The birth of the past / Zachary Sayre Schiffman ; foreword by Anthony Grafton.

Incluye bibliografía.

Introduction: The past defined -- Pt. I. Antiquity : Flatland ; Pasts present ; The Herodotean achievement ; Thucydides and the refashionings of linear time ; Hellenistic Innovations -- Pt. II. Christianity : Can´t get here from there ; The power of prayer ; Breakthrough to the now ; The idea of the saeculum ; The saeculum reconfigured ; Gregory of Tours and the saeculum ; Back from the future: Bede and the figural view of reality -- Pt. III. Renaissance : The living past ; The birth of anachronism ; Petrarch´s ´Copernican leap´ ; The commonplace view of the world ; Jean Bodin and the unity of history -- Pt. IV. Enlightenment : Presence and distance ; Biography as a form of history -- The politics of history ; The relations of truth/the truth of relations ; Montesquieu and the relations of things ; The past emerges --Epilogue: The past historicized.