004): 235–47. 26. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum VI.5.3*e. Otto Kurz, “Huius Nympha Loci: A Pseudo-classical Inscription and a Drawing by Dürer,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953): 171–77. See also Millard Meiss, “Sleep in Venice: Ancient Myths and Renaissance Proclivities,” Papers of the American Philosophical Society 110 (1966): 348–82. Edgar Bierende connects Cranach's painting of the nymph to local interest in a miraculous spring associated with the prehistoric foundation of the city of Meissen; and more generally to Tacitus's account of the early Germans' cult of nature and attentiveness to prophetesses; Lucas Cranach d. Ä. und der deutsche Humanismus: Tafelmalerei im Kontext von Rhetorik, Chroniken und Fürstenspiegeln (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2002), 227–34. 27. Petrus Apianus and Bartholomeus Amantius, Inscriptiones sacrosanctae vetustatis (Ingolstadt, 1534), 385. 28. G. F. Hill, A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renassance (London: British Museum, 1930), nn. 421, 423. Stephen K. Scher, ed., The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance (Washington: National Gallery of Art; New York: Frick Collection, 1994), n. 27, 102–3. On the self-portrait medal, the reverse with the allegory is inscribed OPVS IOANIS BOLDV PICTORIS VENETVS XOGRAFI (= zographos, painter from life) and dated 1458. A version by another artist replaces Boldù's image with a portrait of Caracalla but preserves the allegory on the reverse, though with a different inscription: IO SON FINE and the date 1466. Neither of these inscriptions or dates appears in the woodcut in Apianus; nor does the obverse, obviously. For the reception of the image, see William R. Levin, ed., Images of Love and Death in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art, exhibition catalog (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1975), n. 84; Wendy Steadman Sheard, ed., Antiquity in the Renaissance, exhibition catalog (Northampton, MA: Smith College Museum of Art, 1978), n. 80; and Horst W. Janson, “The Putto with the Death's Head,” Art Bulletin 19 (1937): 423–49. 29. The connection Celtis made to the Three Fates may have derived from a passage in Apuleius; see Peter Luh, Kaiser Maximilian gewidmet: Die unvollendete Werkausgabe des Conrad Celtis und ihre Holzschnitte (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001), 331, n. 25. 30. Charles R. Morscheck, Jr., Relief Sculpture for the Façade of the Certosa of Pavia, 1473–1499 (New York and London: Garland, 1978), 245 and fig. 61. The medallion is on the north side of the socle. For the medal portraits of Constantine and Heraclius, contrivances of a Burgundian court artist of around 1400 which were understood as antiquities by many scholars throughout the sixteenth century, see Scher, ed., The Currency of Fame, 32–37. 31. Conrad Celtis, Norimberga, ed. Albert Werminghoff (Freiburg: Boltze, 1921), 123–25; Celtis, Quatuor libri amorum (Nuremberg, 1502), 1:12; 2:9; 3:13; Celtis, Liber odarum (Strasbourg, 1513), 3:28. For Aventinus's reception of Page 174 →Celtis's reports, see his Bayerische Chronik, vol. 4, chap. 26, 106, and Germania illustrata (1531), Sämmtliche Werke (Munich: Kaiser, 1908), 6:156–57. 32. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315; reprinted in Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 1–39; Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969); Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997); Ingo Herklotz, Cassiano dal Pozzo und die Archäologie des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hirmer, 1999). See also the volumes edited by Salvatore Settis, Memoria dell'antico nell'arte italiana, 3 vols. (Torino: Einaudi, 1984–86).

33. On credulity and criticism in the church context, see esp. Klaus Schreiner, “‘Discrimen veri ac falsi’: Ansätze und Formen der Kritik in der Heiligen- und Reliquienverehrung des Mittelalters,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 48 (1966): 1–53, and František Graus, “Fälschungen im Gewand der Frömmigkeit,” in Fälschungen im Mittelalter, vol. 5, Fingierte Briefe; Frömmigkeit und Fälschung; Realienfälschungen (Hannover: Hahn, 1988), 261–82. 34. Trapp, preface to Essays on the Renaissance and the Classical Tradition (Alder-shot: Variorum, 1990). 35. Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Modern Library, [1932]), 1:189. 36. For this concept, see Richard Krautheimer's “Postscript” to his seminal article of 1942, “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Medieval Architecture,” in Krautheimer, Studies in Early Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance Art (New York: New York University Press; London: University of London Press, 1969), 149–50. 37. Charles Mitchell, “Archaeology and Romance in Renaissance Italy,” in Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F. Jacob (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 455–83. On invented frames, see Mitchell, “Felice Feliciano Antiquarius,” Proceedings of the British Academy 47 (1961), 197–221, esp. 216–17; Annegrit Schmitt, “Antikenkopien und künstlerische Selbstverwirklichung in der Frührenaissance,” in Antikenzeichnung und Antikenstudien in Renaissance und Frühbarock, ed. Richard Harprath and Henning Wrede (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1989), 1–20 (on the interplay of accuracy and freedom in the antiquarian drawings of Jacopo Bellini and Marco Zoppo); and Wood, “Notation of Visual Information in the Earliest Archaeological Scholarship,” 96–100. 38. Weiss, Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 117–18. 39. On Annius, see below, pp. 158–60. On Pirro Ligorio, whose attitude toward truth is only now emerging in all its complexity, see the volume of essays edited by Robert W. Gaston, Pirro Ligorio: Artist and Antiquarian, and Gaston, “Merely Antiquarian: Pirro Ligorio and the Critical Tradition of Antiquarian Scholarship,” in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen J. Grieco (Florence: Olschki, 2002), 355–73. 40. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).Page 175 → 41. Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). On the self-emancipation of Renaissance poetry from referential responsibility toward origins, see David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 42. J. B. Trapp, “The Image of Livy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” Lecturas de historia del arte 2 (1992): 211–38; or “The Poet and the Monumental Impulse,” Society for Renaissance Studies, Occasional Papers 6 (1980), 12–14. Julius von Schlosser, “Vom modernen Denkmalkultus,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1926–27 (1930): 8–9. 43. Trapp, “Ovid's Tomb,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 47. 44. Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 104. See also Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), chap. 3 on Annius. 45. Annius, De marmoreis Volturrhenis tabulis, discussed by Roberto Weiss, “An Unknown Epigraphic Tract by Annius of Viterbo,” in Italian Studies Presented to E. R. Vincent, ed. C. P. Brand (Cambridge: Heffer, 1962), 101–20. Walter Stephens, “Berosus Chaldeus: Counterfeit and Fictive Editors of the Early Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1979), 157–74. 46. Italo Faldi, Museo Civico di Viterbo, Dipinti e sculture (Viterbo, 1955), no. 38. Weiss, “An Unknown Epigraphic Tract by Annius of Viterbo,” 119, n. 53. Brian Curran, “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Renaissance Egyptology,” Word and Image 14 (1998): 165–69, figz. 17. 47. Annius, Antiquitatum variarum volumina XVII (Paris, 1512), f. 26r; see also his Auctores vetustissimi (Rome, 1498), f. f i recto-f iii verso. 48. Paola Mattiangeli, “Annio da Viterbo ispiratore di cicli pittorici,” Annio da Viterbo: Documenti e ricerche (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1981), 1:257–339, esp. 297–301. The oak itself was the letter of Osiris. The lizard or crocodile symbolized evil, that is, the Giants. The birds, finally, were the Italians who appealed to Osiris for help; and so forth. Annius also believed he saw an eye among the vines. A tablet with an explanatory inscription was appended to the object in 1587.

49. Curran rightly compares them to the profile heads on the pulpit at Ravello in Campania, “The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Renaissance Egyptology,” n. 76. That pulpit dates from about 1270 and has been attributed to Nic-colò di Bartolommeo da Foggia, an artist not far from Niccolo Pisano; John PopeHennessy, Italian Gothic Sculpture (London: Phaidon, 1996), p. 12; Lucilla de Lachenal, Spolia: Uso e rimpiego dell'antico dall III al XIV secolo (Milan: Longanesi, 1995), tav. XXXV. 50. Vasari, preface to the Lives, Le Vite, 1:220. 51. See the remarks by Riccardo Fubini, “Annio da Viterbo nella tradizione erudita toscana” (1981) in Fubini, Storiografia dell'Umanesimo in Italia da Leonardo Bruni ad Annio da Viterbo (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003), 335–42, esp. 337–38 comparing Annius's forged Viterban inscriptions to the Page 176 →etymological “nuclei” that linked the distant traditions and confirmed his historical theories. 52. C. R. Ligota, “Annius of Viterbo and Historical Method,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 50 (1987): 44–56. Ligota pointed out that Annius frequently noted problems in the texts he had forged. Either this was all part of the ruse or the texts had taken on some measure of authenticity in his eyes. 53. See above all the symposium proceedings Fälschungen im Mittelalter, 5 vols. (Monumenta Germanica Historica, Schriften, vol. 33) (Hannover: Hahn, 1988); the exhibition catalog Fälschungen und Fiktionen (Munich: Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, 1986); and P. Herde and A. Gawlik, “Fälschungen,” Lexikon des Mittelalters, vol. 4 (Munich and Zurich: Artemis, 1988), col. 246ff. An excellent recent survey and analysis of the problem is Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England (London: British Library; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), esp. 1–21. Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 59–62, argues interestingly that the “high art” of forgery was created by literacy, as property claims increasingly came to be understood as relationships between words and things rather than between people. 54. On Maximilian's genealogical projects, see Laschitzer, Simon. “Die Genealogie des Kaisers Maximilian I.,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen 7 (1888): 1–200; Alphons Lhotsky, “Apis Colonna: Fabeln und Theorien über die Abkunft der Habsburger,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Geschichtsforschung in Wien 55 (1944): 171–245; and Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 100–109. See also Christopher S. Wood, “Maximilian I as Archaeologist,” Renaissance Quarterly 58 (2005): 1128–74. 55. Klaus Arnold, Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), 2nd ed. (Würzburg: Schöningh, 1991), 167–79; Nikolaus Staubach, “Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit: Die historiographischen Fiktionen des Johannes Trithemius im Lichte seines wissenschaftlichen Selbstverständnisses,” Fälschungen im Mittelalter, 1:263–316. 56. For such a “non-relativist” position in the debate about the historicity of rationalist skepticism, see the reply to Horst Fuhrmann by H. Patze in Historische Zeitschrift 197 (1963); and Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “‘Falsitas pia sive reprehensibilis’: Medieval Forgers and Their Intentions,” in Fälschungen im Mittelalter, 1:101–19. 57. For “relativist” positions in the debate, see Giles Constable, “Forgery and Plagiarism in the Middle Ages,” Archiv für Diplomatik 29 (1983): 1–41; Horst Fuhrmann, “Die Fälschungen im Mittelalter,” Historische Zeitschrift 197 (1963): 529–54; and Fuhrmann, “Mundus vult decepi,” Historische Zeitschrift 241 (1985): 529–42. 58. See the remarks by Umberto Eco, “Tipologia della falsificazione,” in Fälschungen im Mittelalter (Monumenta Germanica Historica, Schriften, vol. 33) (Hannover: Hahn, 1988), 1:69–82.Page 177 → 59. Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 54. 60. Frank L. Borchardt, German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); see also his “The Topos of Critical Rejection in the Renaissance,” Modern Language Notes 81 (1966): 476–88. 61. Riccardo Fubini, even while warning against a voguish modern “complaisance” or even “connivance” with myth, argues that Annius of Viterbo was an authentic myth-maker, capable of expressing cutural crisis and malaise by symbolic means; “Annio da Viterbo nella tradizione erudita toscana,” 341. 62. Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (original German edition, 1991) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 298.

63. Grafton, Forgers and Critics, 103. 64. Richard Krautheimer made a similar point about medieval buildings in his article, “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Medieval Architecture,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 1–33. The model outlined here is basically an extension of Krautheimer's thesis beyond its original chronological and medial bounds. 65. See R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Marian Rothstein, “Etymology, Genealogy, and the Immutability of Origins,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 332–47. 66. On the dynamic role of the substitutional model within the self-understanding and self-theorization of Renaissance art, see Wood and Nagel, “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism” and Anachronic Renaissance (as in n. 1). 67. Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, trans. G. W. Bowersock, I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 59 and 63; see also 69 on the value of numismatic and epigraphic evidence; Valla, Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine, trans. Christopher B. Coleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), 74–75, 80–81, and 86–87. 68. For the new historiography of the medieval icon, permitting a total reconceptualization of its relationship to the art of the Renaissance, see Gerhard Wolf, “Salus Populi Romani”: Die Geschichte römischer Kultbilder im Mittelalter (Weinheim: Acta Humaniora, 1990); Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel: Traditionen des Christusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance (Munich: Fink, 2002). 69. Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, 120–21; Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine, 142–43. 70. See also Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian.” 71. John Onians argued that Brunelleschi knew perfectly well that the Baptistery was not an ancient building; rather he was attempting to reanimate and perfect a medieval Tuscan tradition of building; Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 130–36.Page 178 → 72. Villani, Chroniche, 1:42. Charles Davis, “Topographical and Historical Propaganda in Early Florentine Chronicles and in Villani,” Medievo e Rinascimento (1988): 33–51. 73. Annius, Antiquitatum variarum, f. 28v. Stephens, Berosus Chaldeus: Counterfeit and Fictive Editors of the Early Sixteenth Century, 174. 74. Robert Williams, “Vincenzo Borghini and Vasari's Lives” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1988), 96–99. On the reconstruction of the supposed temple of Mars Ultor in Vasari's fresco of ancient Florence, see Nicolai Rubinstein, “Vasari's Painting of ‘The Foundation of Florence’ in the Palazzo Vecchio,” Essays in the History of Architecture Presented to Rudolf Wittkower (London: Phaidon, 1967), 69–70. 75. To prove that ancient buildings had been polychromed, Borghini cited a passage from Gregory of Tours on late antique churches. There is evidence that other authorities agreed with him that colored marble was an ancient custom, and that the decoration of the new Cappella Sistina in S. Maria Maggiore was imitating prototypes understood to be not merely early Christian but ancient. Stefan Kummer, “Antiker Buntmarmor als Dekorationselement römischer Kirchen im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Antike Spolien in der Architektur des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, ed. Poeschke, 329–39; also Thomas Weigel, “Spolien und Buntmarmor im Urteil mittelalterlicher Autoren,” in Antike Spolien in der Architektur des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, ed. Poeschke, 117–51. See also Steven F. Ostrow, “Marble Revetment in Late SixteenthCentury Roman Chapels,” in IL 60, Festschrift Irving Lavin, ed. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (New York: Italica, 1990), 253–76; and the informative appendix on medieval and early Renaissance marble revetment in Ostrow's dissertation, “The Sistine Chapel at S. Maria Maggiore: Sixtus V and the Art of the CounterReformation” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1987). 76. See also Hubertus Günther, “Die Vorstellung vom griechischen Tempel und der Beginn der Renaissance in der venezianischen Architektur,” in Imitatio: Von der Produktivität künstlerischer Anspielungen und Missverständnisse, ed. Paul Naredi Rainer (Berlin: Reimer, 2001), 104–43, on S. Marco in Venice and other “Greek” churches as transmitters of ancient forms, and 138–39 generally on the importance of pre-Gothic architecture to the revival of antiquity. Vasari mentioned S. Marco together with SS. Apostoli (in Florence),

Le vite, 1:235–36. 77. Vasari, Le vite, 4:522. 78. Ingrid D. Rowland, “L' Historia Porsennae e la conoscenza degli Etruschi nel Rinascimento,” Res publica litterarum 12 (1989): 185–93. 79. On fifteenth-century interest in Etruscan antiquities, see C. C. van Essen, “Elementi etruschi nel Rinascimento toscana,” Studi etruschi 13 (1939): 497–99; André Chastel, Art et humanisme a? Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique: e?tudes sur la Renaissance et l'humanisme platonicien (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 63–71; Cristina Frulli, “Caratteri etruschi nella scultura fiorentina al tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico”; and Franco Borsi, “Architettura” (on reconstructions of Etruscan buildings by Antonio da Sangallo and others), in Fortuna degli Etruschi, ed. Borsi (Milan: Electa, 1985), 102–8 and 36–43 respectively; and Giovanni Cipriani, Il mito etrusco Page 179 →nel rinascimento fiorentino (Florence: Olschki, 1980), 1–36; on the Etruscanizing imagination of the Biblical scholar, theologian, and cardinal Egidio da Viterbo, see Rowland, Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 148–50. 80. See the exhibition catalogs Il Giardino di San Marco: Maestri e compagni del giovane Michelangelo (Florence: Silvana, 1992), n. 26; and L'Officina della maniera: varieta? e fierezza nell'arte fiorentina del Cinquecento fra le due repubbliche (1494–1530) (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), n. 46. The surface of the head is painted, perhaps to resemble bronze. Vasari, Le vite, 4:510, also mentioned a pair of terracotta heads by Sansovino representing the emperors Nero and Galba and “ritratte da medaglie antiche.” 81. Spinello Benci, Storia della cittá di Montepulciano (Florence, 1641), frontispiece and 7.

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SIX Artifacts of Authentication: People Making Texts Making Things in Ming-Qing China Bruce Rusk “Lost and misguided in the pursuit of things,” asked one collector in sixteenth-century China, “Who knows what is right?”1 Feng Fang (1493–1566) was lamenting his contemporaries' blind rush after the antiques, books, artworks, and other artifacts that were available in greater numbers and to more people, and in many cases at higher prices, than ever before. The last century of the Ming (1368–1644) and the first decades of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) have been recognized as a time of great social, cultural and economic change, with shifts in the relationships between people and things transforming relationships among people. Although these developments were complex and sometimes contradictory, a general picture has emerged of an increasingly commercialized economy with many new sources of wealth and greater opportunities to purchase the trappings of culture, including some formerly accessible only to a privileged few. Both local elites and officials expressed dismay at these developments but could neither control nor stop them.2 Many, especially in prosperous regions such as the Yangzi Delta (Jiangnan believed that economic change had transformed their world and that the rising dominance of “things” threatened the social and moral order. Even for those who embraced it, the market brought distrust and uncertainty along with its ever-changing flow of goods. Things could be acquired everywhere, but caveat emptor: there were fake jewels, counterfeit drugs, loaded scales, and debased currency. Few products, however, were perceived as more unreliable than cultural artifacts. Books, paintings, calligraphy, curios—every sort of antique and collectible—were liable Page 181 →to fakery. What was not forged might be mislabeled, poorly copied, or ill-gotten. The language of connoisseurship was one way to address these worries. Written or oral statements affirmed or denied particular qualities of things: This piece is old (or only looks that way); that object was (or wasn't really) made, or owned, by a famous person. Every culture asks such questions about its artifacts, producing answers that can include or exclude parts of the tradition by deeming them “authentic” or “inauthentic.” This essay examines how Chinese writers between roughly 1500 and 1700 dealt with such questions as they applied to objects that had been passed down or discovered, asking who made the judgments, on what basis, and to what ends. I examine three cases of authentication, each involving artifacts purportedly of historic significance: the seal of the first emperor, a stele inscription by the sage-king Yu and the ritual bronze vessels of the Xuande (1426–35) court. These cases help identify the types of actors involved, the sorts of documents they produced, and some of their methods, assumptions, and goals. In all these instances, the assessment of antiquities was based on and expressed in written texts, a cumulative process by which a discourse of antiquarianism perpetuates itself. Since the texts themselves were often as unreliable as the artifacts, many of the issues raised by the process of authenticating objects, such as establishing reliable provenance and guarding against deception, applied as much to the supporting documents as to the antiques. Feng Fang, the writer who deplored his peers' mindless “pursuit of things,” was certainly not wrong to worry. He was an insider in the art and book market, famous especially as an expert of calligraphy, and as an authenticator he tried to stem the flood of new and dubious materials. But he also led this market on, misguiding fellow collectors and the reading public with some of the most daring forgeries in Chinese history. Creating fake artifacts was of course one way to manipulate this market, but as we will see Feng Fang also intervened more indirectly, creating documents that gave spurious provenance or meaning to existing artifacts. Forged texts could in turn become the basis for forged artifacts, a cycle that links collecting, scholarship, and the world of the artisans who also helped fabricate the past.

The Qin Seal In the seventh lunar month of the thirteenth year of the Hongzhi reign (1500), a runner arrived at court in Beijing.

Coordinator of Shaanxi Province: At or about midday on the twenty-second day of the sixth month of the present year (July 17, 1500), Mao Zhixue adult soldier of Dao'an Village in Hu County of Xi'an Prefecture, while bathing by the riverbank in the hamlet of Zhaolun of said village, discovered a jade seal. Your subject has deciphered its inscription in seal script, eight characters reading, “Receiving a Mandate from Heaven, Long-enduring and Prosperous.” On its top is a sash-loop [in the shape] of a scaled tiger (chi . Its color is immaculate white and it shimmers with an extraordinary luster. It is one cun thick [ca. 3.2 cm], or two cun including the sash-loop, and one chi four cun and four fen around [ca. 45 cm]. Overall, the inscription is clear and the engraving queer and antique, [the jade] remarkably unflawed. Grand Coordinating Censor Xiong Chong has verified that this is the Seal of Dynastic Succession (chuanguo xi passed down through the ages.3 The arrival of this object raised a number of questions for court officials. Was it really what Xiong Chong took it to be? If so, how was the seal to be treated—and if not, what was to be done with it and the people concerned? Should they be punished? Both forging an official seal and sending a false report were crimes, with punishments ranging up to death.4 Conversely, what would it mean if the seal were the seventeen-century-old relic Xiong Chong claimed? The memorial from the provinces and the response in the capital make it clear that the seal was interpreted as a potential omen. Notices and analyses of portents had been sent by officials to their superiors since at least the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) and were understood through a cosmological theory that assumed sympathetic connections between events in the human realm and those in the natural world. The ruler was pivotal: as “Son of Heaven” (tianzi he served as prime intermediary between earth and heaven. In this schema, unusual phenomena were interpretable responses to the human world; some were positive, such as marvelous beasts that marked the coming of a sage ruler, while others were negative warnings that the human order had gone awry. As Wolfram Eberhard and Kojima Tsuyoshi have shown for the Han and Song (960–1279), respectively, anthropocosmology and portentology Page 183 →became a language of contention among political groups (including emperors, officials and eunuchs), not an external determinant of political outcomes.5 While most portents were natural phenomena, be they biological, astronomical, or meteorological, some were artifacts with a capacity to respond to the sociopolitical order. The best known of these were the nine cauldrons (ding said to have been cast in remote antiquity by the sage-king Yu that could supposedly indicate fitness for rule. In the capital of a virtuous leader they were immovably heavy, but under a wicked ruler they were light and easily removed, so installation of these cauldrons in the capital marked a government's legitimacy.6 According to Han legend, the wickedness of the founding emperor of the preceding Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) was proven when a dragon foiled his attempt to recover one of the cauldrons from a river.7 In an irony of which traditional historiographers were well aware, the artifact that replaced the cauldrons as the gauge of legitimacy was the stone seal of this same Qin founder. The cauldron was an apt symbol of pre-imperial governance, since through bronze vessels early kings carried out their ritual prerogatives, incidentally displaying wealth and power. If the cauldron represented ritual order, control of natural and human resources, and the familial or familiaristic relations at the core of pre-imperial (sometimes called “feudal”) government, the seal was a fitting sign of its replacement by a bureaucratized, legalized state of more abstract relations among nonhereditary officials, mediated by regulations and record-keeping. Kings of the Western Zhou dynasty (c. 1045–770 BCE) delegated power by inscribing terms of enfeoffment on the interior of bronze vessels, which could also record important events such as alliances and battles; the goal was the extension over time and space of personal relationships between the ruler and his kinsmen, real or fictive. The seal, on the other hand, guaranteed the authenticity of documents in the absence of personal contact and emphasized, through mechanical replication, the dependence of the many on the one. The ruler's myriad subjects were like the potentially infinite impressions of his unique seal, all alike in their relation to a single master.8 Although the Han and subsequent dynasties professed repudiation of the Qin model for its harshness and inhumanity, none deviated from its basic bureaucratic-imperial structure. The seal, which became known as the “Seal of Dynastic Succession” in the Han, continued to function as an instrument of state. It became a coveted marker of favor from Heaven, as evidenced by the efforts of the usurper Wang Mang (45 BCE–23 CE) to acquire it in order to legitimate his Xin dynasty

(9–23).9 According to dynastic histories, it Page 184 →was passed down until the Later Tang (923–36), whose last emperor self-immolated in his palace, destroying the seal.10 It subsequently reappeared several times, most remarkably in 1096 when a farmer near Xi'an ploughed up a seal that soon made its way to the capital. Thirteen high officials memorialized that it corresponded to descriptions in official histories and that, as the “seal script and workmanship were unlike anything known today,” it had to be the Qin relic.11 It was received with pomp, reverence, and fasting by the emperor, who honored its discoverer with gifts and an honorary title. The arrival of the seal, interpreted as a mark of divine favor, was a major political event, and led in 1098 to the declaration of a new reign-name, “Auspicious Talisman” (Yuanfu .12 Although the two seals discovered in the Song and Ming eras respectively cannot both have been the real thing (probably neither was), the Ming officials who dealt with the find cited the Song case as a historical precedent. When Xiong Chong realized that the inscription matched that recorded for the Qin seal, he was reading it—like the thirteen Song officials before him—as an omen interpreter. It does not make historical sense that the seal would be found at the site of the old Qin capital at Chang'an (modern Xi'an) since, although the seal had been there for centuries in the palaces of Qin, Han and later rulers, it was reportedly in Luoyang, 350 kilometers to the east, when incinerated in the Later Tang. Its mysterious reappearance in its place of origin, however, would make sense as a portent and symbol. This was clear in the 1096 case, in which the seal was likewise found near Xi'an (which, the thirteen officials pointed out, was said to be the source of its jade). This is not to say that the interpretation of the find by officials such as Xiong Chong was a purely political or religious affair, unconnected to scholarship. Rather, it was based on their knowledge of history and use of written sources. Xiong Chong owned a sizable library, particularly strong in classics and history, though he was probably not able to access it while stationed in the provinces.13 Xiong's first and quite difficult task was deciphering the archaic script in which the seal was written. Although the character forms on the 1500 seal have not survived, images ostensibly based on the actual Qin seal have. The text was inscribed in an exaggerated form of “bird” script (also referred to as “bird-and-fish,” “fish,” or “dragon”) which fancifully constructs Chinese characters of the outlines of birds or other animals. The dictionaries of archaic characters available in the early Ming would have been of little help with these rare and elaborate forms.14 Standard reference books listed the wording of the seal Page 185 →inscription but at best described its script; reproductions of the seal itself were rare, and Xiong Chong probably never saw one. Still, he assessed the seal to the best of his knowledge and ability and it checked out. Xiong's presentation of the conditions under which the seal was found, including the precise location and time of day, were typical of portent accounts. Time and place mattered because they were part of a system by which omens could be interpreted: years, days, and hours had cosmological significance, as did spatial relations. The fact that the seal was found by a commoner, in a mundane fashion, is one way in which the influence of good government is shown to have pervaded the world. That the seal was indecipherable to the finder and that it took Xiong Chong's expert knowledge to identify it validated the find by suggesting an accidental discovery rather than a plant. In a more extreme precedent, an illiterate Mongol likewise allegedly found the Qin seal in 1294, during the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). As an illiterate, the argument went, he could not possibly have planted it.15 An unintentional and popular origin pointed to an irruption of history into the present, spontaneous appearance rather than artificial creation, and fit with the improbable location of the find. When the seal and accompanying memorial reached the court in the seventh month of 1500, the matter was handled by the newly-appointed Minister of Rites, Fu Han (d. 1502). Fu was an avid interpreter of omens. His biography records that in response to “irregular asterisms, earthquakes, rain and hail” in the capital and “many anomalies” in the provinces he urged the emperor to be frugal in order to reduce the frequency of such phenomena. He had also rejected some putative omens: earlier in 1500 he had criticized the offering to court of an auspicious albino magpie. He likewise looked unfavorably on the seal from Shaanxi.16 Fu Han first noted differences between the newfound seal and descriptions in historical works. The only title he cited was the Nancun chuogeng lu (Respite from plowing in the southern village) by Tao Zongyi (1316–1403), a collection of miscellaneous notes and passages copied from other books. The Respite reproduces the imprint of the seal and the

creature decorating it.17 It is not clear what authority Fu Han granted it, since he thought the seal to have been lost 400 years before the Respite was compiled and considered the various seals that had appeared since the tenth century to be forgeries. Moreover, the Respite itself contained two versions of the seal with different wording.18 Nonetheless, Fu Han's textual resources trumped Xiong Chong's limited access to books. Page 186 → Historical verification, however, was only a preface to a principled condemnation of the seal and its alleged significance. In my view, the purpose of seals lies in the authentication of documents and defense against fraud; they are not to be seen as precious baubles. The First Emperor of Qin obtained jade from Lantian [near Xi'an] to make his seal, which was used again in the Han. Thereafter people fought over it with craft and force, claiming that having the seal was all one needed to receive the Mandate [of Heaven] and that not to have it was regrettable and meant the loss of the Mandate. [Such people] did not understand that, since the Mandate depends on virtue, the seal is unimportant. Thus those who searched for it without success secretly made forgeries of it to deceive others. Those who found such a seal foolishly thought it to be the Qin seal, and rulers and their ministers made a show of delight, undertaking ceremonies and sacrifices, boastfully displaying it before the whole realm. All of this will be laughed at for a thousand years to come.19 Fu Han moralistically denied the legitimating role that the seal had sometimes played. He went on to argue that existing Ming seals were sufficient and pointedly warned the emperor that acceptance of this novel antique risked setting a new standard that would threaten dynastic stability: Page 187 → For over a hundred years a series of sages [viz., the Ming emperors] have followed the ancestral regulations. Although they did not have this ancient seal, still they have been blessed with a prosperous and flourishing hold on the Mandate. His Majesty's manifest virtue and diligence in maintaining the Mandate, the myriad blessings of his sagely person, and the respectful tranquility that reigns in his clan are sufficient proof that he need not bother with a seal for Heaven to show concern for him. The less tangible standards of dynastic precedent and morality offered, in Fu's eyes, a more reliable claim to power. This left the problem of how to deal with the seal and those who submitted it. Fu Han urged that the matter be quietly buried: The appearance of this seal in the soil of Shaanxi may have been taken for a numinous sign granted by Heaven and offered up as a way to please you through flattery; [the senders] must have been unaware that it is a fake. For the time being it is best kept in the palace treasury as a trinket, so as to manifest your sagely virtue and to rectify the minds of others. The emperor went along with Fu Han's suggestions; the soldier who found the seal received a modest reward and Xiong Chong's career was not affected. The question of whether to believe in the seal was subordinate to that of its meaning as a portent and symbol, though the two were not entirely separable. When the seal was presented to the court as an omen, the expectation that it would be well-received was based on the assumption that it would be seen as a positive sign, as much as that it would be believed.

Primitive Perfection: The Inscription of Yu The officials who grappled with the Qin seal drew on lore and images that had been preserved, in part, because of

a longstanding fascination with old and unusual artifacts, particularly those bearing written characters. Attempts to understand ancient writing went hand-in-hand with a desire to find more examples of it, leading to the discovery and publication of the relics that in turn became part of the repertory of paleographic Page 188 →knowledge. One of the most striking stories in this process is that of an inscription attributed to the ancient sage-king Yu (whose cauldrons were mentioned above as predecessors of the Qin seal) and found at Mt. Heng near Changsha in modern Hunan Province. The lore surrounding this text begins with an early legend about the existence on this sacred mountain of an inscription left by the sage-king in the course of his struggle against cataclysmic floods. According to the Wu Yue chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue), he was unable to complete his hydraulic engineering projects until he acquired jade tablets inscribed with instructions for water control. On Mt. Heng, after he had fasted for three months, a divine envoy bestowed them upon him.20 This legend evolved into a story that Yu had left an inscription somewhere on the mountain (some identify the spot as the Goulou Peak, west of the main summit). Xu Lingqi (d. 474), according to a Song-period biography, dwelt on and explored the mountain for fifteen years, during the course of which he saw an inscription by Yu, in “tadpole script” (kedou wen , on the Peak of the Celestial Pillar (Tianzhu feng .21 A few years later, Ren Fang (460–508) mentioned another inscription of Yu that, along with one by his predecessor Yao had been noted in the early Zhou period as having “lasted through antiquity without being obscured.”22 The story survived into Tang times, when Han Yu (768–824) lamented that unlike Xu Lingqi, referred to below as “a Daoist,” he had never seen the inscription: At the summit of Mount Goulou, the stele of Godlike Yu, Is writ in blue on reddish stone, in form obscure and strange, With scripts of curled-up tadpoles and leaves of leek unfurled, Like perched and flitting phoenixes, like tiger and dragon embroiled, So secret and so well-concealed, the spirits catch no glimpse. A Daoist once did climb alone and saw it there by chance. Arriving here I sigh aloud and tears fall interlaced. Every which way I seek it—wherever could it be? Amid the dense green forest, the yellow gibbons wail.23 Han Yu's poem was often cited by visitors to and historians of the area, though its statements about the form and content of the inscription are by nature speculative. It suggests that imagination could not quite fill in the gap of a missing artifact and that to see it in person was both a sign and a source of supernatural power. The legend later took on Page 189 →even more magical overtones; according to one Song tale, “Once there was a woodsman who saw two intertwined dragons on a rock face. In a flash the inscription emitted a bright glow, and unable to look straight at it he fled in terror. No one has seen it since.”24 The legends all treat the stone as a mystically and historically important thing that just happened to bear a text. Several Song texts mention the inscription but give only fabulous details and say nothing of its content.25 By the Southern Song, perhaps because of the growing influence on jinshi studies (epigraphy) a story with the reverse logic appeared: the inscription was a text that happened to be on a thing, from which it could be liberated and disseminated. Such a tale was recorded by Zhang Shinan a literatus interested in paleography and antiques. He tells of a sighting of the inscription in 1212 by one He Zhi He's reaction was to make a copy of the text. He presented this ink-squeeze rubbing to an official, who recognized its potential value but rejected it out of fear that He was trying to deceive him with a fake or some other inscription.26 Unable to attract state interest, He Zhi had the fifty-odd-character-long inscription copied onto a boulder behind the Yuelu Academy at Goulou Peak.

Although this source gives no idea of the content of the inscription, or even of whether it was decipherable, it treats the inscription as the most important feature of the stone and one that could ideally be copied and distributed. That distribution took some time, however. The inscription seems barely to have been mentioned again until, in 1534, the outgoing prefect of Changsha, Pan Yi (jinshi 1521), unearthed an inscribed stone behind the Yuelu Academy.27 Pan Yi identified the inscription as that Page 190 →of Yu and reproduced it, along with a report of the discovery, in the prefectural gazetteer the following year (fig. 2). The gazetteer makes no mention of He Zhi nor any attempt to transcribe the inscription in modern characters, stating rather that it “was all in ancient sealscript and indecipherable.”28 Moreover, this text was seventy-seven characters long, not the fifty-odd counted by He Zhi. On the other hand, Pan Yi did find the inscription where He Zhi had left it, apparently without knowledge of He's role and thus unaware that it was a copy. Without a pre-1534 copy of He Zhi's text, there is no way to be certain of the origin of Pan Yi's inscription. If the inscription were that which He Zhi had carved in 1212, it would be one of many Song discoveries—or forgeries—that were not widely disseminated until the Ming. For example, in the 1560s the scholar, printer, and perpetual examination failure Wang Wenlu (1503–86) published, under the title Huitang zhaiqi (Selected oddities from the collector's hall), facsimiles of three texts collected by his father. The Yu inscription and two others were reproduced along with transcriptions and notes. The others (both specious) derived from Song calligraphic or paleographic works: the first was a coffin lid for Xiahou Ying Duke of Teng (d. 172 BCE), the second a tomb inscription for Ji Zha written by Confucius. The Duke of Teng inscription was taken from a Song epigraphic collection, Wang Qiu's (twelfth century) Xiaotang jigu lu (Record of collected antiquities from Whistlehall), while the epitaph in Confucius's hand came from the renowned tenth-century calligraphy modelbook Chunhua ge tie (Sampler from Purification Pavilion).29 Model-books (fatie gave scholars access to ancient inscriptions, as well as calligraphy originally written on paper or silk, sometimes long after the original had vanished. Like the early modern European sylloges discussed by Christopher Wood in the previous chapter, these collections often mixed genuine pieces with others that were spurious and well known to be so, but apparently more than their European equivalents the model-books were themselves the object of a sophisticated body of connoisseurship. Approaching the fatie in a scholarly fashion meant, by the mid-Ming, first going through this elaborate discourse on the origin of the copy. None of Wang Wenlu's three inscriptions is now considered reliably ancient, but each derived from what, by the sixteenth century, was a venerable Song source. This provenance was primarily textual—each came not directly from objects but from reproductions in written Page 191 →sources. If these cases are typical, while fakes did flourish in the Ming it was as much a result of a wider dissemination of earlier forgeries as the product of Ming unscrupulousness about authenticity. What increased in the sixteenth century was not the possibility of or ability to create such frauds but the capacity to rapidly disseminate them to a large audience through the expanded commercial book market. Selected oddities was issued as part of Wang Wenlu's widely-read collectanea Bailing xueshan (A hundred hills from the mountains of learning). The rapid spread of the Yu inscription to all corners of the empire—it was soon printed in Changsha, Jiangnan, and Sichuan—was the product of a thriving printing industry.30 Of course, printing was not required for rapid transmission over long distances: as we saw with the case of the Qin seal, the Ming state was able to move information and objects quickly from point to point.31 Nonetheless, commercial publishing had an impact on the way Ming scholars studied and interpreted the Yu inscription. Many well-known epigraphic pieces existed in a variety of forms, differing in quality, completeness, and accessibility. Because the Yu stele was a new discovery and the various copies spread quickly from a single source, there was little concern among early collectors for variation among particular copies. They focused their attention instead on the text itself and how to read it. For instance, the collector Fan Dache (1524–1610), who recorded in detail the provenance and editions of many rare pieces of epigraphy and calligraphy, noted the Yu inscription and affirmed its antiquity but made no mention of the particular version he had or of others he might have seen.32 Scholarly attention was instead directed at fixing the meaning of the text by transcribing it into modern characters.

At first, the impenetrability of the script was accepted: the Changsha gazetteer writers did not attempt a transcription and the scholar-official Zhan Ruoshui (1466–1560), who saw a reproduction in Nanjing around 1536, declared himself unable to make out all but one or two characters. For Zhan, the strangeness of the writing, while stifling legibility, was confirmation of its great antiquity.33 The first attempt at transcription was made by Shen Yi (fl. 1530s), whose reading and line-by-line explanation became the basis for all later readings. He arrived at his version not by comparing the inscription to extant scripts or historical works but by direct appeal to its author: When I first acquired this inscription, I burnt incense at night and prayed, saying: “Divine Yu, the Sage! If your spirit survives, make it Page 192 →known to me by an omen in a dream.” In a dream that night a tall man held a vase which he handed to me. It was yellow, over a foot in height, squaretopped and round-bottomed. Around the belly were four gold bands and three characters around the mouth read, “X official made [this].” Below was seal script shaped like dragons and serpents, grasses and trees. In my sleep I forgot the first character. When I awoke the next morning I could rhyme off the entire inscription as clearly as if I had always known it.34 Shen Yi read the inscription as a record of Yu's hard work in controlling floodwaters and bringing peace to the realm, but offered no explanation of his method other than the dream and cited no external evidence. The second and more influential reading was by Yang Shen (1488–1559), the most formidable scholar of his day.35 He devised his own version, which was soon printed and quickly spread throughout the empire. Yang read thirteen characters differently from Shen Yi.36 For Yang, however, what mattered more than the meaning of the words was the fact that this artifact preserved traces of the earliest known script, a unique blessing that helped restore connections with antiquity. He welcomed the inscription as a material bridge to the lost past, since “whether This Culture/Script (siwen is manifest or hidden indeed depends on masterpieces” such as the Yu inscription.37 In a preface to a song he composed to celebrate the discovery, he treated it as a boon from Heaven and concluded that “there is no longer any need to lament being born in too late an era.”38 Yang pushed the inscription into service on other intellectual scores. He had long criticized the school of Dao Learning, including its most important representative scholar Zhu Xi (1130–1200), as dogmatic and closed-minded, so he wrote with evident glee that Zhu Xi had been wrong to assert, in comments on the Han Yu poem about the stele, that the inscription was pure myth. Zhu's skepticism was, Yang concluded, based on no more than limited personal experience.39 With some pride, Yang listed other famous connoisseurs who had failed to describe it. Because of its unique history the Yu inscription could be discussed in relative isolation from the Song heritage of connoisseurship. Although the need to study an artifact through earlier sources and precedents was lessened, scholars were left unsure of how to treat the artifact. The position of the eminent Wang Shizhen (1526–90) reflects some of these ambiguities: he doubted that it was really written by Yu but insisted Page 193 →nonetheless that its primitive calligraphy proved that it came from the pre-Qin period—if perhaps from a forger of that time.40 While certain critics cried forgery on account of anachronisms such as place names from after Yu's time, others defended the inscription by saying that the transcriptions were mistaken and that its value was as an artifact and example of archaic writing—so archaic that there was no point in trying to transcribe it. Or so it seemed until 1565, when the master forger Feng Fang told his friend, the publisher Wang Wenlu, that he had access to a previously unknown source. He claimed to possess a transcription of and note on the text by Liu Chang (1019–68), an antiquarian to whom Ouyang Xiu (1007–72) had often turned for advice in compiling his Jigu lu (Record of antiquities).41 Feng's source was fabricated: it is dated 1078, ten years after Liu Chang's death.42 Feng claimed that Liu Chang's record of the inscription was preserved in books by two Song collectors, Song Shou and Hu Shijiang , works not recorded in any reliable bibliography.43 Why did Feng Fang create this spurious reference? By inventing a Song source, instead of rejoicing like Yang Shen that there were no Song precedents, or turning like Shen Yi to divine inspiration, Feng Fang intervened in the debate about the inscription by trying to channel readings of it along the familiar path of textual provenance: if his Song sources were accurate, anyone writing about the inscription would have to refer not only to Liu Chang's text (“his” in the authorial sense), but also to Feng Fang's text (“his” in the proprietary sense). This was the type of scholarship in which Feng Fang

had the advantage, a stock of unique resources (Song manuscripts) that did not yet circulate in the commercial print market. Feng relied, or hoped to rely, not on the actual possession of such resources but on the plausibility of his claim to possess them—a claim that was not, given the size and depth of his family's collection and his own reputation as a connoisseur, incredible. This is precisely the sort of background Feng invented for his many forgeries of classical texts. In those cases, too, he cast his family library as a conduit for supposedly lost knowledge and ridiculed those who, like Yang Shen, claimed to circumvent Song antiquarians.44 Hence, despite the rejection of Song antiquarian traditions it provoked, the stele still sent scholars back to their libraries, to look through their dictionaries, and to check for—or invent—connoisseurs' comments on the text. It found its way into later epigraphic collections and dictionaries, albeit with reservations about its authenticity, and the usual debates about versions and interpretations ensued. Antiquarianism thus Page 194 →partially domesticated what had been a magical artifact that inspired prayers, dreams, and celebratory verse.

Forgery by the Book: The Xuande Bronzes This complex interplay of texts in multiple genres, deceptive claims, and objects of uncertain status was typical of the discourse surrounding the most ancient relics, but even artifacts of more recent vintage drew similar accretions. By the late sixteenth century, just a century and a half after the reign period for which they are named, the Xuande bronze vessels (mostly small incense burners) had become some of the most sought-after collectibles. They achieved an almost mythical status for their design and workmanship, though there has been continuous doubt about how many pieces in fact date to this period. The identification of genuine specimens rests on two premises: first that a distinctive set of bronze vessels was cast for the Xuande court, and second that the textual sources describing them are reliable. The first premise cannot be verified since there is no contemporary evidence of their production. By the late Ming, when references to Xuande censers first appear in connoisseurship literature, although they were extremely popular their origin was uncertain and many vessels in circulation were suspected to be fakes. This changed with the appearance of a set of documents emanating from the Xuande court, compiled into three closely related books, the most important of which is Xuande dingyi pu (Register of vessels from the Xuande era).45 According to these documents, after receiving a huge gift of raw copper from a Thai king the emperor ordered thousands of vessels for use at court and in various offices in the capital and provinces. The problem with this account is that the documents are fabrications, probably of the late seventeenth century (well after the first boom in collecting the bronzes). While some problems with the sources have been noted, the accounts have continued to be used by art historians as sources for the study of the bronzes.46 The evidence that they are fakes is overwhelming, however.47 A critique was first developed a long-ignored article by Paul Pelliot, who pointed out a number of historical inaccuracies, and more recently by Ulrich Hausmann, who argued that the quantity of raw material described was insufficient for the number of pieces allegedly produced.48 I will adduce further textual evidence that supports Page 195 →these conclusions and helps in dating the documents more precisely to the early Qing. The first piece of evidence is negative: the creation of the bronzes is not mentioned in any early-Ming source. Most notably, it is absent from the Ming Veritable Records (Shilu a day-by-day record of events at court. While the Records are imperfect, it is surprising that these matters would be left out entirely: not only were large quantities of raw materials and labor involved, the creation of so many new vessels for ritual purposes and the replacement of old ones would almost certainly have been noted. In particular, the Ming founder had mandated that the vessels for state ceremonies be of porcelain, not bronze, and any deviation from this precedent would have been debated and recorded (not to mention that only a few types were produced in bronze, which would have created mismatched sets partly of porcelain and partly of metal). Instead, just days after the project was supposedly begun, the Veritable Records transcribe a long harangue from the Xuande Emperor to the Minister of Works, warning the latter against undertakings wasteful of the people's resources.49 The Register of Vessels is particularly inaccurate in references to foreign countries. A large fraction of the metal used is said to have come from Thailand (Xianluo but the tribute items from that country listed in the Veritable Records and other sources do not include any metals.50 In the Register the Thai king is called Cijiaman'ai a name

I have not found in any other source; the ruler of the Ayutthaya kingdom at the time was Borommaracha II (r. 1424–48, in Chinese Sanlai bomolazhalai .51 Pelliot mentions another diplomatic impossibility: the text claims that some of the material used was from Holland (Helan but China had no contact with the Dutch until the 1590s; indeed Holland was hardly nameable as a country until its independence from Spain in 1579.52 These discrepancies suggest a date after 1600 for the forgery, but greater precision is possible. The context of Pelliot's debunking of the Registers was an article on Xiang Yuanbian (1525–90), to whom an important preface is attributed. As the preface is dated 1624, it is not only impossible that Xiang wrote it but implausible that it was written at or soon after that time: no informed reader in the 1620s would have been unaware that Xiang Yuanbian was thirty years dead. So the preface, at least, must have been forged well after 1624. A final, telling detail is that among the staff ostensibly involved in the project were workers seconded from the Metropolitan Mint (guzhuju Page 196 →This agency was founded under the Yuan dynasty but did not exist in the Ming; it was reestablished in the early Qing.53 In combination with the late date of the Xiang Yuanbian preface, this evidence points to a Qing date for the texts. Working back from the conclusion that all these documents are late forgeries reveals a further layer of complexity to the authentication of purported Xuande bronzes. As with Feng Fang's fabrication of Song accounts of the Yu stele, the Xuande documents made new claims about known objects. While many “Xuande” vessels were in circulation when the texts first appeared, more were being produced at the time; a large proportion of the “Xuande” bronzes now in circulation are thought to date to the Qing. The documents may thus have been created to produce a set of expectations for “genuine” objects, perhaps to help one producer to sell more of particular designs. Afterward, of course, other producers could and most likely did suit their designs to the standards introduced by the documentation. In this case, an act of authentication, albeit a deceitful one, would not only have played a role in changing the art market's attitude toward existing pieces but may have led to the production of the objects themselves. Seen in this light, authentication becomes a form of advertising, both heightening the value of and creating demand for particular goods, while connoisseurship becomes inextricable from commercial production, not reducible to an aspect of consumption.

Conclusion The three groups of misrepresented artifacts we have looked at are more than physical objects; in each case, the existence of originals is uncertain and all we have are items of dubious provenance and texts of uncertain authenticity. Perhaps more worthy of study is the deployment of arguments based on authenticity, which have a history and a reality of their own. Even falsehood produces knowledge. For example, the entire modern body of connoisseurship and study of the Xuande vessels is founded on the untenable credibility of a set of documents without which we would have no clear picture of the early appearance of the bronzes, which are of historical interest and aesthetic value no matter when or why they were produced. On the inscription of Yu, too, traditional scholarship has been the basis for modern studies. The stele was decried as a forgery (of the Song Page 197 →or Ming, or by unidentified “Daoists”) by most Qing epigraphers, and skeptical twentieth-century scholars, particularly those interested in sweeping away traditionalist or superstitious claims about the past, followed their lead.54 A recent reassessment, based on a comparison between archaeologically excavated items and Ming copies and rubbings, makes a novel if not widely accepted case that the inscription was not a late forgery but rather a fifth-century-BCE artifact of the state of Yue and thus one of the oldest known stone inscriptions in China.55 While a few fragments of what may be the original stone survive, according to an investigation undertaken in 1986, their existence and the full text of the inscription would be unknown without the efforts of its Song and Ming promoters. An even more striking case for the value of forgery can be made by bringing us much closer to the here and now. In 1951 the Western-educated diplomat Cao Shuming made an astounding discovery in an antique store on East 57th Street in Manhattan. He purchased a heavy stone seal inscribed with the eight characters from the Seal of Dynastic Succession. The seller was an American who, like the Mongol who found a similar seal in 1294, knew nothing of its value. Cao claimed to have rediscovered the Qin seal and promoted his discovery in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.56 It is tempting to interpret the appearance of this relic at this historical juncture as a

political omen since it came shortly after the Republic of China, which Cao Shuming served as a diplomat, had abandoned the Communist-controlled mainland for Taiwan. Its location was also strangely apt, just blocks from the partially built headquarters of the United Nations, the Republic's membership in which was a bulwark of its precarious legitimacy. As with the seal found 450 years earlier, the rulers of Taiwan, if they were the intended audience, did not take the bait. Yet in the course of his promotion of the seal, Cao (who went on to a career as a professor of Chinese literature) produced a piece of advertising which establishes, if not the authenticity of his possession, the conditions of its authenticity: he wrote a detailed study of the Qin seal, including the various forgeries of it which appeared through the ages, that remains the most valuable monograph on the topic. The section on the New York seal aside, it is the starting point for any scholarly study of this important relic. Such a symbiosis between forgery and serious scholarship is by no means unusual. Anthony Grafton has traced the precepts of modern Western textual criticism to Renaissance forgers who needed to establish within their very forgeries criteria by which new discoveries could be assessed Page 198 →and accepted.57 In this domain at least we can point to similar connections in the Chinese case. Neither forgers nor their adversaries ever have complete control in the struggle over authenticity. Rather, standards and practices of authentication are a byproduct, an artifact, of this contest. If we are curious about how the authenticity of things was defined, it is not the things themselves, nor even the people who made and transmitted them, that are of greatest interest. The whole cumulative process of making, accepting, and rejecting claims and counterclaims—and artifacts and counterartifacts—must occupy our vision. If Ming collectors found themselves misled by things, then their erstwhile guides, the texts meant to point toward certainty, proved no more reliable. By both begetting and abetting a forged artifact, a forged provenance could extend and channel its cultural afterlife. Rather than separating the wheat from the chaff, the historian of authenticity must scour the threshing grounds as well as the granaries to discover more than kernels of truth.

NOTES 1. Feng Fang (1493–1566), Zhenshang zhai fu (Rhapsody on the Studio of true connoisseurship). See my dissertation, “The Rogue Classicist: Feng Fang (1493–1566) and his Forgeries,” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2004), chap. 1 and Appendix C. 2. For recent discussions of these issues see Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China, 2nd ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004). 3. This portion of the memorial is preserved in Sun Chengze Chun ming meng yulu (Further record of a spring dream of the Ming) (Guxiang zhai ed., 1881), 26.6a–6b. 4. These activities fell under the statute on “deception and forgery” (zhawei which also covered the unauthorized use of official documents and stationery and forgery of paper money. See Da Ming lü jijie fu li (Legal code of the great Ming with collected explanations and appended substatutes) (1898 ed.), juan 26. Translated in Jiang Yonglin. The Great Ming Code: Da Ming lü (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 208–14. 5. Wolfram Eberhard, “The Political Function of Astronomy and Astronomers in Han China,” in Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. John Fairbank, 33–70 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). Cf. Hans Bielenstein, “Han Portents and Prognostications,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 56 (1974): 97–112; Kojima Tsuyoshi Sgaku no keisei to tenkai (The formation and development of Song learning) (Tokyo: Sbunsha, 1999), pt. 1.Page 199 → 6. See, for instance, Zuozhuan, Duke Xuan, 3rd year, in Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhengyi (Correct meanings of Zuo's commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals), 1815 Ruan Yuan ed., 21.15b–16b, and Zhanguo ce (Stratagems of the warring states), in Sibu beiyao, 1.1ab. 7. Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 58ff, 138, 348. 8. Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), chaps. 3 and 5 on Zhou bronzes; 29 on seals. 9. The early history of the seal is obscure, in part legendary. Kurihara Tomonobu has argued that the

evidence for the existence of a Qin seal that passed to the Han is unreliable and that the seal in question was created in the early Han. Kurihara, Shin Han shi no kenky (Studies on Qin and Han history) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kbunkan, 1960), chap. 2, esp. 134–44. It is irrelevant, for the issues discussed here, which early stories about the Seal of Dynastic are true; they were all part of the lore of the seal in later periods. For more on the seal, including translations of many important early sources, see Lothar Wagner, “Die Ganze Welt in einem Zoll: Ein Beitrag zur chinesischen Siegelkunde” (PhD diss., Heidelberg, 1987), 174–222. 10. Jiu Wudai shi (Old history of the Five Dynasties) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1976), 85.1125. 11. Song shi (History of the Song dynasty) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), 154.3583–85. 12. Song shi, juan 18. The reign name (nianhao was the year designation set by the state since the Han Dynasty. In general, reign names had symbolic and/or correlative significance and could act as slogans indicating the goals or philosophy of the ruler. Dates were typically recorded in terms of reign names (e.g. 5th year of Yuanfu) plus lunar month and day. The name of the reign period 116–19 BCE (under Emperor Wu of the Han) was chosen for similar reasons: it was called Yuanding (“Auspicious Cauldrons”) on account of the discovery of ancient vessels. 13. Guo Tingxun Benchao fensheng renwu kao if (Study of personalities of our dynasty, arranged by province) (1622 ed.), 92.8b–9b. 14. An epigraphic dictionary published in 1530 was probably the first to include the characters on the Qin seal. See Zhu Yun Jinshi yunfu (Rhyming epigraphic dictionary). On bird script and related forms, see François Louis, “Written Ornament—Ornamental Writing: Birdscript of the Early Han Dynasty and the Art of Enchanting,” Ars Orientalis 33 (2003): 10–31. 15. Yuan shi (History of the Yuan Dynasty) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1976), 116.2898–99, 164.3853, 173.4045. The memorial submitted by Yang Huan (fl. late 13th c.) along with the seal is translated in Sir Percival David, Chinese Connoisseurship: The Ko Ku Yao Lun, The Essential Criteria of Antiquities (New York and Washington: Praeger, 1971), 242–48. The seal arrived at court at a key moment, a month after the death of Khubilai Khan. See also Herbert Franke, From Tribal Chieftain to Universal Emperor and God: The Legitimation of the Yüan Dynasty (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Page 200 →1978), 45–46. On the significance of the Seal of Dynastic Transmission and other Chinese seals to Mongols and other northern groups, see Ho Kai-long (He Qilong) “Meng Yuan he Man Qing de ‘Chuanguo yuxi’ shenhua, jianlun Fojiao ‘erjiao zhi men’ de xugou lishi” (The myth of the “jade seal of dynastic transmission” in the Yuan and Qing, including a discussion of the fabricated history of the Buddhist “two principles”) Xin shixue 19/1 (2008/3): 1–50. 16. Ming shi (History of the Ming Dynasty) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 68.1658 and 184.4882. Ming shilu (Veritable records of the Ming) (Nan'gang: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, 1961–1966) Hongzhi 13/7/bingzi, 163.13ab, and jiaokan ji, 164.3b. 17. The Zhonghua shuju edition used in figure 1 is a facsimile of a 1923 reprint, allegedly based on a Yuan edition. 18. See Cao Shuming Qin xi kao (A study of the Qin imperial seals) (Hong Kong: Universal Book Co., 1966) for reproductions of various versions, and, on 16–17, selected descriptions of the inscription from later periods (Song-Ming). Tao probably derived his seal from the copy in Xue Shanggong Lidai zhong ding yi qi kuanzhi fatie (Samples and explanations of bronze vessel inscriptions through the ages) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), 193–95. 19. Ming shilu, Hongzhi 13/7/bingzi, 163.13ab (2993–94). Ming shi, 68.1658 gives a condensed version. On the detailed description of the seal, see Cao Shuming, Qin xi kao, chap. 1. 20. Zhao Ye, Wu Yue chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue), Sibu congkan, 143–47. Yu's receipt of tablets on Hengshan is also mentioned in Li Daoyuan Shuijing zhu (Commentary on the Classic of waterways), in Sibu congkan, 38.9a–10a. Cf. Hou Hanshu (History of the Later Han Dynasty) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965), 22.3485. On the legends surrounding the mountain and its later religious history, see James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue) in Medieval China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), especially chaps. 3 and 5. 21. Xu Lingqi, Hengshan ji (Record of Mount Heng), quoted in Liao Shen Nanyue jiu zhenren zhuan (Biographies of the Nine Perfected Ones of the Southern Peak), Daozang 452, 4b. Tianzhu is one of the peaks of Mt. Heng and the site where Yu supposedly first sought instruction. Xu Lingqi's work on Mount Heng is lost, but fragments of it and other early works on the region were collected by Chen Yunrong (nineteenth century) and Wang Renjun (1866–1913). See Chen, Wang et al., Jingzhou ji jiuzhong (Nine

records of Jingzhou) (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1999). 22. Ren Fang, Shu yi ji (Accounts of curiosities), in Longwei congshu, 1.4b–5a. Ren places the inscriptions on nearby Mt. Kongtong 23. Han Yu, “Goulou shan” (Mt. Goulou) in Quan Tang shi (Complete poems of the Tang) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 338.3790. See also Charles Hartman, Han Yü and the T'ang Search for Unity (Princeton: Page 201 →Princeton University Press, 1986), 65–66. As the editors of the 1996 Nanyue zhi point out, a line is missing near the end of the poem (between “tears are interlaced” and “Every which way”). Hunan sheng difangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui Nanyue zhi (Gazetteer of the Southern Marchmount) (Changsha: Hunan chubanshe, 1996), 358. 24. Chen Tianfu Nanyue zongshengji (General record of the sights of the Southern Peak), cited in Chen Yunrong Xiangcheng fanggu lu (Record of visiting antiquities in Hunan), in Gu shi jinshi yudi congshu, 17.1a. Inconsistencies in this passage suggest that it is based on a corruption or rewriting of Xu Lingqi's Nanyue ji. 25. Chen Tianfu, Nanyue zongshengji, 1.19ab, 1.33a–34b, 2.31b–32a. 26. Zhang Shinan, Youhuan jiwen (Tales from a traveling official) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), 6.72–73. On He see Song shi, 39.762. 27. Some sources state that the find took place in 1530, others 1534. The 1533 Changsha fuzhi (Gazetteer of Changsha Prefecture), edited by Pan Yi and others, indicates that a new prefect took up office in 1535. While this gazetteer is conventionally dated to 1533 because of its preface, it includes information from as late as 1535, e.g. the list of officials on 1.27b. 28. Changsha fuzhi, 1533, 5.31b. The inscription is mentioned in several places in the gazetteer: reproduced in facsimile as a stop-press supplement to the final juan, shown on a map (tu.4, on a hill just behind the Yuelu Academy), and listed as a landmark (mingsheng 5.31b). 29. Wang Qiu Xiaotang jigu lu (Record of collected antiquities from Whistlehall) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), 70ab. Doubts about the authenticity of these texts go back at least to the early Song. See, for example, Qin Guan (1049–1100), Fatie tongjie (Complete explanation of calligraphic samplers), in Yishu congbian, 6–7. See also Rong Geng Congtie mu (Catalog of collected samplers) (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), juan 1. 30. Book history has become a major part of the study of late imperial China in recent decades, and my arguments here draw on much of that recent work. For a summary, see Tobie Meyer-Fong, “The Printed World: Books, Publishing Culture, and Society in Late Imperial China,” Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 3 (2007/8): 787–817. 31. Copies were also made by carving the text onto new stelæ. For instance, in late 1541 the local official Wang Shen (jinshi 1529) had it inscribed at the tomb of Yu in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. But as the colophon by Zhang Mingdao makes clear, the inscription appeared only after paper forms, including the transcription by Yang Shen, had widely circulated. The stele is still extant at the Temple of Yu in Shaoxing. 32. Fan Dache, Beitie jizheng (A witness to stelæ and calligraphy), Siming congshu, 1ab. 33. Zhan Ruoshui, Zhan Ganquan xiansheng wenji (Collected works of Zhan Ruoshui), 1681 ed., Siku quanshu cunmu congshu, 21.46b–48a. 34. Shen Yi, notes on Yu inscription in Zhao Ning Xinxiu Yuelu shuyuan zhishu (Newly compiled gazetteer of Yuelu Academy), 1687, 4.5ab.Page 202 → 35. On Yang, see Leo Shin's essay in this volume. 36. Yang Shen, Taishi Sheng'an quanji (Complete works of Yang Shen), 1583 ed., 47.16b–18a. 37. Yang Shen, Taishi Sheng'an quanji, 47.17b. Siwen, which usually referred to the culture based on ancient precedents and shared by the educated elite, could also refer specifically to the written characters thought to embody the thoughts and ideals of the ancients. See Peter Bol, “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 1–3, 232–33. Yang expressed a similar delight in the rediscovery of a number of other pieces of calligraphy not seen by Song connoisseurs in his Jinshi guwen (Epigraphy in ancient script), ed. Li Diaoyuan 1735. 38. Yang Shen, Taishi Sheng'an quanji, 24.9b. The song (24.8b–11a) alludes to Han Yu's poem on the stele and, in the lament about living “too late,” to Han Yu's song on the Stone Drums. Cf. Quan Tang shi, 340.3811. 39. Yang Shen, Taishi Sheng'an quanji, 47.17a. Cf. Zhu Xi, Yuanben Han ji kaoyi (Variora in Han Yu's

works, original edition), Siku quanshu, 1.22b–23a. 40. Wang Shizhen, Yanzhou shanren sibu gao (Draft of Wang Shizhen's works in four categories), 1577 Shijingtang ed., 134.1ab. On Wang, see Kenneth Hammond's essay in this volume. 41. See Ouyang Xiu, Jigu lu, preface. 42. Wang Wenlu, Huitang zhaiqi, 6ab. The dating discrepancy cannot be a simple misprint because 1078 is the first year of the Yuanfeng period, whose name Liu Chang cannot have known. The text is not in Liu's Gongshi ji (Works of Liu Chang). 43. Feng cites model-books from two collections, Song Shou's Cishu tang and Hu Shijiang's Zigu tang Wang Wenlu, Huitang Zhaiqi, 6b. There is no evidence that either of these books was real. The Cishu tang tie is listed as lost by Gao Lian (16th c.) but this mention may be a spurious by-product of Feng Fang's claim. Gao, Zun sheng ba jian (Eight prescriptions for the preservation of life) (Chengdu: Ba Shu shushe, 1992), 539. Zigu was indeed a studio name used by Song Shou, but there is no record of a sampler so entitled. Cf. Ma Duanlin (1245–1325), Wenxian tongkao (Comprehensive diplomatics) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), 238.1896a. Hu probably did write a work on epigraphy, however; see Yang Dianxun “Songdai jinshi yishumu” (Bibliography of lost Song dynasty epigraphic works), Kaogu (Beiping) 4 (1936): 211. 44. See my “Rogue Classicist,” chaps. 4–5. 45. On the three works and differences among them, see Liu Jingmin “Xuande yiqi tupu zhi tantao” (An investigation of the Illustrated register of vessels from the Xuande era), Lishi wenwu 6, no. 2 (1996): 44–50. Much of the content of the various versions overlaps, though only one contains illustrations (which may date from no earlier than 1900). See Rose Kerr, Later Chinese Bronzes (London: Bamboo Publishing, 1990), 18–19.Page 203 → 46. A recent catalog touches on some of the questions about the documents' genuineness but only in footnotes and without serious consideration of the evidence against the texts. Robert D. Mowry, China's Renaissance in Bronze: The Robert H. Clague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100–1900 (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1993), 83–93, 236. 47. The earliest external evidence for the existence of the texts comes from Hang Shijun (1696–1773). Hang, postface to Xuande yiqi pu in Daogu tang quanji (Complete works from the Hall of discoursing on antiquity), 1888 ed., 28.11a–12a. Soon afterward the Register was copied into the Imperial Library of the Four Treasuries (Siku quanshu), though from a manuscript different from the one Hang had seen. See Xuande dingyi pu in Siku quanshu, “tiyao.” 48. Paul Pelliot, “Le prétendu album de porcelaine de Hiang Yuan-pien,” T'oung Pao 2nd series, 32 (1936): 15–58, and Ulrich Hausmann, “Later Chinese Bronzes,” ed. Paul Moss, Documentary Chinese Works of Art in Scholars' Taste (London: Sydney L. Moss, 1983), 230–38. 49. Ming shilu, Xuande 13/3/bingxu, 39.5–6. 50. One annal of foreign relations records a decrease in trade with Thailand in the Xuande period. Mao Ruizheng (jinshi 1601), Huang Ming xiangxu lu (Record of the interpreters of the August Ming) (Yangzhou: Yangzhou gudian shudian, 1988 [1629]), 5.14a. 51. Ming shilu, Xuande 3/3/jiashen, 39.3. 52. There are further terminological anachronisms as well. In juan 6, the text describes vessels placed in the temple of Confucius, referring to him as the “Most Sagely Former Teacher” an epithet not coined until a hundred years later. The copper used is referred to as “foreign copper” (yangtong but the use of yang (“ocean,” “overseas”) to refer to imported goods did not begin until the late Ming. 53. Qing huidian shili (Institutions of the Qing, by event and precedent) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1991), 284b. 54. The 1913 dictionary Ciyuan (Fount of words) states that “it is now suspected to have been forged by Yang Shen of the Ming”; this claim was echoed in 1941 by Gu Jiegang (1893–1980), one of the most prominent historians of ancient China in the early twentieth century. See Gu, “Gudai Ba Shu yu Zhongyuan de guanxi shuo ji qi pipan” (An explanation and critique of the relations between ancient Ba-Shu and the central plain), Lun Ba Shu yu Zhongyuan de guanxi (On the relationship between Ba–Shu and the central plain) (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1981), 68. The eminent bibliographer Qu Wanli (1907–79) followed Qian Daxin (1728–1804) in treating it as a Song forgery. Qu, Xian Qian wenshi ziliao kaobian (Critique of pre-Qin literary and historical material) (Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1983), 281–82. Following different Qing epigraphers, Lu Xun (1881–1936) identified the perpetrators as “Daoists.” Lu,

Xun) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 6:87. The debate over the stele played itself out Page 204 →in European sinological circles as well, drawing in the great translator James Legge (1815–97), who blamed the Daoists, and the credulous Egyptologist Baron Bunsen. See Robson, Power of Place, 105–12 and Legge, The Shoo King (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), “Prolegomena,” 67–76. 55. The paleographer Cao Jinyan who participated in the 1986 survey, published his findings in a 1989 article; a revised version was published as Cao, “Goulou shan bei yanjiu” (Study of the Mt. Goulou stele), Niaochongshu tongkao (Complete study of bird and insect script) (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 1999), 217–32. See also Hunan sheng, Nanyue zhi, 94ff and Appendices. The oldest stone inscription in China may be the “Stone Drums” of the state of Qin, also from approximately the fifth century BCE. As with the Yu inscription, their preservation (both as heavily damaged stones and in paper rubbings and copies) is due in part to mistaken claims about their great antiquity. See Gilbert L. Mattos, The Stone Drums of Ch'in (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1988), and Martin Kern, The Stele Inscriptions of Ch'in Shih-huang: Text and Ritual in Early Chinese Imperial Representation (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2000). 56. Cao Shuming, Qin xi “Shou ming yu Tian, ji shou yong chang” zhi yanjiu (Studies on the Qin “receiving the mandate from heaven, long-enduring and prosperous” seal) (Singapore: Xingzhou guyu xuan yin wu youxian gongsi, 1958); Cao, Qin xi “Shou ming yu Tian, ji shou yong chang” zhi yanjiu (Studies on the Qin “receiving the mandate from heaven, long-enduring and prosperous” seal) (Taibei: Zhongguo wenhua xueyuan wenhua bowuguan, 1963); Cao, Qin xi kao (A study of the Qin imperial seals) (Hong Kong: Universal Book Co., 1966). 57. Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). See Christopher Wood's essay in this volume for a discussion of the place of this approach in the development of scholarship on forgery.

