PRESENTISM AND THE RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN HISTORIAN Writing in 1941, Benedetto Croce argued, ‘All history is contemporary history’. In doing so, he created an aphorism that offers two dimensions to ‘presentism’. 1 It can mean, for example, that we seek present-day concerns in the past, searching in the archives for the earlier versions of our own contemporary lives and interests. But ‘presentism’ can also mean attempts to remove texts from any particular period or place, asking them to represent universal rather than historically situated values. Like Robin Osborne’s classicism (described elsewhere in this set of articles), the framework of the Renaissance and early modern in Europe poses particular challenges in understanding this dual role. Both period labels drew on complex nineteenth-century nationalistic historiographies. 2 The concept of the ‘rebirth’ of classical antiquity, a rinascita, or renaissance, was first adopted by Jules Michelet for the seventh volume of his nationalistic Histoire de France (1855), while in English the term ‘early modern’ was originally used by William Johnson in 1869 for his book Early Modern Europe. Whether looking backwards to a revival of classical art and architecture or forward to Protestant nationhood, the two historians connected the transition to nineteenth-century modernity to imagined beginnings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 3 But it was not only nationhood that mattered. Like classicists, Renaissance and early modernist specialists saw themselves as having a unique 1 Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, trans. Sylvia Sprigge (London, 1941), 19. For a discussion of Croce’s approach, see Nicola Conati, ‘History as Contemporary History in the Thinking of Benedetto Croce’, Open Journal of Philosophy, v (2015), 5 http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojpp.2015.510074(accessed 9 Oct. 2016). 2 J. B. Bullen (ed.), The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford, 1994); J. B. Bullen, ‘The Source and Development of the Idea of the Renaissance in Early Nineteenth-Century French Criticism’, Modern Language Review, lxxvi, 2 (1981). See also Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1981); Martin A. Ruehl, The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination, 1860–1930 (Cambridge, 2015). 3 Justus Nipperdey, ‘The Significance of Terminology for the Idea of a Historical Period: Considerations on Fru ¨he Neuzeit/Early Modern’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftgeschichte, xxxviii (2015). 245 PRESENTISM Past and Present, no. 234 (Feb. 2017) ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2017 doi:10.1093/pastj/gtw058 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/234/1/245/2965809 by King's College London user on 08 January 2019