1. Included in Untimely Meditations , tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 59-123; I am aware that Nietzsche expressed himself quite differently in other places. [BACK]

2. Ibid., pp. 59, 77. [BACK]

3. I have made this point most explicitly in the last selection in the volume, "The History Teacher as Mediator," which also recognizes the dangers in the conception. [BACK]

4. What follows are my own reflections about the impulses underlying my work. For other perspectives, both by colleagues whom I particularly esteem, see Martin Jay, "Hierarchy and the Humanities: The Radical Implications of a Conservative Idea," Telos 62 (1984-1985), 131-144, and above all Randolph Starn, "William Bouwsma and the Paradoxes of History," Culture, Society, and Religion in Early Modern Europe: Essays by the Students and Colleagues of William J. Bouwsma , a special issue of Historical Reflections 15 (Spring 1988), 1-11. [BACK]

5. In making this move I was influenced above all by Mary Douglas, especially Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973); and Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976). I have elaborated on the distinction between intellectual and cultural history in "From History of Ideas to History of Meaning," ch. 15 below. [BACK]

6. In an earlier form, this conception underlies my essay of 1980, "Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture," ch. 6 below; it was carried further in John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York, 1988). [BACK]

7. The notion of distinct cultures corresponding to class is less and less accepted by historians; cf. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France , tr. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, 1987), pp. 3-5. The basic inseparability of elite and popular culture in the sense in which I use the term underlies, for example, Natalic Z. Davis, "The Study of Popular Religion," in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion , ed. Charles Trinkaus (Leiden, 1974), pp. 307-336. It also poses the problem to which Lawrence L. Levine gives so suggestive an answer in Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). [BACK]

8. This reflection was stimulated by Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste , tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). [BACK]

9. For example, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, in "L'histoire immobile," Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations 29 (1974), 673-682, tr. John Day, "Motionless History," Social Science History 1 (1977), 115-136. The irrelevance of a history that ignores events has recently been pointed out with particular poignancy by Arno Mayer in connection with the Holocaust in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History (New York, 1989). [BACK]

10. Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth , tr. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 102. Cf. my discussion of "the myth of apocalyptic modernization" in "The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History," ch. 16 below. [BACK]

11. Cf. George H. Nadel, "Philosophy of History before Historicism," History and Theory 3 (1964), 291-315. [BACK]

12. Quoted from a letter of 1867 by Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York, 1985), p. 87. [BACK]

13. In what follows I have drawn on "Early Modern Europe," my contribution to The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States , ed. Michael Kammen (Ithaca, 1980), pp. 78-94. I have not included it in the present collection because it is chiefly of only bibliographical interest. [BACK]

14. The Age of the Democratic Revolution , 2 vols. (Princeton, 1959-1964), I:8. [BACK]

15. Broader perspectives on the Reformation have also been narrowed by its identification with German history and a view of its manifestations elsewhere as a tribute to the originality and influence of Germany. My effort to understand it in European terms (see ch. 9 below) met with strong resistance at the Fourth International Congress for Lutheran Research in 1971. [BACK]

16. Cf. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London, 1965). [BACK]

17. Alan Megill, ''Foucault, Structuralism, and the Ends of History," Journal of Modern History 51 (1979), 451. The point is also central to Megill's Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley, 1985). [BACK]

18. This seems to me also implicit in the observation of Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980), xvii-xviii: "an understanding of the death of history must also engage the attention of the psychoanalyst. At the most obvious level, the latter would see the sharp break from a tie with the past as involving generational rebellion against the fathers and a search for new self-definitions." Much of this sense of discontinuity, however, also seems to me to reflect—and is used to justify—ignorance of the past. In this connection, see my review essay on Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca, 1982), in History and Theory 23 (1984), 234-236. [BACK]

19. Though much of my Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter-Reformation (Berkeley, 1968) is narrative history. [BACK]

20. Cf. the preface to Ranke's Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494 to 1514 , in The Varieties of History from Voltaire to the Present , ed. Fritz Stern (New York, 1956), pp. 55-58. [BACK]

21. See the critical treatment of the course by Gilbert Allardyce, "The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course," American Historical Review 87 (1982), 695-725. [BACK]

22. I hasten to add, however, that I do not object to elitist history per se but only when its appropriateness is unquestioned and therefore not a matter of deliberate choice. [BACK]

23. Cf. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), pp. 167-168. [BACK]

24. By "my teachers" I do not mean only those from whom I received formal instruction at Harvard. [BACK]

25. This was revised and published as Concordia Mundi: The Career and Thought of Guillaume Postel, 1510-1581 , Harvard Historical Monographs, 33 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957). [BACK]

26. "Uses and Disadvantages of History," p. 78. [BACK]

27. J. H. Hexter, "The Burden of Proof," London Times Literary Supplement , Oct. 24, 1975. [BACK]

28. See "The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought," ch. 1 below. [BACK]

29. De civitate Dei , XII, 13; I quote in the translation of Henry Bettenson (London,1967). [BACK]

30. Cf., most recently, though without reference to Augustine, Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1987). [BACK]

31. Discorsi , II, 2; I quote in the translation of Allan Gilbert (Durham, N. C., 1965). [BACK]

33. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (London, 1924). [BACK]

34. The first to touch on this subject were ch. 12, "Three Types of Historiography in Post-Renaissance Italy," and ch. 19, "Christian Adulthood"; it became prominent, however, only with ch. 6, ''Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture." [BACK]

35. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (New York, 1957). [BACK]

36. "Uses and Disadvantages of History," p. 78. [BACK]

37. Cf. Randolph Starn, "Historians and 'Crisis,'" Past and Present 52 (1971): 3-22. [BACK]

38. The New Organon , ed. Fulton H. Anderson (Indianapolis, 1960), p. 95. I do not mean, of course, quite what Bacon meant by "art," i.e., scientific procedure. [BACK]

39. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society , 2d ed. (New York, 1963), esp. pp. 48-108. Erikson uses the phrase to designate those zones of the body most sensitive to psychological and cultural stimuli. [BACK]