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PART 3 The Discovery of the World

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SEVEN Styles of Medical Antiquarianism Nancy G. Siraisi Between the fifteenth and the early seventeenth century, learned physicians quite frequently turned their attention to aspects of antiquity and, in some instances, types of sources more usually thought of as the province of antiquaries: social customs, institutions, and the evidence of material as well as textual remains. While the aspect of Renaissance medical antiquarianism that is most readily recognizable may be its association with humanistic erudition, I think it deserves to be emphasized that in this period there was often also a practical side to medical interest in antiquity. Reasons that some Renaissance physicians advanced for engaging with antiquarian studies included the idea that knowledge of ancient society and institutions would result in fuller understanding of valued ancient medical texts, or that ancient responses to health issues taught useful lessons, whether for imitation or avoidance. The pursuit of antiquarian learning by physicians even in fields unrelated to medicine might also be quite practical in the sense that it could be a route to professional advancement in particular social and cultural settings. Accordingly, in this brief essay I propose to consider a few examples that may shed some light on patterns of opportunity, methodology, and motivation in the involvement of physicians with antiquarianism.1 Yet it should be said at the outset that physicians expressed their interest in antiquity and antiquities in such diverse ways that the expression “medical antiquarianism” cannot be made to refer to any single, coherent, or well-defined methodology or body of knowledge. In the first place, a number of physicians addressed aspects of antiquity unconnected Page 208 →to medicine, health, or disease. Indeed, one of the most important early examples of the antiquarian impulse to record and depict the monuments of ancient Rome was the work of a physician, namely the famous collection of descriptions and drawings assembled in the 1460s by Giovanni Marcanova, professor of medicine at Padua and later Bologna.2 In the next century, works on antiquity by physicians include—among others—treatises on the Roman consuls and the ancient Batavi, as well as a whole series of writings on ancient peoples, places, and institutions by Wolfgang Lazius, imperial medicus et historicus, to whom I shall return shortly.3 Secondly, when one turns to medical books, the list of all the topics that sixteenth-century authors were likely to treat in ways that might in the broadest sense be considered antiquarian is too lengthy to enumerate, much less discuss, in a short article. To name only a few, such a list would include accounts of the origins of medicine, the history of particular medicinal ingredients or remedies, or of ancient outbreaks of disease, biographies of ancient physicians, accounts of ancient medical practices such as incubation, and descriptions of ancient diet and physical culture.4 Of course, the primary approach to ancient medicine remained the analysis and occasional critique of the standard ancient medical texts that still constituted the foundation of medical knowledge. Nevertheless, sixteenthcentury learned physicians were on the whole more likely than their thirteenth-to fifteenth-century predecessors to show interest in ancient cultural practices and social arrangements related to medicine and health and in so doing to take into consideration evidence from outside medicine. That evidence came predominantly from historical and literary texts but also on occasion from archaeological sources. In this respect, the Roman physician and professor of medicine Andrea Bacci was probably fairly typical. He assured readers of his work on ancient dining habits that his work was based on both literary and archaeological sources, although it seems clear that in this as in other instances the literary sources—described by Bacci as a “vast forest”—predominated.5 Thirdly, although both the participation of medical men in the broader humanistic culture and aspects of medicine itself (notably the inescapable presence of at least some measure of empiricism, narrative, and attention to particulars) undoubtedly combined to foster historical interests among them, those interests did not necessarily take the form of study of material culture, customs, and so on. Interest in the past might just as easily lead a physician to embark on writing history of one kind or another—as the very different examples of Dr. Hartman Page 209 →Schedel, author of the Nuremberg Chronicle, and Dr. Alessandro Benedetti, author of the Diaria de

bello carolino, among many others, testify. In some instances, of course, the same author might write both historical narrative and antiquarian studies, or might incorporate elements of both into the same work. No doubt personal preference ultimately determined whether a physician who engaged with antiquarianism chose a topic related to medicine or health, however broadly defined, or turned his attention to other aspects of antiquity. But it seems likely that external circumstances might also play a part, among them the demands of medical teaching and practice, the extent of interaction with antiquaries and collectors, and the wishes of powerful patrons (who, of course, were also often patients), and, probably, conventions of medical authorship. To illustrate this proposition, I shall first briefly consider some genres of medical writing that came to prominence in the sixteenth century and that seem especially characterized by openness to a variety of material, including accounts of antiquities. I shall then turn to the case of an individual who provides a remarkable—indeed an extreme—example of a physician who devoted his energies almost entirely to antiquarian and historical studies of topics unrelated to medicine or health. Although the career of Wolfgang Lazius (1501–65), professor of medicine and imperial medicus and historicus at Vienna, was undoubtedly idiosyncratic, it is also in many ways suggestive of the ways in which a particular environment of university and court might combine to shape and direct intellectual interests and opportunities.

Antiquity in Newer Types of Medical Writing The sixteenth century saw both the transformation of a traditional genre of medical writing—that of commentary—and the emergence of new ones in the form of collections described as medical epistles, variae lectiones, or observationes. Commentary on ancient medical texts flourished in the sixteenth century as it had in the Middle Ages, but Renaissance humanist medical commentators often changed the genre in significant ways. They frequently—though not always, and not necessarily consistently throughout an entire work—abandoned rigorous scholastic argumentation in favor of a more humanistic and/or philological approach. They also addressed a wider range of texts than their predecessors, owing both to access to more of the heritage of Greek medicine and to Page 210 →the willingness to turn attention to works that, even if previously available, did not form part of the usual academic curriculum in medicine and hence had not attracted commentary. Moreover, since commentary was always a relatively open genre, allowing considerable scope for the commentator to introduce current, or personal, concerns, Renaissance medical commentators at times found occasion to introduce discussion of ancient material culture, customs, and institutions. A salient example is provided by the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places, which, although already available in Latin translation in the Middle Ages, was apparently first commented in the sixteenth century. This treatise contains substantial ethnographic sections that include statements about the customs and political institutions of ancient peoples encapsulating profoundly influential assumptions about the role of environment in shaping physiology and psychology. Consequently, as I have noted elsewhere, the Hippocratic account of the Amazons inspired both an anatomical critique from Girolamo Cardano and a historical one from the Milanese physician Lodovico Settala, who compared the Hippocratic text with statements by Diodorus Siculus, Pompeius Trogus, and Greek scholiasts on Homer, Strabo, Plutarch, and others.6 The Florentine court physician Baccio Baldini raised—and resolved to his own satisfaction—the problem that ancient historical experience seemed to contradict the Hippocratic maxims that Asiatics were less warlike than Europeans and that subjects of kings were unwilling to fight.7 The newer types of medical literature included humanistically influenced miscellanies of various kinds. Collections of “medical epistles” usually consisted of a mixture of essays on various topics and advice for individual cases. Other collections bearing the title variae lectiones or something similar addressed selected passages in ancient medical and other authors. Physicians who included antiquarian discussions in their medical writings generally sought to explain ancient practices that could have some bearing on contemporary health care, but in these new formats, which encouraged diversity of content, the connection could be quite tenuous. Thus, Johann Lange (1485–1565) devoted many of his “medical epistles” to themes that he announced in his preface: the reform of medicine and surgery and the need to exclude pseudomedici from medical practice. But he also found room for essays in which he expatiated on the architecture, heating, and uses of ancient Roman public baths and described Roman palaestras and gymnastics, giving as his justification the need to understand the

recommendations about bathing, massage, and exercise of the ancient medical writers. Although he mentioned Page 211 →ruins in Rome, France, and Granada, his sources were literary not archaeological. His procedure was essentially to supplement medical sources with Vitruvius and Palladio as regards the construction, and Pliny, Athenaeus, Seneca, Plutarch, and others as regards the uses of the baths. His interest in Roman baths most likely dates from the second decade of the sixteenth century, when, like many others from the German-speaking lands, he traveled to Italy for his medical degree. But his essays on the subject are products of his later career, spent in Heidelberg as a court physician.8 Miscellanies of lectiones by learned physicians were usually primarily philological, but might also describe ancient customs, practices, and institutions. The prominent and prolific medical author Girolamo Mercuriale had pronounced antiquarian interests, numerous personal contacts with Roman antiquaries, and considerable familiarity with archaeological remains in Rome. His Variae lectiones (1570) are dedicated to textual criticism of passages in ancient medical texts in the light of other ancient authors, his own medical opinions, and, occasionally, archaeological evidence. Thus, he discussed the health hazards of water carried in lead pipes by way of an emendation of the Roman historian Velleius Paterculus and citations of Vitruvius, Columella, and Galen. But Mercuriale also alluded to the unhealthy complexion of workers in lead, and referred to the ruins of the aqueducts of Rome, which, he thought, showed that the Romans avoided using lead pipes for drinking water. In so doing, he was taking a distinctively medical approach to a topic that also interested other antiquaries. Alberti, Biondo, and Pirro Ligorio discussed finds of ancient lead pipes and the uses to which the Romans put them without any caveats about lead and drinking water.9 A connection with practical health concerns, and indeed with the many discussions and projects relating to water supply in sixteenth-century Rome, is readily evident in Mercuriale's discussion of lead pipes. By contrast the goal of the antiquarian material in the Observationes variae (1587) of Marsilio Cagnati, another Roman physician, seems to be chiefly the enlargement of medical erudition. Despite the title Observationes—more generally applied to collections of firsthand reports of individual medical cases or conditions—this work too consists mostly of philological emendation and explanation of ancient writers on medicine or natural history. Yet it includes essays on the history of silk, ancient Greek coinage, ancient maps, and correction of Patrizi's dating of Strabo.10 Cagnati justified the inclusion of the material on coinage by the assertion that knowledge of the ancient Greek monetary vocabulary was Page 212 →necessary to physicians because these terms were often found in works of Greek medical writers.

Wolfgang Lazius as Medical Antiquarian The career of Wolfgang Lazius in Vienna represents another type of intersection of medical learning with historical and antiquarian interests and activity. Lazius was a professor of medicine, whose milieu was that of a university under stress and a court in which interest in the past was profound and influential, but largely inspired by dynastic and genealogical motives.11 In Lazius's case, it is clear that his historical and antiquarian endeavors not only outweighed his medical concerns (in terms of written output, but also no doubt in terms of time and effort) but were also almost entirely unconnected with them in terms of subject matter. In his funeral oration for Lazius, delivered on June 22, 1565, Diomedes Cornarius described his deceased colleague in the medical faculty of the University of Vienna as “an outstanding historian…in the service of the Emperor Ferdinand, a very kindly colleague and friend to his fellow professors, and a practicing doctor of medicine.”12 If this remark is taken to indicate a descending order of importance, it accurately reflects the balance between these occupations in Lazius's written output, if not necessarily in his daily activities. The son of a physician and professor of medicine, Lazius graduated in medicine from the University of Ingolstadt. At the University of Vienna, where he was a professor for more than twenty years, he taught both medical theory and medical practice and for a time was responsible for anatomical demonstrations, finally becoming professor “primarius” and superintendant of the entire university.13 He also served many times as dean of the medical faculty, a position that included responsibility for the Acta, or minutes of the faculty.14 But throughout Lazius's professorial career the formerly flourishing university was undergoing a series of crises, in which the Turkish threat, a dramatic decline in student enrolment, the rapid spread of reformed religion in Vienna, and, in 1550, the

arrival of the Jesuits all played a part.15 Notwithstanding Cornarius's encomium to Lazius's collegiality with fellow faculty members, his strong support of the Catholic cause involved him in bitter disputes with some of them (Lazius certainly does not fit the pattern of ecumenism that has sometimes been claimed for the court of Ferdinand I).16 Relatively little is known of his medical practice, but if Diomedes Cornarius is to be believed, he treated “many Page 213 →patients.”17 He also served as a military doctor during a campaign against the Turks in Hungary, inspected a hospital, was appointed Ferdinand's personal physician, and briefly held the position of magister sanitatis of Vienna during a plague outbreak.18 Despite his protracted involvement in medical studies, teaching, and practice, Lazius left almost no medical writings (I have found one recipe for a medicine “for phlegm” and one oration on the dignity and history of medicine).19 Instead, he fulfilled his responsibilities—and earned an additional salary20—as imperial historicus by copious production of historical, antiquarian, and religious works.21 Lazius was by no means the only physician to receive a similar appointment. Among other examples is Hadrianus Junius (1511–75), who was commissioned by the States of Holland to write the history of the Batavi mentioned earlier. Junius, the author of numerous humanistic and a few medical works, was a graduate in medicine from the University of Bologna and a successful medical practitioner who numbered William of Orange among his patients.22 Lazius's historical writings have received, at best, mixed reviews, though his tireless energy and the importance he attached to archaeological, archival, and medieval manuscript sources inspire some respect. In addition to a substantial output of printed books, to which I shall return in a moment, he left behind him a mass of manuscript material intended to form part of a vast, never-finished history of Austria and neighboring lands from ancient times to the reign of Maximilian II. As this project suggests, Lazius's historical interests were by no means confined to the ancient past or to antiquarian studies of material culture, customs, institutions and so on. He also wrote extensive narrative histories of the recent past, although these are not part of my topic here. His contributions to contemporary history included accounts of the military campaign in which he himself served and of the triple coronation of Maximilian II.23 Moreover, like other northern humanists—and other antiquarians—he also devoted attention to the Middle Ages. His most enduring historical contribution was indeed probably the important collection of medieval manuscripts that he brought back to Vienna from travels to monasteries throughout Austria and parts of southern Germany.24 Yet I think one can argue that the subjects of Lazius's completed and published works reveal his two central preoccupations. One was the geography and chorography of Austria and the genealogies of Austrian noble families.25 The other was the ancient past of the Hapsburg lands: the origins of the city of Vienna, the government and institutions of the Romans in their Danubian provinces, and the origins and migrations of Page 214 →the Germanic and other invaders of these parts of the Roman Empire.26 Lazius approached this last set of topics in an undoubtedly antiquarian spirit. In addition to combing literary sources, he devoted much—if not always successful—effort to the interpretation of archaeological evidence from inscriptions and coins. He collected Roman inscriptions systematically (physically removing a number of gravestones and inscribed tablets to the garden of his house)27 and filled his works with transcriptions of them. In his capacity as curator of the Emperor Ferdinand's medals (a position he held in addition to that of imperial historicus) he published a study of selected items from the imperial collection. As Howard Louthan has noted, Lazius's numismatic work was harshly criticized in his own day.28 Even more implausible than some of his numismatic assertions was his claim to have found Hebrew inscriptions in a suburb of Vienna showing that the ancient Israelites had established themselves there shortly after the Flood.29 In Lazius's prolific writings, it is hard indeed to find signs of the kind of exploration of ancient institutions or customs in the light of medical or health concerns that is characteristic of some other medical antiquaries elsewhere. For reasons of space, one brief comparison must suffice, namely of the way Lazius and the Roman physician Marsilio Cagnati treated the subject of ancient clothing. Lazius considered clothing in some detail in two contexts. In what may be his most substantial contribution to the study of antiquity, a work on Roman civil and military institutions and customs in provinciis exteris, he included a chapter de vestimentis in which he provided a straightforward list and explanation of various items of Roman dress and weaponry. In his work on the migrations of the Germanic tribes he made up for the lack of archaeological source material by providing highly

imaginative illustrations of the dress of the early peoples based on descriptions in ancient writers that he expounded at some length.30 In neither case does he appear to have considered dress in relation to the care of the body or health. Even the statements of ancient authors about the early Germans' near-nudity, hardiness in the face of cold, and habit of bathing in rivers, which greatly exercised Philip Clüver and Hermann Conring in the next century, received only brief and noncommittal mention from Lazius.31 By contrast, Cagnati's allusion to ancient clothing is much slighter, but it occurs in the context of a work on preservation of health. In the course of discussing the ancient Roman propensity for frequent washing (the baths again), Cagnati remarked that the antiquary Onofrio Panvinio had pointed out that the toga-wearing Romans went about with bare arms and legs. This explanation Page 215 →led Cagnati to realize that so much exposure of the body rendered frequent washing necessary.32 With Lazius, then, we encounter an extreme example of a physician and professor of medicine whose engagement with antiquity seems to involve a turn away from, rather than being integrated with, medical learning and natural knowledge. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his disputes over religion with colleagues in the arts and medical faculties may have been partly responsible, although Lazius had already begun collecting historical material and antiquities early in his career before his involvement in these disputes.33 Clearly the pull and rewards of court patronage played a part. Relations with other humanist scholars of antiquity, most notably Beatus Rhenanus, with whom he corresponded, may also have helped to direct his interests.34 But in fact Lazius was only the most prolific and singleminded of a succession of humanist professors of medicine in sixteenth-century Vienna whose primary intellectual orientation seems to have been not toward medical or natural knowledge but toward civil history and antiquities and who were rewarded by court patronage. Of course, such men were never the only professors of medicine and very far from the only physicians with court appointments. On the contrary, the Vienna and court of Maximilian II are celebrated for the presence and activities of some of the best-known and most important medical and natural history authors of the day—Crato of Krafftheim, Mattioli, Clusius, and Rembert Dodoens.35 Nevertheless, in the university faculty of medicine, Lazius was preceded by the physician, historian, poet, and diplomat Johannes Cuspinianus, author of works on the Roman consuls and caesars. As court historicus he was followed by the physician and historian of Hungary Johannes Sambucus. Unlike Lazius, however, both these men also left some medical works.36 Finally, the treatment of antiquity in new genres of medical writing, both by physicians concerned to a greater or lesser extent with public health and by Lazius, suggest some some general conclusions about the appeal of medical antiquarianism to both physicians and their patrons and/or readers. In general, the interest of humanistically educated physicians in institutions, customs, and material remains of antiquity is not hard to explain. Medicine was a specialized discipline with its own texts and techniques; but university medical education also entailed exposure to the arts curriculum and to intellectual trends broadly diffused throughout humanistic culture. And although at least some parts of medicine traditionally claimed association with natural philosophy, medicine and history too had features in common, in that examples, Page 216 →narrative, and knowledge of particulars were essential to both. Equally, the practice of medicine and the study of antiquities both called for attention to physical evidence, which was habitually read in the light of ancient texts. Furthermore, changes beginning in the fifteenth century greatly enlarged the role and prestige within medicine itself of observation, description, and narrative. In some contexts, moreover, antiquarian learning seems likely to have been perceived as both relevant to medicine and practically useful. Efforts to understand the way in which statements of ancient physicians were conditioned by the customs and institutions of their own time bear some resemblance to better-known endeavors of medical humanists—for example in anatomy—to explore and occasionally critique all ancient medical texts as fully as possible. The ancient past was not essential for medicine in the way that knowledge of ancient celestial events was essential for astronomy. Yet ancient experience of disease or solutions to particular technical problems of urban life might nonetheless seem to offer the possibility of information useful for modern conditions. At the same time, the antiquarianism of physicians was by no means confined to medically relevant topics. Patterns of local antiquarian culture and the readiness of patrons to sponsor works by physicians on aspects of antiquity wholly unrelated to medicine also suggest a widespread acceptance of humanistic medical education as general

preparation for any kind of historical work. But both types of involvement of physicians with antiquity seem to me to reveal essential characteristics of sixteenth-century medical learning, the interaction of medicine with broader humanistic culture, and, often, the influence on medical men of specific intellectual circles, patrons, and local circumstances.

NOTES 1. For the full exposition of this theme see Siraisi, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 2. For Marcanova's career see Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 392–93. Several manuscripts of his Collectio antiquitatum, which may draw on the work of Ciriaco d'Ancona, are extant; see Jonathan J. G. Alexander, ed., The Painted Page: Italian Renaissance Book Illumination 1450–1550 (Munich and New York: Prestel, 1994), 143–45, nn. 66–67; see also Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 120–26. The digitized version of the Garrett manuscript at Page 217 →Princeton can be seen at http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/garrett /garrett_ms_158.final.pdf. 3. Johannes Cuspinianus, De consulibus Romanorum commentarii, ex optimis vetustissimisque authoribus collecti (Basel [1553]); Hadrianus Junius, Batavia: In qua praeter gentis et insulae antiquitatem originem, decora, mores, aliaque ad eam historiam pertinentia, declaratur quae fuerit vetus Batavia…quae item genuina inclytae Francorum nationis fuerit sedes (Leiden, 1588). Regarding Lazius's works, see below. Lazius habitually identified himself as medicus et historicus on the title pages of his works. See, for example, Wolfgang Lazius, De gentium aliquot migrationibus, sedibus fixis, reliquiis, linguarumque initiis et immutationibus ac dialecticis, Libri XI I…Autore Uuolfanggo Lazio Viennensi Austriaco Medico et invictissimi Rom. Regis Ferdinandi Historico (Basel, 1557). 4. Many examples could be listed in each category, but I make no attempt to provide citations here. Some discussions of the origins of medicine and efforts to identify “true” versions of medicines mentioned by ancient authors are noted in Nancy G. Siraisi, “In Search of the Origins of Medicine: Egyptian Medicine and Paduan Physicians,” in Generation and Degeneration, ed. Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 235–61. 5. Andrea Bacci, De naturali vinorum historia de vinis Italiae et de conviviis anti-quorum libri septem… (Rome, 1596), book 4, preface, 129: “quare primum a communi vitae consuetudine illorum temporum, et quibus actionibus homo Romanus dispensaret diei horas, aut comederent.” Ibid., book 4, p. 144: “duo habebimus demonstrationum genera, primum ex auctoritatibus antiquorum, alterum vero ex variorum marmorum sepulchralium, antiquorumque praesertim in urbe Roma inspectione.” However, it seems likely that he may have drawn some of his information from Fulvio Orsini's very learned Appendix to Pedro Chacon, De Triclinio Romano (Rome, 1588). On Bacci, see M. Crespi, “Bacci, Andrea,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 5 (Rome, 1963), 29–30; Leone Caetani, Saggio di un dizionario bio-bibliografico italiano (Rome, 1924), cols. 40–43; G. Marini, Degli archiatri pontifici (Rome, 1784), 1:464, and in the supplement to P. Mandosius, 13–16; Filippo Maria Renazzi, Storia dell'Università degli studi di Roma, 2 (Rome, 1804), 2:195; I maestri della Sapienza di Roma dal 1514 al 1787: I rotuli e altre fonti, ed. Emanuele Conte (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano, 1991), 2:861. 6. On the Latin version of Airs, Waters, Places available in western Europe in the Middle Ages, see Pearl Kibre, Hippocrates latinus (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 25–28. Regarding Renaissance commentaries on that work, see Nancy G. Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 126–30, 143–44; idem, “Anatomizing the Past,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 13–15. 7. Baccio Baldini (d. 1585), In librum Hyppocratis de aquis, aere, et locis commentaria (Florence, 1586), 205–6. 8. Johann Lange, Epistolarum medicinalium volumen tripartitum (Frankfurt, 1589), bk. 1, preface, 1–9, and letters, 50–51, “De veteri balnearum fabrica et usu,” and “De veteri palaestrae, et in ea balnearum structura, ac olei et Page 218 →strigmentorum usu,” 247–66. Book 1 of this collection was first published in 1554; it

was augmented with Book 2 in an edition of 1560. The complete edition in three books appeared posthumously in 1589 and was reissued in 1605. On Lange (1485–1565) and his epistles, see Vivian Nutton, “John Caius und Johannes Lange: medizinischer Humanismus zur Zeit Vesals,” NTM 21 (1984): 81–87, and idem, “Humanist Surgery,” The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. A. Wear, R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie (Cambridge, 1985), 75–99, at 91–96. 9. Girolamo Mercuriale, Variarum lectionum libri quatuor. In quibus complurium, maximeque medicinae scriptorum infinita paene loca vel corrupta restituuntur, vel obscura declarantur (Venice, 1570), 2.9, ff. 42v–43v, “De aquarum per plumbum ductarum pravitate, et quod Romae ex fontibus potarent, locus Paterculi emendatus.” Subsequent expanded editions of this collection were published in Basel, 1576 (in five books), Paris, 1585 (in six books), and Venice, 1588 (in six books). For Ligorio's views on lead pipes [he thought the Romans had water in lead pipes carried to every house], see Robert W. Gaston, “Ligorio on Rivers and Fountains: Prolegomena to a Study of Naples XIII. B. 9,” in Pirro Ligorio: Artist and Antiquarian, ed. Robert W. Gaston (Milan, 1988), 174–75. For Mercuriale's biography, see Italo Paoletti, Girolamo Mercuriale e il suo tempo (Lanciano, 1963). For the fifteenth-century discussions of lead pipes, see Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 250 and references there cited. 10. Marsilio Cagnati, Variarum observationum libri quatuor (Rome, 1587), 3.20, 243–59 (Patrizi); 4.5, 268–70 (maps); 4.6, 270–60 [error for 276] (coins); 4.11, 294–309 (silk). On collections of observationes in the sense of accounts of individual medical cases or conditions, see Gianna Pomata, “‘Observatio’ ovvero ‘historia.’ Note su empirismo e storia in età moderna,” Quaderni storici 31 (1996): 173–98. 11. On the Habsburg interest in genealogy, see Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 12. Diomedes Cornarius, Oratio in funere magnifici et clarissimi viri D. doctoris Wolfgangi Lazii Viennensis, Sacrae Caesaris Maiestatis Consiliarii, et Historici, etc. (Vienna, 1565), 11: “Caesarea Maiestas patris sui invicitissimi Ferdinandi Caesaris pie defuncti Historicum eximium, et Consiliarium fidelissimum: Professores Collegam et amicum dulcissimum: Artis Medicae studiosi salutaris huius artis Doctorem Practicum.” The oration is included in Diomedes Cornarius, Consiliorum medicinalium habitorum in consultationibus à clarissimis atque expertissimis, apud diversos aegrotos, partim defunctis, partim adhuc superstitibus medicis, tractatus (Leipzig, 1599), with separate pagination. 13. On Lazius's biography and bibliography, see, in addition to Cornarius (as in the last note), C. F. F. von Kauz (Khautz), Versuch einer Geschichte der Oesterreichischen Gelehrten (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1755), 143–83; Joseph Aschbach, Geschichte der Wiener Universität im ersten Jahrhunderte ihres Bestehens, vol. 3, Die Wiener Universität und ihre Gelehrten 1520 bis 1565 (Vienna, 1888; Page 219 →reprint Gregg Press, 1967), 204–33; Anton Mayer, Geschichte der Stadt Wien (Vienna, 1911), 4:5–16; Neue deutsche Biographie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1985), 14:14–15. 14. See Karl Schrauf, ed., Acta facultatis medicae universitatis Vindobonensis (6 vols., Vienna, 1894–1912), vols. 3 and 4, for many entries concerning Wolfgang Lazius between the years 1530 (Acta 3:176) and 1565 (4:68: notice of his death). Other entries concern his father, Simon Latz or Lazius, who also taught at Vienna. 15. On the history of the University of Vienna between the 1520s and 1560s and the efforts of the Emperor Ferdinand I to introduce academic reforms and suppress religious dissent see, in addition to the work of Aschbach cited in note 13 above, Rudolf Kink, Geschichte der kaiserlichen Universität zu Wien (2 vols., Vienna, 1854), 1:231–308, and, for Ferdinand's reform edicts, 2:331–39, 346–60, 373–401, nn. 54, 58, 62; Thomas Maisel, “Universitätsbesuch und Studium. Zur Wiener Artistenfakultät im frühen 16.Jahrhundert,” Österreichische Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Mitteilungen 15 (1995): 1–12, and Kurt Mühlberger, “Zwischen Reform und Tradition: Die Universität Wien in der Zeit ds RenaissanceHumanismus und der Reformation,” ibid., 13–42. 16. See Ernst Trenkler, “Wolfgang Lazius, Humanist und Buchsammler,” Biblos 27 (1978): 186–203, at 187, and Mayer, Geschichte der Stadt Wien, 4:7. 17. Cornarius, Oratio, 3: “et pacis, et belli tempore de multis aegrotis sua scientia, fidelitate et benevolentia meritus.” 18. Acta facultatis medicae 3:266, 1554 (visitation of hospital); Neue deutsche Biographie 14:14 (personal physician to Ferdinand, magister sanitatis). Lazius refers to his own participation as an army doctor in his

account of Ferdinand's campaign against the Turks in Hungary, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek cod. 7688, ff. 125–39. 19. ÖNB cod. 11229, Medical miscellany; at end miscellaneous recipes, some attributed to Vienna MDs; 570r Morselli de ordinatione D D Lazii pro phlegmate (conceivably some other anonymous recipes on the same folio may also be by Lazius). ÖNB cod. 9472, ff. 15r–29r, De artis medicae praestantia et antiquitate declamatio Wolfgangi Lazii Vienn medici Caesaris. 20. Mayer, Geschichte der Stadt Wien, 4:7, notes that his salary as court historian was 200 guilders per year. 21. I make no attempt here to discuss Lazius's religious writings, editions of religious or liturgical texts, or interest in prophecy and apocalypticism, but on these aspects of his work see Alastair Hamilton, The Apocryphal Apocalypse: The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 103–7 (I owe this reference to Anthony Grafton); and Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 69–72. 22. On Junius (1511–75), see Petrus Junius, Hadriani Junii Vita in Hadrianus Junius, Epistolae, Quibus accedit Ejusdem Vita et Oratio de Artium liberalium dignitate; Nunquam antea edita (Dordrecht, MDLII [?1652], *3r–[8v]; Abraham Jacob van der Aa, Biographisch Woordenboek der Nederlanden, ed. K. R. J. van Page 220 →Harderwijk and C. D. J. Schotel (Amsterdam: B. M. Israel, 1969), 73–75; D. J. Gordon, “‘Veritas filia temporis’: Hadrianus Junius and Geoffrey Whitney,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3 (1939–40): 228–40. 23. Lazius's numerous manuscripts relating to this project remain in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. They are described in Josef Chmel, Die Handschriften der K. K. Hofbibliothek in Wien, im interesse der Geschichte, besonders der österreichischen (Vienna, 1840–41), 658–89. The relation of individual manuscripts to the larger project of which they form a part, namely Lazius's work on Austrian history, initially entitled Commentarii and later Decades, is explicated in Michael Mayr, Wolfgang Lazius als Geschichtschreiber Österriches: Ein Beitrag zur Historiographie des 16. Jahrhunderts (Innsbruck, 1894), 20–72. Regarding Lazius's account of the campaign in which he served himself, see note 18 above and Mayr, Wolfgang Lazius, 49–51. ÖNB cod. 7688, f. 258–92 and cod. 7995 contain different versions of Lazius's account of Maximilian II's coronation; on these MSS. see Mayr, 61. 24. For these journeys, on which Lazius traveled with an imperial letter of authorization, and the manuscripts he collected (sometimes over the objections of their owners), see Trenkler, “Wolfgang Lazius”; Hermann Menhardt, “Die Kärntner Bibliotheksreise des Wolfgang Lazius 1549,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte und Kulturgeschichte Kärntens: Festschrift für Dr. Martin Wutte zum 60. Geburtstag (Klagenfurt, 1936), 100–112; and Josef Stummvoll, Geschichte der Österreichische Nationalbibliothek: Erster Teil Die Hofbibliothek (1368–1922) (Vienna: Georg Prachner Verlag, 1968), 62–67. After Lazius's death, his manuscripts came into the possession of the library. 25. Two principal examples of his work in these areas, which I do not discuss further here, are Wolfgang Lazius, Typi chorographici Provinciarum Austriae cum explicatione earundem pro Commentaria Rerum Austricarum… (Vienna, 1561), with many maps, reissued as Wolfgang Lazius, Austria: Vienna, 1561, intro. Ernst Bernleithner (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1972), and Wolfgang Lazius, Commentariorum in Genealogiam Austriacam libri duo (Basileae, 1564). I have not seen the second of these works. Much of his Vienna Austriae and of the later books of his De gentium aliquot migrationibus (see next note) are also devoted to genealogy of Austrian noble families. 26. His three principal published works on these subjects are Vienna Austriae: Rerum Viennensium Commentarii in Quatuor Libros distincti, in quibus celeberrimae illius Austriae civitatis exordia, vetustas, nobilitas, magistratus, familiae que, ad plenum (quod aiunt) explicuntur (Basel, 1546); Commentariorum Reipubl. Romanae illius, in exteris provinciis, bello acquisitis, constitutae libri duodecim: in quibus limitum omnium restitutiones, praetoria, magistratus, munia tam militarca quam civilia,…explicantur (Basel, 1551) (I have consulted the second edition, Reipublicae Romanae in exteris provinciis, bello acquisitis, constitutae, commentariorum Libri duodecim [Frankfurt, 1598]; and De gentium aliquot migrationibus, sedibus fixis, reliquiis, linguarumque initiis et immutationibus ac dialectis, libri XII (Basel, 1557) (I have also consulted De gentium aliquot migrationibvs, sedibus fixis, reliquiis, linguarumque initiis & immutationibus ac dialectis, libri XII [Frankfurt, 1600]). 27. Trenkler, “Wolfgang Lazius,” 191–93.Page 221 →

28. Howard Louthan, The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27–29. 29. Lazius, De gentium aliquot migrationibus (Frankfurt, 1600), 14–19; also referred to in idem, Vienna Austriae (Basel, 1546), 6. See Anthony Grafton “From De die natali to De emendatione temporum: The Origins and Setting of Scaliger's Chronology,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985): 125–26. 30. Wolfgang Lazius, Reipublicae Romanae in exteris provinciis, bello acquisitis, constitutae, commentariorum Libri duodecim (Frankfurt, 1598), bk. 8, De vestimentis atque armaturis eius populi omnis generis, pp. 695–745; idem, De gentium aliquot migrationibus (Frankfurt, 1600). Each of the twelve internal books of the latter work opens with an illustration representing a member of a different early people, in most instances followed by several pages of explicatio. The explicationes following the illustrations to books 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, and 12 include a substantial paragraph on dress. 31. Ibid., bk. 8, 353–54. The nudity of the ancient Germans was strikingly depicted in the illustrations to Philip Clüver, Germaniae antiquae libri tres (Leiden, 1631) (first published in 1616). Conring objected to the extent of the nudity supposed by Clüver; see Hermann Conring, De habitus corporum Germanicorum antiqui ac novi causis: liber singularis: Editio tertia prioribus multum auctior (Helmstedt, 1666) (first published 1645), 89. On Clüver's illustrations and their influence, see H. van de Waal, Drie eeuwen vaderlandsche Geschied-Uitbeelding 1580–1800 (S-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 178–203, with English summary at 326–28, and Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, The Mammoth and the Mouse: Microhistory and Morphology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 164–84. 32. Marsilio Cagnati, De sanitate tuenda libri duo. Primus de continentia, alter de arte gymnastica (Padua, 1605), ff. 95v–96r. 33. Trenkler, “Wolfgang Lazius,” 187, makes the suggestion, but also notes that Lazius was collecting historical materials from 1541. 34. For Lazius's letter to Beatus Rhenanus and the latter's reply see Adalbert Horowitz and Karl Hartfelder, eds., Briefwechsel des Beatus Rhenanus (Leipzig, 1886), 540–44 n. 401 and 564–68 n. 423. 35. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 36. On Cuspinianus, see Hans Ankwicz-Kleehoven, Der Wiener Humanist Johannes Cuspinian Gelehrter und Diplomat zur Zeit Kaiser Maximilians I (Gräz-Cologne: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1959); on Sambucus, Hans Gerstinger, ed., Die Briefe des Johannes Sambucus (Gräz: Bohlau, 1968),with introduction and Sambucus's biography at 11–21.

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EIGHT Therapy and Antiquity in Late Imperial China Nathan Sivin

Basic Comparisons By the era of humanism in Europe, the universities had made medicine a profession. When historians write about the antiquarian interests of physicians in Vienna or Venice, we know whom they mean. That leads to the most fundamental of all possible comparisons with China. When its historians write about what physicians thought about or did, we can never be sure whom they mean unless they tell us. In these remarks I will consider several fundamental similarities and differences between European and Chinese medicine, concentrating on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—in China, the late Ming and early Qing eras. In Greek and Roman antiquity, a doctor was anyone who practiced medicine. In the early middle ages, in almost all of Europe, a handful of ancient therapeutic classics survived in the libraries of religious orders, where few studied and applied them; most medical practitioners had no access to them, and little book learning of any kind. Medicine became a profession only after universities evolved into institutions that granted generally accepted degrees and licenses. The three standard graduate faculties—law, medicine, and theology—sat atop the faculty of philosophy or arts, which provided all graduates with a grounding in classics, mathematics, astronomy, and other indispensable components of a general education. Page 223 → Given this shared liberal foundation and the concern of all three professions with the classical past, it is not surprising that the boundaries between them were far from tight. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), a Pole, did what today would be called his undergraduate work in astronomy and astrology. There was no graduate degree in study of the sky; he studied law and medicine at Padua, and received from Ferrara the doctorate of canon law that he needed for his career as a church administrator. To be a physician meant not that he practiced (although he was a medical consultant to his uncle, the bishop who sponsored his career), but that he had learned his medical classics at a university.1 Physicians were only a small and statistically negligible component of the health care systems of Europe. They competed with surgeons and apothecaries, who eventually provided roughly similar ranges of therapy to overlapping clienteles. All three were a minority in societies in which (as in the rest of the world) the rural majority and the urban poor had access only to religious and other varieties of popular healing. Even in the cities, where educated physicians formed guilds and sometimes sought monopolies of therapy, they were actually too few to deliver it to all those they claimed as their clientele. This diversity of practitioners remained the norm even in the seventeenth century. Of the classically educated few, many who did not need the income did not practice; what earned the esteem of colleagues was more often their command of Galen than the frequency of their cures. To sum up, in many parts of Europe physicians were gentlemen, members of a learned profession for which clinical practice was optional. The most salient difference was that in China before modern times, medical practitioners were not members of a profession—a characteristic that historians of medicine rarely comment on, but that is hardly trivial. That is, I readily admit, a debatable finding. The historians and sociologists who study occupations rely on a great many incongruous definitions of “profession.” Most of these are of little or no use in studying long ranges of the past. The word originally referred to the vows taken on entering a religious order.2 Learned authors use it to mean any calling or source of income (as in “the most ancient profession”), any vocational group that shares a code of ethics, any vocation in which one professes a skill, any form of livelihood that carries high social status, and so on.

Religious vows are too narrow a criterion, and most of the alternatives are extremely vague and broad. Most scholars of China simply use “profession” Page 224 →as a synonym of “occupation.” But the first word always implies a choice. A nightsoil collector or a pimp makes a living, more or less. If that is all “profession” means, we have no word to express the enormous difference in social standing and authority between these two jobs and those of a judge and a physician, and we are likely to overlook great differences between subcultures. I have therefore found useful the criteria proposed by the incisive sociologist Eliot Freidson: a profession is an occupational group that to a large extent sets its own criteria for who joins it and who it ejects, and controls the remuneration of its members.3 These exceptional privileges and the prestige connected with them depend, of course, on the consent of the society it serves. There was no profession by these criteria in imperial China, and there still is none. Nor was there before 1950 even a single occupational group. Physicians of the small literate office-holding class never saw themselves as part of a larger group that included priestly ritual healers, sellers of materia medica, therapists of various kinds who might or might not be able to read and write, folk wonderworkers, and so on. The spectrum of therapy there, from magical to religious to classical, was as broad as in Europe. On the other hand, there was no Chinese counterpart to Greek antiquity's dominion of philosophy over more specialized studies. There was nothing like the medieval European university system built on philosophy as a common foundation for the professions. In China medical practitioners drew on abstract metaphysical conceptions as generously as those of other cultures did, but remained institutionally and therefore intellectually autonomous. Such concepts as yin-yang and the five phases (wuxing ) that organized its knowledge developed out of the everyday language in which they had originated. Medicine simply elaborated its categories of analysis in different ways than in ethics or physics. The education of the small literate elite had a common basis in the study of whatever classics at a given time formed the basis of orthodoxy and governmental examination. For more than a millennium, passing the civil service examinations to qualify for government appointment remained the great goal for sons of the upper class.4 There were indeed medical examinations from 734 on,5 but for reasons I will take up shortly, they never set the standard for private practice. To sum up, before the twentieth century, Chinese physicians educated in the classical art did not form associations that could regulate practice or set fees. The organizations that came into being in the 1920's to prevent the abolition of classical Page 225 →medicine did not gain those powers; and since 1949, the state has regulated all collectivities except the Communist Party. In neither what it calls “Traditional Chinese Medicine” nor biomedicine can practitioners set standards or remuneration.

The Professional Status of Medicine From roughly the thirteenth century on, shrinking access to bureaucratic posts made medicine an acceptable and sometimes even a desirable alternative for sons of the elite. But China had no institution similar to the university to certify those educated in the medical classics and separate them from the ritual, religious, empirical, and other curers on whom the Chinese public largely depended to maintain and restore health. There was no social basis for making common cause, or associations to provide a widely accepted identity, so doctors had to compete with each other.6 Elite practitioners who did very well did not organize guilds or enforce qualifications. In the absence of institutions, they bid for authority instead by denouncing the less successful, the less learned, and those with lower status, as quacks. Nevertheless, the society offered much opportunity for mobility. Those below them on the career ladder sought to speed their own climb by denigrating those a few rungs below themselves. In that way they hoped to convince potential clients that they themselves were not charlatans. Among accredited physicians in most European states, polite competition was more or less the norm; in China rivalry was rife and open, not at all conducive to cooperation. And infighting among literate practitioners was a minor strain compared with the inevitable attacks on every other kind of therapist selling skills in the medical marketplace. It would be naive to argue that the lack of a medical profession led to health care of lower quality at the eastern than at the western end of Eurasia. To the contrary, in many parts of Europe the proclivity in late antiquity for bleeding patients and dosing them with strong purgatives remained dominant well into the nineteenth century precisely because of those strong institutions. From the sixteenth century on, those institutions also kept the focus of the learned on anatomy—which had little clinical use before 1800—with less concern for the study of somatic

processes than in China, where physicians consistently practiced. Still, without large bodies of reliable statistics from centuries ago, we have no Page 226 →idea at all whether the fairly clear professional status of universitybased medicine in the West, or the absence of a counterpart in the East, led to more effective therapy.

Physicians and Literati On the other hand, this difference in social standing led to quite different relationships in Europe and China between physicians and other learned people, as Kenneth Hammond's contribution to this volume makes clear. No Chinese doctor graduated from a faculty of medicine.7 Whether he was acceptable to gentry patients depended on his ancestry and on the extent of his nonmedical education. It particularly depended mainly on whether he had passed at least the lowest civil service examination. Doing so made him, in the eyes of the law, no longer a commoner. In a society centered on the imperial administration—where there was no independent provincial or local government, and little private patronage—one might expect that medical officials controlled, or at least set, medical trends. That was far from the case. Although, like other officials, they were chosen by examinations, in the period we are considering they were eligible to take them only if they were the offspring of medical officials. Members of the palace medical service ranked too low in the civil service to have much status in officialdom or in society at large.8 The physicians most admired among the elite were not necessarily those who knew the canonical Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor best,9 those who worked hardest at their art, or those who were most famous for their cures. Two models stood out in late imperial China. One was the successful court figure famed in the first instance for his poetry, classical erudition, or statecraft, who practiced medicine when he felt like it, and never—openly—for money. In other words, the ideal of amateurism that ruled among literati in the last millennium of imperial China reigned with respect to medicine as well. The second paradigm was the local practitioner famous for correct behavior, dedication to family and lineage, and ability to attract patients of high rank. Personifying these gentlemanly traits was the key to the rise of one medical family after another.10 Through most of history physicians who learned from their father or grandfather, often with little or no additional education, made up the undistinguished bottom and middle layers, but more successful Page 227 →families also tended to build on their reputations by training their offspring in medicine.11 There were too many kinds of physician to choose a typical one. Consider the two most influential medical authors of the early seventeenth century, Wang Kentang (c. 1552–1638) and Zhang Jiebin (1563–1640). Zhang came of a distinguished military family (a category that enjoyed much less prestige than civil appointees). When he accompanied his father to the capital at the age of thirteen he studied medicine, but spent his youth in the retinues of military commanders. After finishing that phase of his life, he quickly made a stellar clinical reputation in the capital and took up practice in his native lower Yangzi River region, the wealthiest part of China. His Classified Canon (Lei jing 1624) and its sequels took the Inner Canon, the founding textual corpus of the elite tradition, rearranged it topically, reconciled its many internal contradictions, and lucidly explained its contents. His Complete Writings (Jingyue quan shu 1636 or 1637, first printed 1700) amply covered therapy for the main medical disorders of the time, with considerable innovation. Wang Kentang, like his father and grandfather, passed the highest civil service examination. He began a career of the kind that often led to high office but, when the prevalent political intrigue interrupted his career for some time, practiced medicine. His Water Level and Line Marker [that is, standards] of Diagnosis and Therapy for the Six Disciplines (Liuke zhengzhi zhunsheng 1608) became the handbook of choice for generations of students; his anthology The Main Artery of the Orthodox Medical Tradition, a Complete Collection (Yi tong zheng mai quan shu 1601) was a largely successful attempt to define a standard series of classics from antiquity to the midfifteenth century. Unlike Zhang, Wang was a superbly educated polymath. He published on history, mathematical astronomy, philosophic classics, music theory, Ch'an Buddhism, and calligraphy, among other topics. In uniting the strengths of Wang Shizhen in aesthetic scholarship and those of Li Shizhen in medical compilation (see Kenneth Hammond's essay), he represented the most elevated stratum of literati physicians devoted to the study of

antiquity. Wang's detour into medicine was due to the turmoil of his time, which soon became much worse. A couple of generations later, literati doctors often had careers that made his seem idyllic. Fu Shan (c. 1606–84) was not only an outstanding medical author,12 but one of the most exceptional painters and calligraphers of his Page 228 →time. But his life was cut in half by the Manchu invasion that in 1644 ended the Ming dynasty. Like many others in his time, he chose to follow the principle that a member of the scholar-official class who grew up in one dynasty should not serve its successor—even though Fu had suffered considerably from the corruption endemic in the old regime. He nearly killed himself to avoid recognition of his talent by the new government, and lived in abject poverty, supporting himself and his son in large part by peddling medicines from a pushcart.13 Once the Manchus’ Qing dynasty had settled in, it was as easy as in the sixteenth century to find examples of classical, literary, and medical eminence combined in one person. One figure who comes readily to mind is Jiao Xun (1763–1820), best known as a philosopher and classicist, but also remembered for his writings on cosmology, mathematics and its application to the Book of Changes, astronomy, medicine, agriculture, and natural history. But looking at a few individuals reveals only facets of medicine's integration within culture. It was a changing integration. Perhaps the most important transition of the period was grounded in the lower Yangzi region. Its prosperity had led to the preeminence of its natives in government, commerce, art, technology, science and medicine.14 But that part of the empire was plunged into chaos in the 1850's and 1860's by a millenarian religious rebellion that in effect removed it—and the taxes it paid—from the empire. The Manchus retook it only by a precursor of what became the Pyrrhic “strategic hamlet” policy of the war between the United States and Vietnam. Some historians consider this Chinese “liberation” more devastating than the rebellion that it ended. In any case, the wholesale destruction of the time, followed by ever more ineffective administration and a power vacuum, sped up a shift of initiative from the central government—still, in the minds of many, a dynasty of foreign occupation—to localities, from central officials to local gentry. Marta Hanson has shown that, as part of this shift, which turned out to be irreversible, physicians in the lower Yangzi region, especially in the Suzhou area, developed and pressed further earlier arguments that therapy should be a regional matter. They insisted that the medicine of the classics was not, as its devotees claimed, universal. Originating in the north, it was of limited use for treating the decisively different bodies of southerners, shaped by distinct environments. As their fellow southerners were questioning feeble claims to cultural leadership by the imperial administration in the north, these doctors were suggesting that the remedies of antiquity were useless to meet local needs. On the surface Page 229 →this move rejected the Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Disorders (Shanghan za bing lun between 196 and 220), the canonical source for drug therapy, in favor of the category of Warm Factor disorders (wenbing ), elaborated beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. By the late nineteenth century it became a distinct tradition with its own literature, diagnostic methods, and therapies.15 The implications of this revaluation were global. It meant that old remedies were unsuitable for new disorders. In a society that frequently likened good doctors to good statesmen, the political resonances were unmistakable. The idea that the ancient classics were not trustworthy, practical guides to the contemporary world, if true for medicine, might well be true for the whole of literati culture. Others would eventually form in nonmedical terms the dangerous idea that the government's assertion of legitimacy to rule all of China was founded on an inability to acknowledge local diversity, and therefore was spurious. Doctors in the Suzhou area, while they continued to be educated in the medical classics and remained paramount in critical scholarship on them, had transformed them into sources that remained foundational but were no longer universally pertinent. Gradually physicians elsewhere accepted this estimate, and proposed limits of other kinds to their value. As Chinese came to grips with European learning (beginning with astronomy in the early seventeenth century and medicine from c. 1850 on, but accelerating after 1919), eventually they came to see their millennial classics as important (but minor) world classics rather than as the only conceivable basis for civilization.16 By the end of the empire in 1911, absorption in the past ceased to be a fundamental mode of thought for all educated people and became merely the preoccupation of antiquaries.

Conclusions What larger comparative picture do these thoughts lead us to? I have concentrated so far on a crucial point that previous comparisons have ignored. Well before the sixteenth century, Europe differed fundamentally from China in that medicine was a profession. Chinese medical intellectuals were not formed in a university faculty—unique to Europe and the Middle East until recently—but rather gained their status individually through a combination of heredity and success in the civil service examinations—unique to China until very late. There were no associations Page 230 →for physicians. They were represented among imperial palace functionaries in the same way that cooks and entertainers were. There was no nontechnical distinction between medical and nonmedical thought. Another important question calls for attention: what are the appropriate comparanda? The dominions of the Ming and Qing empires—whether we consider their size, their population, their economy, or their bureaucracy—were larger than all of Europe until the second half of the nineteenth century. To align Italy, or even the Holy Roman Empire, with China makes no more sense than to compare Western Europe with Hubei province. Latin gave European intellectuals at least elements of a common culture, as the written language of the humanistic classics did for the Chinese office-holding class. But below that rarefied stratum, the local cultures of Portugal, Romania, and Denmark had little in common, no more than those of northwestern Gansu's desert oases and southeastern Fujian's maritime coast. Over the last quarter-century it has become clear that the basic units of China for historical as well as economic purposes were not provinces but the eight physiographic regions that G. W. Skinner mapped out (the lower Yangzi is one of these). What the dynastic histories record is not the history of China but that of the few hundred miles around the capital and events elsewhere that affected it.17 When we think of China, we concern ourselves with an order that was culturally diverse but politically united; in the order of early modern Europe, political disunity and religious diversity encouraged even greater variety in other provinces of culture. What, then, of engagement with the past? Although the mandarins of both parts of the world anchored their consciousnesses in what seemed to them golden ages of thought, there were signal differences in the way they related past and present. In some early periods China split into two or three political units, and in others the statesponsored orthodoxy was based not only on the canonical writings associated with Confucius but on those of Buddhism.18 Nevertheless, the encounter of the Chinese elite with the state's current choice of ancient classics remained intimate and determinative. When new knowledge entered from Europe, those with access to it naturally sought classical precedents that proved it was not altogether strange, and therefore possibly worth studying. It was not until the early twentieth century that to new generations the classics themselves seemed impediments to cultural survival. In Europe, when sojourners in Muslim Spain from c. 1000 onward began to return with lost Greek and Roman classics, they were filling an enormous cultural gap that had opened after the second century CE. Page 231 →The cascade of rediscovered thought and practice, particularly from Constantinople when it fell in 1453, raised the question of whether moderns could ever equal the brilliance and depth of antiquity. Not until the Enlightenment was that debate settled to general satisfaction. Fledgling physicians were still writing medical dissertations in Latin c. 1850, because that is how one showed one's relation to the brilliance and depth of that hard-regained past—and, of course, how, as a Swede at a Belgian medical school, one could address one's peers in Hungary. But by 1850 Latin was only one of many languages in which scholarship could be published, and a fading one. The change that began in China c. 1915 was of a very different kind. What replaced the classical language was a bevy of artificial written languages based variously on the vernacular of the official class, not only diverse but far from colloquial. Until that time, classical Chinese still meant unbroken continuity with an ideal past; in parts of Europe, Latin meant a modern connection to an ideal but long-lost past. My point is that the great differences in the status of elite medical practice and its role in health care at the two ends of Eurasia, and differences of every kind in traditions of thought and languages of scholarship, naturally made for great variation in medical antiquarianism. Keeping these comparanda in mind will make for sturdier and more useful comparisons.

NOTES 1. Charles Coulston Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York, Scribner, 1970–). The

university medical faculties also taught non-canonic authors such as Ibn Sina (known in early Europe as Avicenna). 2. OED Online, sense I.1.a, c. 1225 CE: “The declaration, promise, or vow made by one entering a religious order; hence, the action of entering such an order; the fact of being professed in a religious order.” 3. Eliot Freidson, Profession of Medicine. A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1970). 4. Even as governments from the mid-sixteenth century on gradually failed to provide enough attractive careers for those who qualified, few prepared for alternatives. See Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology. Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984); Robert P. Hymes, “Not Quite Gentlemen? Doctors in Sung and Yuan,” Chinese Science 8 (1987): 9–76. Because most medical education was based on master-disciple apprenticeship until the twentieth century, beyond the elementary level the choice of texts to memorize depended on the teacher.Page 232 → 5. Ce fu yuan gui (Outstanding models from the storehouse of literature, 1013), 639.1 and, for later periods Liang Jun Zhongguo gudai yizheng shi lue (Outline history of ancient Chinese medical administration) (Huhhot: Nei Menggu renmin chubanshe, 1995), 100–101. Those examined were at first people already recommended for the palace medical service. 6. The best study so far of competition is Joanna Grant, A Chinese Physician. Wang Ji and the “Stone Mountain Medical Case Histories” (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2003). 7. Statuses equivalent to gentleman varied considerably in various European countries, but until well into the nineteenth century people generally credited a graduate of a medical faculty with some such social standing. 8. The more scholarly among them could use their access to the imperial library to gain recognition, but that was more likely to lead to historical recognition than to immediate benefits. 9. The Huangdi nei jing was generally attributed before the twentieth century to a legendary ruler before the beginning of history, but present opinion puts it in the first century BCE or the first century CE. 10. Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine (Seattle: Eastland Press, 2007). 11. On elite attitudes toward hereditary practice, see Chao Yuan-ling, “The Ideal Physician in Late Imperial China: The Question of San-shih ” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 17 (2000): 66–93. 12. On questions that modern scholars have raised about the authenticity of works that carry his name, see He Gaomin, Fu Qingzhu nüke jiao shi (Critical annotated edition of Fu Shan's Women's Medicine (Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1984); He Gaomin Fu Qingzhu nanke chong bian kao shi (Fu Shan's Men's Medicine, re-edited with studies) (Beijing: zhongyi guji chubanshe, 1994); and Lü Zhi “Zai tan Fu Shan yixue zhuzuo de zhenwei” (Again on the authenticity of Fu Shan's medical writings) Zhejiang Zhongyi zazhi 6 (1986): 137–39. 13. On Fu Shan see, e.g., Kakui Hiroshi et al., Fu San sh (A collection of the work of Fu Shan) (Chgoku hosho gaido 55; Tokyo: Nizensha, 1990); and Bai Qianshen, Fu Shan's World. The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center Publications, 2003). A voluminous guide to sources for medical biography is He Shixi , Zhongguo lidai yijia chuan lu (Biographies of physicians in China through the ages) (Beijing: Renmin weisheng chubanshe, 1991). 14. All the physicians listed above except Fu Shan were natives of this area. 15. Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China, Needham Research Institute Series, 9 (London: Routledge, 2011). 16. The standard source for this transition is Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).Page 233 → 17. Skinner presented his thesis most compendiously in 1985, G. William Skinner, “Presidential Address: The Structure of Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies 44, no. 2 (1985): 271–92 (see also Journal of Asian Studies 45, no. 4 (1986): 721–43 and 48, no. 1 (1989): 90–113). 18. Although this promiscuous, shifting ideology is often called Confucianism, it had little in common with the teachings of Confucius and his main early disciples.

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NINE Wang Shizhen and Li Shizhen: Archaism and Early Scientific Thought in Sixteenth-Century China Kenneth J. Hammond David Freedberg's study of the early seventeenth-century Academy of Linceans and the circle of Federico Cesi, a social network of scholars who wrote to each other and exchanged visits to share the results of their studies, raises a number of points which are of interest to historians concerned with the intellectual life of early modern China as well.1 Cesi and his circle were profoundly engaged in the investigation of natural phenomena at a critical moment in the development of European scientific thinking. Their use of careful empirical observation, their critical attitude toward the received opinions of antiquity, and their desire to test their ideas in practical activity all marked them as travelers on the path toward what we have come to regard as modernity. But as Freedberg notes, the Linceans and other early modern thinkers did not represent a complete rupture with established intellectual traditions and practices, nor were they in pursuit of a kind of knowledge which was rigorously delineated or segregated from larger fields of inquiry and reflection. Freedberg asks, “How are we to reconcile their study of antiquity and their engagement in more purely literary activity with their empirical researches into physics and natural history?”2 He follows this question with his own suggested response, In order to answer such questions we must take every aspect of their work as seriously as they did. We shall have to free ourselves from modern presuppositions about the nature of science and of scientific activity, and to remain attentive to different and shifting paradigms. Page 235 →We cannot dismiss as mere antiquarianism their interest in archaeology or in ancient texts, and we must respect the ideological pressures on the ways in which they published—or suppressed—their discoveries. Above all we must acknowledge that science for them covered a much larger field than it does now. It ranged from what we call the humanities to fundamental physical phenomena and to mathematics. It included the occult sciences too, and it should not surprise us to find in them, as in Kepler, a faith in astrology that often seems as strong as the commitment to the new astronomy.3 The emergence of early modern scientific thought in Europe, then, was to a significant extent a matter of the sharing of ideas among individuals who were often involved in disparate intellectual activities, covering a wide range of fields, but who shared a common interest in seeking to understand the world around them not only on the basis of the wisdom of the past, but on a fruitful dialectic between past and present, between the ways of thinking and seeing which had been passed down via literary texts and the evidence of their eyes which presented itself to them in their own daily studies. China in the later years of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) was not a dissimilar intellectual environment. Indeed, recent studies of Ming China have built up a portrait of a society which in many ways bore certain structural resemblances to early modern Europe. The work of cultural historians such as Craig Clunas or Timothy Brook has shown how the rapidly developing commercial economy of the sixteenth century, particularly in the Jiangnan region of southeastern China, gave rise to intellectual and cultural developments which were shaped by the context of a market economy.4 William Theodore deBary's work on humanist thought in the Ming has suggested the emergence of a Chinese individualism in a time of growing economic agency for producers and consumers.5 Other phenomena of the Ming intellectual world have not been as fully investigated, but the emergence of portraiture and self-portraits, along with the writing of autobiography and rise of topical theater in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are all suggestive of some common cultural responses in Europe and China to the stimuli of a developing capitalist economy.6 It is in this setting of a cultural world in a state of dynamic transformation that one can consider the relationship of

two of the most prominent figures in Ming intellectual history, Li Shizhen (1518–93) and Wang Shizhen (1526–90). Li Shizhen is known most widely for his Page 236 →compilation of the great pharmacopeia Bencao gangmu, which has long been recognized as a major work of rational, empirical investigation and analysis.7 Wang Shizhen, on the other hand, occupies a central position in the literary and cultural life of the Ming, and is perhaps best known as one of the two leaders of the Archaist literary movement (gu wenci). This essay examines the relationship between these two gentlemen to show how in Ming China, as in the Europe of the Linceans, men engaged in widely diverse fields of intellectual activity shared common interests, and understood their investigations into the natural world and the realm of human culture to be a shared endeavor of inquiry that encompassed both a critical encounter with the authorities of ancient times and a contemporary empiricism based on what Confucian discourse called “the investigation of things” (gewu).

Li Shizhen Born in 1518 in Qizhou, Huguang, in the Yangzi River valley of central China, Li was part of a family which had been involved in the practice of medicine and the selling of drugs for at least the previous two generations.8 While his grandfather had been an itinerant peddler, his father, Li Yanwen, seems to have had a more elevated career. Li Yanwen is recorded as having earned the lowest level degree in the imperial civil examination system, and to have served for a time in the Imperial Medical Academy in Beijing. He was the author of several medical treatises, and was known as an authority on certain diagnostic techniques. As a member of an ambitious, upwardly mobile family, Li Shizhen was prepared from his early youth to try his hand at the imperial exams. In 1531 he passed the first level examination, but failed in three successive tries to pass at the next highest, provincial level. His family finally decided that further effort in this direction would likely continue to be unproductive, and Li was allowed to direct his attention to other career options. He chose to follow in the family tradition and devoted his energies to developing his skills as a medical practitioner. He soon became frustrated with the state of medical knowledge, and particularly with what he saw as deficiencies in information about the many natural substances used in preparing drugs for treating patients. He began to devote more and more time to the study of medicinal plants and other materia medica, seeking through direct investigations to verify or refute received views about the properties or efficacy of standard prescriptions. He achieved a Page 237 →local reputation as a skilled healer, which eventually brought him to the attention of the Prince of Chu, the local branch of the imperial family. This led, around 1550, to an appointment as superintendent of sacrifices at the Chu court in Wuchang. His duties also involved serving as de facto court physician. Not long thereafter he was given an appointment to the Imperial Medical Academy in the capital, which gave him access to both the medical library there and the circles of official life in Beijing. After a short time, however, Li returned home and carried on his medical practice and his researches into pharmacology. His experiences in the practice of medicine, combined with his reading in the existing medical literature, had led him to a feeling that the inherited state of knowledge was both flawed and inadequate. Beginning in the early 1550s he conceived the ambition of compiling a new, comprehensive study of the various materials used in prescriptions, and a review of the received body of literature descriptive of these things. He traveled widely around the empire, consulting other medical men and reading in their libraries whenever and wherever possible. This brought him into contact with other gentlemen who, like himself, were engaged in the critical reappraisal of classical knowledge, such as the geographer Luo Hongxian (1504–64) and the Hanlin Academician Qu Jiusi (1546–1617).9 Li's efforts encompassed not only reading and consultation with other scholars; he also undertook a program of systematic investigation of the actual properties and effects of substances used in making up prescriptions or noted for their curative powers. He compared his own observations with the information contained in existing texts and with the oral traditions to which he had access. By the late 1570s Li had produced several drafts of his compendium and was ready to prepare an edition for publication. He gave the work the title Bencao gangmu, which may be translated as A General Outline of Materia Medica. The published compendium contained fifty-two juan, or chapters, of text, and two of illustrations. It included 1,892 entries overall, with 275 covering minerals, 444 zoological items, 1,094 botanical entries, and 79 miscellaneous substances. He also appended a bibliography of just under 1,000 works, many of which had not

been referred to in early pharmacopeia. Li's work was also significant because he included numerous plants which had come to China recently as a result of trade with Europeans in the first half of the sixteenth century. Li's work has long been recognized by modern Western scholars as an example of early modern scientific thinking in China. In the volume on botany in the encyclopedic Science and Civilisation in China Li is characterized Page 238 →as “the greatest naturalist in Chinese history, and worthy of comparison with the best scientific men contemporary with him in Renaissance Europe.”10 Some of Li's insights and techniques were not reached or reproduced in the West until the nineteenth century. When Western scholars such as F. Porter Smith, in the late nineteenth century, or Bernard E. Read in the early twentieth century, began to seriously explore the biological and botanical richness of China they drew heavily on Li Shizhen as a basic source of reliable information.11 Yet Li has been seen as essentially an isolated figure. While his accomplishments were truly impressive, they have not been seen as forming part of a larger pattern of intellectual transformation. Western historians of science have generally held that there was no phenomenon in China comparable to the “Scientific Revolution” in Europe. Though Nathan Sivin raised the ironic matter of “Why the Scientific Revolution Did Not Take Place in China—or Didn't It?” as early as 1982, this perspective has remained dominant in Western views of China.12 If we expand our consideration of Li Shizhen beyond his own ideas and scientific activity, and place him in relation to his contemporary intellectual environment, this may alter our perception of the world of thought in the later Ming. It is with this in mind that we can turn to Wang Shizhen, and through investigating the relationship between Wang and Li explore some of the ways in which scientific enquiry was being conceived and communicated about in sixteenth-century China.

