Interactive antiquities: A Relational History
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Franz L. Fillafer
Abstract
My chapter is devoted to what might be called the brokerage of pasts: the interplay between the discovery of the Greek and Roman ancient worlds on the one hand and non-classical antiquities on the other. The following essay attempts to recover the intense exchange of concepts and values that occured between these pasts as well as between the templates and techniques used to study them. I begin by alluding to the global historical dimension of this relationship: Unearthing ancient civilisations across the globe, the age of discoveries provincialised the Mediterranean antiquity without diminishing its prestige: Graeco- Roman antiquity became a convertible asset, a template permitting its European users to explore and embellish their own barbarian pasts. Central European humanists made good use of these participatory chronopolitics, and the Counter- Reformational Habsburg Reconquista against Ottoman and Protestant foes reaped the fruits of the humanist learning it absorbed. Latinate to the bone, the new Catholic intellectual culture blended romanitas and christianitas: As papal Rome instilled its sacred ancestry into antiquity by discovering Christian vestiges in the Eternal City, local historians of Central Europe inserted their past into the ancient world via Catholicism. Baroque humanism annexed the Habsburg lands to the symbolic landscape of Rome, but it also encouraged the design of local pasts whose study relied on cross-referencing with ancient prototypes. In their pursuit of competing ancestral visions, eighteenth-century Habsburg antiquarians used their superb knowledge of the classics and the Roman sediment in the region to explore pre-, non-, and post-Roman pasts. Enlightenment statecraft under Maria Theresa and Joseph II prompted classicist patriots across the Empire to rediscover their local Renaissance humanisms as golden ages when the cultivation of Latin and the respective vernaculars had flourished in tandem. A creative response to the time regime of Enlightenment progress and delay, the rediscovery of Renaissance humanisms permitted its promotors to prove their historical cultures’ self-reliant access to classical antiquity that did not depend on mediation by others. Patriotic scholars cropped, tweaked, and conflated chronologies in order to prove the equivalence of their antiquities to the classical heritage. The last section of my chapter carries my argument into the nineteenth century and recovers the Habsburg alternative to neo-humanism. As officials of a multilingual and multi-religious monarchy, Habsburg scholars encountered groups that their French, English, and German counterparts chose to idealise or orientalise as neighbours and collaborators: Greeks and Ottomans. Deeply steeped in the management of imperial diversity, Habsburg scholars resisted the idealisation of classical Greece and complicated its link with modern Hellas. At the same time, these Central European learned men retained a multi-layered framework of Mediterranean antiquity and resisted the obliteration of its Hebrew, Asian, and African components.
Abstract
My chapter is devoted to what might be called the brokerage of pasts: the interplay between the discovery of the Greek and Roman ancient worlds on the one hand and non-classical antiquities on the other. The following essay attempts to recover the intense exchange of concepts and values that occured between these pasts as well as between the templates and techniques used to study them. I begin by alluding to the global historical dimension of this relationship: Unearthing ancient civilisations across the globe, the age of discoveries provincialised the Mediterranean antiquity without diminishing its prestige: Graeco- Roman antiquity became a convertible asset, a template permitting its European users to explore and embellish their own barbarian pasts. Central European humanists made good use of these participatory chronopolitics, and the Counter- Reformational Habsburg Reconquista against Ottoman and Protestant foes reaped the fruits of the humanist learning it absorbed. Latinate to the bone, the new Catholic intellectual culture blended romanitas and christianitas: As papal Rome instilled its sacred ancestry into antiquity by discovering Christian vestiges