The movement back to the sources in Germany until the Thirty Years’ War was a notable one. Collections were made by Simon Schard (1535-1573), Johannes Pistorius (1576-1608), Marquard Freher (1565-1614), Melchior Goldast (1576-1635) and others. After the war Leibnitz began a new epoch, both by his philosophy with its law of continuity in phenomena, and by his systematic attempt to collect sources through an association (1670). His plan to have documents printed as they were, instead of “correcting” them, was a notable advance. But from Leibnitz until the 19th century German national historiography made little progress,—although church historians like Mosheim and Neander stand out among the greatest historians of all time.
France had not paralleled the activity of Maximilian’s Renaissance historians. The father of modern French history, or at least of historical research, was André Duchesne (1584-1640), whose splendid collections of sources are still in use. Jean Bodin wrote the first treatise on scientific history (Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, 1566), but he did not apply his own principles of criticism; and it was left for the Benedictine monks of the Congregation of St Maur to establish definitely the new science. The place of this school in the history of history is absolutely without a parallel. Few of those in the audiences of Molière, returning home under the grey walls of St Germain-des-Près, knew that within that monastery the men whose midnight they disturbed were laying the basis for all scientific history; and few of the later historians of that age have been any wiser. But when Luc d’Achery turned from exegetics to patristics and the lives of the saints, as a sort of Christian humanist, he led the way to that vast work of collection and comparison of texts which developed through Mabillon, Montfaucon, Ruinart, Martène, Bouquet and their associates, into the indispensable implements of modern historians. Here, as in the Reformation, controversy called out the richest product. Jean Mabillon’s treatise, De re diplomatica (1681), was due to the criticisms of that group of Belgian Jesuits whose Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur (1643, &c., see [Bollandists]) was destined to grow into the greatest repository of legend and biography the world has seen. In reply to D. Papebroch’s criticisms of the chronicle of St Denis, Mabillon prepared this manual for the testing of medieval documents. Its canons are the basis, indeed, almost the whole, of the science of diplomatic (q.v.), the touchstone of truth for medieval research. Henceforth even the mediocre scholar had a body of technical rules by which to sort out the vast mass of apocrypha in medieval documentary sources. Scientific history depends upon implements. Without manuals, dictionaries, and easy access to texts, we should go as far astray as any medieval chronicler. The France of the Maurists supplied the most essential of these instruments. The great “glossary” of Ducange is still in enlarged editions the indispensable encyclopaedia of the middle ages. Chronology and palaeography were placed on a new footing by Dom Bernard de Montfaucon’s Palaeographia graeca (1708), the monumental Art de vérifier les dates (3rd ed., 1818-1831, in 38 vols.), and the Nouveau Traité de diplomatique (1750-1765) of Dom Tassin and Dom Toustain. The collections of texts which the Maurists published are too many and too vast to be enumerated here (see C. Langlois, Manuel de bibliographie historique, pp. 293 ff.). Dom Bouquet’s Historiens de la Gaule et de la France—the national repertory for French historians—is but one of a dozen tasks of similar magnitude. During the 18th century this deep under-work of scientific history continued to advance, though for the most part unseen by the brilliant writers whose untrustworthy generalities passed for history in the salons of the old régime. Interrupted by the Revolution, it revived in the 19th century, and the roll of honour of the French École des Chartes has almost rivalled that of St Germain-des-Prés.
The father of critical history in Italy was L. A. Muratori (1672-1750), the Italian counterpart of Leibnitz. His vast collection of sources (Rerum Italicarum scriptores), prepared amid every discouragement, remains to-day the national monument of Italian history; and it is but one of his collections. His output is perhaps the greatest of any isolated worker in the whole history of historiography. The same haste, but much less care, marked the work of J. D. Mansi (d. 1769), the compiler of the fullest collection of the Councils. Spain, stifled by the Inquisition, produced no national collection of sources during the 17th and 18th centuries, although Nicolas Antonio (d. 1684) produced a national literary history of the first rank.
England in the 16th century kept pace with Continental historiography. Henry VIII.’s chaplain, John Leland, is the father of English antiquaries. Three of the most precious collections of medieval manuscripts still in existence were then begun by Thomas Bodley (the Bodleian at Oxford), Archbishop Matthew Parker (Corpus Christi at Cambridge), and Robert Cotton (the Cottonian collection of the British Museum). In Elizabeth’s reign a serious effort was made to arrange the national records, but until the end of the 18th century they were scattered in not less than fifteen repositories. In the 17th and 18th centuries English scholarship was enriched by such monuments of research as William Dugdale’s Monasticon, Thomas Madox’s History of the Exchequer, Wilkins’s Concilia, and Thomas Rymer’s Foedera. But these works, important as they were, gave but little idea of the wealth of historical sources which the 19th century was to reveal in England.
In the 19th century the science of history underwent a sort of industrial revolution. The machinery of research, invented by the genius of men like Mabillon, was perfected and set going in all the archives of Europe. Isolated workers or groups of workers grew into national or international associations, producing from archives vast collections of material to be worked up into the artistic form of history. The result of this movement has been to revolutionize the whole subject. These men of the factory—devoting their lives to the cataloguing of archives and libraries, to the publication of material, and then to the gigantic task of indexing what they have produced—have made it possible for the student in an American or Australian college to master in a few hours in his library sources of history which baffled the long years of research of a Martène or Rymer. The texts themselves have mostly become as correct as they can ever be, and manuals and bibliographies guide one to and through them, so that no one need go astray who takes the trouble to make use of the mechanism which is at his hand. For example, since the papal archives were opened, so many regesta have appeared that soon it will be possible to follow the letter-writing of the medieval popes day by day for century after century.