Wang Shizhen Like Li Shizhen, Wang Shizhen was born into a family with a long history of accomplishment and prestige. In contrast with the medical professionalism of the Li's, however, Wang's family had been highly successful in pursuing careers in the imperial civil administration.13 Wang's father and grandfather both held government positions (though his father did not attain the jinshi examination degree until the early 1540s, when Wang Shizhen was already in his teens). Wang's family was based in Taicang, in the heart of the Jiangnan region, the most economically advanced area in China at the time and the part of the empire with the greatest concentration of literary and cultural resources. Wang's family held significant tracts of land around Taicang, and the wealth generated by these meant that both Wang Shizhen and his brother Wang Shimou Page 239 →could be given the best possible education in preparation for the imperial examinations. Wang Shizhen passed the highest level of the examinations in 1547, when he was just twenty years old. He embarked on an official career which was marked by alternating periods of public service and enforced retirement due to several clashes with leading powerful ministers like Yan Song (1480–1565) and Zhang Juzheng (1525–82). None the less he eventually rose to be Minister of Punishments in the secondary capital at Nanjing, a post which he held until shortly before his death in the late autumn of 1590. While Wang's political life was colorful and significant, his position as a literary theorist and connoisseur was even more prominent. By the early 1550s he had already emerged as a major figure on the literary scene in Beijing, and formed a close association with Li Panlong (1514–70), an older scholar who was well-established as a literary luminary.14 Li Panlong and Wang Shizhen came to be seen as the leaders of a literary movement known as gu wenci, which has on occasion been translated as “Old Phraseology” but which is more commonly referred to in English as the Archaist movement.15 The Archaists have been characterized as advocating the emulation of classical literary models, in particular the prose of the pre-Qin era and the poetry of the High Tang. I have argued elsewhere that Wang Shizhen's gu wenci ideals were in fact more a matter of advocating the emulation of what he saw as good writing no matter from what historical period. His theoretical writings stressed the need for writing to be effective in moving people to share aesthetic sensibilities, and that there should be a proper coherence between form and content. He was especially fond of the Song writers Su Shi and Sima Guang.16 Wang had a critical perspective on art and literature which in some ways foreshadowed the rise of Evidential

Scholarship (kaozheng xue) in the seventeenth century. He wrote an extensive work of art and literary history, the Yiyuan zhiyan, to which we will return later, which sought to organize and categorize artists and writers according to developmental criteria and to track changes over time. He was also very interested in institutional and political history. His approach to historical texts and documents was very skeptical, and he gathered many of his writings about institutional history, along with large amounts of primary sources, into several collections, perhaps most notable the Yanshan tang bieji. He wrote as well about inaccuracies in the pictorial representation of clothing or Page 240 →objects from various historical eras in painting, and praised landscape painting which accurately represented real places rather than simply expressing an idealized view of nature. Wang's Archaist literary thought, especially its emphasis on textual criticism and skepticism, was influential not only in Ming China but more broadly in early modern East Asia. In particular Tokugawa Confucian thinkers in Japan, most particularly Ogy Sorai (1667–1728), were strongly moved by Wang and Li's writings, and built upon the empirical methodology they saw at work there. As Samuel Hideo Yamashita has noted, “What Sorai found so intriguing about this difference between the classical and modern literary styles that he had learned from Li and Wang was that it could be verified empirically. Here Sorai shared his contemporaries' interest in empiricism, and their attraction to the ‘reality of the actual physical nature of man and things’…”17 This is not to say that Wang Shizhen was a thorough-going materialist or totally “modern” thinker. Indeed, as with Freedberg's characterization of the Linceans, we can see in Wang Shizhen the coexistence of intellectual ideas which seem to fit comfortably in the early modern category with others which, from a modern, secularist perspective, seem mystical and superstitious in a decidedly premodern mode. Ann Waltner has explored Wang Shizhen's devotion to the levitating teenage female Daoist Tan Yangzi, the daughter of Wang's good friend and fellow-townsman Wang Xijue.18 Wang Shizhen's belief in Tan Yangzi's mystical abilities, and her ultimate ascent into the realm of the immortals, seems hard to reconcile with his skepticism about historical texts and images. Wang Shizhen's intellectual and cultural activities, along with his wealth and social prominence, attracted large numbers of followers, and he maintained wide circles of acquaintance. His home in Taicang was often filled with young scholars seeking his advice and patronage. He corresponded with friends and the many gentlemen who wrote to him seeking his ideas or asking for favors. In the second half of the sixteenth century he was one of the most widely known and respected figures in China; but, like anyone with strong views, he also had no shortage of intellectual and political opponents. Given his high profile, and his involvement in a wide range of intellectual endeavors, it is not surprising that an ambitious and creative thinker like Li Shizhen should have been drawn to seek Wang's acquaintance. What we can see in the relationship between Li and Wang is one instance of the circulation of ideas among educated gentlemen in Ming-dynasty China, and how the realms of literary and scientific thought Page 241 →intersected and overlapped in ways not dissimilar to the contemporary scene in Europe.

Li and Wang Li Shizhen completed the drafting of the Bencao gangmu in 1578. He continued to revise the text in minor ways thereafter, but at the end of the 1570s he was looking to publish the work, and decided to seek a preface from Wang Shizhen. Such prefaces were often seen as valuable in drawing attention to a new work, and in creating a positive reception for the appearance of a publication. The association of Wang Shizhen with Li's compendium would give it added weight in the cultural marketplace. In the fall of 1580 Li traveled to Taicang to call on Wang Shizhen at home. At this time Wang was living in enforced retirement from official life, having come into conflict with the new chief grand secretary, Zhang Juzheng, in 1576. It happened to be at this time that Wang was most deeply involved in the cult of Tan Yangzi, and Li's visit seems to have coincided with the most dramatic episodes in this period of mystical spirituality for Wang, making Wang's comments on Li's work perhaps even more remarkable. In the introduction to a poem commemorating Li Shizhen's visit, Wang noted in 1580:

One evening Mr. Li of Qizhou came to call on me. This was just at the time when the Immortal Teacher ascended to Heaven. He showed me the Bencao which he had compiled, and asked me to write a preface for it. I gladly agreed [to do so].19 The “Immortal Teacher” is Tan Yangzi. Her “ascent into Heaven” took place in October 1580, which dates Li Shizhen's visit to that time. In the poem which follows Wang again refers to Tan Yangzi, invoking an image of her as “a true Immortal ascending astride a dragon.” He goes on, though, to talk about Li Shizhen's book, observing that Li had compiled the work and “corrected errors” over a ten-year period. He records Li's request for a preface, and ends the poem with two lines declaring his pleasure in being of service to such a worthy gentleman, and characterizing Li as one who is likely to attain the highest Daoist Heaven himself. Page 242 → Both the poem and preface to the Bencao gangmu are filled with images and literary references with strong Daoist overtones. When Wang mentions Li's book he calls it a qingnang zhouhou su, “a book of medical knowledge relating to the measuring of the pulse at the wrist.” The term qingnang is associated with Daoist pharmacological practices already in the Jinshu [History of Jin], a fifth-century text. By the Tang dynasty (618–907) the term was linked with zhouhou as a description of medical diagnostic techniques.20 Wang also likens Li's request for a preface to the case of the Jin-dynasty mystic Huangfu Mi, who was asked to write a preface for Zuo Si's San du fu (Prose poem on the Three Capitals).21 The Daoist tone of Wang's poem and preface of 1580 reflects not only his immediate fascination with the cult of Tan Yangzi but also reinforces a long-established association between religious Daoism and pharmacology, dating back to the middle period in Chinese history.22 Daoism and Daoist pharmacology remained powerful forces in the middle Ming and had played a significant role at the court of the Jiajing emperor during his long reign from 1522 to 1566.23 Both Li Shizhen and Wang Shizhen were comfortable with the links between spiritual and material concerns in the study of materia medica. It is not clear how long Li Shizhen remained at Wang's home in Taicang in the fall of 1580. No other writings appear to refer to this visit. While Wang agreed to write the preface for the Bencao gangmu sought by Li, it was to be more than nine years before the two men met again, and before the preface was completed. In February 1590 Wang Shizhen was serving in Nanjing as Minister of the Board of Punishments, which would prove to be his final appointment in the imperial administration. He held this post from July 1589 until April 1590, when he retired again to his home in Taicang, where he died the following December. At the beginning of the Lunar New Year, in January 1590, Wang was ill with gout and was resting at his residence in the southern capital. On February 19 he completed work on the preface for Li Shizhen's book. The preface includes comments on the revisions which had been made to the final version of the text, which Li had completed in 1587, indicating that Wang remained in touch with Li over the intervening years. The printing blocks for the first edition of the Bencao were cut in Nanjing at the beginning of the 1590s, though the process was apparently not yet complete when Li Shizhen died in 1593. Wang's preface does not explicitly state that Li and Wang were together in February 1590, but their shared presence in Nanjing in that year makes it highly likely that Wang completed the preface in order to be able to personally present it to Li.24 Page 243 → The preface begins by recalling Li's visit to Wang's Yanshan Garden in 1580. Wang notes that the two spent several days together drinking wine and conversing. He describes Li as a slight figure, who was none the less compelling in his intensity. When he unpacked his bags Wang observed that Li carried very little with him other

than the ten scrolls of the Bencao gangmu. Wang then recounts Li's self-introduction, in which Li told of how he had been a sickly youth, who had taken to the reading of books “as if they were sugar candies,” and that he embarked on a program of reading which took him through the Confucian Classics and on to works on medicine, divination, garden plants, and physiognomy. In compiling the Bencao Li had consulted works from the Han, Liang, Tang, Song, and later dynasties. He had found many errors and omissions, and had decided to correct these. Over some thirty years he had examined books by more than 800 authors, and his own work had gone through three complete drafts. He had tried to weed out repetitions and eliminate any gaps in his coverage. By the time Li had first brought the book to Wang and asked him for a preface it had already grown to include some 1,518 items, to which another 374 were added in the ensuing years. Wang remembers opening the scrolls of the book and noting that each medicinal item was labeled, taking the “rectification of names” (zhengming), a concept deriving from the Analects of Confucius that emphasized the priority of correct terminology in organizing and understanding the world, as his organizational principle.25 The explanation of each item's name became Li's starting point in presenting his material. Each entry was described in terms of its geographic origins, the conditions of its growth or production, with careful attention to correcting errors in previous accounts. Plants, minerals, animal materials, all were meticulously described in physical form, taste or smell, as well as in their medicinal properties and uses. Wang likens reading Li's pharmacopeia to wandering in the garden of the Jin-dynasty scholar Shi Chong (d. 300), or ascending to the palace of the Dragon Lord, both images filled with Daoist associations. The book is broad in scope, without being a mere jumble of data, filled with detail yet not losing sight of what is essential. Indeed, Wang goes on to make important claims on behalf of the Bencao gangmu as much more than just a compendium of information about materia medica. “How,” he asks, “could this be seen as merely a medical text? Truly it reveals the subtle essence of natural principles, a comprehensive record of the investigation of things, worthy to be the private guide for an emperor, and a treasure for ministers and the people.” In an age when so many shabby works of pseudoscholarship are being produced, Page 244 →Wang concludes, Li Shizhen's diligent effort to distinguish truth from falsehood is greatly to be welcomed. Wang closes the preface with a selfdeprecating reference to his own incompleted work, the Yiyuan zhiyan, his ten-juan compendium on literary and art history. Wang's preface represents a response to Li Shizhen's work which goes beyond the Daoist imagery of the 1580 texts. While the earlier poem and preface had been composed at the height of Wang's involvement with the mystical cult of Tan Yangzi, the 1590 preface embodies a broader perspective, and situates Li's work in a fuller intellectual context. Wang still places Li Shizhen and the Bencao gangmu within the stream of Daoist discourse stemming from the earliest development of the alchemical quest for immortality, but his overall assessment is much more concerned with those aspects of Li's book which are analytical rather than metaphysical. In reviewing Li's research methodology, Wang notes that Li consulted works from successive historical periods and gives rough figures for the number of sources used. He emphasizes the ways in which Li sought not simply to compile a body of received knowledge, but rather approached the historical record as one which contained errors and which overlooked important information. More importantly, he stresses Li's ability to correct mistakes through his own direct observations and descriptions of the materials included in his study. Wang's emphasis on the critical and empirical nature of Li's methodology represents a new valorization of this approach not generally found in Tang, Song, Jin, or Yuan precedents. In his overall assessment of the Bencao gangmu, Wang uses two particular terms to characterize Li's work which present it both as revealing the “subtle essence of natural principles” (xingli zhi jingwei) and as a “comprehensive record of the investigation of things” (gewu zhi tongdian). These passages deserve particular attention, as they embody Wang's evaluation of Li's work in terms which highlight its scientific nature. The term xingli refers to the underlying patterns in nature, the discovering and understanding of which had stood at the center of Confucian moral thought since Zhu Xi (1130–1200).26 Gewu zhi tongdian invokes the concept of the “investigation of things,” which is central to the discussion of ordering the world in the Da xue, the Great Learning, one of the four texts given first priority in Zhu Xi's pedagogical program.27 The term tongdian alludes to the great Tang-dynasty encyclopedia of institutional history compiled by Du You (735–812), also known as the Tongdian, long admired

as an example of careful, critical scholarship. In the centuries following Zhu Xi's initial foregrounding of the concept of gewu, this idea had been Page 245 →interpreted in various ways, with some thinkers emphasizing the need to examine the external world of physical phenomena while others focused on the need for meditation and the contemplation of inner, mental phenomena. In the sixteenth century the teachings of Wang Yangming and his later interpreters carried on this emphasis on the mental realm.28 Wang Shizhen's use of these terms is characteristic of literary discourse in late Ming China in discussing efforts to understand the operations of the material world around them.29 While the later Ming has often been seen as a period when metaphysical speculation and intuitionism influenced by Wang Yangming was the dominant mode of interpreting phenomena, Wang's use of xingli and gewu reveals an approach to the description and analysis of the material world which is trending toward a more secular, rational, materialist mode of analysis which is in many ways comparable to contemporary early scientific thought in the West.30 Willard Peterson has suggested that this way of thinking began to become dominant in China in the 1630s, but the intellectual activities of Li Shizhen, Wang Shizhen and others like them indicate that such thought was already well-developed by the second half of the sixteenth century.31 Wang's allusion to his own work, the Yiyuan zhiyan, illuminates consistencies between Wang's literary thought and his view of Li Shizhen's project. In the Yiyuan zhiyan Wang sets out a major study of literary and art history. Like the Bencao gangmu this text was the result of a long-term research project, begun in 1558 and carried through until 1565, with some additional work done in later years. In ten juan the text covers poetry, prose writing, painting, and calligraphy. Wang presents a chronological and stylistic analysis of the development of different schools and trends in each of these areas over a long span of time. His discussion is based on compiling and correlating textual materials passed down from earlier times, and on his own viewing of paintings and works of calligraphy, as well as his reading of literary texts. In his 1572 preface to this work he cites in particular the writings of the earlier Ming scholars Xu Zhenqing (1479–1511) and Yang Shen (1488–1559), and the twelfthcentury classic of poetic theory, Yan Yu's Canglang shihua, as works which he wished to build upon. He explicitly states his intention to “correct what these three gentlemen had not completed.”32 This echoes his praise of Li Shizhen for correcting the errors and lacunae in the received knowledge of materia medica. Wang's position as one of the most respected and influential cultural figures of his day gave him access to private libraries and art collections, and he seems to have made the most of the opportunities this gave him Page 246 →to broaden his acquaintance with all manner of literary and artistic production. As Li Shizhen had embarked on a wide-ranging inspection and critique of received knowledge of plants, animal products, and minerals used in medical prescriptions, in which he undertook not simply to compile what had been said in the past but to empirically confirm or refute existing views, so had Wang Shizhen entered into a historically critical and analytical investigation of aesthetic knowledge. While not subject to the same kind of empirical research as Li's work on the pharmacopeia, Wang's treatment of his material in the Yiyuan zhiyan reflects a comparable frame of mind; a parallel which he invokes in his preface to Li's book.

Conclusions The encounter between Wang Shizhen and Li Shizhen in the late sixteenth century goes far beyond merely being the conventional exercise of one asking the other to write a preface for his book, perhaps hoping to improve sales upon publication. Wang's records suggest that the two men shared certain ways of thinking about the world around them, which we can see as comparable to the scientific mind developing at the same time in early modern Europe. Li Shizhen's researches into the nature and functions of plants, minerals, zoological, and other materials in the treatment of medical conditions has long been recognized as an incipient instance of the scientific investigation of the natural world. We can also see Wang Shizhen's work on the history and theory of Chinese art and literature, and his overall orientation to intellectual inquiry, in a similar light. Wang was most certainly an exponent of the gu wenci Archaist school of literary thought and a strong advocate of the emulation of literary models from China's ancient past. Yet his relationship to that past, to the literary cultural heritage, was not one of uncritical acceptance and simple imitation, but was a dynamic of critical investigation and analysis, and when possible of empirical examination and verification.

Wang Shizhen makes this link clear in his preface to Li Shizhen's Bencao gangmu. He clearly delineates the empiricism and critical rationality of Li's work and situates it within the existing cultural categories of xingli and gewu, which encompassed the effort to understand the patterns and principles of the universe through the “investigation of things.” For Wang Shizhen this was clearly a materialist undertaking in which issues of causal relationships and chronological development were critical. Yet Page 247 →as the poetic record of the initial meeting between Wang and Li shows, Wang Shizhen was by no means a thorough-going skeptic and rationalist. He was fully able to believe in the mystical powers of the teenage female Daoist Tan Yangzi, to the point of risking his official career. Even at the height of his embrace of this mystic cult, though, he endorsed the scientific enterprise of Li Shizhen, and welcomed Li's visit to his garden in Taicang with praise for Li's intellectual efforts, couched in his own Daoist enthusiasm. The connection between Li Shizhen and Wang Shizhen helps to remind us that the cultural and intellectual world of the later Ming dynasty was one of great diversity, and that there were significant alternatives to both the examination orthodoxy of Cheng-Zhu Confucianism and the alternative intuitionism of Wang Yangming's followers. The tensions within Chinese cultural and social life were intensified by the rapid commercialization of the economy which was continuing through the end of the sixteenth century, undermining existing hierarchies and hegemonies and fostering greater openness in practical and intellectual affairs. Wang Shizhen was one major figure seeking to draw upon the literary heritage of the past to make sense of the world through a critical reevaluation of that heritage. Li Shizhen sought to correct and expand medical knowledge in similar ways. Certainly the two thinkers did not constitute a “school” or even form the core of a society quite like the Linceans in Europe. But they were also far from alone in their quests. Much more work needs to be done on the substantive links between scholars in the Ming and other periods of Chinese history. Too often these are categorized as simply literary circles without substantial significance for the permeation of intellectual positions and methodologies. But Wang Shizhen's influence was widespread, and his endorsement of Li Shizhen would have brought Li's work to the attention of many “literary” gentlemen. In doing this Wang saw a common thread connecting his Archaism with Li's science. This thread was more widely woven into Ming intellectual life than we have so far recognized.

NOTES 1. David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 2. Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx, 9. 3. Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx, 9.Page 248 → 4. Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (London: Blackwell, 1991). 5. William Theodore deBary, Learning for One's Self: Essays on the Individual in Neo-Confucian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 6. James Cahill, “Ch'en Hung-shou: Portraits of Real People and Others,” in The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth Century Chinese Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Wu Pei-yi, The Confucian's Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 7. See for example the discussion of Li's work in Joseph Needham, ed., Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6, pt. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 308–21. See also note 11 below. 8. The basic English language source for Li's life is L. Carrington Goodrich et al., eds., Dictionary of Ming Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 859–65 (hereafter DMB), and Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 1986. 9. DMB 980–84; Mingshi (History of the Ming) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), 7390–91. 10. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 308. 11. F. Porter Smith, Chinese Materia Medica (Shanghai, 1871); Bernard E. Read, Chinese Materia Medica (Peking, 1936).

12. Nathan Sivin, “Why the Scientific Revolution Did Not Take Place in China—Or Didn't It?” Chinese Science 5 (1982): 45–66. 13. DMB, 1399–1405; Kenneth J. Hammond, “History and Literati Culture: Towards an Intellectual Biography of Wang Shizhen” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1994); Zheng Lihua, Wang Shizhen nianpu (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 1993). 14. DMB, 845–47. 15. See for example John Timothy Wixted's translation of Yoshikawa Kojiro, Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 16. Kenneth J. Hammond, “Beyond Archaism: Wang Shizhen and the Legacy of the Northern Song,” in Ming Studies 36 (1996): 6–28. 17. Samuel Hideo Yamashita, “Nature and Artifice in the Writings of Ogy Sorai (1666–1728),” in Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture, ed. Peter Nosco (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984), 143. For Wang Shizhen in Sorai's writings see, inter alia, Ogy Sorai, “Bend: A Discourse on the Way,” trans. Tetsuo Najita, in Tokugawa Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3; Samuel Hideo Yamashita, trans., Master Sorai's Responsals (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994), 91. 18. Ann Waltner, “T'an Yang-tzu and Wang Shih-chen: Visionary and Bureaucrat in the Late Ming,” in Late Imperial China 8, no. 1 (June 1987): 105–33. 19. Wang Shizhen, Yanzhou shanren xugao (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1983), 875.Page 249 → 20. The term qingnang is associated with Daoist pharmacological practices already in the Jinshu (History of the Jin dynasty), a fifth-century text. By the Tang dynasty (618–907) the term was linked with zhouhou as a description of medical diagnostic techniques. Hanyu da cidian, vol. 11 (Beijing, 1983), 564. 21. Hanyu da cidian, vol. 2, 313. 22. Michel Strickmann, “On the Alchemy of T'ao Hung-ching,” in Facets of Taoism: Essays in Chinese Religion, ed. Holmes Welch and Anna Seidel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 123–92. 23. James Geiss, “The Chia-ching Reign, 1522–1566,” The Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, The Ming Dynasty, ed. Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 440–510. 24. The text of the preface is included in the Yanzhou shanren xugao, juan 19. A modern punctuated version is included in Li Shizhen, Bencao gangmu (Beijing: Remin chubanshe, 1975), 17–18. 25. Confucius, The Analects, vol. 18.3 (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 118. 26. On the development of the conception of pattern and principle in Song Confucian thought see, inter alia, Peter K. Bol, This Culture of Ours: Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 27. Daniel K. Gardner, Chu His and the Ta-hsueh: Neo-Confucian Reflection on the Confucian Canon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 28. On the thought of Wang Yangming and his interpreters see William Theodore deBary, Learning for One's Self: Essays on Individualism in Neo-Confucian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 29. Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 30. For an overview of mid-to late Ming intellectual culture see Willard Peterson, “Confucian Learning in Late Ming Thought,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty 1368–1644, pt. 2, ed. Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 708–88. For a classic Chinese formulation of the problems with Ming intuitionism see Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Intellectual Trends of the Ch'ing Period, trans. Immanuel C. Y. Hsu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 27–28. 31. Willard J. Peterson, Bitter Gourd: Fang I-chih and the Impetus for Intellectual Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 32. Wang Shizhen, Yiyuan zhiyan, preface to Ming shihua quanbian (Shanghai: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1997), 4189.

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TEN The Botany of Cheng Yaotian (1725–1814): Multiple Perspectives on Plants Georges Métailié Among the many Chinese scholars who wrote about plants, Cheng Yaotian (1725–1814; personal name Yichou ) stands out for his innovative approach.1 Although his primary interest was philological, seeking to understand references to plants in classical literature, his analyses went far beyond the literary realm to include firsthand observations, experiments, and interviews with farmers. Cheng was born in She , Anhui province, passed the imperial juren examinations at the provincial level, and served as an official of middle rank in his home province. Particularly well-known for his knowledge of classical literature,2 he belonged to the Qing “evidential research” movement (kaozheng xue , which consisted of literati who, in “contrast to their predecessors, stressed exacting research, rigorous analysis, and the collection of impartial evidence drawn from ancient artifacts and historical documents and texts.”3 Cheng compiled and privately published his writings in 1804 as a twenty-volume compendium entitled Tong yi lu . Reflecting the wide-ranging interests of its author the Tong yi lu includes autobiographical and biographical notes, numerous prefaces, philological commentaries, and technical texts on ancient units of measurement, mathematics, burial etiquette, and archaic bronze bells, for which he was especially famous.4 Cheng also included two treatises devoted to plants. One of these, in four parts, is titled Jiugu kao (Research on the nine grains); the other is called Shi cao xiao ji (Notes on “Explaining Grasses”).5 This latter work refers to a chapter bearing the name Shi cao, “Explaining Grasses,” from the third-century-BCE encyclopedia Page 251 →Erya, . In these two essays Cheng examined plant names with an obscure or ambiguous botanical meaning and proposed his own interpretation. In doing so he demonstrated a hitherto unique methodological approach, which quickly found recognition. Jiao Xun (1763–1820) a contemporary, already quotes Cheng's “Research on the nine grains” to support his own point of view in the third juan of a manuscript titled Explanations of the Names of Things in the Book of Poetry (Maoshi wu ming shi ).6 In a more recent paper by Qi Sihe on the names of grains in the same Book of Poetry, Cheng's “Research on the nine grains” is considered to be the best among all the previous studies on the subject.7 Cheng's long text of 164 pages was composed to elucidate the true meaning of the term jiugu , “nine grains,” mentioned in the first chapter of the Zhouli (Zhou rituals) (c. fifth–third century BCE).8 There had been discrepancies among the early commentaries on the correct identification of the nine plants.9 The Han commentator Zheng Xuan (127–200) had proposed the following list for these nine grains:10 a glutinous broomcorn millet (shu ),11 broomcorn (ji ),12 foxtail millet (liang),13 rice (dao ),14 hemp (ma ),15 soybean (dadou ),16 lesser bean (xiaodou ),17 barley/wheat (mai ),18 and wild rice (gu ),19 an aquatic plant. This list raised problems due to the fact that various other commentators disagreed on which plants were represented by the names ji and shu . In order to solve the problem, Cheng Yaotian researched the names quoted by Zheng Xuan. His basic reference was Xu Shen's Shuo wen jie zi (Elucidations of the signs and explications of the graphs), a dictionary compiled in 100 CE and presented to the emperor in 121.20 Cheng compared the definitions from the dictionary to those found in other books, from the most ancient up to Li Shizhen's (1518–1593) Bencao gangmu (Classified materia medica) of 1596.21 The content of Cheng's essay is particularly interesting for the history of agriculture and Chinese society. Its rich nomenclature of varieties of crops and its terminology of parts of plants also makes it a precious source for research in historical ethnobotany. From a methodological point of view, it provides insight into Cheng Yaotian's evidential scholarship. To give a sample, I propose to follow his discussion of the last of the nine grains, wild rice (gu ).22 First, Cheng quotes the Shuo wen jie zi, which gives two synonymous terms, tiao gu and jiang Then he explains that several ancient texts referring to the nine grains did not include this plant, while others, such as Zheng Xuan's,

did. He goes on to describe the plant and mentions Page 252 →a very peculiar characteristic, the fact that “its root produces a small fungus called gucai .” He quotes Han Baosheng , author of the Chongguang ying gong bencao (c. 950), who is the source of this name and who writes that the fungus appears in summer and is edible. Then Li Shizhen, author of Bencao gangmu, and Su Song (1020–1101), author of the Tujing bencao , are mentioned as references for a synonym of gucai used in the South, jiaobai , a term still in use today for one of the most refined ingredients of Chinese cuisine. Following Han Baosheng again, he writes that when the root produces a large white fungus that looks like a lotus rhizome this fungus is called gushou , or “head of wild rice.” Since Han Baosheng had written that this fungus appeared on three-year-old plants, Cheng conducted an experiment to verify the point. The result was not convincing because he noticed that the fungus grew during the first year and became smaller after two or three years. He concluded that gucai and gushou are two different kinds of fungus because they did not grow at the same time: the first grew in summer and the second in autumn23 and that, Cheng says “is what I have experienced with my own eyes in She.” On the basis of these first results, he now recognized that an entry in the encyclopedia Erya corresponded precisely to this kind of fungus.24 The Erya lists it as chusui and provides the synonym jushu “ju vegetable”; Guo Pu (276–324), the author of the earliest existing commentary on the Erya, explains: “It resembles the tujun [a kind of mushroom] and is produced within the wild rice. People of Jiangdong eat it. It is sweet and mucilaginous.”25 Then Cheng delves further into the characteristics of this “mushroom” and provides the nomenclature of different parts, always in reference to previous authors. He notes that when young it is brittle, smooth, and solid in its center, and when old its heart becomes hollow and black veins appear. He gives the names of these veins as wuyu , “black motives,” following Chen Cangqi , the author of Bencao shiyi (c. 725), and jiaoyu , “motives of the wild rice,” after Hu Sanxing's (1230–1302) edition of the Zizhi tongjian (Complete mirror for the illustration of government) by Sima Guang (1019–1086). Actually these “veins” form the sporangium of the parasitic fungus (Ustilago esculenta P. Henn. = shiyong heisuijun ), responsible for the transformation of the normal stem into the edible “mushroom.” This Cheng Yaotian could not know. The name of the plant itself he borrowed from Su Song, jiaocao , “jiao-grass,” with a synonym gujiangcao “gujiang-grass”; but Cheng also noted the term gufeng , which he understood to describe Page 253 →a spontaneous grafting of roots that after some time floated up to the surface of the water. Quoting Su Song again, he notes that this was very common in what is today Zhejiang province, where countrymen used to pick these floating grasses in order to plant them. Today we know that these floating grasses are not the result of a kind of spontaneous grafting but parts of a rhizome with sprouts on the nodes. Then we read a fascinating long note on the sentence “those which grow a stem make a spike and produce seeds” . Cheng commented upon this by recounting that in his home town, She, people who cultivated wild rice said that this grass was differentiated into female and male. The plants that produced fungi, had no stem, no inflorescence, and no seeds were called jiaosun , “wild rice shoots,” and considered “female.” Those that, in late autumn, grew a stem, had an inflorescence, and produced edible seeds were called “males.” This probably seemed strange to Cheng Yaotian since he acknowledged the fact that this situation was just the opposite of what it was for hemp. Then he described in minute detail the flowers and compared them to the flowers of other cereals. At last he came to the terminology for seeds as part of the plant and as food. Different names are given for the seeds in reference to different authors: diaogu following Li Shizhen; diāohú and anhu following Sima Xiangru (d. 117 BCE) and Zheng Xuan; and yanshan and yanshan heishi from the Guanzi , compiled around 26 BCE.26 He finished this detailed enumeration with the various terms used for the cooked grain, gushi , found in the “Nei ze” chapter of the Liji (first century BCE),27 and gufan , from the Huainanzi (c. 139 BCE). Cheng's discussion of rice highlights his way of investigating philological problems related to plants. The first step was textual research, followed by the observation of plants, and in this case also the inquiry among people who cultivated them. A research note on four grains entitled Tu shu ji dao liang si gu ji , following his “Research on the nine grains,” provides more evidence of the empirical dimension of Cheng Yaotian's scholarship. Here Cheng proceeds as an anthropologist when he investigates what really was meant by shu , broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.); ji broomcorn (Sorghum sp.); dao , rice (Oryza sativa L.); and liang foxtail millet (Setaria italica [L.] Beauv.). His

inquiry considered the level of knowledge among adults and children; folk taxonomy; the differences between the various crops in different parts of the country; and dates of sowing and harvesting. He also added five pictures of his own observations Page 254 →of the plants, one for each of the four crops plus one of you , a “weed” growing in foxtail millet fields—already quoted in the Shuo wen jie zi—which is actually a spontaneous cross between the crop and green bristle grass (Setaria viridis [L.] Beauv.). Up to this point, if we compare the attitudes of Cheng Yaotian and, for instance, Li Shizhen, in their investigations of plant names, there is both great similarity and great difference. Both scholars relied on texts which they used with a critical eye. The difference comes from the fact that the contemporary evidence Li Shizhen sometimes reported was generally hearsay or borrowed from other books, whereas Cheng Yaotian always adopted a concrete and empirical attitude and brought firsthand remarks. This, of course, did not prevent errors by anachronism, for instance, as in the case of ji , where the name of a millet in ancient China was used for broomcorn when he made his investigations among the countrymen of his time. Two examples taken from Shi cao xiao ji (Notes on “Explaining Grasses”) shed light on other aspects of Cheng Yaotian's interest in plant-related terms. The first regards the meaning of a character tu, which appears in the Erya as “tu, the tu of the bitter vegetable” . In order to elucidate this entry, he first identified the two plants known in his time as “bitter vegetable” (kucai ). One of them was a wild lettuce.28 He went to the countryside, observing the plant, tasting the white sap that appears when one cuts its leaves, and asking local countrymen about it. Then he compared the information he had gathered in this first stage to what he could read in ancient texts. He quoted the texts and then commented upon them. Eventually, he concluded that in this first case, the word tu referred to the downy seed-heads that are seen on the plant. Then he turned to the second “bitter vegetable,” which was the sow thistle.29 He realized that the two plants, besides similar seed-heads, had other similarities like the bitter taste of their sap and their flowering period. All these facts made him consider them as members of a same category. He went on to enumerate all the plants he knew to have similar characteristics. An interesting fact appears in this process. Cheng gave as additional examples some plants for which he had no names, but knew from direct observation. Analyzing several other quotations from the same Erya, he noticed that several different terms associated with various plants actually referred to the same thing, these downy seed-heads. We must note here that all these plants are recognized today by botanists as members of the Compositae family, or Asteraceae. Then, again using philological analysis, Cheng clearly showed that another term, tiao , which Page 255 →is applied in the Erya to the inflorescence and fructification of rushes and reeds, actually meant the same thing as tu, and so concluded that there was evidence enough to associate all these plants into what one would call today a general implicit category. So, beginning with a philological problem, the question of the true meaning of a term in an ancient text, Cheng Yaotian not only proposed an answer to the philological problem, Page 256 →but also proposed, by logical deduction, a kind of classification which is not without significance for botanists, for all these plants are anemochorous, that is, their “fruits or seeds are dispersed by wind [fig. 1].”30 The second example from Shi cao xiao ji shows Cheng Yaotian elucidating the real meaning of a term, musu , the Chinese name for alfalfa.31 Cheng had noticed discrepancies in the descriptions of the color of the flowers when comparing Li Shizhen's comments in Bencao gangmu (1596) with those in Wang Xiangjin's Qun fang pu of 1620. He asked his son, who was living in Beijing, to send him seeds of musu. After growing them, he concluded that the plant was one he knew, a local plant called caomuxi , a melilot, the yellow sweet clover. He writes: The plant which Li Shizhen says has yellow flowers and which is drawn is this one. [Li] Shizhen, a man from the South, looked for seeds in the North and what he got to sow were muxi seeds. Actually, for people of the North, muxi and musu have a similar pronunciation. Li Shizhen made an error…. The Qun fang pu alone says that the flowers are purple. So he sent another letter ordering his son this time to ask a man from Shanxi province, to prevent any misunderstanding. Then in fall 1796 he received new seeds very different from the previous ones. He wrote: The following year, during the second month I sowed them. They germinated after guyu [April 20]. I

took young sprouts and parboiled and roasted them before eating them. There is a taste of wild vegetable…. The leaves are trifoliate [yi zhi sanchu—], with small teeth at their upper part…. I have taken a root for examination. It was unique without ramification [yi tiao du xing— ]. This year there have been no flowers. I took a stem of muxi (melilot) and a stem of musu (alfalfa) to compare them. The melilot, like a tree, forms branches and trunk, but the other grows hundreds of stems intermingling and eventually looking like hair in disorder. Since it had not flowered, at the beginning of fall I sowed it again, with buckwheat, as said in the Qun fang pu. The following year [1798] in spring, the persistent roots of alfalfa gave sprouts [su gen sheng miao ]. The twenty-first day of the fourth month, two days before mangzhong [June 6], I saw it had made flowers. A flower with its heel was three fen long [one centimeter], light purple in color and had four sections/petals Page 257 →[si chu ]. The biggest one faces alone in one direction and of the three smaller ones, two are opposite, one faces a different direction. The bases of the small petals are wrapped in the base of the big one. The heel is contained in a small envelope with four divisions at its upper part. Inside the flower there is a heart formed by hard whiskers leaning against the larger petal. At their extremities are yellow anthers. This forms the flower.

We may appreciate here the precision of the description of a papilionaceous flower. After other considerations and serious criticism of the work of Li Shizhen, Cheng Yaotian concluded that what he saw corresponded to what was written in the Qun fang pu; and to prevent future misunderstandings he added two pictures clearly illustrating the differences between the two plants (figs. 2 and 3). He stressed the point that he wrote this all down and made these pictures in order to correct the errors of Li Shizhen, which is a proof of his interest in the work of his predecessor.

Conclusion Obviously Cheng Yaotian was interested in plants primarily in order to solve philological problems. Until the end of the nineteenth century, even authors who considered plants as their main object of interest—whether as food, medicine, or sources of other commodities—could not give what is today a botanical description, i.e. a diagnosis based only on the morphological characters, using a proper terminology without any reference to other plant or social context. They needed to rely upon earlier written records beginning with those of the highest antiquity. Actually, they looked at plants using a comparative process in which the texts came first, and names were the ultimate keys to reality. In an explicit or implicit way they all referred to a famous passage in the Lunyu (Confucian Analects) (XVII, 9) which states: “the Master said: ‘My children, why do you not study the Book of Poetry? The Odes serve to stimulate the mind…. From them we become largely acquainted with the names of birds, beasts, grasses and trees.”32 In his “Essay on Plants and Animals” (Kunchong caomu lüe ) of the Tongzhi , the Song scholar Zheng Qiao (1103–62) incited the literati who had commented upon the Odes' ancient poems, to go to the countryside and observe Page 258 → plants and animals and listen to the sounds they made, instead of writing about them from previous texts.33 He thought that since the origin of human language was the interpretation of the sounds of nature through onomatopoeia, this was the best way to find the true meaning of uncertain archaic terms related to plants and animals found in the poems. He also thought that the true knowledge of plants and animals given by “celestial harmony” to mankind had been preserved from the beginning by illiterate people from the countryside and the forests. In this way, he also recommended inquiries among these simple people, who were unpolluted by the errors of generations of scholars relying only upon books without any knowledge of the natural world. This attitude, of course, implied a lack of evolution either in language or things and also of the survival of the antique in the out-ofthe-way. Page 259 → Page 260 →

Cheng Yaotian worked within this mainstream but when we take into account his method of investigation, he appears different from all his predecessors, Li Shizhen included. He always began with a philological problem and made inquiries in the ancient literature in order to clarify the status of the words he was investigating. Since these words designated natural objects, he considered it necessary to examine the reality of things and he did so in a very systematic and rigorous way. In some cases, reading his notes gives one the feeling of being faced with the protocol of an experiment. He always gave a minute description, with adequate terminology, of the parts of the various flowers he considered. He wrote down the dates of the phenological phases of plants with precision. In some cases he had them sown for an experimental purpose. We must keep in mind that botany as a field of learning did not exist in the China of Cheng Yaotian, even if he was a contemporary of Linnaeus. However, it seems to us that in the observation of plants, he went further than any other Chinese scholar, inventing a field of his own that could be called an “implicit botany” beyond the boundaries of established domains such as agriculture, horticulture, or medicine. This botany, in which phenology played a very important part alongside morphology, was the result of an original blend of philological research in ancient literature, naturalist observation, practical experimentation, and what would today be called ethnobotanical field work. Its originality and fruitfulness, as well as its limitations, as in the case of the sorghum, have been the subject of this paper.

NOTES 1. For an overview of Chinese writings on plants, see Joseph Needham, Botany, in Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6, ed. Needham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1; Gwei-djen Lu, “China's Greatest Naturalist: A Brief Biography of Li Shih-chen,” Physis 8, no. 4 (1966): 383–92. 2. Fang Binguan et al. , Zhongguo renming da cidian (Shanghai: Shanghai Shangwu chubanshe, 1933), 1190. 3. Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Changes in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1984), 6. 4. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 182. 5. Cheng Yaotian , Tong yi lu (1804), juan 10 and 11.Page 261 → 6. I would like to thank Dr. Minghui Hu for this information and for having given me access to this precious document. 7. Qi Sihe , “Maoshi gu ming kao (Research on the names of grains in the Book of Poems),” Yanjing xuebao 36 (1949): 263–311. 8. For a presentation of this book, see William G. Boltz, “Chou li,” in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and The Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993), 24–32. 9. On the study of the early crops in China, see Chang Te-Tzu, “The Origins and Early Cultures of the Cereal Grains and Food Legumes,” in The Origins of Chinese Civilization, ed. David N. Keightley (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1983), 65–94; and Francesca Bray, Agriculture, in Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6, ed. Needham, 2. 10. Lin Yin , Zhouli jinzhu jinshi (Zhouli with modern notes and translation) (Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, 1985), 13 n. 37. 11. Panicum milliaceum L. 12. Ji, which “undoubtedly refers to [a] millet” (Chang, “The Origins and Early Cultures of the Cereal Grains and Food Legumes,” 65), is considered to be a nonglutinous variety of broomcorn millet Panicum milliaceum L. Looking at the picture given by Cheng Yaotian of the plant, it is obvious that for him it was a kind of broomcorn, Sorghum vulgare L. Today it is recognized that the culture of sorghum is of African origin (H. Dogget, “Sorghum,” in Evolution of Crop Plants, ed. N. W. Simmonds [London and New York: Longman, 1979], 114; and Jack R. Harlan, Crops and Man [Madison, WI: American Society of Agronomy, Inc./ Crop Science Society of America, Inc., 1992], 71). This error of Cheng Yaotian is interesting because it indicates that sorghum was an important crop plant in Anhui province during the eighteenth century and that the name of the ancient Chinese cereal for broomcorn millet ji had been transferred to the introduced plant. 13. Setaria italica (L.) Beauv. See Chang, “The Origins and Early Cultures of the Cereal Grains and Food

Legumes”; Wayne H. Fogg, “Swidden Cultivation of Foxtail Millet by Taiwanese Aborigines: A Cultural Analogue of the Domestication of Setaria italica in China,” in The Origins of Chinese Civilization, ed. Keightley, 95–115; and Bray, Agriculture, 434–48. 14. Oriza sativa L. See Chang, “The Origins and Early Cultures of the Cereal Grains and Food Legumes”; Bray, Agriculture, 477–509. 15. Cannabis sativa L. 16. Glycine max (L.) Merrill. See Chang, “The Origins and Early Cultures of the Cereal Grains and Food Legumes,” 80–81. 17. Vigna sp. 18. Mai is a generic term for barley damai (greater mai) Hordeum sp. and wheat xiaomai (lesser mai) Triticum sp.; see Chang, “The Origins and Early Cultures of the Cereal Grains and Food Legumes,” 77–79. 19. Zizania caduciflora (Turcz.) Hand.-Mazz. This wild rice is a species of the same genus as the wild rice of North America Zizania aquatica L.; on this American “epicurian delight,” see Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Wild AsparagusPage 262 →(New York: David McKay Co., Inc. / Crop Science Society of America, Inc.,1974). 20. On this text, see William G. Boltz, “Shuo wen chieh tzu,” in Early Chinese Texts, ed. Loewe, 429–42; Françoise Bottéro, Sémantisme et classification dans l'écriture chinoise (Paris: Collège de France / Institut des Hautes Études Chinoise, 1996), 15–81; Marc Winter, …Und Cang Jie erfand die Schrift: Ein Handbuch für den Gebrauch des Shuo Wen Jie Zi (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998). 21. On Li Shizhen and his important book, see Lu, “China's Greatest Naturalist”; Nathan Sivin, “Li Shizhen, ” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 8, ed. Charles Coulston Gillespie (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1973); Okanishi Tameto , Honz gaisetsu (General statement about Chinese material medica) (Osaka: Sensha, 1977); Paul U. Unshuld, Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986), 145–63; Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 308–21; Georges Métailié, “The Bencao gangmu (Classified materia medica) of Li Shizhen—An innovation in Natural History?,” in Chinese Medicine: Innovation, Convention and Controversy, ed. Elisabeth Hsu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 221–61; Métailié, “Botanical Terminology of Li Shizhen in Bencao gangmu,” in Essays on Science, ed. Hakim Mohammed (Karachi: Hamdard Foundation Pakistan, 1990), 140–53; and Métailié, “Histoire naturelle et humanisme en Chine et en Europe au XVIe siècle: Li Shizhen et Jacques Dalechamp,” Revue d'Histoire des Sciences 42, no. 4 (1989): 353–74. 22. See Bretschneider, “Botanicon Sinicum,” Journal of the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society for the Year 1890–1891, New Series 25 (1893), 158–59 n. 350 (New edition facsimile: Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint Limited, 1967). 23. In fact it corresponds probably to two different cultivars. See Wu Gengmin , Zhongguo shucai zaipeixue (Gardening science in China) (Beijing: Kexue chubanshe, 1957), 159. 24. For a presentation of this text, see W. South Coblin, “Erh ya,” in Early Chinese Texts, ed. Loewe, 94–99. 25. Emil Bretschneider, “Botanicon Sinicum,” 59 n. 88. 26. W. Allyn Rickett, “Kuan tzu,” in Early Chinese Texts, ed. Loewe, 244. 27. On this text see Jeffrey K. Riegel, “Li chi,” in Early Chinese Texts, ed. Loewe, 293–97. 28. Lactuca sinensis Makino. 29. Sonchus oleraceus L. 30. George Usher, A Dictionary of Botany (London: Constable, 1966), 23. 31. In a seven-page note Shi musu ji e jian tu caomuxi (To transplant alfalfa, with a picture added of the wrong yellow sweet clover). 32. James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics (Hong Kong: Legge; London: Trubner), vol. I, 323. 33. Zheng Qiao Tongzhi lüe (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936), section 24.

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PART 4 Antiquarianism and Ethnography

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ELEVEN The Study of Islam in Early Modern Europe: Obstacles and Missed Opportunities Noel Malcolm In at least two major instances—the study of the classical world, and the study of Judaism—early modern scholars knew that, in order to understand a culture, it was necessary to consider how that culture understood itself, by studying its own hermeneutics and canons of interpretation. Thus early modern Hebraists explored the Talmud and studied the works of rabbinical exegetes and legal commentators; classical scholars investigated not only the literary texts of the ancient world, but also the works of classical grammarians, scholiasts, commentators, and mythographers. Yet when we turn to the early modern investigation of Islam, we find that this principle was not applied—or, at least, that its application was both inadequate and tardy. Islam's self-understanding was, for a long time, poorly investigated and little understood. Indeed, even the study of the primary texts made only halting progress. Work on the central text of Islam, the Koran, lagged far behind the study of Arabic, even though all students of Arabic knew that knowledge of the Koran was of huge importance for any understanding of the literary language itself. After the first printing of the Koran in Arabic (in the late 1530s) had become entirely unavailable (having been either suppressed or, more probably, shipped off to the Levant and destroyed there because of the errors it contained), no such edition was produced until 1694 (by Abraham Hinckelmann, in Hamburg) and 1698 (by Lodovico Marracci, in Padua)—even though the first major printing programme in Arabic type had got under way as early as the 1580s.1 Of the many Arabic texts published in Europe—whether in Arabic or Page 266 →in translation—up to the end of the seventeenth century, very few had any Islamic religious content. Individual scholars had access to some of the standard works of tafsir (Koranic exegesis); but they made only limited use of their knowledge of such material, and never published any systematic translations of such texts. The same goes for the collections of hadith (traditions about the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad); and for the great treatises on sharia (Islamic law); and, for that matter, for the major theological or ethical treatises of writers such as al-Ghazali. Very little work was done combining textual knowledge with observational knowledge of Islam as it was practiced, even though several of the most important textual scholars (Golius and Pococke, for example) had spent long periods in the Orient. It is true, on the other hand, that considerable energies were devoted to preparing editions of two historical texts dealing with the early Islamic period, the History of al-Makin (edited by Erpenius) and the History of the Dynasties of Abu ‘l-Faraj (edited by Pococke); but it is also noteworthy that both of those medieval Arab authors were Christians.2 Most European scholars during this period seem to have shied away from editing theological, philosophical, or ethical texts of a specifically Islamic nature. Instead, many turned to a genre that was more “safe,” theologically neutral, and appealing to a Western readership: collections of proverbs. The Adages of Erasmus had created a huge appetite for this sort of thing among European readers; and in some ways it was no doubt a canny move on the part of the scholars to use such material in order to awaken an interest in Oriental culture, since Arabic proverbs offered both an aura of exoticism (to draw in the readers) and a familiar sense of universal human experience (to reassure them, once drawn in). And, of course, for those learning Arabic, collections of proverbs offered interesting but simple texts in manageably small units. The vogue was begun by Johannes Drusius, whose collection of Hebrew and Arab proverbs (in Latin translation) was published in 1591 and reissued in 1612.3 Then a manuscript containing 200 Arab proverbs, obtained by Casaubon, worked on by Scaliger, and finally prepared for publication by the doyen of Arabic scholars in Europe, Thomas Erpenius, was published in 1614; Erpenius later added 100 more in his edition of the fables of Luqman (1615), and issued an improved edition of the original 200 in 1623.4 These were intended as reading materials for students of Arabic, as was the similar collection of proverbs, attributed to Muhammad's son-in-law Ali, which Jacob Golius published in 1629.5 But other scholars

and writers were aware that there might be an appetite for such Page 267 →things among the general public. A French translation of the Scaliger-Erpenius collection was issued in 1632, German and French versions of the Golius collection were published in 1641 and 1660, and a Latin translation was prepared by Samuel Bochart in the early 1640s.6 During his stint as chaplain in Aleppo in the 1630s, Edward Pococke worked on an edition and translation of the 6,000 proverbs of al-Maydani, but his edition was never published.7 The same fate befell the collection prepared by a later chaplain there, Robert Frampton.8 But Levinus Warner's little edition of 100 Persian proverbs (with Latin translation) was published in 1644, and later in the century general collections of “oriental” proverbs were produced by Timoteo Agnellini and Antoine Galland.9 And in a similar category one might place the animal fables of Luqman, published (with a Latin translation) by Erpenius in 1615, reissued in 1636 and 1656, and offered to the French public in a new Latin translation in 1673.10 By means of these publications, European readers were introduced to the mental world of Arabs, Persians, and Turks in a way that almost entirely avoided any reference to Islam. A similar role was performed by one of the most influential Arabic works issued in the West, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, published in Latin as Philosophus autodidactus by Edward Pococke and his son in 1671: this text, by the twelfth-century writer ibn Tufail, was a work of philosophical theology in fictional format which contained very few references to Islam and was regarded with suspicion by Christian theologians only for its deistic tendencies, not for any Muslim ones.11 And even the Synopsis propositorum sapientiae arabum philosophorum of Husain al-Maibudi, translated by the Maronite scholar Abraham Ecchellensis (Ibrahim al-Hakilani) in 1641, contained, in its treatment of theological principles, only the most general statements (about divine volition and cognition, and so on), set in a classical-philosophical framework.12 To get some sense of the oddity of the situation, one has only to compare this studious concentration on the nonIslamic or barely Islamic products of Islamic culture with the extraordinarily detailed study of Judaism undertaken by Christian scholars of Hebrew during the same period—the researches into the minute details of Jewish ceremonial by Buxtorf, his rabbinical Bible (1617) and Talmudic dictionary (1639), the history of rabbinical academies published by Jakob Alting (1652), the “Christian yeshiva” run by Esdras Edzard in Hamburg from 1656 onward, the formal courses of “rabbinico-Talmudic studies” given by professors of Hebrew at Jena and Heidelberg, and so on.13 Of course, Page 268 →Hebrew scholarship was both longer-established and much more widely practiced. Judaism itself was of special interest because of its relationship to Christianity—a relationship seen, at least in part, as positive, unlike that of Islam, which was viewed only as a later deformation. That the study of Judaism was both quantitatively greater and qualitatively more intense and more motivated goes without saying. But what needs to be said is that the methods developed and applied in that case, which involved understanding a complex and in many ways alien religion on its own terms, were seldom carried over into such study of Islam as did take place—even though the starting-point of most European Arabic scholars was their involvement in Hebrew studies. Any account of the obstacles and difficulties that impeded the scholarly study of Islam must begin with those that impeded the study of the Arabic language. Early modern Arabic scholarship was developed first by a few isolated individuals in the mid-sixteenth century (notably Guillaume Postel and Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter), and then by a cluster of pioneers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (Etienne Hubert, Joseph Justus Scaliger, William Bedwell, Bartholomaeus Radtmann, Peter Kirsten, Thomas Erpenius, Franciscus Raphelengius, Johann Zechendorff); the difficulties they faced were indeed considerable, but not—as their achievements showed—insuperable.14 The lack of native teachers was one problem. Many European cities had rabbis who might be persuaded to share their knowledge of Hebrew with Christian scholars, but few had resident Arabicspeakers. Nevertheless, such people were found: Radtmann (who published an introduction to Arabic in 1592) studied with an educated Turk from Edirne who had been captured, converted and brought to the court of the Elector of Brandenburg; Kirsten was taught by an “Arab” in Germany or Switzerland; in Paris in 1609 Erpenius was able to study with a learned Copt, Yusuf ibn Daqan (who later met Bedwell in England, and gave Arabic lessons in London in 1613); and in Conflans in 1611 Erpenius met another Arabic speaker, the Moroccan envoy Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari, who gave him further tuition.15 Some Catholics had the benefit of tuition by Arab Christians from the Lebanon, after the establishment of the Maronite College in Rome in the 1580s. And some

scholars (for example, Postel, Hubert, and Golius) traveled to North Africa and/ or the Levant, taking advantage of the many opportunities offered by diplomacy and trade. Indeed, thanks to such opportunities, they could immerse themselves in spoken Arabic in a way that was simply not possible for spoken Hebrew. Page 269 → Another problem was the lack of printers able to produce texts in the Arabic script. There were not many sets of Arabic type in Western Europe: from the 1580s to the 1620s the most important were those of the Medici press (in Rome), Raphelengius (in Leiden), Savary de Brèves (first in Rome, then in Paris), Kirsten (in Breslau), and Erpenius (in Leiden). Later in the seventeenth century the opportunities for scholars to publish Arabic texts broadened, as Erpenius's Arabic font was either used or copied in London, Oxford, Amsterdam, Cambridge, and Utrecht.16 But those who did not have access to Arabic type were able to improvise solutions of various sorts. Small amounts of Arabic could be prepared in woodblock (as in some of the publications of Zechendorff) or added by hand (as in the case of a few words in Thomas Greaves's inaugural oration at Oxford, or of all the Arabic in Radtmann's introduction to the language); and, if necessary, the Arabic could simply be printed in Hebrew (as it was in major works by Samuel Bochart and Johann Heinrich Hottinger).17 The paucity of basic materials for the systematic study of the language—above all, grammars and dictionaries—was also a problem. The first rudimentary but generally available version of an Arabic dictionary was represented by the inclusion of Arabic in the five-language dictionary of Valentin Schindler in 1612; the following year saw the publication of both Erpenius's grammar and Raphelengius's dictionary, which became the starting points for a generation of students.18 Several scholars worked on the preparation of Arabic dictionaries (notably Bedwell, Erpenius, and Bochart), but the first well-grounded dictionary did not appear until the publication of Golius's Lexicon arabico-latinum in 1653. Nevertheless, given the Raphelengius-Erpenius materials (and the elementary texts published by the latter), scholars equipped with reasonable amounts of intellectual energy—not a commodity in short supply during this period—could find their own way forward. Another obstacle was the difficulty of acquiring copies of the Koran, or of other key Islamic texts. The Koran posed a special problem: although it was the commonest text, it was also the one most prized by Muslims. Lancelot Addison, who lived for seven years in Tangier in the 1660s, described the problem as follows: I have often doubted whether there be any true Edition of the Alcoran in the European Language, since I observed how difficult it is for any Christian to obtain from the Mahumedans a copy thereof. For they permit not any of a Religion different from their own, so much as to Page 270 →touch it…And at this day it is capital for a Moor to sell an Alcoran to either Jew or Christian. Nor indeed are any Alcorans to be met with in private hands, or exposed to sale to the vulgar. In above seven years of conversation among the Moors, I could not obtain the sight of one.19 Addison told the story of his compatriot Francis Barton, who had tried unsuccessfully to obtain copies of the Koran in Istanbul and Gallipoli, and had been “forced to escape privily” after the latter attempt, for fear of being hauled before the authorities. He also described how Hottinger had made use of a Koran pawned by its Muslim owner, only to find, three years later, that the original owner was making strenuous efforts (via Golius in Leiden) to reclaim it; when that owner discovered that Hottinger had written notes in the margins of the manuscript, he became all the more insistent that it must be returned to him, so that he could have it burnt.20 Serious scholars of Arabic, such as Hottinger, could usually obtain a copy of the Koran sooner or later, but the process was seldom without difficulty. (By 1627 the Tübingen orientalist Wilhelm Schickard had managed to acquire four Korans; each of them, however, was defective in one way or another.)21 As late as 1678, one German scholar was commenting on the huge expense of obtaining a manuscript of the Koran.22 Only toward the end of the century, with the spoils of the Habsburg-Ottoman war of 1683–99, did the flow of copies substantially increase.23 Abraham Hinckelmann, who produced the first generally available printed edition of the Koran, was a beneficiary of this conflict, acquiring many manuscripts from the sack of Buda; by 1694 he possessed no fewer than eleven Korans.24 Most major West European libraries, on the other hand, had been well supplied with Korans

since at least the early seventeenth century: when William Laud obtained a royal letter to the Levant Company in 1634, requiring them to bring one Arabic or Persian manuscript with each of their returning ships, the letter excluded Korans, on the grounds that the Bodleian Library had enough of them already.25 Similarly, the Vatican Library was well-stocked with Korans; when, for example, it received in 1609 a small haul of manuscripts seized from Muslim travelers in the Mediterranean by the Knights of Malta, Korans made up half of that collection.26 Given the difficulty of individually obtaining a Koran on the one hand, and the ease of access to Korans in major libraries on the other, one might expect that an edition would have been quickly prepared, using those public resources to create a product that would supply that Page 271 →private demand. Likewise, with the rapid growth of linguistic competence among European orientalists, one might expect that a scholarly new translation would soon have been published, to replace the inadequate medieval Latin translation which had been reissued in 1543. Yet on both counts the seventeenth century presented, until its final decade, a sorry tale of failure. Before the end of the sixteenth century, Etienne Hubert had prepared a translation of most of the text; but this was neither completed nor published.27 Erpenius was implored (by the German scholar Christoph Besold) to supply an accurate translation; he announced in 1620 that he would “shortly” produce an edition with a translation, but this never appeared.28 His pupil Louis de Dieu was said to be preparing an edition and a translation in the 1620s, but this too remained unpublished.29 Meanwhile Johann Zechendorff, in Zwickau, had prepared a complete text with an interlinear Latin translation. However, as he explained, it languished on his desk, for lack of both Arabic type and a sponsor; encouraged by letters from several academics (including de Dieu), he published just a few sample suras in the 1630s.30 In 1643 Christian Ravius announced that his own interlinear edition would be finished within one year: he tried—unsuccessfully—first to get the authorities in Utrecht to underwrite its publication, then to persuade leading professors at Leiden to ask Elzevier to take it on, and finally he was reduced to printing just a small sample at his own expense.31 In the 1640s Golius was said to be preparing an edition; meanwhile Abraham Wheelock was planning a translation into Latin and Greek, and John Boncle was preparing a “concordance” of the Koran, but none of these was ever published.32 In 1647 a new translation did appear, by André du Ryer, into French; the scale of public interest in the Koran can be measured by the fact that this was reissued several times and translated first into English (in 1649, by an unnamed translator) and later into Dutch, German, and even Russian.33 But the need for an edition of the Arabic text continued; and the consensus soon arose among scholars that du Ryer's translation was not good enough. In 1660 Hottinger was said to be preparing a new translation, but nothing came of this.34 At roughly the same time, the Silesian Catholic theologian Dominicus Germanus, who had traveled widely in the Middle East in the 1630s and 1640s, did prepare a Latin translation of the Koran (with a refutation of it) at the request of Philip IV of Spain; however, this was never printed.35 In the 1680s the Jena scholar Johann Andreas Danz started work on an edition of the Arabic with a Latin translation, but he later abandoned the project and published only a tiny sample of his work.36 In the following Page 272 →decade an Oratorian priest, Louis de Byzance (a converted Jew, formerly Raphael Levi), prepared a complete translation; but only fragments of this were found after his death, three decades later.37 By the 1690s several scholars were planning major editions: Heinrich Sike (Sikius), who had moved from his native Bremen to the Netherlands, hoped to produce a translation based on a text carefully collated with many manuscripts, and Andreas Acoluth in Breslau planned a quadrilingual edition in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Latin.38 Sike's plan was never brought to fruition, and only a specimen of Acoluth's work was eventually published in 1701. But by that time, the major editions by Hinckelmann (in Arabic only) and Marracci (in Arabic, with Latin translation and copious refutatory commentary) had at long last appeared—more than a century after Hubert's initial endeavors. Until the 1690s, therefore, all that had become available of the Arabic text of the Koran, in print, was a handful of suras issued in a variety of minor publications by Erpenius, Zechendorff, Ravius, Johann Georg Nissel, and Matthias Beck.39 If the story of the prolonged nonappearance of the Koran in print is rather dispiriting, that of the nonappearance of other types of text needed for the study of Islam is even more so: tafsir, hadith, and theological works. Among scholars, some sense of the importance of these materials had been present for a long time.40 In 1611 Erpenius wrote to Casaubon (probably on the basis of what Ahmad bin Qasim had told him): “The Koran is nothing without its commentary, and the books of sunna, which contain the deeds, sayings and responses of Muhammad…the sunna is ten times bigger than the Koran, or even bigger, and is of equal authority.”41 John Selden studied at least two works of tafsir, citing them very occasionally in two of his published works.42 Scaliger owned a copy of the

great tafsir of al-Baydawi, though there is no sign that he made any use of it; Zechendorff studied a copy of this work, and his manuscript of it was probably the one used by Hottinger, who copied details from it into the margins of his Koran (to the dismay, as noted above, of that Koran's original owner).43 Hottinger (like Golius) had also studied the tafsir of al-Zamakhshari, referring to both that author and al-Baydawi in his Historia orientalis.44 Du Ryer mostly used the tafsir of the Jalalayn and al-Baydawi, together with the Tanwir fi al-tafsir of al-Righi alTunisi, a copy of which he owned.45 When Hottinger published his pioneering bibliographical work Promtuarium, sive bibliotheca orientalis in 1658, he included a long list of tafsir texts; in most cases, however, he was extracting references to these works from other writers, and there is no evidence that he had studied them himself.46 Edward Pococke, on the other hand, had Page 273 →read many of them, and cited several in the extended notes to his Specimen historiae arabum (1650); but this gave only a tantalizing glimpse into this material, given that Pococke's work was not directly concerned with Koranic exegesis. Nearly a half-century later, just after the publication of Hinckelmann's edition, Heinrich Sike contemplated publishing an entire volume of “the Commentaries of the Arabs on the Koran”; this would have been the first ever substantial publication of tafsir in the West, but the plan was never fulfilled.47 And roughly fourteen years after that, the Saxon orientalist Johann Christian Clodius announced his plan to write a treatise on Islam that would include information “about the literal and mystical commentators on the Koran”; again, no such work appeared.48 With the great collections of hadith the story is the same: the French orientalist Gilbert Gaulmin, for example, possessed the classic collection by alBukhari, and Samuel Bochart, cataloguing Gaulmin's manuscripts, described it as “the Turkish Pandects—a work which, among the Muslims, is second in authority to the Koran.”49 Yet, although Western scholars thus clearly understood the importance of such texts, they never published any selections from them in this period. And the same is true of the classic works of Islamic theology. Christian Ravius, for example, commented on a short treatise by al-Ghazali (the Kimiya, a condensation of his major treatise the Ihya), describing it as a complete “system” of the Muslim faith, and wrote: “So, if you want to know the business, traditions, decisions, legal responses and received opinions of those people, i.e. the Arabs, this book on its own does the job so well that it is impossible to find a better work by this author, and it deserves to be published.”50 But was it published, by Ravius or by anyone else? It was not. In order to explain the syndrome outlined above, it is necessary to look at some of the larger cultural factors that influenced the academic study of Islam during this period. First, it must be understood that the scholars who developed Arabic studies were not primarily concerned with Islam; there were other positive motives for studying Arabic materials, and the motivation where Islam was concerned was in any case more negative. The range of motives was outlined—in a rather formalized and self-justificatory way—in the various “‘orations,” inaugural lectures and academic manifestoes issued by West European professors of Arabic throughout the century. Recurrent themes included the use of Arabic materials to assist biblical scholarship; the study of other disciplines, particularly ones in which ancient Greek texts might be recovered from Arabic translations; practical use in diplomacy and trade; and, finally, Page 274 →the conversion of Muslims to Christianity. Thus Matthias Pasor, in his “oration” to Oxford in 1626, emphasized the usefulness of Arabic for developing a better understanding of Hebrew and the need to study Arabic versions of the Bible; other reasons included the conversion of Muslims and the study of medicine, philosophy, physics, mathematics, history, and poetry.51 A decade later, Thomas Greaves gave priority to the study of Greek science, and of philosophy, medicine, and mathematics; then he passed to the usefulness of Arabic for the study of Hebrew, and mentioned also the need to refute Islam.52 In 1643 Ravius put the study of the Bible first, commenting also on the need to make contact with Oriental Christians and to convert Muslims; then he emphasized the utility of Arabic for all arts and sciences, and also (he was, after all, addressing a Dutch audience) its value for merchants.53 Matthias Wasmuth, in the following decade, emphasized first of all the usefulness of Arabic for the study of Hebrew, and argued that knowledge of the customs and ceremonies of Oriental peoples was needed to interpret the Bible; he also mentioned the conversion of Muslims, before writing at length about the value of Arabic studies for other arts and sciences.54 In his inaugural address to Cambridge in 1667, Edmund Castell put the value of Arabic for law and medicine first, but gave most of his attention to Biblical studies; and his contemporary Johann Frischmuth, at Jena, put all the emphasis on the study of the Bible, mentioning Arabic's usefulness for other sciences almost as an afterthought.55 Such were the standard justifications in northern Europe. In Italy, where the Maronite College was the main centre of Arabic expertise, the principal reason for the study of Arabic was to foster contacts with Oriental Christians; but there was real interest

in missionary work too (stimulated, above all, by the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, which was set up in 1622), and Lodovico Marracci, for example, would give the conversion of Muslims as the main reason for his Koranic studies.56 These interests thus largely turned the focus away from Islam; when they did put the spotlight on it, it was as a target for attack. Much of Western Arabic scholarship was conducted by pious Protestant Biblicists (Pasor, Bochart, Wasmuth) or Catholic clerics. Many scholars of Arabic were deeply imbued with anti-Islamic sentiment; William Bedwell's modern biographer, for example, has commented on his “gratuitous venom” against Islam.57 Abraham Wheelock, translating the Koran in the 1640s, wrote that he was motivated to study it because “the wicked and pernicious Alcoran's hypocrises, soe full of good wordes under divelish endes ought to bee confuted,” and that he hoped to demonstrate that it was Page 275 →full of hipocrisie, falsehoode, savage crueltie.”58 Hottinger, in a printed broadside for the inaugural oration by Johann Freinsheim at Heidelberg in 1656, wrote in praise of Arabic that it was valuable for “the study of law, medicine, philosophy, history and the other philological sciences,” but added the proviso: “as for what concerns their Koranology [‘Koranologiam’], legal traditions, and liturgy, they are often imbued with the deadly poison of impiety.”59 Many of the scholars who planned editions or translations of the Koran included, as an integral part of their project, a “refutation” of it: Zechendorff was hard at work on one, and Hottinger gave the refutation of the Koran as the main justification for publishing it.60 In the Catholic world, hostility to the Koran had been institutionalized by a series of sixteenth-century decrees which placed it on the Index in Portugal, Spain, and Venice; Marracci was enabled to publish the Koran only because the main point of his work was to present a comprehensive refutation of it.61 But the Protestant world's suspicions and hostilities, though less formally stated, were in the end quite similar. Bochart recalled that a project to print the Koran in Holland and England was brought to a halt by the “scruples” of some scholars; the Leiden theologian André Rivet insisted that de Dieu's edition and translation of the Koran should not be published without an “antidote.”62 Behind these attitudes there stood, of course, the whole panoply of traditional attitudes toward Islam, derived to a large extent from medieval anti-Muslim polemics.63 According to the traditional view, Muhammad was an impostor, and his religion was concocted—out of Judaism and heretical forms of Christianity—for reasons of personal ambition; to recruit his followers, he had deliberately appealed to their baser motives (allowing polygamy in order to appeal to their lust, and so on). Islam was thus not only fraudulent and morally bad, but also theologically uninteresting, since it was merely an artificial “hodge-podge” or “medley.”64 Unlike almost every other religion considered by early modern scholars, therefore, Islam was never seriously regarded as a possible repository of “prisca theologia” or “prisca sapientia” (ancient theology or ancient wisdom); its comparatively recent origin, and its presumed debts to other, better known, religions, prevented that.65 There was thus little room for any positive intellectual engagement with it. Some of the more absurd details were gradually removed from the medieval caricature: famously, for example, when Pococke translated Grotius's De veritate religionis christianae into Arabic, he omitted the claim that Muhammad had trained a pigeon to behave as if it were whispering in his ear.66 But the broad outlines of the caricature were long permitted to remain, even by those Page 276 → scholars who were best qualified to erase them. It is true that some thinkers in the second half of the seventeenth century did develop more positive views of Islam, either because, like Francis Osborne, they saw it in Machiavellian and Hobbist terms as a well-devised “politic” religion, or because, like some of the early Unitarians, they regarded it as a model for a reformed, simplified and de-Trinitarianized Christianity.67 Some writers—most notably Henry Stubbe—managed to combine both views. But these people were not Arabic scholars; when Stubbe compiled his major treatise on “the Rise and Progress of Mohametanism,” his knowledge came entirely at second hand, from standard Latin works such as those of Hottinger.68 Not until the writings of the Dutch academic Adrian Reland, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, do we find a real scholar of Arabic adopting a non-polemical or even sympathetic view of Islamic practice and belief. This lack of intellectual engagement with Islam was reinforced by one special feature of the traditional picture of that religion: the idea that Islam was itself antidisputational and antitheological. That Muhammad had forbidden disputation about his teachings had been a commonplace observation, from Renaissance writers onward. When “Turcopapismus”—a rhetorical identification of Roman Catholicism with Islam—became a theme of Protestant

controversialists at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this point was much harped on: Matthew Sutcliffe, for example, compared Muhammad's intolerance of theological debate to the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church, and to the suppression by the Catholics of books of all sorts, including the (vernacular) Bible.69 Once again, the issue could be understood in essentially political terms: as Addison put it, with delicious anachronism, “Mahumed having out of Politick Ends prohibited Printing.”70 Writers in the Machiavellian and ragion di stato traditions, on the other hand—for example, Boccalini, Osborne, and Saavedra Fajardo—praised Muhammad for his wisdom here, as they feared the effects of religious disputes on the stability of the state; the premise that Islam was peculiarly hostile to theological debate thus remained unchallenged in their writings.71 Such an attitude spilled over into the wider assumption that Islam was somehow anti-cultural, opposed to all books other than the Koran, and hostile to all secular learning for fear that the Koran might be contradicted by it. (One late-seventeenth-century scholar, Samuel Schelwig, claimed that Muhammad was especially opposed to the study of logic, as it would enable people to disagree with his teachings.)72 Particularly influential Page 277 →here were the remarks of the sixteenth-century writer known as “Leo Africanus” (a Granadan-born Moroccan Muslim, Hasan al-Wazzan) in his hugely popular book about north Africa. Commenting on the advent of Islam to Persia, he wrote: “For certain it is, that the Persians at the same time lost those letters which were peculiar vnto their nation; and that all their bookes, by the commandment of the Mahumetan prelates, were burnt, least their knowledge in naturall philosophie, or their idolatrous religion might mooue them to contemne the precepts of Mahumet.” And the same process had, he said, taken place more recently in the Maghreb: the north Africans “haue beene heretofore most studious of the Mathematiques, of Philosophie, and of Astrologie: but these artes…were fower hundred yeeres agoe, vtterly destroyed and taken away by the chiefe professours of their lawe.”73 The assumption that it was the deliberate policy of Islam to suppress the arts and sciences was often combined with the general view that the Ottomans (the most important Muslim power known to early modern Europeans) were anticultural and anti-intellectual. Such a view had been current since the earliest humanist orations on the fall of Constantinople, and had been much fortified by the great shift that had taken place in Renaissance attitudes to the Turks, away from identifying the “Turcae” as “Teucri” (Trojans), toward regarding them as descendants of primitive Scythians instead.74 A commonplace theme in accounts written by travelers to the Ottoman Empire was that the Turks preferred experience to book learning. According to Leunclavius (compiler of one of the most authoritative histories of the Turks) the only area of the humanities cultivated by them was history; otherwise they studied things related to practical life.75 In the great Renaissance debate about “arms versus letters,” writers such as René de Lucinge and Michel de Montaigne placed the Turks firmly in the “arms” camp.76 These assumptions dovetailed neatly with those about the anticultural, anti-intellectual nature of Islam. If it was pointed out that there had once been a strong intellectual culture in those lands—the culture of Avicenna, Averroes, Albumasar, Alhazen, and many others known to Western scholars—the usual answer was that this had been swept aside by the Turks; little attention was paid to the fact that that culture had itself been Islamic. This was not the only issue on which a kind of selective cognitive dissonance became quite normal. Another example concerned the question of whether the Islamic world contained any important schools, colleges, and libraries. On the one hand classic texts, such as that of Leo Africanus, suggested that such institutions played a major role in Page 278 →Islamic society; Leo's portrayal of the great medreses and libraries of the Maghreb still played on the imaginations of English intellectuals in the late seventeenth century, as is shown by the list of queries given by the Royal Society to the Ambassador to Morocco in 1672.77 But on the other hand the accounts written by travelers tended to reinforce the view that there was no intellectual culture in the Islamic world. Lancelot Addison, after his seven years' residence in Tangier, emphasized that there were no colleges or libraries in Barbary; Thomas Smith, after his prolonged stay in Istanbul, dismissed the Turks as “a barbarous nation”; Jean Coppin, a former French consul in Syria, wrote that “The Turks in general are very ignorant, these peoples do not cultivate any body of learning…they will not allow any printing-shop to be set up, for fear that one might print books opposed to their religion, and they have only a very small quantity of writings in manuscript.”78 In fact Istanbul in the first half of the seventeenth century had two guilds of booksellers (totaling 500 men) and 200 bookbinders; it possessed many libraries, and its first secular public library was opened in 1678; probate

inventories from Damascus at the end of the century show that books amounted on average to 12 percent of the total value of the domestic goods owned by Muslim merchants, and 19 percent of those owned by members of the ulema (imams, scholars, judges, etc.).79 But such facts were either unknown to the Western visitors, or elided from their observations. The general image thus created of the Islamic-Ottoman world was of das Land ohne Bücher, the country with no books. Scholars, of course, knew that this was not correct: Hottinger, in his Bibliothecarius quadripartitus, emphasized both the existence of libraries (though his information here was very inadequate) and the wealth of writings in existence.80 Yet the basic assumption, of a nonintellectual, nonliterary culture, still dominated the minds of Western readers. They did not expect to find anything intellectually interesting produced by Islam itself; their expectations were confined either to fragments of classical culture preserved in Arabic translations, or, at best, to a medieval Arabic culture that was of interest only because it was more closely tied to classical learning. The culture and conditions of life of the Islamic world were not, it should be emphasized, a blank space on the West European mental map. Early modern Western culture did possess quite a detailed picture of Islamic life and practice, drawn from direct observation. The canonical texts (mostly from the sixteenth century) were by people who had either lived in Ottoman territory as captives, or visited it as diplomats (or members of their entourages): the captives included George of Hungary (or Page 279 →of Transylvania: “Septemcastrensis”), Bartholomeus Georgewitz, Luigi Bassano, and Antonio Menavino, while the diplomats and other visitors included Antoine Geuffroy, Pierre Belon, Nicolas de Nicolay, Guillaume Postel, and Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq.81 From these and other writers quite a detailed account could be assembled of ordinary life and the system of society and government. But where Islam was concerned, these writers could only describe external ceremonies and/or give somewhat garbled secondhand accounts of beliefs. For although some of them—the captives, at least—became fluent in Turkish and could thus converse easily with Muslims, they neither became Muslims themselves, nor (with the sole exception of Postel) studied texts.82 Besides, they had in their heads, both before and after the times they spent in the Ottoman lands, much of the standard view of Islam that derived from the traditional corpus of medieval anti-Muslim polemics; that standard view inevitably influenced their observations, and what they wrote tended, therefore, to confirm it. Bizarre claims about the beliefs of Muslims were thus happily repeated from author to author: for example, that they thought God was corporeal. But because the writings of these authors had the authority of eyewitnesses, and because, in many other ways, they were quite evidently not caricaturing their objects—praising, indeed, many aspects of Ottoman life—they commanded much respect. This blocked the way for scholars who might otherwise have tried to combine observation of Islam with the serious study of its texts. Occasionally a thoughtful observer would explode one of the commonly repeated claims: for example, the standard claim that if a Jew converted to Islam, he or she was required to become a Christian first, was finally corrected in the late seventeenth century by Paul Rycaut.83 But no systematic correction of such errors, by someone familiar with many of the most important texts of Islam, would be undertaken until the appearance of Reland's De religione mohammedica in 1705.84 It thus seems that the influence of a tradition of Western texts—texts whose very authority was based on the claims of observation, not intertextuality—formed the final obstacle to the development of Western Islamic studies in the seventeenth century. With so many other cultural factors working against such development, this factor was endowed with considerable power. Given that ethnography and antiquarian scholarship were otherwise enjoying such fruitful interrelations during this entire period, the conclusion here can only seem a paradoxical one—that the antiquarianism of the scholar was, for a long time, blocked by the ethnography of the observer. Page 280 →

