MOMIGLIANO AND ANTIQUARIANISM: FOUNDATIONS OF THE MODERN CULTURAL SCIENCES Arnaldo Momigliano MOMIGLIANO AND ANTIQUARIANISM FOUNDATIONS OF THE MODERN CULTURAL SCIENCES Edited by Peter N. Miller Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library www.utppublishing.com © The Regents of the University of California 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-8020-9207-6 Printed on acid-free paper Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Momigliano and antiquarianism : foundations of the modern cultural sciences / edited by Peter N. Miller. (UCLA Center/Clark series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9207-6 1. Momigliano, Arnaldo – Criticism and interpretation. 2. History, Ancient – Historiography. I. Miller, Peter N., 1964– II. Series: UCLA Clark Memorial Library series D53.A2M64 2006 930 C2006-905435-5 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council. In honour of Wallace MacCaffrey This page intentionally left blank Where could one find a feeling for the seriousness of research called to explore the fathomless depths of knowledge? How seldom is there any forbearance towards bold efforts that were unsuccessful, or patience for slow developments! Goethe, Geschichte der Farbenlehre This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments xi Contributors xiii 1 Introduction: Momigliano, Antiquarianism, and the Cultural Sciences 3 peter n. miller 2 Arnaldo Momigliano from Antiquarianism to Cultural History: Some Reasons for a Quest 66 riccardo di donato 3 Momigliano’s Method and the Warburg Institute: Studies in His Middle Period 97 anthony grafton 4 Arnaldo Momigliano’s ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’: A Critical Review 127 ingo herklotz 5 Arnaldo Momigliano et la réhabilitation des ‘antiquaires’: le comte de Caylus et le ‘retour à l’antique’ au XVIIIe siècle 154 marc fumaroli 6 Historia Literaria and Cultural History from Mylaeus to Eichhorn 184 michael c. carhart x Contents 7 New Paths of Antiquarianism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Theodor Mommsen and Max Weber 207 wilfried nippel 8 From Antiquarianism to Anthropology 229 peter burke 9 From Antiquarian to Archaeologist? Adolf Furtwängler and the Problem of ‘Modern’ Classical Archaeology 248 suzanne marchand 10 Arnaldo Momigliano and the History of Religions 286 guy g. stroumsa 11 Arnaldo Momigliano and Gershom Scholem on Jewish History and Tradition 312 moshe idel 12 Momigliano, Benjamin, and Antiquarianism after the Crisis of Historicism 334 peter n. miller Index 379 Acknowledgments This book originated as a conference at the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles. It is a pleasure to able to thank the director, Peter Reill, and the fine staff who made that event such a pleasant experience. That it does not remain only a pleasant memory is due to the University of Toronto Press, to its two anonymous readers, and to Ron Schoeffel, who shepherded the book from start to finish. Theresa Griffin offered careful copy-editing when it was most needed, and Anne Laughlin flawlessly supervised the end-game. I thank Professors Glenn Most, Michael P. Steinberg, Anthony Grafton, Riccardo Di Donato, Deborah L. Krohn, and Naomi C. Miller for their helpful comments at various points in the making of the book. I especially thank Di Donato in his capacity as executor of the Momigliano estate for his generosity in providing us with these great photographs of Momigliano. Most of all, I have to thank the contributors to this volume: for their freely given labour, for its extraordinarily high quality, and for their unfailing pa- tience and punctuality. Finally, my work on this book, as on all my other projects, has been ably assisted by librarians at the Bard Graduate Center: Greta Ernest, Heather Topcik, Erin Elliott, Rebecca Friedman, and Cheryl Costello. I am very happy to be able to dedicate this book to Wallace MacCaffrey. It was in his classes at Harvard two decades ago that I took my first steps towards becoming a historian. A book about one great scholar and teacher seems to me the best way to say thank you to another one. This page intentionally left blank Contributors Peter Burke, a Fellow of Emmanuel College, was Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge until his retirement in 2004. His books range from The Renaissance Sense of the Past (1969) to Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (2004). Michael C. Carhart is assistant professor of history at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Human Nature, Human Culture: Enlighten- ment Social Science (Harvard University Press, 2007). Riccardo Di Donato is Professor of Greek Language and Literature, and Chair of the Department of Classical Philology at the University of Pisa. He collaborated with Momigliano in the latter’s Pisan seminars (1970– 86) and is Curator of the Archivio Arnaldo Momigliano (Pisa). Marc Fumaroli is honorary professor at the Collège de France, and member of the Académie Française and of the Académie des Inscrip- tions et Belles Lettres. The author of many books about the European tradition of classical learning, he is currently preparing a study of the Count of Caylus and the French origins of the eighteenth-century ‘re- tour à l’antique.’ Anthony Grafton teaches European history at Princeton University. Ingo Herklotz is Professor in the History of Art at the University of Marburg (Germany), and previously held teaching positions at the Uni- versities of Rome, Konstanz, and Basel. He has been a visiting professor xiv Contributors at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, the Getty Research Institute at Los Angeles, and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art at Paris. Moshe Idel is Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. His scholarship focuses on the history of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. He is the author of, most recently, Enchanted Chains: Techniques and Rituals in Jewish Mysticism (2005) and Kabbalah and Eros (2005). Suzanne Marchand teaches European intellectual history at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She is the author of Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970, as well as several other essays on the history of the humanities in Germany and Austria. Peter N. Miller is Professor and Chair of Academic Programs at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Wilfried Nippel holds the Chair of Ancient History at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He has published extensively on Athenian democ- racy, the Roman Republic, the history of political thought, and the history of classical studies. He is one of the editors of the German edition of Momigliano’s essays. Guy G. Stroumsa is Martin Buber Professor of Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His recent works include La fin du sacrifice: mutations religieuses de l’antiquité tardive (Paris, 2005) and Le rire du Christ, essais sur le Christianisme antique (Paris, 2006). MOMIGLIANO AND ANTIQUARIANISM: FOUNDATIONS OF THE MODERN CULTURAL SCIENCES This page intentionally left blank chapter one Introduction: Momigliano, Antiquarianism, and the Cultural Sciences PETER N. MILLER Arnaldo Momigliano was one of the great historians of the twentieth century. His contribution to the study of the ancient world has been enormous. His command of Roman, Greek, and Jewish history was legendary. But he was also a historian who cared deeply about the history of historical study. And from 1950 onwards, in a career that began in the early 1930s, he devoted the lion’s share of his intellectual energies to exploring the history of historiography. These essays, beginning with ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’ (1950), brought Momigliano to the wider attention of modern historians, but also to historians of art, archaeology, and the social sciences. At the centre of this story, or, rather more precisely, the thread that runs through this story, is history’s debt to antiquarianism. Momigliano explored the role and resonances of antiquarianism in ancient Greece and Rome, and its position vis-à-vis what counted then as ‘history,’ but devoted the bulk of his attention to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There, he discerned the crucial encounter between the meth- ods that antiquaries had developed for studying subjects abandoned by ‘historians,’ namely, old, non-political matters that required research into sources, and the rhetorically gifted writers of history who needed to prove that their stories were true. And although antiquarianism and antiquaries continued on into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Momigliano kept coming back to this late seventeenth- and early- eighteenth-century moment. Nevertheless, Momigliano knew much about things he chose not to write about. His reader, in turn, learns to pay close attention to the asides casually tossed off in footnotes, in book reviews, and on the periphery of 4 Peter N. Miller essays devoted to other subjects. And on these margins, Momigliano was willing to hazard the suggestion that if one would pursue not the afterlife of antiquarianism within history – which was his own interest – but rather its survival outside it, in other disciplines, one would find connections to anthropology, art history, archaeology, sociology, and history of religion. This nexus, between antiquarianism and what were called ‘the cultural sciences’ (Kulturwissenschaften) during Momigliano’s germanophone youth, and which he once or twice let slip as ‘cultural history’ – probably in appreciation of Burckhardt’s achievement – allows us to hang on to Momigliano’s own scaffolding the sketch of a history of antiquarianism from the fifteenth century to the twentieth.