In this brillant meditation on conceptions of history, Le Goff traces the evolution of the historian's craft. Examining real and imagined oppositions between past and present, ancient and modern, oral and written history, History and Memory reveals the strands of continuity that have characterized historiography from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Europe.

Preface PAST/PRESENT The distinction between past and present in psychology The distinction between past and present in light of linguistics The distinction between past and present in primitive thought General reflections on the distinction between past and present in historical consciousness The evolution of the relation between past and present in European thought from ancient Greece to the nineteenth century The ghost of the past, the history of the present, and the fascination with the future in the twentieth century ANTIQUE (ANCIENT)/MODERN An ambiguous Western pairing In this pair the modern is the main problem The ambiguity of the antique (ancient): Greco-Roman antiquity and other antiquities The Modern and its copetitors: Modern and New, Modern and Progress Antique (ancient)/modern and history: Quarrels between Ancients and Moderns in preindustrial Europe from the sixth to the eighteenth centuries Antique (ancient)/modern and history: Modernism, modernization, modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Domains that reveal modernism The historical conditions of the recognition of modernism The ambiguity of the modern MEMORY Ethnic Memory The Rise of Memory: From Orality to Writing, from Prehistory to Antiquity Memory in the Middle Ages: Western Europe The Progress of Written and Figured Memory from the Renaissance to the Present Contemporary Revolutions in Memory Conclusion: The Stake of Memory HISTORY Paradoxes and Ambiguities of History Is History a science of the past, or is it true that "there is only contemporary history"? Knowledge and power: Objectivity and the manipulation of the past The singular and the universal: Generalizations and regularities in history The Historical Mentality: Men and the Past Philosophies of History History as a Science: The Historian's Craft History Today Endnotes Bibliography About the Author Index

Historiography has its fashions, and this is a clear and persuasive portrayal of a present trend away from the fraternization of history with philosophy, theology, literature and the history of the plastic arts, toward a flirtation with politics and the social sciences...A fine study. The Historian

In this brillant meditation on conceptions of history, Le Goff traces the evolution of the historian's craft. Examining real and imagined oppositions between past and present, ancient and modern, oral and written history, History and Memory reveals the strands of continuity that have characterized historiography from ancient Mesopotamia to modern Europe.