NOTES I am very grateful to Alastair Hamilton for his comments on a draft of this essay. 1. For a valuable summary of the printing history of the Koran during this period, see H. Bobzin, “From Venice to Cairo: On the History of Arabic Editions of the Koran (16th—early 20th century),” in Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution: A Cross-Cultural Encounter, ed. E. Hanebutt-Benz, D. Glass,

and G. Roper (Westhofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima, 2002), 151–76. On the Venice printing, of which only one exemplum survives, see A. Nuovo, “A Lost Arabic Koran Rediscovered,” The Library, n.s., 12 (1990): 273–92; M. Borrmans, “Présentation de la première édition du Coran imprimée à Venise,”Quaderni di studi arabi 9 (1991): 93–126; and the comments in H. Bobzin, “Islamkundliche Quellen in Jean Bodins Heptaplomeres,” in Jean Bodins Colloquium Heptaplomeres, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 67, ed. G. Gawlick and F. Niewöhner (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1996), 41–57. 2. See G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 45–46, 125. Neither work, however, was polemically antiMuslim; as Alastair Hamilton notes, Abu ’l-Faraj wrote for a Muslim as well as a Christian readership (see his “The Study of Islam in Early Modern Europe,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 3 [2001]: 169–82, here 177). 3. J. Drusius, Apophthegmata Ebraeorum ac Arabum (Franeker, 1591; 2nd ed. Franeker, 1612). 4. J. J. Scaliger and T. Erpenius, eds., Proverbiorum Arabicorum centuriae duae (Leiden, 1614; 2nd ed. Leiden, 1623); T. Erpenius, Locmani sapientis fabulae et selecta quaedam Arabum adagia (Leiden, 1615; 2nd ed. 1636; 3rd ed. 1656). See also R. Sellheim, Die klassisch-arabischen Sprichwörtersammlungen insbesondere die des Abu Ubaid (The Hague: Mouton, 1954), 1–3 (noting that the 100 proverbs were republished by Andreas Sennert in Wittenberg in 1658). 5. J. Golius, Proverbia quaedam Alis, imperatoris muslimici, et carmen Togra’ï, poetis docti(Leiden, 1629). 6. J. Hambraeus, Proverbia arabica selectissima…nunc gallico idiomate reddita (Paris, 1632); A. Tscherning, Centura proverbiorum Alis imperatoris muslimici distichis latino-germanicis expressa (Breslau, 1641); P. Vattier, L'Elegie du Tograi…avec…les proverbes du Chalife Gali (Paris, 1660); Bibliothèque Municipale de Caen, pressmark in- 8o 26, exemplum of Golius, Proverbia quaedam Alis, with MS Latin translations by Bochart on interleaved pages. 7. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 124–25; Sellheim, Sprichwörtersammlungen, 3. 8. A. Hamilton, “The English Interest in the Arabic-Speaking Christians,” in The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. G. A. Russell (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1994), 30–53, here 43. 9. L. Warner, Proverbiorum et sententiarum persicarum centuria (Leiden, 1644); T. Agnellini, Proverbii utili, e virtuosi, in lingua araba, persiana e turca (Padua, 1688); A. Galland, Les paroles remarquables, les bons mots et les maximes des Orientaux: traduction de leurs ouvrages en arabe, en persan & en turc (The Hague, Page 281 →1694), translated as The Remarkable Sayings, Apothegms and Maxims of the Eastern nations (London, 1695). Agnellini's collection, however, was untypical of the genre, being intended primarily for Oriental readers; for proselytizing purposes, he included biblical sayings and statements of Christian doctrine. For general surveys of the genre, see D. G. Morhof, Polyhistor, 2 vols. (Lübeck, 1688–92), 1:251–59, and T. A. Stephens, Proverb Literature: A Bibliography of Works relating to Proverbs, ed. W. Bonser (London: William Glaisher Ltd., 1930), 355–68. 10. See above, n. 4; T. Lefebvre (“Tanaquillus Faber”), Fabulae ex Locmanis arabico latinis versibus redditae (Saumur, 1673), reprinted in his Epistolae, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Saumur, 1674), 1. 11. E. Pococke, ed., Philosophus autodidactus sive epistola Abi Jaafar ebn Tophail de Hai ebn Yokdhan (Oxford, 1671). As Nabil Matar notes, the Pococke translation systematically omitted the occasional Islamic references in this work, such as the praise of Muhammad in its opening epistle (Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 101). On this work, and its translations into Dutch (1672) and English (1674, 1686) see G. A. Russell, “The Impact of the Philosophus autodidactus: Pococke, John Locke and the Society of Friends,” in G. A. Russell, ed., The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, 224–65, and Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 218–22. 12. This work, published in Paris, is an extract from al-Maibudi's “Maqasid hikmat falasifat al-Arab”: see J. Fück, Die arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1955), 76. Similarly, when Andreas Müller published extracts (with Latin translations) from “Maqsad-i aqsa,” a treatise by the Sufi mystic Aziz al-Din ibn Muhammad Nasafi, he mostly chose general passages on divine cognition and the nature of human life: A. Müller, Excerpta manuscripti cujusdam turcici, quod de cognitione Dei & hominis ipsius à quodam Azizo Nesephaeo, Tataro, scriptum est (Cölln an der Spree, 1665).

13. For a valuable summary see C. Wilke, “Splendeurs et infortunes du talmudisme académique en Allemagne,” in Les Textes judéophobes et judéophiles dans l'Europe chrétienne à l'époque moderne, ed. D. Tollet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 97–134, esp. 104–16. 14. On the sixteenth century see H. Bobzin, Der Koran im Zeitalter der Reformation: Studien zur Frühgeschichte der Arabistik und Islamkunde in Europa (Beirut and Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995). On the later pioneers see Fück, Die arabischen Studien; W. M. C. Juynboll, Zeventiende-eeuwsche beoefenaars van het arabisch in Nederland (Utrecht, 1931); A. Hamilton, William Bedwell the Arabist, 1563–1632 (Leiden: Sir Thomas Browne Institute, 1985); Toomer, Eastern Wisedome. 15. B. Radtmann, Introductio in linguam arabicam (Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, 1592), sig. A1; P. Kirsten (“Kirstenius”), Grammatices arabicae liber 1 (Breslau, 1608), 5 (“meus Preceptor Arabs”); A. Hamilton, “An Egyptian Traveller in the Republic of Letters: Josephus Barbatus or Abudacnus the Copt,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 123–50; Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari, Page 282 →Kitab nasir al-din ‘ala ‘l-qawm al-kafirin (The Supporter of Religion against the Infidel), ed. and tr. P. S. van Koningsveld, Q. al-Samarrai, and G. A. Wiegers (Madrid, 1997), pp. 34–35. 16. See Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 22–24, 30–32, 36, 42–46, and G. Roper, “Early Arabic Printing in Europe,” in Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution: A Cross-Cultural Encounter, ed. E. Hanebutt-Benz, D. Glass, and G. Roper (Westhofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima, 2002), 129–50. 17. J. Zechendorff, Specimen suratarum, id est, capitum aliquot ex Alcorani system-ate (Zwickau, n.d [1638?]) (cf. his Fabulae muhammedicae sive nugae Alcorani [n.p. (Zwickau), 1627], sig. A3r, complaining of his lack of Arabic type); T. Greaves, De linguae arabicae utilitate et praestantia: oratio habita Oxonii habita Iul. 19. 1637 (Oxford, 1639); Radtmann, Introductio; S. Bochart, Geographia sacra (Caen, 1646); J. H. Hottinger, Historia orientalis (Zurich, 1651). 18. V. Schindler, Lexicon pentaglotton, Hebraicum, Chaldaicum, Syriacum, Talmudico-rabbinicum, & Arabicum (Hanau, 1612); T. Erpenius, Grammatica arabica (Leiden, 1613); F. Raphelengius, Lexicon arabicum (Leiden, 1613). See A. Hamilton, “‘Nam tirones sumus’: Franciscus Raphelengius's Lexicon arabico-latinum” (Leiden 1613), De gulden passer 66–67 (1988–89): 557–89. Hamilton comments also (565) on the Spanish-Arabic dictionary of Pedro de Alcalá, Vocabulista aravigo (Granada, 1505), which, however, gave the Arabic words in Roman transcription only, and was confined to the Granadan dialect. 19. L. Addison, The Life and Death of Mahumed (London, 1679), 49. 20. Ibid., 50–52. 21. W. Schickard, Briefwechsel, ed. F. Seck, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog Verlag, 2002), 1:319. 22. J. V. Bechmann, Institutiones iuris publici axiomaticae (Jena, 1678), 360, cited in H. Bonick, Exercitatio historica ABIBΛ0YΣ, seu eruditos sine libris, qua generaliora sistens (Leipzig, 1693), sig. B3r. 23. Cf. two Korans in the Herzog-August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, MSS 239.6 Extrav. and 239.7 Extrav., with notes recording that they were obtained as “booty” by Capt. Gerthumb of the Bernstorff Regiment in 1685; or Marsigli's astonishing haul of 600 MSS, mostly from the mosque libraries of Buda and Belgrade, including twenty-seven complete or substantially complete Korans (see V. Rosen, “Remarques sur les manuscrits orientaux de la collection Marsigli à Bologne,” Atti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei: Memorie della classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche [1884]: 163–294, esp. 183–85). 24. S. Roman, The Development of Islamic Library Collections in Western Europe and North America (London: Mansell, 1990), 132. 25. C. Wakefield, “Arabic Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library: The Seventeenth-Century Collections,” in The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Russell, 128–46, here 130. 26. G. Levi della Vida, Ricerche sulla formazione del più antico fondo dei manoscritti orientali della Biblioteca Vaticana (Città del Vaticano, 1939), 260–62. 27. D. Ancillon, Mélange critique de littérature (Amsterdam, 1702), 46. 28. [C. Besold], Consideratio legis et sectae saracenorum (Tübingen, 1619), 5; T. Erpenius, Rudimenta linguae arabicae (Leiden, 1620), sig. 7r (“brevi”).Page 283 → 29. R. M. Meelführer, Accessiones ad celeber. viri, Theodori Jansonii ab Almeloveen,…bibliothecam promissam ac latentem (Nuremberg, 1699), 23 (“textus Corani Arabici, qui Venetiis 1530 primum prodiit, secundam editionem, ac Interpretationem paravit”); Schickard, Briefwechsel, 1:341 (Rivet to Schickard, 6 February 1628, referring to a pupil of Erpenius who had collated several manuscripts of the Koran and

begun a translation). Cf. also Juynboll, Zeventiende-eeuwsche beoefenaars, 202. 30. J. Zechendorff, Specimen suratarum (Zwickau, n.d. [ca. 1638]), sigs. A2r (saying that he had begun the complete translation twenty years before), E2–3r (letters from Crinesius, de Dieu, Fabricius). On this work and its companion, Suratae unius, see also Bobzin, “From Venice to Cairo,” 158. 31. C. Ravius, Panegyrica prima orientalibus linguis dicta in illustrissimo & frequentissimo auditorio rheno-trajectino (Utrecht, 1643), 17; J. Cocceius, Opera ’αvέkδoτα theologica et philologica, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1706), 2:666 (Ravius to Cocceius, 23 May 1646); C. Ravius, Prima tredecim partium Alcorani arabico-latini (n.p., n.d. [Amsterdam, 1646]). In 1643 Ravius had sent a sample of his projected Koran edition to the Amsterdam publisher Johan Blaeu, who showed an interest in the project and told Ravius that “I need to know roughly how many such leaves the whole Koran will come to, in order to decide on the format and the size of the type” (Uppsala University Library, MS Nordin 478, no. 56, f. 74r: “il me faut scavoir a peu pres a combien de telles feuilles tout le Quoran montera, pour resouldre sur le format, et grandeur de la lettre”). But nothing further came of this. 32. Hottinger, Historia orientalis, sig. χχ2r (Golius); University of Sheffield, Hartlib Papers (CD-ROM edition) (hereafter “HP”), 33/4/4A (Wheelock to Hartlib, 12 November 1647); 31/22/9 (Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1648, part 1); cf. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 89–90. 33. See A. Hamilton and F. Richard, André du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth-Century France (London: Oxford University Press, 2004). For details of a Spanish translation of 1672 (in manuscript) see also T. Gonzalez de Santalla, Manuductio ad conversionem mahumetanorum (Dillingen, 1689), 2nd pagination, pp. 24–27, 33. The traditional identification of the English translator with Alexander Ross is surely false. Hartlib wrote that the “Alcoran is translated into English out of French by a Friend of Mr Wahl's who also hath translated other bookes out of French. Hee stays only till hee bee furnished with a Historie of Mahomet's life and his Religion which one hath promised to preface” (HP 31/22/9B [Ephemerides 1648, pt. 1]); Ross had not “translated other bookes out of French,” and would not have needed someone else to write about Muhammad's life and religion. His “Caveat” referred to the translator in the third person, and took a different attitude, on the question of the public authorities' hostility to the translation, from the one taken in the translator's own preface to the reader. See N. Malcolm, “The 1649 English Translation of the Koran: Its Origins and Significance,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 75 (2012). 34. J. D. Gruber, ed., Commercii epistolici leibnitiani…tomus prodromus, qui totus est boineburgicus (Hanover, 1745), 357 (Conring to von Boineburg, 8 June 1660, Page 284 →praising “Hottingeri in Alcoranum conatus,” and stressing the need for an accurate translation). 35. A. Kleinhans, Historia studii linguae arabicae et collegii missionum S. Petri in Urbe (Quaracchi, 1930), 75–86. The translation has recently become available: Germán de Silesia, Interpretatio alcorani litteralis: Parte I: La traducción latina, ed. A. García Masegosa (Madrid, 2009). 36. See C. F. Schnurrer, Bibliotheca arabica, enlarged ed. (Halle, 1811), no. 410; Bobzin, “From Venice to Cairo,” 159; A. Hamilton, “A Lutheran Translator for the Quran: A Late Seventeenth-Century Quest,” in The Republic of Letters and the Levant, ed. A. Hamilton, M. H. van den Boogert, and B. Westerweel (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005), 197–221, here 204–5. 37. A. Marre, “Deux mathématiciens de l'Oratoire,” Bulletino di bibliografia e di storia delle scienze matematiche e fisiche 12 (1879): 886–94, esp. 889. 38. G. W. Leibniz, Otium hanoveranum, ed. J. F. Feller (Leipzig, 1718), 39 (Meyer to Leibniz, 1696); H. Bobzin, “Die Koranpolyglotte des Andreas Acoluthus (1654–1704),” in Germano-Turcica: zur Geschichte des Türkisch-Lernens in den deutschsprachigen Ländern, ed. K. Kreiser (Bamberg, 1987), 57–59; Hamilton, “A Lutheran Translator,” 209–18. 39. See Bobzin, “From Venice to Cairo,” esp. 155–59. Some complete translations did exist in manuscript, but these seem to have undergone little or no circulation: see L. Roqué Figuls and J. Vernet Ginés, eds., Alcorán: traducción castellana de un morisco anónimo del año 1606 (Barcelona: Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres, 2001), and O. de la Cruz Palma, ed., La traducción latina del Corán atribuida al patriarca de Constantinopla Cirilo Lúcaris (1572–1638) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2006). See also, for details of a manuscript translation by the Jesuit Ignazio Lomellini (d. 1645), G. Levi della Vida, “Il P. Ludovico Marracci e la sua opera negli studi islamici,” Atti dell'Accademia Lucchese di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, n.s. 3, 7 (1949): 105–25 (124, n. 33).

40. For evidence of some knowledge of tafsir among medieval and sixteenth-century writers see T. E. Burman, Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 41. Fück, p. 63 (n.): “Nihil est Alcoranus absque suo commentario, et libris [sunna], qui continent acta, dicta et responsa Muhammedis…[as-sunna] autem decuplo major est Alcorano, aut amplius, et paris cum illo auctoritatis.” Cf. also the earlier comments of Guillaume Postel on the authority of “Suneh” in his widely read work De orbis terrae concordia, libri quatuor (Basel, 1544), 152. 42. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 65 and 68. 43. Hamilton, “Study of Islam,” 174 (Scaliger); Bobzin, “From Venice to Cairo,” 158 (Zechendorff); Addison, Life and Death of Mahumed, 51 (Hottinger). 44. Hottinger did cite and translate some substantial passages from al-Baydawi (Historia orientalis, e.g., 16–17, 49, 59–60, 66–67, 71, 73, 93, 94); the use he made of al-Zamakhshari was much slighter (e.g., 129). 45. Hamilton and Richard, André du Ryer, 96–101. 46. J. H. Hottinger, Promtuarium, sive bibliotheca orientalis (Heidelberg, 1658), 158–62.Page 285 → 47. Leibniz, Otium hanoveranum, 39 (Meyer to Leibniz, 1696: “Commentarios Arabum in Coranum”). 48. J. C. Clodius, Schediasma, quo institutum suum de edendis ephemer. orientalibus (Meissen, n.d. [c. 1710]), sig. A3r: “de Alcorani Commentatoribus literalibus ac mysticis.” 49. F. Secret, “Gilbert Gaulmin et l'histoire comparée des religions,” Revue de l'histoire des religions 177 (1970): 35–63, here 57: “Pandectae turcicae…Liber secundae post Alcoranum authoritatis, apud Mahometanos.” 50. C. Ravius, Panegyrica secunda, orientalibus linguis dicta, in splendidissimo & florentissimo auditorio Rheno-Trajectino (Utrecht, 1644), 15–16, referring to al Ghazali's “Kimijah Essâdetti,” “qui per quadraginta capita totidem fundamenta sive articulos fidei Muslumicae [sic] tradit. In quo opere hoc sibi autor proposuerat, totum systhema religionis Muhammedanae conscribere…Ita etiam ad cognoscendas res atque traditiones, resolutiones, responsionesque ac receptas istorum hominum, Arabum dico, opiniones solus hic liber adeò perfectè facit, ut melior alius hoc autore reperiri nequeat, dignusque sit, qui edatur.” 51. M. Pasor, Oratio pro linguae arabicae professione (Oxford, 1627), sigs. A4v–B2. 52. T. Greaves, De linguae arabicae utilitate et praestantia (Oxford, 1639), 9–18. 53. Ravius, Panegyrica prima, 6, 14, 16, 36–37. Ravius was also trying to promote a scheme in which books printed in Oriental languages (under his direction) would themselves become “big business” in the East (18: “magna mercimonia”). 54. M. Wasmuth, Paraenesis de linguae arabicae utilitate, issued with his Grammatica arabica (Amsterdam, 1654), sigs. *3–4, **1–2. 55. E. Castell, Oratio in scholis theologicis (London, 1667), esp. 14–27; J. Frischmuth, Programma, quo arabicae linguae usum amplissimae commendat (Jena, n.d. [1667]), sigs. X2–X4r. 56. On the Maronite College see P. Raphael, Le Rôle du Collège Maronite dans l'orientalisme aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Beirut: Université Saint Joseph, 1950); on the role of the Propaganda Fide see Z. Remiro Andollu, “La Sagrada Congregación frente al Islám: apostolado de la prensa en lengua árabe,” in Sacrae congregationis de propaganda fide memoria rerum, ed. J. Metzler, vol. 1, pt. 1 (Rome: Herder, 1971), 707–31; on Marracci see M. Borrmans et al., Il Corano: traduzioni, traduttori e lettori in Italia (Milan: Istituto Propaganda Libreria, 2000). Marracci's edition was printed at the Seminary in Padua, where, inspired by the Propaganda Fide, Gregorio Barbarigo developed an oriental press and organized tuition in oriental languages; the official prospectus of the Seminary described the teaching of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian as solely for missionary purposes (Ratio et institutio studiorum seminarii patavini [Padua, 1690], 30). 57. Hamilton, William Bedwell, 67. 58. HP 33/4/3A (undated; 1647). 59. British Library, MS Lansdowne 753, ff. 26–27, broadside dated 19 Feb. 1656 (he who neglects the Arabs “injuriam is genti de studiis Juridicis [nam Koranologiam, Deuteroses, & Leiturgias eorum quod attinet, impietatis saepe exitiali succo imbuta illa sunt] Medicis, Philosophicis, Historicis, caeterisque Philologicis…facit”).Page 286 → 60. Zechendorff, Specimen suratarum, sig. A2; Hottinger, Historia orientalis, sig. χ3v. 61. Hamilton and Richard, André du Ryer, 93 (decrees; noting also a general Papal prohibition on all

writings about Islam in 1603). Du Ryer's French translation came very close to being suppressed by the ecclesiastical authorities in Paris (ibid., 54–55). 62. Ancillon, Mélange critique, 47 (Bochart); Schickard, Briefwechsel, 1:341 (Rivet to Schickard, 7 February 1627). 63. For classic accounts of this tradition see A.-T. Khoury, Polémique byzantine contre l'Islam: VIIIe–XIIIe siècles (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1972); N. Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960); S. C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), 387–451. 64. Addison, Life and Death of Mahumed, 84 (“a hodge-podge of Judaism, Gentilism, and Christianism”); R. Simon, The Critical History of the Religions and Customs of the Eastern Nations, trans. A. Lovell (London, 1685), 148 (“for the most part but a medly of the Christian and Jewish Religions”). 65. I have found only one hint of such an attitude: a statement by Guillaume Postel that, according to Maimonides, most of the doctrine of the Koran was taken from Egyptian doctrine, as taught to the Egyptians by Abraham (De originibus [Basel, n.d. (1553)], 66). This remark by Postel was also cited, inaccurately, by Besold (Consideratio legis, 12). However, this was not Postel's own position; nor did Besold endorse it. It is also true that the alchemical tradition (and, following it, the Rosicrucian one) attributed special wisdom to Arab writers; but this is of little relevance here, since those Arabs were not seen as propounding the doctrines of Islam. 66. See Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 217; cf. also the comments on this in S. Ockley, Introductio ad linguas orientales (Cambridge, 1706), 126–27. 67. See F. Osborne, Politicall Reflections upon the Government of the Turks (London, 1656), esp. 7–11, 18–19, 46–48, 51–56, 71–72. For the Unitarians see J. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 106–16, and the letter to the Moroccan Ambassador in London, written by the French irenicist Noël Aubert de Versé and one or more English Unitarians in 1682 and printed in C. Leslie, The Socinian Controversy Discuss'd (London, 1708), pt. 6, iii–xiii; on Aubert de Versé's role see M. Mulsow, “The ‘New Socinians’: Intertextuality and Cultural Exchange in Late Socinianism,” in Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarianism, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. M. Mulsow and J. Rohls (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005), 49–78, here 57–61. 68. For a somewhat bowdlerized version of this text see H. Stubbe, An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, ed. M. K. Shairani (Lahore: Orientalia, 1954). Details of Stubbe's sources can be found in the marginal references in two manuscripts of fragments of the text, British Library MSS Sloane 1709, ff. 94–115, and Sloane 1786, ff. 181–89. Major sources included Erpenius (including his edition of al-Makin), Pococke (including his edition of Page 287 →Abu ’l-Faraj), Scaliger, Selden, Hottinger, Addison, de Busbecq and Gabriel Sionita. 69. M. Sutcliffe (“T. M. S.”), De turco-papismo: hoc est, de Turcarum et Papistarum adversus Christi ecclesiam & fidem coniuratione (London, 1604), 43–51. 70. L. Addison, West Barbary: Or, A Short Narrative of the Revolutions of the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco (Oxford, 1671), 225. Addison refers to “Muley Mahumed,” a term used by him for the Prophet. 71. T. Boccalini, Ragguagli di Parnaso, ed. G. Rua, 3 vols. (Bari, 1910–48), 2:242; Osborne, Politicall Reflections, 13; D. de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea de un principe politico-cristiano: rapresentada en cien empresas (Milan, 1642), 497–98. 72. S. Schelwig (“Schelguigius”), De philosophia turcica, oratio inauguralis (Danzig, n.d. [1686]), 13. 73. Leo Africanus, A Geographical Historie of Africa, trans. John Pory (London, 1600), 29 and 39. On this writer see N. Z. Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). 74. See A. Pertusi, “I primi studi in Occidente sull'origine e la potenza dei Turchi,” Studi veneziani 12 (1970): 465–552, and M. J. Heath, “Renaissance Scholars and the Origins of the Turks,” Bibliothèque d'humanisme et renaissance 41 (1979): 453–71. 75. J. Leunclavius, Historiae musulmanae Turcorum, de monumentis ipsorum exscriptae, libri XVIII (Frankfurt, 1591), 4–5. Cf. the comment by Paul Rycaut, nearly eighty years later, that the Turks were ignorant of logic, physic, metaphysics, mathematics, and foreign history, but kept “the most strict Registers and Records” of their own history (The Present State of the Ottoman Empire [London, 1668], 32).

76. On de Lucinge see M. J. Heath, Crusading Commonplaces: La Noue, Lucinge and Rhetoric against the Turks (Geneva: Droz, 1986), 32; on Montaigne see J. J. Supple, Arms versus Letters: The Military and Literary Ideals in the “Essais” of Montaigne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 65–66. Cf. also G. Botero, The Reason of State, ed. and trans. P. J. Waley and D. P. Waley (London: Routledge, 1956), 105. 77. T. Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, 4 vols. (London, 1752), 3:22–29; e.g., 27: “Whether at Morocco they keep still their public arts of scholars; and if so, what is therein performed? [Answer:] Their academies are but their priests teaching to read and write their own language and law; those places they call universities being guilty of no other learning”; 27–28: “what books of geography, genealogy, history, alchemy, medicine, magic, &c. are extant among them; and particularly, whether the Genealogies, said by Leo Africanus to have been written by one Ivan Racha…are to be had…? [Answer:] We can learn of no public libraries, or of booksellers.” 78. Addison, West Barbary, sigs. a4v–a5r (disagreeing explicitly with Leo Africanus); T. Smith, Remarks upon the Manners, Religion and Government of the Turks (London, 1678), 1; J. Coppin, Le Bouclier de l'Europe, ou la guerre sainte (Lyon, 1686), 231: “les Turcs en general sont fort ignorants, ces peuples ne cultivent aucune sçience,…ils ne veulent souffrir aucune Imprimerie de crainte qu'on ne fit Imprimer des Livres contre leur religion, & ils n'en conservent que tres-peu d'écrits à la main.”Page 288 → 79. See the following studies in F. Hitzel, ed., Livres et lecture dans le monde ottoman, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 87–88 (1999): F. Hitzel, “Manuscrits, livres et culture livresque à Istanbul,” 19–38; F. Bilici, “Les bibliothèques vakfs à Istanbul au XVIe siècle: prémices de grandes bibliothèques publiques,” 39–59; C. Establet and J.-P. Pascual, “Les livres des gens à Damas vers 1700,” 143–69. 80. J. H. Hottinger, Bibliothecarius quadripartitus (Zurich, 1664), 9–26. 81. George of Hungary's Tractatus de moribus, conditionibus et nequitia Turcorum was first published in 1481; Bartholomeus Georgewitz [Djordjević], from southern Hungary or Slavonia, had spent thirteen years as a captive: his De turcarum ritu et caeremoniis was published in 1544; Luigi Bassano, from Zadar, who had been captured in c. 1530 and returned in 1541, published his I costumi, et i modi particolari de la vita de' Turchi in 1545; Giovanni Antonio Menavino, from Genoa, who was captured by corsairs in 1505, published his Trattato de' costumi et vita de' Turchi in 1548. All of these works went through many editions; and there were also popular compilations, such as Francesco Sansovino's Dell'historia universale dell'origine et imperio de' Turchi (1560), in which most of them were reprinted. Antoine Geuffroy's Estat de la court du grant Turc was published in 1542; Pierre Belon, who accompanied the French ambassador in 1547, published his Les Observations in 1553; Nicolas de Nicolay, a member of a subsequent French mission, published his Les Quatre Premiers Livres des navigations in 1568; Guillaume Postel's De la République des Turcs was published in 1560; the Epistolae of the Habsburg diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq were published in two installments, in 1581 and 1589. 82. Georgewitz did publish an account of a theological “disputation” which he had conducted in Turkish with a dervish in Oradea Mare (Nagy Várad, Grosswardein) after his return from captivity: B. Georgewitz, Pro fide christiana cum turca disputationis habitae et mysterio sanctae Trinitatis in Alchorano invento…brevis descriptio (Cracow, 1548). Here he showed some knowledge of Arabic (using it in an ingenious attempt to prove that the “‘Bismillah,” “In the name of God, the merciful and compassionate,” contained the doctrine of the Trinity), but very little knowledge of the Koran, or of Islamic beliefs more generally. See P. M. Tommasino, “Discussioni di confine sul dogma della Trinità: l'uso della basmala in Bartholomaeus Georgevits (Transilvania, 1547) e nel monaco ‘Enbaqom (Etiopia, 1540),” Islamochristiana, 35 (2009), 101–39. 83. Rycaut, Present State, 105. 84. A. Reland, De religione mohammedica libri duo (Utrecht, 1705; 2nd ed. Utrecht, 1717): the second book goes through a whole series of traditional assertions about Islam (including the one about belief in the corporeal nature of God), disproving each in turn. This work was translated into English (London, 1712), German (Hanover, 1716) and French (The Hague, 1721).

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TWELVE Thinking About “Non-Chinese” in Ming China Leo K. Shin At the start of his Record of All Vassals (Xian bin lu), a text completed no later than 1591, Luo Yuejiong, a scholar from Jiangxi (in southern China) whom we otherwise know little about, seeks to explain to his readers why his historical survey of “non-Chinese” peoples (si yi) deserves attention. In Luo's telling, in his time, “scholars who are fond of antiquity” (haogu zhi shi) have generally taken to focus on texts composed before the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and ignore those from later periods. But while scholars who have developed a degree of familiarity with pre-Han sources might like to think of themselves as “broadly learned” (boxue), Luo observes, their intellectual horizon is, in fact, not unlike “the outlook of a frog at the bottom of a well.” By contrast, in composing his general study of those “non-Chinese” peoples who have, over time, interacted with China (Zhongguo; literally, “central dominion”), Luo Yuejiong points out, he has consciously consulted a wide range of sources, including in particular materials that are outside the scope of classical texts and standard histories.1 Luo's Record was of course only one of many texts composed in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) that were concerned with the si yi, a label that was used regularly in Chinese sources to refer to a wide range of “nonChinese,” from people who lived in faraway countries to those who populated the border regions of the “central dominion.” As I have discussed elsewhere, for a variety of reasons—among them the persistent military threats (especially from across the northern border) faced by the Ming state, the increased opportunities for travel in Ming times, and Page 290 →the expansion of commercial publishing in China since the sixteenth century—a growing number of Ming-dynasty scholars were becoming increasingly sensitive to human diversity as well as interested in identifying and demarcating the “non-Chinese” populations.2 And though there appeared in the Ming period a great number of texts that were focused on the si yi, Luo's Record does stand out for its apparent breadth of research: included in its bibliography (yin yong zhu shu mulu)—a referential device not commonly found in similar works—are a total of 345 items; while some of the texts cited, such as The Zuo Tradition (Zuozhuan) and Record of the Historian (Shiji), both dated to the second half of the first millennium before the common era, might be considered canonical, the rest are distinctly an eclectic collection of post-Han compositions.3 What is noteworthy as well about the Record of All Vassals are some of its claims. According to Luo Yuejiong, though there were clear distinctions between the “Chinese” and “non-Chinese,” many of the si yi discussed in his text were in fact “descendants of the kings and nobles of the central dominion.” For example, the so-called Tatars (Dada)—among whom Luo included the Xiongnu of the Han period, the Turks (Tujue) of the Tang dynasty (618–907), and the Mongols who had been active in the northern region since the Song period (960–1276)—were, in his view, descendants of the last ruler of the Xia dynasty, who, upon the fall of his regime (in the early part of the second millennium before the common era), were said to have retreated with his followers to the steppe region. Likewise, according to Luo, many of the “non-Chinese” peoples who populated the southern border region were actually descendants of Emperor Ku (more popularly known as Gaoxin), one of the Five Emperors who had been identified in ancient sources as among the first sovereigns of the people of the “central dominion.” Luo Yuejiong was clearly sensitive to human diversity, but he was just as interested in making the case that, given their common origins, some of the “non-Chinese” could in time be transformed into “Chinese.”4 Luo's Record is interesting to us not only because of its scope (in all more than a hundred foreign and borderland groups are discussed) or its claims (some of which are, admittedly, far from original) but also because it offers the historian an opportunity to reflect on how the increased awareness of human diversity on the part of some Mingdynasty scholars had informed their understanding of—and approaches to—China's antiquity. During the Ming, it should be noted, thinking or writing about “non-Chinese,” especially outside the context of policy debates, was by and large a marginal intellectual endeavor, and scholars who engaged in Page 291 →it generally did not do so to

challenge their own perceptions of antiquity. Nevertheless, by examining some of the more representative writings on “non-Chinese” during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—such as those by Qiu Jun (1421–95), Yang Shen (1488–1559), and Wang Shixing (1547–98)—one could better understand not only how Ming scholars differed in their perceptions of China's antiquity but also, perhaps more importantly, how they differed in their approaches to ancient sources. My goal here is not to be explicitly comparative; what I seek to show is that, in making sense of the diversity of “non-Chinese” peoples both within and beyond the “central dominion,” scholars in Ming-dynasty China did find it necessary to reexamine and, in some cases, revaluate the textual remains of times past.

Classical Texts as Sources of Authority To place Luo Yuejiong's general survey of the “non-Chinese” in the broader context of Ming intellectual and cultural history, the writings of the prominent fifteenth-century scholar-official Qiu Jun would be as useful a starting point as others. It is unclear whether Luo would count Qiu as among those “scholars who are fond of antiquity” he spoke disapprovingly of; what is evident is that, even though they were both interested in tracing the history of “non-Chinese” groups, their approaches, as well as their conclusions, were markedly different. Whereas Luo Yuejiong would emphasize the importance of taking into account information beyond those found in classical texts and standard histories, Qiu Jun would argue that the basic—unruly—nature of “non-Chinese” peoples had been amply documented in ancient sources. And whereas Luo would draw attention to what he perceived to be the common origins between the “Chinese” and “non-Chinese,” Qiu would insist on the basis of his own reading of early sources (many of which could be dated to the first millennium before the common era) that the two peoples were fundamentally distinct. Qiu Jun's interests in—and concerns about—the “non-Chinese” were no doubt shaped by his own background. A native son of Qiongshan (present-day Hainan Island) in China's far south, Qiu was one of very few highly influential government officials of his time who had come from a region with a significant “non-Chinese” (in this case, the “Li”) population. A student in the imperial capital at the time of the Tumu debacle—in which the Ming emperor, during a misguided military expedition, Page 292 →was taken hostage by the Mongols—Qiu Jun was evidently deeply influenced by his experience during the upheaval. But despite the ensuing political chaos (for some time, there was much concern about the immediate threats posed by the newly emboldened Mongols), Qiu's official career was by all accounts a successful one. Awarded the highest civil service examination degree in 1454, Qiu Jun was immediately assigned to the prestigious Hanlin Academy, where he served continuously for almost a quarter of a century. He took part in many editorial projects, including the compilation of the official records of two of the Ming emperors. Through these assignments, Qiu was able to not only access a vast quantity of government documents but also shape the official accounts according to his view of history. In addition to his memorials and official compilations, Qiu was the author or editor of a wide range of works, among which the most interesting to us are his Correct Bonds in History (Shishi zhenggang), a study he completed in 1481, and his Supplement to the “Extended Meaning of the Great Learning” (Da xue yan yi bu), a monumental encyclopedia of statecraft he finished in 1487.5 Not surprising, Qiu Jun's concerns about the Mongols in particular and other borderland “non-Chinese” groups in general are reflected in his conception of China's past. In his Correct Bonds in History, a survey of major developments in the “central dominion” from the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) to the beginning of the Ming period, Qiu clearly states that one of the main objectives of his study is to draw attention to the importance of “observing strict distinctions between Chinese and non-Chinese” (yan hua yi zhi fen). According to Qiu Jun, the need to defend the boundary between “Chinese” (hua) and “non-Chinese” (yi) is not unlike the imperative to maintain proper relationships between a ruler and his ministers (in the context of a country) or to uphold the bonds between a father and his sons (in the context of a family). In all three cases, Qiu argues, the “correct” (zheng) models of relations (or bonds) have been demonstrated time and again in the historical records. To Qiu Jun, then, a study of the past is, at its core, an examination of how earlier dynasties were or were not able to uphold such correct models of relations. Seen from this perspective, according to Qiu, whereas the dynasties of Han, Tang, and Song—under which China was ruled by the Chinese—were clearly part of what he would call the “orthodox tradition” (zhengtong), the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368)—under which the central dominion was ruled by the Mongols—was an example of historical aberration.6

Qiu Jun's desire to make use of the past to make sense of the present Page 293 →is even more evident in his magnum opus, Supplement to the “Extended Meaning of the Great Learning.” Though it is billed as a “supplement” to a Song-dynasty work, Qiu's compendium is in fact a study with a much different aim, focusing not on individual ethics but on government administration. Presented to the newly enthroned emperor in 1487, the Supplement, which runs to more than fifteen hundred pages in modern reduced-size reprints, is at once a masterly display of scholarship and a comprehensive blueprint for actions. Divided into 12 sections and 119 subsections, Qiu's study is apparently intended to cover all important aspects of government, from the workings of the imperial court to policies concerning borderland “non-Chinese.” As part of the format of the work, each subsection would include a selection of quotations from both classical texts and standard histories, and each would feature Qiu Jun's own commentaries as well as policy recommendations for the Ming ruler. Although Qiu's ideas would at times prove controversial, that his study would be ordered to be reissued in the late Ming was a clear testimony to its continual political relevance and influence.7 To Qiu Jun, what is apparent from a systematic examination of the historical records is that it is natural (or, in his words, in accordance with “the pattern of all-under-heaven” [tianxian zhi li]) that there exists a boundary between “Chinese” and “non-Chinese.” In the section of the Supplement devoted to “Subordinating non-Chinese” (yu yi di), Qiu can be found frequently quoting from both classical texts—the Book of Songs (Shijing), the Book of Documents (Shangshu), the Rites of Zhou (Zhouli), the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu), among others—and standard histories (such as the Record of the Historian and History of the Han [Hanshu]) to make the case that, in order for the “central dominion” to enjoy peace, the boundary between hua and yi must be defended. The age of the sage-kings (that is, antiquity) was a time of tranquility, Qiu argues, because a clear distinction was made between the inner zones, on the one hand, and the outer zones, on the other. By contrast, the border troubles of later dynasties (such as the Han and the Tang) were results of the rulers' “failure to defend attentively the boundary between inside and outside” and to prevent “the amalgamation of the customs of the hua and yi.” To strengthen border defense, in Qiu's view, the Ming court should emulate the model of antiquity and limit interactions between the “Chinese” and “non-Chinese.” In the case of the northern border, where military threats are more imminent, this would mean that the Mongols should be kept strictly away from the “central dominion”; in the case of the southern border, where various “non-Chinese” peoples (among them the Ge, the Page 294 →Ling, the Lao, the Yao, and the Zhuang—all descendants of the so-called Nanyue of ancient times, according to Qiu) have long intermingled with the “Chinese,” a key to success would be to restrict contacts between the local populations.8 To Qiu Jun, what seems obvious as well from his close reading of both classical texts and standard histories are the inherent differences between hua and yi. To him, that “Chinese” and “non-Chinese” are fundamentally distinct is evidenced by the presence of geographic boundaries (especially mountains and rivers) that have separated the two. It would be a mistake, according to Qiu, if the rulers of China were to try—whether through alliances or through force—to breach such natural barriers. In particular, in his comment on a passage from the Rites of Zhou (in which references are made to the presence in China's peripheries of the peoples of Yi, Man, Min, Mo, Rong, and Di), Qiu Jun argues that whereas the Chinese have long dominated the center, the non-Chinese have occupied the margins; the hua have mixed with and assimilated to one another (hun er tong), while the yi have developed a wide range of temperaments and customs. And whereas the non-Chinese who settle near the Chinese have come to share some of the practices of the latter, those who live far away have remained unruly and rebellious. To maintain peace, Qiu observes, the earliest rulers of the central dominion were concerned less with transforming the customs of the non-Chinese than with confining them to their own space. This, to Qiu Jun, remains a sound policy.9 The claim that history offers important political and moral lessons was of course, by Ming times, hardly earthshattering. Nevertheless, the writings by Qiu Jun are significant for at least two reasons. The first one has to do with the thoroughness with which Qiu employed both classical texts and standard histories to make sense of what he perceived as the essential tensions between the “Chinese” and “non-Chinese.” Qiu Jun certainly understood that the past was different from the present, but as a leading scholar-official of his time he was evidently much more impressed by historical analogies and the idea that the institutions and practices of ancient times should (and could) help guide contemporary policies. But the relationship between Qiu's approach to the historical records and

his sensitivity to human diversity was necessarily dialectical. Just as Qiu's particular reading and understanding of ancient sources had informed how he made sense of the persistent threats posed by the Mongols and other borderland “non-Chinese,” his increased awareness of human diversity (and this is the second reason his writings deserve our Page 295 →attention) had in turn reaffirmed his commitment to the classical texts as sources of authority.10

The Importance of Being “Broadly Learned” The writings by Qiu Jun might continue to be influential, but as we could see from the case of Luo Yuejiong, Ming-dynasty scholars who were sensitive to the diversity of “non-Chinese” peoples were not uncritical of how China's antiquity should be understood or how ancient sources should be approached. To be sure, the classical texts and standard histories Qiu often cited as sources of authority would continue to shape the collective imagination of the educated elite. Yet, by the sixteenth century, more and more scholars would argue that the hallmark of a true gentleman was not the individual's mastery of the Confucian canon or his success in the civil service examinations; rather, according to this understanding, the defining characteristics of a “man of culture” (wenren) were his broad range of learning as well as his ability to adopt a critical approach toward scholarship. For individual scholars in Ming China, then, their growing awareness of human diversity not only offered them a chance to expand their scope of learning but also—more relevant to our discussion perhaps—provided them an opportunity to revaluate a wide range of ancient sources. Of those scholars whose interests in the “non-Chinese” populations appear to have intersected with their commitment to “broad learning,” the most well-known—and certainly the most prolific—was Yang Shen. Son of Yang Tinghe (1459–1529), a prominent minister at the Ming court, Yang Shen was by most accounts a brilliant student who, at the young age of twenty-three, was awarded first place in the civil service examinations. Appointed to the Hanlin Academy soon after his examination success, Yang would turn out to be just as outspoken as his father. In 1524, Yang Shen was one of 134 officials who were imprisoned by the emperor for their involvement in the so-called Great Ritual Controversy. As part of his punishment, Yang was sentenced to exile to the southwestern border province of Yunnan where he would, in effect, spend the rest of his life. Already famous for his literary talent and scholarship, Yang Shen, now free from political entanglements, was apparently able to devote even more time to reading and writing. In part because of Yang's broad interests and in part because of his fame, by the turn of the seventeenth Page 296 →century, more than one hundred titles would be credited to him. Even if one disregards those items that were obviously falsely attributed, Yang's oeuvre would include, in addition to his poems and other literary outputs, studies on poetry, epigraphy, phonology, philology, and history, as well as a significant body of writings on geography and borderland peoples.11 Yang Shen's interests in China's border regions are clearly reflected in his writings on Yunnan. As Yang's adopted home for almost thirty-five years, Yunnan was, in Ming times, still widely perceived as a hostile region populated by a variety of “non-Chinese” (yi) peoples. Although it had long been in contact with the “central dominion,” it was not until the Mongol Yuan dynasty that the region of Yunnan (approximately the size of present-day Germany) was officially incorporated into China. During his long years in exile, Yang Shen managed to travel widely within the province. Of the works on Yunnan Yang has left behind, at least three—Journey to Yunnan (Dian cheng ji), Descriptions of the Mountains and Streams of Yunnan (Yunnan shanchuan zhi), and Climate of Yunnan (Dian hou ji)—are specifically concerned with the geography of the southwestern borderland. Though Yang Shen was no doubt keen on contrasting what he believed to be the norms of the “central dominion” with what he observed in Yunnan, what is noteworthy about these studies is that, in general, Yang seems to be more interested in presenting firsthand knowledge than in imposing judgments. In this regard, as we will see, Yang Shen appears to have anticipated some of the scholar-travelers of late Ming China.12 Yang Shen's curiosity about Yunnan was not confined to geography. Since the border region had long lain outside the rule of the centralizing state, Yang was interested also in tracing the history of the native ruling clans. Regional Rule in Yunnan (Dian zai ji; completed in 1543) is not, as far as one can tell, an original work by Yang Shen. In a postscript to the text, Yang explains that while he has long searched for historical records for the kingdoms of Nanzhao and Dali (which, in succession, had ruled the region of Yunnan from the seventh to the

thirteenth centuries), he had not had much success—that is, until he came upon two unusual texts written in the local Bo language. Regional Rule in Yunnan, thus edited and transcribed into Chinese by Yang Shen and his helpers, is essentially a record of legends and selected facts concerning the early rulers in Yunnan. For Yang, being able to trace the history of the rulers of Nanzhao and Dali was no doubt itself significant, but what seems to have given him even more pleasure was the broader context of his study. In making use Page 297 →of as wide a range of sources as possible in reconstructing the past, Yang Shen saw himself as emulating not only Sima Qian (c. 145–c. 86 BCE) and Sima Guang (1019–86)—the two great historians from the Han and the Song, respectively—but also the very master, Confucius himself.13 Although much of Yang's writings on the subjects did concern Yunnan, his interests in China's border regions (and its borderland peoples) are reflected also in his “supplementary comments” to the Guideways through Mountains and Seas (Shanhai jing). Compiled over centuries beginning before the founding of the first empire in 221 BCE, the Guideways is now generally understood as a work of imaginary geography. Of particular note about the fantastic landscape found in the text is the presence, both within and beyond the so-called central lands, of a vast array of hybrid creatures. Although the Guideways had had a long history of transmission since the scholar Guo Pu (276–324) left behind his commentaries, it was not until the second half of the Ming dynasty that the text seems to have generated new interests. In addition to Yang Shen's “supplementary comments” (buzhu) a collection of 107 short glosses of terms and names—at least one new set of commentaries, by Wang Chongqing (1484–1565), was also made widely available in the sixteenth century. In one such late Ming edition of the work, the Guideways, which had for centuries been transmitted without illustrations, is even accompanied by a set of images.14 For Yang Shen, what was noteworthy about the Guideways of Mountains and Seas was not whether hybrid creatures such as the Di (who possessed “the face of a human but the body of a fish”) or the Rong (who had “the head of a human with three horns attached”)—to name just two of the myriad beings mentioned in the text—actually lived. To him, what was important was to uphold the principle that true scholars must not limit their reading to the Classics alone. In a note that accompanies his Supplementary Comments (Shanhai jing buzhu), Yang in fact compares the Classics with the five grains one is expected to consume every day and texts such as the Guideways with special dishes that possess extraordinary flavors. The assumption is that the textual—and, by extension, cultural—tradition that is China is far richer than what has been defined by the civil service examination curriculum. To Yang Shen, what was important as well was to uphold the belief that, in order to make full sense of the cultural tradition, scholars must attend to rigorous textual studies. In part echoing the sentiment of Guo Pu, Yang argues in another note that accompanies the Supplementary Comments that even though scholars have long expressed doubts about the origins and contents of the Guideways, Page 298 →many of the claims that have been made about the work can in fact be corroborated by other sources from antiquity. Rather than simply dismiss the text as “strange,” Yang Shen implies, it would be worthwhile for scholars to devote energy to reading the work more closely and critically.15 In part because of the range and quantity of his writings, Yang Shen, even to his contemporaries, has proved to be somewhat of an enigma. To his admirers, Yang's literary and intellectual outputs were simply extraordinary. There might be occasional mistakes in his works, but such minor shortcomings should in no way diminish the accomplishments of one of history's greatest minds. To his critics, however, the reputation of Yang Shen was illdeserved. The size of Yang's intellectual output might be vast, but the quality was at best uneven. To move beyond this narrow range of criticisms, recent scholars have drawn attention to Yang Shen's contributions to the development of textual—and, more generally, “evidential”—learning in late imperial China. Although modernday scholars might disagree on what Yang's most important literary and intellectual legacies are, most would agree that his significance has at least in part to do with his iconoclasm: in his scholarship, not only is Yang Shen responding to the then-dominant, examination-centered school of learning, he is also reacting to the powerful (but, in his view, misguided) intellectual challenges posed by the teachings of Wang Yangming (1472–1529).16 The “broad learning” of Yang Shen, in the final analysis, does complicate efforts to put him in any intellectual straitjacket. But, as Adam Schorr has shown, it is perhaps more helpful to think of Yang not as a proponent of any one school of scholarship but as someone who was most concerned with upholding what he considered “refined”

or “cultured” (ya) and exposing what he deemed “vulgar” (su). Cast in this light, Yang Shen's efforts to trace the history of the native ruling clans in Yunnan as well as his readiness to draw attention to a work of imaginary geography do exhibit a degree of intellectual coherence: in both cases, Yang was demonstrating how scholars could extend their knowledge (and, by implication, the Way or dao) by reading closely and critically both ancient and not-so-ancient texts. To claim, as Schorr does, that Yang Shen placed aesthetics above truth is perhaps overstating the case. But in contrast to Qiu Jun, Yang was clearly less interested in developing overarching interpretations of—and drawing timeless historical lessons from—the Classics than in upholding the importance of textual (and evidential) learning. Yang Shen might or might not believe in the need Page 299 →to defend the boundary between “Chinese” and “non-Chinese.” What he seemed most convinced of was the need for scholars to treat the received texts from ancient times not automatically as sources of authority but as sources that required attentive studies.17

From Textual to Empirical Knowledge While Ming-dynasty scholars who were sensitive to the presence and diversity of “non-Chinese” peoples would continue to emphasize the importance of classical (textual) learning, by the second half of the sixteenth century, many would also increasingly draw attention to the need for firsthand or empirical knowledge. Even though the precise origin of this development is difficult to pinpoint, it is possible to identify two contributing factors. The first one, not surprisingly, had to do with the increased popularity and ease of travel. By the sixteenth century, as more and more scholars took to the roads and roamed the breadth and depth of the country, many would decide that it would be useful to supplement what they had learned in local gazetteers and geographical guides with information gained from firsthand observations. The second contributing factor, by contrast, had to do with the growing exasperation felt by many a scholar in the late Ming. As a result of the absence of imperial leadership as well as a heightened level of bickering among the political elite, many frustrated scholars would choose to seek alternative forms of fulfillment. While some would opt for traveling and writing, others would engage in what historians would loosely refer to as “substantial learning.”18 One Ming-dynasty scholar whose interests in the “non-Chinese” clearly intersected with this growing emphasis on empirical learning was Wang Shixing. A native of Zhejiang province on China's east coast, Wang might not be the most well-known scholar-traveler of the Ming period, but he was certainly one of the most enthusiastic and observant. Throughout his successful if uneventful official career, Wang Shixing would take advantage of almost every opportunity to see the country. His first assignment to southern Henan, a region well known for its place in China's cultural history, was in many ways typical of his journeys. While there, not only did Wang manage to visit many of its historical sites, he also climbed Mount Song, one of China's five major sacred mountains (wu yue). Wang Shixing's subsequent official assignments would bring him to other parts of the country, allowing him eventually to accomplish Page 300 →the rare feat of visiting all five of the sacred mountains. His travels, it should be noted, were not limited to areas with apparent historical or cultural significance; in time, he was also given opportunities to journey to the border provinces in the southwest. As it has been pointed out by one of his biographers, with the exception of the coastal province of Fujian, Wang Shixing seems to have managed to visit, at one point or another, every major region in the Ming territory. But Wang is not known to us simply as an avid traveler; his travel writings—Notes on Travels to the Five Sacred Mountains (Wu yue you cao; prefaced 1591), Record of Extensive Travels (Guang you zhi; prefaced 1593), and Further Elucidations on My Extensive Record of Travels (Guang zhi yi; prefaced 1597)—are impressive not only for their geographic coverage but also for their observations and periodic insights.19 For Wang Shixing, while travel was certainly a form of self-fulfillment, it was also an important means for scholars to supplement their textual knowledge with firsthand observations. This emphasis on empirical learning, while evident throughout his travel writings, is most explicitly set forth in Wang's preface to his Further Elucidations on My Extensive Record of Travels. There, he laments the practice by some fellow travelers to “substitute their ears for their mouths” (ji er wei kou) and to report what they did not personally experience. Unlike such travel writings, Wang assures his reader, his notes are “all based on what I have personally seen and heard; where this is not possible, I would rather leave out [the information].”20

From the point of view of Wang Shixing, empirical learning was useful for understanding regional differences. In his Record of Extensive Travels as well as in his Further Elucidations, Wang appears particularly interested in explaining why certain provinces in the south (such as Guizhou and Guangxi) have lagged behind other regions in their developments. Wang's answers to his own question are still very much informed by a philosophy of geography that is based on his interpretation of certain classical concepts. In particular, as far as he is concerned, the three long (“dragons”) of China—best understood in this context as systems of mountains and ridges that provide visual clues to the flow of qi (pneuma)—all have their own timing of manifestation. Whereas the long of central China and the long of the North were the first to manifest themselves, according to Wang, time has come for the long of the South (which runs from China's Southeast to the Southwest) to take its turn. But Wang's answers to his question are not based solely on the classical Page 301 →concepts of long and qi. For him, what distinguishes Guizhou and Guangxi from other regions is not their mountainous terrain but their river systems. Since the rivers in the two provinces neither lead directly to the ocean (as in the case of those in the lower Yangzi region) nor come together to form a basin (as in the case of the rivers in Sichuan), Wang argues, it has been much more difficult for the two southern provinces to develop major settlements and to become prosperous.21 For Wang Shixing, firsthand knowledge was important as well for making sense of the diversity of the borderland “non-Chinese.” In Guangxi, where he once served as an administrator, for example, Wang would identify at least seven categories of “non-Chinese,” including the Yao, the Zhuang, the Ling, the Dong, the Shui, the Yang, and the Lang. “Whereas the Ling and the Dong are similar,” Wang observes in his Record of Extensive Travels, “the Shui and the Yang are few in number.” And whereas the Zhuang are by nature “relatively submissive,” the customs of the Yao are “most repulsive.” Although in his depiction of the “non-Chinese” Wang still draws from a long-standing textual tradition that emphasizes the “impropriety” of the man and yi, he also offers firsthand observations. In his discussion of the so-called Yao people, for example, Wang does draw attention to their “repulsive” marriage practice (it was apparently customary for men to marry the daughters of their own sisters or the widows of their own brothers), but he also describes, in relatively neutral terms, the local customs for courtship (after their daily field work, single men would travel in groups to neighboring villages to sing to the young women there). Wang is interested in not only how Yao people dress—while women wear the so-called dog's tail blouse, “as a gesture of not having forgotten their ancestry,” men wear short shirts and earrings—but also how they live, what they eat, how they entertain guests, and what they do when they are sick.22 Wang Shixing was of course not alone in drawing attention to the importance of empirical learning. Xu Hongzu (Xu Xiake; 1587–1641), the most well-known scholar-traveler of the late Ming period, would spend most of his adult life traveling the far and wide of the country and almost made it his calling to correct the errors found in the Union Gazetteer of the Great Ming (Da Ming yitong zhi; 1461), the imperially sponsored geographical guide. In the world of arts, as historians have shown, a small but important group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painters (among them Zhang Hong [1577–after 1652]) would come to favor relatively realistic representations over idealized imageries. Even Yang Page 302 →Shen, the textual scholar we encountered earlier, would in an essay on geography caution his reader not to depend solely on the descriptions found in textual records but to try to visit notable sites in person.23 Nor was the “discovery” of the importance of empirical learning the prerogative of travelers. For example, in a preface to his monumental Material Medica: A General Outline (Bencao gangmu; 1593), Li Shizhen (1518–93) is noted to have said that he had spent thirty years compiling the text, that while doing so he had consulted more than eight hundred references, and that, in all, he had included in the work discussions of a total of 1,892 substances. What Li could have added too is that he had traveled widely to collect and examine specimens and that his compilation was by far the most comprehensive of all pharmacopoeias that had appeared. Likewise, in the preface to his Exploitation of the Works of Nature (Tian gong kai wu; 1637), a study of technology, Song Yingxing (b. 1587) would make the case that, given the benefits of the myriad things and phenomena in the realm of heavenand-earth, a scholar who prefers to “discourse emptily on the ancient sacrificial vessels of Ju” but who does not even know “the measurements and care of cooking pots” is ultimately still “unworthy of emulation.” Although the advent of “evidential learning” has often been regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, as Willard Peterson explains, “pursuing evidence as an endeavor in learning” was very much a part of the Ming intellectual landscape. To late Ming scholars, what constituted “evidence” was not limited to the contents of the Four Books and Five

Classics; in their view, according to Peterson, “data drawn from one's own perceptions of the myriad things in the realm of heaven-and-earth” as well as “from earlier, not necessarily ancient, texts” could both serve as the foundation of learning.24

Antiquarian Learning in Context Just as other contributors to this volume have placed the manifold manifestations of “antiquarian learning” in their particular contexts, I have laid out in this essay some of the ways Ming-dynasty scholars' interpretation of—and approaches to—the ancient past intersected with their increased awareness of human diversity. By way of conclusion, let me again draw attention to two observations. First, as it should be evident, the particular relationship I have focused on in this essay was necessarily dialectical: just as their conceptions of antiquity and classical sources would shape how Ming scholars would perceive the “non-Chinese,” their Page 303 →increased awareness of human diversity would also inform how the cultural elite of Ming times would interpret the ancient past and its textual remains. Second, among those Ming-dynasty scholars who made efforts to reexamine antiquity based in part on their perceptions of human diversity, there were clear differences: while some, such as Qiu Jun, would emphasize the “lesson” revealed time and again in ancient sources that the boundary between “Chinese” and “non-Chinese” must be vigilantly observed, others, such as Luo Yuejiong, would point to examples from the ancient past to show that there was in fact much in common between the people of the “central dominion” and those who surrounded them. As illuminating as the debates concerning the relationships between “Chinese” and “non-Chinese” might be, what is equally significant about the writings we have discussed are the different approaches Ming-dynasty scholars brought to their reading and uses of ancient sources. In the case of Qiu Jun, even though the Hainan native was no doubt sensitive to the diversity of borderland peoples, his political concerns, especially about the threats posed by the Mongols, had clearly informed not only how he would view the “non-Chinese” (as people who were “uncivilized” and who should not be allowed to mingle with the “Chinese”) but also how he would approach the Classics (as sources of political and moral authority). By contrast, in the case of Yang Shen, though he did spend half of his life in a southwestern border province, his interest in “non-Chinese” peoples was evidently inspired less by a desire to understand human diversity than by his commitment to critical textual studies. Finally, in the case of Wang Shixing, although he was by virtue of his success in the civil service examinations a man of (classical) learning, his interests in geography (“patterns of the earth”) would lead him to emphasize, in his travel writings as well as in his descriptions of borderland peoples, the importance of supplementing textual studies with firsthand observations. For all their intellectual differences, it is worth noting that, despite (or because of) their increased awareness of human diversity, Ming-dynasty scholars remained, by and large, firmly committed to the idea of the superiority of their own culture (si wen). This self-assurance is obviously in display in Qiu Jun's Supplement and Luo Yuejiong's Record of All Vassals, but it could be readily detected also in the writings of Yang Shen and Wang Shixing (among others). This is not to say that Ming scholars were ignorant of the outside world. Even if one discounts the long-term impact of the far-reaching voyages of Zheng He (1371–1433) of the early fifteenth century, it is evident that, over the course of the Ming, the Page 304 →steady stream of travelers to and from China had considerably enriched Chinese knowledge of polities and societies both near and far. Nor do I mean to claim that scholarofficials during the Ming lacked the ability to reflect critically on China's intellectual-cum-political order. One needs only to recall the intellectual upheavals associated with Wang Yangming as well as the political storms set off by members of the so-called Donglin faction, to mention just two well-known examples from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to appreciate the intellectual dynamism of Ming China. What I am suggesting, however, is that even those Ming scholars who had become more sensitive to human diversity did not, as a general rule, find it necessary to question the assumption of the superiority of the moral-political order as embodied in the institutions of China. To be sure, the arrival of the Jesuits in China in the second half of the sixteenth century did, in time, lead some of their more prominent followers—Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), Li Zhizao (1565–1630), and Yang Tingyun (1557–1627), among others—to openly reflect on the relationships between the teachings from the West and those found in China's classical tradition, but even then it is evident that such followers were more interested in establishing a common ground than in challenging China's cultural preeminence.25

In calling attention to this Chinese sense of superiority, I am not suggesting that Renaissance humanists did not also hold the view that the civilization that was Christendom (or Europe, more specifically) was itself exceptional. As Anthony Pagden puts it, by the early modern period, there was a growing sense among the elites that whereas “Europe was the place of civility, of free men living in secure urban communities under the rule of law,” the rest of the world “served out their day under tyrannies governed according to the caprice of individual rulers, or in nomadic or semi-nomadic groups never far from the primordial ‘state of nature.'” But even though the assumption of European exceptionalism, according to Pagden, has persisted since at least the first century of the common era, both the revaluation of the classical tradition by Renaissance humanists and the increased recognition of human diversity by colonial agents, merchants, missionaries, and other travelers did appear to have brought upon Europeans what Eugene Rice has referred to as “a new freedom from temporal provincialism…and a more selfconscious understanding of their own society.” Renaissance humanists and travelers might not have given up their assumption of exceptionalism, but in their willingness to take seriously cultures across time and space, they did Page 305 →contribute to the transformation of the political and intellectual life in western Eurasia.26 As other essays in this volume have made clear, the cultural elite of Ming China did engage in the revaluation of past scholarship, develop special interests in collecting and studying ancient artifacts, and, on the whole, broaden the range of approaches to the understanding of antiquity. While such activities are best made sense of in the specific contexts of political, intellectual, and socioeconomic changes in late imperial times, it would be useful, as Peter Miller and François Louis remind us in their introduction, to take this opportunity to reflect on the particularities of the Chinese (and, by extension, European) experience. In this spirit, let me offer two final observations. First, if “who the antiquaries were” is an integral part of our inquiry, it is worth noting that the Chinese scholars we have encountered in this volume were almost always officials of the imperial state. While I have shown that such scholar-officials were far from unanimous in their outlooks, it is worth considering (more carefully than I have done here) how their common background might have shaped the contours of their intellectual endeavors. Second, even though the Ming scholars we have discussed here—Luo Yuejiong, Qiu Jun, Yang Shen, and Wang Shixing—might in fact be interested in understanding “what the ancient world actually was,” at the core of their intellectual efforts was their desire to claim authority over knowledge. How the desire to claim authority, which was not simply about scholarship but was, in the case of China, about one's moral standing, might have influenced how scholars approached the study of antiquity is, I think, a topic worthy of further reflection.

