TIME - Jan 9, 2008
Past Masters: John Burrows' History of Histories
The writing of history is one of the great legacies of the ancient Greeks, and its earliest masters, Herodotus and Thucydides, are as central to the foundations of Western civilization as Homer, Socrates and Sophocles. In more modern times, multivolume sagas of crumbling empires, explosive revolutions and nations nudging toward greatness were huge best sellers, making historians like Edward Gibbon, Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle as well known as Stephen King and John Grisham are today.
But the fact that this needs stating, or that we must intermittently re-emphasize history's relevance to understanding ourselves, points to a problem that has hounded the discipline in recent years — its tendency toward clubby academic isolation. A fine antidote to this trend is John Burrow's A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, an ambitious and accessible account of the historian's craft over the last 2,500 years....
He goes on to discuss "the radical and pervasive" impact of the Bible on history — for example, in the writings of the 6th century French Bishop Gregory of Tours, whom he dubs "Trollope with blood." Equally intriguing is Burrow's discussion of the secular historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, a fabricator who claimed that his 12th century account of King Arthur was in fact a translation of an early work in Welsh — one that nobody else has ever been able to unearth. Geoffrey's "pseudo history," writes Burrow, dressed up myth as fact, thereby launching Arthur and his knights as potent symbols of Britain's "emerging ethos of chivalry."
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