Ancient History and the Antiquarian Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano

Arnaldo Momigliano was convinced that all disciplines need to be aware of their own history. His famous lecture Ancient History and the Antiquarian, delivered in 1949 at the Warburg Institute, and published in 1950 in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, has become a landmark. In it he showed how historiography had been changed by the recognition that what historians had left out of the record could be put back by the antiquarians. He argued that a comprehensive interest in the vestiges of ancient civilization, beginning in the Renaissance and refined and enlarged during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, made a rigid distinction between historical and antiquarian studies unjustifiable; furthermore, the standards set by the antiquarians in the understanding and interpretation of the past still have relevance.