NOTES 1. Luo Yuejiong, Xian bin lu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983), fan li (notes on conventions), 13. For an introduction to the text, see Ping-kuen Yu, ed., Chinese Collections in the Library of Congress: Excerpts from the Annual Report(s) of the Library of Congress, 1898–1971 (Washington, DC: Center for Chinese Research Materials, Association of Research Libraries, 1974), 2:652–54. 2. For a more extensive discussion of Ming scholars' interests in the “non-Chinese,” see Leo K. Shin, The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. 158–70. 3. For a bibliography of Ming-dynasty works on the si yi, see Wolfgang Franke, An Introduction to the Sources of Ming History (Kuala Lumpur: University of Page 306 →Malaya Press, 1968), 201–32. For the list of works Luo consulted, see Luo Yuejiong, Xian bin lu, 234–37. 4. For his general claim on the common origins between the “Chinese” and “non-Chinese,” see Luo Yuejiong, Xian bin lu, fan li, 13–14. For the Tatars, see Xian bin lu, 1–21; for the “non-Chinese” in the south, see Xian bin lu, 211–27. 5. On Qiu Jun (Ch'iu Chün), see L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang, eds., Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 249–52; Li Zhuoran, Qiu Jun pingzhuan (Critical biography of Qiu Jun) (Nanjing: Nanjing daxue chubanshe, 2005). For a history of the “Li” in Hainan, see Anne Csete, “A Frontier Minority in the Chinese World: The Li People of Hainan Island from the Han through the High Qing” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1995). 6. Qiu Jun, Shishi zhenggang (reprint, Taipei: Qiu Wenzhuang gong congshu jiyin weiyuanhui, 1972), esp. preface: 2b–3, 1:1a. On Qiu's conception of China's past, see On-cho Ng and Q. Edward Wang, Mirroring

the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005), 205–6; Li Zhuoran, Qiu Jun pingzhuan, chap. 8. 7. Hung-lam Chu, “Ch'iu Chün (1421–1495) and the ‘Ta-Hsüeh Yen-I Pu': Statecraft Thought in FifteenthCentury China” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1983); Li Zhuoran, Qiu Jun pingzhuan, chap. 6. 8. On the need to defend the boundary between hua and yi, see Qiu Jun, Da xue yan yi bu (reprint, Taipei: Qiu Wenzhuang gong congshu jiyin weiyuanhui, 1972), 143:1–6; for the quotations, see 143:5a, 6. On the northern border, see 144:16b–17. On the southern border, see 153:6–7a, 11b–13, 14b–17a. On Qiu's ideas, see Li Zhuoran, Qiu Jun pingzhuan, chap. 7. On the importance of the so-called Five Classics in the imperial period, see Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 9. On his perception of the inherent differences between hua and yi, see Qiu Jun, Da xue yan yi bu, 144:8b–9a, 153:1b–2a, 155:15b–16a. On the ancient conceptual division between an inner and an outer zone, see Michael Loewe, “The Heritage Left to the Empires,” in The Cambridge History of Ancient China, ed. Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 995–97. 10. For an overview of historical thinking and writing in China before the Ming, see Ng and Wang, Mirroring the Past, chaps. 1–5. On Chinese perceptions of antiquity, see Dieter Kuhn and Helga Stahl, eds., Perceptions of Antiquity in Chinese Civilization (Heidelberg: Edition Forum, 2008). 11. On Yang Shen, see Goodrich and Fang, Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1531–35; Feng Jiahua, Yang Shen pingzhuan (Critical biography of Yang Shen) (Nanjing: Nanjing daxue chubanshe, 1998). On his literary and scholarly outputs, see Wang Wencai, Yang Shen xuepu (The spectrum of scholarship of Yang Shen) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1988), esp. 140–84; Feng Jiahua, Yang Shen pingzhuan, 393–413. 12. For the history of Yunnan, see C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Page 307 →University Press, 2006); Bin Yang, Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). On Yang's writings on Yunnan, see Feng Jiahua, Yang Shen pingzhuan, 294–304; Ihor Pidhainy, “Yang Shen and the Nature of Travel Writing” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2005). For his sensitivity to the differences between Yunnan and the “central plains” of China, see, for example, Yang Shen, “Dian hou ji xu” (preface to Climate of Yunnan), in Sheng'an quanji, juan 2, collected in Yang Sheng'an congshu, ed. Wang Wencai and Wan Guangzhi (Chengdu: Tian di chubanshe, 2002), 3:110. 13. For his postscript, see Yang Shen, Dian zai ji, in Yang Sheng'an congshu, 2:225–26; for discussions of the text, see Wang Wencai, Yang Shen xuepu, 245–48; Feng Jiahua, Yang Shen pingzhuan, 297–99. For a more general discussion of Yang's interests in the “non-Chinese” peoples of Yunnan, see Mario Cigliano, “Yang Shen (1488–1559), un letterato in esilio e la rivalutazione delle culture minoritarie dello Yunnan,” in Studi in onore di Lionello Lanciotti, ed. S. M. Carletti, M. Sacchetti, and P. Santangelo (Napoli: Dipartimento di Studi Asiatici, Istituto Universitario Orientale, and Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1996), 353–76; I would like to thank Maria Petrucci for her help with the translation of this article. 14. For the origins and transmission of Shanhai jing, see Riccardo Fracasso, “Shan hai ching,” in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1993), 357–67; Richard E. Strassberg, ed. and trans., A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways through Mountains and Seas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 1–79. 15. My discussion of Yang's reading of the Guideways is drawn heavily from Adam Schorr, “Connoisseurship and the Defense against Vulgarity: Yang Shen (1488–1559) and his Work,” Monumenta Serica 41 (1993): 89–128; Yang's comments on the Classics are quoted on p. 112. For his comments on the “strangeness” of the Guideways, see Yang Shen, “Shanhai jing houxu,” in Sheng'an quanji, juan 2, collected in Yang Sheng'an congshu, 3:96. On Guo Pu, see Strassberg, Chinese Bestiary, 15–18. 16. For Yang Shen's contributions to the development of “evidential” learning, see, for example, Lin Qingzhang, Mingdai kaojuxue yanjiu (Evidential learning in Ming China) (rev. ed.; Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 1986); Feng Jiahua, Yang Shen pingzhuan, chap. 9 (for a bibliography of Yang's works, see 393–413); Willard J. Peterson, “Confucian Learning in Late Ming Thought,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, pt. 2, ed. Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 785–87. For a discussion of Yang Shen in a broader intellectual

context, see Adam Schorr, “The Trap of Words: Political Power, Cultural Authority, and Language Debates in Ming Dynasty China” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1994). 17. Schorr, “Connoisseurship,” esp. 91–92. 18. For an overview of the intellectual developments in late Ming, see Peterson, “Confucian Learning.”Page 308 → 19. On Wang Shixing (Wang Shih-hsing) and his travels, see Goodrich and Fang, Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1405–6; Zhou Zhenhe, ed., Wang Shixing dili shu san zhong (Three treatises on geography by Wang Shixing) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1993), 1–12. 20. Wang Shixing, Guang zhi yi, in Wang Shixing dili shu san zhong, 238; the translation is adapted from Julian Ward, Xu Xiake (1587–1641): The Art of Travel Writing (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 2001), 17. 21. For the notions of long and qi, see Wang Shixing, Guang you zhi, in Wang Shixing dili shu san zhong, 210–12, 214; for more general discussions of the idea of “siting,” see Andrew L. March, “An Appreciation of Chinese Geomancy,” Journal of Asian Studies 27, no. 2 (1968): 253–67; Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 179–89. On the river systems of Guizhou and Guangxi, see Wang Shixing, Guang you zhi, 214. 22. For his depiction of the “Yao” and other “non-Chinese,” see Wang Shixing, Guang you zhi, 216–18. 23. For Xu Hongzu, see Ward, Xu Xiake (1587–1641). For Zhang Hong, see James Cahill, “Huang Shan Paintings as Pilgrimage Pictures,” in Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, ed. Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 253–58; idem, The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), chap. 1. For Yang Shen's comment, see Lin Qingzhang, Mingdai kaojuxue yanjiu, 111. 24. For the preface to the Material Medica, see Li Shizhen (Li Shih-chen), Bencao gangmu (Beijing: Renmin weisheng chubanshe, 1975), 1:17; on Li and his text, see Goodrich and Fang, Dictionary of Ming Biography, 859–65; Joseph Needham, Gwei-Djen Lu, and Hsing-Tsung Huang, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6, Biology and Biological Technology, pt. 1, Botany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 308–21; Paul U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 145–63; Peterson, “Confucian Learning,” 782–84; Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 29–34; Carla Nappi, The Monkey and The Inkpot: Natural History and its Transformations in Early Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). For the comment by Song Yingxing, see Sung Ying-hsing, Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century, trans. E-tu Zen Sun and Shiou-chuan Sun (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1966), xi; on Song and his text, see Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (1644–1912) (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), 690–91; Pan Jixing, Tian gong kai wu jiaozhu ji yanjiu (Exploitation of the works of nature, collated, annotated, and studied) (Chengdu: Ba Shu shushe, 1989). On the development of “evidential learning” in Ming China, see Peterson, “Confucian Learning,” 772–88 (quotation is from p. 781). 25. For contacts between the Ming and the wider world, see the chapters by Morris Rossabi, Donald Clark, Wang Gungwu, and John Wills in Twitchett and Mote, Cambridge History of China, vol. 8. For Zheng He, see Edward L. Dreyer, Page 309 →Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–1433 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007). For the Donglin movement, see John W. Dardess, Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and Its Repression, 1620–1627 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002). On the Jesuits and their followers, see Willard J. Peterson, “Learning from Heaven: The Introduction of Christianity and Other Western Ideas into Late Ming China,” in Twitchett and Mote, Cambridge History of China, 8:789–839; Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 26. Anthony Pagden, “Prologue: Europe and the World Around,” in Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History, ed. Euan Cameron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12; Eugene F. Rice and Anthony Grafton, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460–1559, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 86. See also Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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PART 5 Antiquarianism and a “History of Religion”

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THIRTEEN From Antiquarianism to Philosophical History: India, China, and the World History of Religion in European Thought (1600–1770) Joan-Pau Rubiés

Voltaire the Antiquarian? Voltaire is known as one of the first European historians who proclaimed the necessity of a worldwide perspective against the ethnocentric bias of the European tradition. He represents a late exponent of the libertine tradition, in that his challenge to ethnocentrism attacked less the classical tradition of Greece and Rome than the Hebrew Bible as the basis for universal history. If philosophically he proposed a rationalist, anticlerical Deism, I would argue that historiographically his vision owed a great deal to the antiquarianism of the previous century. By offering this counterintuitive argument (given the lack of antiquarian rigor that Voltaire could be accused of), I also seek to qualify the radical opposition of philosophical history to antiquarianism once proposed by Arnaldo Momigliano, and which Voltaire's own scorn for mere antiquarians would seem to corroborate.1 Voltaire's history of the world was also “an essay on customs” (Essai sur les moeurs); the eventual preface to this work, his La philosophie de l'Histoire of 1765, which I will take as point of departure for my discussion of India and China, was essentially an essay on ancient history concerned with religion, languages, chronologies, alphabets, and ritual customs, to the exclusion of wars and politics—what today we would call a “history of civilization.”2 By emphasizing the connections between this kind of philosophical history and antiquarianism, I am also embracing a broad understanding of the latter. Early modern antiquarianism was not Page 314 →merely the collection and use of artifacts and monuments as a historical source, nor even the systematic study of institutions and beliefs which one may oppose (as Momigliano once did) to humanist rhetoric and history.3 European antiquarianism was born in the fifteenth century as the study of the customs, religion, institutions, and material culture of the classical past. It can be understood as a kind of cultural history which was increasingly concerned with the past as past, that is, as culturally distant from the present (hence a sense of anachronism was conditioned by the perception of cultural diversity); which employed a wide range of sources (literary, material, and ethnographic) to analyze this cultural diversity (and therefore contemporary, exotic ethnographies often interacted with the study of the past); and which led toward an enhanced methodological awareness concerning problems of evidence, ranging from the criteria that one may use for establishing a document's authenticity, to the use of comparisons and analogies in order to establish genealogical relationships.4 Although the antiquarians did not necessarily engage in the pursuit of the moral themes of humanist political history, its practitioners usually shared the cultural horizon of humanist writers, and their endeavors often consisted of extending the humanist reliance on philological methods to a wider range of sources and questions.5 We could perhaps say that from Poggio Bracciolini and Flavio Biondo in the Italian Renaissance of the mid-fifteenth century, through Justus Lipsius or Pedro de Valencia in the neo-Stoic and skeptical moments of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to Isaac Vossius at the dawn of Paul Hazard's crise de la conscience européenne, the antiquarian was to begin with a humanist scholar, even if he often transcended the mere humanist.6 One of the classic Renaissance discussions of history, Francesco Patrizi's Della historia diece dialoghi (Venice, 1560), already made it clear that the historian was not only concerned with the deeds and sayings of great men that made up the standard political narratives, or even with the history of ideas (“opinions”), but also studied the diversity of customs, ancient material culture, and various forms of government.7 The recognition of this widening of the thematic scope of history was developed by French writers such as Jean Bodin and Louis Le Roy to propose a methodical approach to the history of civilization, a late-Renaissance agenda that would flourish in the Enlightenment. In the early decades of the seventeenth century, the new antiquarian research on classical culture and pagan religion was led by late humanists such as Justus Lipisus, John Selden, and Gerard Vossius. From this perspective, the antiquarian became (however wide-ranging in his fields of enquiry) a specialist, working for Page 315 →a Republic of Letters

still dominated by polymaths. Some of these antiquarians, inspired by the sixteenth-century example of the Venetian humanist Giovanni Battista Ramusio, dedicated themselves to editing and collecting travel accounts, for example the French savant Melchisédec Thévenot, whereas others collected and studied oriental sources.8 Even the encyclopedic publishing culture of the early Enlightenment, increasingly dominated by hack writers writing in English, French, or Dutch, and which made available to a wider public in a synthetic and sometimes polemical form the new evidence collected by a variety of travel writers and historians, often echoed the themes of antiquarian scholarship. This is the case whether we consider Jesuit apologists like Louis le Comte, JosephFrançois Lafitau, and Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Huguenot refugees like Jean Frederic Bernard and the illustrator Bernard Picart, or universal historians, cosmographers, and travel editors such as Arnoldus Montanus, Olfert Dapper, George Sale, or George Psalmanazar.9 Philosophers from Leibniz to Voltaire, while not themselves antiquarians, were avid consumers who understood that the writing of world history would be transformed by both exotic ethnography and antiquarian research. They realized that the fruits of antiquarianism—the publications of the seventeenth-century érudits and savants—made possible new solutions to the problem of how to conceptualize the history of civilization, in the light of the coming together of humanist scholarship about the pre-Christian past of the classical Mediterranean world, and the new global perspective opened up by the remarkable geographical discoveries of the early modern centuries. What I propose to do here is to work backward, from Voltaire's discussion of the ancient history of India and China to some of the antiquarian constructions and debates of the previous 150 years, in particular diffusionist theories of the history of gentile religion and civilization, in order to illustrate the way philosophical history was influenced by the antiquarian tradition even when there emerged an apparent opposition. I will emphasize, for example, Voltaire's paradoxical reliance on Jesuit writers for his views on gentile religion, chronology, and sources. My particular contention is that diffusionism operated as a vehicle for the selective application of antiquarian learning to the increasingly crucial concern with the history of religion and civilization, eventually leading to philosophical history. The diffusionist theories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were largely about rationalizing cultural differences and change on the basis of universalistic principles, often subjecting ethnography to the predefined values of a biblical historical narrative. The enterprise Page 316 →was highly controversial, despite (but also because of) the dominance of a Christian universalistic agenda. Divergent theologies made it possible, and sometimes inevitable, that the production of antiquarian research and its interpretation became a field for debating the Bible's status as a historical narrative. The wider problem I am trying to tackle is one that Richard Popkin identified some years ago: in a Christian society, what is it exactly that prompts the application of skeptical arguments to the Bible?10 In particular, was the new evidence of gentile civilizations problematic per se, or were the particular mechanisms for the presentation and interpretation of this evidence what really mattered? At which point did a greater awareness of cultural difference lead to challenging the grand narrative of human history, revising or replacing biblical universalism with what increasingly looked like a secular history of civilization? I would like to suggest that the idea of a linear evolution from orthodoxy to libertinism must be treated with caution, and that we need to understand better the way primary accounts informed religious controversies, and the role of methodological issues in those controversies.

Voltaire's India Voltaire offered a remarkably positive view of Indian civilization (indeed, from a sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury perspective, Voltaire was more original in his idealization of India than in his idealization of China).11 India, he claimed, is naturally fertile, and this explains that it is the country where men first joined together as a community—that is, the oldest human civilization (with Egypt and Mesopotamia following). Not only had the Persians learned in India their astrology and the Greeks their philosophy “even before Pythagoras,” but the oldest “antiquities” that the Chinese emperors have in their palaces, the oldest coins for example, are of Indian origin. Arabic chess and numbers are of Indian origin. This presumption of cultural originality is supported by the argument that, from the most ancient times, all peoples have sought to trade with India, or to invade it, whereas the peoples of India have basically stayed there. Having established Indian priority to his satisfaction, Voltaire continued with a description of the defining traits of this most ancient civilization: the Indians are naturally peaceful (by contrast with their conquerors) because the doctrine of the transmigration of the souls has taught

them to respect all creatures. The ancient religion of India is hence equivalent to classical Pythagoreanism, and it inspires a universal charity. Together Page 317 →with Confucianism, it can be counted as the only “nonbarbarous” religion of the world. Needless to say, all this entailed a highly selective reading of the sources, with obviously polemical ends. Hence, Voltaire noted that the Indians, unlike Christians, do observe their religious precepts. Had the Christian nations followed their religion of peace and charity—as in fact only the Quakers do—they would have been conquered, rather than becoming conquerors. Let us note however that Voltaire was building his case on the ancient religion of the Brahmins, not on its modern form, which (as he saw it) was full of absurdity and clerical abuse, due to the “theocracy” which the Brahmins had been able to install. He interpreted Hindu institutions like widow-burning as an example of the vulnerability of human nature to fanaticism and contradictions. Hence the religion of the Brahmins combined absurd “modern” rituals with good “ancient” moral precepts. Interestingly, Voltaire derived these ancient precepts from a forgery, the famous Ezour-Vedam (echoing the then little known Yajur-Veda), in reality a work of Christian apologetics written by a French Jesuit missionary in South India under the guise of restoring the “lost” Veda of the ancient Brahmins, and misunderstood as authentic by a number of French orientalists.12 It was precisely because the work was based on the thesis of primitive monotheism of the Christian apologetic tradition that it would appeal so powerfully to a Deist heir of the same tradition, however antiChristian. Voltaire actively worked to date the text to the period before Alexander the Great, at a time when idolatry—the mysterious text's main target—was supposedly starting to spread, but when the ancient religion of the gymnosophists had not yet been corrupted.13 The admirable doctrine presented in the Ezour-Vedam allowed Voltaire to claim that all peoples share a single, eminently rational moral system, even though their religious rituals may divide them. It was a typically Deistic claim built upon the Catholic (Thomist and Jesuit) distinction between natural religion and supernatural revelation—all Voltaire needed to do was to embrace natural religion and denounce the ritual elements as equivalent to the superfluous and, indeed, dangerous superstitions which Christian writers associated to idolatry.14

Voltaire's China As is well known, Voltaire adopted toward China an emphatically positive view. What most attracted Voltaire was the authority of their annals, Page 318 →which provided a solid and continuous nonbiblical chronology supported by astronomical observations, “all of which have been found to be correct” (here Voltaire preferred to ignore the many imperfections in those calculations which the Jesuits themselves had detected, and which some European critics—for example the astronomer Jean Cassini—had used to attack the authority of those same annals).15 Obviously, the issue was that this chronology created difficulties for the biblical story of a universal Flood, among others. Rather than imitating the Jesuits, or the humanist antiquarian Isaac Vossius, in their adoption of the “long chronology” of the Septuagint in order to reconcile disparate chronologies, Voltaire insisted that the very fact that there were three possible biblical chronologies—those in the Vulgate, the Septuagint and the Samaritan versions of the Pentateuch—made it impossible to believe in the books' authority (he of course made the Chinese proclaim this). In any case, Chinese records not only went back 2,300 years before Christ, they also implied the existence of a preceding period which must have been much longer, long enough so that a vast and civilized empire could be formed from “savage” times. This would become a crucial argument in Voltaire's attack on biblical chronology.16 In his eagerness to authenticate these gentile records against European skeptics, Voltaire fell into many small contradictions. For example, after having said earlier that Indian coins were the oldest objects collected by the Chinese, here he asserted that Chinese bamboo tablets were “the oldest monuments of the whole world,” even older than the clay tablets of the “Chaldaeans.” He also insisted that their contents were not “fabulous,” like the Greek and Egyptian (or indeed Indian!) mythologies, which were concerned with the origins of the cosmos, but instead offered simple and reasonable human history. Voltaire's explanation was that the Chinese elites were not subject to a priesthood, even though the same eminently rational literati had, at some point, abandoned the common people to the superstitious religion of the Buddhist bonzes. Voltaire's admiration for a paternalistic but absolute monarchy—a kind of legal despotism—also allowed him to emphasize the virtues of the Chinese political system, against Montesquieu's more negative analysis of such “despotism.”

Voltaire acknowledged the severe limitations of the Chinese in medicine and natural science. He adopted the Jesuit strategy (also followed by Leibniz) of emphasizing their cultivation of natural morality, “the first of all sciences.” Ancient religion was rational and nonsuperstitious, without mysteries, and never led to persecutions, conflicts with the state, or religious Page 319 →wars. Confucius was not an inspired prophet, but simply a teacher of ancient morality. His teaching was theistic, unlike what some (opponents of the Jesuits) had declared in France—their temple inscriptions proved this. Confucius was in this respect the equivalent to Chumontou, the ancient Brahmin who, faced with the beginnings of superstitions (the same superstitions that eventually penetrated China from India), authored the Ezour-Vedam.17 Targeting Calvinists, Jansenists, and Dominicans with a single sweep, Voltaire ironically added that those who had criticized Bayle for suggesting that there could exist a society of atheists had also declared that the most ancient government of the world was in fact a society of atheists.18 It is in passages like this that Jesuit accommodation, Bayle's Protestant skeptical fideism, and Deistic libertinism can best be seen to have had a combined effect which they might have never achieved separately.

Ideology and Method in Early Modern Antiquarianism Voltaire's interpretation certainly related to a clear ideological agenda, but it also responded to a number of identifiable “antiquarian” controversies of the previous century. These were controversies about the ancient history of languages, religions and other human institutions based on classical erudition, biblical analysis, exotic ethnographies, and the use of comparative methods and analogies. In fact, Voltaire's interpretation of India and China was ideologically motivated, and methodologically flawed, in a way similar to the majority of seventeenthcentury diffusionist theories which, in their effort to connect peoples, religions, and languages, were often conditioned by religious agendas and undermined by a blatantly selective use of arguments.19 Let us quickly consider the key controversies. 1. The nature of primitive religion, and the related problem of the salvation of “virtuous gentiles,” with a number of options on the table: natural religion (rational monotheism), often associated with the idea of a primitive revelation; idolatry, often understood as the result of religious degeneration; and the possibility of rational atheism. This was of course what the antiquarian dimension of the Rites Controversy had largely been about. Voltaire clearly stood next to the Jesuits in his emphasis on a natural monotheism and rational morality, although, unlike them, he denied the possibility of any primitive “Noachian” revelation. In fact, Voltaire took a step beyond François de La Mothe le Vayer's thesis in his De Page 320 →la vertu des payens (1641) that the Christian revelation was unnecessary for the “salvation” of those virtuous pagans who, like Socrates and Confucius, had attained a true knowledge of God through rational means, and whose virtue was therefore authentic (contrary to what the Jansenists claimed, following Augustine). Voltaire was also in the tradition of Leibniz and Wolff concerning the universal value of a “natural” morality expressed, for example, in Confucianism. In turn, I would argue, all of these positions rested on the Jesuits' “Stoic” model of an autonomous rational morality, imagined by Ricci in relation to ancient Confucianism, publicized in Europe by Nicolas Trigault, and consistently maintained by the Society throughout the Rites Controversy until it was finally banned by Rome. (The case of India is peculiar, as Voltaire, by taking seriously the Veda as evidence of a primitive monotheism, unwittingly relied on the Jesuits as apologetes rather than on the Jesuits as antiquarians). It was this idea of the rational apprehension of natural law which made it possible for the Jesuits to emphasize a primitive natural monotheism in China, a proposition contested by their “Augustinian” (Dominican and Jansenist) critics; as is well known, during the controversy the Sorbonne actually declared the intellectual core of Confucianism to be atheistic (although, paradoxically, the cult of ancestors and of Confucius was considered to be idolatrous, against the Jesuits' contention that it could be seen as a mere civil ritual). The danger of moral rationalism was of course the idea, suggested by writers such as Pierre Bayle, that religion had nothing to do with morality, a step that that Jesuits and Deists alike would struggle to prevent. In this respect, it is worth emphasizing here that Voltaire, despite his criticism of religious superstition, shared a target with Christian orthodoxy, namely atheism—a warning to avoid a reductionist interpretation of the libertine tradition as inevitably Spinozist.20 2. Closely related to the problem of the nature of the ancient religion of gentile nations was the history of idolatry. Within the monogenist assumptions of the Bible, there were two basic options: a “degenerationist” model, by which the primitive revelation or natural law of the times of Noah had been forgotten through the dispersion of

mankind, quickly replaced by widespread idolatry, and a prisca theologia model with greater potential for accommodation (or, in other words, less Augustinian), by which a core of natural theism had either survived as an esoteric teaching, or had been renewed through new rational teachings. Calvinist theologians, but also many Augustianian Catholics, tended to emphasize the inevitability of idolatry due to the corruption of human nature; Catholic rationalists, but also many liberal (Arminian) Protestants, gave Page 321 →more credit to the capacity of human reason to naturally worship a single God, and could even be sympathetic to some idolatrous cults as manifestations of this natural tendency, in effect suggesting that superstition was distinct from, and worse than, idolatry.21 Between these paradigms a number of diffusionist theories were put forward in the seventeenth century, mainly as pious attempts to reconcile the diversity of gentilism with the monogenist assumptions of biblical history. The most notable of these attempts were the Egyptian/Pythagorean diffusionism of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, to which I shall return, or a few decades later the Mosaic diffusionism of Bishop PierreDaniel Huet. Let us also note within Protestantism the Noachian diffusionist theories of Samuel Bochart and George Horn. Against these pious constructions, which ultimately drew inspiration from the emphasis on the Hebrew primacy of the Patristic tradition, in the eighteenth century we find a growing willingness to explore the idea of autochtonous cultural developments, a tendency represented for example by the French academic Nicolas Fréret (and eventually also adopted by some of the more sophisticated Jesuits), or, more controversially, the semipolygenist thesis of writers like Voltaire. Let us also note that for Voltaire, strictly speaking, idolatry did not exist, because it was an ethnocentric concept. He thus stood in stark contrast not only to the Jesuits (who through accommodation sought to define carefully what was, or was not, idolatrous), but also to Pierre Bayle or David Hume (for whom, here in a position agreeable to orthodox Calvinism, all primitive religions were idolatrous). Of course, Voltaire also insisted on the prevalence of a clerically induced superstition and intolerance, which were in fact his key targets, and in which Christians, as exalted heirs of Judaism, sadly excelled. It is this separation of idolatry from superstition which allowed Voltaire to place the analysis of Christianity on an equal footing with that of all other religions.22 3. These histories of idolatry were in turn closely connected to the problem of reconciling biblical, Chinese, and Indian chronologies, and hence to the question of how to read the Bible. Voltaire's “long” chronology allowed him to dismiss the biblical framework altogether as fabulous. He was at the end of a line of debates in which orthodox writers had been struggling to avoid precisely this consequence. Throughout the seventeenth century the authority of different versions of the Bible had been pitted against the authority of Chinese annals publicized by Jesuit missionaries.23 If the impact of the Chinese records first publicized by Martino Martini, and their enthusiastic reception by the humanist scholar Isaac Vossius, came to dominate the controversies of the second Page 322 →half of the seventeenth century, in the eighteenth century there was an indological turn that, in effect, only served to increase the pressure on the Bible. Whether authors privileged China or India, what was being denied was a cultural diffusionism premised upon the Hebrew and Egyptian traditions of antiquity. What seems peculiar to the whole process is that from the assumption that the Bible must be right, and that new evidence must be accommodated, many Europeans turned to the idea not only that a synthesis was impossible, but also that the continuous records of the Chinese were on the whole more trustworthy than the Bible. 4. We might add a fourth element to these antiquarian controversies, concerning sources and methodology. What I would like to emphasize now is that Voltaire's sources were most often “orthodox,” especially Jesuit, writers, who exercised a privileged control of the early literature concerning China and remained very influential on India and elsewhere.24 The point is that there could be various European “readings” of this material, hence the methodological problem was inevitable from the moment that the Roman Church (let alone the Jesuits) did not control the European debate. (Of course the same methodological issues applied to the use of primary accounts produced by lay writers: as Bayle observed when discussing the possible fictionalization of oriental despotism in his Réponse aux questions d'un provincial, the problem was how to judge the evidence from travelers like Paul Rycaut).25 Voltaire was therefore aware that the issue of the use and abuse of comparisons had been at the core of some seventeenth-century ethnological and antiquarian controversies, in relation to both the origin of the American Indians and the history of oriental religion.26 Could genealogical relations be established between different peoples on the grounds of linguistic and cultural similarities? What constituted a sufficient analogy? The

ethnological and historical dimension of the debate thus centered on the principles of analogy and influence: on the one hand, comparing similar customs, languages, myths, doctrines, worship, and ritual practices; on the other hand, connecting the similar in the framework of universal history through diffusionist models. These antiquarian debates inevitably led to enhanced source criticism: which sources were authoritative, and why? Historical Pyrrhonism in part developed as a response to debates on chronology and to arbitrary diffusionist analogies. Antiquarian erudition, and the seeming solidity of coins and inscriptions set against the rhetorical power of writers, could provide an answer to Pyrrhonism, but it soon became clear that objects no less than texts could be forged, and ethnographic, iconographic, and linguistic analogies, when weak, Page 323 →could also foster doubt. The critical assessment of the Chinese annals publicized by the Jesuits in the late seventeenth century provides a fascinating example of how historical evidence was subjected to ever closer scrutiny.27 In all of these controversies Voltaire's targets were clearly consistent: the Bible as a reliable Revelation, the Jews as recipients of this Revelation, and Christianity as the heir to this tradition. Both China and India allowed Voltaire to dismiss traditional claims about Jewish cultural priority to all other peoples and their monotheistic uniqueness—assumptions which much of seventeenth-century antiquarian discussions had sought to buttress. Against these assumptions, Voltaire offered the image of “Jewish” Christianity as a local and largely deplorable tradition, to be set against a universalistic rationalism which is not, let us note, without problems. (As an example of these “problems” we can mention, in particular, Voltaire's racialism, which, combined with his anti-Judaism, would seem to lead to anti-Semitism.28 What had started as an antibiblical tool inherited from polygenists like the heterodox Isaac la Peyrère sat uncomfortably with Voltaire's emphasis on the universality of human nature, and would be opposed by other Enlightened naturalists and antiquarians like Buffon, Fréret, or Sonnerat).29 Voltaire's “package” of views was influential, but of course also personal and polemical. His work can serve a point of departure for a wider discussion of how new sources about China and India, and in particular about their past, transformed through a number of debates (inextricably linked to religious controversy) the European writing of world history. It is implicit in my previous discussion that we can distinguish two elements: the antiquarian claims of some primary accounts, and their use in Europe. I also would like to suggest that in those uses we can distinguish three basic intellectual strategies: Catholic, Protestant, and libertine. However, at this point I would like to introduce three caveats: First, I believe that it would be dangerous to assume a linear evolution toward increasing skepticism and “libertinism.” What I find is a transformation of the “cultural field” by which, increasingly throughout the seventeenth century, different “orthodox” views—Catholic or Protestant—of ancient history and the Bible could no longer merely argue with each other, but in fact needed to position themselves in relation to a skeptical antireligious stance, often through recourse to either antiquarian scholarship or, alternatively, through skeptical, antirationalist fideism. Second, it will be useful to identify a number of basic “strategies”: Page 324 →Catholic, Protestant, and skeptical /libertine. However, because (as we shall see) there was no automatic link between many antiquarian doctrines and the theological positions defended by those who adopted them, it is important to also emphasize the amount of controversy within each confessional “camp.” Consider here not only the Rites Controversy, with the peculiar position of the Jesuits contested within Catholicism, but also the struggle conducted by orthodox Calvinists against “liberal Protestantism” (irenicist and postskeptical minimalist systems). More generally, it is also important to note that savants and érudits of different persuasions borrowed from each other both in terms of sources and methodologies; the widespread recourse to analogies and comparisons to support diffusionist theories of the ancient history of religion and culture can serve as example of this. Finally, we need to assess more carefully the role of primary accounts in changing historical views held in Europe. In the case of India and China, as in the case of the American Indians, the relationship between primary accounts and controversies was complex. The primary accounts cannot be dismissed as merely peripheral to an inevitable debate in Europe: they often provoked the debate—we cannot imagine an Isaac Vossius adopting the Septuagint chronology without Martino Martini first publishing his challenging Chinese annals. At this point we may wish to compare Vossius on the Septuagint to Galileo on heliocentrism—the issue was less the thinkability of an

alternative theory than the impulse to adopt it as more likely to be true. Should we adopt Thomas Kuhn's model for the Copernican revolution, by which a traditional paradigm can be eroded by “evidence” to the point where it is no longer plausible? Only with an important qualification: the plausibility of a traditional account—in this case, in particular, the biblical account of the primitive history of mankind—can only be assessed in relation to a cultural field which allows for a variety of subfields, that is, for a plurality of visions. Obviously, for the purposes of our particular story, the partial success of the Reformation was crucial in splintering Christianity on a number of important issues, and hence it weakened the mechanisms for “correction” toward tradition, or otherwise consensual change, that medieval Christianity may have had. In other words, in certain circumstances a cultural subfield may evolve and, in the process, eventually challenge the core elements of the tradition. The story of early modern antiquarianism suggests that there was a great deal of room for individual options to become decisive in the light of personal attitudes to authority, access to information, subjective imagination, and commitment to a cause. In Page 325 →fact, the lack of a consistent or automatic correspondence between particular antiquarian theories and particular religious conclusions made the whole field extremely fluid and, to contemporaries, often bewildering. Some cases were clear-cut: if Isaac la Peyrère argued for men before Adam, the conclusions were either heretical or too skeptical.30 But other cases were less so. Was Isaac Vossius a danger to orthodoxy when he adopted the longer chronology of the Septuagint over the Hebrew (Masoretic) text in order to fit in the Chinese annals, in this way granting superior credibility to the records of a barbarous nation? Was it not better to simply dismiss those gentile annals as unreliable, as the majority of Calvinist scholars and many Catholics, such as Bishop Bossuet, were inclined to do? Or could Vossius's controversial move, which after all did not lack precedents in the early Church, perhaps be seen as an admirably pious action, one which followed from the lucid realization that, inevitably, European Christians would have to come to terms with the solidity of the Chinese chronology after the reign of Fu Xi? Or, to use another famous example, was the Jesuit insistence that Confucius's original teaching was rational, theistic, and nonidolatrous an intelligent interpretation which would help the conversion of the civilized Chinese to Christianity, or was it safer to be, with many Dominicans, skeptical about those claims, and to rely on the evidence of neo-Confucian atheism and of the “idolatrous” worship of ancestors in China, in order to safeguard Christianity from the corrupting influence of a gentile religion? In other words, information did not lead automatically to new doctrines, but was mediated by the existence of a complex system of cultural fields, each distinguished by distinct doctrines, authorities, and methodologies. An example of this dynamic is provided by the prevalence of diffusionist theories of the history of language, religion, and civilization. Diffusionist models were assumed by humanists like Polydore Vergil in his De inventoribus rerurm (1499; 1517) when attempting a history of culture and of religion. The emphasis of such a history of “inventions” need not be progressive, as in fact Polydore followed the Patristic tradition of emphasizing a Hebrew primacy over the Greeks, deplored many inventions as corruptions, and denounced many Christian practices as pagan.31 These models were also an obvious answer to the problem of how to relate the empirical evidence of human diversity, described in the travel writing of the period, to the needs of a universalistic religion which based its core belief system on the Bible, that is, on a Providential account of human history with very specific statements about “what happened.” With Adam, the Flood, and Noah, a single genealogy was Page 326 →made explicit for the whole of mankind, a Christian bias which led anthropological speculation toward monogenist approaches when a polygenist thesis (more explicit racialist theories, in particular) could have otherwise prevailed.32 The same is apparent with the story of the “confusion of tongues” after Babel: here again the bias was toward comparative linguistics that took an original language which was universal—usually Hebrew—as starting point. Concerning the history of religion specifically, the issue was more complicated, in that the sharp opposition between one exclusive Revelation and gentile idolatry did not initially lend itself to an empirical investigation of universalistic claims. Comparisons, if at all required, were only legitimate for gentilism. Some of the first antiquarians, humanist clerics like Polydore Vergil or his German contemporary Johannes Boemus, were keen to domesticate the evidence for cultural diversity and change found in classical sources within the parameters of biblical priority, and whereas, for example, Boemus puzzled about the classical account (Stoic and Epicurean) of the history of the rise of civilization in purely naturalistic terms, as found in the first book of Diodorus Siculus, or, more famously, in the remarkable fifth book of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, he, like Polydore Vergil, had no doubts that any gentile history could be rejected by asserting the superior antiquity of the Jews, as the Jewish and

Christian apologists Josephus and Eusebius of Caesarea had learned to do in ancient times.33 Yet here also antiquarian research eventually came to challenge biblical exclusivism in favor of a more rationalist form of universalism. There was, as we have seen, a Patristic background to this problem, but not a clear outcome, since an alternative apologetic tradition, later taken up by Renaissance Platonists and always appealing to those inclined to syncretism, emphasized the idea of a primitive universal Revelation, largely Platonic-Stoic or Neoplatonic (i.e. rationalist and mystic) in philosophical content, which extended to figures like Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras, the Jewish cabbala, and the sages of Egypt and India. It is usually referred to as prisca theologia, and it often—but not always—assumed that a Mosaic Revelation preceded this pagan monotheism. However, the increasingly dominant view in the West, which was also closer to Augustine's theology, emphasized the unique and exclusive nature of the Mosaic Revelation, and the fact that virtuous actions were not truly virtuous unless performed through faith in Christ.34 The study of the gentile religions of China, India, and elsewhere, usually undertaken for apologetic aims, created new vistas in the history of gentilism and therefore opened up the issue again, although with a new, extremely Page 327 →dangerous element: the fact that the Mosaic Revelation could not be easily placed at the root of these exotic religious traditions meant that either natural reason, or a pre-Mosaic Noachide tradition, had to replace it. In other words, a traditional theological dispute became both more urgent in the light of the religious missions and more explosive in the light of the problem of geographical and cultural distance and disparate, or implausible, chronologies.35 The relation between Christian apologetics and the growth of revisionist antiquarianism is indeed the crux of the matter. One could of course use diffusionist models to rewrite the history of gentilism as a history of connected systems of devilish idolatry, but it was also possible to raise the issue of whether, before idolatry, there was a universal and “natural” primitive monotheism. If we can agree that the relationship between primary accounts and antiquarian controversies was complex, so were the interactions between doctrinal disputes within European Christendom and the methodological transformation brought about by the rise of antiquarian culture. Hence for example the Rites Controversy, a doctrinal dispute, led to a deeper analysis of ancient Chinese history, but only because, in the first place, the Jesuits' humanistic training had given them the opportunity to develop accommodation in a creative fashion.

Jesuit Historiography and the Antiquarian Origins of Libertinism A proper analysis of the legacy of antiquarian controversies upon philosophical history would require considering at last the three traditions, Catholic, Protestant, and libertine, which I have outlined. Here I will limit myself to considering the contributions which were more relevant as sources and models for Voltaire as philosophical historian, who may be best described (because of his rationalist Deism) as a “Catholic libertine.” That means focusing primarily upon Catholic strategies and in particular the Jesuit model. Indeed, the antiquarian elements developed by Jesuit accommodation proved crucial for the European debates which, in turn, created the grounds for European libertinism.36 Voltaire's sources on China were overwhelmingly Jesuit. His sources on India were more diverse, reflecting the relative openness of the country and therefore the wider range of European perspectives available. Voltaire was an eclectic and avid reader of everything relevant to his wide religious, literary, and historical interests. For example, his library Page 328 →contained a very remarkable amount of literature on India, much of it acquired and read fairly soon after publication (we can follow the traces of the Ezour-Vedam, or the historical accounts by the British Company officers John Holwell and Alexander Dow, in his writings after 1760). However, when he came to actually using this material, a limited number of authors became his authorities, precisely those like Holwell and Dow who provided him with primary sources (authentic or apocryphal, Voltaire was unable to distinguish) on the ancient religion of India—Holwell a creation myth, Dow some philosophical fragments.37 Holwell, himself a Christian Deist, was also supportive of Indian claims to a prebiblical chronology, and did not shy away from suggesting that the Brahmins had received an authentic theistic Revelation and had subsequently taught religion to Egypt, rather than the other way round. His views obviously fit neatly with Voltaire's own theological agenda. It was this agenda which clearly drove Voltaire's interpretation and use of his indological materials in a variety of writings, especially in his Essai sur les moeurs, which he repeatedly rewrote as new sources became available to

him. While in the 1740s and 50s Indian religion appeared to Voltaire as an example of priest-induced superstition analogous to Christianity, mainly through the lenses of the seventeenth-century philosophical traveler François Bernier, after the 1760s Voltaire's new texts allowed him to give India a more interesting role, and in particular to challenge the priority of Judaism through an ancient religion which could plausibly be made to have a documented monotheistic philosophical core. Interestingly, the very comparability of Indian mythological traditions to oriental Mediterranean religions made India more useful than the culturally and geographically very distant China: all Voltaire needed to do was to reverse the traditional interpretation of any possible analogies as a diffusion from Egypt or even Christianity to India, adopted for example by many Jesuits from Kircher in his China Illustrata to Fr. Jean Bouchet in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, all of which Voltaire had read, to establish Indian priority.38 Not only “popular” idolatry and superstition, but crucially also philosophical monotheism and civilization in general could now be made to have originated in India or Mesopotamia before the Egyptians, let alone the Jews, appeared on the stage of history.39 Voltaire was therefore interested in supporting Indian claims to antiquity, which European writers traditionally dismissed as nonsensical. He was for example keen to situate the Ezour-Vedam in the period before Alexander the Great's expedition, and even before Pythagoras, without any convincing grounds—ideological convenience was sufficient.40 However, Page 329 →it would be fair also to note that his key sources (the Jesuit-constructed Ezour-Vedam, the writings of Holwell and Dow) provided him with apparently authentic proof of a philosophical monotheism, which only subsequent Sanskrit scholarship was able to declare apocryphal.41 For his indology Voltaire may have reversed the Mediterranean-centered diffusionism of Jesuit missionaries like Bouchet, but he was also inspired by the traditional thesis of a hidden monotheism first formulated by Nobili early in the seventeenth century, and which writers like Fr. La Lane continued to defend in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, supported at the time of Voltaire's maturity by the new antiquarian scholarship on India represented by the academics Abbé Mignot and Nicolas Fréret, or the revisionist Jesuit Coeurdoux.42 Generally speaking, Voltaire's views owed a great deal not only to the empirical findings, but also to the intellectual strategies of the Jesuit tradition. At the heart of Roberto de Nobili's search for a monotheistic element within Hinduism was a policy of accommodation similar to Ricci's. This impulse not only helped him overcome the reluctance of his contemporaries to study a religion which seemed obviously idolatrous, but also led him to introduce an antiquarian element in his analysis. Some previous missionaries—the Augustinian Azevedo, or the Jesuit Fenicio—had studied Hindu texts, but mainly in order to refute them as fabulous and absurd, and the Jesuit historian Maffei was following the common line when in 1588 he referred to Hinduism as a collection of vain and undignified fables. It was Nobili who found himself in the position of having to argue (albeit initially only within the clerical establishment) about how this religious tradition may have evolved. Like Ricci, he was prompted to do so by a combination of apologetic tactics and the need to defend his method from the attack of fellow Christians (and, indeed, fellow Jesuits), who insisted that he was making compromises with idolatry—the famous Malabar Rites Controversy. The parallels with the Chinese case are indeed striking. The crucial idea was that the gentile civil tradition of the Brahmins, insofar as it did not challenge natural law, could be made compatible with Christianity on the basis of the Thomistic distinction between nature and grace. Hence Hindu dharma could be translated as recta ratio. In this sense, Hindu civilization was not different from classical Greece or Rome—or from ancient, Confucian, China. It was however necessary to also argue that modern Brahmins, not unlike modern neo-Confucians, erred when attaching superstitious and indeed idolatrous meanings to what “in reality” were their own civil customs. Here the European antiquarian was Page 330 →forced to correct the modern gentile concerning their own tradition, by engaging with the Sanskrit texts which gave authority to that tradition. Nobili indeed learned to read Sanskrit, and obtained access to the four Vedas from a Telugu Brahmin called Shivadharma. These four Vedas he considered a jumble of religious and civil precepts miscellaneously put together. Indeed, he argued (very controversially) that they could be treated as no more than a collection of legal opinions compatible with a variety of religious views, given the very plurality of Hinduism, hence not necessarily linked to any of them specifically. This is what made it possible for him to appeal to an authentic “spiritual” Veda by introducing Christianity as the restoration of an original theistic system which had become confused (this was precisely the argument underlying the later Ezour-Vedam). Nobili was of course building on the distinction between an elite rational monotheism, represented by Shankara's philosophy, and the popular idolatry and silly tales which the priests introduced in order to manipulate the crowds. It was not any

different from the way classical Mediterranean gentilism could be represented, with the philosophers cultivating virtue and a Platonic or Stoic theism whereas the masses worshipped Zeus or Hercules. But Nobili was careful to bring in all the local particulars into his case. Hence, in another antiquarian twist, Buddhist atheism came to play an important role in this construction: Buddhism came to be perceived by Nobili as a kind of primordial skeptic atheism to which the Hindu systems of idolatry represented a reaction. Nobili could then espouse this deistic impulse while insisting that it needed to be restored from the negative effects of a historical process of sectarian fragmentation and idolatrous degeneration. The adoption of Christianity was therefore not only compatible with Brahminical civil customs, but indeed a return to the original spiritual Deism of earlier Brahmins. Although after 1750 India figured prominently in what we might call the Great Antiquarian Debate, China was clearly the case that had dominated the discussion in the preceding century. Ricci had in fact formulated his strategy earlier than Nobili, but, more important, his analysis of Chinese religion, incorporated in his historical account of the Jesuit Mission to China, very quickly reached a wide European audience (with the important help of his fellow Jesuit, and Latin editor, Nicolas Trigault). Remarkably, although Ricci was neither the first nor the last European to write in some detail about Chinese gentilism, his interpretation was still central to the debate more than one hundred years later, when Fr. Jean-Baptiste Du Halde published his influential synthesis Description de la Chine (1735).43 Page 331 → Ricci's historical account described the Confucian literati as practicing a very ancient and apparently native natural monotheism, and teaching a moral doctrine which was civil rather than religious, generally in accordance with the innate light of reason which all men naturally shared. The nonidolatrous monotheism and rational morality of the Chinese were therefore understood by Ricci as being compatible with Christianity, much like ancient Stoicism could be made to be—and indeed, it was through the use of Stoic ethics that Ricci soon sought to establish a common ground with the Confucian literati of the late Ming period. However, in private letters Ricci had first communicated that the current doctrine of the literati, rather indifferent to religion, was that of the Epicurean sect.44 Ricci's distinction between a neo-Confucian materialism (or pantheism) infected with Buddhism, and the purely theistic original teachings of Confucius, would become quite crucial to subsequent Jesuit strategy in China. In fact, Ricci sought to combat neo-Confucian doctrines by claiming the true understanding of Confucius. Hence the analysis of observed gentile religion, if it was to support an ambitious program of apologetics, led also to complex antiquarian claims. These were cast in a degenerationist model: unlike the primitive religion of the Chinese, which was almost without errors, in modern times the original light had been dimmed, and “of those who escape idolatry, there are few who do not fall into atheism.”45 Ricci's successors, writers like Philippe Couplet in the epoch-making Confucius Sinarum Philosophus of 1687, were increasingly forced to be more precise about how they supported the distinction between ancient and modern Confucianism, mainly in response to the Rites Controversy, that is, in order to defend their method against the assault led from the 1630s by Spanish Dominicans and eventually supported by the many allies (Jansenists and others) that the friars found in Europe. The fact that the leading Jesuit writers, from Matteo Ricci to Louis Le Comte, argued for the natural theism of Confucius was undermined by their own acknowledgment that many Chinese mandarins were atheists, and inevitably superseded by the fact that Dominican critics like Noel Alexandre presented the doctrinal core of Confucianism, no less than that of Buddhism, as essentially atheistic (most observers saw elite atheism as perfectly compatible with the popular idolatry and superstition of the uneducated classes). Hence the Jesuit claim that the Chinese Confucian sages, as opposed to the Buddhist idolaters, cultivated a rational morality was not only vulnerable to the reactionary charge that the cult of Confucius was idolatrous, but, more seriously, also open to the skeptical counterclaim that Page 332 →these virtuous gentiles were not really Deists, but atheists instead. This set the impact of the Rites Controversy in the context of the crisis of the widely influential Ciceronian argument that the existence of God was proved by the universal consent of mankind. The possibility that Jesuits were trying to minimize the extent of Chinese idolatry was a problem from the missionary perspective, but the idea that they were covering up the atheism of the literati was even more explosive, in the face of the growth of libertine thought. Bayle's scandalous contention that atheists were more morally admirable than idolaters was in reality a logical extension of the Jesuit principle that rational, virtuous gentiles like Confucius

were closer to Christianity than Buddhist idolaters. All one needed to do was to be able to assert that many “‘virtuous gentiles,” from the savage Indians of America to the civilized Chinese, and indeed Confucius himself, were atheists rather than Deists. In the context of the Rites Controversy, which eroded the credibility of the Riccian interpretation, it was not difficult to do so. How sound was the Jesuit distinction between genuine Confucian theism and the neo-Confucian philosophy of the mandarins, infected by later accretions from idolatrous, but also atheistic, Buddhism? And why had Niccolò Longobardo, Ricci's immediate successor, argued that the philosophy of Confucians was atheistic, only to be suppressed by his own order? When the Catholic Church eventually turned against the Riccian model, in effect it sacrificed the proof from universal consent to the weakening of the Jesuits. Indeed, the conclusion reached by the Sorbonne and by Rome was an implicit statement that atheism and materialism were predominant in the most impressive civilization outside Europe. Although no debate about the ancient religion of China surpassed the importance of assessing the true nature of Confucianism, Ricci's construction of Buddhism was not simple ethnography either. The Buddhists (“la setta di Sciechia e Omitofe”) were seen to have borrowed their religion from India, an event Ricci felt he could safely date, from Chinese records, to the year 65 CE. The Chinese then passed it on to the Japanese (despite the latter's claims to have received it from the Siamese). One of the central doctrines of this sect, the transmigration of the soul, had been taken from the Pythagoreans, whereas other elements originated in Christianity itself, duly perverted. Hence, Ricci was sketching a diffusionist model by which Pythagoreanism and Christianity both contributed to Indian Buddhism (he had little to say about the religion of the Brahmins), which then infected most of Asia, mainly through China. To this idolatrous system, a direct rival to Christianity, he opposed the primitive Page 333 →monotheism of authentic Confucianism, which was instead compatible with the Mosaic and Christian revelation. Ricci did not mention whether the Chinese had kept a primitive Noachian revelation (some of his followers, like Adam Schall, would, offending the national pride of the Chinese by making explicit their derivation from a Noachian migration). However, by combining a naturalistic element—a kind of primitive rational religion—with a diffusionist one, in effect Ricci had created the dual parameters which would dominate the historiography of gentile religions up to the Enlightenment. With similar methods Ricci and Nobili had ended up with two rather different models in one crucial respect: in India, Buddhism was the primordial atheism which the Brahmins had sought to replace with Deistic systems which were in the end preferable as closer to the spirit of Christianity. In China, on the other hand, Ricci had posited a primitive native theism which an alien influence from, in fact, India, that is to say, Buddhism, had come to adulterate (through a curious combination of elite materialism and popular “Pythagorean” idolatry), and which needed to be restored to act as the perfect, natural preparation for Christian Revelation. The fact that, for most of the seventeenth century, Nobili's views were not publicized in Europe, and that the debate about his methods was contained with a muted papal support, allowed the Jesuits to concentrate on their Chinese controversies without having to fight on an additional front, Kircher's extravagant indological theories notwithstanding. This public concentration on China became rather useful, as fairly soon a second antiquarian crisis opened up. Martini's publication of a version of Chinese ancient history, Sinicae Historiae (Munich 1658; Amsterdam 1659), complementing his Novus Atlas Sinensis (Amsterdam, 1655), was crucial for challenging standard biblical chronologies. Ricci had already written that Chinese records went back 4,000 years (roughly to 2400 BC), but Martini publicized traditions which reached even earlier (to 2952 BC, the reign of Fu Xi).46 Since 1637 the Jesuits in China were discreetly working with the methodological hypothesis that the problem could be solved with recourse to the Septuagint, a useful complement to their interpretation of Confucianism as theistic. The Septuagint allowed for over one thousand additional years since Creation, and placed the Flood at 2957 BC, rather than the 2349 BC offered by the Hebrew Masoretic text upon which Jerome had prepared his Latin translation (the medieval Vulgate), and which many Christian Hebraists continued to favor. These 608 extra years after the Flood were very helpful when accommodating the Chinese historical record, but the Page 334 →Jesuits were aware that publicizing the existence of different versions of the Bible was tricky, and had been discreet when returning to the Septuagint.47 Curiously, it was the Protestant Isaac Vossius (1618–89), perhaps best described as an “Erasmian” and “Arminian” Protestant, in the tradition of Grotius, who would create scandal by publicly defending the longer chronology in his Dissertatio de vera aetate mundi, qua ostenditur natale mundi tempus annis minimum 1440

vulgarem aeram anticipare (1659), in this way challenging the consensus in the Protestant world (famously, Archbishop James Ussher, Vossius's most immediate target, had been able to fix Creation according to the Hebrew text to Sunday October 23, 4004 BC), and provoking a series of furious replies by Calvinist scholars like George Horn.48 The Catholic Church maintained instead its ambivalent cultivation of alternative hypotheses as hypotheses only, very much in the spirit with which the papacy would have liked to contain heliocentrism as a mere possibility, had not Galileo gone too far in espousing it. In this case it worked better, as for example Friar Domingo Navarrete, possibly the most influential Dominican critic of the Jesuits' interpretation of Confucianism, also accepted the Septuagint chronology, and even the reactionary Bossuet would come to espouse it in the third edition of his Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle (1700). Confronted with the need to place these “local” histories within a providentialist biblical narrative, many authors ignored the rather subtle distinctions introduced by Ricci or Nobili and appealed instead to a diffusionist model. Athanasius Kircher made an important contribution to this tendency with the radical claims of his China Illustrata (1667), which, following from Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–54), sought to link Egyptian (or Greco-Egyptian), Sanskrit and Chinese traditions by reconstructing, through a comparison of religious doctrines and systems of writing, a history of ancient migrations. At the deepest level, the Egyptian colonists who created the gentile civilizations of Asia were the sons of Noah, and the descendants of “Cham” in particular, who traveling through Bactria (where he was known as Zoroaster), were responsible for taking a rudimentary system of ideographic writing based on natural elements all the way to China.49 Kircher was not alone in developing this type of cultural diffusionism based on a system of ancient migrations. A precedent was the Huguenot Samuel Bochart's derivation of the gentile religions of Asia from a Noachian root (Geographia Sacra, 1646). His analysis however did not go beyond Persia—Bochart simply refused to include China or any other “new world” in his calculations. In this sense he is representative of the strategy underlying Protestant Hebraism, by which biblical Page 335 →authority was asserted by denying equivalent authority to any embarrassing gentile sources. (His etymologies also left a lot to be desired). By contrast, Kircher confronted the traditions of exotic gentilism in full. Hence he proposed a direct analogy of the ancient theology of the Egyptians—that is, the teachings of Thot, or Hermes Trismegistus—with the natural, non-idolatrous theism taught by Confucius.50 In his scheme, the Buddhist sect derived from Greco-Egyptian temple religion and idolatry, and Taoism corresponded to the magical culture of the common people. There was in other words a triple analogy between the theologies of ancient Egypt and modern China, best explained through direct influence. Kircher however altered the parameters of the Indian case, as he made the Brahmins crucial mediators between the idolatry brought by a supposed group of exiled Egyptians, and the Buddhist system of idolatry prevalent in China, Japan and elsewhere. The doctrine of the transmigration of the souls was of course to cornerstone of that analogy. Kircher, however, confused things when he identified Rama with Buddha (an error that would persist), describing him as a “very sinful Brahmin imbued with Pythagoreanism.” Although Kircher's Jesuit sources were wide-ranging and often impeccable (he quoted Gian Pietro Maffei, Pierre du Jarric, Nicolas Trigault, Roberto de Nobili, Henry Roth, Martino Martini, and many others), obviously his clumsy attempt to correlate so many different strands created a real abuse of the analogical method, great simplifications, and insuperable logical difficulties. For example, the curious reader was offered an image of three “Chinese deities,” namely the “Lord of Heaven” Fo (a), a deified Confucius (b) and a deified Lao Tse (c) (see fig. 1). He was then told that this trinity represented Jupiter, “with the crowd of the armed followers of Mars above him, and those of Neptune below” accompanied by Apollo and Mercury. In turn, Fo/Jupiter was also Egyptian Osiris, “Mars” above him was Iris, and “Neptune” below was Horus. Kircher concluded that “these are clearly vestiges of the Egyptian and Greek mythology.” It could not be more obvious (although Kircher had to concede that “they have imported so many fables that one can scarcely straighten them out”).51 Kircher did not lack good credentials as an antiquarian. He was outstandingly successful in his use of iconographic power, and for example the publication of a reproduction of the eight-century Nestorian monument uncovered in the Chinese city of Xi'an in 1625, with inscriptions in Chinese and Syriac, caused a sensation. It was his interpretation of the evidence that left a great deal to be desired, especially the inconsistency with which he alternated between arbitrary connections and selective Page 336 →skepticism. Leaving aside the weakness of some of his linguistic arguments, there was a lack of intellectual depth even when only compared to some of his fellow Jesuits.52 Hence Kircher ignored much of what Nobili had found out about Buddhism, even though he

mentioned his work. He also sought to avoid the sharp distinction between religion and civilization which was the cornerstone of the method of accommodation advanced by Nobili and Ricci: in his account, all civilizations were essentially religious, and all gentilism idolatrous, in what amounted to a very Augustinian tale of fall and redemption.53 There was little that was original in suggesting that with the confusion of tongues the primitive religious vision of mankind—a natural monotheism—had been splintered, degenerating into idolatry. It was rather Kircher's attempt to precisely connect all known systems of oriental idolatry to the supposedly more ancient Egyptians, and his various linguistic genealogies, that offered a novel vision, and in these particulars he could hardly be taken seriously by any informed antiquarian.54 It is in fact peculiar that he stood as the major exponent of the public presentation of Jesuit indology in the seventeenth century, by contrast with the many publications that the Society of Jesus produced about China.55 The Egyptian idea, which in effect had had its roots in Herodotus and Diodorus (and of course Eusebius, who followed the latter), and which had been taken up in earlier comparative studies like Lorenzo Pignoria's edition of Cartari's Imagini de gli dei de gl'Antichi (Padua, 1615; here Pignoria extended Egyptian influence not only to India, but also to Peru in America), continued to find supporters until the French academic antiquarian Abbé Mignot demolished it in 1761–12. However, I suspect that Kircher's true legacy was the way he made the need to come to terms with the historical diversity of gentile traditions, classical and modern, more obvious, and by virtue of the inspiration he may have provided later writers to attempt alternative models (orthodox, or geared toward a prisca theologia) based on the same diffusionist principle. These ranged from Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet's emphasis on a Mosaic presence, transmitted by the Egyptians or the Persians in a scheme similar to Kircher's (Demonstratio evangelica, 1679), to (within the Protestant world) George Horn's reactionary Noachian diffusionism (1666), soon followed by John Webb's identification of Chinese with the primitive language of mankind, on the basis of the hypothesis of Noah's settlement on China after the flood (1669).56 Isaac Newton can be placed in the same group.57 Page 337 → Page 338 → The missionary Joachim Bouvet and other Figurists represent a late and extreme version of this approach. Inspired by the “ancient theology,” they sought to identify through an allegorical reading of Chinese classics the universal teaching of primitive monotheism, and indeed a prophecy of the Christian mysteries. Hence the mythical emperor Fu Xi (not Confucius, as Kircher foolishly suggested) becomes a Chinese memory of Hermes Trismesgistus/Thoth /Enoch. However, these Jesuits were not allowed to publish, as their views were opposed within the mission by those who defended a historical interpretation of the Chinese records.58 Their impact was therefore limited. In fact, the general trend within the Jesuit order at the turn of the eighteenth century was to seek to control the potential damage to orthodoxy inflicted by the likes of Nobili, Ricci, Martini, and Kircher, with increasingly conservative versions of their respective apologetics, chronologies, and appeals to ancient theology, without however accepting the need for a full retreat to pure Hebraism and Augustinian fideism, the position adopted by their Jansenist and Calvinist critics.59 Some Jesuits, like Fr. Parrenin, openly distanced themselves from the Egyptian diffusionism espoused by Kircher and Huet on the grounds that similarities between ancient civilizations were to be expected, and could not be used at the expense of ignoring all the considerable differences that also existed.60 A new generation of eighteenth-century antiquarians debated how appropriate allegorical readings of gentile traditions were, and tended to revive euhemerist interpretations. There was not however a simple Jesuit abandonment of the comparative methods of antiquarianism, as first utilized by Ricci in China, for a historical criticism concerned with proper contextualization: history and comparison had both informed Ricci's late humanist vision, and both continued to be alive in the eighteenth century.61 The issue was about creating rules to control the use of comparisons and etymologies in order to circumscribe diffusionist claims. The intellectual process was remarkably unsystematic. Although philosophes like Voltaire were heirs to the widespread criticisms of flawed apologetics, they often fell for the same facile comparative method when it suited their arguments. That analogies, etymologies and allegories could be abused was more obvious Page 339 →than any idea of how to establish diffusionist claims rigorously, and nobody was prepared to dispense with them entirely. Despite the growth of polygenism (cultural, and less often racial) in the eighteenth century, the idea of cultural influence remained central to any plausible history of religion and civilization. Despite the close parallels between the methods advocated by Nobili and Ricci, and the nature of the controversy

