Abstract
Reviewed by: Ruth M. McAdams, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA
This ‘history of thinking about how to study the past through things’ seeks to reframe the relationship between antiquarianism – or a kind of thing-oriented historical thought – and history proper, understood as a university-based textual practice (1). Through an opening reading of Nietzsche, Miller pushes back against the standard view of antiquarianism as myopic and pedantic, observing the way that antiquarian impulses have not only been absorbed into the academic discipline of history, but also permeate modern forms of popular historical engagement. He argues that the recent material turn in historical study has been preceded at many points, and that in fact we might understand the detached grand historical narrative of Gibbon or Burckhardt as the deviation from an object-centred norm. The book’s unusual structure circles in on Miller’s main focus – nineteenth-century Germany – by first working from the present backward to the 1870s and then jumping back to the early modern period and working forward to the same point. This unconventional approach allows Miller to forge a fascinating and overlooked connection between the recent history of material culture studies and the longer antiquarian tradition.
The argument begins by tracing an early-twentieth-century conversation about objects and history that went largely unnoticed when material culture studies was established in universities at the end of the century. Miller focuses in particular on creative and critical work from the 1920s and 1930s, the full impact of which was not felt until much later, including Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Aby Warburg’s lecture on the Hopi snake dance, before concluding with readings of recent visual art and literature that are self-reflexive about materiality and history. The second chapter, then, goes back further to recover the contributions to a discourse on material culture of the work of German historian Karl Lamprecht, an influence on Warburg. The chapter ends by suggesting the limitations of the genealogical approach taken in this opening section to understanding the long-submerged discourse of materiality and history.
Miller here turns back to the Renaissance, emphasizing that the interest in antiquity was inspired by material artefacts and tracing the development of antiquarianism in the work of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (the subject of an earlier book), Jacob Spon, Jean Mabillon and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The following two chapters consider parallel developments in late-eighteenth-century German universities. Chapter 4 recounts the establishment of the first academic curriculum for the historical study of material culture, at the University of Göttingen in the 1760s, looking at Johann Christoph Gatterer’s historische Hilfswissenschaften and August Ludwig von Schlözer’s Statistik. Chapter 5 considers developments in the field of archaeology, discussing Christian Gottlob Heyne’s concept of ‘Archäologie der Kunst’ and the work of August Boeckh. Looking now outside the university, Chapter 6 describes the nineteenth-century German flourishing of amateur local historical societies, which more fully embraced material sources than did their contemporaries at universities.
The final section considers the development and public presentation of cultural history in Germany from the 1840s onward, before the innovations of Burckhardt. Miller places the writings of Gustav Friedrich Klemm in the political context of liberalization leading up to the failed revolutions of March 1848. A discussion of the founding of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, the brainchild of Hans von und zu Aufseß, argues that the museum grew out of the work of amateur historical associations and the antiquitates tradition. Although the museum project received public support, leading historians like Droysen and Ranke shied away. A brief conclusion argues that the value of objects for historical study is that they require our imagination to make them meaningful – that in their apparent foreignness they allow us imaginatively to seek our common humanity with the people who created and used them.
The book’s unconventional structure beautifully highlights Miller’s nuanced way of accounting for connections and disconnections in the story he is telling. It is an inspiring model of longue durée history that subtly negotiates between continuity and rupture. The fact that the book as history itself does not meaningfully engage with objects is an irony on which Miller never comments – his meditation on this choice would have been welcome. Invigorating though the book is, Miller’s considerable erudition can occasionally overwhelm the reader with vertiginous shifts between people, places and eras – on a single page in the conclusion, 15 writers are mentioned. Furthermore, Miller’s rhetorical style is inductive and diffuse, such that the most fascinating argumentative claims – for example, about the resistant politics of nineteenth-century German material culture studies – emerge frustratingly slowly and remain implicit. The book is nonetheless a great achievement that will be of interest to scholars of interdisciplinary material culture studies, art history and archaeology, historiography, intellectual history, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany, as well as to artists and museum practitioners.