The apparatus for this research is too vast to be described here. Archives have been reformed, their contents catalogued or calendared; government commissions have rescued numberless documents from oblivion or destruction, and learned societies have supplemented and criticized this work and co-ordinated the results. Every state in Europe now has published the main sources for its history. The “Rolls” series, the Monumenta Germaniae historica, and the Documents inédits are but the more notable of such national products. A series of periodicals keeps watch over this enormous output. The files and indices of the English Historical Review, Historische Zeitschrift, Revue historique, or American Historical Review will alone reveal the strength and character of historical research in the later 19th century.
Every science which deals with human phenomena is in a way an implement in this great factory system, in which the past is welded together again. Psychology has been drawn upon to interpret the movements of revolutions or religions, anthropology and ethnology furnish a clue to problems to which the key of documents has been lost. Genealogy, heraldry and chronology run parallel with the wider subject. But the real auxiliary sciences to history are those which deal with those traces of the past that still exist, the science of language (philology), of writing (palaeography), of documents (diplomatic), of seals (sphragistics), of coins (numismatics), of weights and measures, and archaeology in the widest sense of the word. These sciences underlie the whole development of scientific history. Dictionaries and manuals are the instruments of this industrial revolution. Without them the literary remains of the race would still be as useless as Egyptian inscriptions to the fellaheen. Archaeology itself remained but a minor branch of art until the machinery was perfected which enabled it to classify and interpret the remains of the “pre-historic” age.
This is the most remarkable chapter in the whole history of history—the recovery of that past which had already been lost when our literary history began. The perspective stretches out as far the other side of Homer as we are this. The old “providential” scheme of history disintegrates before a new interest in the “gentile” nations to whose high culture Hebrew sources bore unwilling testimony. Biblical criticism is a part of the historic process. The Jewish texts, once the infallible basis of history, are now tested by the libraries of Babylon, from which they were partly drawn, and Hebrew history sinks into its proper place in the wide horizon of antiquity. The finding of the Rosetta stone left us no longer dependent upon Greek, Latin or Hebrew sources, and now fifty centuries of Egyptian history lie before us. The scientific historian of antiquity works on the hills of Crete, rather than in the quiet of a library with the classics spread out before him. There he can reconstruct the splendour of that Minoan age to which Homeric poems look back, as the Germanic epics looked back to Rome or Verona. His discoveries, co-ordinated and arranged in vast corpora inscriptionum, stand now alongside Herodotus or Livy, furnishing a basis for their criticism. Medieval archaeology has, since Quicherat, revealed how men were living while the monks wrote chronicles, and now cathedrals and castles are studied as genuine historic documents.
The immense increase in available sources, archaeological and literary, has remade historical criticism. Ranke’s application of the principles of “higher criticism” to works written since the invention of printing (Kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber) was an epoch-making challenge of narrative sources. Now they are everywhere checked by contemporary evidence, and a clearer sense of what constitutes a primary source has discredited much of what had been currently accepted as true. This is true not only of ancient history, where last year’s book may be a thousand years out of date, but of the whole field. Hardly an “old master” remains an authoritative book of reference. Gibbon, Grote, Giesebrecht, Guizot stand to-day by reason of other virtues than their truth. Old landmarks drop out of sight—e.g. the fall of the Western Empire in 476, the coming of the Greeks to Italy in 1450, dates which once enclosed the middle ages. The perspective changes—the Renaissance grows less and the middle ages more; the Protestant Revolution becomes a complex of economics and politics and religion; the French Revolution a vast social reform in which the Terror was an incident, &c., &c. The result has been a complete transformation of history since the middle of the 19th century.
In the 17th century the Augustinian scheme of world history received its last classic statement in Bossuet’s Histoire universelle. Voltaire’s reply to it in the 18th (Essai sur les mœurs) attacked its limitations on the basis of deism, and its miraculous procedure on that of science. But while there are foreshadowings of the evolutionary theory in this work, neither the philosophe historians nor Hume nor Gibbon arrived at a constructive principle in history which could take the place of the Providence they rejected. Religion, though false, might be a real historic force. History became the tragic spectacle of a game of dupes—the real movers being priests, kings or warriors. The pawns slowly acquired reason, and then would be able to regulate the moves themselves. But all this failed to give a satisfactory explanation of the laws which determine the direction of this evolution. Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744) was the first to ask why there is no science of human history. But his lonely life and unrecognized labours leave him apart from the main movement, until his works were discovered again in the 19th century. It was A. L. H. Heeren who, at the opening of the 19th century, first laid that emphasis upon the economic factors in history which is to-day slowly replacing the Augustinian explanation of its evolution. Heeren’s own influence, however, was slight. The first half of the century (apart from the scientific activity of Pertz, Guizot, &c.) was largely dominated by the romanticists, with their exaggeration of the individual. Carlyle’s “great man theory of history” is logically connected with the age of Scott. It was a philosophy of history which lent itself to magnificent dramatic creations; but it explained nothing. It substituted the work of the genius for the miraculous intervention of Providence, but, apart from certain abstract formulae such as Truth and Right, knew nothing of why or how. It is but dealing in words to say that the meaning of it all is God’s revelation of Himself. Granting that, what is the process? Why does it so slowly reveal the Right of the middle ages (as in slavery for instance) to be the Wrong to-day? Carlyle stands to Bossuet as the sage to the myth. Hegel got no closer to realities. His idealistic scheme of history, which makes religion the keynote of progress, and describes the function of each—Judaism to typify duty, Confucianism order, Mahommedanism justice, Buddhism patience, and Christianity love—does not account for the facts of the history enacted by the devotees. It characterizes, not the real process of evolution, but an ideal which history has not realized. Besides, it does not face the question how far religion itself is a product or a cause, or both combined.