Lines in Time

This book begins with two deceptively simple questions. ‘What does history look like? How do you draw time?’ Piling example upon example, in a survey that runs all the way from the fifteenth century to the present, historians Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton more than prove their point that these questions admit an almost unlimited variety of possible answers, which continue to proliferate today, in the age of the internet, much as they have done since the Middle Ages. These answers were and are as ingenious as they are bizarre, as humble as they are hubristic, as handy as they are cumbersome, as faithful to the truth as they are perfidious, and in all these respects they resemble concurrent attempts, throughout the same period of six centuries, to answer the corresponding questions of cartography: ‘What does geography look like? How do you draw space?’ But the pairing of these questions, in both cases, hides another of more fundamental philosophical import. What difference would it make if we asked what time or space looks like, or how one might draw history or geography? How does history relate to time, and geography to space? The question of geography's relation to space lies beyond the scope of this volume; however that of history's relation to time lies at its heart.