in the Eternal City, local historians of Central Europe inserted their past into the ancient world via Catholicism. Baroque humanism annexed the Habsburg lands to the symbolic landscape of Rome, but it also encouraged the design of local pasts whose study relied on cross-referencing with ancient prototypes. In their pursuit of competing ancestral visions, eighteenth-century Habsburg antiquarians used their superb knowledge of the classics and the Roman sediment in the region to explore pre-, non-, and post-Roman pasts. Enlightenment statecraft under Maria Theresa and Joseph II prompted classicist patriots across the Empire to rediscover their local Renaissance humanisms as golden ages when the cultivation of Latin and the respective vernaculars had flourished in tandem. A creative response to the time regime of Enlightenment progress and delay, the rediscovery of Renaissance humanisms permitted its promotors to prove their historical cultures’ self-reliant access to classical antiquity that did not depend on mediation by others. Patriotic scholars cropped, tweaked, and conflated chronologies in order to prove the equivalence of their antiquities to the classical heritage. The last section of my chapter carries my argument into the nineteenth century and recovers the Habsburg alternative to neo-humanism. As officials of a multilingual and multi-religious monarchy, Habsburg scholars encountered groups that their French, English, and German counterparts chose to idealise or orientalise as neighbours and collaborators: Greeks and Ottomans. Deeply steeped in the management of imperial diversity, Habsburg scholars resisted the idealisation of classical Greece and complicated its link with modern Hellas. At the same time, these Central European learned men retained a multi-layered framework of Mediterranean antiquity and resisted the obliteration of its Hebrew, Asian, and African components.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Table of Contents V
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Introductions
- Introduction: The querelle that wasn’t 1
- Habsburg intellectual history in context. Two perspectives (roof intro) 21
- Habsburg intellectual history in its universal, imperial, and regional contexts: A Counter-Reformation account 23
- Habsburg intellectual history in a global context: revolution, evolution, innovation 53
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The Church
- Bernhard Pez challenges his abbot, as viewed from a curial perspective. New materials on a conflict situated between monastic discipline and theological antiquarianism 97
- Ignorant critics, learned colleagues, and evidence from the source: Bernhard Pez’s Apologia for the publication of The Life and Revelations of Agnes Blannbekin 119
- Die Rezeption der Constitutio Unigenitus (1713) im Alten Reich: eine unterschätzte Diskussion? 141
- The debate about the completion of the Cathedral of Milan during the eighteenth century. Innovation and continuity with regard to aesthetical, lexical, and theoretical issues 171
- Tradition and reform in the scholarship of Sebastiano Paoli OMD (1684–1751) between Vienna and Naples 193
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The Empire
- Verhandlungen über das Mittelalter zwischen Melk und Leipzig: Bernhard Pez’ Brief von einigen alten Poeten, welche in teutscher Sprache etwas geschrieben (1725) 215
- Wenn „große Männer“ fehlen: Argumentationsstrategien im Ringen um eine Studienreform an der Universität Wien zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts 241
- „Interdum optarem autoritatibus Tua magis muniri caeteroque philologico apparatu.“ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Kritik an Hermann von der Hardts rationalistischer Bibelauslegung 267
- Another querelle. The Usus Modernus Pandectarum and the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire around 1700 293
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The Habsburg Monarchy
- Gebrauchtbuchhandel als neue Geschäftspraxis: Der Wiener Buchhandel des Johann Adam Schmidt (Nürnberg) zwischen Novitäten und Antiquariat (1730–1751) 311
- Der Streit um die Genealogie der Wittelsbacher. Gottfried Philipp von Spannagel (Wien) gegen Ignaz Franz Xaver von Wilhelm (München) 347
- Two visions of a sacred kingdom: Gabriel Hevenesi and Samuel Timon as expositors of Holy Hungary 393
