Volume 15, Number 7 · October 22, 1970
The Old New History
By Frances A. Yates
The Idea of Perfect History
by George Huppert
University of Illinois Press, 215 pp., $7.50
Among those gaps in knowledge to which Francis Bacon draws attention is the absence of any 'just story of learning.' What are the antiquities and originals of knowledge? What have been the flourishings, oppositions, decays, depressions, oblivions, removes, 'and all other events concerning learning throughout the ages of the world'? History, says Bacon, has not yet concerned itself with these matters, with the rise and fall of what we would call civilizations. Later he speaks of 'imperfect' and 'perfect' histories. Imperfect are memorials or 'naked' accounts of events; imperfect, too, are antiquities, or monuments and other fragments of the past scrupulously collected. There could be, however, a 'just and perfect' history, though in defining this he becomes unclear.
Review, 3400 words
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