Kirjahaku

In The History of the Destruction of Troy, Dares the Phrygian boldly claimed to be an eyewitness to the Trojan War, while challenging the accounts of two of the ancient world's most canonical poets, Homer and Virgil. For over a millennium, Dares' work was circulated as the first pagan history. It promised facts and only facts about what really happened at Troy — precise casualty figures, no mention of mythical phenomena, and a claim that Troy fell when Aeneas and other Trojans betrayed their city and opened its gates to the Greeks. But for all its intrigue, the work was as fake as it was sensational. From the late antique encyclopedist Isidore of Seville to Thomas Jefferson, The First Pagan Historian offers the first comprehensive account of Dares' rise and fall as a reliable and canonical guide to the distant past. Along the way, it reconstructs the central role of forgery in longstanding debates over the nature of history, fiction, criticism, philology, and myth, from ancient Rome to the Enlightenment.

The study of intellectual history might be second only to the novel in the number of mournful obituaries it has received over the years. But--if the vibrancy on display in Thinking in the Past Tense is any indication--reports of the death of intellectual history have been greatly exaggerated. This collection of interviews with leading American and European scholars from such diverse fields as the history of science, classical studies, global philology, and the study of books and material culture positively brims with insights on historical scholarship of the early modern period (ca. 1400-1800). The lively conversations collected here don't simply reveal these scholars' depth and breadth of thought--they also disclose the kind of trade secrets that historians rarely elucidate in print. Thinking in the Past Tense offers students and professionals alike a rare tactile understanding of the practice of intellectual history.