| Abstract |
The purpose of this article is to investigate the scholarly foundations of writing “truthful” ancient history in early modern Europe, with a view to tracing the origins of the modern historical method. Renaissance humanists revived the paradigm of the historical writing developed by classical historians, which relied on narrative sources as evidence. But the development of historical pyrrhonism during the sixteenth century, which questioned the reliability of narrative sources, shook the foundations of the humanist historical writings. The rise of antiquarian research, however, helped the humanist historians out of this crisis. Antiquarianism was a branch of Renaissance classical scholarship which attempted to reconstruct the ancient world via material remains such as coins, inscriptions, pictures, monuments, and documents. These tangible objects, being directly left by the ancients, were assumed to be more reliable than narrative sources as historical evidence and could therefore be used to reconstruct trustworthy ancient history. The rise of antiquarianism was to cause a revolution in historical methods, which induced historians to shift to primary sources for historical evidence. In so doing, early modern European antiquarians not only helped to lay the foundations of modern historiography, which cherishes mainly primary sources; they also enabled modern historians to write ancient as well as contemporary history. |
