Presidential Address: Great Historical Enterprises. I. The Bollandists

Abstract

ON several occasions during the last twenty or thirty years students of the past have had their attention directed to the seventeenth century by historians of science and of scholarship. We have been told that we shall find there the authentic beginnings of the modern world, and that in that age reliance on the traditions and books of the past gives way to experiment, to analysis and to criticism. In the realm of history, there is a shift from the classical, literary traditions to the original sources and to official records, while the historical writings of the past are subjected to the new technique which for a hundred years had been applied to the literary masterpieces of the ancient world by a succession of great scholars from Valla and Erasmus to Scaliger and Casaubon. Certainly, in many ways the seventeenth century is more significant in the annals of historiography than is the century that followed. In England it is the age of Dodsworth, Dugdale, Twysden, Wharton, Wanley and Hearne. In France, it is the age of D'Achéry, Labbé, Ducange and the Maurists. In the part of the Netherlands that is now Belgium it is the age of the first Bollandists.