Arnaldo Momigliano and the History of Cultural History

—a conference organized by Peter N. Miller, Bard Graduate Center, and
Peter H. Reill, University of California, Los Angeles

Arnaldo Momigliano was one of the great twentieth-century historians of the ancient world. But his many essays and lectures also called attention to the men and the methods that, over the centuries since the Renaissance, have been used to make sense of the lived life of antiquity. This aspect of Momigliano’s intellectual legacy is the subject of this conference. It will focus, in particular, on Momigliano’s provocative suggestion that modern disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, art history, sociology, and history of religion developed out of the practices and questions of early modern antiquarianism. In this claim lies the kernel of a yet-to-be-written history of modern cultural history, and the papers to be presented at the conference, and later developed into a publication, provide that history. Presentations fall into two categories: those that reflect on Momigliano’s link between antiquarianism and the disciplines that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and those that assess the contribution of Momigliano as a cultural historian by placing him alongside other twentieth-century masters such as Warburg, Huizinga, Scholem, and Foucault.