- Old and new iconographic forms on the eastern border of the Habsburg Monarchy. Social prestige and family alliances in eighteenth-century Oltenia 415
- New uses of an old theme: The Roman origins of Romanians in the discourse of the Greek Catholic elite in eighteenth-century Transylvania 441
- The Istoria of Francesco Ottieri and the writing of modern history in early eighteenth-century Italy 459
- Antiquos reverentia, novos aequitate: „Moderne“ Antikerezeption bei Carl Gustav Heraeus 479
- Habsburgs beste Quellen. Tradition und Innovation in der Balneologie des 18. Jahrhunderts 511
- Das Josephinische Eherecht. Eine Gemengelage aus Altem und Neuem im Dienste einer bürgerlich-patriarchalen Geschlechterordnung 529
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Epilogues
- Interactive antiquities: A Relational History 565
- Querelle – Parallèle – Paradoxe – Guerre. Framing the dispute between Ancients and Moderns in the early modern periodical press (Nouvelles littéraires, Neue Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen) 607
- Index of People 639
- Index of Places 655
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Table of Contents V
-
Introductions
- Introduction: The querelle that wasn’t 1
- Habsburg intellectual history in context. Two perspectives (roof intro) 21
- Habsburg intellectual history in its universal, imperial, and regional contexts: A Counter-Reformation account 23
- Habsburg intellectual history in a global context: revolution, evolution, innovation 53
-
The Church
- Bernhard Pez challenges his abbot, as viewed from a curial perspective. New materials on a conflict situated between monastic discipline and theological antiquarianism 97
- Ignorant critics, learned colleagues, and evidence from the source: Bernhard Pez’s Apologia for the publication of The Life and Revelations of Agnes Blannbekin 119
- Die Rezeption der Constitutio Unigenitus (1713) im Alten Reich: eine unterschätzte Diskussion? 141
- The debate about the completion of the Cathedral of Milan during the eighteenth century. Innovation and continuity with regard to aesthetical, lexical, and theoretical issues 171
- Tradition and reform in the scholarship of Sebastiano Paoli OMD (1684–1751) between Vienna and Naples 193
-
The Empire
- Verhandlungen über das Mittelalter zwischen Melk und Leipzig: Bernhard Pez’ Brief von einigen alten Poeten, welche in teutscher Sprache etwas geschrieben (1725) 215
- Wenn „große Männer“ fehlen: Argumentationsstrategien im Ringen um eine Studienreform an der Universität Wien zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts 241
- „Interdum optarem autoritatibus Tua magis muniri caeteroque philologico apparatu.“ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Kritik an Hermann von der Hardts rationalistischer Bibelauslegung 267
- Another querelle. The Usus Modernus Pandectarum and the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire around 1700 293
-
The Habsburg Monarchy
- Gebrauchtbuchhandel als neue Geschäftspraxis: Der Wiener Buchhandel des Johann Adam Schmidt (Nürnberg) zwischen Novitäten und Antiquariat (1730–1751) 311
- Der Streit um die Genealogie der Wittelsbacher. Gottfried Philipp von Spannagel (Wien) gegen Ignaz Franz Xaver von Wilhelm (München) 347
- Two visions of a sacred kingdom: Gabriel Hevenesi and Samuel Timon as expositors of Holy Hungary 393
- Old and new iconographic forms on the eastern border of the Habsburg Monarchy. Social prestige and family alliances in eighteenth-century Oltenia 415
- New uses of an old theme: The Roman origins of Romanians in the discourse of the Greek Catholic elite in eighteenth-century Transylvania 441
- The Istoria of Francesco Ottieri and the writing of modern history in early eighteenth-century Italy 459
- Antiquos reverentia, novos aequitate: „Moderne“ Antikerezeption bei Carl Gustav Heraeus 479
- Habsburgs beste Quellen. Tradition und Innovation in der Balneologie des 18. Jahrhunderts 511
- Das Josephinische Eherecht. Eine Gemengelage aus Altem und Neuem im Dienste einer bürgerlich-patriarchalen Geschlechterordnung 529
-
Epilogues
- Interactive antiquities: A Relational History 565
- Querelle – Parallèle – Paradoxe – Guerre. Framing the dispute between Ancients and Moderns in the early modern periodical press (Nouvelles littéraires, Neue Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen) 607
- Index of People 639
- Index of Places 655
