Ancient Genres and Modern Narratives: Writing Universal History in the Decades around 1700

The decades around 1700—in which Paul Hazard famously located a “crisis of European consciousness”—have long been depicted as moments of tumult in European intellectual culture. Perhaps nowhere have these conflicts seemed more pronounced than in debates over the theory and practice of historiography. Skeptics squared off against defenders of historical tradition, and self-professed moderns engaged in polemical quarrels with self-proclaimed ancients. More recently, however, scholars have also turned their attention to those who championed a middle course in such disputes. This paper examines one of the most prominent of such figures: the Leiden classical scholar Jacob Perizonius (1651-1715). Through analysis of Perizonius’ lectures on universal history, it explores how “classicists” (long before they commonly identified as such) could command geographies and temporalities far distant from Greco-Roman antiquity. Late humanist classical scholars like Perizonius used the genre of universal history or historia universalis to combine everything from the fall of ancient Rome to the rise of modern Europe into a single continuous narrative. In so doing, Perizonius helped forge a via media between antiquity and modernity that proved immensely influential in Enlightenment historiography and beyond, even as he bemoaned the ostensible decline of learning from its supposed Renaissance heights. Wedged uneasily between our own periodized definitions of Renaissance and Enlightenment, “late” humanists like Perizonius have suffered undue neglect in traditional accounts of intellectual history. However, they helped fix those turning points that still determine the boundaries of historical periods today, whether for good or for ill.