Institutionalized Myopia

Gregory provides a superb analysis of the self-imposed blindness of the historical profession ( The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society , 6-10). Periodization is itself a problem, with specialists delving ever deeper into their chosen period without trying to puncture the wall or bridge the gap with other eras. Periodization is made more problematic by a “maximalist” historicism that is, he claims, “institutionalized in the teaching of history,” a historicism that makes every period a prison for its inhabitants. Historians develop a deep appreciation of historical distance, but no sense of historical proximity, no sense that the people and periods they study have a lingering presence.

Attempts to write big history suffer, he adds, from a form of “supersessionism” that reflects the same historicism. Once everyone was medieval; now everyone is modern. The transformation is thorough and without remainder. One of Gregory’s chief purposes in the book is to show that this doesn’t fit the facts.

All this robs historical study of the practical political uses that history has traditionally had. If every period is a world to itself, study of the past won’t be able to teach us much about who we are today. If there is a clean break from past to present, then we don’t really have a way to determine who we became who we are.

Gregory concludes, “if changes that originated in the distant past remain influential today, transcend national boundaries, and are inextricable from the full range of human ambitions and actions, then the prevailing division of scholarly labor among professional historians is ill-suited even to identify them. There are few incentives to attempt to think in such terms . . . . the very persons most intensively engaged in the study of the premodern past are conditioned to overlook in important ways its relationship to the present” (8-9).