Michael Hewson Crawford

C. R. Ligota

Arnaldo Momigliano was convinced that all disciplines need to be aware of their own history. His famous lecture Ancient History and the Antiquarian, delivered in 1949 at the Warburg Institute, and published in 1950 in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, has become a landmark. In it he showed how historiography had been changed by the recognition that what historians had left out of the record could be put back by the antiquarians. He argued that a comprehensive interest in the vestiges of ancient civilization, beginning in the Renaissance and refined and enlarged during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, made a rigid distinction between historical and antiquarian studies unjustifiable; furthermore, the standards set by the antiquarians in the understanding and interpretation of the past still have relevance.

Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano

Ancient History and the Antiquarian

Letizia Panizza

The essays in this volume bring together, in a revised and updated form, papers presented at a colloquium held at the Warburg Institute in December 1995. As the title suggests, Lucian is considered both in his contemporary environment and in his Nachleben, and the overall purpose is to show the freshness and resilience of the presence in European culture of an author whose well-aimed satirical wit has, from his time to ours, led to defensive attempts at repression and expulsion from the cultural canon. As Kurt Tucholsky put it, nothing was sacred to Lucian, which makes him a 'friend, cousin, brother, comrade at arms'.

C. R. Ligota

Books

Your next favorite book is out there