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During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, historians across the world often started the history of the modern historical discipline with Leopold Ranke’s teaching at the University of Berlin during the 1830s. Ranke, they argued, here introduced a new style of training exercises, which afterwards defined the discipline. Some connected this history to a story of increasing standardization and institutionalization of education and research, culminating with the methodological textbooks, uniform training exercises, and large research institutes of the period. Many historians also associated Ranke’s exercises with certain epistemic virtues, such as carefulness, accurateness, and love of truth. These epistemic virtues, some argued, were products of the close relationship between teachers and students. The virtues, this chapter argues, also helped nineteenth-century historians assess the scribes, chroniclers, and historians of the past. The chapter illustrates this emphasis upon epistemic virtues through the example of Georg Waitz, who participated in Ranke’s famous exercises during the 1830s and whom nineteenth-century historians often described as his most prominent and loyal student. It especially focuses upon how Waitz conveyed the virtues of the Ranke school to his doctoral students in Göttingen and how this training influenced the students’ practices of interpretation and source criticism. Finally, the chapter discusses the tension between the educational ideas of the Ranke school and the standardization and institutionalization of education and research during the second half of the nineteenth century. The tension, it argues, illustrates that the emergence of the modern historical discipline cannot be explained solely with reference to the process of institutionalization.

This themed issue brings together introductions to some of the important texts that shaped the modern humanities. We argue that these texts are foundational for the humanities, and yet they are rarely read. Our collection starts in the predisciplinary realm of the Enlightenment, moves on to the increasing specialization and professionalization of the nineteenth century, and follows with early twentieth-century texts that aimed to overcome academic compartmentalization. The collection ends with the introduction of new digital methods in the decades after World War II.

From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, most European scholars considered moral cultivation as the primary purpose of the humanities. The humanities were human not just because they concerned the products of the human mind but also because they transformed scholars and students into better human beings. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rise of Big Humanities questioned this moral purpose. However, Big Humanities also reemphasized the importance of epistemic virtues for scholarship. The language of epistemic virtues helped scholars create new communities of learning and scholarship. Within these communities, the language of virtues established common standards of collaboration and granted scholars a sense of purpose. Many of these scholars also continued to associate epistemic virtues with moral virtues.

Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen: “History, Time, and the Past. On the Image of History Writing in the Enlightenment”During the 18th century, the image of the historian changed dramatically. The proper historian was no longer a man of the world, who wrote from personal experience, but a professional, who gained his authority from his training and academic background. The essay investigates this transformation through images of history writing and argues that the shift in the image of the historian was connected to a new sense of the precarity of the past and to a new divide between history and the past. *Online-version adskiller sig fra den trykte version.

This article investigates the emergence of the archive as the primary venue for the production of historical knowledge in the 19thcentury. The turn to archival research, the article argues, may be considered as a response to the discussions about the problems of testimony that dominated 18th- and early 19th-century German writings on the methodology and epistemology of historical research. These discussions, especially regarding the epistemic virtues of witnesses, also helped create the particular culture of knowledge-making within German historical scholarship that enabled the archival turn. The article illustrates these developments through the examples of Johann Peter von Ludewig, who was one of the most prominent historians of the early German Enlightenment, and Leopold von Ranke, who is normally considered the founder of the modern historical discipline and the most important advocate of the 19th-century archival turn.

From 1827 to 1831 the German historian Leopold von Ranke travelled through Germany, Austria, and Italy, hunting for documents and archives. During this journey Ranke developed a new model for historical research that transformed the archive into the most important site for the production of historical knowledge. Within the archive, Ranke claimed, the trained historian could forget his personal predispositions and political loyalties, and write objective history. This essay critically examines Ranke's model for historical research through a study of the obstacles, frustrations, and joys that he encountered on his journey. It shows how Ranke's archival experiences inspired him to re-evaluate his own identity as a historian and as a human being, and investigates some of the affiliations between his model for historical research and the political realities of Prince Metternich's European order. Finally, the essay compares Ranke's historical discipline to other nineteenth-century disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology.

