Draft version – comments and suggestions will be gratefully acknowledged 1 Humanities across Time and Space: Four Challenges for a New Discipline 1 Rens Bod University of Amsterdam rens.bod@gmail.com Introduction While histories within the context of a single humanities discipline have been written for more than a century, it is only over the last decade that we have witnessed histories that go beyond single humanities disciplines and that bring together different fields, periods or regions. 2 It thus comes as a surprise that virtually no studies go into the methodological problems of the new métier. Questions abound: What do we mean by “bringing together” different humanities fields across time and space? Should we study their shared concepts, methods, virtues, research practices, historical actors, pedagogical practices, personal interactions, or yet something else? And when in history can we speak of the “humanities” as a group of disciplines? And how can we compare the humanities from different parts of the world? In this essay, I will discuss four methodological challenges which I believe to be constitutive for the history of the humanities as a field. These are the challenges of demarcation, anachronism, eurocentrism and incommensurability. Any history of the humanities that goes beyond the scope of a single discipline, period or region will have to address at least one of these challenges. While none of my challenges have absolute solutions, I will give a motivated choice for each of them. I will argue that my solutions provide a viable way to write a comparative history of the humanities, and that we can therefore speak of them as maxims. Although the preferred solutions will differ among historians, the challenges remain the same. At the end of my essay, I will discuss other possible solutions to the challenges, as well as other possible challenges for the history of the humanities, such as the challenge of forgotten scholars, non-academic humanities and colonial humanities. Finally, I will go into the relation between the history of the humanities and the history of science and knowledge. 1 This paper is a preliminary version of a chapter written for the volume Writing the History of the Humanities: Questions, Themes, and Approaches, edited by Herman Paul for Bloomsbury’s ‘Writing History’ series. The author will be grateful to receive comments and suggestions. He will acknowledge and incorporate all useful suggestions received before March 15, 2021 (which is the deadline of the chapter). Later suggestions may still be included, but this depends on the time schedule of the publication of the volume. 2 See e.g. Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and Thijs Weststeijn (eds), The Making of the Humanities, 3 volumes, Amsterdam University Press, 2010, 2012, 2014; Jan Eckel, Geist der Zeit: Deutsche Geisteswissenschaften seit 1870, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008; Rens Bod, De Vergeten Wetenschappen, Prometheus, 2010, translated as A New History of the Humanities, Oxford University Press, 2013; James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Humanities, Princeton University Pres, 2014. See also the journal History of Humanities.