Literary Historian
The Introduction to the Literature of Europe continues a topic broached in the View of the Middle Ages. In the first chapter Hallam sketches the state of literature in Europe down to the end of the 14th century: the extinction of ancient learning which followed the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Christianity; the preservation of the Latin language in the services of the church; and the revival of letters after the 7th century. For the first century and a half of his period he is mainly occupied with a review of classical learning, taking short decennial periods and noticing works which they produced. For the period 1520–1550 there are separate chapters on ancient literature, theology, science, speculative philosophy and jurisprudence, the literature of taste and other miscellaneous literature; and the subdivisions of subjects is carried further in later periods. Thus poetry, the drama and polite literature form the subjects of separate chapters. An author may be mentioned in many chapters: Shakespeare, Grotius, Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes appear in half a dozen different places.
The plan excluded biographical history. It is an account of the books which would make a complete library of the period, arranged according to date of publication and subject.
Read more about this topic: Henry Hallam
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or historian:
“Dining-out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)