A common culture of scholarship existed across Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. This culture possessed its own institutions, traditions, and rituals that connected its members across borders and religious divides. A professor from Lisbon, a librarian from Hanover, and a schoolmaster from Turku would all speak nearly the same language and wear nearly the same clothing. They would share many of the same dreams, celebrate many of the same heroes, and have similar memories from their youth and adult life. They were convinced that they belonged to the same cultural group and were normally willing to make personal and economic sacrifices when called upon by members of this group. Long before the emergence of European nation-states, the community of scholars formed what Benedict Anderson has called an imagined community, united by the forces of language, culture, and writing.1From around 1500, the community of scholars went by the name respublica litteraria-the Republic of Letters. Italian humanists already used the metaphor in the early fifteenth century, and with Erasmus of Rotterdam's Antibarbarorum liber, it became commonplace within Europe.2 To Erasmus and his circle the Republic of Letters signified the natural community between all students of creation, divine reason, and Greek and Roman antiquity. It gathered scholars across space and time and set them apart from the hordes of ignorant barbarians. To most early modern scholars, however, respublica litteraria signified much more than a community of reason and knowledge. They used the metaphor to describe every aspect of the culture of scholarship that connected its members and demarcated them from surrounding society. Universities, academies, and secret societies were talked about as parts of the Republic of Letters. Scholarly letters and conversations tete-a-tete, books, lectures and seminars, rituals and traditions were all included. The metaphor demarcated invisible borders between learned and lay, tacitly known to insiders but rarely strictly defined.3The Republic ChallengedDuring the last decades of the seventeenth century the metaphor of the Republic of Letters lost much of its force and elasticity. Scholars used and debated the metaphor more than ever before, but these heated and emotional discussions were not necessarily-as is assumed in much of the work on the eighteenth century4-a sign that the metaphor and the culture it represented had gained ground. The discussions were, much rather, a symptom of crisis. The end of the great religious wars and the emergence of modern centralized states forced scholars to rethink their role in society and their relationship to the new military and administrative elites. Philosophical skepticism and philological criticism threatened established academic teachings and methods.5 Debates about the Republic of Letters reveal the scholars' efforts to answer these political and intellectual challenges. In her studies of learned Huguenots who, after 1685, were spread across Europe, Anne Goldgar has described how the alienated community of scholars at the turn of the eighteenth century came increasingly under pressure.6 The Huguenots felt marginalized in their adopted homes, lost income and patronage, and suffered a decline in social prestige. According to Goldgar, these external pressures resulted in stronger internal bonds, as exiled scholars rallied around the ideal of the borderless Republic of Letters. But already before Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Huguenot scholars defined a French version of the republic-La Republique des Lettres-in strong opposition to the forces suppressing the Protestant minority. In 1684 Pierre Bayle defiantly declared from his Dutch refuge,It is not a matter of religion, but of science: therefore one should put an end to all boundaries that divide men into different camps, and consider only that which unites them, namely their rank as noblemen in the Republic of Letters. …

The Danish amateur scholar Christian Jürgensen Thomsen has often been described as a founder of modern "scientific" archaeology. Thomsen's innovation, this essay argues, reflects developments within neighboring fields, such as philology and history. He reacted against historians who limited themselves to histories of texts and therefore abandoned the earliest human history. Instead, he proposed a new history of objects, which included the entire history of humankind. Thomsen's work as director of the Royal Museum of Nordic Antiquities in Copenhagen was especially important for this renewal. The arrangement of artifacts not only helped him formulate his theories, but also allowed him to present his arguments in a language of objects. At the same time, Thomsen's definition of archaeology as a museum science placed his branch of archaeology in a closer relationship with other museum sciences, such as geology and comparative anatomy. From the 1840s, Thomsen's museum became a model for how the study of human artifacts could deliver scientific insights into human nature and the laws of human development.