historiography

Romantic historiography

Nevertheless, it is hard to see how historiography could have developed further within the limits established by the Enlightenment worldview. A second generation of philosophes, especially the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were already testing those limits in the later 18th century; but the most potent challenge to them came from Germany, now finally assuming its full place in the intellectual life of Europe. The period 1770–1830 witnessed the activity of an astonishing constellation of German thinkers, poets, and eventually historians, of whom Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich von Schiller, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel are only the best known. ... (104 of 41,368 words)