Complex and erudite, confident and controversial. As Schiffman's brilliant argument suggests, anachronism not only helps define the past but becomes its doppelganger. Times Literary Supplement Lively, brilliant, and erudite. [Schiffman's] learned and engaging style [and] fresh, stimulating ideas provide a intellectual feast not only for students of Western civilization, but for those of us seeking to understand other traditions. Essential. ... Read moreChoice This ambitious, lucid book chronicles European methods of imagining and representing the past from the ancient Greeks to the French Enlightenment. Schiffman provides a masterful account of the emergence of modern notions of historical causation that begins with Thucydides and ends more than two thousand years later with Montesquieu and Herder. Sixteenth Century Journal Anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, or the history of historiography for that matter, will find that this book repays close attention. Reviews in History Thought-provoking. History Wire - Where the Past Comes Alive This is an important book, and deserves to be widely read. The Sun News Network Schiffman has given us a 'historiographical essay' by his own admission, and an excellent one at that: not the whole truth, but, more valuably, a new foothold for serious engagement.
Anthony Ossa-Richardson Intellectual History Review It is refreshing to read a book with a clear, even bold, thesis that forces readers to reexamine the authority and applicability of basic historical concepts... The strength of this engaging study is not simply that it historicizes and thus defamiliarizes what passes for common sense in the present but also that it reconstructs what had been regarded as common sense in previous epochs in the Western tradition, from antiquity to the Christian era, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Journal of Modern History Show Less