Antiquarianism and national history. The emergence of a new scholarly paradigm in early modern historical studies*

Early modern Europe was marked by fundamental changes in its intellectual landscape. In the field of historiography, this led to the development of a new antiquarian current in historiography which marked a fundamental shift in the view on historical writings. While traditionally historiography had been considered a literary genre, the new scholars approached it as a ‘scientific’ discipline. On the basis of a comparative study of a number of northern European national histories, this paper analyses major transformations in two aspects of historical writing. Firstly, antiquarian historians extended the subject range of historiography to include a variety of cultural-historical topics. This innovation also had implications for the structure of their works. Secondly, the new current introduced a novel approach to the question of historical evidence to counter sceptic criticism and meet the new requirements occasioned by the rise of empirical models of research. Antiquarian scholars therefore introduced several new types of source materials: material evidence of the past, comparative studies of languages and customs, and documentary texts were added as sources of historical information. They furthermore subjected all historical sources to rigorous critical assessment.