Universal History and the Origin Narrative of European Modernity: The Leiden Lectures of Jacob Perizonius (1651–1715) on Historia Universalis
Frederic Clark
This article explores a central facet of humanist scholarship and pedagogy—namely, the writing teaching universal history—in decades around 1700. In does so by examining one most prominent humanists European Republic Letters: Leiden classical scholar Jacob Perizonius (1651–1715). Through analysis Perizonius’s unpublished lectures on history, it how ‘classicists’ (long before they commonly identified as such) could command geographies temporalities far distant from Greco-Roman antiquity. Late scholars like used ancient genre history or historia universalis to combine everything fall Rome emergence Renaissance Europe into single continuous narrative. doing, helped forge via media between antiquity modernity at moment when self-identified “ancients” “moderns” frequently engaged in conflict. synthesis proved immensely influential Enlightenment historiography beyond. As argued here, enabled craft an origin narrative nostra Europa ‘our Europe’ purportedly became modern.
Erudition and the republic of letters