Bacon's Henry VII
A Case-Study in the Science of Man
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4496438 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stuart Clark (0000-0002-0495-670X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1974 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 97 |
| Publication date | 1974-05-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History and Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2504854 |
| OpenAlex | W2334048727 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
Both Acton and Collingwood believed that until the later nineteenth century studies were in a position similar to that of the natural sciences before Galileo. In fact, this analogy between a nineteenth-century historical revolution and the seventeenth-century scientific revolution extends beyond the development of the discipline itself to the criteria by which it still tends to judge its own past. Just as physics and astronomy before Galileo and Newton were once regarded by historians of science as the superstitions of an unenlightened age, so today the achievements of the comparable pre-scientific period of history-writing, unless manifesting some literary or philosophical merit, tend to suffer from a similar disdain. Modern professional historians, it is true, have little alternative but to apply the exacting standards and sophisticated criticism of today's study to their predecessors from whatever period who come before them as possible sources of testimony or pieces of evidence. Weighed in this balance, from Ranke's appendix to the History of the Latin arnd Teutonic Nations onward, the work of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries has, not surprisingly, been found wanting. But the historians of thought, who might have been expected to consider the historiographical past more sympathetically in its proper context of changing assumptions and values, have been no less anachronistic in their judgments. Looking backward from the same post-nineteenth-century vantage point, they have tended to evaluate periods and writers principally by the criterion of how much each has contributed to the evolution of the modern discipline of history. In the first great survey by Eduard Fueter and in the latest by Peter Burke, the Renaissance is sifted for early signs of the attitudes and techniques which have since come to dominate work.' Other
Epistemology · Historical and Literary Studies · History · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.13 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1987 - 2012 (26) |
| Highly cited | No |