that they created, throughout the seventeenth century there was a marked difference between the Jesuits' willingness, even compulsion, to publicize Chinese history and religion in Europe (with the works by Trigault, Semedo, Martini, Couplet, le Comte) and their reluctance to report in great detail about India, until the publication of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses by the French Jesuits after 1700—precisely when Nobili's method, officially sanctioned in 1623, came under renewed assault from within the Catholic Church.62 This contrast is not for want of primary works analysing Hinduism—consider the writings by Jacomé Fenicio, Diogo Gonçalves, Antonio Rubino, Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso, and Nobili himself. 63 These missionary accounts of a gentile religion were not meant to be published, hence there are hardly echoes of them in the missionary histories of the seventeenth century by Fernão Guerreiro, Pierre du Jarric (both are rather vague about Nobili's knowledge of Hinduism), and even Daniello Bartoli, whose work effectively failed to include anything about the Jesuit missions in India beyond the 1580s, by contrast with his treatment of Japan and China. Instead there was a string of non-Jesuit publications discussing Indian religion (by Diogo de Couto, Manuel de Faria y Souza, Pietro della Valle, Henry Lord, Abraham Rogerius, and François Bernier), even though some of these might have, paradoxically, used Jesuit material (notably, both the Dutch cosmographer Philippus Baldaeus and the Portuguese historian Faria y Souza relied on the unpublished polemical treatise by Jacomé Fenicio, who had been active in the Malabar coast).64 In effect, the Jesuits let the Dutch Protestant Abraham Rogerius dominate the historiography on South Indian gentilism in the second half of the seventeenth century, despite the fact that they had covered the same ground earlier and could have continued to do so with a little more support for Nobili's approach. The difference can instead be explained by the three following factors: To begin with, in India the Jesuits were deeply divided about their methods, largely on “national” lines, with the Jesuits more sympathetic to Nobili and his methods often seen as “foreign” (especially Italian). Page 340 →Nobili's victory of 1623 was in this sense Pyrrhic, as he was personally isolated and without sufficient additional support and continuity. This in turn seems related to a negative reception of Indian civilization according to the political assumptions of the Renaissance (consider Valignano and his selective use of accommodation). Second, and paradoxically, their methods in India were less open to external (Dominican and Jansenist) attack in Europe than those they were following in China, despite (or because of?) the higher levels of porosity of their missionary field (they did not have a monopoly, as Franciscans, Capuchins, Theatines, and even Protestant pastors were all there). For much of the seventeenth century there was no need to defend themselves with a string of orientalist publications from the kinds of attacks received by the Riccians on their Chinese rites—hence a missionary like Antonio Rubino became after 1640 a controversial defender of accommodation in China, not in India, which was his real field of specialism! There was not therefore any need for the indological equivalents of Martini, Couplet, or Le Comte. Finally, and perhaps crucially, in India the Jesuits were far less successful and rather demoralized, hence they attracted less envy. This, in turn, had a great deal to do with the lack of a positive political horizon in South India, especially after the disintegration of the southern kingdom of Vijayanagara. Whereas in China the Jesuits successfully navigated the transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasties, entrenching themselves at the imperial court, in southern India the petty Nayakas of Madurai and elsewhere only offered a very precarious kind of patronage, which contributed to the isolation of the more creative Jesuits like Nobili and Rubino, or, later in the century, João de Britto. In this context what is peculiar is the renewal of the Jesuit discourse on Indian Gentilism under the influx of the French, who arrived accidentally to Southern India after being expelled from Siam. After the condemnatory report on Jesuit accommodation issued by the papal legate Cardinal Tournon after his visit of 1704–7, which among other things precipitated a full collapse in China, the effort to renew the Indian missions had only limited potential. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, Jesuit historiography on India and China as represented especially in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses—the historiography which most immediately influenced Voltaire—shared a key novel condition: it was the defensive product of an order in full retreat, which had been fatally wounded in Rome, and that depended for its survival as an effective missionary force on the lukewarm

support of the monarchy of France and Page 341 →its never-too-consistent colonial plans. It was precisely because they felt the need to oppose the libertine implications of their findings within the context of a Republic of Letters outside Catholic control that the Jesuits now publicized the ethnographic and especially the antiquarian work underlying their missionary apologetics in India. The Jesuits were not of course alone in the struggle to defend orthodoxy with a creative use of antiquarian research. Other writers influenced the horizons of the philosophical historians of the eighteenth century. Orthodox diffusionism, Catholic or Protestant, remained widespread and mainly consisted of making Greek and other oriental religious mythologies a corrupted “idolatrous” version of the authentic Hebrew record, in the tradition of Gerard Vossius, John Selden, and Samuel Bochart, with the interpretation and dating of ancient Egyptian culture as the key remaining enigma. It was the extension of this approach to India and China that created new problems. The fascinating anonymous preface to Rogerius's De open-deure tot het verborhegen heydendom (1651), published in French in 1670 as La porte ouverte pour parvenir à la connoissance du paganisme caché to become the key pre-Enlightenment work on Indian gentilism, turned back on the strict Calvinist tendency to disregard all pagan traditions as worthless idolatry and espoused the more liberal thesis of a hidden philosophical elite monotheism, which (as we have seen) was also central to the Jesuit strategy, and which, with small modifications, would provide the basis for Voltaire's libertine Deism.65 (It was also the thesis adopted by many antiquarian scholars, like Ralph Cudworth or William Warburton in England, to solve the riddle of pre-Mosaic Egypt and its hieroglyphs.)66 Even within Catholicism, there were influential non-Jesuit proposals. Three radically different examples of French antiquarian research, those provided by Huet, Renaudot, and Fréret, help illustrate the complexity of the field inherited by philosophical historians. The Bishop of Avranches, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), became best known for his Demonstratio Evangelica (1679), a Christian apology which was both antilibertine and postskeptical (although many would have considered the author himself a free thinker in the mould of many libertins érudits).67 Its very title echoed the fundamental work of Eusebius of Caesarea, whose vision and strategy in effect Huet sought to update.68 But whereas for Eusebius it was sufficient to relegate Greek culture as younger and less certain than the Hebrew tradition to which Christians alone—not the Jews—were the true successors, Huet had to tackle the much broader horizons of seventeenth-century orientalism. Hence his main thesis was that the Page 342 →Jewish and Christian Revelation had reached all peoples, and one could find traces of it in all traditions. This, in turn, could serve as basis of a wildly ecumenical “restoration” based on history rather than pure natural reason: Christianity was simply the most accurate version of a universal Mosaic Revelation, one which all gentile traditions “proved” to be true. The Demonstratio was conceived as a modern, “geometrical” defense of Christianity by a liberal Catholic scholar at the heart of the Republic of Letters—a friend of both Jesuits and Parisian libertins érudits who, as assistant to Bossuet, taught classics to the dauphin but was also willing to work toward a minimalist form of Christianity remarkably sympathetic to Protestantism.69 Methodologically, with his combination of philosophical skepticism and historical empiricism, Huet was an heir to Gassendi, and he ended up identifying himself with the probabilistic scientific approach of the English Royal Society.70 In fact his antiquarian outlook was a reaction to the emergence of Cartesianism as a new form of philosophical dogmatism, which Huet never ceased to attack: he was a polymath defending late humanist linguistic skills and historical erudition against the vociferous modern threat to traditional learning, conscious that only a renewed antiquarian research could convincingly respond to attacks on orthodox religion like the polygenist theses of Isaac La Peyrère (at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden in the 1650s, where Huet traveled with Isaac Vossius and Samuel Bochart, many of these threads had come together). Hence for Huet only history and philology, rather than philosophy, could support the truth of religion: his attack on Descartes on the basis of a kind of skeptical fideism was accompanied by a belief in antiquarian erudition, which by being empirical was also “scientific.” Huet's selective use of Pyrrhonism signaled the antiquarianization of the persistent European debate about faith and reason. Unfortunately, his diffusionism was no less arbitrary than that of late humanists like Grotius or baroque polymaths like Kircher, notwithstanding his attempt to dress his apologetics in the rhetoric of the geometrical method (the Demonstratio was presented as a collection of definitions, postulates, axioms, and propositions).71 The appeal of a logical argument was no more successful than Kircher's seductive use of iconography in hiding an ultimate lack of antiquarian cogency. In effect, by seeking to make the most ancient pagan gods shadowy

corruptions of the historical Moses, transmitted to India in the traditional manner by the Egyptians, Huet joined Kircher as a major target for a debate on the abuse of analogies and comparisons to establish diffusionist claims.72 Voltaire's eventual reply was inevitable: if Page 343 →history had become the main rational basis for faith, history, rather than philosophy, would make the Bible fall. Even more reactionary was the use of antiquarian orientalism by Abbé Eusèbe Renaudot (1649–1720) in order to attack the use of China and its antiquity, by the turn of the eighteenth century widely perceived as one of the most dangerous challenges to the authority of the Bible. If Huet was willing to adapt the geometrical method to historical scholarship in order to refute the Cartesian apologetic strategy of exclusively relying on clear and distinct ideas, which might perhaps sustain philosophical Deism, but certainly not Trinitarian Christianity, Renaudot was keen to translate and publish medieval Arabic sources in order to close the door to antiquarian sinophilia that the Jesuits Martini and Couplet had opened up with their editions of Chinese sources, cleverly targeting Isaac Vossius as the libertine whose conclusions exposed the missionary strategy of the Jesuits as utterly misguided.73 His Relations des Indes et de la Chine de deux voyageurs Mahométans qui y allèrent dans le nouvième siècle, traduites d'Arabe (Paris, 1718), accompanied by a number of dissertations of which the most important disparaged Chinese learning, was a tour de force that firmly placed methodological arguments about assessing the reliability of oriental sources at the heart of a debate about cultural authority. Not only did Renaudot question the value of Chinese astronomical observations (the key “proof” of the authenticity of their ancient annals) before the Jesuits themselves reformed their calendar with the help of Tycho Brahe, it also suggested that “they had no knowledge of sciences, and the little they knew they had learned from the Indians.”74 Indeed, the level of barbarism and ignorance of the Chinese as described by the Arab travelers in the ninth century was such that the idea of a continuous dynastic tradition stretching back to 2697 BC (that is, to just after the Flood, if one were generous enough to adopt the Septuagint chronology over the Vulgate), became ridiculous. The initial reaction of the Jesuits was to suggest that those Arab travelers were a fraud and had never been to China, so unlike were their views of Chinese learning and civility to the ones they, who had been there, held.75 However, the real question was not simply how the civilization China at the time of the Ming and Ching dynasties was to be assessed, but rather how it may have changed since the centuries preceding the visit by Marco Polo in the late thirteenth century. By contrast to Bishop Huet's inventive liberal apologetics, and Renaudot's reactionary demolition of the Jesuit edifice of antiquarian sinophilia, Nicolas Fréret (1688–1749) was widely perceived as a cryptolibertine.76 Page 344 →Like Renaudot, he was working within the institutionalized antiquarianism of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, of which he became perpetual secretary, and he has been rightly described a the perfect representative of enlightened erudition, a philosophe who was also a savant.77 Beginning in 1719 with an apparently innocent discussion of the origins of the game of chess, but increasingly in the context of a wideranging debate on the nature of historical “fables”—a debate dominated by Abbé Banier's Explication historique des fables of 1711, and its neo-euhemerist claim that there was a core of primitive human history behind every religious mythology—Fréret was instrumental in widening the antiquarian perspectives of the French Académie.78 Fréret's euhemerism went beyond dynastic affairs or the divinization of heroes and embraced the cultural history of mankind, with a sophisticated combination of diffusionism and developmentalism; his method seemed rigorous in that it avoided the abuse of arbitrary etymologies that plagued most antiquarian work, and sought to identify where the weight of the evidence fell (this is not to deny that some of his hypotheses remained artificious). In effect, he insisted on the character of history as a probabilistic science, abandoning by the way Huet's illusion of a geometrical method. Credibility was the issue. Fréret's work on Chinese language and chronology in the 1730s is particularly symptomatic: on the one hand, it can be interpreted as a demolition of the underlying diffusionism of the so-called Figurists, an eccentric group of Jesuits (such as Fr. Bouvet) based in Canton who pushed the Kircherian analogies of the Christian apologetic tradition to the extreme of arguing that the ancient Chinese scriptures were little more than an allegory of Christian mysteries, which the Chinese, deprived of faith, had been unable to interpret. On the other hand, Fréret refused to simply dismiss the antiquity of China, and, working with the more moderate Jesuits in Peking—men like Fr. Gaubil—through regular correspondence, he sought to develop a critical method for the interpretation of Chinese historical record. With the help of astronomy, he came to argue that Chinese antiquity was reliable from 1724 BC.79 This date was earlier than the Figurists, who were

chronological conservatives, accepted, but later than the more enthusiastic Jesuit sinologists had traditionally argued. It was also easy to accommodate within the chronology of the Septuagint, allowing Fréret to present himself as a defender of orthodoxy. In reality, his religious position consisted of expelling theology from universal history (historical faith, he insisted, was the foundation of religious faith), and by rejecting dogmatic assumptions he also discarded the Riccian idea of a Page 345 →primitive monotheism in ancient Confucianism, interpreting instead a kind of nonspiritual pantheism, perhaps more Stoic than Spinozist.80 Fréret's truly decisive move was to reject the Eurocentric assumptions of Christian apologetics on the grounds of method, declaring that “I look at the antiquities of the Chinese and those of Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians with the same eyes” and that the Bible is “an ordinary book.”81 By giving the history of Chinese civilization and, indeed, of all peoples with written records an autonomous logic, in effect Fréret challenged not only the primacy of the biblical framework, but also the Académie's traditional reliance on classical Greco-Latin sources, or any privileging of the ancient near East over more distant lands (this also meant being able to assert the antiquity of Indian civilization against the traditional Egyptian claim).82 His eventual defense of orthodoxy was creative in the tradition of Isaac Vossius or those Jesuits who had adopted the Septuagint for their chronologies in order to fit in the Chinese records, but it did not totally dominate his scientific agenda, even when, at the end of the day, the key questions concerning religion were inevitable: what exactly was the status of the Judeo-Christian Revelation in the perspective of a world history which no longer could ignore the increasingly documented antiquity and cultural complexity of other traditions, and which potentially treated all religious texts as mythological constructions produced by men as part of their historical development? Boulanger's Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme oriental (1762) encapsulated what in some quarters of the Republic of Letters was to be the obvious conclusion: “Paganism and Judaism are two mythologies, and neither has any other truth in it than their common source, the abuse of the history of Nature.”83

Conclusion Adopting a long-term perspective, it is possible to interpret Voltaire's iconoclastic La Philosophie de l'Histoire as a reversal of the model of universal history produced early in the fourth century by Eusebius of Caesarea, one of the first and probably the most decisive of Christian antiquarians.84 In effect, Voltaire was demolishing an intellectual edifice which had been crumbling throughout the seventeenth century, despite the efforts of antiquarian apologetes like Kircher or Huet to revive it. Eusebius's original task had been made possible by the remarkable library which he had inherited from his mentor Pamphilius, and through which Page 346 →he also became heir to Origen's biblical scholarship.85 First, in his Chronicle the Bishop of Caesarea had tackled the chronological problem head-on by tabulating the lists of kings from Mesopotamia and Egypt, one the one hand, and the Greek Olympiads, on the other, placing however the Hebrew dates—the most ancient and reliable tradition—at the centre of the new system of synchronisms (which of course required dismissing the thousands of years claimed by Berosus and Manetho as fabulous, or reinterpreting them as “months”). In his subsequent and most ambitious intellectual creation, the Paeparatio and Demonstratio Evangelica, a two-part apologetic project distinguished for its excellent documentation, he fleshed out a view of universal history—in essence a history of religion—in which the Christians stood as true and direct heirs to the ancient Hebrews and their moral truths, as opposed to both infantile Greeks (whose religious culture was derivative) and corrupt Jews (who, alone having received the authentic religious and moral teaching, had lost their way).86 In reality Eusebius inherited much of his key strategy of subjecting Greek culture to a Hebrew primacy from hellenized Jews such as Josephus—all that was left to do was to take Jesus Christ, the logos incarnate, as true restorer of the primordial moral vision, in fulfillment of the prophets. Eusebius crowned his edifice with a no less important (and certainly more famous) history of the Church in which the hitherto persecuted Christians suddenly saw their religion become official in the Roman empire, largely thanks to his own personal friend Constantine.87 Future generations of Christians, East and West, were able to assume that their claims to a Providential status were bound to a compelling vision of universal history, one in which the history of the successful expansion of a universalizing Christianity in the late Roman empire stood as proof of the gospel.88 Those who, like Voltaire, eventually sought to overturn this status could only do so because they felt able to propose an alternative vision. My argument has been that it was precisely the antiquarian scholarship of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

much of it of a rather pious character, which made Voltaire's dramatic reversal of Eusebius's strategy possible, especially as this scholarship came to terms with the newly discovered gentile civilizations.89 In the great ethnographic works produced by Jesuit but also lay Catholic writers, the sense of cultural distance felt toward the gentile civilizations of America and Asia was naturally treated as analogous to the cultural distance experienced when studying the past of civilized gentilism. The equation of the Chinese or the Incas with ancient Rome was the standard approach by the turn of Page 347 →the seventeenth century, as was the comparison of the “savage” inhabitants of modern America with the barbarians of ancient Europe. However, this assimilation of the past with the exotic took a dramatic new step when universal history, traditionally constructed around the biblical Revelation, was forced to also come to terms with the fact that exotic gentilism also had a past. This “deep” antiquarianism, by which the exotic gentile also became distant from the ancient gentile, was originally a secondary outcome of an ethnohistorical enterprise strongly conditioned by the missionary efforts of Jesuits and others. However, in the context of the theological controversies of the period, it soon proved to have the potential to challenge the biblical assumptions it was supposed to propagate. By 1650, the debate on the origin of the American Indians and the debate about Chinese chronologies were only the two more obvious examples of how explosive the issue of cultural distance became when seriously treated as part of universal history. Diffusionist theories, which from the sixteenth century had been employed by humanist writers to meet the challenge of making sense of cultural diversity and change, often proved sadly inadequate, and only helped fuel further skepticism. It was in this context that the thematic and methodological legacy of antiquarianism could contribute decisively to the philosophical history of the Enlightenment. In the 1650s and 1660s many pious authors—like the Protestant George Horn—still felt that the best treatment the Chinese claims about their own past deserved was contempt, but the attitude could not be sustained for very long. By the time Voltaire wrote, it had become possible to cast doubt on the biblical record by trusting with disingenuous liberality the Chinese and Indian counternarratives. The development of antiquarian scholarship after the Renaissance, and in particular the diffusionist theories which throughout the seventeenth century had sought to reconcile gentile antiquities with the account of the primitive history of mankind in Genesis, can therefore be seen as a necessary condition for the Enlightenment's attack on biblical monogenism. This antiquarian element played a crucial role in three distinct phases. Initially, Jesuit accommodation involved not only a novel ethnography (which in this article I have not touched), but also, crucially, a historical analysis of gentilism and its cultural context that transcended the sheer negative strategy of labeling any religious worship outside the biblical tradition as “idolatry.” Second, the reconstruction of exotic cultural traditions needed to be recast within the old strategies of universal history, and this led to the development of diffusionist theories, some Catholic (and occasionally Jesuit), others Protestant, which were usually conceived in Page 348 →the spirit of renewed Christian apologetics, and which sought, but failed, to create a new orthodox consensus, in effect leading to a number of complex controversies involving issues of method and authority. Finally, these controversies eventually led to a sustained attack on the antiquarian methods for assessing authenticity and for establishing comparisons underlying diffusionism. The crisis facilitated the emergence of a more polygenist framework for interpreting universal history. The new paradigm, in turn, was supported by a more rigorous, academic antiquarianism—one which has sometimes been labeled “scientific orientalism,” and which came to inform the development of philosophical history.90 Heirs to this antiquarian transformation, philosophical historians were able to secularize the history of the origins of human civilization without abandoning the tale of universal convergence, but they replaced the ecclesiastical model of Christian universalism (when not Christian imperialism) once proposed by Eusebius with the story of the rise of Europe to global commercial dominance, often via a stadial history of civilization.91 Although it is possible to generalize by saying that allegorical interpretations and superficial etymologies all came under increasing attack, the specific content of these apparently methodological debates (which, in any case, were never purely methodological) deserves closer scrutiny on a case-by-case basis. However, what seems clear is that antiquarianism, however distinctive its contributions to the European Republic of Letters, was neither thematically nor methodologically isolated from a wider historiographical tradition of universal history. The continuities from humanist philological criticism to seventeenth-century antiquarianism, and from the latter to “scientific orientalism,” or even to “philosophical history,” are no less remarkable than the apparent discontinuities suggested

by the controversial nature of many of the issues discussed.92

NOTES 1. “The French encyclopedists declared war on erudition and carried the day,” in Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 75. Momigliano went on to qualify the statement by adding that Voltaire and others “recognised the importance of the subjects studied by the antiquarians—law, political institutions, religions, customs, inventions,” but objected to their method of study, “by accumulating insignificant details and ignoring the struggle between the forces of reason and those of superstition.” In effect Voltaire did not object to antiquarianism as a discipline, but to the antiquarians as mere antiquarians, targeting a conservative group of practitioners Page 349 →who (he thought) failed to confront the larger historical themes and, by implication, the ideological issues of the day. He certainly read many of their works. For a recent and remarkably comprehensive reassessment of Momigliano's position, see Peter N. Miller's introduction to Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2007), 3–65. 2. I have used the modern editions by René Pomeau, Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations, et sur pes principaux faits de l'histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu'à Louis XIII, 2 vols. (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1963), which follows the text of 1769, and J. H. Brumfitt, La Philosophie de l'Histoire, in The Complete Works of Voltaire, 59 (Geneva and Toronto: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1969). 3. I find myself generally in agreement with Ingo Herklotz's recent assessment of this issue, “Momigliano's ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’: A Critical Review,” in Momigliano and Antiquarianism, ed. Miller, 127–53. Herklotz in particular emphasizes that the antiquarian method consisted of combining text and image in order to overcome the limitations of (rather than challenge the value of) textual evidence. He also notes the extent to which the antiquarian tradition was not absent from classical historiography (a point Momigliano himself recognized), although I would also argue that the impact of ethnography was less dependent on the model of Herodotus than on the impetus created by early modern colonialism and the religious missions. This is an aspect that Margaret Hodgen's classic Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964) only partially explored. 4. On anachronism see Peter Burke, “The Sense of Anachronism from Petrarch to Poussin,” in Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), 157–73. This growing awareness was perhaps one of the key outcomes of the development of a more methodical approach to the study of the remains of classical civilization, but it could be argued that some authors were more interested in emphasizing continuities than in detecting change, and therefore that attitudes varied a great deal in this respect. In any case, to reduce antiquarianism to systematic descriptions of institutions and beliefs is overly narrow because it ignores the implications of the antiquarian's focus on ancient times, his regular reliance on textual materials, and the fact that his methods and findings were compatible with the practice of general history. In addition, I would add that not all ethnography was antiquarian: that which was historically informed is more properly called antiquarian than that which was not. 5. As Miller noted, through the application of “the philology of late humanism to the extra-classical world,” John Selden with his De diis Syris (1617) and those who followed him created the basis for the emergence of oriental studies at the end of the seventeenth century (Peter N. Miller, “Taking Paganism Seriously: Anthropology and Antiquarianism in Early Seventeenth-Century Histories of Religion,” in Archiv für religiongeschichte 3 [2001]: 183–209). 6. The recognition of this humanist lineage is not to deny that antiquarians, led by their subject matter, were free to abandon the moralizing aims and creative license of humanist historiography, hence becoming more purely Page 350 →“scientific” in their outlook. However, as I shall seek to demonstrate, their erudition was rarely free from ideological agendas. 7. Francesco Patrizi, Della historia diece dialoghi (Venice, 1560), 10v: “Et quello ch'io dico è questo, che sono alcuni historici, i quali non piu dell'ationi delle nationi scrivono, ma delle maniere della vita loro, de'costumi, et delle leggi. Le quali cose, sono tutte appartate cose da quelle degli imperii…[11r] Et e' vi sono alcun'altri anchora, et hoggidi massimamente, i quali di una quinta maniera di cose scrivono, si come è

della forma de' vestimenti Romani et Greci; della foggia dell'armi et del modo dell'acamparsi; delle forme delle navi et degli edifici, et di altri stormenti di ogni fatta della lor vita et de lor mestieri…Et alcun'altri scrivono di un sesta maniera di cose, si come de'magistrati Romani et de' Greci, et alcun'altri il fanno della maniera del governo delle republiche di Roma, o di Athene, o di Sparta, o di Cartagine, o di Venetia.” Having defined history as the memory of human affairs, Patrizi nevertheless acknowledged the existence of natural history and cosmography, arguing that travel accounts provided a mixed type of history, by combining the natural-geographical with the human. See now on Patrizi, Anthony Grafton, What was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 124–42. 8. On French savants and their orientalist pursuits see now Nicholas Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV's France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For the evolution of the genre of travel collections see J. P. Rubiés, “From the history of travayle to the history of travel collections: the rise of an early modern genre,” forthcoming in Richard Hakluyt and Collected Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe, ed. Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt (Ashgate and The Hakluyt Society Extra Series, 2012). 9. Examples of how these synthetic encyclopedic works helped publicize ethnological controversies based on antiquarian research include the prefatory summary of the debate on the origin of the American Indians between Hugo Grotius and Joannes de Laet offered by Arnoldus Montanus in his Da Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld of 1671 (published in English as America by John Ogilby in the same year); the various dissertations comparing Hindu beliefs and customs with those of the ancient world (Jews and Gentiles) included in J. F. Bernard and B. Picart's Cérémonies et coûtumes religieuses des peuples idolâtres (Amsterdam, 1723–28); the extended comparison between the customs of the North American Indians and those of antiquity offered by the Jesuit J. F. Lafitau in his Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Paris, 1724). The more prosaic histories of navigation and commerce which often prefaced eighteenth century British travel collections, written by hack writers such as John Campbell or the cartographer John Green (alias Bradock Mead), increasingly sought to create a “modern” system of geography which would be more precise and complete than the obscure ancient record permitted. Their grand theme was no longer the rise of civilization in antiquity but rather the modern rise of Europe. However, despite the occasional denunciation of the “useless pains” of learned erudition, their footnotes reveal that there was no clean break between antiquarian scholarship and modern history and geography.Page 351 → 10. R. H. Popkin, introduction to Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Richard H. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden, New York, and Köln: Brill Academic Publishers, 1993), 1–11. 11. Voltaire's views of India are discussed in Daniel S. Hawley, “L'Inde de Voltaire,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 120 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1974). 12. On the Ezour-Vedam and its reception (including the fascinating eighteenth-century debate about its authenticity) see the excellent edition and analysis by Ludo Rocher, Ezourvedam: A French Veda of the Eighteenth Century (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1984). I am grateful to Ines Zupanov for pointing me in its direction. Voltaire was not the only one to be fooled. Its first editor in 1778, the academic baron de Sainte Croix, accepted it was a translation from an authentic Sanskrit text but re-dated it to the time of Buddhism. Similarly, Joseph de Guignes and Abraham Anquetil-Duperron accepted it as authentic. Interestingly, the latter continued to do so even after the traveler-naturalist Pierre Sonnerat, with remarkable lucidity, as early as 1782 denounced it as a missionary imposture—“un livre de controverse”—written by the Jesuits in Masulipatnam, and dependent upon relatively late Puranic materials (Voyage aux Indes Orientales et a la Chine fait par ordre du Roi depuis 1774 jusqu'en 1781, 2 vols. [Paris 1782], 1:215). 13. Voltaire believed the text to have been translated into French by a Brahmin. His arguments for dating the text in very ancient times are a perfect example of the misuse of antiquarian methods. Writing to his friend Jacob Vernes in October 1761, a few months after receiving the text from the chevalier Maudave (commander of a fortress in Coromandel), he noted that, because none of the names of mountains or rivers was Greek, the text must predate Alexander's expeditions, and indeed Pythagoras, since the author attacked the beginnings of idolatry. However, Ludo Rocher (ibid., 58–60) argues that on linguistic evidence the text could only have been written in French, although by someone with some knowledge of Sanskrit (mixing Bengali and South Indian pronunciations), and possibly with the idea of producing a Telugu version for a

popular Hindu audience (as the forgery would not have been an effective text against Brahmins who actually knew the Vedas). The most likely candidate for such creative apologetics is Father Antoine Mosac (1704–c. 1784), once superior of the mission of Chandernagor, on the evidence of Fr. Coeurdoux who in a letter of 1771 to Anquetil-Duperron declared that Mosac had been the “translator” of the work, but other possibilities cannot be discounted, in particular Jean Calmette (1693–1740), who also knew Sanskrit and in the 1730s proposed to write anti-idolatrous tracts based on extracts from the Vedas, or Pierre Martin (1665–1716), who in a marginal note was mentioned as the work's translator by the same chevalier Maudave who brought the manuscript to Voltaire. The nineteenth-century idea that the author was Roberto de Nobili, known to have learned Sanskrit and written Christian apologetic works in Tamil, can be safely discarded. 14. For a discussion of the paradoxical character of the impact of the Jesuit use of the Thomist distinction, where the missionary logic clashed with the logic of European intellectual culture, see my “The Concept of Cultural Dialogue Page 352 →and the Jesuit Method of Accommodation: Between Idolatry and Civilization,” Archivium Historicum Societatis Iesu 74, no. 147 (2005): 237–80. Voltaire not only echoed the Jesuit distinction, but also the Diestic claims of Protestant libertinism, as represented for example by J. F. Bernard's Cérémonies et coûtumes. 15. Jean Cassini (1691) calculated backward to several of the astronomical observations recorded in the Chinese annals published by the Jesuits, concluding that most of them were incorrect. The Jesuit reply, clever enough, was that the fact that the calculations were mistaken proved their authenticity: the modern Chinese would not have made these errors, hence the observations could not have been recently interpolated and belonged to a primitive stage of Chinese astronomy. For these debates see Edwin van Kley, “Europe's Discovery of China and the Writing of World History,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 358–85. 16. The argument, inspired by Nicolas Fréret, is also an example of how antiquarianism became “philosophical”: it was not simply a matter of knowing and interpreting the records, one also needed to consider what must have happened to make the records possible. 17. Voltaire, “Défense de mon oncle” (1767), in Oeuvres complètes (1785), 27, 221–22. 18. On the relationship between exotic antiquarianism and the problem of atheism see Alan Kors, Atheism in France 1650–1727: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 135–77. 19. Hugo Grotius's intervention in the debate on the origins of the American Indians, best seen as the response to an intellectual context that demanded the antiquarianization of his Christian apologetics, could serve as an example. See my “Hugo Grotius's Dissertation on the Origin of the American Peoples and the Use of Comparative Methods,” in Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnography, ed. J. P. Rubiés (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 11:1–34. We can also consider Lipsius's selective interpretation of China and Rome (Papy, this volume), which again suggests that the antiquarian humanist was not far from the philosophical historian when it came to interpretation. 20. In this respect I distance myself from the interpretation offered by Jonathan Israel in his The Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 21. Jean-Frederic Bernard's “Dissertation sur le culte religieux” that prefaced the monumental Cérémonies et coûtumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Amsterdam, 1723–37) is a good example of this rationalizing tendency within a liberal Protestant-Deistic tradition: the cult of God was natural and simple, but institutional religions were full of absurd devotions and inhumanity; hence some primitive idolatrous cults were to be preferred to more elaborate Christian ones, because the latter were in fact more superstitious. 22. I have discussed the historicization of idolatry also with reference to Voltaire in “Theology, Ethnography and the Historicization of Idolatry,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 571–96.Page 353 → 23. For a succinct discussion of Martini's contribution see David Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), 124–33. For its huge impact see especially Edwin van Kley, “Europe's ‘Discovery’ of China and the Writing of World History,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 358–85. 24. It is not coincidental that Voltaire had been educated by Jesuits, at a time when their oriental missions were highly publicized and rather controversial. This obviously influenced his perspective on world history,

but probably also his attitudes toward Christianity. As claimed by Pomeau, much of Voltaire's “Catholic libertinism” can probably be understood as a primary reaction against the Jansenist attitudes of his maternal family in combination with his father's libertinism. We might also add a secondary reaction against the clericalism and rigidity of his Jesuit educators, whose devotions bored him. René Pomeau, La religion de Voltaire (Paris: Nizet, 1956), chap. 1 (for his family background) and chap. 2 (for his Jesuit education). 25. Reponse aux questions d'un Provincial, vol. 1 (Rotterdam, 1704), “Du despotism,” chaps. 64 (587–600) and 65 (600–618). 26. Possibly the most famous controversy where the issue of comparison was considered crucial was the one relating to the origins of the American Indians. After interventions by Grotius, Laet, and La Peyrère in the 1640s, and well in to the eighteenth century, the topic was highly prominent within the Republic of Letters. Voltaire responded to these “vaines disputes” by taking a radical stance against the orthodox consensus: dismissing any biblical assumption for monogenism, he asserted that men were naturally produced in each land and climate, like so many other animal or vegetal species. This meant that although there was a common human species based on its common organic structures, this species was subdivided according to moral and physical traits, and could not be reduced to a single original (Essai sur les moeurs, 2:340–41). 27. Hence in his Du Rouyame du Siam (Paris, 1691), a systematic description of modern Thailand which also served to publicize materials about China during what possibly was a crucial decade for the emergence of sinology in the Republic of Letters, the traveler Simon de la Loubère noted that the destruction of all Chinese books ordered by the Chin emperor c. 200 BC weakened the Chinese claim to a continuous and reliable written tradition, while in an appendix to the same book, Jean Cassini argued that the astronomical observations that were meant to support the authority of the annals actually did not match (certain conjunctions of the third millennium BC which he took the trouble to recalculate were 500 years off—see note 15 above). La Loubère's important conclusion was that ancient dynastic lists, however coherent they might look, needed to be corroborated independently. See La Loubère, “Du soin des moeurs chez les Chinois et de l'ancienneté de leur histoire” and “Réflexions sur la chronologie Chinoise par Monsieur Cassini,” in Étude historique et critique du Livre de Simon de La Loubère “Du royaume de Siam,” Michel Jacq-Hergoualc'h (Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1987), 558–67.Page 354 → 28. On Voltaire's negative attitude toward Judaism see Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 231–46. Sutcliffe is right to point out that Voltaire's attitude toward Judaism was crucially conditioned by his attack upon institutional Christianity. He is less convincing when suggesting that Voltaire's denunciation of the internal contradictions of the biblical account and of its moral system was inevitably inconclusive because it relied on the same evidence it sought to destroy; in reality it was not the evidence, but its status, that was at stake. The postmodern idea that myth and tradition are impervious to a rationalist critique (238–39) would not have been a recognizable problem for Voltaire. 29. For Buffon's influential views, by which human variability was the result of climatic influences but did not challenge the unity of the human species, see Buffon, De L'Homme, ed. Michèle Duchet and Claude Blanckaert (2nd ed., Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006). He was however criticized by polygenist or racialist writers such as the Scottish philosophical historian Lord Kames, in this respect closer to Voltaire than to Montesquieu—see the discussion in Silvia Sebastiani, I limiti del progresso: Razza e genere nell'illuminismo scozzese (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008). On methodological grounds we might also compare Voltaire's obscenely ideological stance to Fréret's more equanimous and methodical scholarship, which signaled the birth of a relatively “scientific” orientalism. Even libertines sympathetic to Voltaire's causes came to the conclusion that his account was flawed in its details. Hence the naturalist and traveler Pierre Sonnerat, author of the fascinating Voyage aux Indes orientales at a la Chine (Paris, 1782) which appeared in two handsome volumes with many engravings of flora, fauna, and antiquities, would soon update Voltaire's indology with a more sophisticated version of the same libertine claim to Indian antiquity, one which combined the thesis of a primitive theism which had nothing to do with Moses with a diffusionist model that placed India as the source of both religion and civilization (relying, as often was the case, on the classical idea that Pythagoras learned his doctrine of transmigration from India). In Sonnerat's complex account, influenced by Tamil sources, the Buddhist/Hindu (Vaishnava) sect of the Brames, which taught the doctrine of métempsycose, was introduced in India and Ceylon about 3000 BC, possibly by a “Siamese”

who crossed the Ganges, and from India spread its influence toward the Near East (including Egypt and Greece) as well as toward Buddhist South-East Asia (“Des dogmes des Indiens,” Voyage, 1:191–205). This system did not deny, but rather overlaid, the primitive rational monotheism of the ancient “brachmanes.” The ancient Brahmins were in fact the illustrious inventors of all the arts and sciences, but their doctrine—their worship of Brouma (Brahma)—was later corrupted by priestly manipulation, and only survived as an esoteric teaching. Hence there had been a degeneration into idolatry and superstition, although this had been caused by the dominant position of a no less ancient popular idolatrous religion represented by Shaivism and the cult of the lingam, which in this respect preceded the Vaishnava-Buddhist construct. As we have seen (note 12 above), Sonnerat could dispense with the Jesuit forgery of the EzourVedam “discovered” in 1760 and naively publicized Page 355 →by Voltaire and Anquetil-Duperron. Sonnerat's sinology, also revisionist in relation to Voltaire, was aimed at destroying the Jesuit paradigm of a just and learned China, for example denouncing its despotism (hence following Montesquieu instead). 30. On La Peyrère see Richard Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1677): His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1987). La Peyrère was not seeking to challenge the Bible, but was rather a messianic thinker—one of many examples of how pious heretics contributed no less than skeptics and Spinozists to the growth of libertinism. 31. The tradition of claiming a Mosaic priority over the Greek philosophers was well-established among early Christian apologists from Clement of Alexandria to Eusebius of Caesarea. It owed a great deal to the parallel effort by a Hellenized Jewish apologist such as Josephus (especially in his Contra Apionem) to establish the antiquity and reliability of Jewish historiography against any gentile sources. Josephus himself was a key source for Eusebius, and eventually for Renaissance chronographers and antiquarians. It is possible to argue that Josephus and Eusebius defined the core Judeo-Christian antiquarian strategy. 32. Hence a negative view of cultural and especially religious diversity was assumed. This is exemplified in Johannes Boemus' Omnium gentium mores, leges et ritus (1520), which did not break any new ground when interpreting the variety of languages and customs as a consequence of religious degeneration: superstition and idolatry, following the post-Noachian dispersion of mankind, both clouded the true worship of God, and led to cultural variety and confrontation. Boemus, interestingly, sought to incorporate the natural patterns of a process of civilization beast-like savagism into his universalistic vision. Placing this process after the Flood made it compatible with the location of true monotheism in archaic times. This was still Vico's solution 200 years later. 33. This was clearly what Boemus was trying to do in the preface and first two chapters of his Omnium gentes mores, ritus et leges (1520; 1536), although not without betraying some fascination with the philosophical (Stoic and Epicurean) version of the story of the first men offered by Diodorus in the first book of his Library of History. 34. On this see D. P. Walker, Ancient Theology (London: Duckworth, 1972), 1–21. 35. India and China did not raise a totally new problem, as both Babylonian and Egyptian claims to antiquity were well-known from the accounts by (for example) Herodotus and Josephus. Josephus, like Eusebius after him, discussed in particular the evidence supplied (in Greek) by the Egyptian priest Manetho and by the “Chaldean” priest Berosus, both by-products of the Hellenistic conquest of the East. What made the task relatively easier was the fact that both Egypt and Mesopotamia (and, one might add, Phoenicia) were the source of traditions attested within the biblical record, including many contacts with the ancient Jewish nation. Hence Jews and Christians soon developed strategies to select those elements which were compatible with the universalistic assumptions of Genesis, and dismiss other claims as fabulous. Further controversy was of course potentially possible—for example, Page 356 →the relationship between Moses and Egyptian learning opened up possibilities for strengthening the hypothesis of a prisca theologia hidden behind the popular idolatry of Egypt. However, what India and China posed was the new problem of traditions whose claims seemed completely independent from the Bible. The crucial point is that the majority of humanist antiquarians (and many humanist-educated Jesuit apologists) writing in the seventeenth century tended to extend their research from the classical world to those gentile civilizations which had left a written record of ancient times. 36. When considering Jesuit letters, histories, and apologetic treatises on exotic religions and civilizations, we again need to confront the problematic definition of antiquarianism: what predominated was less the use of monuments (although this existed: consider Kircher's discussion of the seventh-century Syriac Christian

monument of Xi'an) than a growing access to literary sources, leading first to the acquisition of oriental languages and texts in order to conduct disputes, later to a textual analysis supported by classical and biblical erudition in order to define a historical narrative compatible with European assumptions, and an original theology underlying exoteric practices. Ethnographic analysis of social practices and rituals did not necessarily lead to antiquarian research, unless combined with historical or theological concerns. However, the use of comparisons with ancient classical gentilism, and the historicization of exotic gentilism, can both be considered antiquarian elements. 37. Both Holwell and Dow understood Persian and a number of native languages of India but not Sanskrit, and therefore gave as ancient relatively recent Brahminic literature, often through Persian versions (Howell's texts read like forgeries. Dow, however, did publish an authentic Nyyastra by Gautama). This, combined with the innocent misunderstanding of the Ezour-Vedam as a native source, made Voltaire's ancient indology largely apocryphal, only some fifteen years before Charles Wilkins and William Jones began translating directly from Sanskrit. Writing in the 1750s and 60s, Voltaire's antiquarianism was caught in the transition between Jesuit missionaries, amateur officer-historians, and the later generation of educated orientalists represented by Jones or Anquetil-Duperron. It is nonetheless interesting to note that Jones's orientalism, albeit orthodox, would support Voltaire in placing India ahead of Egypt and hence classical Greece in antiquity, or that the philosophical traveler Pierre Sonnerat, while being as we have seen (see note 12 above) the first to understand that the Ezour-Vedam was a Christian apologetic work, in fact worked to update Voltaire's larger thesis about the precedence of India. For Holwell's and Dow's “gentile” documents (first published in 1767 and 1768) see P. J. Marshall, ed., The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 45–139. In his introduction Peter Marshall offers a good discussion of Jones's “orthodox” dating of Indian civilization (ibid., 35–38). 38. The collections of 1711, 1718, and 1720 included Fr. Bouchet's letters to the famous apologist PierreDaniel Huet and others in France on Indian religious beliefs, demonic oracles, and similarities with ancient Pythagorean Page 357 →doctrines. Unlike Kircher, who argued that a system of idolatry had been transmitted from Egypt to India, Bouchet insisted that it was the Old Testament and some Christian teachings which the Indians had received and distorted. See Francis X. Clooney, Fr. Bouchet's India: An 18th Century Jesuit's Encounter with Hinduism (Chennai, 2005) Bouchet's letter to Huet in direct support of his Mosaic diffusionism even made it into Bernard and Picart's proto-libertine Cérémonies et coûtumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, vol. I (1723), part II, pp. 100–106; see also vol. IV (1728), part I, pp. 156–86, for parallels with the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis. Other Jesuits who published important indological letters were Frs. La Lane (1713), Calmette (1734, 1739), and Pons (1734). While Bouchet reiterated the diffusionist principle in its extreme Mosaic form (of particular interest to Huet, of course), Calmette insisted on the thesis of primitive monotheism, while Pons wrote about the Sanskrit language and philosophy. Much of this ground had been explored by the less publicized Nobili a century earlier. 39. There were classical precedents for both an Egyptian origin of learning (as in Diodorus Siculus) or for an Indian precedence (as suggested by Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana, whose key passage concerning the priority of the Brahmins over Pythagoras was however linguistically ambiguous, and was often read in the Latin and vernacular translations of the Renaissance to say the opposite, that is, that Pythagoras taught the doctrine of metempsychosis “to us” the Brahmins rather than “to you” the Greeks). Christian writers, from Clement of Alexandria to seventeenth-century antiquarians like Kircher and Huet, usually developed these two alternative models, Egypt-centered or Indian-centered, with reference not only to philosophical wisdom, but also to idolatry and even primitive revelation. In this redating of Egyptian antiquity in favor of Mesopotamia and India, reversing the dominant Egypt-centered diffusionist models, Voltaire was influenced by the academic antiquarian Fréret, one of his correspondents. Fréret however did not seek to overturn the biblical chronologies, and instead (like the Jesuits earlier) relied on the Septuagint in order to integrate Indian traditions, as first expounded in a 1744 mémoire read at the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. It is worth noting that despite his negative judgment about Egyptian claims to antiquity, Voltaire (consistent in his Deism) also detected a primitive monotheism, here following Warburton despite their many disagreements. 40. See note 13 above. 41. For a thorough discussion of how Voltaire's new sources affected his evolving indology see Daniel

Hawley, “L'Inde de Voltaire,” who insists on the priority of ideological use over rigorous research. Hawley probably overestimates the extent to which India's antiquity was needed to challenge the Judeo-Christian chronology (139), given that the Chinese example was generally better documented. 42. Mignot, Mémoire sur les anciens philosophes de l'Inde, read at the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1761), which (as René Pomeau noted) was also used by Voltaire. On French indology generally see Sylvia Page 358 →Murr's important article, “Les conditions d'émergence du discours sur l'Inde au siècle des lumières,” Purushartha 7 (1983): 233–84. See also her work on Fr. Coeurdoux, who mounted a counterattack against Voltaire's conclusions by abandoning the strategy followed by Kircher and Huet, and denying the validity of any Egyptian diffusionism relating to Indian idolatry, which instead could be traced back directly to the dispersion of the sons of Noah after the tower of Babel, that is, an autonomous corruption of primitive monotheism: Sylvia Murr, L'Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire, 2 vols. (Paris: École Française d'Extrême Orient, 1987). Also her “Genealogies et analogies entre paganisme ancien et gentilité des Indes dans l'apologétique Jesuite au siècle des lumières,” inLes religions du Paganisme Antique dans l'Europe Chrétienne, xvie–xviiie siècle (Paris: Presses Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1988), 141–61. On antiquarian reactions to Voltaire's theses, of which Larcher's Supplément à la philosophie de l'histoire (1767) is notable, see Brumfitt, ed., Philosophie de l'histoire, 64ff. 43. Matteo Ricci's Italian original, completed in 1610 soon before his death with the title Della Entrata della Compagnia di Gesù e Christianità nella Cina, was taken to Europe by the Belgian Jesuit Nicolas Trigault, who also translated it into Latin (with some modifications) and published it as De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas ab suscepta Societate Iesu (Augusta, 1615). There was also a French version from the Latin first published in 1616, and soon others in German, Spanish and Italian (which was, in effect, a retranslation). 44. Between the mid-1580s and 1609 Ricci's thought about Confucianism evolved in an interesting way. His initial impressions (as expressed for example in a letter of October 1585 to the General of the order Claudio Acquaviva) identified the sect of the literati as “Epicurean” atheists who had no regard for religion, as opposed to the “Pythagorean” Buddhist idolaters; in the late 1580s, however, it was clear that Confucius taught largely valid ethical principles, although the problems remained that he did not say enough about God and the immortality of the soul, and that his cult of ancestors was somewhat idolatrous; by 1609, Ricci's elaborate theory claimed that in antiquity the Chinese simply followed a monotheistic natural law, and that their idolatry was relatively recent and, within Confucianism (as opposed to the other sects), relatively innocuous. 45. Pasquale M. d'Elia, S. J., ed., Fonti Ricciane, 3 vols. (Rome: Libreria della Stato, 1942), I 110: “quei che in questi tempi scappano dall'idolatria, puochi sono che non cadano nell'atheismo.” This in contrast to the earlier statement that “Fecero sempre molto caso di seguire in tutte le loro opere il dettame della ragione che dicevano avere ricevuta dal cielo,” so that (in the past) the Chinese never attributed to the divinity the absurd things found in Roman, Greek and Egyptian mythologies (ibid., 109). Those ancient virtuous monotheists who followed natural law, Ricci thought, God would have graciously saved (despite their ignoring the Mosaic and Christian revelations). Like Nobili, Ricci sought to present Christianity as a restoration of the genuine native “rational” tradition. 46. An earlier discussion of this problem—and to my knowledge also the first to be published in relation to the problem of Chinese antiquity—appeared Page 359 →in the second edition of the Augustinian Jerónimo Román's Repúblicas del Mundo (Salamanca, 1595). The chapter on China of this antiquarian /cosmographical synthesis was based on the report by the Augustinian envoy of 1575 Martín de Rada (sent by the Governor of the Spanish Philippines), and noted that the Chinese historical dynasties went back to 2567 BC, that is, some 220 before the Flood. Inspired by Augustine, who in turn echoed the strategy defined by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Chronicle, Román solved the problem by asserting that in antiquity “years” could mean different things, not necessarily solar years. The Jesuit Martini's work some sixty years later would demolish this type of reasoning by correlating the ancient Chinese chronology to astronomical observations. For more details on Román and Rada see Rubiés, “The Concept of Gentile Civilization in Missionary Discourse and its European Reception: Mexico, Peru and China in the Repúblicas del Mundo by Jerónimo Román (1575–1595),” Missions d'evangélisation et circulation des savoirs XVIe–XVIIIe siècles. Charlotte de Castelnau, Marie-Lucie Copete, Aliocha Maldavski, and Ines Županov, eds. (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2011), 311–50.

47. Martini himself was quite ambiguous as to what he thought about his Chinese dates in relation to the Bible, although the Jesuits became clearer in their espousal of the Septuagint when they published Father Gabriel de Magalhães's Nouvelle Relation de la Chine in Paris in 1688, translating a Portuguese text originally composed in China in 1668. Despite the Catholic Church's attachment to Jerome's Latin version of the Ancient Testament, there were sound scholarly precedents for considering the pre-Christian (Jewish) translation of the scriptures into Greek as inspired, as this had been the text used by the Church during its first centuries. Hence Eusebius had defended its use. 48. George Horn (1620–70) replied to Vossius immediately with his Dissertatio de vera aetate mundi: qua sententia illorum refellitur qui statuunt natale mundi tempis annis minimum 1440. vulgarem aeram anticipare. Vossius then produced his Castigationes ad scriptum Georgii Hornii de ætate mundi, and the latter a new reply, Defensio dissertationis de vera aetate mundi contra castigationes Isaaci Vossii: qua Hebraea Biblia eorumque authentica & incorrupta veritas contra objectiones, ex LXX interpr. Samarit. Josepho, Chaldaeis, Aegyptits, Sinensibus, asseruntur, all of this within the same year of 1659. Vossius, primarily a Greek scholar, embraced the Jesuit image of Chinese civilization through his previous espousal of the Septuagint on philological grounds, but he ended up with a more radical praise of the antiquity and achievements of the Chinese cultural tradition than the Jesuits themselves had ever contemplated. He also acquired over the years a reputation for religious libertinism, although I believe that in many ways he was an intellectual heir to the Erasmian tradition like his father Gerard Vossius, and, at least officially, ended up adopting Anglicanism as his Church. In this respect see David Katz, “Isaac Vossius and the English biblical critics, 1670–1689,” in Scepticism and Irreligion, ed. Popkin and Vanderjagt, 142–84; Erasmus, of course, had remained a Catholic, but his intellectual legacy was largely taken by liberal Protestant scholars with an ecumenical or irenic bent.Page 360 → 49. Kircher, China Illustrata, trans. Charles van Tuyl (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1987), 214–22. There was some ambiguity here, since the mythical emperor “Fo Hi” (Fu Xi) who invented the Chinese characters 300 years after the Flood was in fact following the system of Ham/Zoroaster. Kircher did however make clear that the Chinese only received the rudiments of these concepts “taken from nature,” not their full esoteric significance, according to his own theory of the hieroglyphs. 50. The identification of the civilizing hero of the Phoenicians Taautus, inventor of the first alphabet, with the Egyptian Thoth/the Greek Hermes by Eusebius of Caesarea (Praeparatio Evangelica, bk. 1, chap. 10), and the interpretation of his teaching about the origins of the cosmos as some kind of fundamental theology, provided an important precedent. Interestingly, although in his China Illustrata Kircher defended the gradualism of the Jesuit method in China, and assumed the theistic nature of Confucianism, he was sparing in his support of the Riccian interpretation of Confucian ethics as natural law, and, hoping to assuage the critics in Rome, insisted instead on the need of grace for salvation. 51. Kircher, China Illustrata, 126–27. 52. Even those who defended the authenticity of the Syro-Chinese monumental inscription unearthed in Sian against skeptics (the whole thing had been dismissed as a forgery by the likes of the Protestant George Horn) noted that Kircher's search for Coptic words was flawed, and made no theological sense either. Consider Eusèbe Renaudot's discussion in Anciennes Relations des Indes et de la Chine de deux voyageurs Mahometans qui y allerent dans le neuvième siècle (Paris, 1718), 233–35, written from a Catholic antiJesuit perspective. 53. On Kircher's history of religion—interpreted as an “Augustinian” biblical structure with a Hermetic overlay and strongly influenced by the theology of Nicholas of Cusa—see Dino Pastine, La nascita dell'idolatria. L'Oriente religioso di Athanasius Kircher (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978). Noel Malcolm, “Private and Public Knowledge: Kircher, Esotericism and the Republic of Letters,” in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man who Knew Everything, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2004), 297–308, emphasizes even more his Gnostic or Neoplatonic heterodoxy. 54. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of 1667 (vol. 2, 484–88) offer an example of how quickly Kircher's China Illustrata was read, and of the skeptical tone of its reception. 55. This is of course because the Jesuits published so little about India compared with other areas. For an excellent account of Kircher's chronology, including some reference to his relations with Martini, see Anthony Grafton, “Kircher's chronology,” in Athanasius Kircher, 171–87. It remains to me unclear the

extent to which Martini's key chronological contentions about China depended upon Kircher's previous speculations about Egyptian antiquity, based on accepting Manetho. The chronological model offered by Eusebius of Caesarea, who like most early Christian scholars before Jerome was convinced of the inspired and indeed superior character Page 361 →of the Greek Septuagint translation, should have sufficed for the Jesuits in China. Although early modern scholars only had access to Jerome's Latin edition of the second part of Eusebius's Chronicle, consisting of the chronological tables, Scaliger had reconstructed much of the first part on the basis of quoted fragments from the Byzantine Syncellus. The full version, which only survived in an Armenian translation published early in the nineteenth century, would also have shown how Eusebius, unafraid to offer very substantial quotations of gentile sources, dismissed the problem of the long Chaldean and Egyptian chronologies offered by Berosus and Manetho by treating their “years” as lunar months or something equivalent. 56. On Webb's agendas see Rachel Ramsey, “China and the Ideal Order in John Webb's An Historical Essay,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2001): 483–503. 57. On Newton's antiquarian theories—largely devoted to supporting the chronological claims of the Hebrews and the priority of the biblical tradition, but also tinged with an “Arian” emphasis on a primitive natural (and heliocentric!) monotheism which Moses and Jesus simply restored—see F. E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 85–102, and Jacques Solé, “Newton et les Fils de Noe: la Théologie des Gentiles vue par les Chrétiens (1670–1680),” Les religions du Paganisme Antique dans l'Europe Chrétienne, xvie–xviiie siècle (Paris: Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1988), 75–80. 58. The so-called “Figurists” (as they were dismissively called by Fréret, who sympathized with the Peking antiquarians) can also be seen as a potentially reactionary group whose symbolic reading of a primitive Christian revelation dating from before the Flood could derail Ricci's strategy (his Confucian-theistic interpretation of the Chinese classics was rationalist and minimalist, not prophetic and mystical). They were largely based in Canton and mistrusted by the Peking fathers (although Bouvet himself was in Peking). The Peking faction was convinced about the nonfabulous character of the historical record of China up to the third millennium, hence they adopted the Septuagint version of the Bible. The Figurists preferred the traditional Vulgate: they were not interested in retrieving ancient history, but in interpreting the universal symbols of natural law. Despite their loss of confidence—one of them, Fr. Foucquet, actually sided with the Dominicans who considered Confucianism idolatrous, and had to leave the order—the Figurists were not totally isolated: Bouvet corresponded with Leibniz, and Fr. du Halde sought to appease Foucquet, hence in his great synthesis Description de la Chine he suppressed some of the antiquarian material on the I Ching that the Peking missionaries (especially Fr. Régis) made available to him (see Virgile Pinot, La Chine et l'Esprit Philosophique en France 1640–1740 [Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1932], 171–73). 59. An example of this trend toward caution in the context of the Rites Controversy is the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus by Philippe Couplet, which reasserted the core elements of Ricci's accommodation, in particular the interpretation of Confucius as a natural theist, while moderating the chronological claims offered by Martini, now presented as merely probable. A few decades later Father du Halde was even more conservative, retreating Page 362 →into a historical chronology compatible with the Vulgate. As Virgile Pinot noted, “du P. Martini au P. Couplet et du P. Couplet au P. du Halde, la chronologie Chinoise se trouvait réduite de six siècles” (La Chine, 269), that is, from 2952 BC (the reign of Fu Xi) to 2697 BC (the reign of Huang Di) and then to 2357 BC (the reign of Yao; interestingly, modern sinologists would tend to at most take as historical the Xia dynasty of c. 2200–c. 1760 BCE). The context explains this drift. Increasingly isolated, and desperate to obtain allies against the scholarship of Protestant skeptics such as Bayle, the French Jesuits sought to appease independent “Catholic” writers like Huet, Fontenelle, and Voltaire, only to eventually find them too libertine. In the end they abandoned many of the more liberal positions they had adopted in the seventeenth century, on biblical exegesis (the flexible understanding of Church tradition espoused by Petau and Simon), chronology (their appeal to the Septuagint to reconcile Chinese records), and free will (with a neo-Augustinian turn). For the Jesuits in eighteenth-century France see Catherine M. Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment 1700–1762 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991). 60. Published in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (1743), 26:23–25. See the article by Claire Timmermanns, “Comparatisme et sensibilité historique dans l'étude des religions: le cas de la Chine,”

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 3 (2001): 55–66. 61. Timmermanns (ibid.) argues that Ricci's method was comparative, underestimating the extent to which it relied on the distinction between Confucianism and neo-Confucianism. There is in any case a huge distance between Ricci's cautious diffusionist claims in relation to specific philosophical doctrines and those wide-ranging analogies exploited by Kircher or by the Figurists. 62. Kircher's indological discourse is only a partial exception to this trend, as his emphasis—the title of China Illustrata well declares it—is on China over India, and his approach was in any case idiosyncratic. 63. See Rubiés, “The Jesuit Discovery of Hinduism: Antonio Rubino's Account of the History and Religion of Vijayanagara (1608),” Archiv für religiongeschichte 3 (2001): 210–56. As argued there (232), these early indological works reveal a common intellectual approach, characterized by “a firm belief in the Devil as an active presence behind gentilism; an apologetic aim as ultimate reason for orientalist research; a bias toward the rationality of Christianity, often based on some of the assumptions of Christian ethics (especially the ideal of chastity) and aesthetics (ideas of order and simplicity, combined with uncritical acceptance of biblical history, against wildly imaginative mythological fables); a general reliance on empirical research for descriptive purposes; finally, a combination of some esoteric research with a largely exoteric description of forms of religious worship and organisation.” 64. J. P. Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 345. 65. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion (vol. 1, 3.1 and 4.1) Calvin had asserted that all men shared as their natural condition a religious instinct (semen religionis) and a glimmer of knowledge of God (sensum divinitates), but was Page 363 →also emphatic that this light was almost entirely clouded by the darkness of sinfulness, to the extent that without divine assistance (in the form of Revelation and Grace) human reason was unable to know God, and unguided, the religious instinct led to idolatry. Many Catholic (especially Thomist) and some liberal Protestant (Arminian) theologies widened the scope for human reason to know truths about God naturally. It was in this context that the theory of primitive monotheism acquired a positive, philosophical content, and offered a rationalist support for Christian apologetics. For the rather contradictory theological claims found in of the preface to Rogerius's work, traditionally attributed to Andreas Wissowatius, see Rubiés, “Jesuit Discovery,” 242–43. 66. Ralph Cudworth's The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) offered a historicized version of Neoplatonic prisca theologia through a rearguard recovery of Hermetic texts against Isaac Casaubon's wholesale demolition, thus making an Egyptian esoteric learning, which he supposed to be pre-Mosaic, central to a renewed claim about the universality of philosophical monotheism. Bishop William Warburton's The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist (1738–41), written with a now urgent concern to defend orthodoxy against free-thinking Deists, argued for a natural monotheistic religion of mystery cults in Egypt which Moses' legislation—Warburton insisted—did not so much deny as make explicit: political elitism, not human nature, was the cause of idolatry, and therefore the target of God's Revelation. 67. The true extent of Huet's philosophical skepticism (in the fideistic tradition of Gassendi and La Mothe Le Vayer) only emerged in full after his death, when his Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l'esprit humain was discovered. Some of his Jesuit friends, with whom he had shared the anti-Cartesian crusade and to whom he had left his enormous library, were horrified—in fact they argued that the work was a forgery to discredit Catholicism. However, Huet clearly understood his skepticism as a way of methodologically modernizing orthodox belief, and restricted its use to philosophy. See Germain Malbreil, “Le Traité Philosophique de la Foiblesse de l'Esprit Humain, de Feu Monsieur Huet, ancien Evêque d'Avranches,” Pierre–Daniel Huet (1630–1721): Actes du colloque de Caen (12–13 novembre 1993), ed. Suzanne Guellouz, Biblio 17, no. 83, Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature (Paris, Seattle, and Tübingen, 1994): 169–82. Hence he tried to turn the three great medieval rationalist philosophers—Maimonides, Averroes, and Aquinas—into skeptical fideists, while (for example) distancing himself from the self-indulgent impudence of Montaigne (on the latter see Huetiana, ou Pensées diverses de M. Huet eveque d'Avranches, 2nd ed. [Amsterdam, 1723], chap. 6, 15–18). 68. The extent of Huet's indebtedness to Eusebius merits more attention. It may be significant that Huet's great claim to philological work was an edition of Origen's biblical commentaries, Eusebius's own theological guiding light, which he published in 1666. By contrast, his criticism of the great French

Protestant apologist Philippe du Plesssis Mornay (De la Verité de la Religion Chrestienne, 1581), has been properly emphasized by April Shelford, “Thinking Geometrically in Pierre-Daniel Huet's Demonstratio Evangelica (1679),” Page 364 →Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 4 (2002): 599–617. As she rightly notes, Huet felt that beyond the arguments for natural religion one also needed to show the rationality of specifically Christian beliefs, something that Mornay failed to do. In other words, one needed to reconstruct the authority of the biblical account of sacred history upon fresh historical grounds, and that made necessary a more sophisticated antiquarian approach. What Huet shared with Mornay was a primary concern with fighting impiety and atheism within Christian society. 69. In this sense Huet was a Catholic counterpart to Grotius or, in his generation, Leibniz, with whom he shared the project (on his ecumenical ideas see Huetiana, chap. 16, 46–48). Huet's own preface to the Demonstratio Evangelica suggested that the work was originally prompted by his discussions with Menasseh ben Israel at the time of his youthful trip to Sweden and Holland (1652–53), and the statement has often been accepted (see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 278). However, there is also evidence to suggest that Samuel Bochart's example of antiquarian apologetics exercised a powerful influence over him (Memoirs of the Life of P. D. Huet, written by himself, trans. John Aikin, 2 vols. [London, 1810], 31–32). It also seems probable that news of the De tribus impostoribus spurred Huet to develop his project as a “modern” response to radical libertinism—or at least this is what his correspondence with Jean Chapelain suggests (Lettres de Jean Chapelain de l'Académie Française publiées par Ph. Tamiez de Larroque, vol. II 1659–1672 [Paris, 1883], 206–11). Despite his international connections, Huet was criticized for his friendship with Protestants, and his relationship to Bochart, always conducted with some caution, eventually suffered. 70. It seems clear that for Huet Christian apologetics and recourse to philosophical skepticism were not separate things but part of a comprehensive strategy which was directed at both non-Christians and libertines. His mitigated skepticism, by which religion is not entirely irrational, since reason recognizes the historical truths upon which faith is based, was rather close to the contemporary Jesuit position. On Huet in general see A. Dupront, Pierre-Daniel Huet et l'exégèse comparatiste au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie E. Leroux, 1930), and Léon Tolmer, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1620–1721), humaniste-physicien (Bayeux: Colas, 1949). On his anti-Cartesianism, see Pierre-Daniel Huet, Against Cartesian Philosophy, ed. and trans. Thomas Lennon (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003). 71. “Probari potest religionis Christianae veritas eo genere demonstrationis, quod non minus certum sit quam demonstrationes ipsa geometricae” (Demonstratio, 3). For a discussion of why Huet felt obliged to adopt the geometrical garb (mainly as an attempt to upstage Descartes and refute the logic of Port Royal) see Shelford, “Thinking Geometrically.” 72. Unsurprisingly, the large Latin volume was criticized by many as unconvincing. Richard Simon tore it apart. 73. Renaudot was not wrong to see Vossius as the heir to the Jesuits. Building upon his defense of the Septuagint in the 1650s, and inspired by writers such as Martino Martini, Isaac Vossius had developed a radical sinophilia Page 365 →(emphasizing the antiquity and superiority of Chinese learning) which culminated with his “De artibus et sceintiis Sinarum” (published in his Variorum observationum liber in 1685). Vossius was then living in England and his work, together with Couplet's 1687 translation of Confucius, contributed a great deal to the surge of interest in China in the Royal Society of the late 1680s. For the English context see William Poole, “Isaac Vossius, Robert Hooke and the Early Royal Society's Use of Sinology,” in The Intellectual Origins of Religious Heterodoxy 1600–1750, ed. Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010) and Matt Jenkinson, “Nathanael Vincent and Confucius's Great Learning in Restoration England,” Notes and Records of the Royal Historical Society 60 (2006): 35–47. 74. Renaudot, Anciennes Relations, 374. The key chapter is “Éclaircissements sur les sciences des Chinois,” 340–97. Renaudot's book was also published in English in 1733 as Ancient accounts of India and China by two Mohammedan Travellers who went to those parts in the 9th century. 75. For a discussion of the Jesuit reaction to the publication, see Isabelle Landry-Deron, La preuve par la Chine. La “Description” de J.-B. Du Halde, jésuite 1735 (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2002), 169–73. 76. The extent of his religious libertinism is difficult to establish, and largely depends on whether we judge

him the author of the Lettre de Thrasybale a Leucippe which circulated after he died. Sergio Landucci defended the attribution in his important edition of the Lettre (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1986) For a more skeptical discussion see Miguel Benítez, “La composition de laLettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe,” Nicolas Fréret, légende et vérité, ed. Chantal Grell and Catherine Volpilhac-Auger (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1994), 177–92. 77. Already d'Alembert, in the article on chronology of the Encyclopédie, noted that Fréret “joignait à l'érudition la plus vaste l'esprit philosophique.” 78. For a discussion of Fréret in the context of the evolution of euhemerism see Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 103–25. For his views on India see Sylvia Murr, “Les conditions d'émergence du discours sur l'Inde,” 247–49. More generally, on his views on ancient history and chronology see Chantall Grell, Le Dix-huitième siècle et l'antiquité en France 1680–1789 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), chap. 9. 79. Of the many dissertations on China published by Fréret in the Mémoires de l'Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres two are particularly important: “De l'antiquité et de la certitude de la chronologie Chinoise” of 1733 (vol. 10) and the “Eclaircissements” that followed in 1739 (Mémoires, vol. 15). 80. C. Larrère, “Fréret et la Chine: du philosophique des langues à l'historique de la chronologie,” Nicolas Fréret, légende et verité, 109–29, offers an excellent discussion of Fréret's sinology. See also the classic discussion in Pinot, La Chine, 261–79. 81. Letter to Father Prémare (one of the Jesuit figurists) of 1735, quoted in Larrère, “Fréret et la Chine: du philosophique des langues à l'historique de la chronologie,” 122. 82. In this debate, the “Chaldean” Berosus or the “Egyptian” Manetho functioned as part of the Greek tradition. Fréret identified the civilizations of Page 366 →India, China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia (Chaldea) as the only four with a serious claim to antiquity and thus originality. 83. “Le Paganisme et le Judaisme sont deux mythologies qui n'ont de vrai l'une et l'altre que leur source commune, l'abus de l'histoire de la nature,” Recherches, section 8, 151–54. Boulanger did not however dismiss the value of mythologies for antiquarian research: rather the contrary, he dismissed all annals and chronologies as fabulous in order to build his philosophical history of the ancient world on the study of customs and fables. For Voltaire's mixed reaction to this book (which he found inopportune on largely political grounds) see Paul Sadrin, Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1722–1759) ou avant nous le déluge (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1986), 47. Boulanger's Recherches, originally written in 1755, in effect soon became one of the most scandalous Enlightenment works on ancient world history. 84. As Momigliano noted, Eusebius was the intellectual heir of Alexandrian antiquarians and grammarians (Classical Foundations, 137). While Momigliano assessed his immense contribution to western historiography primarily as the founder of ecclesiastical history, my contention is that Eusebius's ecclesiastical history must also be interpreted as the last chapter of a universal history whose influence is worth considering. 85. Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library at Caesarea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). For a more succinct introduction to Eusebius see also Andrew Louth, “Eusebius and the Birth of Church History,” Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, ed. Frances Young, Lewis Ayres, and Andrew Louth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On the political and theological context see Timothy Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1981). 86. Eusebii Pamphili Evangelicae Praeparationis libri XV, trans. into English by E. H. Gifford, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903); Eusebius of Caesarea, The Proof of the Gospel being the Demonstratio Evangelica, trans. W. J. Ferrar, 2 vols. (London and New York: Macmillan, 1920). While embracing the Hebrew patriarchs from Abraham to Job as some kind of proto-Christians, as well as postMosaic Jewish Philosophers such as Philo, Eusebius justified the rejection of the Mosaic Law as one that was given specifically to “the Jews” as a distinct, morally weak subgroup: “For the old covenant was given as a law to the Jews, when they had fallen from the religion of their forefathers, and had embraced the manners and life of the Egyptians, and had declined to the errors of polytheism, and the idolatrous superstitions of the Gentiles. It was intended to raise the fallen, and to set on their feet those who were lying on their faces, by suitable teaching…But the new covenant leads those who, through our Saviour by the

grace and gift of God are raised up, to a rapid march into the kingdom promised by God. It summons all men equally to share together the same good things” (Proof, 23–24). The model of an “Egyptian” Moses would be influential in some of the antiquarian constructions of the seventeenth century—see for example John Spencer's De Legibus Hebrareorum Ritualibus et Earum Rationibus (1685), also influenced by Maimonides. It is discussed as an alternative to the more conventional Page 367 →line taken by Kircher and Huet in Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 55–79. There has been a resurgence of interest in the Praeparatio and Demonstratio. See Aryeh Kofsky, Eusebius of Caesarea against Paganism (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2000) and Aaron Johnson, Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius' Praeparatio Evangelica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). However, Johnson's strong emphasis on the ethnic, rather than religious, character of Eusebius's Christian identity seems anachronistic. 87. The project had a fourth part, the Theophany, a mature theological summation of his apologetics. It survived however only in its early Syriac version. For a discussion see Kofsky, Eusebius, 276–311. 88. There are not enough studies of the impact of Eusebius's apologetic work in the early modern period, but it is clear that it circulated very widely and was highly influential. After George of Trebizond's Latin translation, first published in 1470 and often reprinted, seventeenth-century savants could depend on the critical edition (also with parallel Latin translation) published by the Jesuit François Viger in Paris in 1628. 89. The Eusebian triumphal vision had of course suffered many crises in the meanwhile, from the barbarian invasions in the Latin West to the rise of Islam in the Greek East, let alone various later schisms and, in the West, the Reformation; however, it maintained much of its appeal precisely by reference to the history of ancient religion as a fall from natural religion into daemonic idolatry (with the Greeks taking their cue from Phoenicia and Egypt). 90. A philosophical historian like Voltaire was not of course himself a scientific orientalist (he was not even a consistent philosopher), but his perspective was supported by the work of the likes of Fréret. 91. For an illuminating discussion of the genre of universal histories of the early Enlightenment (focused on the works by Bianchini, Sale and Psalmanazar, and Goguet), emphasizing the underlying heritage of sacred history behind the new secular interpretations, see Tamara Griggs, “Universal History from CounterReformation to Enlightenment,” Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007): 219–47. For a wider discussion of the erudite background to Enlightenment Histories see Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia P. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Chantal Grell, L'Histoire entre érudition et philosophie: Étude sur la connaissance historique à l'age des Lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993); and John Pocock's multivolume Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 92. Since its first delivery as a paper to the New York conference on the age of antiquaries in March 2004, this article has been able to benefit from many exchanges with Anthony Grafton and Peter Miller. I am grateful for their comments, but also for the added satisfaction of being able to experience, within modern academia, the life of the old Republic of Letters.

