A Brill Calendar: November 22

The Birth of Cellarius

Few characteristics of thinking about the past are so easily taken for granted as the idea that history can be – or even should be – divided and articulated in ‘periods’.

Outsiders and strangers in the Helicon City of Clio, daughter of Mnemosyne and Muse of history, endorse this idea wholeheartedly; politicians and statesmen especially. Particularly in the immediate aftermath of events causing general public upheaval and confusion. A thrilling speech under such conditions can hardly avoid – or so it would seem – signalling a ‘new era’. Of course, most of these ‘new eras’ are as readily abandoned and forgotten as they were identified and proclaimed.

It is seldom taken into consideration by rhetoricians of this brand that ‘periodizing’ the past as a whole is an intellectual convention not older than early Christian times, preceded by the mythical notion of a Golden, Bronze and Iron Age. The most popular and widely-spread instance of this belief and conviction is the one in Antiquity, Middle Ages and Modern Times; as a notion however, it only appears to be ageless.

The idea actually came into being during the days of Erasmus and Luther; without yet the 'intellectual orthodoxy' associated with schoolmasters and classrooms. It had to wait for a German historian, Christoph Cellarius – ‘Keller’ Latinized – (Schmalkalden, November 22, 1638 – Halle, June 4, 1707) to give it a status hardly ever challenged since. During an earlier era, namely Saint Augustine’s in the 4th century, the accepted way to look at the past in its God-given entirety was to discern six periods, since the Creator Himself needed six days to build his Grand Design.

Cellarius applied his tenets in ‘General History’ (a complex notion in its own right) in a book with the rather intimidating title ‘Historia universalis ac perspicue exposita, in antiquam, et medii aevi ac novam divisa’.