An enumeration of individual positions and concepts (such as I have provided above) can be only a starting point for a critical history of earlier and contemporary studies in Late Antiquity. To provide a necessary corrective to current research and an incentive to examine the discipline itself more critically, we have to identify the historical circumstances that influenced the historiography on Late Antiquity. Over the centuries, both humanism and Protestantism impeded a positive view of Late Antiquity as an epoch in its own right, and scholars thought of it as a transitional period between antiquity and the Middle Ages, and judged it unfavorably as an era of decline. Still, the production of the great editions of texts composed by Christian authors and other writers of Late Antiquity that was characteristic of this phase was of vital importance for subsequent research into the later period. Thus, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scholars from the Netherlands and France, Italy and Germany, England and the Scandinavian countries succeeded the humanists and emerged as literary critics and editors. A multitude of late classical and Byzantine works were printed for the first time - in some instances supplemented by brilliant conjectural emendations and profound annotations. The Huguenot and lawyer Jacobus Gothofredus (Jacques Godefroy, 1587-1652) deserves a special mention here: even today, his commentary on the Codex Theodosianus (1665) is indispensable. Moreover, a wealth of antiquarian literature was devoted to the late Roman Empire and the early Church.
Catholic scholars had always been eager, since the Counter-Reformation, to present the foundation of the Roman Church as a feature of Christian antiquity. From 1643 onward, the Jesuit Bollandists edited and commented on hagiographic texts. For over two generations, from the late 1660s, the Benedictine congregation of St. Maur (the ‘‘Maurists,’’ such as Jean Mabillon, Bernard de Montfaucon, and Thierry Ruinart) published editions of numerous ‘‘Fathers of the Church’’ that in many respects have not been surpassed to the present day. The French cleric Jacques-Paul Migne (1800-75) reprinted a large number of the texts in his extensive and still widely consulted editorial enterprise, the cursus completus of early ecclesiastical and medieval writings of the Fathers (the Patrologia Latina and the Patrologia Graeca, known universally as ‘‘Migne’’). Meanwhile, Louis Sebastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637-98), having made extensive use of primary sources, had published two general accounts of the imperial and ecclesiastical history of the (late) Roman Empire: M'emoires pour servir a I’histoire eccl'esiastique des six premiers si'cles (sixteen volumes, 1693-1712), and Histoire des empereurs (six volumes, 1690-1738), the latter covering the period from Augustus to Anastasius, 31 bc-ad 518. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, both works had a lasting effect on the scholarly perception and study of Late Antiquity.
The secularized historiography of the Enlightenment likewise put greater emphasis on the decline of the Roman Empire than on the rise of the Roman republic. Gibbon was not in this regard the only figure of importance. In his Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence (1734), Montesquieu had already shown how ingenious legislation had made Rome great, but also how, with law-governed necessity, the cost of Rome’s triumph was its decline, as the temptations of power destroyed the virtues of the Roman people and the principles of Roman politics. With the French Revolution, however, the Roman republic became once again the focus of scholarly and public interest all over Europe.
World History