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FOURTEEN Whose Antiquarianism? Europe versus China in the 1701 Conflict between Bishop Maigrot and Qiu Sheng D. E. Mungello

The Role of Antiquarianism in the Chinese Rites Controversy The controversy over the Chinese rites, which unfolded over the course of the seventeenth century, was in part a struggle over how to view antiquity. On one side were a group of Chinese literati converts and most Jesuit missionaries, who claimed that the God of antiquity was common to both China and Europe. They believed that the ancient Chinese Shangdi (Lord-Above) of the Confucian Classics was the same God as Tianzhu (Lord of Heaven) of Christianity. The opposing view consisted of European Christians (including most non-Jesuit missionaries), who claimed that China's antiquity was essentially different from Europe's antiquity. It was pagan and not reconcilable with the Judeo-Greco-Christian God. The Rites Controversy was a watershed in Sino-Western relations in that the defeat of the accommodationists and the victory of the European exclusionists set back the effort of assimilating Christianity into Chinese culture. The triumph of the European exclusionists was so complete that until quite recently, the Chinese Rites Controversy was seen mainly as a battle between two different groups of Europeans in which the Chinese were mere bystanders who did not participate in any significant way. However, recently a deeper appreciation has emerged of the role Chinese literati played as crucial collaborators with missionaries in producing important religious works in Chinese. Frequently, the contributionsPage 369 → of Chinese were unrecognized and the authorship was attributed solely to Europeans. Growing interest in the Chinese response to Christianity led to the discovery of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents that have been lying unread for several centuries in collections in Rome and East Asia.1 Using these documents written by Chinese literati converts, we can see that the Rites Controversy was as much a struggle between Europeans and Chinese as it was a struggle between two groups of Europeans. And the struggle, in its essence, involved a debate over whose view of antiquarianism should prevail. Both Chinese and European civilizations viewed the past in moral terms as a golden age that provided sources of truth, inspiration, and heroes for later times. Both saw the collapse of their classical antiquity during the first half of the first millennium; and the length of time between the fall of antiquity and its revival was strikingly similar in both civilizations. Approximately eight hundred years intervened in China between the decline of Confucian antiquity and its Neo-Confucian revival in the eleventh century, while roughly nine hundred years intervened in Europe between the fall of Rome and the revival of Greek and Roman antiquity in the mid-fourteenth century. Another similarity was that these intervening years saw the emergence of powerful religious forces (Buddhism in China and Christianity in Europe) that would color later perceptions of antiquity in both cultures. The eleventhcentury revival of Confucianism included a greater dimension of spirituality than had been present before Buddhism. Renaissance artists expressed the revival of classical antiquity in terms of biblical figures—particularly David, Jesus, and Mary—portrayed in the manner of Greek and Roman gods whose beautiful bodies reflected their transcendent spirituality. While the Renaissance revived the ideals and heroes of classical antiquity, eleventh-century Chinese returned to antiquity as a font of inspiration for reviving the Confucian tradition. Historical criticism was applied with enthusiasm for antiquarian study, led by the historian Sima Guang (1019–86).2 Waves of revival followed that have been distinguished in the West with the names Song Neo-Confucianism, Ming Neo-Confucianism, and Qing Empiricism. Chinese scholars have been more inclined to treat these revivals simply as continuous variations in the True Teaching (Daoxue or Literati Teaching (Ruxue ).(These terms, “True Teaching” and “Literati Teaching,” are used by the Chinese instead of the Western term “Confucianism.”) However, there were also differences

between Europe's and China's views of their respective antiquities. Page 370 → Many antiquarian scholars make a fundamental distinction between the different historiographical approaches of Thucydides (ca. 460–ca. 400 BCE) and Herodotus (ca. 484–425 BCE). These ancient Greeks treated history as two distinct genres. Thucydides organized events into a linear line that revealed their causal connections.3 This involved a narrative of events that were more public than private. Herodotus emphasized private rather than public events. He avoided narrative and focused on a broad range of subject matter that was philosophical, literary, or otherwise in nature. The two genres are often distinguished by the different terms “history” and “antiquities.” According to the seminal antiquarian scholar Arnaldo Momigliano, historians write in a chronological order while antiquarians write in a systematic order.4 While this distinction between chronological and systematic order can be found in China, the development of the two was quite different. In the conclusion to his essay “Tradition and the Classical Historian,” published in 1972, Momigliano pays homage to the memory of his friend Joseph Levenson, who taught at the University of California at Berkeley. (Levenson died prematurely of a canoeing accident on the swollen Russian River in northern California in April of 1969.) Momigliano notes that Levenson's trilogy Confucian China and Its Modern Fate had presented Chinese historians in a way that made them fundamentally different from Greco-Roman historians.5 Whereas Greco-Roman historians had been viewed by their society as interpreters of change, China's historians were seen as witnesses of continuity.6 When antiquarianism is defined in European terms by Momigliano, it involves characteristics that do not entirely fit the True Teaching (Confucianism). The sharp distinction between antiquarianism as a systematic rather than narrative treatment of history only partially fits the seminal Chinese historian Sima Qian (145–86 BCE) who established a narrative and didactic model for the Chinese dynastic histories.7 On the other hand, Sima Qian's division into categories such as annals, biographies, narratives, etc. is systematic.8 The passion of the famous antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) for empirical observation and experiment in all fields fits only a minority of Chinese literati. More fitting is the antiquaries' love of disparate and obscure facts behind which stood a “mysterious and august” antiquity.9 Certainly the literati held the written word in awe and no form of it was held in greater awe than the Confucian Classics, whose dates of composition closely parallel the period of Greek and Roman antiquity. Page 371 →

The Collaborative Effort of the Literati and the Jesuits in Developing Accommodation Qiu Sheng (zi Zhenxin was a Confucian Christian who fit the Chinese category of witness of continuity far more than the Greco-Roman pattern of interpreter of change. He was a native of the Jiangle district, Yanping prefecture, in Fujian province, and was baptized sometime in the second half of the seventeenth century as Matthew (Madou ). He attained the juren degree in 1693 and the jinshi degree, the highest degree, in 1706.10 Eventually he became a secretary in the Grand Secretariat in Beijing and a magistrate of Zhuji in Zhejiang province.11 In spite of his conversion to Christianity, Qiu Sheng was in almost all other ways a typical literatus who revered the teachings of the great sage Confucius and the sages of antiquity. Qiu Sheng conducted parallel arguments with two different groups. On one hand, he tried to convince his fellow Chinese literati that they should accept Christianity because it was an elaboration of the same truths that were developed in Chinese antiquity. On the other hand, he tried to convince anti-Jesuit missionaries of a Jansenist viewpoint that Christianity was a continuation of, rather than a break with, Chinese antiquity. In China of that time, no virtue was more esteemed than revering one's parents, and Qiu Sheng's filial piety is reflected in the biography he wrote about his father. The Jesuit missionary François de Rougemont (Lu Riman ) (1624–76) had been so impressed by the Christian piety of Qiu's father, Qiu Yuezhi (zi Shuliang hao Tianran ), that he asked Qiu Sheng to write the biography.12 Qiu Yuezhi had failed to advance beyond the licentiate (xiucai )

and never attained an advanced degree, but he lived a model life. His baptism with the name of Augustine in 1638 by the Jesuit Francesco Sambiasi (Bi Jinliang ) aroused the animosity of a neighbor and led to the loss of his property and possessions in 1662. He was urged by Fr. Rougemont to forgive his enemy, but he could not overcome his bitterness and died the next year (1663).13 In the tradition of Chinese filial piety, Qiu Sheng and his brothers followed their father in becoming Christians.14 Two of his brothers were baptized with the names Leon and Nicholas, and both of them attained lower literary degrees (xiucai). What we know about Qiu Sheng comes mainly from his 184-page essay (28,000 characters) Shuwen bian Page 372 →(Narrating what I have heard) and two letters preserved in Rome and Taipei.15 For Qiu Sheng, as for most Chinese literati, antiquity was held in awe as the source of truth. And because he believed this period of seminal antiquity was common to all humanity (both Chinese and European), he concluded that Europeans could not reject the truths of Chinese antiquity as false idolatry. Qiu Sheng recognized that the Incarnation of God in the form of Jesus Christ occurred in the West and not in China. But just as Jesus fulfilled and completed the Old Testament, so too did Jesus fulfill and complete the teachings of ancient China, including Confucius. For Qiu Sheng, Jesus too belonged to antiquity, almost as a culmination of what Chinese ancients taught. Jesus thus belonged to a time that preceded the rise of false teachings, particularly in Buddhism, Daoism, and Neo-Confucianism. This period of decline following the collapse of the Han dynasty played a role much like the Middle Ages following the collapse of Rome in the sense that the truths of antiquity were lost. In Qiu's view, the arrival of the Christian missionaries did not present a new teaching to China, but helped China to recapture its faded truths of antiquity. This was a core issue in the Chinese Rites Controversy. The most striking similarity between Qiu Sheng and European antiquarians lies not in any similarity to GrecoRoman historians as interpreters of change, nor with a concern with the material remains of the past. Rather it involved the minimalist doctrinal creed fostered by neo-Stoicism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.16 This doctrinal minimalism emphasized a harmonious relationship between learning and virtue that had been shared by Erasmus. It enabled Christians to accommodate not only Protestants with Catholics, but also Christians and non-Christians.17 Confucius also had a minimalist doctrinal creed and focused his attention on moral issues, while avoiding discussion of spiritual matters. This doctrinal minimalism, shared by Christian antiquarians in Europe and Confucian literati in China, enabled a bridge to be built between certain Jesuit missionaries and a small number of literati, such as Qiu Sheng. Unfortunately, Rites Controversy contentiousness limited it to being a bridgehead in the manner of a cultural and religious offensive rather than a bridge of commonality between Europe and China. Antiquarians like Peiresc and Hugo Grotius embraced a minimalist doctrinal creed that enabled them to accommodate forms of knowledge (such as Galileo's heliocentrism) that threatened more creedal Christians.18 They cultivated a form of Christian Stoicism that minimalized mention of Christ and saints. This enabled them to develop an accommodating Page 373 →view toward Protestants, Jews and Muslims. Among Christian Stoics, the best-known examples are the Jesuits and outstanding among them was Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who presented the Chinese with a Christianity that was shaped by this minimalist creed.19 Whereas Ricci had encouraged the accommodating view that the teaching of the “ancient Literati” (xian Ru ) was in harmony with prerevelation Christianity, other Christian missionaries insisted on the uniqueness of Christianity and refused to accept the idea that a form of Christian natural religion had existed in ancient China. One of the most fundamental beliefs of the accommodative outlook shared by Ricci and Qiu was that the ancient Chinese term Shangdi (Lord-Above) was equivalent to the term Tianzhu (Lord of Heaven) used by the missionaries. Because of the fundamental importance of this claim, it became one of the chief points of contention in the Chinese Rites Controversy. The book that first propounded this viewpoint, Tianzhu shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven) (1603) is usually attributed solely to Ricci and to the brilliance of his insights. However, it is highly unlikely that Ricci could have written this book without the close collaboration of Chinese literati. The body of classical literature was too arcane and vast and the style of the Chinese literary language was too complex for Ricci to have mastered these without assistance. Such collaboration was typical of missionaries who wrote books from an accommodative standpoint.20 The fact is that the Chinese literati view of antiquity

played a crucial role in shaping the accommodative position in the Rites Controversy. There was a ConfucianChristian literati tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries starting with Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), who was baptized in 1603.21 Although the literati adherents of this tradition have yet to be fully identified, it seems clear that they included Shang Huqing (1619–after 1698) of Jinan in Shandong and Zhang Xingyao (1633–after 1715) of Hangzhou.

The Conflict between Bishop Maigrot and Qiu Sheng on the Rites Qiu Sheng's views were shaped by personal contact with a leader of the movement to condemn the Chinese rites, Mgr. Charles Maigrot de Crissey (Yan Dang Jiale , alternately , Yan Dang (1652–1730), the most notorious figure in the controversy. He was a member of the Missions Étrangères de Paris who was confirmed as vicar apostolic of Page 374 →Fujian in 1687 and thereby became a bishop. One year after the Kangxi emperor issued his Edict of Toleration for Christianity (1692), Maigrot issued a Mandate that revived the Chinese Rites Controversy. Maigrot's Mandate contained seven prohibitions that were very hostile to the Chinese rites and which applied to all missionaries in his area of jurisdiction (Fujian province).22 This culminated with a famous face-to-face meeting between Maigrot and the Kangxi emperor on August 2, 1706, in which Maigrot was humiliated by his lack of knowledge of Chinese.23 Qiu Sheng met with Maigrot at least twice and on both occasions they disagreed over the Chinese rites. One meeting between Maigrot and Qiu, in the company of three other literati converts, was witnessed by the Spanish Franciscan Fr. Diego de Santa Rosa, O. F. M. (Hua Xianing , 1659–1740) in 1701 in Jiangle.24 The degreeholders included Qiu and his two brothers Leon and Nicholas as well as another literatus identified only by his surname Joachim. In this meeting Fr. Santa Rosa posed a question asking whom the emperor was addressing when he sacrificed to heaven and earth. The reference was to the imperial sacrifices made at the Altar of Heaven (Tiantan ) in the southern part of Beijing at the winter solstice and to the Altar of Earth (Ditan ) in the northern part of Beijing at the summer solstice.25 According to Santa Rosa, Qiu answered that when the emperor sacrificed to heaven, he was sacrificing to the material heaven or physical sky rather than the spiritual heaven. Qiu claimed that Santa Rosa had misinterpreted his response. In his “Letter…to the Gentleman-Fathers [Maigrot and Santa Rosa]” Qiu explained “what China says about Heaven is really about the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu).”26 Furthermore, Qiu argued that the ancient Chinese name for God, Shangdi (Lord-Above), was an alternate name with the same meaning as the missionaries' preferred term for God, Tianzhu. Qiu pointedly criticized Maigrot and Santa Rosa for twisting the meaning of Chinese texts to fit their argument: “you fathers who study our Chinese books ought to be accommodating and adapt yourselves [to Chinese custom]. It is not right to insert a word or phrase in a bent and crooked manner that is expedient, but which does not serve to benefit the principles of the missionaries' teaching.”27 Unlike many other missionaries in China, including several of his fellow Spanish Franciscans, Santa Rosa was not well versed in Chinese culture. He had only been called to China in 1696 and had a mere five years' exposure to Chinese culture at the time of this meeting. He served in Jiangle from 1700 to 1705. Missionaries who lived in coastal areas, such as Macau, Canton, and certain parts of Fujian province, tended Page 375 →to be less sinified in dress, appearance, and thinking than missionaries who served in the inland provinces. Spanish Franciscans in Fujian were in close touch with the Franciscan provincial in the Philippines because Fujian was the key link and transit point for missionaries traveling to and from the missionary bases in inland China. They were excluded from Macau by the Portuguese, who jealously guarded their monopoly of this European enclave.28 At a later meeting with Qiu and his brother Leon, Maigrot disputed the contents of Qiu's long essay, the Shuwen bian, that had been presented to him the previous day.29 Maigrot opposed the Chinese rites because he claimed they were based on the works of the Neo-Confucian philosophers Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and Wang Yangming (1472–1529). It is unlikely that Maigrot even read Qiu's essay, for he was oblivious to the fact that Qiu shared his rejection of Zhu Xi's interpretations. Maigrot's knowledge of Chinese was very limited and based on his brief study with two literati converts, Li Yifen (baptized Leontius) (c. 1635–after 1706) and Jiang Weibiao (baptized Franciscus).30 He appears to have read Chinese texts for the purpose of finding evidence for an argument already

formulated before he even looked at the texts. With the help of these literati and at the instigation of the Papal legate Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon (Duoluo ), Maigrot compiled a collection of passages from Chinese texts that contradicted Christianity. Most of these passages were drawn from the Neo-Confucian philosophers of the Song dynasty (960–1279) who had developed the metaphysical concept of the taiji (Supreme Ultimate), embodied in a famous diagram. While Maigrot was correct in interpreting the taiji as contrary to Christianity, he failed to distinguish between the earlier form of Confucianism that was closer to Christianity and the later Neo-Confucianism that was less so. He later suffered the embarrassment of being corrected on this point by two Manchu officials sent by the Kangxi emperor to interview him. They rectified his erroneous belief that taiji had been part of ancient Confucianism by clarifying that it had originated much later in Song Neo-Confucianism.31 The fundamental distinction between early Confucianism and later Confucianism had been part of Jesuit accommodation in China since Ricci's time, but Maigrot had to concede in front of the emperor that he had never read Ricci's book Tianzhu shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven) in which this distinction was made.32 Given Maigrot's ignorance of Chinese texts and the arrogance of his condemnation of Chinese practices which he did not understand, Page 376 →Qiu's harsh criticism of the missionaries in his “Letter to the Gentlemen-Fathers” is understandable.

Qiu Sheng's Withdrawal Qiu accepted the missionaries' teaching not because he stood in awe of them, but because, as he said, “its principles are universal” (ci li chu yu tianxia zhi gong ).33 Qiu accused Maigrot and Santa Rosa of being filled with pride, arrogance, and a feeling of superiority to the Chinese. He wrote that “from the beginning of their arrival in China they have never overcome the conceit that blinds them.”34 He told the fathers that not only was the physical distance between China and Europe great, but that their respective rights, customs, philosophy, and literature were all very different and unable to be harmonized. He said it was impossible to make Chinese into Europeans.35 The only thing that they all shared was the Holy Teaching (i.e. Christianity). Qiu used a very traditional Confucian line of reasoning in arguing that the original teaching of Confucius was true and in harmony with Christianity, which he called the Heavenly Teaching (Tianxue ). However, after Confucius died ca. 479 BCE, false teachings arose. Qiu claimed that the first emperor of the Qin dynasty (r. 221–10 BCE) did not understand the will of Heaven.36 He used Daoist magicians to pray to the immortals. He also instituted the practice of sacrificing on Mount Tai and sacrificing with raised hands on nearby Mount Liangfu. This corrupt ritual was continued by the Han dynasty. Because of the destruction of books in the Qin dynasty, the Confucian Classics had been scattered and lost. Gradually, the three Rites Classics (Zhouli , Yili , and Liji ) were reconstituted, but Qiu claimed that they were not fully accurate.37 Erroneous use of the classic Liji was made first by the Han-dynasty usurper Wang Mang (33 BCE–23 CE), then by Su Chuo (498–546), and later by the controversial Song-dynasty reformer Wang Anshi (1021–86). Qiu thought that, whereas the original truth of Confucian teachings were distorted through later literati misinterpretations (including the Neo-Confucian readings of the Song era), Buddhist teachings had been utterly false from the outset. Qiu stressed that prior to the arrival of the missionaries, it was the study of Confucian teachings that kept the Chinese from falling into falsehood. Confucian texts were so embedded in Chinese culture that they could not be disregarded by the missionaries. Page 377 →Chinese began studying Confucian texts at six or seven years of age and later used them as the basis in the examinations to choose officials.38 Qiu believed the fathers did not understand that Confucius was the only one who fully rejected the false teachings that filled China and who cultivated the Lord of Heaven teaching. As a practical matter, Qiu believed that if Confucius were not honored by the fathers, then it would be impossible to get a hearing from the Chinese. In short, Confucian teachings were a necessary ally in the missionaries' struggle to establish Christianity in China. Santa Rosa appears to have misinterpreted the meaning of a gesture of humility that Qiu made to Maigrot at a second meeting in Jiangle. In response to a friendly gesture from Maigrot, Qiu rose from his chair, knelt in front of Maigrot, and asked for his pardon because he was ignorant and uninformed in his argument.39 Santa Rosa interprets this as Qiu conceding the argument on the Chinese rites to Maigrot, but it is clear from Qiu's later

comments that he did not concede the argument and that his act of politeness and respect for Maigrot's priestly office was misinterpreted by a European who did not understand Chinese social conventions. Out of frustration, Qiu withdrew and ceased propagating Christianity among his fellow literati. However, after receiving a friendly letter from a former Jesuit mentor, Carlo Turcotti (Dou Jialu ), now residing in Canton, Qiu Sheng expressed his frustration in a letter written probably in 1702.40 Turcotti had been the Jesuit visitor of China and Japan in 1698–1701 and was appointed vicar apostolic (and titular bishop) of Guizhou in 1696. Qiu said that after Maigrot and Santa Rosa rejected his essay, he became disillusioned, withdrew into his home, and ceased speaking of Rites Controversy issues. He had also stopped encouraging other literati to become Christians. While he observed the standard forms of Chinese politeness and personal humility in speaking of Maigrot, Qiu said it was untrue that he admitted his errors, as Maigrot claimed. Maigrot claimed that Confucius's ideas of serving Heaven and revering Heaven, as well as Confucius's concept of a Supreme Lord, were incompatible with Christianity, but Qiu vehemently disagreed. Qiu explained that Maigrot's objections were baseless. The horizontal tablet with the inscription “jing tian” (revere Heaven) was used by Chinese Christians merely to ward off hostile criticism from curious outsiders.41 Making sacrifices to Confucius did not involve praying to him for happiness. Offering sacrifices to one's ancestors merely involved remembering one's parents and grandparents and not praying to them Page 378 →as spirits. Qiu saw no conflict between these acts and the Ten Commandments. However, Qiu warned that the Incarnation and Crucifixion were difficult to explain to nonbelieving Chinese and these should be the focus of the missionaries' efforts rather than honors to Confucius and the ancestors and revering Heaven. To conclude, it was different views of antiquity that contributed to the Chinese Rites Controversy. Chinese Christians and most Jesuit missionaries saw antiquity as a source of universal values embodied in the truths of natural religion. They were more inclined to accommodate Christianity with the ancient Chinese conception of God (Shangdi) and Chinese rites to ancestors and Confucius. Others (authorities in Rome and non-Jesuit missionaries) viewed antiquity more narrowly in terms of focusing on the Judeo-Greco-Christian tradition as an exclusive source of truth and were less inclined to accept the ancient Chinese conception of God and Chinese rites to ancestors and Confucius as reconcilable with Christianity. In each case, their perspective on the past and the values they derived from that perspective shaped their views of the present.

NOTES 1. D. E. Mungello, The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994), 156–60. Many of these unread documents on the Chinese Rites Controversy in Rome are included in the recently published catalog by Albert Chan, S. J., Chinese Books and Documents in the Jesuit Archives in Rome: A Descriptive Catalogue, Japonica-Sinica I–IV (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002). Other documents are found in the Zikawei Library in Shanghai and the Beitang Library in Beijing. See Adrian Dudink's articles “The Zikawei Collection in the Jesuit Theologate Library at Fujen University (Taiwan): Background and Draft Catalogue,” Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal 18 (1996): 1–40, and “The Chinese Christian Books of the Former Beitang Library,” Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal 26 (2004): 46–59. 2. Hsu Kwan-san, “Historiographical Reviews: The Chinese Critical Tradition,” Historical Journal 26 (1983): 439. 3. Mark Saber Phillips, “Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996): 297–98. 4. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–86. 5. Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and its Modern Fate, 3 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1858, 1964, and 1965). 6. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Tradition and the Classical Historian,” History and Theory 11, no. 3 (1972): 292–93.Page 379 → 7. Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1990), 61 and 65. 8. Han Yu-shan, Elements of Chinese Historiography (Hollywood, CA: W. M. Hawley, 1955), 40. 9. Momigliano, Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, 57–58. 10. Jiangle xianzhi (Record of Jiangle County) (1773), vol. 7, 7 and 12, cited in Lin Jinshui, “Chinese Literati and the Rites Controversy,” in The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning, ed. D. E. Mungello (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994), 66–67. Qiu Sheng's family is said to have also lived for a time in Changshu in Jiangsu province, a part of the prosperous lower Yangzi River region. At the time of Qiu's father's death there was a church of Our Savior and Our Lady in Changshu with a remarkably large parish of 10,000 Catholics and a residence headed by Rougemont. See Chan, Chinese Books and Documents, 47–48. 11. Jiang Hongzao , Zhuji xianzhi (Record of Zhuji County), vol. 21, 48, cited in Lin Jinshui, “Chinese Literati and the Rites Controversy,” 67. 12. Qiu Sheng's biography of his father Qiu Yuezhi, Jap-Sin 112, 160–61, cited in Chan, Chinese Books and Documents, 48. 13. Annual letter of 1663, Jap-Sin 134, cited in Chan, Chinese Books and Documents, 47–48. 14. Sinica Franciscana, vol. 10: Relationes et epistolas s Fratrum Minorum Hispanorum in sinis qui annis 1696–98 missionem ingressi sunt, comp. and ed. Antonius S. Rosso, O. F. M.; prepared for publication and corrected by Frs. Gaspar Han (Han Chengliang) and Antolin Abad, O. F. M. (Madrid: Segretaria della Missioni, 1997), 19. 15. Qiu Sheng, Shuwen bian (Narrating what I have heard) in Yesuhui Luoma dang'anguan Ming Qing tianzhujiao wenxian / Chinese Christian Texts from the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus, vol. 10, ed. Nicolas Standaert and Adrian Dudink (Taipei: Ricci Institute, 2002), 179–362. Qiu Sheng, Minzhong Jiangle xian Qiu xiansheng zhi zhuwei shenfu shu (A letter from Mister Qiu of the Jiangle district of Fujian to the Gentlemen-Fathers), ibid., 163–75. See also the comments on Qiu Sheng in Archie C. C. Lee, “Crosstextual Reading Strategy: A Study of Late Ming and Early Qing Chinese Christian Writings,” Ching Feng 4, no. 1 (2003): 11–15. 16. Peter N. Miller, Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale, 2000), 109 and 115. 17. Miller, Peiresc's Europe, 104. 18. Miller, Peiresc's Europe, 102–12. 19. Miller, Peiresc's Europe, 115. 20. D. E. Mungello, The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650–1785 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 54. 21. Mungello, The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 39–40 and 47, and Nicolas Standaert, ed., Handbook of Christianity in China, vol. 1, 635–1800 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001), 616–18.Page 380 → 22. Claudia von Collani, “Charles Maigrot's Role in the Chinese Rites Controversy,” in The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning, ed. Mungello, 152–54. 23. Collani, “Charles Maigrot's Role in the Chinese Rites Controversy,” 164–67. 24. Fr. Diego de Santa Rosa's letter to Maigrot written at Jiangle, Fujian, on 8 February 1703, in Sinica Franciscana 10:19–20. 25. L. C. Arlington and William Lewisohn, In Search of Old Peking (Beijing: Henri Vetch, 1935), 105–13. 26. Qiu, Minzhong Jiangle xian, 172. 27. Qiu, Minzhong Jiangle xian, 172–73. 28. Mungello, The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 105. 29. Santa Rosa letter to Maigrot of 8 February 1703, in Sinica Franciscana, 10:20. 30. Collani, “Charles Maigrot's Role in the Chinese Rites Controversy,” 159. Li Yifen is also mentioned in Nicolas Standaert, ed., Handbook of Christianity in China. vol. 1, 635–1800, 401 and 423. 31. Collani, “Charles Maigrot's Role in the Chinese Rites Controversy,” 164. There were several versions of the Taiji diagrams. A recent article by François Louis claims that one version of the Taiji diagrams (the eight trigrams surrounding a circle with interlocking yin-yang swirls) did not surface until the Ming dynasty. See his “The Genesis of an Icon: The Taiji Diagram's Early History,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63 (2003): 145–96. 32. Collani, “Charles Maigrot's Role in the Chinese Rites Controversy,” 166. 33. Qiu, Shuwen bian, 185.

34. Qiu, Minzhong Jiangle xian, 165. 35. Qiu, Minzhong Jiangle xian, 166. 36. Qiu, Shuwen bian, 246. 37. Qiu, Shuwen bian, 247. 38. Qiu, Minzhong Jiangle xian, 168. 39. Santa Rosa letter to Maigrot of 8 February 1703, 20. 40. Sinica Lusitana 1 (“Fontes Chinesas em Bibliotecas e Arquivos Portugueses, 1668–1871”) (Lisbon, 2000), 23–25. Adrian Dudink corrects the dating (1668 to probably 1702) and addressee (Francesco Brancati to Carlo Turcotti) in his article “The Japonica-Sinica Collections I–IV in the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus: An Overview,” Monumenta Serica 50 (2002): 510n. 41. Sinica Lusitana 1, 27–28.

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FIFTEEN From Antiquarian Imagination to the Reconstruction of Institutions: Antonius van Dale on Religion Martin Mulsow

Was There Such a Thing as Antiquarian Libertinism? “In the field of religion, the long-standing cooperation between antiquarian and philosopher was disturbed.”1 Such is the verdict of Arnaldo Momigliano about the situation of history of religion during the eighteenth century. How did this disturbance come about? What does “disturbed” mean? Momigliano points to a specifically philosophical type of historiography, which developed increasingly as an independent discipline that emphasized grand theses and narratives rather than detailed scrutiny. “The more philosophic spirits of the age,” Momigliano explains, “found it unnecessary to stoop to collect and interpret literary and non-literary evidence on ancient religion.”2 A separation between philosophical historians and antiquarians developed—a separation also asserted by Edward Gibbon, who himself was able to overcome it in his work.3 The purely “philosophic” historians, however, had no use for the erudition of antiquarians and, as Momigliano points out, had to pay the price: “In the early eighteenth century they lost control of non-literary evidence.”4 What significance, then, does this “disturbance” have for the question: “was there an antiquarian libertinism or a libertine antiquarianism?” Antiquarian libertinism would indicate, like all libertinism, a disposition to free thought, critical to religion as well as beyond conventionally accepted moral norms.5 But it would support its arguments through the application of antiquarian evidence: coins, inscriptions, or objects. On Page 382 →the other hand, libertinism parallels the writing of philosophical history because it breathes a philosophical spirit, and hence may be far away from antiquarianism. Still it is important to make some distinctions here. If philosophers used study of the history of religion during the eighteenth century for their own purposes, they can hardly be said to have been neutral during the seventeenth century when this inquiry first matured. During that period, theologians developed it for their purposes. A look at the terms in use makes that clear: in this context, it was not the neutral term religio that was being used, but idololatria or superstitio instead, much more strongly polemical. Pagan religion, which became the focus of increased interest from the early seventeenth century, was per definitionem the “false religion” in contrast to “true religion.” Yet, it is important to recognize that a relatively objective and scholarly history of religion nonetheless developed behind the back of this polemical and apologetic semantic at the latest in the middle of the seventeenth century: with John Selden, Gerhard Johannes Vossius, Pierre-Daniel Huet, and Samuel Bochart.6 During the late seventeenth century, two developments occur simultaneously. On the one hand the history of religions, which was originally apologetic, began to have a subversive effect on Christianity. The increasing recognition of the interrelation between the Judeo-Christian and pagan religions made Christianity and Judaism less preeminent and exclusive. “A confrontation of the Gods,” in the words of Frank E. Manuel, developed and libertines were able to use this confrontation against Christianity.7 Apart from that and at about just that time, there was a growing awareness that “the study of religion increasingly would have to take non-literary material collected by antiquaries into account.”8 How did these two developments complement each other? Did antiquarianism in fact intensify the confrontation with the gods in religious history? Then we would have to look for an antiquarian libertinism in this critical period. Alternatively, the rift between philosophers and antiquarians may have already prevented antiquarian evidence from reaching those who may have been able to use it in their religious-critical arguments. Were these

then two divergent developments? What seems evident to me, at least, is the fact that around 1700 a certain phenomenon existed, which one might call “philological libertinism.” I am thinking of scholars such as Tanneguy Lefevre, Gilles Menage, Issac Vossius, or Antoine Lancelot, who on the one hand were established and respected as philologists and historians, but on the other Page 383 →hand were open to relatively permissive pranks and subversive theories. This permissiveness certainly peaked with Adriaan Beverland, who developed an explosive mixture of learning, pornography, and criticism of religion.9 The subject of his interest was perfectly antiquarian in nature: the ancient art of prostitution. It was a topic which allowed him to dazzle the reader with erudition. He included biblical themes such as the fall of man, which he interpreted as an encoded report on sexual practices in paradise.10 Beverland, however, did not generally use coins, gems, statues, or inscriptions for his escapades. Only rarely did he make such connections, as in the case of De stolatae virginitatis jure, wherein he refers to an inscription printed by Janus Gruter, recounting the relationship between a eunuch and his mistress.11 Did an antiquarian libertinism or a libertine antiquarianism exist at all? Indeed, I suspect not. So far, I have not discovered a single author who would fit under this rubric. Even Nicolas Fréret, who served as secretary to the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres but was secretly a freethinker, did not use antiquarian evidence in his religious-critical writings.12 One reason for this is certainly that biblical scholarship was nearly exclusively textual,13 requiring only philological criticism, whereas classical antiquity—the main field of antiquarian scholarship—was transmitted through material objects as well. Such objects were stigmatized as pagan, and therefore even freethinkers were rarely willing to present Greco-Roman deities as positive alternatives to Christianity.14 Yet, the study of paganism could indirectly have subversive effects: a detailed analysis of the techniques of priests and miracle-workers, which were exposed as frauds, could suggest that the same was true for the Jewish prophets or Jesus. One could also cut the ties by which Christianity had connected itself with paganism in antiquity as a justification of the truth of the Christian religion: the revelation of the trinity and the prophecies of a Christian God in Hermes and the sibyls, or the rumor that the activities of the oracles ceased with the coming of Christ. This very theory of a fraud and the severing of the mentioned connection appear in the writings of Antonius van Dale (1638–1708), a physician from Haarlem.15 He has occasionally been accused of libertinism, especially since Fontenelle popularized his book on pagan oracles in 1686.16 At the same time, Van Dale belongs to that category of scholar who made the step from historical-philological pursuits to antiquarianism. Does the case of Van Dale constitute evidence that antiquarian libertinism actually existed? In the following paper I will try to investigate this question, but I can Page 384 →already say that I do not come to a positive conclusion. Van Dale was neither a freethinker—he was a devoted Christian—nor did he employ his antiquarianism for a “philosophical” narrative. Instead, I believe that the relationship between antiquarianism and libertinism was an indirect one. This means: it was the seriousness and Unparteilichkeit of antiquarianism that made use of some of its findings for libertine purposes so attractive. Van Dale became interested in ancient prophecy mainly for two reasons. The first one had to do with his medical education. In 1661, he wrote a dissertation on “hysterical” passions (De passione hysterica) and he thus had some knowledge about the psychic background of ecstatic and presumably visionary behavior. The second reason lay in his religious roots in the Mennonites and Collegiants. Among the Dutch group of the Collegiants it was customary for members to express themselves freely during services. This was called “free prophecy” (het vrije spreken; they spoke about their libertas prophetandi).17 An interest in earlier forms of prophecy would therefore be expected. It was tempting for Collegiants to assume that “free prophecy” had already been practiced among early Christians, since the early church and its customs served as their model. Van Dale's research, however, did not lead to a confirmation of this assumption. Unimpressed by the interests of his group he nonetheless published his negative findings, which made him quite unpopular among several of his Collegiant colleagues.18 Evidently he cared little about that. He was convinced that Christianity did not need historically untenable evidence.19 In another instance, he showed that numerous Christians served in the Roman military and were nevertheless tolerated by many of their brothers in faith, although Van Dale's friends who were pacifists would have liked to see that all early

Christians refused service.20In terms of dogmatics, Van Dale was a minimalist. When a visitor, Christoph August Heumann, came to his house in 1705, he told him: “One has to believe, there is a God, and he is the one who rewards those who seek for him. And the rule of life is: what you want that others do to you, do to others. The first is fides, the second religio. I do not state any more requisites of religion.”21 Besides, following Plutarch, he believed that superstition was worse than atheism—like his friend Pierre Bayle.22 In 1703 he told another visitor: “Superstitionem impugnandam esse religionem pie servandam”—one needs to fight superstition in order to keep religion pious.23 For these reasons, Van Dale gradually became an expert in ancient Page 385 →religious and social customs. He was an author with a prolific pen. None of his books numbered fewer than 500 pages. During the more than twenty-five years of his intensive study of Greek and Roman religion, he published four monumental volumes: in 1683 the On the oracles of the ancient pagans (De oraculis veterum ethnicorum) with its 500 pages, in 1696 the Dissertations on the origin and dissemination of idolatry and superstition (Dissertationes de origine ac progressu ideolatriae et superstitionem—750 pages), in 1702 the Nine dissertations in order to illustrate Roman and especially Greek antiques and marbles (Dissertationes novem antiquitatibus quin et marmoribus cum Romanis potissimum Graecis illustrandis inservientes—800 pages) and finally, in 1705, his Dissertation on Aristeas about the seventy Bible translators (Dissertatio super Aristea de LXX interpretibus) again of 500 pages.24

Antiquarian Imagination: A Panopticon of Idolatry We shall not concern ourselves with each of Van Dale's arguments, but instead look at their framework and the practices Van Dale used when he developed them. With regard to their framework, they cover Greco-Roman “idolatry” or “superstition” in general—the entire spectrum of phenomena such as oracles, sacrifices, prophecies, rites, and prayers. John Toland pointedly argued that the title of Van Dale's second book should not have been The Origin and the Dissemination of Idolatry, but instead A Complete Collection of the Most Ancient forms of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian Superstition, since the book itself has little to say about the origin of idolatry.25 Preceding Van Dale, this undertaking in its full breadth had already been attempted by Gerhard Johannes Vossius. Vossius's interest also focused on idolatry in its various manifestations. Hence on the frontispiece of the Frankfurt edition of Vossius's On pagan theology and Christian physics, or on the origin and dissemination of idolatry (De theologia gentili et physiologia christiana, sive de origine ac progressu idolatriae), which was published in 1668, Johann Philip Thelott had tried to capture the diversity of idolatrous cults26 (fig. 1). Based on Maimonides's thesis—so important for Vossius—that idolatry originated from the worship of celestial bodies, Thelott's piece showed the entrance to some sort of temple (a dark cave more precisely) in which human beings are worshipping the sun, moon, and stars. The foreground of these celestial bodies shows strange idols. Engraved in the columns and pedestals are illegible letters. Incense rises Page 386 →from special containers and fills the cave, and an ox is being led to sacrifice. The worship of celestial bodies constitutes what Van Dale called “chaldaeism,” because it originated in the astral cults of the Chaldeans.27 In Van Dale's book on oracles, the first of its seven copper engravings shows a similar panorama28 (fig. 2). It obviously follows the tradition of personifying virtues and vices which was popular in the Netherlands from the 1560s onward.29 Artists such as Maarten van Heemskerck, Page 387 →Philipps Galle, Dirk Coornhert, Hendrik Goltzius, Otto van Veen, and Hendrik Hondius had introduced certain styles which would continue to dominate most engravings until the end of the seventeenth century. The above-mentioned image in Van Dale's work shows a bewildering opulence of figures, which upon closer inspection are composed of a group in the front, numerous smaller groups in the middle and scenery in the back, which is separated by a wall.30 The front group shows the personifications of hypocrisy (hypocrisis), ambition (ambitio), and fraud (fraus). Hypocrisy (which mostly had to be understood in religious terms) is portrayed as a masked woman, who holds a book and whose feet are replaced by those of a wolf. Ambition appears as a lady with a mirror and a crown. Fraud is depicted as a magnificently dressed woman with serpents in her hair. Her five breasts splash milk into the jaws of a serpent and she carries both a sphinx and possibly a Pegasus—two fabulous creatures—under her arms. The picture's iconography is not entirely conventional: the portrayal which is here used for hypocrisy was often also used for images depicting

lying or fraud, which—according to Ripa—appeared with a mask. Hondius is an example for such a use31 (fig. 3). On the other Page 388 →hand, fraud here bears attributes which are conventionally used for envy, such as the serpents in its hair. This suggests that perhaps Van Dale has changed some of the connotations of the allegories.

Whichever might be the case, most interesting are the figures who appear with these women. Hypocrisy keeps two creatures on a chain: superstition (superstitio) and credulity (credulitas). Superstition appears as a strange hybrid, a blindfolded creature with dragon wings and a set of antlers on its head. Since it cannot see, it takes for real what hypocrisy hands to it, although these are actually just shadows. Credulity is portrayed in the iconographic image of fortune, which again suggests a shift in representation. Below her appear her numerous followers—priests of any possible culture and era. In front of the figure of fraud and hypocrisy, stupidity appears huddled up, which in this particular case is called indifference (segnities) and leans on a donkey. She testifies to the words of those above her. The meaning of the picture is quite clear. It represents the complex psychological structure of fraud and superstition, which takes both Page 389 →sides—the active and the passive—into consideration. Religious hypocrisy in collaboration with striving for power, as well as fraudulent machinations, fools the world's credulity. It fakes a fantasy world of religious phenomena, which the people blindly accept as real, impassive followers embracing it and fanatics actively urging others toward it. In the light of this structure, one needs to look at the real historical phenomena of pagan religion in the middle ground. “More from afar,” as the picture's introduction claims, can be seen the oracles of Trophonius, Dordones, or Apis. Worship of emperors, statues, and all different kinds of idols, temples, sacrifices, and pyramids—an entire panopticon of superstitious beliefs and practices—presents itself to the viewer's eyes. At the horizon appear the wonders of the world. Only one scene in the background remains separated by a wall: Calvary, the path of the cross leading to the “gates of truth,” in the imagery of the contemporary “Tabula Cebetis” illustrations.32 The illustrator here apparently uses etchings by Hendrik Goltzius as his model. According to Van Dale, God revealed himself solely through the Bible, which explains why the wall functions as a poignant symbol for the separation of true religion versus idolatry, a difference which Jan Assmann calls the “Mosaic distinction” of monotheism.33 It is not quite certain if in fact Van Dale specifically commissioned this engraving for his work or if he somehow adopted it. The reinterpretation of the iconography as well as the fact that many figures are assigned little numbers which do not match any entry in the picture's legend suggest that it might have been adopted from somewhere else. It is therefore of a certain importance to identify the artist who has designed the illustrations. There is no hint on him in the literature on Van Dale—which is not abundant anyway—but after some research it is possible to identify him as Romeyn de Hooghe, probably the most important Dutch etcher in the years around 1700.34 In de Hooghe, antiquarian interests convene with certain liberal attitudes.35 These attitudes are evident in his political caricatures and in the fact that he did not abstain from illustrating pornographic works.36 In their shared interests in antiquarianism as well in their intellectual independence, Van Dale and de Hooghe could find common ground. It seems that de Hooghe took some liberties in designing the panopticum of idolatry for Van Dale's book, though, more than in the case of the other illustrations, which appear to be conducted more according to the scholar's directions. Moreover, the panopticum is much closer to its late sixteenth-century models. The engraving would actually fit much better Page 390 →in Van Dale's general On the origin and dissemination of idolatry and superstition rather than his more specific study of oracles because it is much harder to present its theses into an appropriate imagery. In this book on oracles, Van Dale argues that they were not caused by demons and that they did not cease with the coming of Christ. Both theses clashed with the common orthodox belief.

Antiquarian Persuasion: The Techniques of the Oracle Priesthood Another central theme of Van Dale's book on oracles was that the ancient priesthood invented and cultivated oracles as a fraud against the common people. This idea of religious imposture was widespread in the late

seventeenth century, especially in deistic and freethinking circles, because it did not stop short of Christianity as well. It appeared in the writings of Herbert of Cherbury and in treatises such as De tribus impostoribus. 37 More moderate scholars therefore remained reluctant to use these types of analyses, which had the potential to turn against their own religion. Van Dale, however, was in contact with radical circles like that of the brothers Bredenburg from the Collegiants, and did not hesitate to ponder these ideas and to incorporate them into his view of antiquity.38 Van Dale's sixth illustration suggestively shows how the fraud theory worked with regard to oracles39 (fig. 4). The example presented does not involve the Delphic oracle but that of Trophonius, which was located in a cave in the vicinity of Lebadeia in Boeotia.40 Van Dale based most of the information for his description of the events on the writings of Pausanias. But let us first take a look at the illustration. It shows that the person seeking council had already arrived at the cave. After he is exposed to smoke scented with thyme, which may certainly have clouded his conscience, he was presented with images, mirrors, and vocal tones; in order to shock the victim, the intensity of the voices and sounds could easily be increased by putting small pipes to a person's ears; this could trigger a superstitious reaction. Obviously a number of other priests who attend to the spectacle are present in the cell as well—a fact that was “essential for these kinds of deception,” as Van Dale writes. Neighboring cells depict the murder of other potential clients, who entered the cave without the priests' permission. After this psychological treatment, the person seeking council is pulled again to the top by means of the same slide, which had previously assisted him into the cave. Not yet fully conscious, the Page 391 →person is then led to the “throne of memory,” where the priests question him about his visual and sensual experiences. During this procedure a painter captures the narrative on a plate. The events which Van Dale describes constitute a genuine brainwashing. They rival the practices of the Inquisition. A look at the original text by Pausanias illustrates the extent to which Van Dale rendered what was in essence a fairly neutral description of these events by Pausanias as something approaching criminal practice.41 Pausanias's narrative begins with the description of ritual bathing of the seeker in the river Herkyna, where two Hermai embalm him. Already at this point Van Dale suspects a fraudulent scheme of psycho-technics, which he reads in the description of the ritual. The influence of certain herbal essences on the body, and through the body on the spirit, comes to his mind. To support his claim he refers to the findings of Pier Andrea Mattioli, an authority in the medical field, who described how certain ointments could trigger certain conditions of mental illness.42 Page 392 → Pausanias then continues in his book with the description of the actual oracle. Accordingly, the oracle's core was located in an artificially constructed hole in the ground which closely resembled a big stove; no specific entrance existed. The potential client had to squeeze himself into the hole, while lying on the ground and holding two honey-baked cakes in his hands. This scene is shown in the engraving in Van Dale's book on the upper right corner. However, Pausanias barely tells us about what happens in the cave. He only mentions that some people have a visual experience whereas others a sensual one. No mention is made of the mechanical apparatus of images, mirrors, and pipes, which are all Van Dale's additions.43 Pausanias only tells us that afterward the person, who is “still under shock and not fully aware of himself,” was pulled up again and put onto the throne of memory. Van Dale's description certainly does not pass for an accurate antiquarian reconstruction at all. However, I surely do not want to convey the impression that Van Dale treated his ancient testimonies without care. On the contrary, he proceeds meticulously and extensively in the discussion of the different pieces of evidence upon which he based his argument. If he nonetheless sounds occasionally like Lucian's Alexander, then this is due to his general suspicion about the role of the priesthood. But a major reason for successfully bringing the complex and detailed written work into poignant formulas is certainly the illustrations. It seems to me important not to underestimate the impact of pictures like this on the overall reception of the argument as a whole. This constitutes a classic case of “Proof and Persuasion,” of regulated persuasion which accompanies the process of the argument.44

The real practices, however, which Van Dale uses in his argument are, first of all, philological in nature: he collects textual evidence, compares them with each other, eliminates whatever seems less likely, and provides alternative interpretative schemes. If this process is compared, for example, to the approach of Johannes Lomeier, an orthodox colleague of Van Dale's, then there are really very few technical differences. Even the engravings are similar, especially since one of Lomeier's shows a group of credulous pagan priests, too. The difference is only that these priests are terrified by lightning and therefore rush to make sacrifices—a Lucrecian model rather than Van Dale's Lucianic one45 (fig. 5). But Van Dale's technique changes in the course of his work: he gradually starts to include inscriptions as the basis for his argument. Van Dale's strategy of including epigraphic evidence in his argument becomes quite clear in his small treatise on pagan consecrations, which was added to Page 393 →the second edition of his work on oracles in 1700. By that time, Van Dale had already moved up from being a mere autodidact interested in ancient material to an acceptable member of the scholarly community. His induction into this community was due mainly to Theodor Jansson van Almeloveen, whom Van Dale befriended in 1685.46 His increasing Page 394 →contact with the Dutch antiquarian elite seemed to go hand in hand with his more intense study of nonliteral material. In the second edition of his work, Van Dale admitted that his section on consecrations still needed more clarification. This led him to improve his presentation of the different forms of observance by including epigraphic evidence. To take one detail, he presents several inscriptions to make the case that some temples were dedicated to multiple deities. He refers here to Claude Nicaise's treatise on the pantheon-coin47 and uses illustrations from Thomas Reinesius's Inventory of ancient inscriptions (Syntagma inscriptionum antiquarum) which show a temple that was dedicated to the sun, the moon, the god Silvanus, as well as a guardian spirit:48 SOLI LUNAE SILVANO. ET GENIO & c. Van Dale takes other examples from Janus Gruter's Inscriptions of the whole ancient Roman world (Inscriptiones antiquae totius orbis Romani) and Jacques Spon's Miscellany of learned antiquity (Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis).49 This shows that he tried to demonstrate how temporary and locally confined different practices of consecration actually were. The impulse of his argument aims at differentiating, not at polemic nor at a specific sort of enlightenment. Van Dale metamorphoses from a proponent of the enlightenment into an antiquarian and from a pure philologist into a classical scholar who is equally skilled in dealing with objects.

Real Antiquarianism: Religious Institutions The Nine dissertations in order to illustrate Roman and especially Greek antiques and marbles, which were published in 1702, undoubtedly mark the highlight of this development. Since he was now embedded in a considerable network of scholars, he was able to draw upon their knowledge and sources for this project. Apart from Almeloveen, Van Dale had established contacts with Gisbert Cuper, the erudite scholar from Deventer, whose coin collection and treasure of books he was able to use50 (fig. 6). Van Dale himself lacked by far the resources to acquire an extensive collection of coins or books. In addition to Almeloveen and Cuper, he maintained contacts with Johann Georg Graevius, the philologist and antiquarian from Utrecht who supported Cartesianism and who, like Bayle, was involved in the “comets controversy”;51 with the quarrelsome Page 395 →Latinist and Graecist Jacob Perizonius from Leyden; and with the Hebraist Adriaan Reland, whose work focused on biblical antiquities.52 It was just about the same type of circle which one would meet in Nicolas Chevalier's cabinet of antiques and wonders and which Anne Goldgar described so beautifully in her work.53 This cabinet contained not only the horns of rhinoceroses or Brazilian lizards, but also ancient statues and medallions.54 Although Van Dale still considered himself a relative novice by comparison with the experts, he had become more or less fluent in their mode of discourse.55 After his visit to Van Dale in 1703, where he was offered an “excellent glass of wine,” Gottlieb Stolle described him as a slim man with average build, who did not “get stuck on philology,” but who cultivated a cordial relationship with both scholars as well as with “dissenters.”56 Van Dale introduces his book with the assertion that, after reading Spanheim's On the advantage and use of ancient coins (De praestantia et usu numismatum antiquorum), his interest was aroused and he wanted to write

something similar. What Spanheim had done with coins, Van Dale wanted to do with inscriptions.57 Spanheim in fact had developed a plan to reconstruct Greek religion with the help of numismatic studies,58 but the project never really got under way. For Van Dale this added the charm of attempting something nobody had actually tried before, especially since he believed that evidence provided by inscriptions was superior to that of coins when it came to the study of antiquity—although coins, he admitted, were particularly useful when one faced more complex problems.59 Van Dale quotes from Spanheim's conversation with Marquard Gudius, recorded in his On the advantage and use, in which Spanheim claims programmatically with regards to the role of numismatics: From it and practically from nowhere else should the different religious rites be researched; the covenant formula; the laws, duties and decisions of the magistrates; the genres, guidelines and functions of the colleges, bodies and professions; the offices of the imperial household; the titles in public life; many institutions in war and peace; additionally the rights of deceased souls; the monuments of the mutual duties of parents, spouses and children and of cultivated decency; finally the names, age, the lineages of the most noble parts of the people, which are somewhat individually described on public tables.60 Van Dale adopted these ideas from Spanheim's monumental work, applied them to epigraphy, and put them into practice for the study of Page 396 →Greek and Roman religion. The nine parts of his book examine the role of the priesthood in the sacrifice of bulls in the Cybeline cults of late antiquity, which were already influenced by Christianity; the institution of the pontifex maximus and his deputy; the offices and titles of the provincial priesthood (Archieregsi); the asiarchs; the neokoroi and the neokoric cities; the crown bearers (stephanephoroi); the pyrtanes and strategoi; the council of the Amphiktyones; the gymnasiarches; the thiases; and finally the oregonoi, offices which Theodor Mommsen studied, as well as the exact meaning of many things which remain unclear to this day.61 Page 397 → The simplistic fraud theory, which had been the incentive for Van Dale's studies in the 1670s, now turned—apart from his studies on the transmission of the biblical texts and their corruptions62—into the more complex and different program of an institutional history of ancient Greek religion. The epigraphic material, which had been available since Janus Gruter's, Thomas Reinesius's, Jacques Spon's, and Lorenz Beger's comprehensive thesauruses, provided abundant evidence for the different priestly offices, whose distinction with regard to their precise function remained anything but an easy task.63 One example would be the neokoroi. The expression was used for specific low-ranked priestly officials, who were nonetheless well-respected.64 A scholar researching oracles, as was the case with Van Dale, would easily run into them, because they were mentioned quite frequently in Delphic inscriptions. But the tasks and functions of the neokoroi were not always the same; they differed widely. In order to get more precise information about them, it was necessary to compare evidence and testimonies of different origin. Occasionally, when confronted with a complex problem, Van Dale chose to consult numismatic material. With the neokoroi this was the case once it became clear that the term was also used as an honorary title for cities. Under Roman dominance these cities had been specifically decorated in the provincial imperial cult. One important question that occupied scholars during Van Dale's time was whether cities, which possessed this title several times, had received them during the reign of one single emperor or simply over the course of time and under the reign of different rulers. Jean-Foy Vaillant, the numismatic expert from Paris, supported the latter theory and so did scholars such as Albert Rubens, Spanheim, and Graevius.65 Gispert Cuper represented the first of the two theories; Van Dale agreed with him, drawing not only on inscriptions but also on coins (fig. 7). The interpretation of coins, however, caused problems especially with regard to the correct reading of the different letters on the coins, Page 398 →since these could sometimes also denote numbers; a gamma, for example, could also mean three times, and a delta could mean four times. In a letter to him, Cuper, however, drew Van Dale's

attention to an alternative way of reading which Spanheim preferred to use: he would read the delta as dis (twice), not as tetrakis. Jean Hardouin in his interpretation of the coins of Elagabal and Valerian, on the other hand, thought that the delta meant tetrakis.66

In another instance, when Van Dale examined the institution of the priestly offices in the provinces, he—like Spanheim before him67—arrived at the subject of Christian as well as pagan metropolitans, which means whatever relates to a metropolis, a principal city, or an ecclesiastical province. A metropolitan or “metropolite” was an early archbishop in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire.68 In these cases it happens that Latin terms appear occasionally in Greek inscriptions. This led again to imprecise readings. As an example, Van Dale used an inscription by Lucius Julius Bonnatus which is quoted in Spon's Miscellanea. In this particular case, the use of the genitive in the sentence, which depends on the term “agonothetes” (some form of referee) seems ambiguous, because it Page 399 →is not clear if the term had to be read as diarion or diasion.69 Inscriptions are often incomplete and in this particular scenario one could not be sure if it was to be read in Greek or in Latin. Whereas diaria means “daily rations”—its use was possible both in civilian or military context—diasia refers to a particular feast in honor of Zeus. Therefore it depends on how the passage in question is read if the inscription is to be ascribed to a referee of gladiators, to daily rations, or even to the organizers of a feast. Van Dale corresponded with Gisbert Cuper and with Jacob Perizonius about this particular problem and compared it to a number of similar inscriptions before he decided that he would prefer the reading of diarion as gladiator. Cuper responded that he nonetheless believed that the passage in question referred to diarion in the sense of daily ration despite the fact that the dictionary entries in both Meursius and Du Cange suggest the later connotation in the sense of Christian salaries, which are financial rations in the civil sector that were given to communities in need;70 he refers to Ulpian who used the expression in the context of food rationing.71 Cuper's response then led Van Dale into more distant paths, such as the legal-historical studies of Jacques Cujas on Cyprinanus's passages on sportulis, food baskets.72 Spon's belief that the inscription referred to a military leader who distributed rations among his soldiers, therefore, became untenable. On the other hand, Perizonius informed Van Dale that the term diaria, if used with regard to rations, referred only to daily and constant allowances and not to specific or temporary ones. Therefore, he (Perizonius) himself leaned toward the term diasion, since he believed that it referred to the context of a feast. According to Perizonius, the title Agonothetes was customarily in use with regards to games and feasts such as those in honor of Jupiter and Mars. In the end, Perizonius concludes with some reflections on principle: But it is difficult to find truth if one has to guess the correct reading in the case of poorly copied inscriptions; since much of the information that was handed down does not appear anywhere else. That is not surprising, since they often contain specific rites of various cities about which we know little or nothing. And especially because that is not known, the most and most important parts have been reproduced poorly by those who copied the inscriptions.73 All these discussions are concerned with miniscule details—but that is exactly the essence of antiquarian work: the devotion to the inconspicuous Page 400 →detail (“Andacht zum Unbedeutenden”), the attitude—later expounded by Aby Warburg—that “the dear God lives in the detail.”74The skeptical remark by Perizonius addresses in this context a painful problem from which this particular discourse suffers. It is, if you will, the dark side of the hermeneutical circle: lacking both contextual knowledge and possessing copies of only poor quality—the second a function of the first, really. Perizonius thus became a representative of a moderate historical Pyrrhonism,75 and it was evident that playing antiquarian evidence against the insecure textual kind was no solution to the problems of our historical knowledge. The skill of interpreting inscriptions—as Perizonius's German colleague Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling put it—was also “deceptive and uncertain.”76 It is important for our argument to recognize how this discourse worked and how it did not. The antiquarian discourse was cumulative, because each collection of inscriptions supplemented the one preceding it; it was nonpartisan and focused on individual details, especially due to its skeptical basis.77 In this respect it was far from the narratives of the philosophical historians of the eighteenth century, which consisted of individual drafts,

focusing on definite and general statements and which, according to Momigliano, interfered in the relationship between antiquarianism and religion. To conclude: Ralph Häfner has justifiably pointed out that “Dale's work plunged Christian humanism into a crisis.”78 It did so because the common procedures of assimilating the Christian-Jewish tradition and paganism by means of allegorical, etymological, and chronological mechanisms were no longer accepted by Van Dale. I would even go so far as to claim that the sober and impassionate spirit of antiquarianism in combination with the Collegiant ethos of truth triggered this crisis. As a result, we have the paradox of the disruption of the relationship between antiquarianism and philosophical history in the field of religious scholarship because of the most thorough application of the spirit of antiquarianism. Pagan religious history became liberated from Christian humanism and was no longer incorporated into the apologetic discourse. It thus also became available to the libertine for the philosophical reconstruction of forms of human culture and a non-Christian “Altertumswissenschaft.” John Toland, who was always well-informed about Van Dale's projects, testified to the enormous authority Van Dale obtained through his unbiased antiquarianism: “We therefore should expect […] reports […] Page 401 →which are not only told with the utmost openness, but with greatest impartiality as well; although Mr. Vandale [sic] himself, with regards to his profession of faith, was a Mennonite, or Anabaptist as we call them, he nonetheless loves truth as well as his friends passionately. I myself do not know anybody else who surpasses him in that.”79 It was not only his theory of fraud, committed by the priesthood, which made Van Dale's work attractive to libertines and freethinkers, but more so the circumstance that his authority had been confirmed within an impartial—namely antiquarian—context. The character of Toland's learning, on the contrary is, like Fontenelle's, of parasitic nature: both tended to adopt material from others, which they used to create their own philosophical narrative.80 If one takes a look at the history of reception of Van Dale's work, however, one would soon run, in Momigliano's terms, into the disruption of the relationship between philosophers and antiquarians. Since Fontenelle “discovered” it, On the oracles of the ancient pagans, unlike the antiquarian Nine dissertations, became a sort of cult book. This milieu was particularly interested in those passages which referred to particular events from the Bible: one of them for example was Van Dale's explanation of the incantation of the dead by the sorceress from Endor, recorded in 1 Samuel 28, in which Van Dale denies the involvement of the devil.81 Fréret picked up just about where Van Dale had left off. When the young Montesquieu went to Paris around 1710 and attended the circles of Fontenelle, Fréret, and Boulainvilliers, he wrote treatises on the idolatry of pagans, on Les Dieux animaux, Les pretres dans le paganisme, and Sur la politique des Romains dans la religion, which were all topics prominent among freethinkers and which at the same time drew heavily on the antiquarian discourse.82 But the rift between them and the antiquarians who were engaged in a dialogue with historians, as Francis Haskell puts it, became more profound.83 Not only do Momigliano's findings in Dupuis, Boulanger, or Court de Gébelin confirm these observations,84but also those by Winfried Schröder, who claims that many anti-Christian clandestine writings were not au courant with contemporary scholarly discourse.85 Schröder's observation in the field of the natural sciences is equally true for antiquarianism. The question then remains, which of the two had the more profound secularizing impact: the direct attack launched by libertines and philosophical historians or the emancipation of antiquity from Christianity to become a totally autonomous field of scholarly study? Page 402 →

NOTES 1. See Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–313, here 308. 2. Ibid., 310. 3. See Edward Gibbon, Essai sur l'étude de la littérature (Dublin: Hallhead, 1767). 4. Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” 311. 5. On the distinction between free-thinking and morally free behavior see Margaret Jacob, “The Materialist

World of Pornography,” in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone, 1993), 157–202; Inger Leemans, Het Woord is aan de Onderkant. Radicale Ideeen in nederlandse pornografische Romans 1670–1700 (Utrecht: Vantilt, 2002). 6. See for instance Guy G. Stroumsa, “John Spencer and the Roots of Idolatry,” History of Religions 40 (2001): 1–23; Martin Mulsow, “John Seldens ‘De Diis Syris’: Idolatriekritik und vergleichende Religionsgeschichte im 17. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 3 (2001): 1–24; Jonathan Sheehan: “The Sacred and the Profane: Idolatry, Antiquarianism, and the Politics of Distinction in the Seventeenth Century,” Past and Present 192 (2006): 35–66. 7. Frank K. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). 8. Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” 309. 9. Adriaan Beverland, De prostibulis veterum; on this manuscript work see Rudolf de Smet, Hadrianus Beverlandus (1650–1716). Nun unus e multis peccator. Studie over het leven en werk van Hadriaan Beverland (Brüssel: Paleis der Academiën, 1988). On “philological libertinism” see Martin Mulsow, Decorum and Disorder: The Republic of Letters 1550–1750 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming). 10. Adriaan Beverland, De peccato originali (Leiden: Gaesbeck, 1679). 11. Beverland, De stolatae virginitatis jure lucubratio academica (Leiden: Lindan, 1680), 34: “Majori jure Spado apud Gruterum: DOMINAE, ET CONJUGI KARISSIMAE, OB EXIMIAM ERGA SE PUDICITIAM.” 12. On Fréret see vol. 29 (1995) of the journal Corpus; Edward Gibbon praises Fréret, in chap. 9, n. 86, of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as being a good combination of antiquarian and philosopher. I am grateful to Wilfried Nippel for this reference. 13. Of course since the Victorine biblical exegetes had done their best to recreate the material world within which the biblical histories unrolled. See, e.g., Jim Bennett and Scott Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Museum of the History of Science in association with the Bodleian Library, 1998). 14. But see the suspicions of being neopagan toward the Accademia Romana around Pomponio Leto. See Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10ff. 15. On Van Dale see Meindert Evers, “Die ‘Orakel’ von Antonius van Dale (1638–1708): Eine Streitschrift, ” Lias 8 (1981): 225–67; Martin Pott, Page 403 →Aufklärung und Aberglaube. Die deutsche Frühaufklärung im Spiegel ihrer Aberglaubenskritik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 207–13; Hans Bots, ed., Pieter Rabus en de Boekzaal van Europe 1690–1702. Verkenningen binnen de Republiek der Letteren in het laatste kwart van de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Holland University Press, 1974); Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 361–74; Ralph Häfner, Götter im Exil: Frühneuzeitliches Dichtungsverständnis im Spannungsfeld christlicher Apologetik und philologischer Kritik (ca. 1590–1736) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003), 379–409. 16. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Histoire des oracles (sec. l, Paris: de Luyne, 1686). 17. See Andrew Fix, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 18. See the letters from Van Dale to his co-Collegiant J. J. Akkerman, Universitätsbibliothek Amsterdam, MS J 32, and to J. Oudaan, Universitätsbibliothek Leiden, Codex Papenbroek 2. 19. See Evers, “Orakel,” 235. 20. See Evers, “Orakel,” 234f. 21. Christoph August Heumann, “Travel Diary,” in Ausführliche Lebensbeschreibung des um die gelehrte Welt hochverdienten D. Christoph August Heumanns, Georg Andreas Cassius (Cassel: Cramer, 1768), 80: “man müsse glauben, esse Deum, eumque remuneratorem illorum, qui ipsum quaerunt; und die regula vitae sey: quod tibi vis fieri, alteri facias. Jenes sey fides, dieses religio. Mehr requisita religionis statuire er nicht.” 22. See Pierre Bayle, Pensees diverses sur la comete (Rotterdam: Leers, 1694). Van Dale was in friendly conversation with Bayle—see note 54.

23. Gottlieb Stolle, Reisejournal (Travel Diary), MS Mf 7330 of the University Library Breslau (Wroclaw), 416: “Plutarchus habe in seinem buche de superstitione gewiesen: daß superstitio ärger sey als Atheismus. dieser meinung sey er auch: superstitionem (sagte er) impugnandam esse religionem pie servandam.” See Plutarch, De superstitione, ed. G. Lozza (Milano: Guerini, 1989). 24. De oraculis veterum ethnicorum (Amsterdam: Boom, 1683; 2nd ed. Amsterdam: Boom, 1700); Dissertationes de origine ac progressu ideololatriae et superstitionum (Amsterdam: Boom, 1696); Dissertationes novem antiquitatibus quin et marmoribus cum Romanis potissimum Graecis illustrandis inservientes (Amsterdam: Boom, 1702); Dissertatio super Aristea de LXX interpretibus (Amsterdam: Wolters, 1705). 25. John Toland, Letters to Serena (London: Lintot, 1704). 26. Gerhard Johannes Vossius, De theologia gentili et physiologia christiana sive de origine ac progressu idololatriae (Frankfurt: Waechtler, 1668). 27. Van Dale, De origine ac progessu, 63ff. and passim; Moses Maimonides, De idololatria (Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1641). 28. The etchings are not signed. On the identity of the etcher, see below. 29. See in general Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London: Collins, 1987). More specific, Ilya Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck and Dutch Humanism in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Michael Hoyle (Amsterdam: Gary Schwartz, 1977); Ilya Veldman, Page 404 →De Wereld tussen Goed en Kwaad: Late Prenten van Coornhert (The Hague: SDU Uitgevers, 1990). 30. Van Dale, De oraculis, illustration 1, 1. The caption reads: “In anteriori parte tabulae stant Fraus & Hypocrisis & Ambitio; quae Ambitio fere latet post alias istas: ex quibus Hypocrisis catenis sibi devinctas habet Credulitatem semper mutabilem, cuique asseclae cujuscumque aetatis ac conditionis stant a tergo: sicut & caecam superstitionem, cui Fraus, seu Deceptio, pro veris corporibus, umbras tradit in manus; quas illa gratanter accipit: dum simul segnietes, quae nihil ipsa scrutatur, ad Fraudis atque Hypocriseos pedes, in ipsarum verba jurat. Magis procul sese conspectui dant Oracula, Trophonii, Dodones, Apidis, &c. At ultra ista septum; ad cujus portam, quae Veritas est, Virtutes Prudentia ac Constantia, victoribus illorum errorum viam ostendunt ad veram Doctrina mac Sapientiam indeque ad veram Beatitudinem: ad quam illos porro ducunt Doctrina, Religio, Constantia, Fortitudo, Spes aliaeque virtutes; quae illos simul adjuvant.” 31. See Henrik Hondius, The Lie, Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, cabinet of engravings; Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Roma: Gigliotti, 1593). 32. See Reinhart Schleier, Tabula Cebetis oder “Spiegel des Menschlichen Lebens, darinn Tugent und untugent abgemalet ist”: Studien zur Rezeption einer antiken Bildbeschreibung im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Mann, 1973). See especially the engravings by Golzius there, where there also is a Fortuna as a personification of vice. On Golzius see the catalog Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617): Drawings, Prints and Paintings (Zwolle: Waanders, 2003). 33. See Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 34. On Van Hooghe see John Landwehr, Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708) as Book Illustrator (Amsterdam: Vangendt, 1970); idem, Romeyn de Hooghe the Etcher, Contemporary Portrayal of Europe 1662–1707 (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1973). 35. For his antiquarian interests see his illustrations of the works of Johann Kirchheim on ancient religion, or Servatius Gallaeus, Dissertationes de sibyllis, earum oraculis, cum figuris aeneis (Amsterdam: Boom, 1688). For the political and satirical works see Gerhard Langemeyer, “‘Aesopus in Europa.’ Bemerkungen zur politisch-satirischen Graphik des Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1706)” (PhD diss., University of Münster, 1973); Wolfgang Cilleßen, ed., Krieg der Bilder. Druckgraphik als Medium politischer Auseinandersetzung im Europa des Absolutismus (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 1997). 36. Inger Leemanns (see note 5 above), esp. 281–83. 37. See Giorgio Spini, Richerca dei libertini. La teoria dell' impostura delle religioni nel Seicento italiano (Roma: Editrice universale, 1950); Israel, Radical Enlightenment, passim. 38. See Louis van Bunge, Johannes Bredenburg (1643–1691), een Rotterdamse Collegiant in de ban van Spinoza (Rotterdam: Erasmus University Press, 1990); Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 342–58. 39. De oraculis (see note 24 above), 195, illustration 6. The caption reads: “Interiora antri Trophonii cum

suis cellis ac fornicibus, etc. 1. Consultor jam in antrum Trophonii protractus. 2. Ipsi, post mentem obnubilatam ac turbatam, Page 405 →picturae et specula exhibita, vocesque auribus ingestae. 3. Ipsae picturae ac specula adhibita. 4. Tubae, ad horrendum sonitum, adeoque et terrorum superstitiosum, excitandum: per quas ei talia, quae in rem ipsorum erant, ingerebant. 5. Thymiamata mentis obnubilationi adaugendae apposita. 6. Sacerdotes, in subterraneis istis cellis, quae necessaria his imposturis, adornantes. 7 & 8. Consultores suspecti, vel qui invitis Antistitibus eo irruperant, occisi; ac per os nun sacrum ejecti. 8 & 9. Communicatio fornicum ac cellarum subterraneum inter se. 10. Oracoli Consultor per idem foramen, per quod demissus fuerit, retractus. 11. Idem, adhuc mente obnubilatus ac turbatus suique necdum conscius, in sella mnemosynes positus; ac de visis atque auditis per Antistites interrogatus. 12. Pictor, qui depingit quid ille, quasi, viderit, atque audiverit: etc.” 40. On the current state of research see Pierre Bonnechere, Trophonios de Lébadée: cultes et mythes d'une cité béotienne au miroir de la mentalité antique (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003). See in general Martin P. Nilsson, Cults, Myths, Oracles and Politics in Ancient Greece (Lund: Gleerup, 1951; new edition Göteborg: Åström, 1986). 41. Pausanias 9.39.5–14. See as well the book by Leigh Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 42. De oraculis, S. 195; see Pier Angelo Matthioli, “Praefatio,” in Di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo libri cinque della historia, & materia medicinale tradotti in lingua volgare italiana da M. Pietro Andrea Matthiolo Sanese medico. Con amplissimi discorsi, et comenti, et dottissime annotationi, et censure del medesimo interprete (Venezia: Niccolo Bascarini, 1544). On Mattioli see Jerry Stannard, “P.A. Mattioli: Sixteenth Century Commentator on Dioscorides,” Bibliographical Contributions, University of Kansas Libraries 1 (1969): 59–81; on the context see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 43. Van Dale seems to rely here on Athanasius Kircher's and Caspar Schott's analysis of ancient Egyptian priestly magic/technology: they argued in effect that the Alexandrian technologies described by Hero and others had been devised by Egyptian priests to instill awe in the people. See, e.g., Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis (Rome: Corbelletti, 1650); idem, Phonurgia nova, sive conjugium mechanicophysicum artis & natvrae paranympha phonosophia concinnatum (Campidonae: Rudolphum Dreherr, 1673); idem, Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Amsterdam: Johann Janssonius von Wesberge & Heirs of Elizaeus Weyerstraten, 1671); Caspar Schott, Magia universalis naturae et artis (Bamberg: Schönwetter, 1677). 44. See Suzanne Marchand, ed., Proof and Persuasion: Essays on Authority, Objectivity and Evidence (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996). 45. Johannes Lomeier, Epimenides sive de veterum gentilium lustrationibus syntagma (Zutphaniae: Spyk, 1681; I use the second edition, 1700). 46. See the ca. 130 letters from Van Dale to Almeloveen in MS 1127 of the Province Library Friesland, Leeuwarden. Some letters from Almeloveen to Van Dale are extant in MS 995, University Library, Utrecht.Page 406 → 47. “De consecrationibus ethnicis,” in De oraculis (2nd ed.) (see note 24 above), 657; see Claude Nicaise, De nummo pantheo Hadriani imperatoris (Lyon: Anisson, 1690). 48. Van Dale, De oraculis (2nd ed.), 660. See Thomas Reinesius, Syntagma inscriptionum antiquarum cum primis Romae veteris, quarum omissa est recensio in vasto Jani Gruteri opere cujus isthoc dici possit supplementum (Leipzig and Frankfurt: Fritsch & Gleditsch, 1682), nr. 289. 49. Van Dale, De oraculis (2nd ed.), 659, 670, and other pages. See Janus Gruter, Inscriptiones antiquae totius orbis Romani, in corpus absolutiss. Redactae, cum indicib. XXV (Heidelberg: Commelin, 1603); Jacques Spon, Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis, in quibus marmora, statuae, musiva, toreumata, gemmae, numismata, Grutero, Ursino, Boissardo, Reinesio, aliisque antiquorum monumentorum collectoribus ignota & hucusque inedita referuntur ac illustrantur (Lyon: Huguetan, 1685). On these works see Margaret Daly Davis, ed., Archäologie der Antike 1500–1700 (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1994). 50. Cuper's correspondence is partly extant in the Royal Library, The Hague, MS 72. On Cuper's collections see the auction catalog: Uitmuntend Cabinet, van antique en moderne goude, zilvere, koopere Medailles […] (Deventer, 1717). On Cuper's papers see P. Bosscha, Opgave en beschrijving van de handschriften, nagelaten door Gisbertus Cuperus (Deventer: Ballot, 1842). 51. See Johann Georg Graevius, Oratio de cometis (Trajecti ad Rhenum, 1681); see Israel, Radical

Enlightenment, 378. Because of these opinions Greavius is called a “dissenter” (Dissentierender) in Stolle's travel diary (see note 23 above). 52. See the book's dedication to Cuper and Graevius, as well as the congratulatory poem by Reland for Van Dale. On the contacts with Perizonius see Van Dale, Dissertationes novem, 249f. 53. Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Civility in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 188ff. 54. See the list of visitors in Koninklijke Bibliotheek Den Haag, MS 69 B 8, f. 41ff. 55. See Dissertationes novem, 346ff. 56. Stolle, Travel Diary, 421ff: “Der Herr van Dale ist ein hagerer Mann, von mittlerer Statur und den decoro u. exterieur nach von Cellario nicht weit entfernt. Sonst ist er freundlich u. von aller Unhöflichkeit gantz frey. Keine hitze spürt man an ihm auch nicht, wie er denn die Modestie in Censierung anderer über alles erhabet. So ein grosser Criticus u. Grammaticus er auch ist, so hat er doch nicht verdrisliches an sich, u. mus ich mich nicht sonderlich verwundern, daß da sonst dergleichen Eruditi an dem Element der Philologie kleben bleiben, er noch ausser dem in der Theologie und Philosophie ein so grosses u. freymüttiges judicium zeiget, u. darinnen so viel heilsame Warheiten entdecket hat. Die dissentirenden kann er sehr wohl dulden, auch mit ihnen freundschafft halten, wie er denn vor diesem mit Graevio u. mit einem Studioso Theol. in Jena, itzt aber noch mit Mr. Bayle, Cupero den de Wilde u. vielen anderen corrspondiret. die superstition haßt er äußerst, u. weit mehr als den Atheismum, weil der AberglaubePage 407 →allezeit seinen diener zu Verfolgung der dissentirenden antreibt, die Atheisten aber sich allein grossen Schaden thäten bey andern aber nicht leicht einen Eingang mit ihren Meinungen fänden, u. sonst euserl. Stille und wohl lebten. Garzu vigoresco, sieht er eben nicht aus, er ist aber nichts destoweniger unverdrossen, und dienstfertig, wie er denn als er, daß ihn die praxis viel Zeit zum Studieren wegnehme, erwehnte gleich dazusetzte: daß es seine Schuldigkeit sey, so lange er könnte, anderen zu dienen.” The theology student that is mentioned could be Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling, who studied in Leipzig in the 1690s, but also kept close connections with Jena and Halle, established contact with scholars in Holland such as Thomas Crenius, and had interest in similar topics as Van Dale's. For Bierling the reading of Van Dale's book on oracles was a decisive event. See Bierling, De superstitione adhibita tanquam arcano dominationis (Rinteln: Enax, 1701). The persons De Wilde mentioned in the text are Jacob de Wilde, a friend of Graevius, and probably his brother. See Peter Berghaus, “‘Si vis amari, ama!’ Johann Georg Graevius (1632–1703) und Jacob De Wilde (1645–1725),” in Ars et Amicitia. Beiträge zum Thema Freundschaft in Geschichte, Kunst und Literatur. Festschrift für Martin Bircher zum 60. Geburtstag am 3. Juni 1998, ed. Ferdinand van Inghen and Christian Juranek (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998). 57. Van Dale, Dissertationes novem, Praefatio, f. *3r: “Quae Perillustris vir, legatus serenissimi Borussae regis, Ezechiel Spanhemius scripsit de Praestantia et usu numismatum antiquorum, mihi etiam salivam moverunt, ut qua eis circa Numismata eximie praestitit, ego quoque circa Marmora antiqua, ipsorumque Inscriptiones tentarem; gustum saltem ut darem illorum, quae ab aliis forsam longe melius ac curatius mundo erudito exhiberi poterant.” On Spanheim see Victor Loewe, Ein Diplomat und Gelehrter: Ezechiel Spanheim (1629–1710) (Berlin: Ebering, 1924); Stefan Lorenz, “Ezechiel Spanheim und das höhere Bildungswesen in Brandenburg,” in Vom Kurfürstentum zum “Königreich der Landstriche”: BrandenburgPreussen im Zeitalter von Absolutismus und Aufklärung, ed. Günter Lottes (Berlin: BWV Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2004), 85–137; Sven Externbrink, “Diplomatie und Républiue des lettres: Ezechiel Spanheim (1629–1710),” Francia 34 (2007): 25–59. 58. Momigilano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” 309. See Spanheim's predecessor in this respect: Guillaume Du Choul, Discours de la religion des anciens romains (Lyon: Rouille, 1556). 59. Van Dale, Dissertationes novem, f. *3rf: “si modo marmorum istorum antiquorum, Inscriptionumque ex illis excerptarum, pondus et merita rite con–sideremus: tum et quam longe plura ex illis, quam ex Numismatibus eruere queamus; quamvis et ista (ut jam docuit Perillustris ille vir) maximum sui usum circa antiquitatum abstrusiorum illustrationem praebeant: ut vel ex istis, quae de Urbibus Neocoris affero, abunde conspici potest.” 60. Van Dale, Dissertationes novem, f. *3vf.: “Inde utique, NEQUE ALIUNDE FERME, petendos varios Sacrorum ritus; Foederum formulas, Magistratuum scita, munia, discrimina; Collegiorum Corporum, Professionum genera, officia, rationes; Domus Augustae ministeria; Titulos operum publicorum; multa domi militiaeque instituta: adde Manium jura; Pietatis mutuae Parentum, Page 408 →Conjugum,

Liberorum, ac eruditae simul elegantiae Monumenta; Principis denique gentium Populi nomina, aetates, tribus, singula publicis quasi tabulis descripta.” See Spanheim, Dissertatio de usu et praestantia numismatum antiquorum (Roma: Deuersin & Cesarettus, 1664), 757. 61. See, e.g., Franz Poland, Geschichte des griechischen Vereinswesens (Leipzig: Teubner, 1909); Martin P. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen Religion, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (München: Beck, 1967), vol. 2, 2nd ed. (München: Beck, 1961); Jörg Rüpke, Religion of the Romans (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). 62. See Van Dale's assertions in his conversation with Stolle (note 23 above), 415ff: “das Neue Testament sey nach u. nach zusammen gebracht u. nach entl. ein paar seculis rest zum Canone worden, daher habe es noch zu seiner Zeit sich nicht in allem auf dasselbe, sondern auch auf traditiones beruffen. ja Chrysostomus gestehet: daß zu seiner Zeit die Acta Apostolorum noch von sehr vielen nicht gesehen worden. Julianum numquam vere fuisse Christianum, Lipsium numqaum vere Reformatum. das 4te buch Esdra sey erst post Christum natum geschrieben. Lactantii buch de mortibus Persecutorum sey ihm suspect, denn der stylus sey offt barbarus, so stünde auch viel Sachen darinne, so dem was andere probati autores geschrieben contrair wären. Der locus Johannis de tribus in coelo testibus sehe nicht in versione syriaca u. Erasmus sey der erste, so ihn (ex metu vor den Mönchen) in seine version bracht. gleichwohl habe man ihn zum Arianer machen wollen. […] Er könne nicht leugnen, daß er einer von ihnen sey, so man Anabaptisten nenne, wiewohl mit unrecht, denn sie tauften niemanden wieder. Ja er würde auch, wenn seine frau ein Kind hätte wollen taufen lassen, es nicht gewehrt haben. Zudessen sey gewiß, daß man biß ins dritte seculum die Kinder nicht getauft habe. und werde er diese materie in einer dissertation, so er den scripto von des Aristea Historia der LXX Interpretum, mit anhengen werde, gründl. ausführen. Die versio Bibl. der so gennanten LXX Interpretum sey zwar ante Christum aber erst post Ptolomai tempora successive u. von unterschiedlichen Autoribus verfertiget, wie solches diversitas styli unter anderen bezeuge. der Pentateuchus sey noch wohl, aber die Propheten sehr schlimm übersetzt.” See especially Van Dale, Dissertatio super Aristea de LXX Interpretibus. 63. For the case of priestly offices in ancient Hebrew religion, Johannes Saubert has done similar work with epigraphic material. See his De sacrificiis veterum conlectanea historico-philologica et miscella critica (Jena: Birckner, 1659; enlarged edition by Thomas Crenius, Leiden: Luchtman, 1699). 64. See Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopaedie, s.v. “Neokoroi.” 65. See Jean-Foy Vaillant, Numismata Aerea Imperatorum, Augustarum, et Caesarum, in coloniis, municipiis, et urbibus jure latio donatis; ex omni modulo percussa (Paris: Horthemels, 1688), 61; Regum Et Imperatorum Romanorum Numismata Aurea, Argentea, Aerea. A Romulo Et C. Jul. Caesare Usque Ad Justinianum Aug. Cura Et Impensis Illustrissimi et Excellentissimi Herois, Caroli, Ducis Croyiaci Et Arschotani…Olim Congesta, Aerique A Biaeo Incisa. Post Insigni Auctario Locupletata, Et Alberti Rubenii Commentario Illustrata, Cum Indicibus Copiosissimis: Nunc Ob Exemplarium Defectum Recusa, Et In Usum Studiosae Antiquitatum Page 409 →Juventutis Denuo Publicata, Subjectis Laurentii Begeri Annotationibus (Coloniae Brandenburgicae: Liebpert, 1700); Johann Georg Graevius, Thesaurus antiquitatum Romanorum, 12 vols. (Utrecht: Halma & vander Aa, 1694–99). 66. Van Dale, Dissertationes novem, 247: “Praeterea Celeberrimus Gisbertus Cuperus, in epistola ad me data, observat, quamvis Harduinus in nummis Elagabali, Philippi filii, ac Valeriani d pro tetrakis legat, tamen non deesse eruditos, qui ibi dis tantum, non tetrakis.legant: atque ad Illustrem illum Ez. Spanhemium mihi praecipue respicere videtur.” See Jean Hardouin, Antirrheticus de nummis antiquis coloniarum et municipiorum (Paris: Muguet, 1689); Hardouin sent his books, despite the differences in denomination, also to his colleague Graevius. See the copy of Hardouin's work Nummi antiqui populorum et urbium illustrati (Paris: Muguet, 1689) with the call number 4 Num. ant. 68 in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München. It contains a handwritten dedication to Graevius by the author. 67. Compare with Spanheim, De praestantia et usu, enlarged 3rd edition, vol. 1 (London: Smith, 1706), 584, 639, etc. 68. See Aristeides Papadakis, “Metropolitan,” in Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1359. 69. Spon, Miscellanea, 356. 70. Charles Du Fresne Sieur Du Cange, Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae graecitatis (Lyon: Posuel & Rigaud, 1688); Johannes Meursius, Glossarium Graeco-Barbarum (Leiden: Elzevir, 1614). 71. Van Dale, Dissertationes novem, 247: “Diaria, Fateor, Meursio et Du Cange sumpta sunt ex auctoribus

infimae Graecitatis; et agitur in iis de Personis vel salariis Ecclesiasticis sive annatis, nec respiciunt annonam publicam. Neque tamen sententiam muto. Nam Diaria Latinis, atque inde Graecis notant victum quem populus sibi in diem, vel paucos, dies emit. Cum igitur ille deficeret, Julius Bonatus singulis civibus MODION vel FRUMENTI MODIUM ad sublevandam inopiam, et sedandam procul seditionem, dono dedit. Ita in genere de victu Ulp. L. 21. de Alimentis: Diariis vel cibariis relictis, neque habitationem, neque vestiarium, neque calciarium deberi palam est: quoniam de cibo tantum testator sentit. Ita etiam Cicero in Ep. Ad Att. Caesarem scribit diariis militum alacritatem accelerasse. Et quidam eo nomine veniebat frumentum et vihor cibus: unde apud Petronium post asellum diaria non sumo. Cum igitur Sardibus plebs sibi comparare non posset vel in singulos, vel in plusculos dies frumentum diarión endemia, annonae caritas facta est; cui obviam ivit Julius Bonnatus, qui ut hoc obiter addam, fuit bis primis magistratus vel Archon: non autem, ut Sponius vertit, primis militiate Dux.” 72. On Cujas see Ernst Peter Spangenberg, Jacob Cujas und seine Zeitgenossen (Leipzig: Hartknoch, 1822); Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1970). 73. Van Dale, Dissertationes novem, 249f.: “Nec enim, ut recte observas, ex media aut infima Graecitate quod probari potest, id ad tempora Augusti vel Tiberii, vel Caligulae, quibus posita videtur haec inscriptio, retrahere licet. Neque vero istic simpliciter pro annona aut re frumentaria ponitur; quae Page 410 →significatio hic requireretur. Tuae vero interpretationi refragari videtur, quod DIARIUM et DIARIA Latinis notet non rem certi aut noti temporis, sed quotidianam. Hinc DIARIA ACTA, &c. Putem ego designari hic Festum aliquod seu Agonem, tanto magis quia passim Agnothétēs in inscriptionibus jungitur genitivo valium Agonum. Sic apud Sponium Itiner. Pag. 411. Agnothetésanta tou megáln kaisaréin Sebasn. & p. 414. Agnothetésanta tou megáln panathēnaín. Fuerunt autem ejusmodi certamina quamplurima er diversissima, inque iis multa singularia, quae alibi non fuerant, et quorum quotidie vix aut semel tantum occurrunt nobis nomina. Quapropter quum Athenienses certe habuerint Jovis praecipuum Festum, quod appellarunt Diásia, quod Latini dicerent DIALIA, crediderim id et habuisse Asiaticos, eodem nomine insignitum: atque ideo pro DIARIÓN legendum hic DIASIÓN. Nisi quis malit Diásia vel Diáseia fuisse festum et agonum in honorem Jovis simul et Martis: vel separatim legere DI AREIÓN h.e. per tempus agonis Martialis, in Agonibus Martialibus. Sed dificilissimum est verum invenire conjectando lectionem Inscriptionum male descriptarum: quum multa in iis memorentur, quae nusquam alibi occurrunt. Neque id mirum cum saepe contineant peculiares ritus variarum urbium, quarum nullam vel exiguam prorsus habemus historiam. Ea vero ipsa quia ignota sunt ideo potissimum plerumque ab iis, qui descripsere, male excepta sunt […].” 74. See Roland Kany, Mnemosyne als Programm. Erinnerung und die Andacht zum Unbedeutenden im Werk von Usener, Warburg und Benjamin (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987). 75. On Perizonius's moderate skepticism see Carlo Borghero, La certezza e la storia. Cartesianesimo, pirronismo e conoscenza storica (Milano: Angeli, 1983); Fabrizio Lomonaco, Lex regia. Diritto, filologia e fides historica nella cultura politico-filosofica dell' Olanda di fine seicento (Napoli: Guida, 1990). 76. Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling, De pyrrhonismo historico (Rinteln: Enax, 1707), 50. See Martin Mulsow, “Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling: Skepsis, Libertinage érudit und deutsche Frühaufklärung,” in Dissertationes selectae, Bierling, ed. Martin Mulsow (Lecce: Conte, 1999), vii—xix. 77. See in general Giovanna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi, eds., Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 78. Häfner, Götter im Exil, 86. See also 381f.: Es “verfielen aber nicht nur die mit chronographischen, allegoretischen und etymologischen Verfahren betriebenen Akkommodationsbemühungen Dickinsons und Huets der herben Kritik, vielmehr schied bereits die mehrfache Allegorese der heidnischen Götterlehre in dem Umfeld der spätantiken stoischen Philologie selbst als legitimes Verfahren ihrer Interpretation aus.” 79. Toland, Letters to Serena. 80. On Toland's scholarship see Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 81. Nicolas Fréret, Observations sur les oracles rendus par les ames des morts, in Mémoires de l'Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, vol. 23 (1756), 163–92.Page 411 → 82. Lorenzo Bianchi, “Montesquieu et Fréret: quelques notes,” Corpus 29 (1995): 105–28. 83. Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1993), chap. 6. 84. Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” 310. 85. Winfried Schröder, Ursprünge des Atheismus. Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1998), 321ff.

Page 412 → Page 413 →

Contributors KENNETH J. HAMMOND

Professor of Chinese History, New Mexico State University

FRANÇOIS LOUIS

Associate Professor, Bard Graduate Center, New York

NOEL MALCOLM

Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford

GEORGES MÉTAILIÉ Directeur

Professor, Bard Graduate Center, New York

PETER N. MILLER

MARTIN MULSOW D. E. MUNGELLO JAN PAPY

de recherche honoraire, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris

Professor of Early Modern European Learned Cultures, University of Erfurt

Professor of History, Baylor University

Professor of Latin Literature, University of Leuven

JOAN-PAU RUBIÉS Reader

in International History, London School of Economics and ICREA Research Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona BRUCE RUSK

Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature, Cornell University

ALAIN SCHNAPP LEO K. SHIN

Professor of Archaeology, University of Paris–I (Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies, University of British Columbia

Distinguished Professor of History, emerita, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York NANCY G. SIRAISI

NATHAN SIVIN

Professor of Chinese Culture and the History of Science, emeritus, University of Pennsylvania

CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD

Professor of the History of Art, Yale University

Page 414 → Page 415 → Index Abu ’l-Faraj, 266 Académie Française, 344–45 Accademia dei Lincei, 234, 236, 240, 247 Accademia Romana, 34 Acoluth, Andreas, 272 Acosta, Emmanuel, 91 Addison, Lancelot, 269–70, 276, 278 Aghion, Irène, 19n1 Agnellini, Timoteo, 267, 281n9 Agustin, Antonio, 126, 157 Albani, Alessandro, 40 Albert, Archduke, 92 Alberti, Leon Battista, 151, 169, 171n11, 211 Albumassar, 277 alchemy, 16, 244 Aleandro, Girolamo, 127 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d', 5 Alexander of Abonoteichus, 392 Alexander the Great, 317, 328, 351n13 Alexandre, Noël, 129, 331 Alhazen, 277 Ali ibn Abi Talib, 266 Almeloveen, Theodor Jansson van, 393, 394 Altertumswissenschaft, 18, 400 Alting, Jakob, 267 American Indians, 322, 333, 335, 347, 350n9, 352n19, 353n26 anachronism, 158, 179, 254, 314, 349n4

Annius of Viterbo, 156, 157, 158–59, 166, 167, 177n61 Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe, 351nn12–13, 355n29, 356n37 antiquarianism: defined, 1–2, 10, 11–12, 29, 58, 71, 75, 84, 314–315, 356n36; emotional response, 7, 8, 60, 62, 118, 119–21; European antiquarians and Islamic culture, 265–79; fashionable pastime, 3, 16, 76, 123; history of Chinese, 5–7, 20nn7–8, 70–78, 103–4, 290–91; history of European, 1–5, 12, 27–47, 113, 156, 313–15; prehistoric, 59; relation between Chinese and European, 8, 14, 59, 71, 74–77, 103–34, 222–24, 343, 370; relation to empiricism, 11, 167; relation to libertinism, 316, 323, 327–45; 381–85; relation to philosophy, 12, 130, 327, 343, 381; religious implications, 313–48, 368–78, 381–401; Voltaire on, 348n1. See also Egyptian antiquarianism; medicine/medical antiquarianism; Mesopotamian antiquarianism; poetry and antiquarianism “antiquarianization,” 23n34 antiquities, 2, 37, 104, 369–70; Chinese, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 20n8, 116, 122, 123, 128, 181, 316; European, 6, 28, 29, 38, 59, 82, 154, 216 Apianus, Petrus, and Bartholomeus Amantius, 153 Appian, 92 “archaeographia,” 37 archaism, 12, 16, 20n7, 239, 246 archeology: defined, 32, 33, 36, 39, 151; Chinese, 5, 20n6; European, 28, 29–33, 35, 39, 151, 164, 166–67 architecture, 38 art history, 30, 32, 33, 38, 39, 41, 46, 245 Assmann, Jan, 63, 367n86, 389 Assurbanipal, 69 Athenaeus, 211 Augustine, 104, 106, 112, 114, 320, 337, 359n46 Aurelian, 93 Aventinus, Johannes, 150, 154 Averroes, 277, 363n67 Avicenna, 231, 277 Azevedo, Luís de,329 Page 416 → Bacci, Andrea, 15, 208 Bacon, Francis, 29, 37, 41 Balázs, Étienne, 108 Baldaeus, Philippus, 339

Baldini, Baccio, 210 Ban Gu, 106–7, 111 Banier, Antoine, 344 Barkan, Leonard, 157 Barthélemy, Jean-Jacques, 27, 28, 38, 122 Bartoli, Daniello, 339 Barton, Francis, 270 Bassano, Luigi, 279, 288n81 Baudelot de Dairval, Charles César, 123 Baudouin, François, 88 Baydawi, al-, 272 Bayle, Pierre, 319, 320, 321, 322, 332, 362n59, 384, 394 Beck, Matthias, 272 Bedwell, William, 268, 269, 274 Beger, Lorenz, 397 Bellay, Joachim du, 77 Bellori, Gian Pietro, 127 Belon, Pierre, 279, 288n81 Benci, Spinello, 168–69 Benedetti, Alessandro, 209 Berberini, Francesco, 127 Bernand, Carmen, and Serge Gruzinski, 91 Bernard, Jean Frederic, 315, 350n9 Bernays, Jacob, 43–44, 46 Bernhardy, Gottfried, 33 Bernier, François, 328, 339 Berosus, 158–59, 161, 346, 355n35, 361n55, 365n82 Berr, Henri, 47 Besold, Christoph, 271

Beverland, Adriaan, 383 Bianchini, Francesco, 27, 127 Bierling, Friedrich Wilhelm, 400, 407n56 Biondo, Flavio. See Flavio Biondo Bloch, Marc, 9–10, 47 Boccalini, Trajano, 276 Bochart, Samuel, 267, 269, 272, 274, 275, 321, 335–36, 341, 342, 364n69, 382 Bodin, Jean, 88, 314 Boeckh, August, 30, 32–33 Boemus, Johannes, 326, 355nn32–33 Bol, Peter, 116 Boldù, Giovanni,153 Bollandists, 127 Boncle, John, 271 Bonnatus, Lucius Julius, 398 Book of Changes. See Yijing Borchardt, Frank, 161–62 Borges, Jorge Luis, 77–78 Borghini, Vincenzo, 166, 178n75 Borommaracha II, 195 Bosio, Tommaso, 126 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 325, 334, 342 botany, 16, 41, 129, 131, 237, 243, 246, 250–60 Böttiger, Karl August, 36, 52n45 Bouchard, Jean-Jacques, 127 Bouchet, Jean, 328, 356–57n38 Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 401 Boulanger, Nicolas Antoine, 345, 366n83, 401 Bouvet, Joachim, 338, 344, 361n58

Brahe, Tycho, 343 Braudel, Fernand, 19n3 Bredenberg brothers, 390 bronzes, 7, 9, 40, 72, 76, 128. See also Xuande bronzes Brook, Timothy, 235 Brown, Shana, 132, 134 Browne, Thomas, 75 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 151–52, 165, 171n11 Buddhism, 92–93, 141n68, 230, 330–32, 335, 337, 354n29, 372, 376 Buffon, Georges de, 323, 354n29 Bukhari, al-, 273 Burckhardt, Jacob, 33, 42–43, 45–46 Busbecq, Ogier Ghiselin de, 86, 279 Byzance, Louis de, 272 Caesar, Julius, 152 Cagnati, Marsilio, 211, 214–15 calligraphy, 6, 11, 22n26, 190 Calmette, Jean, 351n13, 357n38 Calvin, John, 362n65 Page 417 → Camden, William, 27, 110 Campani, Giovanni Antonio, 152 Canetti, Elias, 60–61 Cao Jinyan, 204n55 Cao Shuming, 197 Cardano, Girolamo, 210 Carpentras, 36 Cartari, Vincenzo, 337 Casaubon, Isaac, 60, 123, 266, 272, 363n66

Casaubon, Méric, 60, 61, 76 Cassiano dal Pozzo, 27, 35, 40, 53n62, 54n67, 127, 128 Cassini, Jean, 318, 352n15, 353n27 Castell, Edmund, 274 cauldrons, 183, 188 Caylus, Anne Claude de, 27, 33, 36, 38, 40, 52n51, 60, 120 Celtis, Conrad, 110, 153–56, 157, 159, 165, 167 Cesi, Federico, 234 Chacón, Alfonso and Pedro, 126, 217n5 Chang Kwang-chih, 5, 20n6, 71 Chardin, Jean Baptiste, 4 Chen Cangqi, 252 Chen Qiqing, 111 Cheng Yaotian, 11, 16–17, 250–60 Cheng Yi, 7, 116 Chevalier, Nicolas, 395 Chinese culture, 91, 92–93, 100n44, 199n12, 224–31, 235–47, 289–305, 372, 376–78; attitude toward nonChinese, 289–305; medical practices, 224–31, 236–38, 242; Voltaire on, 317–19. See also under antiquarianism; historiography Chinese eras: Han, 5, 106, 182–83, 289, 372, 376; Ming, 7, 9, 11, 15, 16, 17, 112, 123–27, 132–33, 141n71, 180, 190–91, 235–47, 289–305, 340; Northern Song, 6, 9, 110, 115–16, 124; Qin, 183–84, 292, 376; Qing, 9, 11, 15, 16, 112, 124, 129, 130–34, 180, 195–96, 228, 340; Shang, 10, 71; Song, 5–7, 11, 15, 107, 109, 112, 124, 131–34, 189, 193, 239, 290, 375; Southern Song, 111, 189; Tang, 107, 109, 120, 242, 290; Xia, 10, 72, 290; Xin, 183; Yuan, 7, 17, 185, 292; Zhou, 10, 71, 117, 183 Christ, Johann Friedrich, 38 Christina, 342 Chunhua ge tie, 190 Chunqiu, 106, 293 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 92, 93, 105, 114, 125, 137n33, 332 Clark, Hugh, 111–12 Clement of Alexandria, 355n31, 357n39 Clodius, Johann Christian, 273

Clunas, Craig, 19, 141n71, 235 Clusius, Carolus, 215 Clüver, Philip, 214, 221n31 Coberg, Wenceslaus, 38 Coeurdoux, Gaston-Laurent, 329, 351n13, 358n42 Cola di Rienzo, 114 Collegiants, 384, 390, 400 Collingwood, Robin George, 59 Colocci, Angelo, 153 Colonna, Giovanni, 114 Columella, Lucius, 211 Confucius/Confucianism, 6, 9, 129, 190, 203n52, 230, 233n18, 243, 247, 257, 297, 317, 319, 320, 325, 331–35, 344, 358n44, 360n50, 361n59, 369–72, 375–78; Neo-Confucianism, 7, 112, 141n68, 325, 332, 369, 375 Confucius Sinarum philosophus, 128 Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, 274 connoisseurship, 181, 190, 192, 196 Connors, Joseph, 27 Conring, Hermann, 214, 221n31 Constantine, 154, 164, 346 Conze, Alexander, 30 Coornhert, Dirck Volckertszoon, 90, 387 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 223 Coppin, Jean, 278 Cornarius, Diomedes, 212–13 Cotton, Sir Robert Bruce, 27 Couplet, Philippe, 331, 339, 340, 343, 362n59, 365n73 Court de Gébelin, Antoine, 401 Page 418 → Couto, Diogo de, 339 Cranach, Lucas, 153, 173n26

Cranz, F. Edward, 137n32 Crato von Krafftheim, Johannes, 215 Creutzer, Leonhard, 158 Crinito, Pietro, 152 Cronaca, Il, 171n14 Crossley, Pamela Kyle, 125 Cudworth, Ralph, 341, 363n66 Cujas, Jacques, 399 Cuper, Gisbert, 394, 396, 397, 399 Cuspinianus, Johannes, 215 Cyprian, 399 Cyriac of Ancona, 2–3, 14, 27, 33, 34, 122–23, 125, 141n65, 157 Dai Zhen, 131 Danz, Johann Andreas, 271 Daoism, 141n68, 241–42, 244, 335, 372, 376 Dapper, Olfert, 315 Dati, Lorenzo, 169–70 Davis, Richard L., 140n54 de Bary, William Theodore, 235 De Hooghe, Romeyn, 389 Décultot, Élisabeth, 40 Della Valle, Pietro, 339 Descartes, René, 4–5, 342, 364n71 Diderot, Denis, 5 Dieu, Louis de, 271, 275 difanzhi. See gazetteers ding. See cauldrons Diodorus Siculus, 92, 210, 326, 337, 355n33, 357n39 Diogenes Laertius, 93

diplomatics, 31, 39 Dodoens, Rembert, 215 Domitian, 93 Doni, Giovanni Battista, 127 Dow, Alexander, 328, 329, 356n37 Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, 39 Druids, 154 Drusius, Johannes, 266 Du Cange, Charles du Fresne, 112, 399 Du Chesne, André, 112 Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste, 315, 330, 361–62n58–59 Du Jarric, Pierre, 335, 339 Du You, 244 Dupuis, Charles François, 401 Dürer, Albrecht, 153 Eberhard, Wolfram, 182 Ecchellensis, Abraham, 267 ecclesiastical history, 8–9, 127, 366n84 Edzard, Esdras, 267 Egan, Ronald, 119–21, 122 Egypt, 68, 90, 92, 159, 322, 328, 334–38, 341, 355–56n35, 357n39, 366n86 Egyptian antiquarianism, 13, 59, 61–65, 78n8, 119 Elman, Benjamin, 18–19, 129–34 English Royal Society, 342 Epicureanism, 326, 331, 358n44 epigraphy, 5, 6, 31, 37, 67, 69, 87, 103, 114, 118, 121–22, 126, 139n52, 150, 189, 395 Erasmus, Desiderius, 117, 129, 144n92, 266, 359n48, 372 Ernesti, Johann August, 38–39 Erpenius, Thomas, 266–67, 268, 269, 271, 272

Erya, 250–51, 252, 254–55 Esarhaddon, 67 ethnology/ethnography, 13, 17, 35, 124, 314, 347, 349n4, 350n9, 356n36 Eusebius of Caesarea, 326, 337, 341, 345–46, 355n31, 355n35, 359nn46–47, 360n50, 361n55, 363n68, 366–67nn84–88 Eutropius, 92 Ezour-Vedam, 317, 319, 328, 329, 330, 351nn12–13, 354n29, 356n37 Fabricius, Johann Albert, 34 Fabricius Ferrarinus, Michael, 152–53 Fan Dache, 191 Faria y Souza, Manuel de, 339 Farnese, Alessandro, 126 fatie. See model books Febvre, Lucien, 47 Feliciano, Felice, 157 Feng Fang, 180–81, 193, 196 Fenicio, Jacomé, 329 Ferdinand I, 212–14, 219n15 Page 419 → Figurists, 338, 344, 361n58, 362n61 Filarete, 169 Flavio Biondo, 3, 29, 93, 110, 122–23, 126, 142n74, 211, 314 Florentius, Nicolaus, 85–86 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 362n59, 383, 401 forgery, 15, 152, 157, 158, 160–61, 164, 167, 169, 176n53, 180–81, 191, 193, 194–98, 204n57, 317, 397 Fourment, Hélène, 85 Frampton, Robert, 267 Freedberg, David, 234–35, 240 Freidson, Eliot, 224 Freinsheim, Johann, 275

Fréret, Nicolas, 321, 323, 329, 341, 343–45, 352n16, 354n29, 357n39, 361n58, 365nn76–80, 367n90, 383, 401, 402n12 Freud, Sigmund, 105 Frischmuth, Johann, 274 Fu Han, 185–87 Fu Hao, 70–71 Fu Shan, 11, 227–28, 232nn12–14 Fu She, 133 Fu Xi, 325, 333, 338, 360n49 Fubini, Riccardo, 142n74, 177n61 Fueter, Eduard, 57n89 Fulvius, Andreas, 34 Galen, 3, 211, 223 Galileo, 324, 335, 372 Galland, Antoine, 267 Galle, Philipps, 387 Gassendi, Pierre, 35, 76–77, 342, 363n67 Gatterer, Johann Christoph, 132 Gaubil, Antoine, 344 Gaulmin, Gilbert, 273 gazetteers, 6, 109, 111, 125, 136nn18–21, 190, 299 Ge gu yao lun, 123 George of Hungary, 278–79 Georgewitz, Bartholomeus, 279, 288nn81–82 Germanus, Dominicus, 271 Geuffroy, Antoine, 279 gewu (investigation of things), 16 Ghazali, al-, 266, 273, 285n50 Gibbon, Edward, 41, 43, 156, 381, 402n12 Giusto dei Giusti, 157

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 30, 35, 36, 41, 54n71, 138n38 Goldgar, Anne, 395 Goldschmidt, Adolph, 171n6 Golius, Jacob, 266–67, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272 Goltzius, Hendrik, 387, 389 Gombrich, Ernst, 151, 152, 166 Gonçalves, Diogo, 339 Goodman, Howard L., 133 Goossens, Georges, 66 Graevius, Johann Georg, 35, 36, 85, 394, 397, 406n51 Grafton, Anthony, 133, 158–59, 162–63, 197–98 Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de, 85 Greaves, Thomas, 269, 274 Greece, 2, 29, 33, 38, 154, 209–10, 211–12, 341, 346 Greene, Thomas, 158 Gregory of Tours, 178n75 Grimaldi, Claudio Filippo, 128–29 Gronovius, Jakob, 35, 36 Grotius, Hugo, 275, 334, 342, 350n9, 352n19, 364n69, 372 Gruter, Janus, 383, 394, 397 Gu Yanwu, 131–32 Guanzi, 253 Gudius, Marquard, 395 Guerreiro, Fernão, 339 Guido da Mandello, Giovannolo, 115 Guillet de Saint-George, Georges, 37 Gulielmus, Paulus, 86 Guo Pu, 252, 297 Guzzo, Pier Giovanni, 79n11

Hadot, Pierre, 120 Häfner, Ralph, 400 Hajari, Ahmad ibn Qasim al-, 268, 272 Han Baosheng, 252 Han Yu, 188, 192, 202n38 Hanshu, 293 Hanson, Marta, 228 haogu zhuyi, 5, 6 Hardouin, Jean, 398 Hargett, James, 109, 110, 111, 136n21 Page 420 → Harrist, Robert E., 117 Haskell, Francis, 41, 156, 401 Hausmann, Ulrich, 194 Hawley, Daniel, 357n41 Hazard, Paul, 314 He Zhi, 189–90 Heemskerck, Maarten van, 386 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 42 Herbert of Cherbury, 390 Herklotz, Ingo, 40, 156, 349n3 Hermann, Karl Friedrich, 28 Hermes Trismegistus, 93, 326, 335, 338, 360n50, 383 Herodotus, 8, 71, 337, 349n3, 355n35, 370 Hesychius, 92 Heumann, Christoph August, 384 Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 30, 39 Hilfswissenschaften. See material culture Hinckelmann, Abraham, 265, 270, 272, 273

Hippias, 71 Hippocrates, 210 historiography, 8–9, 18–19, 22nn22–23, 27, 32, 41–42, 47, 58–59, 106–7, 110, 130, 141n68, 314, 338, 340, 348, 349n3, 370, 381; Chinese genres of, 106–12, 117, 125, 129–30, 136n21, 161, 370 Holstentius, Lucas, 127 Holwell, John, 328, 329, 356n37 Homer, 138n38, 210 Hondius, Hendrik, 387–88 Hong Mai, 9 Hordjedef, 63 Horn, George, 321, 334, 338, 347, 359n48, 360n52 Hostetler, Laura, 142 Hottinger, Johann Heinrich, 269, 270, 271, 272, 275, 276, 278 Hu Sanxing, 252 Hu Shijiang, 193 Hu Su, 116 Huainanzi, 253 Huangdi nei jing, 226, 232n9 Huangfu Mi, 242 Hubert, Etienne, 268, 271, 272 Huet, Pierre-Daniel, 321, 337, 338, 341–43, 345, 356–57nn38–39, 358n42, 362n59, 363–64nn67–71, 382 Huizong, 9, 116, 117–18, 122 humanism, 11, 85, 88, 94, 118, 216, 349n6 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 138n38 Hume, David, 321 Hunibald, 161 I Ching. See Yijing Ibn Daqan, Yusuf, 268 Ibn Tufail, 267 iconography, 37

India, 316–17, 320, 326, 327–28, 329–30, 337, 339–41 inscriptions. See epigraphy Institut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte, 9 Iser, Wolfgang, 162 Islam, 17, 265–79 Israel, Jonathan, 352n20 Jahn, Otto, 31, 32 Jalalayn, 272 Japanese culture, 91–93 Jerome, 333, 359n47, 361n55 Jesuits, 133, 304, 315, 317, 318–22, 327–34, 335–42, 343–47, 352nn14–15, 353n24, 356n36, 357n38, 359n47, 361n55, 362n59, 372–73, 375, 378 Ji Zha, 190 Jiang Yan, 108 Jiao Xun, 228, 251 jinshi xue, 5–8, 9, 10, 103, 131, 134, 189 Jinshu, 242, 249n20 Jones, William, 356n37 Josephus, Flavius, 92, 109, 326, 346, 355n31, 355n35 Judaism, 265, 267–68 Julius II, 153 Junius, Hadrianus, 213, 219n22 Justi, Carl, 39, 41–42 Kant, Immanuel, 41–42 kaozheng xue, 7, 129–31, 133, 239, 250 Kawab, 61 Kepler, Johannes, 235 Khaemwaset, 61–62 Page 421 → Kheops, 61, 63

Kircher, Athanasius, 13, 34–35, 92, 127–29, 321, 328–29, 333, 334–38, 342, 344, 345, 356n36, 357nn38–39, 358n42, 360nn49–50, 360nn52–55, 362nn61–62, 405n43 Kirsten, Peter, 268, 269 Klemm, Gustav Friedrich, 19n3, 33 Kojima Tsuyoshi, 182 Koran, 265, 269–76, 280n1, 282n23 Krautheimer, Richard, 177n64 Kublai Khan, 199n15 Kuhn, Thomas, 324 Kurihara Tomonobu, 199n9 La Lane, Père, 330, 357n38 La Loubère, Simon de, 353n27 La Mothe le Vayer, François de, 129, 319–20, 363n67 La Peyrère, Isaac, 323, 325, 342, 355n30 Lackenbacher, Sylvie, 67 Lafitau, Joseph-François, 315, 350n9 Lamprecht, Karl, 9, 44, 46–47 Lampridius, Aelius, 92 Lancelot, Antoine, 382 Lange, Johann, 210–11 Lange, Ludwig, 30 Lanzi, Luigi, 169 Lao Tse, 336 Laud, William, 270 Lazius, Wolfgang, 15–16, 17, 208, 209, 212–15 Le Comte, Louis, 315, 331, 339, 340 Le Roy, Louis, 314 Leclercq, Henri, 35 Lefevre, Tanneguy, 382 Leibniz, Gottfried von, 8, 21nn17–18, 127–29, 315, 318, 320, 361n58, 364n69

Lentulus, Publius, 164 Leo Africanus, Johannes, 90, 277–78 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 59 Leto, Pomponio, 34, 402n14 Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, 328, 329, 339, 340, 357n38 Leunclavius, Johannes, 277 Levenson, Joseph, 370 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 13 L'Heureux, Jean, 126 Li Jifu, 109 Li Gonglin, 139n41 Li Panlong, 239 Li Qingzhao, 60, 76, 77 Li Shizhen, 16–17, 227, 235–38, 240–47, 251, 252, 253, 254, 256, 257, 259, 262n21, 302 Li Yanwen, 236 Li Yusun, 116 Li Zhizao, 304 Ligorio, Pirro, 14, 27, 33, 34, 122, 126, 157, 174n39, 211 Liji, 253, 376 Lin Fu, 136n19 Linceans. See Accademia dei Lincei Linnaeus, Carolus, 260 Lippert, Philipp Daniel, 39 Lipsius, Justus, 13–14, 24n35, 81–94, 126, 130, 314, 352n19 Liu Chang, 6, 193 Liu Zhizhi, 140n61 Livy, 105, 106, 152 Lomeier, Johannes, 392–93 Longobardo, Niccolò, 332

Lord, Henry, 339 Louthan, Howard, 214 Lü Dalin, 116, 118, 122 Lucan, 152 Lucian, 392 Lucinge, René de, 277 Lucretia, 152 Lucretius, 326, 392 Lumbroso, Giacomo, 35 Luo Hongxian, 237 Luo Yuejiong, 289–91, 295, 303, 305 Luqman, 266–67 Ma Duanlin, 108–9 Ma Huan, 124–25 Mabillon, Jean, 27, 36, 127, 130–31 Maffei, Gian Pietro, 335 Maffei, Paolo Alessandro, 34–35 Magalhães, Gabriel de, 359n47 Maibudi, Husain al-, 267, 281n12 Maigrot de Crissey, Charles, 373–76, 377 Maimonides, Moses, 286n65, 363n67, 366n86, 385 Page 422 → Makin, al-, 266 Manetho, 345, 356n35, 360n55, 365n82 Manuel, Frank E., 382 Marcanova, Giovanni, 208, 216n2 Marracci, Lodovico, 265, 272, 274, 275, 285n56 Martin, Pierre, 351n13 Martini, Martino, 321, 324, 333, 335, 338, 339, 340, 343, 359nn46–47, 360n55, 361–62n59, 364n73

material culture, 31–33, 37–38, 46, 88, 112, 126, 130–32, 156 Mattioli, Pier Andrea, 215, 391 Maximilian I, 160 Maximilian II, 213, 215 Maydani, al-, 267 Medici, Lorenzo de', 169 medicine/medical antiquarianism, 3, 11, 12, 15–16, 207–16 Menage, Gilles, 382 Menavino, Antonio, 279, 288n81 Mencke, Johann Burckhard, 4 Mercuriale, Girolamo, 15, 90, 126, 211 Mesopotamian antiquarianism, 59, 65–70, 119 metrology, 38, 40 Meursius, Johannes, 399 Mignot, Abbé, 329, 337 Millin, Aubin-Louis, 44, 47 Ming shi, 19 Mitchell, Charles, 157 model books, 190 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 4, 8, 10, 11, 15, 18–19, 19n2, 27–28, 34, 35, 37, 41, 42, 43–44, 46, 47, 58, 60, 71, 104, 107, 123, 124, 132, 156, 313, 314, 349n1, 366n84, 370, 381, 400, 401 Mommsen, Theodor, 43, 397 Mongols, 290, 292, 293, 294, 303 Montaigne, Michel de, 277, 363n67 Montanus, Arnoldus, 315, 350n9 Montesquieu, Charles de, 41, 91, 318, 354n29, 401 Montfaucon, Bernard de, 36, 52n51 monuments, 32–37, 58–59, 61–63, 123 Morhof, Daniel, 60 Mornay, Philippe du Plessis, 364n68

Mosac, Antoine, 351n13 Mozi, 71 Muhammad, 266, 272, 275, 276–77 Müller, Andreas, 281n12 Murr, Sylvia, 358n42 Murray, Tim, 19n1 Mussato, Alberto, 113, 137n29 mythic thinking, 161–62 Nabonid, 69 Nasafi, Aziz, 281n12 natural history, 11, 33, 40, 401 Naudé, Gabriel, 43 Navarrete, Domingo, 334 Nero, 93 Nestorian monument, 127–28, 335 Newton, Isaac, 337, 361n57 Nicaise, Calude, 394 Nicolay, Nicolas, 279, 288n81 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 43 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 162 Nippel, Wilfried, 10, 23n30, 402n12 Nissel, Johann Georg, 272 Nobili, Roberto de, 329–30, 333, 334–40, 351n13, 357n38 numismatics, 9, 22n26, 31, 37, 38, 40, 114, 121, 126, 214, 395, 397–98 Opitz, Martin, 75 Orientalism, 8, 21n19 Origen, 345, 363n68 Orpheus, 326 Orsini, Fulvio, 27, 85–86, 126–27, 217n5

Ortelius, Abraham, 81–82 Osborne, Francis, 276 Otto, Georg Ernst, 143n82 Ouyang Xiu, 6, 110, 112, 115–22, 131–32, 139n47, 139n52, 140n54, 140n57, 193 Ovid, 114, 119, 158 Owen, Stephen, 72, 74 Pagden, Anthony, 304 painting, 38, 240, 301 paleography, 38 Palladio, Andrea, 211 Pamphilius, 345 Pan Yi, 189–90, 201n27 Panciroli, Guido, 50n33 Page 423 → Panofsky, Erwin, 149–50, 170n6 Panvinio, Onofrio, 15, 27, 43, 126, 142n76, 214 Parrenin, Dominique, 338 Pasor, Matthias, 274 Pasqualini, Lelio, 127 Patrizi, Francesco, 211, 314 Pausanias, 390–92 Peacham, Henry, 123 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de, 4, 27, 35–36, 38, 40–41, 44, 47, 52n51, 56n83, 60, 76–77, 112, 127, 128, 370, 372 Pelliot, Paul, 194–95 Péret, Benjamin, 78 Perizonius, Jacob, 395, 399–400 Peruzzi, Baldassare, 169 Petau, Paul, 58 Peterson, Willard J., 133, 245, 302

Petrarch, Francesco, 4, 74, 104, 105, 112–16, 117, 121–22, 125–26 Philip IV, 271 philology, 2, 3, 7, 8, 16, 30, 31, 32, 33, 46, 87, 126, 130, 144n95, 392 Philostratus, 357n39 physicians, 208–11, 213–15, 223, 224, 227 Picart, Bernard, 129, 315, 350n9, 352n21, 357n38 Pighuis, Stephanus, 86 Pignoria, Lorenzo, 27, 127, 337 Pindar, 119 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 8, 14, 33, 122, 127 Pirenne, Henri, 23n30, 46 plants. See botany Plato, 93, 150 Pliny, 92, 211 Plutarch, 93, 210, 211, 384 Pococke, Edward, 266, 267, 272–73, 275, 281n11 poetry and antiquarianism, 63–64, 74, 75–76, 113–14, 118, 121, 158 Poggio Bracciolini, 3, 105, 122–23, 125–26, 141n66, 151, 314 Poliziano, Angelo, 142n77 Polo, Marco, 343 Pons, Jean François, 357n38 Popkin, Richard, 316 Porsena, Lars, 169 portents, 184–85, 187 Postel, Guillaume, 268, 279, 286n65 Potter, John, 38 Psalmanazar, George, 315 “pseudomorphosis,” 149–50, 170n6 Pyrrhonism, 322, 342, 400

Pythagoras/Pythagoreansim, 316, 326, 328, 332–33, 335, 351n13, 354n29, 356–57nn38–39 Qi Sihe, 251 Qian Daxin, 132 Qin Shi Huangdi, 77–78 Qiu Jun, 291–95, 303, 305 Qiu Sheng, 371–78, 379n10 Qiu Yuezhi, 371 Qu Jiusi, 237 Radtmann, Bartholomaeus, 268, 269 Rambach, Ernst, 38 Ramses II, 61 Ramussio, Giovanni Battista, 315 Ranke, Leopold von, 125, 133 Raphelengius, Franciscus, 268, 269 Ravius, Christian, 271, 272, 273, 274, 283n31, 285n53 Read, Bernard E., 238 Reiner, Erica, 69 Reinesius, Thomas, 394, 397 Reland, Adrian, 276, 279, 395 religion, defined, 91 Renaudot, Eusèbe, 341, 343, 360n52, 365nn73–74 Ren Fang, 188 Renzong, 9, 117 Rhenanus, Beatus, 215 Ricci, Matteo, 128, 133, 320, 329, 330–34, 337–39, 340, 344, 358nn43–45, 361n59, 362n61, 373, 375 Rice, Eugene, 304 Riksantikvariat, 3 Ripa, Cesare, 387 Rites Controversy (China), 18, 295, 329, 331–32, 361n59, 368–78

Rites Controversy (India), 319–20, 324, 327, 329 Page 424 → ritual, 6, 71, 91, 106–7, 117, 183, 195, 225, 313, 317, 320, 322, 376, 391 Rivet, André, 275 Rocher, Ludo, 351n13 Rogerius, Abraham, 339, 341 Rolandino of Padua, 137n29 Román, Jerónimo, 359n46 Roman culture, 33, 81–88, 91–94, 95n6, 104–6, 114, 126, 138n38, 211, 214 Rosinus, Johannes, 126, 142n76 Roth, Henry, 335 Rougemont, François de, 371 Rowland, Ingrid, 151 Ruan Yuan, 131 rubbings, 118, 119, 121, 197 Rubens, Albert, 397 Rubens, Peter Paul, 85 Rubens, Philip, 126, 142n78 Rubino, Antonio, 339, 340 Rycaut, Paul, 279, 287n75, 322 Ryer, André du, 271, 272, 286n61 Saavedra Fajardo, Diego de, 276 Sale, George, 315 Sallast, 109 Salutati, Coluccio, 141n66, 151 Sambiasi, Francesco, 371 Sambucus, Joahnnes, 215 Sangallo, Antonio da, 169 Sangallo, Giuliano da, 171n14

Sansovino, Andrea, 169, 288n81 Santa Rosa, Diego de, 374, 376, 377 Sanudo, Martin, 157 Saumaise, Claude, 43 Savary de Brèves, François, 269 Scaliger, Joseph Justus,, 27, 43–44, 50n33, 56n81, 86, 88, 123, 126–27, 266, 268, 272, 361n55 Schall, Adam, 333 Schedel, Hartman, 208–9 Schelwig, Samuel, 276 Schickard, Wilhelm, 270 Schindler, Valentin, 269 Schlözer, Ludwig August von, 42, 109, 112 Schorr, Adam, 298 Schott, Caspar, 405n43 Schröder, Winfried, 401 sculpture, 37, 38 seals, 131, 181–88, 192, 197, 199n9, 199n15 Sebald, W. G., 8 Selden, John, 27, 272, 314, 341, 349n5, 382 Semedo, Álvaro, 339 Seneca, Marcus Annaeus, 82, 93, 211 Sennacherib, 68 Settala, Ludovico, 210 Shang Huqing, 373 Shanghan za bing lun, 229 Shangshu, 293 Shanhai jing, 17, 297, 307nn14–15 Shankara, Adi, 330 Shanks, Michael, 47n4

Shen Gua, 124 Shen Yi, 191–92, 193 Shi Chong, 243 Shiji, 290, 293 Shijing, 293 Shilu, 195 Shivadharma, 330 Sigonio, Carlo, 43 Sike, Heinrich, 272, 273 Siku quanshu, 130, 131 Sima Guang, 110, 239, 252, 297, 369 Sima Qian, 106, 111, 297, 370 Sima Xiangru, 253 Skinner, G. William, 230 Smetius, Martinus, 86 Smith, F. Porter, 238 Smith, Thomas, 278 Sneferu, 63 Society of Antiquaries, 3 Socrates, 129, 320 Solari, Cristofor, 153–54 Sollberger, Edmond, 68 Song Minqiu, 110 Song Shou, 193, 202n43 Song Yingxing, 302 Sonnerat, Pierre, 323, 351n12, 354–55n29 Sorai, Ogy, 240 Spanheim, Ezekiel, 395, 397–98 Spengler, Oswald, 171n6

Spinoza, Baruch, 18, 320, 345, 355n30 Spon, Jacob, 36, 37–38, 46, 51n44, 52n51, 394, 397–98 Page 425 → Stark, Karl Bernard, 28–47, 47n5, 104, 110 steles, 6, 7, 9, 11, 64, 69–70, 181, 188, 191–93, 196 Stephens, Walter, 166 Stoicism, 93, 320, 326, 330, 331, 345, 372 Stolle, Gottlieb, 395 Stone Drums of Qin, 204n55 Strabo, 92, 210, 211 “structural history,” 5 Stubbe, Henry, 276, 286n68 Su Chuo, 376 Su Shi, 116, 239 Su Song, 252–53 Suares, Jean-Marie, 127 substitutional thinking, 163–66 Suetonius, 92, 149–50 Suidas, 92 Suntheim, Ladislaus, and Jakob Mennel, 160–61 Sutcliffe, Matthew, 276 Taautos, 360n50 Tacitus, Cornelius, 90, 106, 173n26 Taizong, 107, 119 Talmud, 265, 267 Tamizey de Larroque, Philippe, 47 Tan Yangzi, 240, 241–42, 244, 247 Tao Zongyi, 185 Tcha Nefer, 62

temenu, 66–67 Tertullian, 92 Thelott, Johann Philip, 385–86 Thévenot, Melchisedec, 315 Thucydides, 8, 71, 106, 109, 370 Tiberius, 93 Toesca, Pietro, 159 Toland, John, 385, 400–401 tombs, 62, 64, 65, 70, 72–74, 112, 150, 156, 158, 164 Tournon, Charles-Thomas Maillard de, 340, 375 Trancoso, Gonçalo Fernandes, 339 Trapp, J. B., 156 travel writing, 11, 44–45, 88, 300, 315, 343, 350nn7–8 Trigault, Nicolas, 320, 330, 335, 339, 358n43 tripods. See cauldrons Trithemius, Joannes, 161 Trogus, Gnaeus Pompeius, 210 Tunisi, al-Righi al-, 272 Turcotti, Carlo, 377 Ulpian, 92, 399 urbanology, 45 Ussher, James, 334 Vaillant, Jean-Foy, 397 Valencia, Pedro de, 314 Valignano, Alessandro, 340 Valla, Lorenzo, 144n92, 163–64 Van Dale, Antonius, 18, 129, 383–401 Van Veen, Otto, 387 Varro, Marcus Terrentius, 2, 92, 104–6, 112

Vasari, Giorgio, 152, 159, 165, 169 Velleius Paterculus, 92, 211 Vergil, Polydore, 325–26 Verjus, Antoine, 129 Vettori, Pier, 142n77 Veyne, Paul, 161–62 Vibenna, Caio, 169 Vico, Giambattista, 150–51, 162 Villani, Filippo, 165 Vinetus, Elias, 86 Virgil, 114 Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus, 211 Voltaire, 313, 315–23, 327–29, 338, 340, 341, 342, 345–47, 348n1, 351n13, 353n24, 353n26, 354nn28–29, 356n37, 357n39, 357–58nn41–42, 362n59, 366n83, 367n90 Vossius, Gerhard, 314, 341, 360n48, 382, 385–86 Vossius, Isaac, 314, 318, 321, 324, 334, 342, 343, 345, 359n48, 364–65n73, 382 Wachler, Ludwig, 34 Waltner, Ann, 240 Wang Anshi, 376 Wang Chongqing, 297 Wang Kentang, 227 Wang Mang, 183, 376 Wang Qiu, 190 Wang Shimou, 238–39 Page 426 → Wang Shixing, 291, 299–301, 303, 305 Wang Shizhen, 16, 192–93, 227, 235–36, 238–47 Wang Wenlu, 190–91, 193 Wang Xiangjin, 256 Wang Xiangzu, 111

Wang Xijue, 240 Wang Yangming, 245, 247, 298, 304, 375 Warburg, Aby, 46, 400 Warburton, William, 341, 357n39, 363n66 Warner, Levinus, 267 Wasmuth, Matthias, 274 Watt, James, 123 Webb, John, 338 Weber, Max, 10, 14, 23n30, 104 Wei Shu, 110 Weiss, Roberto, 156, 157 Welser, Marcus, 90 Wheelock, Abraham, 271, 274–75 Widmanstetter, Johann Albrecht, 268 William of Orange, 213 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 4, 33, 34, 35, 39–41, 42, 46, 53n60, 54n69, 127 Winghe, Philips van, 126 Witt, Ronald, 113 Wolf, Friedrich August, 30, 42 Wolff, Christian von, 320 Worm, Ole, 3, 19n3, 27 Wu Cheng, 144n95 Wu Yue chunqiu, 188 Wunderkammern, 34 Xavier, Francis, 90–91, 92–93 Xiahou Ying, 190 Xi'an, 182, 184, 186, 335 Xiang Yuanbian, 195–96 Xie Huilian, 72–74

Xiong Chong, 182, 184–85, 187 Xiphilinus, John, 92 Xu Guangqi, 133, 304, 373 Xu Hongzu, 301 Xu Lingqi, 188, 201n24 Xu Shen, 251, 254 Xu Zhenqing, 245 Xuande bronzes, 194–96 Xuande dingyi pu, 194–95, 202n45 Yamashita, Samuel Hideo, 240 Yan Song, 239 Yan Yu, 245 Yang Dianxun, 116 Yang Huan, 199n15 Yang Jing, 182 Yang Mei-li, 123–24 Yang Shen, 11, 17, 192, 193, 201n31, 202n37, 245, 291, 295–99, 301–2, 303, 305 Yang Tinghe, 295 Yang Tingyun, 304 Yao, 188 Yijing, 228, 361n58 Yili, 376 Yu (sage-king), 181, 183, 188, 190–93 Yuan Kang, 71 Yunnan, 11, 295–98 Zamakhshari, al-, 272 Zechendorff, Johann, 268, 269, 271, 272, 275 Zhai Qinian, 6 Zhan Ruoshui, 191

Zhang Heng, 74–75 Zhang Hong, 301 Zhang Jiebin, 227 Zhang Juzheng, 239, 241 Zhang Mingdao, 201n31 Zhang Shinan, 189 Zhang Xingyao, 373 Zhao Mingcheng, 60, 132, 139n53 Zheng He, 124, 303 Zheng Qiao, 107–8, 112, 257–59 Zheng Xuan, 251, 253 Zhou Yinghe, 136n18 Zhouli, 131, 251, 293, 294, 376 Zhu Changwen, 110, 135n16, 136n19 Zhu Xi, 7, 119, 192, 244, 375 Zhushu jinian, 106 Zonaras, Joannes, 92 Zoroaster, 334, 360n49 Zuo Si, 242 Zuozhuan, 72, 290